EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3) (10 page)

“We have to stay hydrated,” I said with a wink, taking the bottle of water she offered me and zipping my jeans. I was surprised to feel less heartache than earlier. Maybe Peyton was right. Maybe I would unravel all of this I’d packed in my chest about her, given time. But then again, I knew what was in my heart. Peyton had, whether she realized it or not, basically simply given me the go ahead to love her in secret. My secret. The one she didn’t have to keep for me.

Dax Malone’s house was so big that he could’ve housed Peyton and a dozen other illegitimate children, but he lived in the sprawling motherfucker by himself. It went to show the quality of his character, I supposed. Peyton had a copy of the key she’d made some time ago and let us in, disarming the sophisticated house alarm. “So I can go in and put out a fire if he’s ever not home,” she explained to my raised eyebrows. “The man’s vain about his possessions.”

And he did have a crap ton of possessions. Trophies from shows, expensively framed photos of him hobnobbing with people I recognized from newspapers and magazines, dusty but costly furniture cramming every square inch of floor space. The man didn’t understand the concept of negative space, didn’t let any of his walls or rich carpets breathe. It made me feel like I was having trouble breathing, that all of his materialism was choking the air out of the room.

“Through here,” Peyton said, and I finally had to sit down at the sight of the clutter that was Dax Malone’s office. There were piles of papers and books stacked from floor to ceiling, covering every available surface, folders bristling with receipts and spreadsheets and memos. There wasn’t a clear path to the desk chair. Hell, I wasn’t even sure there was a desk chair to be had.

“You okay?” Peyton asked, looking at me with curiosity.

“Is your father a hoarder or what? There’s just so much stuff.”

“Oh, he never throws anything away,” she confirmed. “Just sit there, on that bench. Shove those papers over. I won’t be but a few minutes. I think I remember where I last saw it.”

I didn’t ask what “it” was. I was just relieved that I didn’t have to dive into that clutter with Peyton.

“I still don’t understand how we’re going to break into the market,” I called over my shoulder as Peyton moved past me. “Other than the Corbin-Summers Ranch, I’m not sure which ranches in the area still use horses. Definitely not Bud Billings’ operation.”

“He barely has a ranch, by definition,” she said, sounding a bit far away as things crashed and thumped on the floor.

“You okay?”

“Perfect.”

I brooded on the Billings operation, sitting there, waiting for Peyton to come up with a plan for our clandestine horsing project. Old Bud was a piece of shit who had tormented both my family after our parents had died and Paisley after her father had died, leaving her complete control of the ranch she’d grown up on. He was a successful son of a bitch. No one could fault him that. But the way he went about it was all wrong, conducting his operation in a way that didn’t jive with the other ranchers trying to make a living doing it the right way. The cattle were injected with a cocktail of medications that no one was quite sure about, and even if he had one of the biggest parcels of land in the state, it wasn’t devoted to letting the cattle roam and graze like the rest of the people still looking to adhere to the ways things were supposed to be done. Instead, Billings had constructed an enormous feeding operation, keeping the cattle stationary in tiny pens, their heads tied to the feeders so all they did was stand around and gorge themselves and mess themselves. They said you could smell it a mile away, though none of us were particularly eager to get within a mile of Bud Billings or his operation.

He only wanted to make it bigger, and the only way he could do that was to get ahold of the land currently occupied by the Corbin-Summers Ranch.

It was a tense relationship.

My shoulders jerked, startled, as Peyton dropped a heavy tome on the table in front of me.

“Found it,” she said, triumphant.

“What is this ‘it’ you’ve found?” I asked, passing my hand over the black, dusty cover.

“The key we need to break into the market.” She smiled a wolf’s smile. “My father’s address book. All of the contacts he’s made throughout his career in the business. People he’s done business with or associated with, for one reason or another.”

I swallowed, my mouth dry. “And just how are we going to use this to launch our own project?”

“We’re going to steal all these clients for ourselves,” she said, grinning. “Well, technically, it isn’t stealing. We’re not going to do any breeding — not at first, at least, right?”

“That’s right.”

“We’re offering a different set of services than my father does, for the most part. We’re going to see if these people need any of those services. We have a ready-made database of clients, right here in this book.”

“I love the way your mind works.” It was actually a little frightening. Effective, but frightening.

“Well, don’t sit around just loving me,” she teased, making me blush. “Let’s get the hell out of here and start building our business.”

Nothing was that easy, of course. There were real considerations, like how much we should tell people about our business, where it should even be located. After a couple of scouting expeditions on properties both familiar to us and unknown, we settled on a small, out of the way parcel on Dax Malone’s place.

There was wild, and then there was wild. This untamed patch of land behind a screen of tangled trees on Dax Malone's horse farm was the latter wild, tough and foreboding and stubbornly against development.

"Here?" I asked, surveying the terrain with dread. "Are you sure?"

"I mean, or we could set up shop right at the entrance to the drive," Peyton said, shooting me a withering gaze. "I figured this was better for that little bit of discretion we discussed was a necessity for this project."

"Discretion, sure. But this is more like oblivion. Exile."

I just couldn't understand how we were going to manage all the way out here. A makeshift path trundled this far, but it was more of an overgrown rut than a traditional road.

"I'm telling you, this is the best option," she said crossly. "No one ever comes back here."

"And no one ever will." Not even the wind seemed to be able to reach the trees, and the heat radiating from the sun reflected off the dead grass, baking us twice.

"I would love to hear your idea for a superior alternative," Peyton said, stopping in her tracks and making me bump into her noisily, sending birds scattering from the tree in loud squawks of complaint.

"This is going to be just fine," I said, trying harder to convince myself of that fact than to appease Peyton. “We'll get a tractor in here to see what we can do with the grass, take a look at what's in the underbrush, maybe set up some corrals or a little office or barn."

"That's the spirit," she said, still looking at me like I would renege on our deal at any moment. "But everything needs to be done quietly. Discreetly."

"I'm with you on that one." I was already fighting that battle on one front, trying to keep my brothers both misled and appeased. For perhaps the first time in my entire life, I was thankful that I did kind of tend to go unnoticed within my own family. It made things easier. Everyone — family and ranch hands included — had the right to two scheduled days off per week. None of us usually utilized those weekends, too intent on working the ranch, providing an extra set of hands or eyes even if we could’ve been off taking a break. But I started redeeming mine every single week, devoting those two days to securing supplies or services, doing everything with my own two hands that I could to minimize gossip in town and foot traffic on Dax Malone’s land.

I went over there before first light and after sunset, slipped away during lunch and overstayed. I discovered that as long as I wasn’t assigned duties in the pasture abutting the river, Chance really didn’t notice where I was or wasn’t. And with Peyton watching her father’s movements and gradually making contacts with his same clients, informing them about the services she was offering, we were surprised to find that we were actually the owners of a promising new business venture.

“I don’t know how else to get the word out, though,” she was saying, sitting in the little office we’d both built and agreed would be too cheesy to paint. It was just large enough to comfortably house a side table that functioned as a desk, and a set of chairs.

“What do you mean?” I guzzled some water. I’d just finished fencing in an area we’d cleared for a corral. Next up was a small shed with a roof that would contain some stables for the horses we’d be seeing.

“It’s not like we can take an ad out or anything,” Peyton said. “No social media campaigns like your family’s dude ranch is doing.”

I felt momentarily sorry for Avery, but it passed fairly quickly. He was the one who’d wanted the dude ranch in the first place. He could deal with everything that came along with it.

“Well, once you make contact with everyone in your father’s ledger and we start seeing our first clients, I’d imagine it’s going to be more of a word of mouth operation,” I said.

“Yeah, sure.”

I wiped my forehead free from sweat and looked at Peyton, who sounded distracted, her hair waving in the battery-powered fan we’d trucked out here.

“Something wrong?” I asked as she stared at me.

“Pretty hot out there,” she said, sounding like she still wasn’t completely present in the moment.

“Yeah,” I agreed, cocking my head at her. “Super hot.” I looked down and remembered I’d stripped off my shirt under the heat of sun while I worked.

I laughed, and it snapped her out of whatever daze my bare torso had put her in. “What?”

“Are you mesmerized by my bulging muscles?” I joked, making my pecs pop. My muscles didn’t bulge, but they were there. It came from the hard work on the ranch and the occasional pushup. I didn’t go overboard in the gym or with protein shakes or whatever. I used my body every single day. It just came with the territory.

“Anyone would be,” Peyton said, joining in my laughter. “Make those things dance again. I liked that.”

It was funny to be the one lusted after for a change. Peyton was always so effortlessly sexy and exotic that I felt it was a given that I’d by drooling after her all the time. Rare was the opportunity to swap spots with her.

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” she asked, smirking.

“I can only guess.”

“I think it’s time we christened this project properly.”

She stood up and pushed me down into one of the chairs before straddling my lap, grinding her front against mine. I reached around her and directed the fan our way so we could have at least a little air circulation. The heat around us, though, quickly became secondary to the heat building within us and between us. Peyton licked the salty sweat from my chest, and I tangled my fingers in her hair and tilted her head back so I could access the individual droplets dotting her neck and throat. We responded to each other so readily that I almost wanted to question it … only I’d learned long ago not to ask questions when good things happened. Peyton and I were good together. All we had to do right now was sit back and enjoy ourselves without having to worry about definitions and expectations and the talk of the town. We were doing a surprisingly good job keeping our association a secret from everyone else — almost as good a job as we were doing distracting ourselves from trying to name whatever our relationship might be.

Peyton abruptly switched tacks, unzipping my pants and freeing my erection and halting her grinding in favor of turning around to face the opposite way. I was treated to an exquisite view of her ass as she slipped out of her shorts and carefully settled onto my lap, sinking my cock into her ready body. The heat outside was nothing compared to the heat inside of her, and I held on as tight to her as I could while she squirmed, getting comfortable, testing the waters until she found just what she was looking for.

“Oh,” she mewled. “Right there.”

I thrust upward, nuzzling her neck, cupping a breast in my hand, dragging my fingers over her taut stomach, running along her inner thigh until I reached her pussy, leveraging my fingers against it until she cried out even louder and I knew I’d grazed her clit.

The friction was almost as unbearable as the heat. The angle and position, her legs clenched tightly closed, transformed every stroke I made into liquid fire, a sultry play on something we’d done dozens of times.

It didn’t matter how many times we did this. Each time was new and special and important in its own right. We didn’t have to figure out what we were to each other or put a label on this. It was as natural as breathing, the sun coming up and going down every day, the wind in the trees. But goddammit, I loved her. I loved her so much that I didn’t care if she never found it in her heart to love me. That was fine. I’d just love her enough for the both of us.

I came with a groan — I couldn’t rightly keep myself from it — and forced myself to keep going, to push through as I softened, keeping my hand hard against her, and then Peyton collapsed backward, gasping as I brought her to my plane of existence, my hand aching, smelling of salt and something more secret and essential than that, both of us hotter than we’d ever been in our lives but unable to give a single fuck about it.