EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3) Read online

  “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?”
<
br />   “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.

  “Well, that’s that,” Peyton panted. “People will be lined up down the road waiting for our expert services. That was a good luck christening. Our business is going to take off immediately, so you better get that shed up.”

  “And you better finish calling that list of people and getting our system set up,” I said, giving her a sloppy kiss I knew she’d pretend to hate, wiping it off dramatically.

  But business wasn’t good. Not at first.

  Through much flirting and cajoling, Peyton was at least able to get a few horses in for grooming sessions. She grumbled throughout, braiding the manes with a ribbon for a special touch as I trimmed the hooves.

  “They could do this themselves if they weren’t so damn lazy,” she said.

  “Hey, business is business,” I replied, glancing up at her. “This is how it starts. A trickle. Soon, it’ll be a flood — you’ll see.”

  But that was just optimism — or naïveté. Whole weeks passed without a horse even coming in for a good grooming. It was hard to stave off despair, the thought that this was all just a stupid waste of time. The only positive I found from it was spending time with Peyton.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t do such a good job grooming them,” she suggested, poking around at the laptop we brought to our office.

  “That would be bad business,” I said, looking up from my phone at her. We had open hours when anyone could walk in, but we also took appointments. I’d have to talk to her about seeing if she could staff the open hours herself and call me if anything came in. I was too afraid I’d start being missed around the ranch.

  “Well, we might get some repeat customers if you didn’t do the hoof trimming properly,” she tried.

  “Peyton, I couldn’t willfully do a bad job on our clients.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “I’m just frustrated. And bored.”

  And that’s when we usually had sex, tempted by the idea that perhaps a walk-in client would happen up the path, unsure whether we were there or not. It was a pretty fantasy — and one that made the hookup sexier — but no one ever came.

  Until the day they did.

  A truck and trailer crept up to the office, and Peyton and I nearly pushed each other out of the way to greet them.

  “You need a good grooming?” Peyton asked.

  “No, it’s bee stings,” the panicked owner said. “I was out riding him, and we upset a nest or something. I didn’t get so many stings, myself, but he did. You’re closer to me than the vet. Please tell me you can help.”

  I opened and closed my mouth. Our plan for the rehab facility was horses that had experienced traumas, horses in need of lessons on relearning how to wear a saddle and carry a rider, horses that had been injured and needed help getting back up to full strength. Bee stings were really something the vet should take care of.

  “We can help,” Peyton said firmly. “Let’s take a look at him.”

  The horse had indeed taken the brunt of the swarm’s fury, and a few bee carcasses littered the bottom of the trailer, bereft of their stingers. The creature was remarkably calm, though, until I touched one of the many swellings on its body. It rolled its eyes back at me and stomped in warning, snorting several times.

  “Okay, okay,” Peyton soothed. “Those hurt. Ouch. How about we get out of this trailer, huh?”

  There had to be several dozen welts along the horse’s coat that I could see in the sunlight.

  “These have to come out,” Peyton said, continuing in the singsong voice that calmed the horse. “It’ll be so gentle you won’t even notice. Emmett, could you get some ice and the aloe vera plant by the door of my cottage?”

  “Sure,” I said, scrambling to comply. I wasn’t sure what the plant looked like, but it was thankfully the only potted plant by her door. I threw as many trays of ice as she had in her freezer into a shopping bag and dashed back down to the office.

  “It’s the strangest thing,” the owner said, agape as Peyton worked over the horse. “I tried to get some of these stingers out myself but panicked when he panicked. He bucked and kicked and was just impossible. But he’s just as calm as he can be, now.”

  Peyton flicked the stingers away from a grouping of welts, then held her hand out. “Ice, please.”

  She dabbed it over the welts, then worked backward to tend to the other sting sites. Then, she broke off several limbs from her plant, slit them open with a fingernail, and
wiped the electric green goo on each and every welt.

  “What you’ll be watching for, now,” she said in that same tone, but directing her attention on the owner, “is signs of allergic reaction. Tongue swelling. Listlessness. Things like that. Then you need to get him to the vet immediately. Good news is, nothing so far. He’s a good boy. Just had a little scare.”

  “Thank you so much,” the owner gushed. “I couldn’t imagine going all the way to town with him like he was, stressed out like that.”

  Peyton gave a half shrug. “Well, tell people who need help that we know our shit. Stuff. Excuse me.”

  “You can say whatever you want as far as I’m concerned,” the owner said as we helped him load the horse back in the trailer. “You saved him.”

  “That was amazing,” I said, watching the truck and trailer make its way back to the road. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

  “It’s happened to me before,” she said. “Just experience. You can’t be afraid, or the horse will feel it. Calm works every time.”

  Word got around so swiftly that I considered it a small miracle that we didn’t hear anything from either of our families. I supposed it was a blessing that they rarely got into town to hear the gossip. But the bee incident was the first indication to people that Peyton and I were serious about our operation.

  We received more requests for grooming, then a request for additional training for a horse that tended to shy away from obstructions on the trail. Next came a lame horse that simply had a rock lodged beneath the shoe that had gone unnoticed. When the next gossip got around that I could shoe horses — a skill I’d picked up from an old farrier a couple of towns over once — more people came with their horses because we were more conveniently located.

  One day, though, we were really challenged. Peyton and I both winced at the horse as soon as we saw it, helping to lead it to one of our little stables. The stables were built to be tight so injured animals couldn’t move around too much in them, but we could tell that something was seriously wrong with the leg.