EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3) (13 page)

“What happened?” Already I could hear the sirens far off, but getting gradually louder, approaching us to help sort all of this out. I could hear Dax Malone groaning on the ground, but I couldn’t make myself feel anything about that. I’d done what I’d had to do to try and help Peyton. I’d been too late. She’d been hurt in spite of me, because of me. If I hadn’t pushed her about the horse rehab project, if I hadn’t approached her in the first place, we never would’ve gone to Mary Crow’s trailer, never would’ve ended back up here, on Dax Malone’s land, inciting his rage and getting Peyton hurt. This was my fault.

“Whatever you’re doing, stop,” Peyton said, sitting up a little with my help and yelping at her ribs. “Fucker kicked me while I was down.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t need your apology. You weren’t the one doing the kicking. Thanks for getting him off of me.”

“How did he know about this?” I asked. I surveyed the damage done to our project with a cursory glance. It was hard to care about any of that with Peyton so obviously injured. But it seemed to be a total loss, glass glittering across the floor of the office. I was certain our computer — or records — hadn’t survived Dax’s temper.

“I told him,” Peyton said. “Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I guess I’m the one who should be sorry for causing all this.”

“You didn’t cause this,” I said. “This is all fine. Things we can replace. We can’t replace you. Are they sending an ambulance?”

“God, I hope so,” she laughed, though the movement pained her. “I confronted him about my mother. He tried to lie about it, at first, but when I threw this project in his face, that’s when everything kind of came to a head. Truths were revealed.”

She shook her head, and I could only assume she was in shock. This was a lot for a person to take in a single day, and even if Peyton was behaving pretty ambivalently about it, I knew that she was so out of her mind that she probably didn’t even realize how badly she was hurt. She had a cut over one of her eyes, but both of them were swelling, bruises already forming from what might have even been a broken nose.

“How’s your wrist?” I asked, concerned at the way she held it against her chest.

“Hurts,” she said simply, and then three cop cars, an ambulance, and a pickup truck I knew all too well pulled up to a stop in a cloud of dust.

“Get away from her,” one of the officers I recognized from school hollered.

“No, idiot,” Peyton yelled back. “The guy who did this to me is over there.”

“Emmett, what the hell?” Tucker approached with the rest of the police officers, his brow furrowed like Chance’s got when he was really pissed. I guessed I should’ve been thankful that it was Tucker the police department got a hold of instead of Chance, or I would’ve been in some real deep shit.

I threw up my hands. “I guess things are a little complicated.”

“You think?” Tucker took one look at my knuckles and then over at Dax Malone. “You’d better tell everyone what happened.”

“We have a pretty good reckoning on the general gist of things,” the sheriff said. “Dispatch has a record of the 9-1-1 call. You can end the call on your phone now, if you like, Ms. Crow.”

Peyton had trouble fishing the phone out of her pocket, but she made it happen. “Thank God for technology, right?” she joked weakly.

“She’s very injured,” I said, waving the EMTs over. “Don’t try to speak, Peyton. If they want to talk to you, they can do it later, after you’ve been looked after.”

They bundled her up into a stretcher and carted her off, her eyes closed against the extra pain the jostling caused her. I watched her go, only vaguely aware of Tucker’s bulk still shadowing me.

“You going to explain yourself?” he asked as we watched the EMTs work on Dax while the police officers argued over the merits of handcuffing an injured old fart.

“I don’t know why they even called you,” I grumbled, noting the hits I’d gotten on Peyton’s father. She’d stopped me too quickly. He wasn’t nearly as hurt as she was.

“They called me as a professional courtesy,” Tucker said curtly.

“Professional courtesy, my ass. You’re not a cop anymore.”

“That’s true, but it’s a matter of principle. They can respect that, even if you can’t.”

“I’m not trying to insult you,” I sighed, turning away from Dax Malone and the rest of the officers. “It’s just that this isn’t anybody’s business but mine and Peyton’s.”

“You just beat the shit out of an old man,” Tucker reminded me. “That makes it other people’s business.”

“I was defending her.”

“From what?”

“Her father half-killing her, obviously.”

Tucker pinched the bridge of his nose. “Emmett, I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in, but this isn’t your fight.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“This is a family dispute,” he tried to explain. “And it’s not your family.”

I weighed a couple of things. I was going to be asked what I was doing out here. What all this was. What my relationship was with Peyton. And I needed to come up with something vague as quickly as possible.

“Peyton and I are … involved,” I said finally, and Tucker shook his head before lightening up.

“You never even got into fights when you were in school,” he said. “You’re a real Corbin, now, I guess. We should have a party, or something.”

“Screw that,” I said, somehow finding it inside myself to laugh. “Just don’t tell Chance, and that’ll be celebration enough.”

“You know he’ll find out.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be from either of us.”

“So, you and Peyton?”

“Yeah. Me and Peyton.” And that wasn’t such a stretch to believe, was it? “Involved” could mean a lot of things, and it did. We were confidantes, first and foremost. And we were business partners second. And somewhere between those two things, or perhaps separate from them, it was hard to tell, was the fact that we were lovers. I didn’t know if we were exclusive. I didn’t know if she still sat at that table in the bar, waiting for a little extra cash to flow in. I didn’t care. That Peyton was somehow separate from the Peyton I was involved with.

“Well, good for you,” Tucker said at last, making me expel the breath I’d been holding. I hadn’t known until that very moment how important it was to me for him to support that choice. I knew what a lot of people thought about Peyton, but it was a relief that Tucker was able to see past that.

“Thanks.”

“These guys will probably have a few more questions for you,” he said, “and I’ve got to get back to the ranch. I expect you won’t be back for dinner.”

“Dinner?”

He gave me a small, pointed smile. “Don’t you have someone to visit in the hospital?”

I followed one of the police units to the hospital after I’d answered their questions thoroughly enough to satisfy their curiosity, half surprised I wasn’t going to jail. I couldn’t say the same for Dax Malone, loaded into the back of another cruiser after the EMTs popped a couple of bandages on his face.

The town’s hospital was usually described as a place to go get a Band-Aid slapped on a gaping cut or just a holding center for old folks to die. I hoped they weren’t mistreating Peyton, that they’d have the sense to refer her to a hospital in Dallas if she was really bad.

But when I finally got the right directions to her room, she looked to be doing about as well as she could after getting the shit kicked out of her.

“I knew you weren’t going to go to jail,” she said as soon as she saw me. “Though I kind of wish you had.”

“Why would you say that?” I asked with a surprised laugh.

“So you wouldn’t get to see me like this.” She gestured at herself, her swollen and bandaged face, the cast on her wrist.

“I like seeing you however I can,” I said, bending to give her a light kiss on the forehead. “What’d the doctors say about your ribs?”

“Bruised, but not broken,” she said, managing a smile. “But I guess I’m kind of stuck.”

“Stuck how?” I eased myself into the seat beside her bed, wondering why this moment was the most normal part of our day. We’d started out with the problem of a horse with a broken leg, and now Peyton was broken in a hospital bed. If we had been anywhere else, if she hadn’t had obvious wounds on her, this would’ve felt almost ordinary — a couple chatting in the bedroom. But we were hardly a couple, and definitely not normal.

“They want to keep me here overnight,” she explained. “That shit’s expensive.”

“We’ll figure something out.”

“You’re not paying for it.”

“I didn’t say I was. I said we’d figure it out.”

Peyton looked down at her lap. “There’s something else.”

“What else?”

“Well, a lot of things.” Her eyes slid to the opposite wall, but there wasn’t anything there to look at. She just didn’t want to look at me. “The project is completely destroyed.”

“I gathered that. It’ll be okay. What else?”

“What else?” Peyton huffed. “It took time and money and effort to get that put together. We still have appointments that we’re missing. What the hell are we supposed to do?”

It would’ve been easy to allow the panic of letting people down, of screwing up our dream take over. But seeing Peyton like this and going through everything today made one thing very clear: she was more important to me than any of that. If something had happened to her today that had compromised her life even more than this beating from Dax, I didn’t know what I would’ve done.

“We’re supposed to take care of you, first,” I said. “That’s what we’re going to do. Don’t worry about the project right now. Worry about getting better.”

She looked at me, tentative. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“What do you mean?” Even as I asked that, I kicked myself. She had the cottage back at her father’s place, but there was no way she was going to want to go back there. It didn’t matter how long the bastard was going to spend in jail, and I assumed it wouldn’t be a lengthy stint. That place meant bad memories, and bad blood. Of course she wouldn’t live there anymore.

“I guess I’ll just squat here until they kick me out,” Peyton said, her bruised eyes, open to a slit, roaming the spare hospital room with resentful resignation. “I can’t pay the bills, but I don’t think I could survive another ass-kicking like that.”

“There wouldn’t be another ass-kicking,” I said, my thumb running over the scabbed-over but still tender sores on my knuckles. “They’re locking your father up in jail as we speak. But I agree. You shouldn’t go back to his place.”

“Maybe they’ll let me sleep in the bar if I promise to clean it up after closing and not drink any of the booze.”

“You don’t have to go there, either.”

“If there’s some secret place I can live that you aren’t telling me about, I’d love to hear about it. And it had better not be my mother’s trailer.”

She looked like hell, but Peyton was giving it all she could to stay chipper — at least trying to resurrect the old sarcasm that had made her so popular with everyone. Maybe she thought it was all she had left. Maybe that was why she clung to it. I wished that she could understand that she didn’t have to put up a front with me, that she could be honest with her own feelings even if I was there with her.

“Easy,” I said, wondering if it would be. “You’ll come stay with me. On the ranch.”

Mary Crow’s warning to me about love being a son of a bitch echoed in my head, but I did my best to ignore it. We didn’t need any relationship advice from her. We could do this on our own.

It took some convincing, but then I was moving Peyton into the trailer with me, Avery and Tucker getting the belongings she wanted from her cottage on Dax Malone’s property and trucking them over.

“This is really pretty unnecessary,” she said more than once. “My father’s going to stand trial, and in the meantime, there’s a restraining order in place. He can’t get within several hundred yards of me, and that’s at least as far away as the cottage is from the house.”

“You shouldn’t take the chance,” Tucker counseled her. “What would you do if he decided the restraining order didn’t mean shit one night after a few too many drinks?”

“He’ll know I’m here with Emmett, if that happens,” she said. “What’s to stop him from coming over here?”

“A lot more people to get through,” Avery assured her.

“Just lie down,” I advised. “Relax. You’re thinking too much about this.”

“It’s a lot to think about,” she said, but settled herself moodily on the bed anyway. “I feel like I’m a prisoner here.”

“You’re not,” I said, waving as my brothers motored away to get back to work on the ranch. “You’re just here until you figure out what else you want to do.”

“I want to go back to the cottage,” she tried again. “It’ll all blow over soon. It isn’t the first time we’ve gotten into a fight like that. Of course, that one was the worst one.”

“Your father’s going to pay for what he did,” I reminded her. We’d persuaded her to file a lawsuit against him to really send a message. I thought it would be important for her to get some kind of closure or exact a punishment for the things Mary Crow had told us. Now, though, I wasn’t so sure. Peyton didn’t seem particularly interested in it.

I applied Mary’s knowledge to the horse we still had in our care, which had miraculously escaped Dax’s wrath, and called the owner.

“We’ll pay you a house call to see how this is working for your horse,” I said, eyeing the reinforced splint I’d made from Mary’s instructions. “Things here at this location are a little … complicated right now.”

“I’ll say,” the owner said, his tone of voice telling me that he already had more details about what had transpired here than even the police report had. I simply kept reminding myself just how small a town this place was and tried to keep moving forward.

“I feel like I’m invading your space,” Peyton said another day in the trailer as I dodged around her to get to the sink to brush my teeth.

I spat out a mouthful of foamy toothpaste. “You’re not,” I said. “I just haven’t lived with anyone in here before. We’ll figure it out.”

“I’m smothering you,” she said the following week, spread-eagled in the bed as I read in a chair.

“You’re being ridiculous,” I laughed. “I like having you around.”

I reached out to her, trying to reassure her, but something about that or something else or God knew what pissed her off.

“I’m just some kind of game to you,” Peyton said, dodging my outreached hand. “That’s all this is, isn’t it? A game? Something fun to distract you from the ranch? I get it.”

“Peyton, please stop. Please listen to me.”

“I don’t need to listen to you. I know everything I need to know. I was a fool to think this was a good idea.”

“I don’t know if this was a good idea, either,” I confessed. “But what choice did we have?”

“You had a choice,” she snapped. “People like you always have a choice. I’m the one who doesn’t.”

I ached for her, recognizing her pain, but I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t enrage her further. What was it about finally having come to literal blows with her father that had destroyed her so thoroughly? I knew I was privileged for wondering, for not coming close to ever understanding, but if she said they’d come to blows before, what was it about this time that had made her come undone? The Peyton I knew was strong, confident, unwilling to let anyone get her down. I’d admired that Peyton even as I’d feared her — terrified of disappointing her, boring her, shaping up to be like just another asshole drifting through her life.

“What do you want, Peyton?” I asked, fighting to keep a tremble out of my voice. “Tell me. I would do anything to help you.”

“You just want to take advantage of me.”

She was weeping like it hurt her, her teeth bared, jaw clamped together, and maybe it was painful to come apart like this. Peyton was always so self-assured, so contemptuous of everyone around her that it was difficult to recognize that she had holes in her armor, just like the rest of us. I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t think of what kind of solace she would accept — and I didn’t think I could handle being pushed away again. I loved her too much for that. It would cut too deeply.

“I would never take advantage of you,” I said quietly. “Not ever. And I would protect you from anyone who tried.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said, wiping her face hard with the heel of her hand, sounding like she didn’t even believe that fact herself.

“I know you can. I just want to know if you’d let me take care of you, too. If you’d let me in.”

She snorted at me, and I guessed I could at least be thankful it wasn’t a laugh. A laugh might’ve completely demoralized me. I was trying to be honest with her here, and with myself, too. I had significant feelings for Peyton Crow, as problematic as that was. How many men had crooned how much they loved her into her ear after burying their seed deep inside her, then throwing her away? How many men had she used for her own gain, leading them along until she’d wrung out all the money they were willing to give her — or all the money they had.

“I’m pathetic,” she said, out of the blue, giving voice to one of the thoughts tumbling around in her head.

I wished I could reach out and wipe away the residue from her tears that still stained her cheeks, but I didn’t think she’d let me touch her.

“You’re not pathetic. You never could be pathetic.”

“Look at me.” She lifted her hands and let them drop uselessly into her lap. “Run out of my home. Letting my fucking parents get to me like this. There’s a reason I stayed away from the both of them. Just look at me.”

The bruises were fading, physically speaking, but it seemed like they’d leave their marks for a longer time than any of the doctors estimated. Even if her only broken bone had been her wrist, it seemed like this encounter had broken much more than the obvious.

“I see a resilient young woman who is in the midst of redefining her career and her existence,” I said, cringing when Peyton tossed back her head and howled with laughter. “What? What’s wrong with that?”

“You’re a cheese factory,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. I wasn’t sure whether they were from mirth or despair. “It’s like a storybook for you, isn’t it?”

“I really don’t understand.”

“This is life.” She pushed her hair out of her face and gave me a flat stare. “People just don’t hope hard enough for something good to happen. Nothing good ever happens.”

I swallowed. “I think something good happened.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“We’re together,” I said, wincing at the way her shoulders slumped. “I don’t know if you even want to hear this right now, but I have feelings for you. I’m glad you’re here with me, even if the circumstances were terrible to get you here.”

“Typical. You’re thinking with your dick.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Then what? Don’t tell me you’re in love with me.” Her lip curled in an ugly, sarcastic way above her teeth, and I knew that if I told her that, yes, I was in love with her, that I cared deeply about her, that I envisioned a future for the both of us that involved doing the things we were most passionate about while being passionate with each other, she would eviscerate me.

“Well?”

What could I do?

“I am in love with you,” I admitted. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, especially not right now. But I’m glad you’re here with me because I’m in love with you. I’m glad I can be here for you.”

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

Of all the things I expected Peyton to say to my confession, this wasn’t exactly one of them.

“Oh, don’t give me those stupid puppy dog eyes,” she said, glowering at me, her own dark eyes narrowed to slits. “Those don’t work on me. Yes, you’re an idiot. You heard me right.”

“I guess I am an idiot, because I really don’t understand why you think that.” I tried not to look as hurt as I felt, tried to keep from handing Peyton any more ammunition to fire at me than she already had.

“Because you don’t love me. You’re not in love with me.”

She stared at me, daring me with a jut of her chin to refute her.

“This fucking idiot needs you to explain yourself, please,” I said, feeling tired. “I just don’t know what else I’m supposed to feel.”

“Everyone thinks they’re in love with me. You’re not the first person to tell me that, and you won’t be the last.”

Just what I was afraid of. “I’m sure that lots of people have told you that,” I said. “I don’t care. That’s in the past. What I’m more interested is the present — and the future.”

“You want to take me away from all this ugliness, Emmett Corbin?” she wheedled, her eyes as hard as flint. “You want to save me from my own life? Sweep me off my feet and make everything better again? Make me feel like a virgin again?”

“I recognize that you have had a tough time of things,” I said, ignoring her peals of laughter, trying to finish my thoughts, trying to defend the thing inside of my chest that was aching, so sure of what was real. “I wouldn’t pretend to be able to change anything for you. I’m no Prince Charming, if that’s what you’re laughing at. I know I’m not. All I know is that I love you. You don’t have to love me back. Just accept the truth that I do love you.”

“You don’t love me. You can’t. You love the idea of me, the fantasy that you can clean me up and fix me up and have me all to yourself, good as new. But it’s never going to be like that. You just don’t understand.”

“Then help me understand.” I leaned forward and captured her good hand, but she yanked it away from my grasp as if I had burned her.

“This is the only way people can love me,” she said, ripping her tank top off with some difficulty, exposing her breasts to me. The bruises there, though fading, were more prominent than the ones on her face, including the dark spread across her ribs that had given the doctors such initial worry. With a shimmy and a kick, Peyton divested herself of her shorts, too, naked in front of me except for the cast on her wrist. She was a beautiful woman even with the damage she’d been dealt. But something about this display was ugly, and I looked quickly down at my feet.

“No, you look at me, Emmett Corbin,” she said, crawling forward on the bed until she could kneel and take my head in her hands, forcing my gaze back up. “You look at what you love. You love me like this. This is the only way it works.”

“This doesn’t have to be the only way it works,” I said, but she kissed me hard. “Peyton …”

She ignored me, kissed me again, kissed me until I stopped being able to protest, stopped trying to insert words between her lips, which were so determined to prove her point. Peyton pulled me forward until my thighs knocked against the bed and I lost my balance, tumbling forward into her. It knocked the wind out of her with a whoosh, but if it hurt, she didn’t give a single indication. She simply rolled me off of her and straddled my middle, grinding herself against the crotch of my pants.

“Peyton, please.”

“Yes, beg me,” she said, her eyes glittering in a way I hadn’t seen before. “Beg me for this.”

“This isn’t what I want.”

“This is the only thing you want.”

“That’s just not true.” I tried to still her hips by gripping them with my hands, but she only seemed to take that as encouragement.

“You want me.”

“Of course I want you,” I said, sweat beading on my forehead as I fought desperately to control a burgeoning erection. “But in many ways. More ways than just this.”

“Bullshit.”

And my cock was in her hand, and she guided it into her body, rocking on it, covering my mouth with her other hand, her eyes glittering as she looked down at me. There was so much pain in that gaze that it was hard to stay locked with it, but I wouldn’t allow myself to look away. I couldn’t. It would be the worst thing to do. I kissed the palm of her hand over my mouth and gently removed it.

“Yes, I love you like this,” I said. “But I love the Peyton who knows everything about horses, the one who can do anything, who follows her dreams. The one who doesn’t give a fuck what anyone says or thinks. The one who knows her own heart.”

“Shut up.”

We hadn’t made love since before the episode with her father. Maybe she needed this. Maybe I needed this. I tried to move in the right ways, the ways that would help her find her way back to herself and to me. But then she started crying again, or maybe she’d been crying this whole time. I tried to withdraw, tried to take her in my arms, but she resisted, pinning my hands with hers, riding me until she was finished with me.

“Peyton, talk to me.”

She’d climbed off of me, but she still wouldn’t let me hold her.

“I’m never going to be good at anything except giving my body to people,” she said, completely shattered. “That is the only thing I’m good at. I’ll do it until my fucking teeth fall out, and then the blow jobs will be even better. Maybe I’ll charge more, then.”