AVERY (The Corbin Brothers Book 2)

by Lexie Ray

  And then, thankfully, outrage subsided into guilt. Paisley was out here because I wasn’t a good husband to her. She deserved to have attention paid to her, for people to laugh with her and buy her drinks and want to spend time with her. She was gorgeous whether she chose to do her makeup and wear a dress and heels, or if she just slapped some sunscreen on her face and wore jeans and a T-shirt on the ranch. She was beautiful now, laughing and looking like she was genuinely enjoying herself.

  I was an asshole. I was an asshole and a terrible husband.

  Partly indignant and partly eager to try and set things right — or at least push the situation toward the path of being right — I left my barstool and walked over to join the party.

  “I see you’re having a good time,” I said, clearing my throat at Paisley, who jumped but didn’t look especially surprised to see me here. She might not have seen me come in. But this was my haunt, after all, not hers.

  “Well, look who it is!” she exclaimed. “You all know my husband, don’t you? Avery Corbin?”

  Of course everyone knew me. If they didn’t know me personally, they knew Corbin Ranch. They knew my family name.

  “Avery, you remember Joe, don’t you?” she asked, patting the enormous man’s shoulder. “Joe Durham, from elementary school?”

  For fuck’s sake. She apparently did know exactly who he was. Why was she so much as giving him the time of day?

  “I remember,” I said, nodding curtly at him. He held out his hand almost grudgingly, but I shook my head at him. I couldn’t be sure as to why my wife was forcing this interaction, but I wasn’t about to be chummy with a guy whose ass I’d kicked for a noble cause. I didn’t care how long ago it was.

  “Well, Joe’s back in town visiting his folks,” Paisley continued, oblivious to or perhaps thoroughly enjoying my discomfort. “I suggested we catch up. Isn’t it funny to see how we’ve all changed through the years? You’ll never guess what he’s been up to.”

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” I asked, plastering what was probably a sickly smile on my face for appearances’ sake.

  “And ruin our party?” She pouted. “What’s so important that you’re being such a party foul?”

  “Yeah, don’t be a party foul, Corbin,” Joe said, leering at me. “Paisley can do whatever she wants — isn’t that right, Paisley?”

  “That is very right, Joe,” she said, patting him fiercely on the head like she might’ve if he were a pet dog. He didn’t seem to mind the contact. In fact, he looked like he liked it — or perhaps liked the way it was making me distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Paisley can do whatever she wants,” I said as patiently as I could manage. Seeing her in that dress was such a distraction, especially remembering how I’d taken her, bent over, in my trailer. Could she even fit underwear beneath that dress? It would be easy just to take her out to the truck and satisfy whatever strange craving I was feeling. It was a touch barbaric, the urge to reassert my marriage by forceful, impassioned fucking in a vehicle, but that was about where I was at with Paisley. It was vexing.

  “I’ll drink to that!” Paisley cheered. “Paisley can do whatever the fuck she wants!”

  She drained what remained of her cocktail, and I wondered if I had ever seen her this drunk before. She always seemed like she liked to stay in control, but tonight, she was out of it, stumbling in her too-tall heels, leaning against everything and everyone in a desperate bid to remain upright.

  “Would Paisley like to have a quick and private word with me out in the parking lot, maybe?” I asked, keeping my tone as even as I was able to.

  “She already says she doesn’t want to talk to you, genius,” Joe said, standing up. Well. His height had finally caught up with his girth. He was nearly as tall as I was, now.

  “Remember,” I said lightly waving my finger in his face. “The game is that Paisley gets to do what she wants. She doesn’t need your help to determine that.”

  “You think you own her,” Joe said. “That’s what she told me. That’s a hell of a thing to make a woman think.”

  I looked at Paisley with raised eyebrows, and her eyes twinkled in merriment. The idea that I would try to convince her that I owned her — or would even want to try and do such a thing — was downright laughable. She was having fun making a fool out of Joe, but she was making a fool out of me at the same time.

  “No one owns Paisley Summers,” I informed Joe. “I just happen to be married to her.”

  “You don’t sound very excited about that,” he said. “If I’d married Paisley, I’d tell anyone who listened.”

  “That’s because it would be such an anomaly for her to marry someone like you,” I said.

  “What the fuck is an anomaly?” Joe demanded, getting up in my face as Paisley laughed her head off in the background. I was glad someone was finding this so funny. It was looking more and more like I was going to have to repeat a lesson I thought Joe had already learned back in elementary school.

  The strange thing was that it wouldn’t have been an anomaly for Paisley to marry someone like Joe. From the shine of the watch on his wrist, even though I didn’t know much about those kinds of things, I could tell he was doing well for himself. His clean fingernails illustrated the fact that he didn’t work with his hands like us ranchers did. What had he been up to? Why had Paisley reconnected with him? The thought gave me a shot of hot, ugly jealousy right to the chest, making my heart pump.

  “Are you going to answer me, or am I going to beat it out of you?” Joe demanded, reclaiming my attention.

  “The only thing you’re going to be beating is your own cock when you go home alone,” I informed him. “Whatever you’re doing right now isn’t a good idea.” That last sentence was also directed to Paisley, but she was apparently having too much fun orchestrating all this drama to let a little thing like dignity stop her from what she was doing.

  “You all are both so much bigger now than last time,” she said. “I wonder if the outcome will be the same or different?”

  “I’d be more than happy to try and figure it out for you,” Joe said.

  “I would like to avoid that,” I said. “A recess scrap in elementary school is one thing. A bar fight is another.”

  “You’re scared,” he taunted.

  “No. I’m just smarter now, though you seemed to have suffered a setback in that department.”

  Joe cocked his fist back and my stomach sank. I really, really hadn’t wanted to get into a fight tonight. I dodged his wild punch and stepped back, holding my hands up, palms outward, in what I hoped was a sign I wanted to placate him.

  “I’ll leave you all to your party,” I said. “I hope you enjoy yourselves.”

  “What did you even want to talk to me about before?” Paisley asked, looking a little disappointed that she wasn’t going to get the rematch she’d been wanting to see.

  “It’s not important anymore,” I lied.

  “Just tell me,” she said impatiently. “What was so important that you were trying to interrupt our party so rudely in the first place?”

  I gritted my teeth. “I just wanted to tell you that I had never seen you wear that dress before, and that I thought you looked very nice in it.”

  She blinked, surprised. It obviously wasn’t what she’d expected me to say. Hell, I hadn’t even expected that I’d say that. It wasn’t a lie. She did look good in the dress, even if it wasn’t in my particular taste. But what I’d really wanted to figure out was just what the hell Paisley was trying to do. This wasn’t like her. Reconnecting Joe was a deliberate prod at me. She couldn’t have enjoyed being with him. He’d made her feel like shit when we were kids, and it was something I didn’t think she was willing to forget.

  If I had to guess, it was a ploy to make me jealous, to show me what I was missing out on because I couldn’t get past the fact that ours was a marriage of economics, not genuine desire.

  The thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that Paisley had gotten it ri
ght. I was jealous.

  Chapter 7

  I’d hoped that Paisley would be satisfied with the trouble she’d caused in her first debut out on the town, but I was very wrong. Every time I went out to the bar after finishing up work on the ranch, Paisley was almost always there. On the rare occasion she wasn’t, she made an appearance later, always already the life of the party, egging regulars on. She earned quite a following, and it was difficult for me to watch. This wasn’t the Paisley I knew — or thought I knew. This was the Paisley putting on a show to get to me, to show me that anything I could do, she could also do — but bigger, better, and much more obnoxious.

  It made me wish that this stupid town had more than one damn bar. If there were more than one bar, we probably could work out some kind of custody arrangement, organizing visitation days for each of the establishments.

  “Stop looking so blue,” she told me as she passed by my spot one night. “I’m just doing what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t act like you do,” I said. “I don’t make a fool out of myself.”

  “Incorrect,” she said. “You do make a fool out of yourself for getting so drunk so often here, and you make a fool out of me.”

  “You’re doing that to yourself these days,” I informed her. “You drink hard enough that it has to be affecting your work by now.”

  “You’re so full of shit it’s a wonder you don’t stink of it,” she retorted. “Who says I’m drunk all the time.”

  “You were drunk the night I almost had to kick Joe’s ass for him again.”

  Paisley spluttered into helpless laughter at that. “Sure, I was drunk that night. But since then, I’ve just been acting extra happy. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “What’s wrong is that it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you’re not here to get drunk, I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to do here.”

  “Just have as good a time as you have every night,” she said innocently. “If you don’t want to spend time with me at home, fine. But don’t expect me to wait around there for you to show up. I like having fun, too.”

  “Go have fun somewhere else,” I told her. “You’re only camping out here because you know it tortures me.”

  “Oh, I had no idea,” she said, surprised. “Well, now I know that it tortures you. That’s an interesting fact to know. It tortures you to see me having fun.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  “I have no idea what you mean, or what your problem is.” Paisley smiled brightly. “Fantastic. Everyone’s trying to listen in on our conversation.”

  “You’re the one who started this,” I reminded her.

  “Wrong again. You are. Your need for escape from this marriage is so harmful that I feel like I have to come down here just to keep an eye on you.”

  “I’m telling you right now, just like I told you the other day. I am not cheating on you. I only come here to relax. There isn’t another person in the world …” That was odd. I’d been about to spout off that there wasn’t another person in the world I’d rather be with than Paisley, but that didn’t make a lick of sense. I didn’t want to be with her at all. Sure, maybe that meant that I didn’t want to be with anyone, but what I’d been about to say had been almost unbearably emotional.

  “You can finish your thought,” Paisley said. “I can take whatever you want to dish out, Avery.”

  “I’m not sleeping around,” I finished lamely. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “You just don’t understand that I’m so frustrated with you I could scream,” she said. “You think you can come here and I can’t. That you can get drunk in public but I can’t. It’s a double standard, and that’s not fair.”

  “Fine, I don’t give a shit,” I said, chugging my drink down and hopping down from my barstool. “This can be your place, if you want it to be. But don’t bother me if you need to find a way home. Don’t bother me at all, in fact. What’s happening between the two of us right now, what’s been happening … this is what I imagine hell to be, Paisley. People playing games with each other and never understanding what’s going on.”

  “Oh, I thought you’d be pretty used to doing that by now,” she said. “You’ve been doing it to me our entire lives.”

  “I’m leaving before you turn this into even more of a spectacle than it already is,” I said, my eyes darting around to the people trying to watch us out of the corners of their eyes, hunched over their beers. “Have fun with all of your new friends.”

  “I will,” she shot back. “I always do.”

  The worst part about all of this was that I was jealous of the attention she paid to those new friends, men who were hanging on to the novelty of Paisley Summers, out and about, painting the town red. I wanted her to see that my concern was because I cared about her, but that was impossible to say to her, especially with how self-righteous she had been acting, like this was some kind of personal crusade for her.

  We didn’t speak for several days later, when my cellphone buzzed in my pocket while I was out with the herd, keeping logs.

  The only reason I answered Paisley’s call was to fuss at her, to tell her not to call me, to demand what was taking up so much of my attention. At least, that’s what I told myself. It wasn’t because she’d looked so beautiful laughing with all of those assholes at the bar. No, that wasn’t it. It also wasn’t because she laid her hand on Joe Durham’s bicep as if all had been forgiven. They’d make a handsome couple, maybe even a match that made sense, but that wasn’t the reason I answered her call, either. It certainly wasn’t because I was steadily ignoring the possibility that Paisley might not be so bad, after all, to have as a wife.

  “What is it?” I snapped as harshly as I could. She knew better than to call ranch hands during the middle of a shift. Hell, everyone knew it.

  “It’s my father,” she said, sounding lost.

  It threw me for a momentary loop that she didn’t rise to my bait, react to my tone of voice. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but all the walls I’d hastily erected around myself didn’t allow me to.

  “I’m pretty busy, here,” I reminded her.

  “He wants to talk to you,” she said, sounding like that girl I’d saved from the bully all those years ago. Something tugged on my heart a little bit, something I didn’t quite understand how to give a name or meaning to.

  “I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to get away from here, Paisley,” I said. “You know that Chance isn’t just going to let me ride off into the sunset when there’s still work to be done.”

  “You’re my husband,” she said, finally getting a little more fire into her voice. “On paper, at least.” Ouch. “You have an equal stake in my part of the ranch whether you want it or not, and Chance can’t say a goddamn thing if you need to leave. And you do. My father wants to talk to you — needs to talk to you, he says — and you have to come to the hospital at once.”

  “The hospital? Why?”

  I heard Paisley breathing heavily, and finally I understood. The inevitable was happening — just the same thing we all had to face someday — but it was different because it was her father and it was hard to lose a father.

  “He took a turn for the worse this morning,” she said. “The doctors are looking pretty grim about it.”

  She said those words as if they cost her nothing, but I knew all too well just how deeply that sword cut. The old man had been sick for a long time, but that didn’t change the fact that you could never be prepared for the death of a loved one, no matter how long it had been in coming.

  I couldn’t pretend that Paisley’s father on his way out affected me much. I’d booted him out of his master bedroom in the Summers house and handily avoided him ever since out of that awkward truth. But it made me identify with Paisley in a way I hadn’t before. We’d been more different than two people had any right to be — her love for ranching and my hatred for it practically canceled each other out —
but this was an emotion I could readily understand. I knew what it was like to lose both of your parents. It was the worst feeling in the world.

  “Are you going to come or not?” she demanded. “Do it for him, at least, for God’s sake. Not for me.”

  I had a flash of anger. Right when I’d been marveling over this new connection with my wife, she’d reminded me just how much she loathed me. Would we ever share anything but animosity for each other?

  “I’ll come when I can.”

  “Avery, if you show up and my father is already dead because you thought you’d make me wait just to piss me off, I really might give you that divorce that you’re so fucking desperate for.”

  She’d threatened to divorce me before, and I’d laughed her off, telling her she needed me much more than I needed her. She’d been pissed and blustering, then, but now she sounded dead serious. At one time, that would’ve been a relief. Screw Paisley, screw our marriage, screw this whole entire ranching operation. What did I have to be the cog that kept everything running? But now, something was different. It had to do with just how furious I was seeing her out and about with other men, as vapid as it sounded. And maybe it had to do with the fact that whether she’d admit it or not, Paisley needed me to go to her father just as much as the old man needed to say whatever he had to say to me.

  Something had changed between the two of us, and it was hard to tell whether Paisley realized it, too.

  “I’ll be there,” I said finally, but she’d already ended the call.

  I shoved the cattle log in my saddlebag and turned my horse back toward home — the Summers end of the property, not the Corbin. Even though I usually put my horse up in his own stall for the night, I knew it wouldn’t be such a big deal to use the facilities near the Summers house. Half of it was mine, any way, though I didn’t care to claim it.

  I got ready as swiftly as I could, not wanting to risk Paisley’s ire or the old man’s stamina, and drove to the dumpy little hospital in town. Even Hadley always turned her nose up at the thing, taking care of all her various hospital-related emergencies — mostly with us Corbins — straight up to Dallas so at least there wouldn’t be any time wasted. The purpose of the hospital in our little town was to wait for people to die and then declare them dead. If there ever was an emergency that required skilled medical professionals to solve, the EMT drivers took Hadley’s route and went straight to Dallas, blaring their lights and sirens the entire way.