THE CORBIN BROTHERS: The Complete 5-Books Series

by Lexie Ray

  “What?”

  “Our marriage. It doesn’t have to be bad.”

  “I … don’t want it to be bad.”

  “I understand if you don’t love me right now,” she said. “I understand that this whole thing was rushed. But I hope you’ll maybe grow to love me.”

  “Paisley …”

  But she walked away, laughing and waving as guests started to filter into the tent, radiant in that confounding green dress. It was a good thing. I hadn’t been sure what I was supposed to say to that. The truth was out, at least — she knew I hadn’t married her out of love. But that truth didn’t make this marriage any easier.

  I grabbed a drink at the bar because I didn’t know what else I should be doing and went to try and find out where I was supposed to be sitting. I hadn’t had the stomach to eat anything today, and all of the whiskey I’d already had was starting to wear on me. Dinner sounded both good and not so good, my stomach doing a poor job of telling me what it wanted. I didn’t even know what I wanted.

  “You’re supposed to be greeting guests with your wife right about now,” Emmett said, swooping by me at the bar. “Not a good time to grab a drink, Avery.”

  “Shit,” I muttered, throwing it back and down my throat and wiping my mouth on the sleeve of my suit jacket. I’d forgotten that detail, one of what felt like thousands tossed at me during hurried rehearsals. Paisley was at the entrance to the tent already, beaming and accepting congratulations for marrying some idiot who couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be responsible for at his own wedding.

  “About time,” she said to me quietly through a tight smile.

  “Sorry,” I muttered back, and started receiving handshakes and hugs and well wishes for something I didn’t feel good about at all. My smile felt sickly on my own face, so I stopped trying to match the wattage one Paisley’s face and simply nodded and thanked folks for turning out for the end of my life as I knew it.

  “Don’t look so horrified,” Paisley said as we were finally able to sit at our own table. “I told you things didn’t have to be bad.”

  “I’m not trying to look horrified,” I said, casting a look around, trying to find some outlet of escape. I could only see the bar.

  “If you get through this reception without embarrassing either of us, I’ll make it up to you tonight,” she promised, biting her lower lip.

  With divorce papers? That was the only thing that would make me feel better about any of this — an immediate escape.

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re proposing,” I said, crooking my finger at one of the waiters drifting around the tent.

  “We’re married, dummy,” she said. “I’m talking about sex. Good sex. Wedding night sex.”

  But my cock didn’t so much as twitch. Sex with Paisley had been good, sure, but the fact that we were married now made all my worldly desires curdle and disappear.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’d never want you to do anything you didn’t want to do.”

  “Who says I don’t want to have sex with you?” she asked, drawing her eyebrows together. “We’re married now. We can have sex all we want.”

  “People don’t have to be married to have all the sex they want,” I retorted. “You and I had sex prior to tying ourselves together, remember?”

  “Are you going to be like this for the entirety of the night?”

  “Like what?”

  Paisley almost threw her hands in the air but restrained herself at the last moment. “Like this. Angry. Embarrassing.”

  “All I want to do is to enjoy myself for the sake of these people and then go to bed,” I said. “It’s been a long day, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose it has.” Paisley looked out over the tent at all of the people finding their carefully organized seats — all my brothers were seated together, and her father was seated with a few of his remaining close friends — and I wondered if she was filled with just as many regrets as I was. Had all of this truly been worth it for her?

  “Just don’t get too drunk to mess up our first dance,” she said, standing abruptly. “I’m going to go chat with people.”

  “First dance?” I snagged her by her wrist, detaining her departure. “I don’t dance, Paisley.”

  “Everyone dances at their own weddings,” she said, looking down at me. “I told you this. We’ll be dancing to the song — our song — I had the guitarist play at the ceremony. You agreed to it.”

  I agreed to a lot of things, I was realizing, that I really didn’t like.

  “The first dance better be sooner rather than later,” I said, gulping down another whiskey. “To get it over with.”

  Paisley narrowed her eyes again. “I’ll have a word with the DJ.”

  The rest of the evening was something of a whiskey-tinged blur, people stopping by my chair to yammer inanities, a constant stream of crap I forgot to do, numerous toasts and dinner tucked away in there. I got through the dance, Paisley smiling gently like she didn’t actually want to murder me, and returned to my drinks, wishing that everyone would just go home and stop staring at me. This was natural, right? That’s what Emmett had said. It was natural to have the jitters. Was it okay if they continued well after the deed had already been done?

  “I’m feeling like it might be time to go,” Paisley said, much later, placing her arm gently on my shoulder. I shrugged her off.

  “I’m not ready.” The bar was free, the liquor was flowing, and Sam Summers was footing the bill as a part of the stipulations of the contract I’d just entered into. I’d signed away my life for my family’s ranch. I wasn’t going to leave my own party until I was good and ready, and that meant shit faced.

  “I hate to break it to you, husband, but you’re probably twice as drunk now as you were when I took you home that night,” she said, glancing around, trying to gauge whether we were about to make a scene.

  “Just leave me alone,” I said. “All I want to do is sit here and drink. I’m not hurting anyone.”

  “You’re hurting your reputation, and mine,” Paisley said. “You also look twice as miserable as you did when you were trying to drink away your sorrows at the bank’s foreclosure of your family’s ranch. People are going to start gossiping.”

  Somehow, that option didn’t seem as bad anymore. Fuck the ranch. Fuck my brothers. Fuck this entire town. I didn’t care at all about my reputation or Paisley’s or anything else except where my next drink was coming from.

  Paisley had to have sensed — or seen — my stubbornness.

  “If you come quietly,” she said, leaning down, her lips brushing the shell of my ear and making me shudder, “I can pretty much guarantee that you will come very loudly when we get home.”

  Now that I was so much drunker than before, that seemed like a much more tempting offer. I’d like to sink my cock into something as sweet — if manipulative — as Paisley, go to bed, and wake up tomorrow ideally with someone else’s life.

  I swayed dangerously as I pushed myself up, and Paisley snaked her arm around my waist. I couldn’t help but feel like this had all played out before — that I was all played out — but I didn’t have the time or inclination to analyze it. The only thing I could focus on was staying upright, putting one foot in front of the other, keeping my eyes straight ahead instead of roving around at the numerous faces still at our reception.

  “Best of luck to you two!” someone said, clapping me on the shoulder and nearly knocking the two of us down.

  “Careful, looks like the groom has had a good time at his reception,” someone else joked.

  “Not as good a time as he’s going to have on his wedding night,” Paisley fired back a little forcefully.

  “Take care of yourself, you all. Take care of each other.” That one sounded suspiciously like Zoe, who was dancing with Chance, but that couldn’t be right. Chance wasn’t much of a dancer, and I knew I had to be seeing things.

  “Trailer,” I mumbled at Paisley as she mostly heaved me
into the passenger seat of her truck. It was the bar all over again, riding home from it, but this time, it wasn’t going to be anything close to a one-night stand. I’d never be rid of Paisley. We were married. My stomach contents sloshed around dangerously.

  “Hell, no, we’re not going to your trailer,” she said, jumping into the driver’s seat. “We’re going home.”

  “Home?”

  “To my home. Well, ours, now.”

  This was something I hadn’t thought about before. I’d just assumed everything would stay the same. If both of us accepted that this marriage was all about business, couldn’t we keep things as separate and sterile as possible? Paisley seemed to be taking the traditional aspects of whatever we’d just entered into a lot more seriously than I realized she would.

  “But doesn’t your father live there?”

  “Yes, but he’s living in the guest apartment, now.”

  “Guest apartment? Just how rich is your family?”

  “Rich enough to bail you all out,” she said, sharp and salty and full of sass. “You’ll like it there. I think you’ll find it’s a couple of steps up from what you’re used to.”

  What I was used to was having a space of my own, apart from everyone else, and I’d apparently given that up upon marrying Paisley. I’d given everything up. For what?

  “Avery Corbin, if you vomit in this truck, you will be sleeping in it.”

  Paisley was glaring at me as she drove, angry I’d let myself get to this state.

  “I won’t vomit in your truck,” I promised.

  “Is this going to be how things are going to be?” she asked me. “Are you going to have to be drunk out of your mind all the time to make this work? Is that the future I need to prepare for?”

  “It was our wedding,” I said. “Just having fun.”

  “Some fun.”

  The house loomed in the night, and Paisley parked. She helped me inside, and I kicked my own shoes off so she wouldn’t have to wrestle me out of them like the last time.

  “So, where’s that promise?” I asked her, too drunk to even take stock of my surroundings, flopping hard on the bed and enjoying the bounce.

  “I think you’d be better served by sleeping it off,” she informed me. “Good night.”

  She didn’t so much as turn off the lights as she stalked out, and when I opened my mouth to call after her, I vomited instead.

  At least it wasn’t in the truck.

  Chapter 5

  I would never get used to the Summers house. Paisley and her father — and whatever help they’d had — maintained it beautifully. It was a ranching house, sure, a mud room full of dust-peppered boots and jackets, but so much nicer than the house my brothers and I had grown up in. When our parents were still alive, there were enough people to put forth the time and effort necessary to maintain a house. But now that it was just us boys, it had begun a slow fall around our ears, the outside requiring a fresh coat of paint, roof repairs, shutters replaced, porch redone, the works. I was sure that revamping the house was somewhere on Chance’s list of things to do, but the ranch itself had come first for so many years that the house had become downright ramshackle.

  Not so with Paisley’s home.

  Maybe it helped that she’d infused it with things she loved. The house was very Paisley — sunny and bright and functional. It was also very Paisley in that it grated on me. There was no reason for it in particular, I just found that I hated life particularly when I was in that damn house.

  Even if we were married and it was ours.

  Paisley had even expressed if not trepidation, then at least hesitation when showing me around the place.

  “This is our room — well, the master bedroom,” she said. “You don’t have to sleep in here if you don’t want to, but Daddy gave it up for us.”

  I didn’t even know what to say to that. I hated the idea that I would be living here on some favor of Paisley’s father just because I’d entered into a contract with her. It was no more a home to me than the Corbin Ranch itself. I was beginning to be afraid that there wasn’t a single place in this world I fit in. If I couldn’t make my home in either of these ranches, where was the place I truly belonged?

  I could do nothing right in that house. The mud room seemed too clean for my boots, so I took them off outside, exasperating Paisley.

  “It’s called a mud room,” she explained for what must’ve been the fifteenth time, letting my boots fall with a clatter, scattering dirt clods across the floor. “It’s supposed to be dirty.”

  “But it has to be cleaned now,” I said, eyeing the clods.

  “Yes, like everything has to be cleaned,” she said. “But that is the sole purpose of this room — to hold our outerwear and dirty shoes. If you’re leaving your dirty shoes outside, you’re wasting this room.”

  She bought food that rotted in the refrigerator, untouched by any of us loosely orbiting one another.

  “Did you seriously order pizza again?” she demanded, brandishing a wilted head of lettuce. “Do you ever eat vegetables?”

  “I got mushrooms and peppers on the pizza,” I said, holding up a slice. “Do you want some?”

  “No, I don’t want any,” she exclaimed, angry. “I want us to have dinner together sometimes. Something one of us can cook.”

  “We never get here at the same time,” I reasoned through a mouthful of pizza. “And I can’t cook.”

  “You can learn,” she snapped. “I can learn. We can make a schedule or something. Make time for family dinner.”

  But not even my brothers and I had ever managed to make that happen together. Zoe or someone would prepare something and stick it in the microwave, and the rest of us would filter in as our schedules allowed, or our stomachs grumbled to let us know we were hungry.

  Paisley and I circled each other warily in the master suite. She said it was ours, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to either of us. She’d insisted I moved my belongings from the trailer into here, but I dragged my feet about it, only keeping a couple of shirts and a pair of jeans in the cavernous walk-in closet.

  We were both so tired all of the time that even if we ended up sleeping in the same bed — a rare occasion — one of us was already passed out cold by the time the other dropped in to it.

  Ranching was so much more difficult now with the increase of land and resources. It would be good, in the end -- at least that's what Chance and Paisley assured everyone -- once we got everything situated.

  All of us Corbins were impressed with the Summers operation. There were a lot of ranch hands on that side -- so many that Chance and Paisley moved some of them to the Corbin side of the ranch. Seeing my oldest brother and my wife work together was strange. Paisley never consulted her father, to my knowledge, but she always seemed to know what to do or what decision to make. I was sort of jealous of the natural rapport Chance and Paisley had, because she and I more or less avoided each other since I puked on our marriage bed — except for whenever she compelled to tell me I was behaving in the house incorrectly. The ranch work was so vast and never ending, though, that it was hard to feel much about that situation at all. We were busy installing gates, importing water, analyzing the costs and benefits of a grain operation, and beefing up care of the herd. It was twice as large, now, though we still kept the Corbin and Summers stock separate for ease of workflow. For the first time in a long time, it seemed like the ranch was actually doing well.

  If only it would rain.

  And if only it hadn't required me marrying a woman I didn't love to save everything.

  For the first time in my life, I found solace on the ranch, comfort in the mind-numbing regularity of cattle logs, a space apart from Paisley and everything else going wrong.

  I looked up one morning from my notations to see her trot by astride a horse.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” she said, tossing her hair at me, mocking my stare. “What, did you think I didn’t know how to ride a horse?”

  “I
’m sure you probably took lessons,” I said, a dig at the money her father had.

  “My only lessons were trial and error in the backyard of Daddy’s house,” she said, circling my horse with hers, making me dizzy to continue trying to look at her.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked her. “Field trip?”

  “I’m working,” she said, snorted at me. “Field trip. Really? You think I have time to just gallop around the ranch?”

  “What do you know about working?” I asked her. “What are you working on today?”

  “I’m covering for one of the Summers guys,” she said. “He’s out sick, so I told him I’d pick up his shift. Crowd control and such.”

  “I’m sure someone else would’ve been willing to get the overtime,” I said.

  “It’s nice to be out and about, out from behind a desk,” she said. “What’s that? Cattle log?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can I see?”

  I handed it to her, watched her horse graze and wander as she pored over it, nodding to herself.

  “Do you think we’ll make it?” she asked, glancing up, prodding her horse back over to mine with a squeeze of her knees. The fact that she could compel the animal to do her bidding without jerking on the reins surprised me.

  “The herd’s doing just fine,” I said. “It would help if it rained, of course, but the grain is fattening the calves right up.”

  “I meant you and me,” she said. “I can see the herd’s doing just fine from the logs.”

  “Good logs, then,” I said because I didn’t know what she wanted me to say about the state of our marriage. It felt precarious at times, and other times it didn’t even seem like we were married. If I didn’t run into her on the ranch, I could go whole days without actually seeing her. It was the oddest thing to live in the same house as my wife and be a stranger to her.

  “You don’t know very much about me, you know,” Paisley said, cocking her head coyly at me. “Aren’t you at least a little bit curious about what makes your wife tick?”

  Thinking of her as my wife was what really sent me into the twilight zone. That’s when things sort of tilted on their axis and stopped making sense. I knew we were married. I’d been at the ceremony, more or less. But that didn’t mean it was any less weird accepting the fact that I was somebody’s husband.