THE CORBIN BROTHERS: The Complete 5-Books Series

by Lexie Ray

  The thing that rubbed me the wrong way was that Paisley had gotten it right. 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.

  But I knew Paisley’s father would be there simply because there was nothing else for any of the doctors to solve. Paisley had said it herself. All they had to do now was wait and hope the old man didn’t suffer.

  I walked down the hallway — it was so small that there was only one, and only one floor, too — and slowed when I saw my wife seated outside a door to a room that had to contain her father. She held her face in her hands, and I instantly thought the worst. Even though I’d made every effort to make it here on time, I’d failed. She would be too angry to believe me, and just like that, I’d jettison her dreams and our marriage and my brothers’ ranch for the sole reason that I was too damn stubborn to admit that I loved my wife.

  I blinked and skidded to a halt, still eyeing her slumped over form. Did I really just think to myself that I loved Paisley? That couldn’t be right. I’d had to hold off her rabid advances throughout our mutual tenures in the public school system, then had signed a marriage license that came with other legal documents for saving both of our family’s ranches. Love wasn’t something I thought I could feel for that woman, and yet there it had surfaced, right in front of me. I realized that I loved the woman who pressed her face in her hands and was about to feel like she was the loneliest person on the planet. I wanted to do something to comfort her, wanted to at least tell her I knew what she was going through, but she lifted her face and saw me standing in the middle of the hallway, staring like an idiot.

  She frowned and sighed at me, half consternated, half relieved, and shrugged.

  “He’s in there waiting for you, but I don’t think he’ll be able to wait forever,” she said.

  “Paisley …”

  “Just … don’t.” She held her hands up to ward off whatever platitudes I had been prepared to offer her. “Go to him. The doctors say he should be in pain, even though he swears up and down that he isn’t, and he wants to stay lucid for you.”

  This fact seemed to piss her off, sending her hand to manically smooth the stray hairs away from her face. I wasn’t sure why she was angry, why she was tending to her hair when it looked perfectly fine. But, if I were being honest, I wasn’t sure about a lot of things. These were probably the least of them.

  “If you’re implying that I know whatever he might want to talk about, I don’t,” I said weakly. This was roughly a thousand times worse than him vacating the master bedroom for the unhappy newlyweds.

  “You’re wasting precious time,” Paisley said. “My father’s precious time that he should be spending comfortably.”

  “Jesus, I’m going.”

  “Finally.”

  I had to count to ten a half dozen times before I could stop being angry with her, reminding myself that she wasn’t in a good place, that her father was dying, that her life as she knew it was being upended and it would never be put to right again. At least, that’s what it had been for me.

  When I saw her father, swathed in a cheap hospital gown and sheets, I truly grasped her desperation. Paisley liked being in control, and this was well out of the realm of just what she could muster to follow her will. Sam Summers had been an overly big presence in life, but lying there in that bed, he seemed to have shrunk — everything from his hands and feet to his height and girth. Even his skin had appeared to have somehow simultaneously tightened in some places and loosened in others, giving his appearance the impression that Sam Summers was a man who was falling apart in a most final way.

  “Avery, my boy,” he said, his voice so weak I almost asked him to repeat what he said. I approached him and tried not to look as horrified as I felt. I’d known he’d been sick, but I hadn’t thought it was this serious.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, then cringed at my own stupidity. How should he be feeling? This was a dying man in front of me, Paisley had already revealed that he was very likely in pain, and he didn’t look like a man who’d reply anything but “shitty.”

  “I don’t have much time, Avery, and you need to listen closely,” he said. “I’m very weak, and I don’t know if I can even speak long enough to tell you what I need to tell you. Don’t interrupt. Just hear me.”

  I resisted the urge to ask a question, but only narrowly. All of this seemed so incredibly cryptic I wondered whether Sam was about to reveal some dreaded Summers family secret. Maybe Paisley had a twin locked away in an attic somewhere. Maybe she’d already been married four times with varying degrees of success. Maybe her mother really had left because Paisley was too tomboyish.

  “I’ve been sick for a long time,” he continued. “But I’ve hidden just how extensive the illness is from everyone. I didn’t want to look like I could be taken advantage of.”

  I knew what he was talking about without having to ask for clarification. Ranchers could be a salty bunch, and some of the time, even though we were in perfectly modern Texas, it was something out of the wild west. At least one ranch in the immediate area would try and swoop in to snap up the Summers Ranch if its rotten owner caught wind of just how sick Sam was. Bud Billings was a nasty snake on the best of days. We’d foiled his big plans for the Corbin Ranch with Summers money. That wasn’t a secret to anyone, Billings included. I still didn’t understand what Sam was so hellbent on telling me.

  “My daughter …” He fell to coughing, and I froze in place. What should I do? Pour some water? Call a nurse? Pound him on his fragile back? I fidgeted over him until he waved me away again.

  “Paisley’s been
running the ranch solo for longer than I’d care to admit,” he said, his voice weaker than ever. “She’s a hell of a ranch hand and an even better ranch boss. She knows the business inside and out, from top to bottom, and if she’d been born a boy, well, the Summers Ranch would’ve lived on.”

  It was the same wild west concept as before. Because Paisley was a girl, she wasn’t respected in this world. It had been like this her entire life, from the day I stood up to her bully, to our wedding day. My stomach began to sink as I fully understood the nugget of wisdom Sam was trying to instill in me from his deathbed.

  “I didn’t want her to marry you,” he said. “Her dream was to run that ranch alone, but she understood the reality of that dream. You were the way she decided to do what she wanted. You opened that possibility for her.”

  I was afraid he’d start coughing again, but he didn’t.

  “She’s a smart girl, my daughter,” he said. “But she needs you more than she knows. I know it’s not perfect. But even if the two of you can’t see it, you’re good for each other. Please take care of her even when she doesn’t realize she needs it.”

  “I’ll … do my best,” I said.

  But I didn’t know what Paisley wanted or needed, not even as I left the room and she pushed past me to go back inside, to be by her father’s side. How could I support her now if she wouldn’t let me in? How could I even think I had a right to be the person she needed when I’d previously been the person who hurt her the most?

  There wasn’t much time to fully ponder Sam Summers’ words.

  I came home — to the Summers house — one night after work. I was trying to take what he’d said to heart, trying to spend less time in the trailer, or at the bar in town. It was just as well tonight, either way, as an electrical storm licked the sky. My sole goal was to be there for Paisley, to try and support her in whatever capacity she might need me in. Maybe it would make her feel better if I was close at hand, in the same house as her while she struggled with her father’s tentative state of being. But when I arrived, there wasn’t a single light on in the place. Part of me was relieved that I wouldn’t have to face her. I could roam the house as I pleased, use the mud room or not use the mud room, ignore the contents of the refrigerator in favor of delivery pizza. I could be myself, wear my own face without Paisley judging it, relax, for once, in the comfort of a house that belonged solely to me, if only for a few minutes or hours.