by Lexie Ray
My worst fears were confirmed as I saw Dax Malone stomping around, swinging a sledge hammer at the corrals, then dashing over to the little office we’d worked so hard on, full of the equipment we’d invested in, breaking everything with wild arcs. He was furious and frightening, red in the face, spittle flying as he shouted things I couldn’t yet hear. But where the hell was Peyton?
I barely had the presence of mind to throw the truck into park before leaping out of it and running toward the scene. It struck me that I didn’t have a weapon, didn’t have any way to defend myself against that devastating swing, but it didn’t matter.
“Peyton?” I bellowed, looking around before I even addressed the problem of Dax Malone on the other end of a sledge hammer.
But then she sprang out of the office, where she’d been hiding or taking shelter or trying to save some vestige of our work together, and took her father by surprise, sending the sledge hammer spinning across the corral. He got a good punch in on her face before she sagged to the ground, holding her wrist in a strange way.
I ran faster than I’d ever run in my entire life, Dax so intent on inflicting harm on his daughter that he didn’t see me until it was too late. He was yelling things — terrible things — but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything except for the pounding of my own heart in my ears.
I didn’t remember much after that, but it was as if a veil descended in front of my eyes, obscuring the majority of things. I realized I was hitting Dax, driving him away from Peyton, that I was yelling at him, things about Mary and Peyton and the quality of his character. I couldn’t say that I was an inherently violent person. Ranching is a tough life, and I grew up with four other brothers. I was used to roughhousing, I knew my way around a fist fight, I’d been in a shootout. But this was different. I’d never been as angry at a person as I was in this moment, and I realized it was because he’d been hurting Peyton. I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t stand that at all. It made me completely lose my mind.
“Emmett, stop.”
Her voice was the only thing that got through to me. I let my fists drop down to my sides, realizing belatedly that the knuckles hurt, that I’d been walloping an old man who was mean as all get out but no competition for me. That Peyton was lying injured on the ground, her wrist twisted, her breathing hard, tears and blood running down her face.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey.” I knelt beside her. “What hurts? Tell me. Can you get up? I can get you to the hospital.”
“I already called the cops,” she managed to say, wincing at the words, grabbing at her ribs. “Well, I dialed 9-1-1 and slipped the phone back in my pocket when I realized just how bad this was going to be.”
“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.
Chapter 7
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.”
