THE CORBIN BROTHERS: The Complete 5-Books Series

by Lexie Ray

  “Well, thanks, I guess,” I said, feeling a little awkward about my baby brother congratulating me about Amelia.

  I was still thinking about it after bedtime, stroking Amelia’s hair absentmindedly.

  “Do you think I should let it grow out?” she asked a little sleepily, melting into my touch.

  “I think you should do whatever you want to do with it.” I liked the way it felt on my hand, spiky and soft at the same time.

  “It’s so easy to take care of when it’s this short,” she murmured. “I’ve had the same bottle of shampoo for all this time, and it still feels like it’s full. I’m afraid it will get all moldy before I get through with it.”

  “Then keep it short,” I said, kissing the hair in question.

  “If it was longer, though, I’d be able to do more things with it,” she reasoned, turning away from me, then settling backward to spoon. “I used to be good at braiding — if Zoe lets Toby’s hair grow out much longer, I could give that kid some extreme style.”

  “I don’t know if he’d go for that,” I said, smiling at the thought.

  “I could grow my hair out very long, all the way down to my butt,” she said, a smile coloring the words. I could tell even in the dark, with her facing away, whenever she was smiling. It gave her words a lilt, making them sing. “I could have a different hairstyle every day.”

  “Then let it grow,” I said. “We could use it as a blanket when it gets cold.”

  “I don’t think it’ll ever get cold,” Amelia confessed. “I think summer will stretch on into winter.”

  “God, I hope not. We need a break from this heat.”

  “Could you imagine how upside down everything would be if it never gets cold? We wouldn’t need our winter wardrobes anymore. No coats or hats or gloves or scarves or anything.”

  “We wouldn’t be able to lie down in front of a fire in the front room,” I said, brushing my lips against the back of her neck and making her shiver. “We wouldn’t be able to keep each other warm at night while the wind and snow howl against the window. I don’t know what Santa Claus would do…”

  Amelia laughed quietly, mindful of Toby and Zoe down the hall. “Christmas will be here before we know it. It always tends to sneak up on you. Do you think Santa will be able to find me all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “He’s always found us without any kind of problem.” It was gratifying to hear her talk about the distant future. She wanted to stay here with me, and I wanted nothing more than to be eating Christmas cookies she and Zoe made and Toby decorated, bedecked in a Santa hat and singing carols a little too loudly because of the spiked eggnog. It had been hard to enjoy Christmas ever since our parents died. It had become a painful part of the year, ripe with memories and regrets of memories that wouldn’t be made anymore. But I had a feeling that Corbin family Christmas celebrations were just going to continue to get happier and happier. We had a much bigger family now, and lots of love in it.

  “You know, Hunter thinks we’re perfect for each other,” I said casually, just to hear what Amelia would think of it.

  “That’s the funniest thing. Zoe told me the same thing, when we were cleaning up after dinner.” Amelia laughed again. “What they all must think of us, hooking up like this.”

  “I think we’re pretty good together, don’t you?” I reasoned, stilling my hand on her head, almost afraid of what she was going to say.

  “Pretty good?” She wriggled her ass right into my crotch. “I’d say we’re damn good.”

  She could make me go from thoughtful to rock hard in the span of ten seconds. It never failed to amaze me. If there was a period of time in my life when sex was better than sex with Amelia, I certainly did not recall it.

  I smoothed my hand down the front of her, pausing to cup one of her perfectly sized breasts, thumbing over her nipple until I elicited a small hiss of pleasure. I worked my way down until she made the tiniest of whimpers — I’d found the spot that got her to make the best sounds of all.

  “You’re going to have to be quiet,” I teased her, whispering so that my lips brushed the shell of her ear.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to,” she confessed in the same whisper. “You make me want to — ah.”

  Distracted by conversation, I’d been able to slip my hand around her body, snaking it up between her legs, stroking her from a brand new angle. I let her absorb that for a few long, sweet minutes, my finger getting wetter all the time. I was able to slip it into her easily, inching upward until she had a new reason to stifle her moans. It gave me such pleasure to hear her fight against herself even though I knew Toby would sleep through a tornado and Zoe was too far down the hall to hear anything of consequence.

  I withdrew my finger, tracing Amelia’s wetness back up her own body, then gently lifted her leg and rubbed my length against her. She knew exactly what I wanted because it was what she wanted, too, and she wriggled against me until she could accommodate the angle of entry.

  She panted quietly as I eased myself into that hot tightness, fitting me like a glove, and once I was buried to the hilt, I just stayed there. It was the sweetness of belonging that I really loved. You could have sex with just anyone, but it was so different with Amelia because of the love that was there. I just felt so good when I was with her. It was where I belonged.

  “You have to move,” she said in a strangled whisper. “Please move.”

  “You don’t have to beg,” I murmured, nipping her along her neck and shoulder. “I’ll do whatever you like.”

  I held on to her and pulled out almost completely before thrusting in again, the unique angle to the operation making us both gasp.

  “Now who’s the loud one?” Amelia asked, throwing a triumphant grin over her shoulder.

  “You’ll be the one screaming by the end of this, bedtimes be damned,” I vowed, pumping into her again.

  I liked this position, the closeness of it, the easy access to all of my favorite parts of her, the way we rocked together, gentle and powerful all at once. We fit together. That was just the truth of it. Our bodies and our hearts fit together, and that’s why it was always so good, such a rush, such a release.

  And in spite of my promise to make her scream, we both rushed into climax in exquisite, breathless silence, Amelia clawing at the bed, me holding her against me so tightly that I was fearful of leaving bruises. There wasn’t anything as good as this. There couldn’t be. Each time with her was better than the last. If possible, each time we were with each other like this, challenging and pushing, devoted and focused, I loved her even more than before.

  Long after the lightning ecstasy had melted into a pleasant afterglow, I was still buried inside of her, still cradling her to my chest. She smelled so good, and I didn’t even mind that we’d probably have to peel ourselves off each other, sweat and heat and lovemaking acting like glue on the surface of our skin.

  “Let’s just sleep like this,” she mumbled, already half asleep herself.

  I couldn’t think of a better proposition, and in the middle of the night, we both woke up and sought out pleasure in each other again. I could do it at any time, and so could she. We weren’t in the habit of leaving each other wanting.

  Life was, for the first time in a long time, perfect. We made it perfect, and loved each other above all other things. It was easy to forget about the hardships we both had endured when we were so busy loving each other, sneaking kisses from the backs of horses, finding any and no reason at all to take off at a gallop, racing across the plains.

  We were so happy that we couldn’t even consider anything bad ever happening, and maybe that was our downfall. Or maybe it didn’t matter what we did. People with a single-minded purpose are difficult to dissuade, and in my experience and the experience of the majority of the police force in Dallas — no, in the entire state of Texas — there had never been anyone quite like Oscar Green.

  I went up to the house in the middle of the day, mostly to s
ee what Amelia was up to, and partly to see about lunch. Her being there was the best incentive to take a midday break to eat that there was, and I usually had a little bit of her for dessert.

  But I could tell something was wrong the moment I opened the door.

  The smell of something burning hit me in the face almost like a physical blow, assaulting my nostrils. I hurried to the kitchen to figure out what had happened, and quickly jerked a smoking skillet off the stove and into the sink, extinguishing the smoldering remains of what might’ve been a grilled cheese sandwich with a stream of water.

  After the clatter of cleaning up that mess, I paused, a question on my lips.

  Where was everybody?

  I had arrived earlier than usual for lunch — ingredients for what Zoe and Amelia had planned to serve up were strewn all over the kitchen counter. Someone had been in the process of preparing the meal and had left it quickly. I turned the burner on the stove off, half wondering why the smoke detector hadn’t gone off. The air was thick with the smoke from the forgotten sandwich.

  The house was dead silent, and it didn’t take a past career of being a cop to understand that something was really, really wrong.

  “Hello?” I called. “It’s Tucker. Who’s here?”

  My heart pounded as I did a walk-through of the house, looking around. I stopped in the front room, feeling sick. There had been a struggle in here. One of the chairs was toppled over, and I hadn’t noticed it because I’d been so intent on the smell of burning.

  “Amelia?” I called, tamping down the panic. What was important right now was that I stopped and thought. Maybe there had been some kind of emergency with Toby. Maybe Zoe and Amelia had rushed out the door with him to take him to Hadley or to the hospital. Anything could’ve happened. He was a curious boy who was always getting scraped up in his adventures. It was absolutely possible.

  “Is anyone home?” I called again, carefully righting the chair.

  I jogged up the stairs, looking around, trying not to miss anything that might give me answers. It was like being a detective again at a crime scene, but this wasn’t a crime scene. No. Not this house, and not with the people in it. There was no way this could be a crime scene. There was something completely explainable about the burning sandwich, the forgotten lunch ingredients, the overturned chair.

  The numbing, terrifying silence.

  This damn house was never empty. Never.

  I checked every bedroom, saving Amelia’s for last because I just … knew. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want the sharp spike of adrenaline, the pounding certainty of my instincts. I knew what had happened, what had gone wrong, and knew there wasn’t anything innocent about it. I knew.

  I wished it away for as long as I could, until I got to her bedroom.

  Until I saw that note laid out on the bed, serene in a room full of destruction and upset, for me to find. There had been a mighty struggle in here, drawers opened, the bedside table knocked over, the lamp that had formerly occupied the surface of the table shattered. Amelia’s phone rested on the floor, crushed, probably under someone’s shoe. A fall wouldn’t have done the device that much damage.

  I soaked in all these details until I knew I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  I had to read the note.

  The note was crudely written in a hand I’d tried so desperately to forget, identical to the piece of paper Amelia had presented me with when she’d first shown up to the house. I’d known it then, and I knew it now. Oscar Green had penned this note. It was signed and everything, and much more reminiscent of the ones I had become accustomed to receiving when I was a cop.

  “Tucker Corbin,” read the salutation. “You’ve gotten lazy in retirement. I’ve been watching you get comfortable and complacent and fat living the good life. But I’ve always been a wolf. Hungry. Patient. And now I can finish what I’ve started. If you’d like to play, return to the place we met. But don’t spoil my game with police. I don’t think Amelia would like that very much.”

  Numb, I ran through the house again. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. Just when we’d gotten comfortable with each other, just when we were realizing that maybe, just maybe, we were perfect for each other, Green had lashed out.

  It struck me that maybe he was waiting to do that, and my blood ran cold to think of just how long he had been watching Amelia. Had he known all along where she was headed? Had he followed her here to the ranch somehow? Or had he ticked off all the places she could’ve been, one by one, and finally hit the jackpot here?

  “Amelia?” I called, looking in every room, beneath every bed. “Amelia? Are you here? It’s Tucker. Answer me, please! Are you here? Amelia!”

  But it wasn’t Amelia who answered. “Tuck — are you alone?” It was a quiet voice, from downstairs, and I raced back down the stairs.

  “I’m alone — where are you?”

  The door to the tiny crawl space beneath the stairs that housed the water filter creaked open and Zoe’s head popped out, her face white as a sheet.

  “Help me, please,” she said. “I fucking panicked. Toby’s stuck.”

  I wanted nothing more than to understand what happened. I needed to know where Amelia was. But I had to deal with matters at hand.

  Zoe stepped out of the closet, her fingers digging into her cheeks in stress, and I stepped in. Toby was crammed behind the water heater, his eyes wide.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said, tamping down my own fears to give him a smile. “What happened?”

  “Amelia screamed that there was a bad man here,” he said, solemn and strangely calm. “Mama said we had to hide, and I guess I got the best spot. She said even if the bad man had found us he wouldn’t have been able to take me out of here.”

  It was some crazy feat of physics that Zoe had been able to shove him behind the water heater in the first place. It was a good spot, though. Even if Green had opened the door, the only person who would’ve been readily visible was Zoe, and she would’ve fought him tooth and nail, no matter what, to save that boy.

  “Well, you’re awfully brave,” I said. “I bet I could get you out of there, though, if you’re willing to get a little messy.”

  “I like getting messy,” he said, a little boy once again, eager and grinning. “Well, only if it’s okay with Mama.”

  “Of course it’s okay with your mama,” Zoe said, practically pulling her hair out of her own head. “Just think of what your mama would have to do if you were stuck back there forever. You’d have to eat all your meals there. I’d get a teacher to come from school to give you your lessons. Hell, we’d probably have to build a special little potty in there for you, too!”

  “Yuck,” Toby groaned. “I don’t want a special little potty — I want to get out.”

  “It’s a plan, then,” I said, nodding at what I hoped was a reassuring way at Zoe. “Let’s let your mama run to the kitchen real quick and bring us back some butter, oil, anything she can find that’ll be slippery.”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she said, dashing off. “Of course. He needs to be slick so we can slip him out of there.”

  I examined Toby’s situation as Zoe rattled around in the kitchen, open and closing drawers, slamming around in the refrigerator. He had a couple of scrapes that might eventually bruise, but he was in good spirits and no worse for wear. I’d seen him with a much nastier scrape on his knee from just playing around on the ranch. If worst came to worst, we could uninstall the water heater to get him out from there, but it would take a while and require manpower. I hoped getting him good and greasy would remedy the situation.

  “Tuck, is that bad man going to hurt Amelia?” Toby asked, making me stop what I was doing.

  I started to respond and bit my tongue. How could I explain this to a little boy? Should I lie to reassure him only to possibly hurt him later if Amelia wasn’t all right? Or should I tell the truth and scare the shit out of him?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to do every
thing I can to find that bad man and get Amelia back here safe with us.”

  “I hope so,” Toby said. “Did you know that Hunter saved us from my daddy?”

  “I … I did know that,” I said, taken aback by the kid’s matter-of-fact delivery. “That’s why you and your mama live here with us now. Do you like living here?”

  “Yeah,” Toby said, nodding. “My daddy could be a really bad man, too. That’s why I’m afraid Amelia will get hurt. Me and Mama got hurt sometimes.”

  “I, uh, found some things,” Zoe said awkwardly, standing in the doorway, holding several sticks of butter and a bottle of cooking oil. “Think this’ll be enough?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I said. “Buddy, after this, you will be delicious enough to fry right up and eat.”

  “No,” Toby said, laughing as he drew out the word. “I don’t want to be eaten.”

  “You’ll be like a little greased pig,” Zoe teased him. I was sure she was biting down on her panic just like I was biting down on mine — for Toby’s sake. “You’ll run around and nobody will be able to catch you.”

  Toby chortled and started in on some hearty oinks as I poured the oil on his bare arms and legs.

  “Need some help?” Zoe asked? “I can’t hardly fit in there with you.”

  “I could use your help, actually,” I said. “Would you do me a big favor and call Chance for me? Tell him to come to the house?”

  “Is he going to be mad that I’m greasy?” Toby asked, rubbing his fingers together, which were shiny with oil.

  “No way,” I said. “And if he is, he won’t be able to catch you, remember? You’re a greased pig.”

  “I’ll call him,” Zoe said hurriedly, realizing that it wasn’t Toby we needed to tell him about.

  “This stuff feels weird,” Toby commented as I coated the portions of the water heater I could reach with a stick of butter.

  “It’s what we use to cook our food sometimes,” I said. “That’s why I said we could fry you right up.”