THE CORBIN BROTHERS: The Complete 5-Books Series

by Lexie Ray

  Back down at ground level, I looked again at the plywood table. It wasn’t much, but maybe I could use it for a desk. That way, I’d be much closer to the actual operations of the ranch. I was pretty far removed when I worked from the laundry room of the house, though it was cool and climate controlled. Plus, when the washer and dryer were running, they acted as a sort of white noise for me, helping me concentrate. Everyone had, at one time or another, teased me for setting up shop in the laundry room. I understood that Paisley had an entire room over at the Summers house devoted to a home office, but I just didn’t care to do that. Now, though, moving everything out to the barn appealed to me. All I had to do to be outside was get up from my chair and wander out the barn door. I wagered that I’d be more active and involved — maybe even get a little more riding and exercising in. I’d appear more approachable to the ranch hands who didn’t know me all that well. Sure, I’d have to get some weatherproof boxes to store the files in, but that wasn’t such a big investment.

  I could try and convince myself that this was a reasonable move all damn day, but I knew the real reason I was considering this was because of Zoe. I couldn’t imagine trying to work in the house with her in there now, both of us tied up in knots because of a few stolen moments. I never should’ve kissed her. That much was evident. So it would be even better if I just removed myself from the situation. Zoe could only get out of the house if she was cleaning the porch or working the garden — or if she had some errand to run into town. I had to be working all day, so it was just as well that I could set up shop here in the barn. I belonged out here, not in the house. Avoiding Zoe and the awkwardness we’d generated was just another good reason to be in the barn instead of the house. I didn’t want to make it awkward for anyone else — if anyone else figured out what we’d done.

  The last of the light was fading from the sky as I put the finishing touches on my new workspace. It wasn’t too shabby, if I said so myself. A battered desk lamp provided all the illumination I required, and I’d actually found a couple of plastic boxes that would serve me as my weatherproof file storage just fine. The plywood table was angled in a way that didn’t really let much rain or weather in, anyway. The entire time I’d been darting between the house and the barn, I hadn’t seen Zoe. I had no idea where she was, even as delicious aromas emanated from the house. My stomach grumbled in spite of my concentration. Just what did Zoe and Amelia have up their sleeves for dinner?

  “What’s all this?” Tucker asked, sidling in the barn door, leading his horse to its stall for the night. “New office space?”

  “Looks that way,” I confirmed. “Closer to things out here.”

  “Closer to the smell of horse shit,” he said, patting his own horse fondly on the neck. “What prompted the change?”

  I wasn’t about to tell him about making out with Zoe driving me from the house. I was supposed to be the big brother, the one who had all his shit already figured out. Even though Tucker was probably the most responsible and put together out of all of us, mostly from his time as a cop, I at least had appearances to think of.

  “Needed a change of scenery,” I said. “Sort of felt underfoot inside. Had a hard time paying attention to everything.” That part was particularly true. I liked to be around Zoe, and would follow her around sometimes as she did chores or cooked, chatting with her instead of working.

  “Fair enough,” Tucker mused, shutting the door to the stall and latching it. “Well, you ready?”

  “Ready? For what?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about tonight’s grand dinner.” He gave a crooked smile. “It’s all that Amelia’s talked about for weeks.”

  “Oh yes. The dinner. She told me. I have heard.” I inhaled deeply before letting the breath whoosh back out of me. “Is it a special occasion, or what?” If I’d forgotten someone’s birthday, I wouldn’t forgive myself. I’d been meaning to program all of the dates I was supposed to remember in my damned phone, but I kept forgetting to do that, too. Sometimes, I felt like I had a little too much on my plate. I needed to rely on Paisley more often, dole out the responsibilities a little more fairly, but I didn’t want to dump too much on her. She was a capable young woman, and had been running the Summers Ranch for some time even as everyone thought her father was still in charge, but she didn’t fully comprehend all of the various duties and responsibilities just yet. I knew she’d get overwhelmed if I tried to readjust the way things were. I just needed to be better on my end, suck things up instead of bemoaning the way things were.

  “Amelia and Zoe don’t need the excuse of a special occasion to have a big dinner event like this one,” Tucker said, laughing. “They just want to show off some new recipes they’ve been testing.”

  “You mean we’re going to be the guinea pigs?”

  “Hell, I’d be a guinea pig for their cooking anytime,” he said. “They’re the best cooks I’ve ever seen — well, besides Mom.”

  “Besides Mom,” I agreed loyally. She’d been a hell of a cook because there wasn’t any other choice. She had five hungry boys and a hungry husband to feed, ravenous from hard work on the ranch and school and growing and everything that entailed. She cooked a lot and she cooked it fast and well. There wasn’t anything super fancy ever on our table growing up, but there weren’t any plates with food left over on them, either.

  “We’d better hurry up,” Tucker said, jerking me away from old memories. I hadn’t tasted Mom’s cooking in nearly twenty years. “There’ll be hell to pay if we’re late for this dinner. I bet they wouldn’t feed us.”

  “Don’t want to chance that.”

  We smelled the spread long before we saw it, joining the rest of our brothers and the women who loved them upon entering the house. It was delicious, making my stomach growl with the fierce pleasure of anticipation, ready to taste what they had cooked for all of us.

  Amelia hadn’t been shortchanging the dinner she and Zoe had concocted. It was a delicious meal, well planned and prepared, a feast in every definition of the word. They had really outdone themselves with this dinner, lavishly prepared for seemingly no real reason at all. The entree they’d chosen to spotlight was a succulent pork tenderloin that had been slow roasted inside the oven all day. I couldn’t help but think that it had been in there, cooking in its own juices while Zoe and I had torn apart the rest of the kitchen in our passion. The main dish was complemented by apples and red onions it had cooked upon, as well as an enormous bowl of garlic mashed potatoes, another dish of seasoned green beans that I knew for a fact had just been freshly harvested from Zoe’s beloved garden, fluffy rolls, and a fruit salad peppered with marshmallows that Toby kept getting caught trying to pick out exclusively for his plate.

  “But they’re good,” he whined, watching the bowl of fruit salad get passed away from him.

  “You know, us grown-ups like sweet stuff, too,” Tucker said, grinning at him as he got some marshmallows by chance on his own plate. “Well, would you look at that?”

  “Aw, man,” Toby whined.

  “If you don’t straighten up right now, it’s to bed with you without any dessert,” Zoe said, raising her eyebrows at him. The moment she looked away, Tucker discreetly flicked a marshmallow onto Toby’s plate, who gobbled it down eagerly. My brothers were going to turn that kid into a spoiled brat. I was sure of it.

  “Jesus, there’s dessert?” Emmett asked, cradling his belly. “This dinner is too much. You’ve outdone yourselves.”

  “What did we do to deserve your talents?” Avery asked them, unbuckling his belt. “I should’ve worn sweatpants.”

  “What he’s saying is that I can’t cook a lick — you two are the only ones keeping him alive,” Paisley joked, giving her husband a peck on the cheek.

  “You said it, not me,” he teased. “Though I probably have Amelia and Zoe to blame for all this weight I’m putting on.”

  “That’s the married life, not our cooking,” Amelia warned.

  “I second tha
t notion,” Tucker said. “A fat husband is a happy husband. Means things are going well.”

  I suddenly found myself missing our parents. They would’ve loved this — all of us sitting around a table together, eating good food, bantering instead of bickering. Things would’ve been so different if the weather had been just a little different that night, if they’d decided to put off their errand that evening to the following day. They would’ve sat on either end of the long table, declining to insert themselves into conversations unless they were specifically asked something, watching their blossoming family with shining eyes. I remembered the way they’d been better than the rest of my brothers, even though Tucker was only a year younger than I was. That was an entire year I’d had with them more than he had. I certainly spent more time with Dad than anyone else. I tagged along with him as he oversaw the ranch, subconsciously gleaning knowledge from what he said and did, how he acted. When we weren’t riding around on horseback or doing chores to keep everything going here, it was all about football. Dad was a rabid NFL fan — Dallas Cowboys all the way. That was always the home team for him, and as he pitched a football back and forth across the yard with me, we dreamed about me playing for a professional team sometime in the future. The biggest thing that Dad taught me was that it was perfectly fine to have dreams. His dream was to keep the ranch as a place for his family to live and work. We were all supposed to go out and get our educations, perhaps pursuing other interests in the interim, but eventually find our way back to the Corbin Ranch.

  At least, that’s how it was supposed to work. My parents’ deaths threw everything up in the air. It fractured us, even as I struggled to keep us together. Several of us scattered, eager to escape the heartache that the ranch now housed. But now we were all back. Everything was practically what our parents had envisioned for us.

  “Asleep at the wheel, Chance?”

  I blinked several times until I realized that Hunter had called me out on my daydreaming. I locked eyes momentarily with Zoe, who was carving up a big pumpkin pie, but she instantly lowered her gaze.

  “I guess so,” I allowed, taking the chuckles around the table in stride.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Hadley said, but I only shook my head.

  “I’d bore you to tears,” I lied. “Just figures and budgets and purchase orders dancing around in this head.”

  “Best to leave work to working hours,” Emmett reasoned, but that was as laughable as me zoning out in the middle of a family dinner. Every single person assembled in this room took their work home with them. Hell, Hunter and Hadley lived in their place of work — the clinic for injured ranchers and whoever else in this town who found themselves needing physical therapy. Emmett and Peyton were the same way. I’d heard a rumor that they’d both recently spent the night in the stables of their horse rehab project to soothe a particularly difficult patient through a storm. Living and working on a ranch required devotion — above and beyond the attention and time other people would give to their own lines of work.

  The pumpkin pie was to die for — of course — and was the perfect way to make all of us uncomfortably full after such a rich meal. All of us were joyfully complaining as Toby was sent upstairs to prepare for bed. We all did what we could to help clear the table and clean up, but Amelia and Zoe had everything well in hand. They worked like they were the same person in two separate bodies, always knowing when to dodge away in the kitchen when the other was coming through with an armful of dishes.

  Two by two, my brothers and the women they loved took their leave, Hunter and Hadley walking down the road to their riverside cottage, Avery and Paisley hopping in a truck, bound for the Summers side of the ranch where they lived, Emmett and Peyton saddling their horses again and taking them back down to their project and trailer. Tucker helped Amelia with the last of the wiping up and they both bid us goodnight, traveling upstairs to the bedroom they shared. I’d offered to give them the use of the master bedroom downstairs, where I slept, but they said they preferred the space they’d already made home upstairs.

  That left just Zoe and me still downstairs. She buffed at a countertop even though it had been clean and gleaming for a while now. She was avoiding me — still unwilling or unable to talk about what had happened earlier. That was fine. We didn’t have to talk now.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I said. “It was really wonderful — really.”

  I stepped out of the kitchen and walked down the hallway to my room, wondering what it was that I’d done wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept kissing her, shouldn’t have perched her on the kitchen counter. I should’ve ignored all the feelings I had for her. Gone on living my celibate life. Perhaps gone into town to figure out if there was anyone at the lone bar who’d taken it upon themselves to fill the vacancy Peyton had made when she’d stopped selling herself and started pursuing her passion for horses with Emmett instead.

  No, I just had to make things awkward inside my own house with someone who didn’t have anywhere else to go. I was a piece of shit. Worse, I was a piece of shit who Zoe couldn’t get away from.

  “Chance? Do you have a minute to talk?”

  I paused at the door to my room and turned to face Zoe, who had apparently quietly followed me down the hall. My heart clattered so loudly in my chest I thought she had to have heard it. But she looked as nervous as I felt, blinking rapidly, struggling to keep her eyes locked with mine. In spite of her obvious anxiety, she was still beautiful, a flush reddening her tanned cheeks. How could she elevate a messy bun into a high-fashion topknot? Her dark hair was always glossy no matter how long she’d been scrubbing up our messes, or cooking meals, or tending to the garden or chickens outside. It was artful to my eyes. Everything she did was special.

  “This is about earlier, isn’t it?” I asked finally, hoping that we could use the quiet of the house and the rest of its near-slumbering occupants to our advantage. I’d been waiting for this particular conversation all day. I knew we couldn’t forgo it. Was I a fool for hoping that instead of talking about it, we’d just finish what we started?

  Maybe, but even fools had to get lucky sometimes, didn’t they?

  “It is about earlier,” she said slowly, seeming to test the words out inside her mind before speaking them. “In the kitchen, to be specific.”

  “I knew what you meant.” We were two grown, consenting adults. Why, then, was it so hard to weed out the awkwardness growing between us?

  “I’m not sure how, really, to say this,” Zoe said, lowering her eyes. “I just … goddammit. I don’t know, Chance.”

  Ah. I’d been so nervous because I was afraid of rejection, and it seemed like that was exactly what she was struggling to do.

  “You can say whatever you want to say,” I told her, hoping to smooth the way for her. I hated to see her unsure of herself. “I understand.” Even if I didn’t.

  “It’s just that I … God help me, I really fucking like you.” She looked back up at me, defiance burning in her eyes. “And this is really confusing.”

  I wasn’t sure what was so confusing about being with someone you liked, but I kept quiet. If there was one thing my years had given me, it was knowing when to not say anything. All I had to do was wait for Zoe to finish her thoughts, however scrambled they might be.

  “I don’t think we should fuck,” she finally said, blunt as ever. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” I said, even if I wished I could. Why shouldn’t we? We were two adults. We shared an undeniable spark, an attraction that neither of us could ignore. But if Zoe didn’t think we should be together like that, I was the last person who would try to convince her otherwise.

  All I had to do was take a cold shower.

  Every day.

  For the rest of my life.

  “I really am sorry,” she said again. “This is shitty, and I know it. I wish I could explain myself better …”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself at all,” I said. “You have
your reasons, and that’s perfectly acceptable.”

  I was starting to realize, with no small amount of horror, that I liked Zoe a lot more than I thought I did. It would’ve been wrong to assume that being intimate with her in a single setting would’ve quenched whatever thirst I had for her. I wished I could stand up for what I wanted more, but I wasn’t that kind of person. I was used to sacrificing for the greater good. I’d been doing it all my life — more so, even, after my parents had died. And I wasn’t about to sacrifice Zoe’s wishes — as confusing as they were — in pursuit of my own happiness.

  “You hate me,” she said, her shoulders slumping.

  “I couldn’t — I could never hate you,” I spluttered, surprised at her. “I have —” I stopped talking abruptly. Jesus Christ. I’d just been about to tell a woman who had informed me that she had no intention of being with me that I had feelings for her. If that wouldn’t turn this house into awkward central, I didn’t know what would.

  “What? What is it? I’ve said my piece — or tried to, damn it.” Zoe peered up at me, pushing the stray strands of hair that had escaped the bun out of her face, puffing at them in exasperation. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking that I’m glad we talked about this,” I said at last, finding the words that should be said even if they weren’t necessarily the words I wanted to be saying. “I think too many people just blindly fall in to bed with each other without discussing it beforehand. We’re grown adults. I’m glad that it didn’t get even farther than it did.” Lies. I hated that we’d been interrupted. I didn’t care if it would’ve been even harder to extricate ourselves from each other. All I had wanted was Zoe. That sweetness. The release of the aching attraction that had built for months.