AVERY (The Corbin Brothers Book 2) (9 page)

I blinked at her. “That means that Joe Durham …”

“Had it right on the money,” Paisley said with a small smile. “That’s why it hurt me so bad. My mother literally didn’t want me. I was too much of a tomboy. She was the one who wanted a princess. That just wasn’t me.”

But it was her, now, whether she realized it or not. That was the persona she’d cultivated following that incident with the bully. She’d swung her identity all the way around because of that, and now she seemed even more confused with herself than ever.

“Would you ever leave this place?” I asked her. “Would you ever want to leave ranching behind you and become someone else.”

“Never.” Her response was immediate, confident, perhaps the only part of herself she was sure about. “I want to ranch until the day I die or someone pries the operation from my fingers. What about you? Would you ever walk away.”

I swallowed hard. “In a heartbeat, if I could.”

“And that’s the biggest, most fundamental difference between us,” Paisley said sadly. “I would do anything for this place, and you would do anything to get away from it.”

The way she put it sounded so simple, and yet it was a gap that might never be able to be crossed. She uncrossed her arms and stared down at her hands as if she were trying to decide what to do with them.

“I guess I’m trying to figure out why you would’ve agreed to marry me if you didn’t want to be a rancher,” she said finally, after a too-long pause that stretched on and on.

“There are four other Corbins who want desperately to be ranchers,” I said. “Any one of them would’ve made you a much better husband — one who loved ranching just as much as you do.”

“That’s funny,” she said, even as her shoulders drooped. “I didn’t just want any Corbin. I wanted you.”

I’d said too much. That much I knew. There wasn’t a way to take any of that back. I needed to just keep my mouth shut, try and hold this marriage together, and have Paisley at arm’s length. She didn’t understand where I was coming from. None of my family did, and she certainly wasn’t family.

“I really need to finish what I’m doing here,” I told her. “Don’t you have something you can be doing somewhere else?”

“You can’t dismiss me, Avery Corbin,” she said as lightly as she could manage after the truth I’d just crushed her with. “I’m your boss, technically. Well, we’re co-CEOs, really. Because we’re married.”

“Sure.” I would’ve agreed with just about anything just to get her away from me. “Whatever.”

“Do you want to maybe have dinner together tonight?” she asked. “I could cook something good. Or if you don’t want me to try my hand at cooking, we could go in town somewhere. You know. Like a little date. Something different.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to make that happen,” I lied. “Lots of work to do. You know how it goes.”

“Yes,” Paisley said, nodding soberly. “Yes, I’m beginning to see how it goes.”

That didn’t make me feel very good, but it was the truth of the matter. I wasn’t going to be able to make dinner with my wife happen because I didn’t want to have dinner with my wife. I didn’t even want to have a wife, but that was something I didn’t have a solution for, yet.

I watched Paisley ride off across the pasture and I dreamt it were me galloping away, jumping the horse high over the fence and never looking back.

The bottle became my best friend.

That was a sad statement if I’d ever heard one, but it was true. I was never particularly close with any of my brothers, never had time to develop friendships because I was working on the ranch, and certainly didn’t consider Paisley a friend and confidant.

I prowled the Summers house until I felt like I was going to start climbing the walls, and then I realized there was no escape except for the escape I made for myself.

I was well aware that, upon emerging from the other side of a bender, my problems were still there. But I took solace in the fact that I could push them away again as I cracked open another bottle of whiskey, taking nips from time to time in the flask I still retained from my wedding. Emmett would never know it, but he’d inadvertently given me the best wedding present of all: a way out.

I found an even greater form of escape once I realized that no one was using my trailer. After I was done with working the ranch, I’d have a quick shower and change my clothes in the trailer without ever having to return to the Summers house and then get into town just when the bar was getting good — well, as good as it ever got. I’d slam shots and buy rounds for people I couldn’t afford and run up my tab until I was too bleary to care anymore about Paisley or the ranch or anything else. Even the hangover the next morning was a pleasant distraction, something to pay attention to with Gatorade and aspirin and antacids instead of Paisley.

Paisley was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. I popped into my trailer in a cloud of dust one evening and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for me, her hat in her hands.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, shocked so thoroughly that it sent my heart pounding in my chest.

“What are you doing here, Avery?” she asked. “You’ve been spending so much time here that I thought maybe you had another wife hidden away in here.”

“This is my trailer,” I said. “I come here to shower off after a long day on the ranch.”

“You have an entire house,” she said, examining the brim of her hat, picking at some invisible speck on it. “You have three different showers there to pick from. What about this one attracts you?”

I shrugged. “I guess I got used to using it. Like a little bachelor pad.”

“Bachelor pad.” Paisley repeated me like she was testing out the words. She didn’t seem like she liked the way they tasted, even if she’d called it that in the past, before we were married. “What do you want, Avery?”

“To take a shower,” I said, pointing to the bathroom.

“And then what?”
“I’m going to the bar in town.”

She shook her head. “What the hell for?”

“To drink.”

“I keep the refrigerator fully stocked,” she said. “On top of everything else — working the ranch, managing business with Chance, trying to figure you out. I could … I could cook you some dinner, if you want.”

I peered at Paisley. Was this some other hat she was putting on now? Hadn’t she gotten what she’d wanted out of this arrangement? I found it extremely hard to believe that she wanted to be a wife, now, too, in addition to having an equal partnership on one of the biggest ranches in the state.

“Do you have a problem with me going out to the bar?” I asked, leveling a gaze at her.

“I have a problem with what it means.”

“What does it mean to you?” I asked her. “To me, it’s a way to unwind after a long day working the ranch. I like socializing there. It’s a good place. I’m treated well. I have fun.”

“You belly up to a bar all by yourself and you drink until you’re stupid,” she said. “You call this piece of shit trailer a bachelor pad like it was something you actually enjoyed. You drive home drunk or you leave my truck there at the bar, overnight, parked crooked in a gravel lot, in favor of sleeping it off at the home or hovel of whoever takes pity on you when you inevitably pass out at the bar. My only comfort is that you probably can’t get that whiskey dick up for any of the bitches who try to get themselves a little slice of Corbin.”

I stared at her. Her hazel eyes blazed at me, but the rest of her face was placid, as if she hadn’t just insulted my manhood and my coping mechanisms all in one breath. It was a poker face I both admired and feared, because I could never truly understand just how enraged she was until it was much too late.

“Can you blame me?” I asked her. “I didn’t want any of this.”

Paisley sucked in a breath and then let it out with a whoosh. Part of me was a little bit afraid of what she would’ve said if she hadn’t taken a second to breathe.

“I know that this is not an ideal setup for either of us,” she said. “But it isn’t so bad, is it? We came into it clear headed, didn’t we?”

“I was desperate, and so were you,” I said. “That doesn’t mean we have to continue being desperate and miserable.”
“Are you really that miserable?” she asked. “Do I make you miserable?”

“The situation makes me miserable.” Why did I feel so guilty for admitting the truth of what I felt?

“What would help?” Paisley asked. “What can I do to help assuage some of this misery? Could I move your trailer closer to our house, maybe? I could help you retrofit it, make it really nice. A man cave, even. We could redo any of the rooms in the house — the whole second floor, even, or the garage — into a space that would be just for you. Would that help?”

I didn’t know if she was genuinely trying to offer solutions or if she was just insulting me. Did she really think that any of that would make a sham marriage and a lifelong commitment to a ranching life I didn’t love whatsoever any better at all? It was a joke. Or maybe it was a dig at me.

“The only thing that helps is the time I get to be away from you and everyone else at the bar,” I said. “And that’s where I’m going right now, just as soon as I get cleaned up.”

“Who are you getting cleaned up for, Avery?” Paisley demanded, watching me shuck my clothes off, her blond eyebrows drawing closer and closer together.

“Myself.” I’d been astride a horse for ten damn hours. Couldn’t she see that I needed a shower?

“If you’re fucking around on me, Avery Corbin, so help me God …”

“What would I even be fucking around on, Paisley?” I demanded, wheeling around to face her, not caring that I was totally nude, sweaty and angry. “We don’t like each other, let alone love each other. This marriage was to benefit the ranches and nothing else. You stood to gain a whole hell of a lot more than I did —”

“Bullshit,” she said, standing up, her eyes narrowed to hazel slits. “I saved the Corbin Ranch singlehandedly. That was my family’s money that made the bank and Bud Billings go away. You should be kissing my ass each and every day, making me goddamn breakfast, eating my —”

“What makes you think I give a flying fuck about the ranch?” I asked, taking a step closer to her so I could stare down at her, using my height to my advantage. “You think I give one shit whether this place stays afloat or goes under? I don’t. I don’t care if a fire sweeps through here or aliens abduct the entire goddamn herd and all of us are out of fucking jobs. You could not pay me enough money to care about this ranch.”

There it was. The truth I had never particularly wanted to say out loud to anyone, and I’d blurted it all out to my wife, the woman I never wanted to marry.

Paisley’s mouth had dropped open, but she snapped it shut again. “Then why did you marry me? Tell me the goddamn truth. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

“What?”

“If the only reason you married me was to save your family’s ranch — which you obviously don’t care about — then why bother?” She looked so fierce there, her hair standing up around her head in a series of fly-aways from her braid, challenging me to tell her why she wasn’t good enough.

“Why bother asking? What’s done is done. Just let me be.”
“Let you do whatever you fucking want even though you’re married to me? I don’t think so.”

Without warning, the full anger my wife was evidently feeling toward me blazed to life on her face, and she seized my cock in one hand. I didn’t have the time or inclination to so much as yelp when she squeezed it, lifting her chin toward my face so that our lips were inches apart.

I didn’t know if it was a good idea to talk at this point, but I couldn’t just stay silent at a time like this.

“Paisley, I don’t know what you think you’re about to do, but I think it’s a better idea if you just let, um, me go and we walk our separate ways.”

She squeezed harder. “Everyone thinks I’m just some dumb bitch,” she whispered harshly, our noses brushing.

“I assure you that no one thinks you’re a dumb bitch.” If anyone did and said it to her face, their most precious of cargoes would be decimated in her rancher’s grip. She was the strongest woman I knew — a fact I was now intimately acquainted with.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Everyone sees you out and about without a care in the world, flirting with any idiot who thinks they’re marrying into money.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again, not sure what I could say to that. I let out a gasp of relief as she let go of my dick, and backed away, out of her reach.

“They think I’m a cuckold or worse,” she said, her shoulders sagging.

“What’s worse than a cuckold?”

“A woman who doesn’t marry for love.” Paisley’s eyes were red around the rims, I noticed for the first time, and I wondered if she’d been crying while crunching numbers or flying around on her horse or however else she spent her day. It bothered me, momentarily, that I wasn’t sure about how the woman I’d bound the rest of my life to spent her working hours, but I shook it off.

“Both of us knew what we were getting into when we entered into this contract,” I said. “I know you can’t say anything different about that.”

“I didn’t think you’d be fucking around on me, Avery Corbin,” she said. “I thought you were a classier man that that, but I was wrong, apparently.”

“I’m not fucking around on you,” I said, even thought I knew it was falling on deaf and dumb ears. Paisley was dead set on having this fight, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to stop it.

“Do you think that’s what you need to be doing?” she asked, switching tacks suddenly enough to worry me. “Do you think you need to be fucking around on me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said diplomatically, even though I had an inkling.

“You sure as shit do. Would you be compelled to be faithful — in spirit and commitment — to me if I put you out to pasture?”

“I’m not retiring.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Paisley raked a hand through her messy hair. “I mean in the stud sense. Would you come home to me if I told you that you could fuck anyone you wanted?”

“Why would you tell me to do that?”

She threw her hands up in the air. “You tell me, Avery. I’m sick and tired of trying to climb inside of your head and figure you out. You don’t want to let anyone in, least of all me. What’s going to make you happy?”

Maybe I shouldn’t have said it. Hell, I knew I shouldn’t have said it. But I still said it all the same because I didn’t know what else Paisley wanted me to say.

“I’d be happy if we weren’t married in the first place,” I said.

That was a cruel statement to make, even if it was the truth. I should’ve said anything other than that. Paisley had tried to make it work, and I had fought her on everything every step of the way. She hadn’t been who I’d wanted, and this ranch hadn’t been what I’d wanted, but I hadn’t been able to ignore my family’s dream. Paisley had been a means to an end, and now that the end goal had been achieved, I was left unhappily married.

“Here’s the thing Avery,” she said, lifting her eyes slowly to meet mine. “I’m not going to be made to look like an idiot. I’m not an idiot. I look like an idiot already with you out partying to all hours with anyone who drifts in to the bar. If you want a divorce, it will cost you and your family dearly.”

“I don’t — I didn’t say —” Why was divorce such an ugly word? It spoke of failings, of sadness, and even though I felt like my marriage with Paisley was a disaster, divorce seemed so … final.

“I bet you didn’t even read the contract, did you?” she asked, scowling at me. “If you renege on our deal, the entire Corbin-Summers Ranch will be mine.”

“What?” The world felt like it was falling out from under my feet. “Why the hell would the contract say that?”

“Because I put it in, idiot. As collateral.”

“Does … does Chance know?”

“Yes. Only he’s convinced you’re in love with me. I don’t think he knows a thing about love. He doesn’t even know he’s in love with Zoe.”

Chance and Zoe? My mind puzzled over that one for the briefest of moments before turning to matters closer at hand.

“You really have trapped me in this, haven’t you?” I demanded. “Are you proud of yourself? Is this what you needed to get married? And you wonder why I drink so damn much.”

“I didn’t want you to take advantage of me,” she said, wiping at her eyes angrily — how dare those tears fall. “I needed your help, and you needed mine. That’s why we’re married, and that’s why we’re going to stay married. Go. Go out all you want. Fuck anyone on this goddamn planet if that makes you happy. But at the end of the day, you are stuck with me, fucker.”