EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3) (15 page)

My brothers and I ran alongside Hadley until we reached the fence. The ranch hands had suspended their efforts to get it back upright, as Hunter currently had a gun trained on them.

“We’re friends,” Zoe said cautiously, her hands in the air. “Hunter, you know us. Will you please point that somewhere else?”

“You don’t understand anything,” he said, his eyes wild, like an injured animal. “It just keeps going and going.”

“You’re safe, now, Hunter,” I tried. “Everyone’s safe. We did a good job. You can put the gun down.”

“This isn’t ever going to stop,” he said.

“He might be right about that,” someone muttered. “We’re out here every single night and this shit still happens.”

“Not helpful,” someone else called.

“Hunter, your family’s here,” Tucker said. “Every single one of us is here with you right now. Let’s all go back to the big house and spend the night, like old times, drinking beer and telling stories.”

Hunter exhaled like he’d been holding a breath. “I hate this.”

“I know,” Hadley said. “Do you think you can get the note in your pocket, now?”

“No, I’m holding the gun,” he said. “I don’t want to put down the gun.”

“Note?” Chance questioned softly.

“Just something to anchor him when this happens,” Hadley said easily. “It’s in his pocket.”

“Can I get it out of your pocket for you?” I asked. “Or I could hold your gun while you get it.”

“I’m holding the gun,” Hunter said, his eyes sliding over to me. He was looking right at me, but I couldn’t tell whether he was actually seeing me.

“Okay, that’s fine,” I said. “But the note. Can I get it for you?”

“Are you going to try and take the gun?”

“Hell, no. That gun’s yours.”

“Slow.” Hunter kept everyone covered with the gun as I walked as slowly as I could toward him.

“Easy,” Tucker said, his eyes hard, his finger on the trigger of his gun. “Be easy, brother.”

“Which pocket is it?” I asked, my voice as calm as I could manage. “You better not say back. I’m not touching your ass.”

He exhaled a little again at the attempt at a joke. “Front right.”

“My right or yours?”

“Mine.”

Thank God the gun was pointed at the rest of the crowd that had assembled instead of me. I didn’t think I could’ve done this so nonchalantly otherwise. It felt like whole hours were spiraling past as I got the folded piece of paper from his pocket as gingerly as possible.

“Would you like it?” I asked.

“Gun,” he said, tense.

“I can open it up and you can read what it says,” I told him. “Very simple solution. You just have to look at it. Cool?”

“Do it.”

“Can you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to read it? What does it say?”

Hunter cleared his throat. “It says, ‘You love a smoking hot woman and she loves you, your family is the closest a person could have and supports you at all times, and the ranch is going to be the biggest and best goddamn thing in Texas.”

I grinned. “You got that right.”

“Still need that gun, Hunter?” Tucker asked quietly. He’d been moving closer to us this entire time. “Why don’t you give it to Emmett?”

“You can have it,” he said, releasing his grip on it so suddenly that I almost dropped it. Tucker smoothly spirited it away, and Hadley moved in, murmuring softly in his ear, petting his cheek with her hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice choked.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Tucker told him. “This kind of thing happens.”

The rest of us quickly got the fence back up and started to disperse, exhausted with what had transpired.

“I think I need to go to a center,” Hunter was saying as he and Hadley walked off.

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “At least to talk to people, you know? Experts who can help.”

Chance, Tucker, and I loaded back up in the truck, but Sugar and Peyton were nowhere to be seen.

“I saw her splint Sugar’s leg on the fly,” Chance said, noticing me looking around. “Then she walked her back toward the house, slow, while Hunter was having the episode.”

“Is that going to happen all the time?” I wondered as Zoe hopped in the passenger seat with Tucker and we took off.

“I don’t know,” Chance admitted. “I didn’t even know this was happening.”

“Hadley told me something about it a while back,” I said. “I thought it would be better by now … only maybe this is something you don’t really cure.”

We were quiet for nearly the rest of the ride back across the darkened passengers, all of us with our own thoughts. Hunter was still haunted by Afghanistan, even after finding love and experiencing a successful physical rehabilitation. Would Peyton continue to be haunted by what her father had said and done? I couldn’t help but draw a parallel.

“You did really well tonight,” Chance said, putting his hand on my arm before I could jump out of the bed of the truck as we rolled up to the trailer.

“Glad I’m not wearing that knee brace anymore,” I said. “Glad we were able to come together, and that I could do something useful for this place.”

“You’re useful to this place all the time,” he said. “Even when you’re canoodling with Peyton Crow.”

I raised my eyebrow. “Canoodling? Really?”

He shrugged. “Find your happiness wherever you can.”

I took a moment to ponder that. “I have, I think. I think she’s my happiness.”

“She knows guns, and she knows horses,” Chance said, thoughtful. “She’d be an asset around here, too, if she wanted to come and work for us.”

“We’re pretty married to the horse rehab project,” I said. “And I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to stand firm on that. We had a lot of success when we first started out. It’s something we’re both really good at, and something we love.”

“I think the rehab project is a good idea.”

“I’ll tell you another thing. This can tie in with the dude ranch. It would be seamless. People could even help with the horses that were done with the rehab and just needed exercise to further their treatment. Think of how empowering that would be for visitors to take part in, how important.”

“Emmett.” Chance was grinning. “Listen to me. I’m telling you yes. It’s a good idea. We’re going to invest and make this a reality.”

My eyes bugged out. “Really?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. It’s your baby.”

“And Peyton’s,” I said, my mind spinning.

“Well, you’d better go tell her the good news,” Chance said. “We need a business plan by Monday.”

“Monday? It’s freaking Friday, Chance.”

“Welcome to the business world,” he said, the grim look on his face making me wonder if he was joking or serious.

The truck took off, and I turned toward the trailer to see Peyton sitting on the steps outside, her face in her hands.

“Peyton, what’s wrong?” My heart was in my throat as I approached. “Is it Sugar? Is the leg worse than what you thought?”

“Sugar’s going to be fine,” she assured me, smiling briefly. “The vet was so astonished when he got here that he even let me use the X-ray machine. Everything is going to be perfect.”

“That’s good news,” I said, but she looked so crestfallen that I pressed her for answers. “What else is going on?”

“Nothing,” she said breezily. “You know, I think I’m just tired.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, drawing out the second syllable. “It’s just … you look sad.”

She gave a half-hearted shrug. “I’m not.”

I snagged her good wrist as she made a move to walk away. “You can tell me anything. What is it? Did someone say something to you? Is it your father? Your mother?”

Peyton laughed, but it had a brittle edge to it. “I guess you could say that, yeah.”

“Did you run into them? Did you hear anything about them?”

She shook her head. “It’s not like that.”

“Then are you going to tell me what it’s like?”

“What do you want me to say, Emmett?” Her shoulders hunched, defensive, as I struggled to ferret out just what had upset her so terribly. “Why do you even care?”

“How could you say that? I care about you. I care what happens to you, what has happened to make you feel like this.”

“You don’t even know how I feel. That’s a ridiculous statement.”

“You don’t feel happy, that’s for damn sure. I want to know what’s wrong so I can help you, if I can. That’s why, Peyton. People who love each other help each other through whatever they can.”

“You can’t help me with this,” she said. “This is mine.”

“Well, maybe it would help if you talked about it.” I felt so useless around her. She was the gifted one, the one who would always know so much more about horses than me, who could silence even the most high-strung ones with a quiet word. I felt like I was just riding on her coattails.

“I don’t think it would help,” she said. “There isn’t anything to be done about it. It’s stupid for me to even feel bad about it.”

“It’s not stupid to feel bad,” I countered. “You feel bad because something’s wrong. Tell me. I just want to see if there’s anything I can do to help you feel better.”

“Can you make me a time machine?” she asked, lifting her dark eyes to meet mine at long last.

“Peyton, if I could make a time machine, everything would be very different already,” I said.

She laughed, but it sounded more like a sniffle. “Yeah, I bet. You probably never would’ve met me.”

“I didn’t say that.” I had been thinking about my parents. If they’d been here, maybe Hunter would’ve never gone to Afghanistan in the first place to break his body and his mind. Avery would’ve been able to pursue his own interests, I would’ve gotten instant support for the horsing operation, Tucker would’ve probably even stayed in the police force, and Chance … well, Chance would probably be out doing whatever he wanted to do. The next big NFL star, a homegrown Texas boy with a heart of gold and an arm of steel.

And yet … things had happened to us that weren’t so bad. If not for Afghanistan, Hunter never would’ve met Hadley. If not for the dire straits we found the ranch in, Avery never would’ve given a life with Paisley a chance. Zoe wouldn’t have found her way to our house, Toby in tow. And I wouldn’t have wandered into the bar in town, crushed with rejection on all sides, and approached Peyton. Life had a funny way of working out, even if it was in ways that we couldn’t really have imagined before. If I had a time machine, maybe I wouldn’t change anything at all. Life was throwing us all curveballs, sure, but that didn’t mean we weren’t still hitting them out of the park some of the time.

“I just want a time machine so I can go back and keep my parents from ever crossing paths,” Peyton said. “That’s all I’d want it for.”

“But that would mean you’d never have been born,” I said. “That would be sad.”

“Not for me, it wouldn’t be. You don’t understand what it’s been like.”

But I did, however unwillingly. In a bigger city like Dallas or Houston, maybe, Peyton had a chance of finding her own place in the world. She was whip smart, gorgeous, witty, and had a bright future in front of her with our horse rehab venture. But in this small town we seemed to be stuck in, it was impossible. Everyone knew she was the product of an ill-fated tryst between her mother and Dax Malone. Everyone knew what Mary Crow had done upon Peyton’s birth. And everyone knew just what Peyton had to do to ensure her own survival — even if no one respected her for it. In spite of her wish for a time machine to go back an undo everything, Peyton was stunningly resilient, a survivor’s survivor, scratching out a life no matter what it took.

“I’m sorry about your parents,” I said. “But I’m not sorry I know you. You brighten up a room when you walk into it.”

“You just wait ten or twenty years,” she said, looking down again. “Looks don’t last forever.”

“Your looks aren’t the only thing you have going for you,” I informed her. “There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, but most people don’t know that.”

“I wish my parents knew that.”

It broke my heart, that simple statement, that desire for validation from the two people who’d had a hand in creating her. I didn’t know that it would ever come. Peyton might grow old and gray waiting on it.

“I know it. And now all of my family knows it, too. Soon the whole town — and beyond — will know it. Once we open our business and the word spreads.”

“I wish that my family was like yours,” she said, almost absentmindedly, then blushed scarlet.

“My family has problems, just like any other family,” I said, thinking of all of the various issues we continued to work through.

“You have people who love you and support you,” she said. “The only reason my father kept me around was because he couldn’t stand the idea of his land going to someone not related to him by blood — and because the law compelled him to do so. I wished I didn’t have his blood running through my veins. I wished I had anyone else’s blood in my veins. You just don’t understand what it’s like, having parents who would rather you were never born. They’ve wished it so hard and so often that I find myself wishing for it, now, too.”