EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3) by Lexie Ray Read Free Book Online

stares and whistles I was certain to get if I made my way through the front and past all the other patrons. They all knew what Peyton was. I was the one who’d tried to see something different in her.
    The air in the alley was just as stuffy as the air had been inside of the bar. I needed wind on my face. I needed somewhere else to be. Peyton had crawled underneath my skin and made herself at home there. I was uncomfortable, hot and bothered, disappointed in her and in myself.
    "Hey, Corbin."
    I whirled around. "It's fucking Emmett."
    Peyton smirked at me as she let the door close to the bar behind her. "I know it is. I just liked the way you looked when you were all worked up about your name."
    She approached me, sinuous, dangerous, a completely foreign experience, until I could practically taste the perfume she'd chosen — a citrus that melded well with the hot night. She tilted her head upward, and I felt like I didn't have a choice. I kissed Peyton Crow and wondered how much more money it would cost me.
    The worry of money and prices quickly melted away. She tasted like fruit even if she hadn't been eating any at the bar, something related to pineapple and another item I couldn't figure out.
    I broke the kiss as soon as my brains returned to my skull.
    "All I wanted was horses," I said. "Nothing more."
    "Uh-huh." She looked amused. "What about what I want?"
    I'd never considered the possibility that Peyton Crow actually wanted anyone she slept with. Or sought to sleep with. I didn't know. I was drunker than I usually was, fuzzy with promises and whispers. I'd told her. I'd told her all I wanted was to talk about horses. Fucking horses. That was it.
    And yet we were out here, in the alley behind the bar, which was the preferred location for a majority of her business transactions. What did she really want? Another handout? She couldn’t actually want to sleep with me, could she?
    “How much is the kiss going to cost me?” I asked, only half joking.
    “Depends on what you want with it,” she said. “The kiss was on me. How you choose to continue is up to you.”
    “I’m going home.” I ached with exhaustion, all the way down to my bones, as if I’d put in a full day at the ranch. I hadn’t at all — I’d ridden Sugar for the first time in a long time, gotten shut down by Dax Malone, and been humiliated by his daughter. It was perhaps an emotionally tiring day, but nothing I should feel this physically tired for.
    “Emmett, wait.”
    I paused in the mouth of the alley, already on the way to my pickup truck along the street. I was done with this — done with Peyton’s games. I hated the way she made me feel, like I was helplessly attracted to her, drawn to her even as I had much more important things in mind, things I needed to do. She made me want her and know I could never be good enough to truly have her. It was perplexing and frustrating, and I was done.
    “You seem like an okay guy.” Peyton picked her way around the debris littering the alleyway, the broken bottles scattered like painful stars across the pavement, her boot heels scraping along the loose gravel. “I mean, as far as men go. You didn’t try to take advantage of me. You didn’t try and push to see how far you could get without paying. I … I did that.”
    I watched her warily, trying to guess what game she was playing now, not trusting that any of this would come from a genuine place. With her line of work, it was hard to imagine that Peyton Crow had a single genuine bone in her body.
    “The ideas I have for horses … they’re good ones,” she said. “Ones we should actually talk about. I can tell that it’s your passion, and it’s rare to find someone who truly has dreams and is doing something to actively pursue them.”
    Any minute now, I expected the punchline. Peyton was working on getting me vulnerable, backing me into a corner, and then she would launch her final attack on me. Everyone would probably come pouring out of