AVERY (The Corbin Brothers Book 2) Read Online Free

the ends of her nails long and shapely. Mine were hard, calloused from use, the fingernails rimmed with dirt, jagged with injury. I still had scabs on the palms of my hands from an incident with barbed wire several weeks ago.
    “There’s nothing wrong with having nice hands,” Paisley reasoned. “All you’d have to do is be more careful with yours. Since you work with them, that’s something you should always be doing.”
    “You think I should be getting manicures? Pretty pink painted nails?”
    Paisley laughed, and it wasn’t unpleasant to listen to. “You could pick a different color, if you wanted. Maybe a bright purple? It is summer. You can get away with some pretty sassy shades.”
    I snorted at her. “Sassy shades. Right. Definitely sounds like me.”
    “Anyway, I love it here,” Paisley said. “I love this cute little town, and I love how beautiful the ranches are. That’s why I want to stay here.”
“You just seem like you’re too big for this town,” I said. “Like you belong in Dallas or better — New York, even.”
    “I don’t know if you’re insulting me or trying to flatter me.”
    “Neither,” I said. “Just an observation.”
    “I don’t think I’ll ever leave here,” she said. “I don’t even want to.”
“How could you not ever want to leave this place?” I asked, dumbfounded. “There are so many other places better than here.”
    “Oh yeah? Name one.”
    “Literally anywhere,” I said. “Any place has to be better than this one.”
    “But name one you’ve been to.”
    I knocked back my beer obstinately and lifted my chin at the bartender for another. “I wouldn’t know.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean I’ve never had the opportunity to leave this place.”
    Paisley gave a half shrug, her bare shoulder showing through a curtain of glossy blond hair. “I’ve left it. I came back.”
    “Where did you go?” I demanded, jealousy rearing its ugly head. Of course Paisley got to travel away from her hometown. Her father was rich and still alive, and she was an only child.
    “Well, I went away for school,” she said. “I did a lot of traveling then with friends I’d meet. East coast, west coast, Mexico, Europe for a study abroad program.”
    “Why did you come back at all?” I asked. “I wouldn’t have.”
“You spend enough time away from home and you learn to appreciate where you’re from,” she said. “I missed it — a lot — when I was away. I guessed I sowed my wild oats and came back home to roost again.”
    The fact that she even got a chance to sow some wild oats was a concept foreign to me. I both resented and admired her for her travels, all the time wishing it were me instead of her who’d gotten to see the world, practically.
    “That’s enough about me, though,” she said, smiling. “Avery, it has been a minute. We were practically inseparable as kids. What in the world have you been up to?”
    The description of our past — inseparable — was a little bit of a gloss job. It was me who was having to peel Paisley off of me throughout high school, deflecting her advances almost constantly. Inseparable? Maybe in her memories. She was more like a little leech.
    “I’ve just been here, on the ranch,” I said. “Nothing as amazing as your charmed life.”
    She paused, weighing her response to that. “I don’t really think that I have a charmed life, but thank you. I’m actually pretty jealous of you, that you’ve been able to be here this whole time.”
    “Jealous? Of me?” I laughed derisively.
    “Well, if you wanted to travel so badly, why didn’t you?” she asked, stung. “Didn’t you go away to school?”
    “No. I didn’t.”
    “Oh.” She considered that, biting her lower lip, which was looking more and more luscious with each beer I guzzled. I was so drunk right now that I was almost happy — if only we hadn’t been talking about ranching, if anyone else in the world would’ve been sitting here, talking to