EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3) by Lexie Ray

forward to spending time with her, to talking about horses, and, yes, to having sex. There was always that.
    I wondered one day if the sex part was too big a facet in our partnership. What happened when our passion for each other cooled? I was realistic. I knew that, at some point, a woman like Peyton would get tired of a man like me. She loved excitement, and I was kind of a one-trick pony. She was inventive, and I was dedicated. It was a matter of time until she decided she was done having sex with me and wanted to move on to someone else. It was hard to assess how I would handle that. Could our working relationship outlast our sexual relationship? Or would our dream suffer if we weren’t together like that?
    But as the weeks passed, I never had to fully explore my worries. We had sex regularly, and it was always good. Unfailingly good. Made me question every experience I’d had leading up to Peyton.
    “What?” she asked one stolen afternoon as I stared at her, both of us spread out, limbs carelessly tangled, in her bed. The sweat on our skin hadn’t even dried from our latest coupling, though our chests had finally stopped heaving.
    “Nothing,” I said quickly. She didn’t want to hear this. I knew she didn’t. And as loath as she was to hear it, I was equally loath to admit anything that had been swirling around in my overstimulated brain of late.
    “Emmett, you just had your dick in me,” she reasoned, rolling her eyes at me. “You can tell me what’s going through your mind.”
    “It’s stupid.”
    “I’ll be the judge of that.” She extricated her arms and legs from mine and rolled over on her belly, kicking her feet in the air behind her. “Talk to me. I like listening to you talk — almost as much as I like you fucking me.”
    “One day you’re going to stop making me blush with all of those shocking statements,” I warned, “and that’ll be a sad day for you.”
    “But it’s not today, thank God,” she teased, pinching my flushed cheek. “Now speak.”
    “I just … I really like having sex with you.”
    “That’s not a secret, Emmett,” she said. “I just told you the same thing. We’ve known this for quite a while now.”
    “I like having sex with you, and I like you.”
    Peyton was slower to respond to that statement. “Well, you ought to like the people you fuck. It makes everything work better.”
    “Peyton … you’re making this difficult and you know it,” I said. “Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
    “No,” she said, the very picture of innocence. “You’re going to have to find the words to explain it to me.”
    “I like you,” I said, feeling like a juvenile. “We have a good thing going. We’re going to have a really good thing going once we get the project off the ground. I have … feelings … of a romantic nature … for you.” Christ, it was like pulling teeth.
    “You don’t have feelings for me,” Peyton said easily, relaxing again on the bed. She’d held herself still for the duration of my tortured speech, but now she kicked her feet in the air again, one after the other.
    I blinked at her, confused. “But I just said I do.”
    “You said you do,” she agreed. “But you don’t.”
    “I don’t?”
    “You don’t.”
    I sat on that for a full moment before trying again. “I’m a little confused, then.”
    “You just think you have feelings for me,” she explained. “They’re not real.”
    “How can you be so sure?”
    “Because it happens all the time,” she said, and there was that little sting in my chest again, that reminder that Peyton had sex with enough people to realize the truth in these things. That I was just a notch on a belt somewhere. The next one. And that there’d be another after me.
    “Okay,” I said.
    “Don’t tell me I’ve gone and hurt your feelings,” she said, putting her hand over my heart.
    “Just the feelings I don’t have for you.”
    She laughed at that. “You’re