Making Promises Read Free

thou, I’ve got Deacon or Jon or Shane here to fit the bill.”
    Jeff was slender and almost comically graceful. He was the kind of guy who could mince when he stepped and trill when he talked and then get totally goddamned serious, and people would take him seriously. His hair was the same lustrous dark brown as Shane’s, and Shane suspected it had the same unruly curl, but Jeff’s had a sophisticated cut to it and some sort of amazing hair glue that made it sit down and behave.
    Jeff could get any set of friends he wanted. It just seemed unfair that he should want the same set of friends that Shane wanted, because Shane didn’t have a whole lot of luck in the social department. Or the friend department. Or the family department.
    But wait a second. “I’d be a knight in shining armor?” he asked Benny, and she grinned at him from around the fuzzy brown head of the toddler in her lap. The little girl was eating her mother’s pie with a single-minded glee that Shane admired. He’d never seen anyone suck whipped cream out of their own tangled hair before.
    “Of course you would, Shane! Look at you—you drive a muscle car for a prancing steed, you perform good deeds as a matter of course, and not a soul on the planet could doubt your good intentions. Yup,” Benny finished happily, taking the second-to-last bite of pie on the plate from her daughter. “Definitely a knight in shining armor!”
    “What does that make me?” Andrew asked, a little real hurt mixed in with the mock outrage. Even Shane could see that in spite of the age Making Promises

    difference, Andrew wanted to be Benny’s knight in shining armor all by himself.
    Benny’s grin at Andrew changed temperature and wattage, and Andrew’s hurt seemed to disappear. “You’re a squire—you’re like a knight in training. You’ll be knighted eventually.”
    “Will you be my Lady Faire?” Andrew asked, and Benny went from charmed girl to age-old-temptress in a heartbeat.
    “Maybe,” she teased and then turned to Shane before she could see Andrew put a hand to the imaginary shaft in his heart. “So, are you going to buy a costume?”
    “A costume?” he said blankly, and she nodded—and Andrew rolled his eyes.
    “Yeah—you know. Everyone’s in costume. The actual knight costumes are usually reserved for the guys on horseback, but there are some great peasant costumes and merchant costumes and….” She looked fondly at her little girl. “We bought the basic dresses, but there were wings and hats and stuff.”
    She didn’t say anything else, but her eyes darted to where her brother, Crick, and his boyfriend were washing dishes. Deacon—the boyfriend—actually owned the horse ranch, and Shane knew the place was in trouble. Deacon had been outed in a spectacular fashion that involved being beaten by a local police officer and a rather dramatic court case. The fallout had resulted in a loss of a lot of the ranch’s local business. When Crick had returned from Iraq in May—injured and unable to go out and earn any extra income—keeping the ranch had been an iffy proposition at best.
    Something had happened to give them some time. Shane knew it had something to do with Crick’s decision not to go to college after his return (a thing that hurt Deacon deeply but didn’t seem to bother Crick at all) but whatever had happened didn’t change the fact that finances were still touch-and-go. Once a month the family—and that included Shane now, much to his honor—had a meeting where Deacon showed them how much money they had lost and how much they still had in capital and what sort of spread that could afford them in another part of the state or even the country. They all knew it would kill him to give up The Pulpit. His father had started the ranch from scratch, and Deacon loved it only slightly less than he loved Crick. But Deacon was adamant—the family came first.

    Benny and little Parry Angel would have the best education and the best