Making Promises Read Free Page A

circumstances money could buy, and if that meant moving the ranch before they lost it, that’s what it meant.
    That didn’t mean everybody’s heart didn’t stop during the monthly family meetings while they waited to see if they had just a few more months for the ranch to start making money again. It didn’t mean that Deacon wasn’t thin and transparent from stress—his best friend Jon had instituted a “Deacon weigh-in” during the family meetings so the family could keep an eye on Deacon’s health. Shane looked unhappily to where Deacon stood, his six-foot frame made to look short by Crick’s extra four inches. At the last weigh-in, he’d been one-sixty. It was better than when Shane had gotten there—called out because Crick and Benny’s crazy-assed family had decided it was time to share the crazy and take the baby from her young mother—but it was still not enough to make him look strong and healthy, and Shane needed him to be strong and healthy.
    Shane was working for the local police force these days. He should have been the enemy after what Deacon had been through, but they’d invited him into their family as a friend. His entire life, Shane had never had a family with that much warmth. He needed the ranch to be here in Levee Oaks. He needed this family to be all right.
    Shane looked thoughtfully to where Deacon was shooing Crick off from resting a pointed chin in his shoulder to try and get him to eat a slice of pie. He was six feet of scrawny, determined alpha male hidden behind a shy smile and a blush. Deacon himself wouldn’t have denied Benny or Parry Angel anything. If Benny had held off on a Renaissance Faire shopping spree, she had probably not spent the money voluntarily, to do her part toward keeping The Pulpit right where it was.
    Shane looked back at Benny. Her hair was bright orange this month, and her eyes—a pretty blue but still the same shape as Crick’s—were wistful and dreamy. Benny could be the closest thing to a damsel in distress that Shane ever got to rescue.
    “What did you want to get?” he asked, inviting conversation. He set his detective’s brain on “record” then, and it was a good thing too. It turned out a sixteen-year-old girl with a beloved baby on her arm could dream a whole lot of princess after one trip to the Faire.
    A few minutes later, Benny carted the baby off to her bath—which turned out to be a community event, since Deacon’s friends, Jon and Amy, Making Promises

    were there, and they decided that four-month-old Lila Lisa needed a little bathwater on her bottom as well. When the community baby-bathing event had sucked half the people out of the room, Deacon asked who wanted to bring the table scraps out to the potbellied pigs. Shane practically knocked his chair over in an effort to volunteer.
    The pigpen was in the dark behind the stable, but Shane didn’t mind the walk. The early October night was still warm enough for cargo shorts and a T-shirt, and the breeze that blew off the delta and through the valley was crisp enough to suggest November was coming. It was a pleasant night to be out, and that was good, because he had something to do while he was there under the stars.
    He rounded the corner to the barn on the way back, found the stack of hay bales under the soda light suspended from the barn, pulled his little notepad and pen out of his pocket, and started writing. He was so intent on his task that after he got all of Benny’s fanciful wishes from the Renaissance Faire down on paper, he was surprised to see Jeff had come out on the porch of the house and was standing there smoking a cigarette.
    Shane put the paper and pen in his pocket, grabbed the empty plastic bowl that had held the scraps, and tried to walk back into the house like he hadn’t been doing anything that needed talking about.
    Jeff wouldn’t let it slide.
    “Did you remember the scent of the hand lotion she wanted?” he asked as Shane came up the steps.
    Shane