Forever Promised (8 page)

He planned to enjoy the family he had around him, and make the choices that kept him there for as long as he possibly could be, so he ate lots of greens, and his family kept coming by for dinner anyway, and he was pretty damned content with his life. And, well, now he was apparently a soccer coach, and that could be fun too. If nothing else, watching the little buggers run the hell around the field like mice on meth without a maze? That right there was high entertainment, and half the reason he’d been so excited to take Parry to practice. So in spite of the lingering sadness of having to see Jon off, Deacon was becoming used to the idea that the world might not be out to kill him, skin him, and eat him after all.

Or he had been until he’d walked into his kitchen and seen the nerves riding everybody like a breaker rode a skittish colt.

And now that Benny had blurted out what she had in mind, he knew why.

“Isn’t that incest?” he asked, honestly befuddled, and Crick smacked him in the back of the head.

“No, idiot, not if she’s having
your
baby.”

Deacon flushed (and he’d been flushing all evening in the diner as it was) and scowled up at his beloved, his partner, his husband, and the giant pain in his ass.

“Don’t get mad at
me
,
Carrick James, it wasn’t
my
idea.” He swallowed against the sudden tightness in his chest and turned to Benny, who was regarding him with those big blue eyes. Oh hells, those eyes held
way
too much hero worship in them, and he shifted uncomfortably. “Benny, I love that you thought of us this way. I do. But you and Drew, you’ve got your own life to live. I mean, I know you’ve been waiting until you graduate this year to get married, but it’s long overdue that you move in with him in the cottage and start making a life together.”

Deacon caught Drew’s irritated glare at Benny and smiled. This might just end normally after all. Then Drew looked up at Deacon, his brown eyes sober and his gaze direct.

“Deacon, this was her idea, but I’m behind it 100 percent. This is something we both really want to give you. We’re well aware—”

Deacon stood up suddenly, his chest tight enough to make his vision go dark. “No, you’re not,” he snapped, looking anywhere but at the two of them. “This isn’t a puppy. It’s a baby, and you’re talking about…. Benny, I was there, remember? Being pregnant isn’t a picnic, and walking away from a baby—even when you know it’s being loved—that’s not something you’re wired to do, darlin’. I was
here
when you came home, remember?”

“It’ll be different this time,” Benny said, but she was wiping her eyes with the palm of her hand as she said it. “Deacon, this won’t be
my
baby I’ll be leaving. It’ll be yours and Crick’s, and I’ll be leaving it right where it’ll belong. With you. Don’t tell me you don’t want this.” She wiped her eyes again, and he wondered when she’d started wearing makeup on a daily basis, because it was smeared all over her eyes like a giant raccoon mask. Her full mouth trembled, though, and so did her pointed little chin, and Deacon looked around the kitchen to find someone, anyone, who would help him haul his way out of this rabbit hole.

What he found was Crick Francis, leaning against their battered, peeling kitchen counter and looking at him seriously from brown eyes that were way too grown-up. His narrow face was pinched in at the corners of his lean mouth, and his back teeth were grinding enough to set the pulse throbbing in his scarred temple. He dragged a long-fingered hand through his black hair and nibbled on his lower lip, such painful hope shining out of this face that Deacon felt his stomach cramp.

“I don’t want them to do this for me,” Deacon whispered, and he had to whisper because it was a terrible, terrible lie.

“I do,” Crick answered back, his jaw pulling back a little to assume that mulish set Deacon was used to.

Deacon took three deep breaths, realized that wasn’t going to be enough, and decided he needed to be somewhere he could breathe.

“I’m going to check on the horses,” he announced and stalked out of the house. The kitchen, with its cracking tile and battered table, was redolent of beans and pulled pork, and the smells alone were enough to make Deacon feel slightly ill. God. He didn’t want to think about it. All the reasons Benny’s proposition was a perfect solution to the one thing he’d always really wanted and all the reasons it was a perfectly shitty idea.

The barn was full these days, and he hadn’t had to rake horseshit in a long time. Shane’s kids from Promise House vied for that position, and Deacon understood that the competition for the work was pretty fierce. The kids completed chores and homework packets and went to their counseling sessions and basically kept their noses clean, all for the rewards of honest hard work. Shane’s selection process must have been pretty stringent, Deacon had often thought, because the only kids who ended up mucking out the stalls and currying the horses had been the best kind, the kids who were going to find a place in the world when the world had been pretty damned insistent about kicking them out of it to date.

Deacon made his way back, thinking horses smelled even better when someone else had cleaned up after them, and found the stall at the end with his favorite horse. No, it wasn’t Shooting Star, who was an incredible fucker and had tried to kill him on numerous occasions. He’d already sucked up to her delicate haunches enough for this day. Instead, he went to where Crick’s horse was, the one Deacon had spent two years combing the trades and horse shows for, hoping that he’d find one that would do.

Crick’s original horse, Comet, had been the color of fresh yellow baby shit, and had a swayback, a dish face, and big bony hips and joints. He had been, in fact, the singularly most ugly animal Deacon had ever seen, but that horse… man, that horse had heart.

Having to kill him was one of the most painful moments of Deacon’s life, plain and simple, and the idea of Crick not having an animal on Deacon’s ranch left a hole Deacon had made it his mission to fill.

The animal had to be big, because Crick himself was tall, and it had to be gentle, because as opinionated as Crick was to the humans around him, he still treated horses with an almost childish awe. It had to be bombproof; it couldn’t shy at a breeze or kick because it felt threatened; and it had to be comfortable at the end of the line, because Crick wasn’t the best horseman in the world,
especially
not after his wounds, and if he and Deacon went riding, Deacon wanted a horse that would keep up without jockeying for position.

Show points hadn’t mattered, and neither had appearance or breeding. Deacon had gone looking for a
gentle
horse, and that’s what he’d found in Flower Princess. The horse had been bought for a rather spoiled young woman, who had sold her after two years when she realized that horses didn’t always smell fantastic. Although Crick had whined copiously about the name, Flower had indeed been exactly what Deacon was looking for. She was big enough to carry Crick as well as a load of saddlebags, and perfectly content to let Shooting Star or another mare or gelding lead the way. She had accompanied Deacon and Crick across the fields and to Promise Rock on more than one occasion, and every now and then, when Shooting Star was just too much of a bitch for Deacon to want to deal with, he took Flower to help train the more skittish horses, because she was so placid, the nonsense of the younger set just washed right over her.

She was an unremarkable roan, and she’d made just enough points in show to keep her breeding record intact. Deacon bred her anyway, because Even Star, their stud horse, was not only gentle but also pretty as a cover model, and of the two foals Flower’d thrown, one had been a beauty queen who’d fetched top dollar, and the other had been an incredibly ugly sweetheart who had been donated (breaking included) to a local ride-to-walk charity. Deacon figured both babies had been welcome, and he planned to give Flower a break for a year and then breed her again. But right now?

Right now, she was content to be used to teach the kids from Promise House to ride when Crick wasn’t riding her, and to get a visit from Deacon almost every night.

She was especially content to get extra carrots when Deacon came around.

She snorted softly and shifted as he walked up to her stall, and he was almost disappointed to see that her mane had been brushed and braided and that her stall was spotless. Yeah, the kids spoiled her too, especially that new girl Mikhail had brought by last week, Sweetie.

“How’s Sweetie treating you?” Deacon asked softly, and Flower leaned shamelessly into his scratch behind her jaw, as if to say,
Not bad. Could pet me more.

Deacon allowed himself to be conned for a moment. “Yeah, them kids, Flower Princess, they just don’t know what they’re doing, do they? No one knows how to scratch you just the way you deserve. It’s shameful, a pure crime, oh yes it is.”

“That horse is going to break the damned door if you don’t stop scratching her sweet spot,” Crick said behind him, and Deacon had to fight not to jump. For an entire five minutes, he’d managed to forget why he was out here.

“Yeah, well….” Deacon swallowed. He didn’t have a reply, or any words at all.

Crick approached him warily and stood just close enough behind him that if Deacon wanted to lean back and rest against him, he could.

Deacon mostly preferred to stand.

“Deacon, what’s so bad about being offered—”

“A chance to watch your sister risk her life and health for us? Nothing at all, Carrick, because it’s not like I haven’t spent the last seven years trying to get her all grown up and happy and healthy and ready to go have a life of her own! No, I’d
love
to chain a girl I’ve thought of as my
daughter
to the ground carrying my baby, because I
am
that much of an asshole!”

Crick grunted. “She seemed to push out the
last
one quick enough,” he said and then held up his hands. “Just saying! Women have babies all the time—”

“And women get sick doing it—did I miss something? Were you not
here
when Amy was pregnant the second time? Because the first time was no joke either, remember?”

High blood pressure the first time, and the added fun of gestational diabetes the second time. The worst part was, the gestational diabetes didn’t leave. It just hung around and became regular pain-in-the-ass, shorten-your-life diabetes. God. Deacon remembered Jon’s voice pitching like a child’s when he told Deacon the news over the phone. Deacon had run over to his house—literally—and dragged the guy out on a horse for the first time in months. Deacon didn’t have any other good cures. Alcohol was out, and Amy had been sleeping while Benny minded the babies, so a road trip to Vegas wasn’t going to happen, not that Jon would have wanted to go. All Deacon had was the horse and the fields and the silence a man could have in his own head while he was riding.

It had seemed to work for Jon like it had worked for Deacon during the worst of Crick’s absence and recovery, and Deacon could only be thankful. Jon was the sane one, the organized one, the one who bailed Deacon out of shit when the temper he’d hidden so well during his childhood escaped as an adult. If Deacon could give to Jon anything approaching what Jon had given Deacon in the course of their friendship, Deacon would consider himself a good man.

That’s why he’d let Jon go without even a whimper. A friend—a
true
friend—didn’t hold a brother back from greatness. It would have been a betrayal, and Deacon didn’t know how to do those.

Crick sighed and backed away at the mention of Amy, his bad leg making shuffling sounds through the hay on the floor of the stall. Perversely, Deacon missed having him there, warming the space at his back, but it wasn’t like Deacon had been accepting his comfort anyway.

“Benny’s built different than Amy—”

“That’s a justification,” Deacon said, his voice tight. “She’s got a man of her own now. If she’s going to put her body through that, shouldn’t it be for her own babies?”

He smiled a little, thinking of what beautiful babies they would make. Drew’s calm steadiness, Benny’s passion and compassion—those children would have the clear gaze of the angels, he was sure of it.

“He wants to give us this too.”

Deacon breathed in sharply. “Yeah, I know, and seriously, what in the holy mother of hell—” Flower snorted, and he lowered his voice so she wouldn’t think he was mad at her. “Why would he do that?” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Why?” Deacon turned to Crick, upset enough to give up the illusion of space he’d created. “He’s going after his certificate, did you know that?”

“Animal health technician?” Crick asked, and Deacon nodded.

“He can commute from here. They can live in the cottage if he gets a chance to go for the full veterinary medicine degree. I mean, we can help all we want, but Drew has
plans.
And he plans to be with your sister. And I don’t understand why he’s going to put all of that off when I think he loves her just… just head over fucking heels, Carrick! He’s been looking at her with his heart in his throat since before you got back—”

“She was only sixteen!”

Deacon had a moment of irritated humor. “Yeah, and so were you when you first moved to The Pulpit, and you swear on your life you were in love!”

Crick grunted. It was the same age difference, Crick knew it. “Well,” he conceded sulkily, “I wish them luck. But before they go on and live their lives together, they want to give us something—”

“This is not a puppy!” Deacon snapped, not sure why people couldn’t see this.

“No, it’s not!” Crick snapped back. He dragged his game hand through his hair again and narrowed his wide-set brown eyes. God, his eyelashes hadn’t gotten any thinner or any blonder, and Carrick James still seemed like he could see Deacon’s soul through Deacon’s body when he turned that look on full blast.

So Deacon studied his boots instead.

“Then why—”

“It’s not a puppy, Deacon, it’s a
baby,
and it’s going to have the best parts of me in it, and, God willing, the best parts of you! Please….” Crick took a deep breath and ventured into Deacon’s vision, his tore-up jeans and boots first, followed by his knees, and by the time Deacon was forced to raise his chin and look up to avoid gazing at his crotch (which wasn’t a bad destination, really), Crick was there, his pretty face anxious and tired and struggling so hard for patience, Deacon wanted to hold him just for that.