Making Promises (3 page)

“No,” he muttered, but whether it was to the waxing question or to the “should we do this at work” question, even he couldn’t tell.

“Better access.” Brandon placed a gentle kiss at Shane’s neck and then one on his collarbone and then one at his spine where his short, curly hair was shaved at the back of his neck. That one brought out little sharp teeth to nibble, and Shane tilted his head forward again, feeling helpless. It wasn’t fair. Brandon could do this to him, and as far as he could tell, nothing he said to Brandon had any effect at all.

“Access is fine,” Shane grunted, and Brandon reached around him to take hold of his cock, which was growing stiff with or without his approval, thank you very much. “It’s—” His voice trailed off because Brandon had just stroked and squeezed, and his teeny-tiny brain had all but exploded. “Appro… appropria… fuck.” Shane grabbed hold of his common sense and self-respect with both hands and jerked away, turning to tell Brandon he would just have to put his porn-dog on hold.

Which meant that when their captain walked in, Shane was the naked one sporting wood, and Brandon was the fully clothed one who looked like he was being sexually harassed.

Brandon smiled that winning grin and held out his hands. “Hey, there partner—nice of you to think of me, but you know I don’t swing that way!”

Of course, when Shane thought back on it, all he had to do was say something witty, something that made the whole situation so wildly unlikely that the captain would just roll his eyes and assume that they were just horsing around, being buddies, whatever.

But Shane wasn’t glib. He wasn’t witty. Brandon had the words.

Shane had an inconvenient brain that frog-jumped over the details and stuck on concepts that needed a master’s thesis to explain. A wicked blush swept his body, even as his damned prick withered and drooped, and he looked up at the captain in completely helpless misery.

“
Titanic
,” he blurted. A truer word was never spoken.

The captain just looked at them before turning and walking out of the locker room without a word. Brandon turned away in disgust, chuffing out air like a scolding parent.

“Jesus, Shane—just once could you not be such a psychopath?”

“
Titanic
,” Shane muttered again, because sure enough, that one moment had sunk them both.

He was wrong, though. It didn’t sink them both. It dragged Shane down to hell, but Brandon got off scot-free.

Shane should have guessed as soon as Brandon got reassigned. He wasn’t sure if it was the captain’s idea or Brandon’s, but since Brand had been refusing to talk to him in the squad room or the locker room or on the phone, he assumed it was Brandon’s. He spent a horrible week waiting for a call from Internal Affairs but the night he was sent out to the area surrounding USC all by himself, he realized the call would never come.

So, before getting out of the cherry top in the city’s worst neighborhood by himself, with gunfire echoing between the darkened streets under shattered street lights, he placed a call to IA himself, along with the time he’d asked for backup.

Then he placed a call to his answering machine at home for double assurance.

Then
he got out of the car alone, loudly identified himself and ducked behind the door to the car, and prayed.

A month later he was almost recovered from the severe internal injuries that occurred when too many bullets hit a Kevlar vest at close range. As his lawyer was wheeling him out of the hospital his friendly IA agent was there with a check to keep him quiet.

Shane looked at the check and wondered if it was his imagination or were all those zeros covered in blood?

“So what are you going to do?” Brandon asked him over the phone that night. Brand hadn’t come to see him in the hospital. Shane had hated himself for hoping that he would. Nope—just this one awkward, pathetic phone call, and Shane wanted it over more than he wanted more pain meds for the surgery stitches.

“Go far away,” Shane said softly. “And find someplace they’ll let me be a cop again.”

Brandon had been a fourth-generation cop but had always thought of the job as beneath him. He knew he was pretty, and he lived in L.A.—he had better things to do with his time. At Shane’s words, he snorted with disgust. “Only you, Shane. You’ve got enough money there to go anywhere in the world.
Do
anything in the world! Have some imagination, why don’t you?”

Shane had a vivid memory, one that had flashed in front of his eyes when he’d enrolled in the academy, one that had sustained him in the long hours of studying and working to make a minimum rent and buy Top Ramen on the way through. It had greeted him when he’d graduated and made the whole thing worthwhile.

He’d been eight years old, and he and his father had been in the back of the Town Car. His father had been busy working on documents, and they’d been driving through the neighborhood where Shane had gotten shot, actually. His father was president of the university at that time—it hadn’t made him any more or less busy or any more or less distant, but it had made the ride to drop him off before school a little more interesting.

They were there at a stoplight when Shane saw two cops run down a guy with a gun. The guy had been hauling ass, nervous, twitchy, wearing a Making Promises

thousand layers of clothing. (When Shane grew up and walked the same beat, he recognized crack addiction, although by the time he came into the job, meth was the drug of choice.)

The policemen had been… extraordinary.

Shane had watched, wide-eyed, as they’d blasted through the street, not with their guns but with their commitment. The cop in front had made a solid tackle, landing on the bad guy (as Shane had thought of him then) and cuffing him efficiently and without violence. As the two cops pulled themselves up off the dirty ground and stalked away, their prisoner in their charge, Shane had been awestruck.

They had done something
real.

Shane was mostly a quiet, chubby kid. He liked living in his own head, in a place of knights and dragons and absolute good and absolute evil. He liked ideals. His mother was on the other side of the world, his father was distant, and his twin sister was so devoted to the world of dance that it was like they didn’t even live in the same house. Those books had raised him—had, in fact, instilled within his heart every hard-earned value he possessed.

And there they were. Real life knights in shining armor, doing real live acts of bravery to slay crack-addicted dragons and save trick-turning princesses.

More than anything, Shane wanted to be one.

And now, ten years out of the academy and technically just months away from getting his detective’s shield, that hadn’t changed. He was still weird. He still lived more up in his head than down here on earth. He had learned that the line between good guys and bad guys was less than absolute—many of the “bad guys” were simply lost, addicted, and hungry.

He had learned that many of the “good guys” were bullies, excited about using their power simply because they could.

But the basic principle was still there, clean, unsullied, and beautiful.

He was a good guy. He could make a difference. All of the fanciful crap in his head could be real when he was on the streets helping people.

“It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, Brandon,” he said, now in the darkened confines of his sterile apartment. He should have something, he thought idly. If he was going to go far away, maybe he 6

could buy a house, get a dog or something. He’d been gone for a month and hadn’t had so much as a goldfish to go belly up without him.

Brandon gave a short laugh. “Only you, Shane. Let me know where you end up.”

“I don’t think so,” Shane replied. “In fact, I’m thinking you’re my object lesson for who I
don’t
want to let into my life.” He hung up on that one. It was the best line he’d ever had.

And if I build this fortress around your heart…

“Fortress Around Your Heart”—Sting

BENNY FRANCIS might have had a toddler of her own, but in this moment she was all bright eyes and excited child herself.

“You’re going to the autumn Renaissance Faire? Really?

Ooooooohhh…. I
loved
the Ren Faire… the summer one in Fair Oaks!” She turned to Andrew, the young private that her brother Crick had met in Iraq. Andrew worked for her brother’s boyfriend, Deacon, on their Levee Oaks horse ranch now and was as much a part of the family as Benny or her daughter or any of the other folks who revolved around The Pulpit like planets around the sun. “Drew—you remember! You took me there in June?”

Andrew nodded soberly, only an act of will keeping his blinding white grin from erupting in his dark-skinned face. Obviously he remembered something funny about the incident that Benny wouldn’t think funny at all.

Shane nodded at Benny over his slice of chocolate cream pie and tried not to be weird. He wanted to say,
Oh dost thou, Lady Faire, tell
tales of knights in days of yore!
, complete with a hokey British accent and everything, but he enjoyed his Sunday nights here at The Pulpit and really didn’t want Deacon or Crick or Benny or any of the people who gathered here for dinner once a week to look at him the way Brandon had looked at him that day in the locker room. He was sincerely trying to not be too much of a psychopath.

“Oh tell me, Lady Faire, do you swoon over knights on prancing steeds?”

The words—so close to the ones in Shane’s head—were uttered in an
atrocious
British accent, and Shane tried not to glare at Jeff, Crick’s best friend.

Jeff was so gay he made an Easter Parade look like a funeral for straight people—but he was also glib and witty and funny, and he could pull off the Lady-Faire schtick where with Shane it would merely be dumb or odd or socially backward. As badly as Shane yearned to belong here at this big, battered wooden table in this old ranch-style home, it was just not any goddamned fair at all.

Benny rolled her eyes at Jeff and said, “If I wanted a knight in shining armor, oh court jester 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.”