Free Keeping Promise Rock by Amy Lane Page B

Deacon’s head as he came completely undone. Oh God… Crick thought he knew pain, and he thought he’d learned a little about death, but nothing, nothing at all had prepared him for this.
    Deacon needed him. Needed him completely, in a way that had nothing to do with Crick’s teenage crush and everything to do with family, and dammit, Crick needed to man up.
    Crick rocked his brother softly for a long time, and when the storm of sobbing had passed, Deacon lay still, his head in Crick’s lap, shivering in the February cold and the terrible chill of grief. By the time Crick made him sit up, made him move so they could take the truck back to The Pulpit
    and deal with all of the awful detritus of death, the hope for Deacon’s love had been put quietly to sleep in Crick’s chest, like a giant sleeping off a magic potion of grief.

    Next to that sleeping giant was the slumbering hope for Crick’s future in art school, because he’d be damned if he went off and rode the whirlwind when Deacon was left home, lost and alone.
    Two years later, in this same place, Deacon looked at Crick with a sudden slyness, a sudden heat in his eyes, and that giant woke up, screaming to get laid.

    cart II

    Deacon

    Promises Made

    JON and Amy got married at Promise Rock in April, when the fields were full of wildflowers and the air was gentle and sweet and the winds sweeping across the valley weren’t too brutal.
    Deacon stood up with Jon, of course, and Amy’s best friend from UCLA stood up with her, and the minister was young and perfectly willing to balance on the top of the rock for the brief, simple wedding ceremony.
    They could have had a larger ceremony—both their parents had money—but that was not what they wanted. They wanted their friends, their families, and people they knew, and they wanted it someplace special to them. Jon had first kissed Amy during a break from school at Promise Rock, and Deacon had been pleased—more than pleased—to give them a wedding in the place that meant so much to all of them.
    The day before, the whole bridal party plus Crick had spent hours hauling out chairs and running streamers, placing vases of flowers, laying that fake lawn stuff, and basically “girling the place up,” as Crick called it, and the result was their favorite place in the world, given a little bit of glitz and romance by the care of friends.
    Amy looked beautiful—her dress was white satin, clean and elegant, draping her tiny, vital body like a queen. She had a kiss on the cheek and a smile for Deacon that morning, but now, at the ceremony, she only had eyes for Jon.

    And Jon, whose movie-star dimple and oval face had only gotten more handsome in the past six years, looked besotted and tender and basically like the happiest man on earth. The two stood together barefoot (the better to balance on the rock) under the shade of that big old oak tree and repeated the old rituals that bound people together in this part of the world. Deacon watched them with a smile that felt like it split his body and shone outward until the middle of the ceremony, when his attention wandered, and he caught Crick.
    Crick was looking at him with such a dark, powerful yearning, he woke a hunger that Deacon hadn’t felt in his belly since he and Amy had last made love under this very tree.
    Deacon’s breath caught in his chest, and the heat, which had seemed mild and spring-like, suddenly washed his face and his chest and—oh dear God—his groin. That wash of heat purged away the last two years, which they had spent living together like brothers. It scoured away two years of being roommates, taking care of each other and The Pulpit . That one look put an entirely new perspective on two years of simple things likeeating breakfast together, breaking horses, working around Crick’s schooling and shifts as an EMT, and basically existing in companionship and family, and took Deacon back to the torturous two years before his father’s