“With sending a brother into danger?” Deacon looked at him with measured eyes, and Shane had to concede. There was something in Deacon Winters—some measure of fineness, of self-possession—that made it impossible to go up against him when he was like this.

  Shane grunted. Great. He finally had a family, and his big brother thought he couldn’t take care of himself. “Does Crick ever win an argument?” he asked bitterly and knew the sound of Deacon’s laugh before he made it.

  “All the goddamned time. Irritating asshole.”

  “Who just brought you ice!” Crick protested, shouldering his tall, broad-chested frame through the screen door. Shane wondered how long he’d been listening before he took his cue line, and then he dropped the ice pack in his hand with an oath and Shane stopped wondering.

  “Did you get some for yourself?” Deacon asked, picking the pack up off the ground and taking Crick’s hand in his own. Crick had come back from a two-year tour of the Gulf with souvenirs that made Shane’s surgery scars look like skinned knees from childhood. The boy—he was twenty-three, maybe—rarely complained.

  “It’s numb enough,” Crick muttered. “Don’t mind me, Deacon. Ice his jaw before it swells.”

  Deacon raised Crick’s twisted, scarred hand to his lips in a brief, tender show of affection that brought a lump to Shane’s throat. It was like anything, any amount of happiness, was possible in a world where that gesture could happen.

  Shane stood still as Deacon applied the ice gingerly to his jaw. He knew both lovers had been EMTs at one time, and Deacon had the professional touch to prove it.

  “So where are you going?” Deacon asked quietly. “When we watch your animals, where will you be?”

  “Gilroy,” Shane told him. He didn’t mention the Renaissance Faire—if Deacon didn’t know he was going, he couldn’t offer money to buy Benny the stuff that Shane had planned to buy.

  Deacon looked up with a wrinkled nose and a shrug, inviting more input. Gilroy was sort of a big ol’ nowhere—lots of farmland, lots of ranches, a few suburbs.

  “My sister’s going to be there,” Shane told him.

  “You have a sister?” Crick asked, plopping his ass down on the garden seat that rested against the wall. “Wow, you think you know a guy.”

  Shane raised a sardonic eyebrow. Fact was, he spoke less than Deacon—they all knew it. “Haven’t seen her in years,” he said quietly. Not since their father’s funeral, actually, but they’d kept in touch once or twice a year since. She’d sent him flowers when he’d been in the hospital, along with a letter. Dammit, Shaney—find another job or learn to duck. I’m way too self-involved to get all tangled up in this grief bullshit, so you’re just going to have to live. He’d gotten cards and the occasional calls since then, and he’d called back. She’d wanted him to come see her perform for the last year, and he had some time off. He figured it was time.

  “What’s she doing in Gilroy?” Deacon asked. Gilroy was a good three-hour drive into, literally, the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere and Left Ass Cheek of Yemen.

  Shane had to smile though, because the answer was so unlikely. “Would you believe dancing?”

  He couldn’t wait to see her in action—she’d always been beautiful when she danced.

  Chapter 2

  And so they linked their hands and danced, Round in circles and in rows…

  “The Mummers’ Dance”—Loreena McKennitt

  SHANE had always liked driving. It was one of the reasons he’d bought the GTO. Being in his own head, blasting rock music as loud as he wanted, feeling the power of the automobile under his hands and the way it purred over the road—it was meditation, pure and simple.

  Part of the journey was on a two-lane highway that wound around the brown hills that bordered the coastlands. He’d left early, so traffic was moderate, and the rumble of the pavement under the deep-grooved posi-traction wheels was soothing. Between that and Springsteen on the stereo, Shane was in his happy place by the time he pulled off at what was essentially a roadside attraction.

  Casa de Fruta used to be merely a fruit stand in the middle of nowhere, but the founders had added a restaurant and some novelty shops, and the effect was charming, like finding Tom Bombadil’s house in the middle of a hazardous journey. For the last few years, the adjoining property had housed the Renaissance Faire for eight weeks in the fall, and as Shane pulled up into the dusty gravel (he paid the extra five-spot for the VIP lot) he thought again of Tom Bombadil’s house and The Lord of the Rings.

  Because Gilroy after a long, hot, summer was a dusty, dry, graceless hunk of land, but the Renaissance Faire turned it into a storybook with the boundless magic of humanity’s capacity for whimsy.

  Shane was wearing jeans and a The Who T-shirt (the old bands were coming back—he’d always known they would!), but as he parked the car and made his way through the parking lot, he felt supremely self-conscious. Almost everyone else was in costume.

  The costumes for the men ranged from leather pantaloons tucked into knee-high boots with a leather over-vest and a linen undershirt to basic cotton trousers (loose and floppy with a drawstring waist and ankles) and a large, blousy, big-sleeved tunic, usually with a V or tied neck. Most men had a vest on over their tunics, and everybody had some sort of hat—leather, raffia, corduroy, linen. The variety of headgear materials alone was impressive, and that didn’t even include the styles. The colors ranged from loud to bright with a dash of understated and the occasional neutral, and the assortment of pieces to any given ensemble was as varied as the men themselves.

  And that was just the men.

  The women did all of that with a combination of skirts and laced bodices—usually with bosoms flapping out of the bodices and sometimes even with thighs showing from hoisted, banded skirts. Shane had to admit he had always enjoyed looking at a nice bosom, and at this point his dry spell had been long enough that he didn’t care which team he was batting for, he just wanted to play. The squishy handfuls of boobage being pushed into touchability were just as enticing as the occasional glimpse of bare chest that he saw from the young men. Anything, dammit—anything just as long as he knew he had the option of human touch sometime in the near future.

  A happy family passed him: mom, dad, teenagers—a boy and a girl—all dressed to the nines. The more-than-plump mother was holding two grade-schoolers by the hand—also in costume. Mom’s floppy bosoms were not as graceful as those of the college-aged girls whom Shane had passed on the way from the car, but her adoring husband still made her stop so he could “fluff” them anyway.

  Shane was glad his sunglasses hid his rather wistful look at Happy Ren Faire Family. He liked them—by the end of the day, the little ones would probably be exhausted and whiny, but as he watched the older boy swing his little sister in the “princess dress” up into his arms, Shane couldn’t help but think of Deacon’s little family back at home. He was part of that, he thought resolutely. He was buying his princesses—both Benny and Parry Angel and even little baby Lila—a truckload of princess crap. Hell, he’d even spring for one of those Robin Hood hats for Drew. He was going to be the indulgent uncle in that happy family if he had to spend all of that useless fucking money sitting in the bank on the Renaissance Faire alone.

  His state of being perpetually horny faded, and he remembered why he was here.

  He was here because he had family, and he wanted more.

  He got his ticket from the will-call booth and ventured under the wooden archway, taking a program from the gleeful young women calling greetings in affected Olde Englyshe accents that were no more authentic than Shane’s jeans and T-shirt but no less charming for all of that.

  It took him less than a minute to scan the program and make an abrupt left into the food court. His sister would be performing in fifteen minutes.

  First he got himself a soda and something called a toad-in-a-hole (it turned out to be a sort of meat pie), and then he sat himself down on a hay bale to people-watch while he was waiting. It was worth his time.

  “That’s a nice costume, isn’t it?”

  Shane turned and found the mother whose family he’d been admiring grinning at him as she sat what looked to be a preschooler on her lap. Shane looked back to where he’d been focused—on a giant of a man wearing what looked to be leather armor, complete with silver (or stainless steel?) buckles and belt rings and a gigantic sword.

  It helped the guy’s image that he was well over six-foot-four and had long black hair down to his waist.

  Shane had, oddly enough, actually been focused on the costume.

  “It’s amazing,” he said to the nice woman. “Where does someone get something like that?” He gave a look to her many colored—and many layered—skirts and her flowered bodice (which in no way color coordinated with anything else in her outfit).

  “You’ll see—after you eat lunch, just follow that path down there. Most of the vendors are selling something that will help you make your costume. You get here an ordinary wank in a T-shirt, but you can leave like a knight in shining armor if you like.”

  The little girl in her lap took a drink of mom’s soda and pushed a mop of the brightest red hair out of her face. “I don’t wanna be a knight. I wanna be a princess!”

  “Absolutely, baby,” Mom said dryly. “You can be nothing other than a princess.” She met Shane’s eyes. “And you can be a princess too,” she told him soberly, and he laughed outright, because she was friendly and because, like Deacon, she made him feel welcome.

  “Probably somewhere in between,” he said with a wink, and she laughed. Her husband met her then with a handful of food balanced in his arms, and the illusion that he was part of a happy family vanished. The music started then, right there in the middle of the food square. Shane stood up with his food and moved with the edges of the crowd who were gathered to see his sister dance.

  Kimmy had grown in her senior year of high school, and it had almost broken her heart when she’d reached five feet, seven inches tall. The fact was dancers needed to be tiny—the better for their partners to hoist them over their heads or whip them around like ribbons made of muscle and grit. It also kept the amount of weight pounding down on delicate joints and tender cartilage bearable—but still, Kimmy had kept dancing.

  She had danced through injury, through demotion from one of L.A.’s premiere dance troupes to finding work where she could get it. It had been ten years since she’d discovered the Faire circuit—performers who were booked in Faires (and there were Renaissance, Celtic, Tudor, Viking, Dickens, or some other old European events happening all over the country on nearly every weekend of the year) made their living doing something they loved. As Kimmy had been telling Shane for ten years, what was valued on the Faire circuit was showmanship, craft, and true athleticism—not who had the youthful body capable of doing the move of the week.

  The woman who stepped into the ring sinuously, dressed as Titania, possessed all of those qualities—showmanship, craft, and a truly gifted grace and athleticism. She also had some meat and muscle on her bones—a thing for which Shane was grateful. Her bulimic days to keep a dancer’s weight were obviously over, and he thought she was beautiful. She was wearing a green unitard and tights, and her long, blond-streaked brown hair hung in waves down her back. Her brown eyes slanted mysteriously at the crowd as she stopped as though listening and then grabbed the strong drapery suspended from a hard-bolted scaffold, erected directly above the dancing square.

  As she climbed, a costumed man appeared—shirtless, but with a hairy pair of trousers on. Truly hairy—he also had pointed ears, long hair, and eyebrows colored in to wickedly arch. He began the narration as Puck, telling the story of Titania’s seduction by Oberon, and Shane was lost. He still saw small things—the bandages wrapped around Kimmy’s feet and knees were worn threadbare and showed him that she was still plagued by injuries, but the way her body moved like silk in water showed him that she was doing what she loved, and it was worth it. The way Kimmy’s mysterious smile never wavered even as she worked her dancer’s body around the hanging draperies, seeming to fly above the ground, told him that her heart was still in this hard, difficult work—and the way her hair clung to her face with sweat told him that she’d learned that nothing you really loved came without its price.

  Shane was so proud of her he actually felt his chest swell. His whole life, he’d wanted to be lovely and graceful, he’d wanted to move like his heart moved, and here was his twin sister, doing just that, and she was beautiful.

  And then Oberon entered, and Shane’s brain took a vacation.

  Oberon was supposed to be dancing in the forest before he caught sight of Titania’s loveliness and became enchanted. Shane was completely enchanted by Oberon.

  He was small—maybe an inch or so shorter than Shane’s sister—and slightly built. His hair was blond, tightly curled, and came to a point on his forehead above almond-shaped gray eyes. He was… delicate. Pretty. He had high, Slavic cheekbones and pouty lips and a little diamond of a chin, complete with a dimple, and Shane’s heart tripped over itself and fell in a puddle as he began to move.

  He moved like poetry, like music, like song. Birds were clumsier, cats more awkward, snakes less sinuous. The music was slow—it was time for a power exhibition—and Oberon performed. He was not dancing on a floor in toe-shoes; he was dancing barefoot, his feet wrapped like Kimmy’s, indicating injury or pain, and still he moved as though his body was pure power, and not flesh and bone at all.

  Slowly he extended his foot, his leg parallel to the ground in front of him. Just as slowly, he raised his foot, then grasped it, holding his leg nearly flush with his side before he left his toes pointing to the blue sky and bent backward, taking his weight on his hands and making a graceful extension under the golden October sunshine.

  His other foot came off the ground, and he held the pose until Kimmy swirled the sturdy draperies around his feet. He tangled himself in them, and then—as the narrator told of Titania taking a fancy to the dancing faerie king—used the draperies and his amazing body to haul himself upward to join Kimmy for acrobatics in the air.

  Please God, let him like guys.

  Shane was half ashamed of the thought. It wasn’t like he had a chance—even a chance of a chance—with such a person. The man clasped hands with Kimmy, and the two started a slow spin, hands clasped, legs extended in the draperies, bodies stretched out over the ground.

  Oh God. It almost seemed impossible that Shane was breathing the same dust.

  It was just, Shane thought, his eyes hopelessly glued to that lithe body rippling with lean, corded muscle, that it would be nice to dream. It was like when a middle-aged woman, happily married, found out that her favorite movie star was gay. It broke her heart a little just to know that there wasn’t a chance even in fantasyland for the two of them to ever touch.

  Shane just wanted to know that there was a chance of touching. Just to know it, he thought with a painfully thudding heart, just to know there was a chance…. It might make celibacy worth it just to know someone that beautiful might ever touch him.

  The dance continued and time stopped. When it was over, Shane clapped with the rest of the patrons in the food court, and the three performers stood together, bowed, and set up the tip basket. Shane waited until the crowds had cleared out and walked over and dropped a twenty in the basket Kimmy was holding, and she looked up at him in surprise.

  When she saw who it was, she passed the basket off to Oberon and squealed, launching herself at Shane with enough enthusiasm to make the three-hour trip to Gilroy completely worth it.

  “You came! Oh God, Shaney, you came!”

  Shane laughed and hugged her, picking her up and swinging her around. “How many sisters you think I’ve got, sweetheart?” he asked as he put her down. (Three, he answered himself, if he counted Benny and Amy, which he did.)

  “Did you see? Did you like?” Kimmy asked excitedly, bouncing up and down, and then she stopped and flushed. “I’m sorry—I’ve been trying to be less about Kimmy and more about the rest of the world.” She paused like a schoolgirl remembering her times tables. “How was your trip? Do you like the Faire? Will you be staying long?”

  “I’m here for the rest of the day, Kim. I’ve got a hotel room, but I need to leave early in the morning. I was hoping we could go out for dinner or something—even if it’s with your friends and all.” He took a chance and swung his chin around to indicate Oberon and Puck, both of whom were hanging out like friends to see who the behemoth hugging their Titania might be.

  Kimmy’s face lit up, and Shane forgot her pretty companion for a moment. His sister was honestly happy to see him.

  “You’ll stay?” she asked again hesitantly, and Shane smiled, feeling very happy he’d come.

  “Yeah—how many more performances you got?”

  “What, Mikhail—three today?” She grabbed Shane’s hand and looked behind her at Oberon, who was showing no signs of bugging off into the dusty wonder of the Faire.

  “You have three,” he replied in voice that held a slight accent. “I have only one more.”

  “Oh yeah,” Kimmy said, frowning in thought. “I’d forgotten. Mikhail isn’t a regular member of the troupe—he’s taking some of the slack off Kurt while he’s healing up.” She pitched her voice conspicuously over her shoulder. “Although we’d love for him to join us on a permanent basis, wouldn’t we, Brett?”

  “I’m all for it!” Brett muttered with a lewd and playful waggle of his eyebrows, and Mikhail cast a furtive look at Shane and blushed.

  Shane tried very hard to keep walking and not just turn around and stare. Did that blush mean what he thought it did? He dismissed the idea of what Brett might be to Mikhail—why would he blush?

  “I have things to do this season,” Mikhail was saying softly. “If there’s still room in the troupe when those things are done, I’d be happy to join, Kim—you know that.”