Page 66 of Running Scared
“I think you fell in love with me the same way I fell in love with you,” Bailey said, reaching up to skim Dean’s cheekbone with his fingertips.“Full throttle, no turning back, no fear, jumping right off the crazy cliff like jumping out of an airplane.”
Dean smiled and closed his eyes.“You get me,” he said happily.“It’ll be fine.”
Plans Like Diamond Stars
MARCUS WASreleased to another hospital in Bakersfield, which was hard on everybody, but Dean was a little relieved.The ramp to the basement was well underway but wasn’t finished yet, and Marcus was going to have a lot of gear down there until he was fully recovered.
Dean and Bailey said goodbye to him in the Bakersfield hospital after he was admitted there and before they took Birdie to the Royal home for a good week of sleep before returning the pilot to El Paso.Glen Echo had offered Birdie a job in Glen’s Napa-based search and rescue crew, and Birdie had accepted for a limited duration, but there was business back at home to deal with first.Birdie still wanted a plane—that hadn’t changed—but apparently the idea of working with a crew had its appeal.
As did being the pilot who was “too mean to die” in a crash in the desert.
“You sure?”Dean said to Marcus before he and Bailey turned to go.He was still headachey and mildly concussed, but cleared to recover at home.It was absurdly difficult to leave his partner, hisfriend,at the hospital while he got to go home.
“Oh my God, please,” Marcus muttered.“Please don’t tell my parents.I… you know my dad.He hated that I joined the Bureau in the first place.My head hurts, my leg’s awar zone,and if I have to hear one more fucking time about how I’m needed in the family business, I’ll give in and spend the next seven days throwing up.”
Dean nodded gently, because the now-familiar throbbing between his ears told him that was a real possibility.
“I hear you,” he said softly, gripping Marcus’s hand.“I just don’t want you here alone.”
Marcus squeezed and gave a grim smile.“I’ll be spending most of my time sleeping,” he confessed.“But I expect your family will keep me eyeballs deep in company.”
It was true.Dean had always, in a rather peripheral way, known his family was glorious, but now, when they’d already started a schedule for who was going to visit Marcus when, he felt that awesomeness keenly.He’d lied a little when he’d told Bailey Sacramento had been Marcus’s idea.In fact it had been both of them—they’d wanted to stay in the state, but fresh out of school with degrees in law enforcement, and then out of Quantico, they’d both been so full of themselves, wanting to be “away from family—my God, they’re suffocating!”That had been six years ago, and Dean hadn’t gone a day—sometimes an hour—without being pulled into his siblings’ lives.Sometimes it was annoying, but even when it was, it was still….
Home.
Bailey was willing to give up the place he’d lived most of his life to be near Dean and his family.
Dean—and maybe Marcus—were both ready to come home.
“You’re okay with moving to Bakersfield?”Dean asked, because although Marcus seemed to have gone along with it, he wanted to make sure.
Marcus grunted.“I’m not giving up my partner because some poor doctor had the bad luck to fall in love with him.I mean, Bailey needs somebody who can bail him out if he blinks twice.”
Bailey snorted.“Thanks,” he said.“That’s code now, locked into stone.I’ll hold you to it.”He grasped Marcus’s hand and shook gently.
Marcus closed his eyes.“Go,” he said softly.“I’ve got a while still here.Dean, you need to go sleep and then deal with the fam and then sleep some more.”
Dean was suddenly, absurdly protective of his partner.He bent and kissed his forehead.“Get well,” he ordered.“We’ve got adventures.”
Marcus looked mostly asleep as they left, but the corners of his mouth were turned up in the faintest of smiles.
HOME WAS…well, home.
Dean could never remember it looking bigger or smaller, more or less dusty, brighter or dimmer.While he would call himself the least sentimental of men—or, at the least, of his entire family—he knew beyond doubt that the way he saw his parents’ house, on their dusty patch of yard with the carefully maintained pool and garden, was etched more on his heart than his vision.
The hardpan in front of the gate to the yard was full of vehicles, and he suppressed a groan.
“How’s your head?”Bailey asked.
“Pounding,” Dean admitted ruefully.
“I’m in the guest room, with some stuff Reg brought down from Sacramento,” Bailey told him.“Let me go first, and you slip in there to sleep.”
It worked—but theonlyreason it worked, he realized when he woke up in the long shadows of early evening, with Mr.Bumble slumbering quietly on his chest, was that Bailey had signaled to the family, and they hadlethim escape into the blissful quiet of the room.
Still, outside in the backyard, he could hear the babble of voices, the splashing of Laure’s and Prock’s children as they played in the pool, the low drone of his parents as they spoke in the kitchen.He’d find out later that Birdie was ensconced in Marcus’s room, since the pilot would be long gone before Marcus was released, and Birdie told the same story.
Neither of them needed to be in the middle of all that babble to appreciate that there were people who were glad they were okay.
