Make a Right (25 page)

“That never changed.” Cade thumbed Tuck’s collarbone, over the old scar where he hadn’t dodged a bullet once upon a time, the scar that’d sent him to St. Pius and to Cade. He raised one slender knee, drawing Tuck into the space between. “Then you can,” he said. “You can have me like this.”

Something odd about the way he said that prickled at Tuck’s mind, but his mind had taken a backseat. For now.

No thinking now. Just doing. They were up against the wall, fitting perfectly between two couches meant for looking at, not lying on. They wouldn’t have done. This did.

Reminded Tuck of old times back in the city, and hell, even at St. Pius when not even Cade could wait. Happened once in a blue moon, and when it did—

Well. Tuck had learned by heart the value of being prepared. He hadn’t been this time.

But Cade had.

Tuck remembered how it’d been. Finding some quiet place—any place would do, as long as it was private—digging out the lube and condoms Tuck risked sneaking out to buy.

It was as clear in Tuck’s mind’s eye as if it’d been yesterday. Cade laughing against Tuck’s neck when Tuck cracked his head on the wall from moving too impatiently. Jerking forward when Cade fingered him wide open without gentleness, without hesitation. Swearing as soft as he could and sucking in a deep, rasping breath when Cade shoved deep. Not enough prep, and it burned like fire when he thrust.

Cade. Always Cade, fucking him fast and without mercy. He knew what Tuck wanted, same as Tuck knew what Cade wanted. Biting his lips so he didn’t shout, even if they were tucked away where no one could see, no one could hear. Rutting back, giving Cade all he had, clenching down around him.

Coming without a hand on his cock, just Cade inside him, pleasure-pain white-hot with every rough stroke Tuck would swear went so deep he could taste. Coming in a second wave, an aftershock that would leave him gasping when Cade would shudder to a halt, mouthing sharp kisses against Tuck’s nape and leaving bruises on Tuck’s hips, loosing hot pulses of cum Tuck would feel on the inside.

They’d shudder their way through it, Cade pulling out before he’d finished, splashing Tuck with the last drops. Turning Tuck around to face him and stealing the last of his breath with kisses that shared their flavors between them. Driving Tuck nuts with wanting more, harder, again.

One of Tuck’s fantasies. His favorite.

Only—this was real, and it’d just happened here and now.

Dazed, delighted, and a dozen other “d” words, Tuck nipped Cade’s mouth, his nose, the sharpness of his chin, and laughed like a kid at the shakiness of their legs. Held Cade upright so neither of them fell, even if the couch’s edge bit into the bare backs of his thighs.

Cade’s gaze met his from inches away. Any closer and their eyelashes would have tangled together. Slowly, slowly, they eased down, breath hot on one another’s faces. Tuck kissed Cade one more time, lingering and deep.

Better than his dreams, that’d been.

Better than he’d ever imagined when Cade pressed his mouth to Tuck’s ear and whispered, rough as raw leather, deep as oak, “Love you. God, I love you.”

Tuck hung on for dear life, and that wasn’t hyperbole. His life? Cade was his life, and they both knew it.

Maybe he could still honest to God have that life back again. With Cade pressing biting kisses on his collarbone, well. Hard to believe otherwise.

Tuck shut his eyes and let himself float away. This was what people meant by happiness. If anyone ever claimed there could be anything better, they were liars.

And this was the truth. “Love you,” he rasped back, holding Cade tight as if he’d never let go. And he wouldn’t. And Cade knew it too.

Always knew.

“You know, every time I hear a waltz from now on, I’m gonna get hard enough to pound nails. That’s gonna be fun to explain when we’re eighty years old at the nursing home.” Tuck’s grin broke out broad and wide, and wider still when Cade thumbed at the dent in his chin.

Cade shook his head, but he was smiling. “Sometimes I wonder about you.”

“Don’t need to and you know it. Anything you want to know about me”—Tuck stole one more kiss—“all you ever have to do is ask, and I’ll tell. No secrets. No lies.”

He might have missed Cade’s small, sharp breath. He didn’t.

“You okay?”

Cade shook it off. “I’m fine.”

Tuck let it go. Or he tried his best. No fucking this up. Not now. Let the piper come calling later but not
now
. Tuck wouldn’t let it.

But be damned if he didn’t have to block out the sounds of
that
music starting…

Chapter Twenty

The aroma of steak filled the air in tantalizing billows of steam from beneath the grill’s lid. Tuck’s stomach rumbled, and his wasn’t the only one. It’d been Megan-the-carnivore’s idea to grill out and peace out the night before the wedding, and a better one Tuck had rarely ever heard.

Cade brought a bowl of briefly marinated chicken to him, Hannah’s preference. “Is this all right?”

Tuck glanced in. He could smell garlic and rosemary without needing to get any closer. “It’ll do.” He hip-checked Cade. “Just don’t go thinking you can replace me in the kitchen.”

Cade poked at the coals with a long, pronged fork. “I’d forgotten how long this takes.”

“You’re not kidding. My one bitch about a cookout? It’s a cook-fucking-
slow
.”

“Patience for both of us, I guess,” Cade said beside him. “Speaking of which…” He grimaced at a well-tangled pile of icicle lights waiting for his attention.

Thomas had gotten the store-bought pavilion up by himself. It would have pissed Tuck off that he’d done so and done a good job—if Tuck hadn’t been pleasantly otherwise occupied at the time. He smirked and didn’t try to hide it.

“I need to help with those. For the girls.”

“I know.” Still trying, Tuck managed a grin. “Go, do your thing.”

Cade glanced at him on a sideways slant. He didn’t quite smile back, but his mouth curved wryly at one corner. “Makes me wish I was the one who knew how to cook.”

Tuck snorted. “Too late. My grill. All mine.”

That wry half smile threatened to grow. “How do you… You have such a crazy heart, do you know that?”

“So it’s been said.” Tuck remembered how helium balloons filled, and how his chest felt the same way, lungs full of clean air. Maybe they’d be okay. Maybe it’d come out all right in the end.

Better to be mad than sad. Better to hope than despair. If he didn’t live by his words, then no one else would.

And so Tuck stood alone by his grill now, the quiet one in the crowd for once, and watched the rest of his adopted family buzzing with activity and loud chatter. It was, for an uncomfortable moment in time, as if none of them needed him.

“Hey!” Hannah called, trying to tuck down a flapping corner of the canvas pavilion cover. “Someone taller than me, help?”

Thomas looked confused by the lights. “How far do these go? All the way to the top?”

“I could get a stepladder,” Megan offered. She pushed a pencil behind her ear.

“Don’t tell me you were drawing on the tablecloths—” Hannah protested, rushing to the buffet tables she’d set up, built by Tuck from the remnants of the crashed pavilion and some plywood and covered with enough trimmings that no one would ever know the difference. “Those are for tomorrow!”

“They’re paper. Practice paper!”

“You’re insane. Someone, tell her?” Hannah turned to Tuck, beseeching him with wild gestures to knock some sense into Megan’s head. The spell broke and Tuck felt himself drawn back into the world he craved like air and water.
Thank God.

Tuck chuckled, mostly out of relief. “You want to talk about crazy? That wild child going insane for math. That’s crazy.”

“Mmm.” Cade, who’d wandered back closer to Tuck, looked thoughtful. “You know, I always thought you’d end up as something besides a driver.”

“Seriously?” Tuck turned the steaks. “What did you think I’d do with my life?”

“That you’d be a teacher.”

Tuck hooted; the noise caught Hannah and Megan’s attention. Probably Thomas’s too. “A teacher, me? Please. You and Megan are the brains around here.”

“Hey!” Hannah snapped, indignant. “I
am
a teacher.”

“Cade and Megan and Hannah,” Tuck amended. “They’re brains. I’m brawn.”

“He’s got a point, though.” Hannah rubbed out probable soreness in her arms as she drifted closer. “If not a teacher, then a social worker.”

Tuck frowned. “I’ll bite. Why?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Look at us. All of us. You take care of everyone. That’s who you are. Do you really have to ask?”

Tuck’s cheeks burned hot. “Yeah, well. I like what I do. The rest of you, tell me there’s anything you’d be happier with than what you’re doing now.” He warmed to the subject. Anything that’d take the focus off him. “Go on. Everyone has dreams about what they’re gonna be when they grow up, and nine out of ten go for something else. Spill.”

Hannah bubbled over with a giggle. “I wanted to be an astronaut.”

“A fairy princess,” Megan said, absolutely straight-faced, even when Tuck stared at her in what he thought was understandable surprise. “And a bull rider,” she admitted. “And a stunt actress.”

“Don’t scare me like that,” Tuck told her.

She beamed at him. “I will if I want to.”

Hannah nudged her. “Behave. I thought about being a ballerina,” she said. “After I met Megan, I wanted to be a swordfisherman. Something dangerous.”

“’Cause you thought she’d like it?”

“Not so much.” Hannah frowned delicately. “More because she made me want to be brave.”

Megan rested her head on Hannah’s shoulder, obviously satisfied that her scribblings on the tablecloths had been forgiven and forgotten. She took Hannah’s hand and raised the back of it to her lips to kiss. “I’m glad she went for teaching instead.”

Tuck’s gesture said, precisely,
then there you have it.

“Thomas?” Megan craned to look at him. When he shrugged in silence, she rolled her eyes. “I shouldn’t have asked. You are what you were born to be, gardener-man.” Her tone softened. “You make things grow where they shouldn’t, and that’s where you’re happiest.”

Tuck sneaked a peek at Thomas, who seemed to accept that with a small shrug. Okay. Without grudging, or trying not to, he could see the truth of what Megan said. Thomas was made out of bedrock and tree roots and green, growing things. So to speak.

“Gardens of Eden,” Cade murmured, gazing at a point somewhere or at some time long ago and far away. Nowhere near here, for sure.

It could have ended there, but Megan never knew when to stop. “What about Cade?” she asked, jerking her head in his direction. “I always thought he’d go into the army or something.”

“Never that,” Cade said. He picked up the lights, and the mood went down. How, Tuck couldn’t say, but they all felt it. Silence fell, broken only by the crackling from the grill. All eyes on Cade, now, either for a glance or a thoughtful study.

Strand by strand, Cade unwound the tangles of light. “I thought about being a priest.”

For an odd second in the deceptive dim dusk, Tuck’s eyes played tricks on him, and he could see rosary beads, not lights, slipping through Cade’s fingers, counting off the prayers one by one.

It would have suited him. Peace. Quiet. Time to think. All the space he needed to be alone.

“When?” Hannah asked.

“The first few months of the year I turned eighteen.” Cade rolled the lights into a neat coil from wrist to elbow and laid them on the grass. “Then I changed my mind.”

“You never said,” Tuck said, hollowness at the pit of his stomach.
His eighteenth birthday
. Right around the time they’d started sleeping together.
Oh God
. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked,” Cade said, clipping the words short. “It’s in the past now.”

“Yeah, but…”

Megan and Hannah elbowed each other in a tattoo of a rhythm. “So! Steaks smell great,” Hannah burbled. “Do you need help? What kind of wine goes with red meat?”

“Red,” Tuck said shortly. He turned his back on her. “Cade?”

Cade had been preparing to stand. He settled back. “That’s not the ‘worst thing’ I was going to tell you,” he said quietly.

“Somehow I figured not.” And if that was worse than this, knowing when he and Cade were fucking—making love—the way they’d done even this afternoon, that Cade had been thinking of throwing it all away to put on a collar—
goddamnit
. “Hannah, you mind finishing up here? I’ve got smoke in my eyes, and I need some water.”

Cade reached for and missed the cuff of Tuck’s jeans. “Wait.”

“I’ll be back,” Tuck said. Lied. “Chill. I just need to wash my face.”

He’d be okay. He would. After how much they’d gotten through and how close they were to good again? He’d make it be okay. He just needed a minute. That was all.

But Cade didn’t believe him, and Tuck could tell.

But he didn’t let it stop him from walking away.
Fuck
. He could see Thomas already slipping in where he’d been, that son of a
bitch
. He’d known Cade thought about being a priest; fuck him if Tuck wouldn’t bet his damn life on that. Known it every time he caught Tuck and Cade kissing.

He needed space. He needed air. He needed—something, goddamnit—

“Hey!” Hannah was the one to stop him. “Smoke, nothing.”

“Hannah,” Tuck said.

She ignored the warning he put into her name. “The wedding is tomorrow. Ohmygod, it’s tomorrow.”

“Hannah, I know what you’re doing. Stop.”

Like that ever worked. Hannah stood her ground, as stubborn as he’d taught her to be. “You guys promised. I want to see for myself if I should change from high heels to steel toes.”

“Not. Now.”

“Now,” Hannah said. She’d plunked herself atop a clean table and leaned back on her arms. “I’m serious. We haven’t seen you yet. Just one turn around the pavilion.” Beckoning Megan up next to her, she nailed Tuck with her stare. “I’m not asking. Go. Whenever you’re both ready.”

She meant well. Tuck supposed that was what people meant by “poetic justice.”