Hanging the Stars

by Rhys Ford

  And despite all the battles Lang’d fought in his life, he’d still remained… innocent, and Zig’s hoarding rattled him to the core.

  “Just tell her she’s okay,” West’d told him when his brother called him to share his pain at the stack of cans and a lost little girl. “And maybe give her some of those canned sausages. They’re disgusting, but Marzo seems to like them.”

  Since then, West was determined to give Zig anything he felt she deserved. Surprise gifts without any occasion attached to them because he’d wanted to be surprised like that when he’d been young and his father’d returned from a trip. There’d been nothing spontaneous in the Harris household, no sudden flights of fancy guaranteed to slough off the boredom of schoolwork and manners. For all the distance he’d wanted to put between himself and Lang’s new family, West simply couldn’t walk away from the little girl who dreamed of ruling the world but still hid tins of food under a pile of stuffed animals just in case her world fell apart… again.

  “It’s so pretty. And nice. And the inside—the fabric’s got cats!” Zig held the soft leather up to her shoulders. Rubbing at its sleeves, she snuck a glance at West through her lashes. “West, the dads won’t let me—”

  “They’ll let you keep it.” West eased off his left hip, feeling every bruise under his skin. “Of course they will. It was made for you. Now try it on. It’s probably going to be a little bit big, but that’s so you can grow into it.”

  Her hug was as tight and sweet as the first one she’d given him, and West wrapped his arms around her, grunting at the fresh wave of pain running over his ribs and spine. Keeping his face as calm as he could, he patted Zig on the back, then let her go.

  “Go find a mirror, hellion.” West caught up the duffel before it slid onto the floor. The rattle of pills was a siren call, and his body was begging to answer it. He smiled as Zig ran up the stairs, probably heading toward a bathroom with a full-length mirror. Digging out the pharmacy bottle, he muttered, “Marzo, I’ll need some water, please. I need to take a handful of these things.”

  “Of course, boss.” The bodyguard put down the case he’d been carrying. “Let me see what’s in the kitchen. Told the agency to stock the place up.”

  West bet himself Lang would wait until Marzo was out of the room before growling at him, and as usual, his twin did not disappoint. His brother was nothing if not predictable and rigidly against making anyone feel uncomfortable.

  “You can’t keep giving her things, West.” Lang ran his fingers through his shaggy hair. “We’re trying not to spoil her.”

  “And that’s your choice.” His hands were shaking from the pain, but West kept them hidden. The weakness in his body alarmed him, and he didn’t want Lang to find yet another reason to pick at him. “It’s not like our mother or sisters are going to surprise her with gifts. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Agnes, little girls adore just-because presents.”

  “You think of your sixty-three-year-old assistant as a little girl?”

  “No,” West sniffed. “She has granddaughters. Agnes is a fine well of knowledge in dealing with someone like Zig. I’d be a fool not to make use of the resources I have.”

  “You shouldn’t—”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Lang,” he cut his brother off. “I should. Because no one did for us. Other than what infrequent affection we received from our grandmother, we were raised on an emotional glacier. You raise her how you need to, but someone has to be… our grandmother for her. It might as well be me, because it sure as hell won’t be our mother.”

  The resignation in Lang’s eyes signaled West’s victory, as did the soft frustrated sigh he let out in one long shuddering breath. Tossing his hands up, his twin finally conceded the only way Lang could give up on a fight… by changing the subject.

  “I was going to take Zig out for some pizza. Deacon’s working late on a bike, and I don’t want to cook. Do you want to come with us?”

  “No.” Keeping a smug smile off his face was harder than West expected, and a bit of it must have crept out because Lang’s deep blue eyes narrowed. “Thank you. While pizza sounds great, I can’t stand to be in a car right now. I just want to take a hot shower and maybe nuke something the shopper left in the freezer. Marzo’s heading back to the city tonight, and he’ll want to make sure I’m set up here before he leaves. So, sadly, no pizza in a loud, noisy restaurant with plastic chairs and fuzzy-backed vinyl tablecloths for me.”

  “You, brother, are an asshole,” Lang pronounced with a disdained sniff. “And a snob.”

  “Hah.” West poked at Lang’s side, hitting the ticklish spot they shared just beneath their third rib. “And here Zig thought you were going to leave before calling me an asshole. I should have bet her on it.”

  “You’d have lost.” Lang stepped away from his brother, keeping himself out of West’s reach. “Because one, she said I’d call you a dick. And two, if there’s anything Deacon’s taught me, it’s never to wait to call someone an asshole to their face. You never know when you’ll have a second chance. So you, brother mine, are a massive, raging asshole.”

  “Even if I spoil your damned kid?” West teased, waving Marzo over before the man headed back into the kitchen holding a much-needed bottle of spring water.

  “Especially because you spoil my damned kid,” Lang grumbled. “Because she loves you, West, and I swear to God, if you break her heart, I’m going to fucking kill you and feed your body to the seagulls.”

  “HEY, ANGEL,” Joey called out from the front of the pizza parlor. “Wanna do me a favor?”

  After loading the last couple of buckets of batter into the restaurant’s fridge, Angel was tempted to crawl onto one of the frosted-over shelves and hibernate until his brother was done with high school. After dealing with the cops, Frank’s assessment of his shot-up oven, a long protracted fight with his insurance company, and then a growly detective who’d practically accused him of murder, the last thing Angel wanted to do was a favor for Joey.

  Since he was pretty much standing in the middle of the biggest favor one restaurant owner could give another, Angel knew he was on the hook for whatever it was Joey wanted him to do. The bakery would have been dead in the water without Joey letting his crew come in at three in the morning to complete their wholesale orders, and the damned man refused to let Angel pay for any of the utilities, preferring to take payment in the form of a wedding cake for his youngest daughter sometime in June. It was hardly a fair trade for Joey and his brother, the restaurant’s owners, but they’d insisted, and Angel wasn’t in any position to argue.

  Now, with as tired as he was, Angel heartily wished he’d put up a bit more of a fight.

  “Yeah, sure,” Angel growled back, slinging a tub of guava-habanero batter up onto a rack. “Whatcha need?”

  The short, balding Italian man padded into the hot kitchen, deftly avoiding the line cooks as they assembled pies and heated up pastas. Wiping his sauce-smeared hands on his apron, Joey gave Angel a crooked, apologetic smile.

  “I hate to ask you, but I’m kind of in a bind here.” Joey jerked his head toward the front of the house. “Place is packed, and I’m down a driver. Can you drop a pie off for me? I’ll slide you a ten for it.”

  “No, it’s fine.” Angel was afraid to nod in case his head snapped off his neck and rolled across the floor. “In town or further out?”

  “No, no. Close by. Down by the beach. Along the bluffs.” Joey’s face broke into a wide grin as he patted Angel on the shoulder. “Thanks, kid. I appreciate it.”

  Kid. Angel figured he outweighed the slender man by at least one hundred pounds and had almost a foot on him, but Joey’d known him since Angel’d been about the size of a straw and about that bright, so he’d earned the right to call him kid.

  “I’ll box up the pie and get you the address. There’s a tip on the tab, so you’ll be taking that with the ten I’m giving you.” The man was shaking his head before Angel could protest. “Take it,
son. You’ve got bills and a boy to raise. Pride doesn’t put potatoes on the plate.”

  “That’s the truth,” Angel muttered. “Thanks. Just let me finish up here, and I’ll run it over.”

  “Thanks.” Joey grabbed a cardboard box, then slid a hot, steaming pizza into it. “And don’t forget the money. My wife is going to have my balls if my daughter doesn’t get that cake ’cause you’re out of business.”

  “Hey,” Angel snorted, closing the walk-in door behind him and shaking off the cold on his skin. “Not like I couldn’t come here to bake it.”

  “That’s not going to help me, kiddo,” he replied, folding the lid down. “You go out of business and she can’t get those chocolate cupcakes she likes so much, I might as well not come home.”

  THE SMELL of cheese, pepperoni, and tomato sauce ruthlessly teased Angel all the way to the slender side street leading off of the main road. His stomach growled, reminding him the last time it’d been fed was hours ago, and a few bites of an oat-bran muffin washed down with a mouthful of cold coffee wasn’t going to sustain him for very long.

  “Screw it. I don’t care if it’s cold. I’m rolling down the window,” Angel muttered to himself. “This damned pizza is killing me.”

  Leaving the bakery’s modified VW van for Justin to use for deliveries in the morning, Angel was left with his old Range Rover to load up the walk-in for his morning crew. It needed new… everything, but the beat-up old green beast was reliable and fairly easy to fix. Although, when his ass hit a hard edge in the seat frame when the Rover’s tires rambled over a large bump in the road, Angel figured the damn thing could use a better suspension.

  “Yeah, that’s happening when pigs fly,” he sighed. His cell phone chirped from its perch in the truck’s console, so Angel hit the button on the one new thing he’d gotten for the Rover—a stereo he could talk through when he drove—and answered. “Hello, Pizza Shack Bakery.”

  “Dude, it’s seven o’clock. Where the hell are you?” Roman’s voice cracked, reaching for manhood, then crumbling into a squeak that was more aluminum foil on teeth than gravelly baritone. “Joey Junior just dropped off some pizza for us ’cause he was heading home sick and said you’re out making deliveries for him.”

  “One delivery,” Angel corrected. “And did you thank Joey Junior for the pizza?”

  “Justin did. I was taking a shower. When are you coming home?” His younger brother sighed heavily. “Stupid Justin won’t let me play any games until you’re here, remember?”

  “Yeah, because he doesn’t want to watch you leave blood splatter all over the TV screen. Won’t be more than forty-five minutes tops. Leave some pizza for me and you can stay up an hour later.”

  “Dude, it’s Friday. I can already stay up an hour later.” Roman snorted. “And we’ve got three pizzas.”

  “I meant an hour on top of what you’ve already got.” Angel maneuvered around a bend slowly, not liking the blind curve. His lights caught on something alive in the brush, a pair of eyes reflecting yellow back at him for a brief moment, then disappearing into the windswept grasses. “But if you want to be a dick about it—”

  “No! Shit, sorry. Okay? I just want to play tonight, and Justin’s a weasel-dick.”

  “Justin’s doing us a solid by hanging with you. Don’t be an asshole about it.” Angel sighed. “Get some food in you, watch some TV with him, and I’ll be home as soon as I can. Did you do your homework?”

  “Bro, it’s Friday.”

  “Bro, get it done before I get home and you can play games all fricking weekend.” He’d been told by the counselor to pick his battles. The idiot woman just hadn’t told him which ones to pick, and it seemed like the one war he constantly waged with Roman was about schoolwork. “All of it, Rome. I’ve got the list from your teachers.”

  “Fine, but if I’m dead from boredom when you get home, it’ll be your fault.”

  Roman hung up before saying good-bye and before Angel could hit the End Call button.

  “It always is, dude.” Exhaling hard, he muttered to himself, “It always fucking is.”

  A rise in the road hid the house from view, but Angel could see its lights shining over the hill’s edge. A few hundred feet and the place’s jutting angled white spires emerged from the darkness, its crystalline windows and crisp lines a vivid brightness against the star-filled sky. The home was a quartz fortress rising from the gold-and-gray coastline, a massive, profane slice of modern architecture set down in the middle of a homey California beach town.

  “Damn, this place is nice,” Angel whispered, carefully balancing the pizza as he got out of the Rover. “And Jesus, it’s huge.”

  The door was pretty hard to miss. A tall, wide plank of heavy black wood, it dominated the house’s front face, competing with the expanse of long windows above it. The doorbell took a while to find, and Angel was only certain the button he’d pressed was a chime because he could hear it echo through the house’s massive interior. A few seconds later, the door opened, and he found himself staring straight into his past. Angel’s breath stole from him, sucked out by the shock of the achingly pretty man with weary bright blue eyes and short, ruffled black hair standing awkwardly in front of him. He’d kissed that bruised mouth and suckled on those long, trim fingers. He knew the taste of the man in his throat, a sensual echo strong enough to flavor his memories even after all the years they’d racked up behind him.

  “Well, fuck me,” Angel heard himself say. “It’s you.”

  Five

  UP UNTIL the moment he’d opened his door and spied Angel Daniels standing on his front walk, West knew time was something a human could only experience in a line. There was no deviation from the thread spun out by the Fates, no knot in the cord large enough to fling a person back to an earlier point in their lives.

  So West was alarmingly unprepared for the sudden jerk back in time and the sudden resurrection of a summer he’d buried behind him more than a decade ago.

  The photo in the paper didn’t do Angel justice. Shorter than West by an inch or two, Angel filled the doorway, the breadth of his shoulders and the power in his long jeans-clad legs leaving West breathless. He didn’t want to be affected by the soft tousle of sun-kissed dark hair or the man’s stark storm-gray eyes, but the sight of him—Angel—punched a hole through West, pushing aside every bit of control and detachment he’d built up since the day he’d told Angel not to call him anymore.

  “Well, fuck me,” Angel rasped, taking half a step forward. “It’s you.”

  “Unfortunately, I never got around to fucking you,” West muttered. “But that can certainly be remedied. There’s plenty of places in this house I’d love to bend you over. Take your pick.”

  Angel snorted. “Think that’s how it’s going to go? Like we’re just going to pick up where we left off? Like it was just last week?”

  “You were the one who kept telling me to live in the moment, Daniels.” West leaned forward, pushing himself into Angel’s space. “Miss me?”

  “Like a hole in my head.” Angel’s pulse leaped at his throat, the small tickle of movement under his skin drawing West’s attention. “Miss me?”

  “Never gave you a single thought,” he lied smoothly. “Delivering pizzas now? Thought you owned a bakery.”

  “Did. Still do. Had a little problem with the place, though. Some asshole shot it up.” Angel assessed him, his changeable gray eyes cool and steady. “You know anything about that?”

  “Not a damned thing. If I had something to say to you, I’d say it to your face. I’m not the one who runs away from things.”

  “No, but you’re the one who cuts things out of his life if shit gets too real.”

  West nearly winced at the jab—probably did if he was going to be totally honest—but honesty was lost in the swirl of emotions crashing over him. There was too much to feel, too much to sort through, and it was made all the harder as he stared straight at the source of all the heartache.

  “That was
shitty. I’m sorry.” Angel’s voice softened, but the anger West heard—the pain throbbing in his voice—was still there. “Fuck, you still piss me off.”

  “Yeah, you piss me off too,” West agreed. “And damned if I know why.”

  “You’re not pissed off at me.” He squared his shoulders, leaning into West a bit. “You’re mad at yourself, for being an asshole back then and for being a fucking dick now. You’re just too fucking much of a coward to admit it.”

  Something broke in West, a small whimpering shred of longing with teeth sharp enough to fight its way out of the bramble inside of him. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, but his brain took the thought it’d dragged up from the storm brewing in him and tossed it out, damning West and any consequences.

  “We were good together,” West muttered. “Damned fucking good.”

  “A long time ago, Harris, like you said.” Angel’s face, his open, erotically handsome face, was suddenly shuttered, eyes hooding as he spoke. “So, not one single thought? Nothing? But we were good together?”

  “Maybe a couple of thoughts,” he confessed softly. “Just not… shit, Angel. I missed you. Damn me to hell if I didn’t… don’t miss you.”

  “You haven’t seen me in years, and you’re trying to shut down my life because, what? You want to build condos?” Angel’s gray eyes turned stormy, a hurricane of pewter and ebony caught in their depths. “You don’t get to miss me, Harris. Not now. Now when—”

  “Just… listen to me, okay?” West wanted to find the words to explain away the stupidity of his youth, of how he couldn’t look at cotton candy without thinking of Angel or hear the crash of a wave against the shore and not think of his first kiss, a salty, sweet explosion of sensations when their lips finally touched.

  Numbed by the pain pills and his heart bleeding out from regret, anger, and pain, West did the stupidest thing he’d done in his entire life since he’d slid down the banister of his childhood home and launched himself through the massive windowpane at the end of the stairwell. Instead of slamming the door in Angel’s face, he stepped in closer, ignoring the sharp sting of pain twisting through his ankle and knees. The pizza fell, and while his stomach grumbled loudly at its loss, his mouth ached to be filled with sweeter, lovelier things.