They were all so lucky that my gun was still locked up and not in a holster on my shoulder, my hip, or my ankle.
“Loc!”
Turning, I saw Dez, and when he came loping up, I held up a hand, warning him to stay back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, stopping but staying close, arms crossed, watching me.
I shook my head, pacing toward him, almost reaching him and then turning around, again and again, but it didn’t help, the anger not dissipating in the least.
“You need me to go get a shovel, and we can bury whoever it is you wanna kill?”
“That is a very thoughtful offer,” I growled.
“Come on, let’s get you…a…beer or…G?”
I checked to see what had Dez so spellbound and found Gene there, having come from the house, standing there on the lawn, frozen, staring at Dez like he’d seen a ghost.
When I turned to look at Dez, he was rooted to his spot on the grass as well.
“Huh,” I said, because whenever you thought the world was big, it proved it was not. It was actually very small, and people you thought could never exist in the same orbit were always much closer than you imagined.
It struck me then that the reason Eugene, or Gene, as his wife called him, or G, as Dez, his lover, called him, had not backed up Alan with his whole gay-equaled-bad thing, was that he was not a huge fucking hypocrite. He was just a cheater.
“What are you doing?” Danielle shrieked at her husband as she charged by him, shoes off, but then came to an abrupt stop as well, her gaze riveted on Dez. “D?”
D? All these letters instead of names.
“What are…why are you here?”
His eyes did a thing, softened as he looked at her, and I was working that out in my head when Beth was suddenly in my face, screaming at me.
“How the hell did you know there was that stipulation in the judgement?”
“Because Nick is the one who asked for it to be in there,” I answered, calming because she was so incensed. Why it worked that way for me, I had no idea, but the louder, angrier, completely over the top someone else was, the more dialed down I became. “And since they were letting your piece-of-shit father walk on the child endangerment charges, they were quite accommodating of anything your brother wanted to add to the new charges they were filing. That included the hate crime.”
“The what crime?” she shrieked at me.
“That can’t be,” Alan lamented, missing what his wife and I were discussing, fixated on the piece that affected his perceived livelihood. He came up beside her, hand raking through his thinning brown hair, yanking on his tie, clearly distraught. “Everything is in place for me to take over the farm.”
Beth rounded on him. “We have to talk to Nick and get him to—”
“Dez,” Nick greeted the man with such fake enthusiasm that I turned to squint at him as he came walking across the lawn to reach us. “You’re back. So great to see you again.”
He was such a liar, and I shot him a pointed look.
“I—” Dez croaked out, looking at Nick and then back at Gene. “I wanted to see Locryn again to…what are you doing here?” he asked Gene and then turned to Danielle. “And how do you know him?”
She swallowed and bent over to put her hands on her knees.
“I’m here with my wife, and…why did you want to see Locryn?” Gene asked, looking like a man drowning on dry land.
I threw up my hands and turned as Nick reached me and put his hands on my hips to keep me still.
“What the hell is going on?”
Grabbing his bicep, I dragged him out of earshot.
“That, as you know, is your sister Danielle,” I said, pointing. “That guy there is her husband, Gene, who’s secretly been boning Dez.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” I told him. “But I suspect that Dez is also sleeping with Danielle, which is why she looks like she’s about to pass out.”
“I had no idea this was what ‘friend of the family’ entailed.”
“Oh you’re nasty.”
He waggled his eyebrows at me.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I am,” he placated me. “Deeply.”
“Ass.”
“And who is he?” he asked, pointing at Alan.
“That is your sister Beth’s husband, Alan, who really can’t think of anything worse than being gay, so I think you should go tell him you’re actually bi, and we’ll see if his head explodes.”
A smile slowly curled his lips.
“And up until five minutes or so ago, Alan thought he was taking over the horse farm from your father.”
“What? No. There’s a thingy, a…whatever you call it.”
“Stipulation.”
“Yeah, that.”
“What’s with you? You seem distracted.”
“That’s because I saw Dez again, and he made a beeline right for you, so I got over here as fast as I could, and I really don’t enjoy other people being interested in you.”