Plans Like Diamond Stars
MARCUS WAS released 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, his friend , 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 a war 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 the only reason 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 had let him 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.
Just then he heard a gentle tap at the door, and his sister came in, her rich, dark hair pulled back from her pretty face, the lines at her eyes and her bold nose giving her character and kindness, which was so much more interesting than her beauty.
“Hey,” she said, bringing in a tray of—oh thank God—chicken curry sandwiches and cantaloupe. “Bailey made us save some for you.”
Dean tried to swing his feet over the edge of the bed, and the room started swimming.
He pushed back so he could lean against the pillows and was humbled when Laure started shoving extra pillows behind his shoulders until he could sit up and eat.
Mr. Bumble slid to the side and eyed them both with vague disapproval until he was settled.
“Thanks,” he said humbly. “I really appreciate it.”
“Course, little brother,” she said, her lovely brown eyes lighting up with a smile.
“You know this family—anytime.” She offered Mr. Bumble her finger, and the cat rubbed up against it in a most dignified fashion.
Dean figured his sister had charmed the cat, as she seemed to charm every other living creature, and was glad.
Like all the boys in the family, he sort of worshipped Laure.
And now he nodded and, to his mortification, felt his eyes burn as they hadn’t in the hospital. “You all really came through for me and Bailey,” he said. “I… I am so grateful.”
“Well, Bailey and his dad are treasures. You know that, right?”
Dean managed a rather watery smile. “I do.” He knew his cheeks turned red, but he had to say it anyway. “I really love him. We’re getting an apartment together here.”
She smiled like a teenager and kicked her feet. “Eeeeeeee! He told us. And we’re so excited. We miss you!”
Dean gave a soft laugh. “Well, as much as it pains me to admit it….”
She gave him a surprise kiss on the cheek. “You miss us too,” she said simply, and something in her eyes flickered, and Dean knew who she was thinking about.
“He misses us too,” he said mildly. “You know that’s not why Sal moved to Grass Valley.”
She sobered. “I know,” she said. “I… I can’t even blame him. But as much as he tries to be bitchy and campy and funny….”
They both shared a sympathetic look, and Dean knew, suddenly, what Laure and Val must go through as the oldest siblings. Their brother Sal’s heartbreak was real and painful and unfixable, but that didn’t mean Laure and Val hadn’t wanted to try.
“He’s still hurting,” Dean said for her.
“Well, you or Val need to get married,” she said practically.
“What?” he tried to straighten up more, but his head threatened to pop off his shoulders.
“One of those long, fancy affairs that gets him down here for two weeks instead of a couple of days.” She nodded forcefully.
“We could totally fix his life. Look at you there, your perfect doctor boyfriend in the yard, charming the parents and my teenage sons and Prock’s adorable little monsters altogether.
I mean, Chance says even Marcus approves, and you know how hard it is to slip one past the work wife. ”
Dean recalled that frantic first meeting between them, and how Bailey and Marcus had seemed to click. Not romantically—thank God—but as though they understood the pitfalls of their situation and needed to work in tandem to overcome them.
It occurred to him now, taking a bite of his mother’s food, with his sister confiding in him like he was— gasp ! — an adult, that he was both the pitfall and the situation.
“I think they’ll plot a lot,” he said, musing. “Try to manage me. You know….”
“Make you saner?” she said, that eye-crinkling smile in place.
“Yeah,” he said, swallowing blissfully. He looked his sister in the eyes again. “He makes me better, Laureate.”
She nodded. “Well, you used my full name. I guess it’s locked in stone.” She frowned then. “By the way, did he tell you Mom told him about the name thing?”
Dean blinked in surprise. Thanks to all seven children absolutely begging their parents to let the name thing be their secret, to be told only in strictest confidence and fudged on all school reports, he’d assumed that he might be able to keep his whole name to himself until he was forced to sign a wedding certificate or something.
“Really?” he asked.
She nodded soberly. “He hasn’t used it against any of us, but he did tell me that Laureate Ivy was a godsend. I could have been Honorarium Vassar, and then I would have been really screwed.”
Dean managed a chuckle. “Oh God. He’s right.” He gave his head the lightest of shakes. “His humor—it sneaks out and surprises you sometimes.”