Making Promises Read Online Free PDF

state of being perpetually horny faded, and he remembered why he was here.
    He was here because he had family, and he wanted more.
    He got his ticket from the will-call booth and ventured under the wooden archway, taking a program from the gleeful young women calling greetings in affected Olde Englyshe accents that were no more authentic than Shane’s jeans and T-shirt but no less charming for all of that.
    It took him less than a minute to scan the program and make an abrupt left into the food court. His sister would be performing in fifteen minutes.
    First he got himself a soda and something called a toad-in-a-hole (it turned out to be a sort of meat pie), and then he sat himself down on a hay bale to people-watch while he was waiting. It was worth his time.
    “That’s a nice costume, isn’t it?”
    Shane turned and found the mother whose family he’d been admiring grinning at him as she sat what looked to be a preschooler on her lap. Shane looked back to where he’d been focused—on a giant of a man wearing what looked to be leather armor, complete with silver (or stainless steel?) buckles and belt rings and a gigantic sword.
    It helped the guy’s image that he was well over six-foot-four and had long black hair down to his waist.
    Shane had, oddly enough, actually been focused on the costume.
    “It’s amazing,” he said to the nice woman. “Where does someone get something like that?” He gave a look to her many colored—and many layered—skirts and her flowered bodice (which in no way color coordinated with anything else in her outfit).
    “You’ll see—after you eat lunch, just follow that path down there.
    Most of the vendors are selling something that will help you make your costume. You get here an ordinary wank in a T-shirt, but you can leave like a knight in shining armor if you like.”

    The little girl in her lap took a drink of mom’s soda and pushed a mop of the brightest red hair out of her face. “I don’t wanna be a knight. I wanna be a princess!”
    “Absolutely, baby,” Mom said dryly. “You can be nothing other than a princess.” She met Shane’s eyes. “And you can be a princess too,” she told him soberly, and he laughed outright, because she was friendly and because, like Deacon, she made him feel welcome.
    “Probably somewhere in between,” he said with a wink, and she laughed. Her husband met her then with a handful of food balanced in his arms, and the illusion that he was part of a happy family vanished. The music started then, right there in the middle of the food square. Shane stood up with his food and moved with the edges of the crowd who were gathered to see his sister dance.
    Kimmy had grown in her senior year of high school, and it had almost broken her heart when she’d reached five feet, seven inches tall.
    The fact was dancers needed to be tiny—the better for their partners to hoist them over their heads or whip them around like ribbons made of muscle and grit. It also kept the amount of weight pounding down on delicate joints and tender cartilage bearable—but still, Kimmy had kept dancing.
    She had danced through injury, through demotion from one of L.A.’s premiere dance troupes to finding work where she could get it. It had been ten years since she’d discovered the Faire circuit—performers who were booked in Faires (and there were Renaissance, Celtic, Tudor, Viking, Dickens, or some other old European events happening all over the country on nearly every weekend of the year) made their living doing something they loved. As Kimmy had been telling Shane for ten years, what was valued on the Faire circuit was showmanship, craft, and true athleticism—not who had the youthful body capable of doing the move of the week.
    The woman who stepped into the ring sinuously, dressed as Titania, possessed all of those qualities—showmanship, craft, and a truly gifted grace and athleticism. She also had some meat and muscle on her bones—
    a thing for which