A Promise Worth Remembering (Promises Collection) Read Online Free PDF Page B

his thumb on top of her hand, he let her know he was letting her into his past and needed her touch for his comfort. Or maybe she needed his touch. She’d had her fair share of dances with those first two. “So Uncle Mark intercepted your call?”
    “Calls. And he caught me sneaking onto the property…twice. He threatened me with trespassing. After what you’d gone through with your mom, I didn’t want to make more trouble.”
    Feeling like a door had slammed shut and startled some sense into her, she wrenched her hand free. “You mean after waiting six months to make contact, I wasn’t worth the trouble.”
    “I didn’t have a choice, Bailey.” He stared down at his boot that drew circles in the sand.
    Still, she envisioned him playing frat boy for an entire semester before he’d remembered his girlfriend back home. She flashed both palms to halt his forward motion. “I don’t care. Whatever you have to say will never be enough.”
    With both hands, he raked his cocoa-colored hair, parting it in four even furrows. He gave her his side profile. “Well, I’m going to tell you. You don’t want to talk to me after,” he hesitated, then added. “Fine.”
    Mouth drawn into a firm line, she folded her arms and waited.
    He pivoted to face her, his boot tips squaring with his buff shoulders. “The only way to have a future is to make peace with the past.”
    “If you’re implying I haven’t, let me assure you I made my peace ten years ago.”
    He pointed upstream and shook a finger. “Our rock. I saw you there yesterday. And the day before. And the day before. Standing, just standing on our rock.”
    Her mouth dropped open, but Tucker kept on talking. She couldn’t block his voice from reaching her water-filled ears. Our rock . She didn’t want him to know she still pined for him. Couldn’t risk getting what little love she had inside her stolen again.
    “…waiting a year after Jesse’s passing to see you, to talk to you just about killed me . But I had to give you time. Time to heal. And I knew you’d be safe with your uncle, but then he died. Well, I worried about my father. Knew I had to come home. To protect you once and for all, and to stand up to him. Then I saw you on our rock, like I said. Gazing—”
    “At your ghost,” she snapped. Her eyes welled with the entire river, so Tucker’s biting expression blurred. “Why, Tucker, why did you leave me when I trusted you? Were your fingers bound, were your lips taped, so you couldn’t give me a single sign that you weren’t dead?”
    He glared, eyes narrowed to slits.
    The expression pulled her gaze toward him like a magnet she couldn’t wiggle free.
    Finally, he hiked up his pant leg, past the boot top, and higher, to the rippled flesh that engulfed his leg past the knee. Burned flesh. Scars so deep they flowed over his skin like white water over boulders.
    Her hand flew to her mouth and Copper snorted. Suddenly, she couldn’t look Tucker in the eyes. Pain surged in her chest but she forced herself to look at what he’d endured. “I don’t understand. What happened?”
    “I want to take you home, Bailey.”
    Her breath raced from her lungs until her throat went dry, but not from fear of the river. She wanted to climb inside that fast car that was Tucker Pierce and never look back. To rescue him. “Then the only way out was to save yourself. And that meant leaving me.”
    “Believe me when I say leaving you in the dark, both literally and figuratively, wasn’t what I planned. But you were—”
    “A child.”
    Her terse word bit the air and Tucker flinched.
    “I was going to say innocent. And I wanted to keep you that way.”
    “But I’m not immune to abuse. You could have told me. You know that’s why my uncle had custody of me.”
    She glanced to the river side of the path. Only fifteen, what could she have really done to protect him against his father? Now she could barely hold her ground against the man. What hurt most was that