Keeping Promise Rock Read Online Free PDF Page A

school.
    “Shhh…,” Amy whispered to him when he was eyeing them in surprise in the attendance office. “Pretend we’re your aunt and uncle….” Crick grinned at her, and she flipped her straight, dark hair over her shoulder and gave him a perky grin. He’d made his peace with Amy Huerta, Deacon’s girlfriend, in the last two years. It helped that she was as pretty and as quiet as Deacon himself. It also helped that besides the dark hair, dark eyes, and café-au-lait complexion, she’d shown a genuine interest in Carrick as a person and not as some pesky little-brother-like-thing that went part and parcel with her boyfriend. He hated to admit it, but it also helped that she was going to UCLA in the fall and Deacon was very firmly enrolling in EMT training as his first step to becoming the perfectly contained ranching businessman.
    But that was in the fall. At this moment, the front office secretary eyed the two teenagers with a gimlet eye—and then she took a look at Carrick’s hopeful face and sighed.
    “Erm… Jon and Amy”—her eyes narrowed—“ Francis, ” she intoned acidly, “you are free to take your nephew out early today.” The woman rolled her eyes and shook her head. “And by all means tell Deacon ‘hi’ for me—did you think we wouldn’t remember you? It’s only been four years for Chrissakes!”

    Jon turned a blindingly sweet smile to the woman—a rather round, kind-faced middle-aged mother of three, and bent down to kiss her cheek.
    “Thank you, Ms. Lacey—you’re the greatest.” And with that, the three of them ran laughing for the truck. Jon and Crick hopped in the back and Amy took the front—illegal, yes, but they weren’t going far. Deacon stopped at a cattle gate and then took a barely-used service road down a scorched field that hadn’t been mowed. Crick looked around the field for landmarks and squinted against the hot wind at Jon, whose longish blonde hair was streaming behind him as he turned his nose to the wind like an oversized Golden Retriever.
    “Where we going?” Crick called over the jouncing of the chassis and the roar of the wind.
    “Same place we always go!” Jon called. “Promise Rock—best swimming hole short of Folsom Lake!” Folsom Lake was nearly thirty miles away—and not easy miles, either. A lot of town driving went on through Folsom, and the river had run fairly high this year, so Discovery Park was dangerous.
    “What made you decide to get me?” Crick asked, but he let his grin show that he didn’t mind at the least.
    “Deac’s idea!” Jon called back. Jon and Amy called him “Deac,” but Crick couldn’t make himself shorten the name. “He said if we were gonna go celebrate, you got to come too!”
    There were sodas in an ice chest in the back of the truck, and B.B.Q.
    beef sandwiches that Parish had made the night before. They’d even packed a pair of Deacon’s old swim trunks for Crick, and he was grateful.
    They’d been out to Promise Rock a lot of times since Deacon had first brought Crick, and it still held the same breathless holiness that it had that first time. This time, the boys all changed in front of the truck while Amy waited patiently behind it. “I don’t know why you’re not changing with her,” Jon grumbled to Deacon. “It’s not like you haven’t seen all that before.”
    Deacon had blushed under his baseball hat and agreed that yes, he had seen it before, but, “It’s only polite. Besides,” he muttered as he slipped on his trunks, “we’re breaking up in the fall anyway.” Crick’s heart had done a little summersault in a cheerleader outfit with pom-poms, but Jon had looked thoughtful.

    “Why?” he asked, standing up and folding his clothes. Crick tried for a moment to admire his body—long, graceful, tan, and lovely—but next to Deacon’s broad chest and pale-marble perfection, Jon was really just decoration. “Why would you break up with her… you two… you really care about each