Free Promise Me This by Christina Lee Page A

wasn’t the best time for me to make that kind of decision. And besides, I never allowed myself to dream. But if I did, they might include someone just like her.
    I pushed that way-too-fluffy thought out of my head and gave her a cursory glance. “At the fork in the road, bear left.”
    I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I envied the relationship she’d had with her parents. Her dad and his damn words. They had stuck with me, lodged somewhere in my throat. I felt them deep, like they were spoken for me.
Promise me this
. Shit, really?
    But Jessie appeared to have had such a good life; how much darkness could she possibly have inside her? Or maybe her father’s point had been that we all had some measure of it, just on different levels. And my levels ran too fucking deep.
    When she neared the bridge, she stepped on the brakes and pushed the gear into park. “Up close, it’s way taller and wider than I had imagined.”
    She was already out of the car and shooting before I could get one foot out the door. She was so excited and I loved watching her in action. I didn’t understand a lick of what she was talking about as she went on about settings and camera angles, but her eyes got this quiet intensity to them that made her even more gorgeous.
    The light was filtering through her caramel brown locks and even the blue tips gave them a softer glow. Against the angular cut of her hair, black eyeliner, and colorful tattoos, her face was absolutely angelic. Her full cheeks and lips were perfectly pink and sometimes, like right now, I couldn’t help but to imagine how they’d taste.
    She asked me about the history of the bridge and thankfully I had brushed up on that information before our trip.
    “There’s also a plaque posted up there that’ll tell you when it was commissioned and built,” I said, pointing to its spot on the bridge. “You might want to get a shot of that.”
    I’d even double-checked facts with my mom who had grown up here, so I was ready for her.
    Had my maternal grandparents still been alive and living in this town, I would have even considered visiting them. But unfortunately, I only had a few early memories of them. The only family left on my mom’s side was her sister—Kai and Dakota’s mom—and they only talked occasionally by phone.
    My mom also had a brother, who allowed me regular time on his racetrack in Mahoning County. He was cool but absolutely did not care for my father, so he never came around. But I wished he would, because he could probably kick my father’s ass in two seconds flat.
    And considering my dad had grown up in foster care his entire life, he had no real family to speak of. Which might’ve also explained why he also had no fucking heart. But there was no room to feel sorry for him—he had essentially bullied me my entire life.
    And that was the thing about dirty little family secrets. People might’ve had their suspicions, but those suspicions were the very thing that kept them from getting too close.
    “Will you go up on the bridge with me?” Jessie asked, breaking me out of my heavy thoughts.
    I headed toward her and up the incline of the hill. At a particularly rocky section, I automatically reached for her hand to help keep her steady. Her arm stiffened in momentary hesitation, but then she entwined her fingers tightly in mine and allowed me to walk her up. That felt like a small victory where Jessie was concerned. I couldn’t help feeling somewhat protective of her—I cared about her as a friend, after all.
    “Have you ever gone rock climbing?” I asked.
    “Hell no,” she said, and I laughed. “I’m slightly terrified of heights. This isn’t too bad, though.”
    “So then you weren’t serious about bungee jumping?” I said.
    “I stand by my original declaration of
never say never
,” she said. “How often do you go?”
    “Pretty regularly. You should come sometime—if only to get a feel for it.”
    She shrugged. “Maybe I will.”
    I liked