Free Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) by Whitney Barbetti Page A

remain unanswered, because he’d never hear them from my lips.

Chapter Eight
    I found myself two days later standing next to Colin as he packed up his car.
    “It’ll be fine,” he insisted, double-tying my shoelaces before turning away to load the gear. I wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince.
    I watched as he secured a pack to the roof of his Jeep next, his arms long, wrapped with lean muscle.
    “Hi,” a voice spoke beside me.
    I jumped, surprised by the closeness of Jude, before peeking up at him. Because I hadn’t been this close to him when we’d met, I hadn’t realized just how tall he was, looming way over my five feet and four inches.
    He stared at me with that intense focus again, and I was compelled to not continue the eye contact. It was strangely uncomfortable to have someone stare at you so intently. His soft, toffee-colored eyes narrowed when I didn’t say anything again.
    “Hi.”
    This time, he smiled, revealing a line of pearly white, straight teeth. If anything, him showing his teeth unnerved me even more. I found myself watching how smiling transformed his face, creating deep creases in his cheeks and small lines around his eyes. He stretched his arms up, flexing all those muscles right in front of my face.
    “Ready for this?”
    Swallowing, I nodded.
    “You’ll want to put your hair up; you’ll get hot.” His arms came down and his gaze traced my hair.
    “You seem to be an expert on hair,” I returned with a small nod back at him. “Since you have so much.”
    He ran his hand over his scalp. His hair had been buzzed so short that I could barely tell his hair was brown. If it wasn’t for the brown in his beard, I wouldn’t have been sure.
    “Yeah, I had a ponytail a couple weeks ago,” he said, “but it became too much maintenance.”
    Giving him the side eye, I said, “Um… okay.” Because imagining him with a ponytail was hot and I didn’t need to be thinking that when I was dating the guy just a few feet from us.
    With that, I turned away from Jude and closed my eyes briefly, willing myself to stop thinking about mountain man Jude and his beard and his tattoos and start thinking about Colin.
    I shouldn’t have to remind myself of Colin, I knew. But I thought of what Ellie had said about him, how his attention was always changing, how he didn’t give anyone that type of singular focus. So it was natural to be put off by Jude and all his intense masculinity. Colin didn’t give anyone the limelight in his life.
    We climbed into the Jeep, Colin driving with me shotgun, and headed up to the trailhead where we would meet another five guys for the hike.
    As we headed up to the trailhead, Jude began prodding me with question after question.
    “How do you know one another?” I asked after a while, in attempt to get him to talk about himself.
    Colin spoke first. “Our moms are friends. They kind of organized our group of friends, actually.”
    I raised an eyebrow. “Like, playdates?”
    Jude laughed and it warmed my chest. “No. Our moms met and introduced us is all,” Colin said.
    Jude added, “A bunch of the guys you’ll meet, they’re in our little group.”
    “Oh.” I looked out the window, passed dozens and dozens of trees. The further we drove, the fewer signs of human life I saw. There was something meaningful about escaping the world that humans created and venturing into a world that grew naturally from the earth, uninhabited by people.
    When Colin pulled the Jeep into the parking lot at the trailhead, I felt the nerves. I’d grown up with one friend really; a group of people was something foreign to me. But I watched as Colin and Jude hopped out and embraced several of the other guys with smiles and dude hugs before I worked up enough courage to climb out of the car myself.
    I stared up at the trail we were to take and wondered how this would go for me. Colin, who claimed to know me, didn’t. I didn’t know me. I wasn’t sure I would know who I really