A Promise Worth Remembering (Promises Collection) Read Free Page A

reaching her ears. He jabbed his finger in the air toward Crooked Bridge upstream and locked his stare on hers.
    The knot in her stomach tightened to a nest made of ivy vines. She didn’t know what she feared most. Coaxing Copper back to the preserve or facing Tucker, looking him in the eye, confronting her past when doing so could drastically change her memories. She didn’t live for today, she realized. She never had.
    Though a thousand unanswered questions about Tucker’s whereabouts over the past decade battered her temples, so did the desperation in Tucker’s eyes that reflected her inner fear of him disappearing again. Of a future he’d promised and the hope she still clung to that her dreams would become reality.
    Foolish girl…
    Only the way his lips parted, his eyes blackened, his chin lowered to meet his chest, his face still held a similar expression to the one he’d worn the night he’d pronounced his love, but then had vanished.
    What had been on his mind then that he hadn’t shared?
    What similar thought warred in his mind now?
    She slid the phone back into her backpack as three knee-high shadows blazed through the underbrush toward Tucker. Dogs—mouths frothing, tongues tasting their prey, lips curling to show sharp teeth—appeared and warned her to stay on her side of the river. The Pierce’s well-trained coonhounds. Day and night dogs bayed—though, lately not as often.
    What were they chasing? At the base of the rock, she grabbed her pants—
    A flash of orange from the corner of her eye stilled her movement and her jeans fell from her grasp into the water and disappeared. Damn. She stomped a bare foot against the gritty surface. She’d swim better without pants anyway.
    Copper sprang from the opposite side of the riverbank, upstream, and a hundred feet shy of Crooked Bridge. He moved with a staggered gait.
    She gasped and lurched forward toward her injured cat as he landed in the middle of the stream where the water deepened.
    His thick paws beat against the angry surface and his head, ears pinned to seal out the water, bobbed. He made no headway when normally he would have crossed the stream effortlessly as tigers are superior swimmers. The current’s frothy curl whipped him downstream.
    Away from her.
    Panic etched her veins like acid on flimsy glass. She commanded herself to stay strong. She couldn’t discount the possibility Old Man Pierce and his cronies had shot Copper already, like Pierce Sr. had warned.
    Injured, Copper didn’t stand a chance against a hired killer or the upcoming eddies. She needed to pull Copper from the water before the river forced him into the narrow strait that threatened to swallow him like the undercurrent had consumed her pants. “Copper!”
    Copper flipped his head in her direction. Wide paws beat the surface and he tried to swim toward her. His precious eyes, those golden globes, locked on hers. Desperate eyes, pleading to be saved.
    Eyes she’d loved since that first day she’d held the fur ball and listened to his darling mews.
    Her throat tightened.
    Tucker jogged along his side of the river’s edge.
    The dogs followed, their baying, howling, and panting making Copper spin in pointless circles.
    Tucker halted where a thick trunk had fallen and blocked his course. He held her gaze for a moment. Again, his brows furrowed and his lips pursed.
    Determination to help her? Or something else she didn’t want to accept—he’d truly moved on…
    As Tucker faded, her chest pinched, but she forced a deep breath and willed herself to stay strong. Although she wanted to yell for him to stay, she had as much control over Tucker—a Pierce helping a Yant—as she did the waterway’s grip on her cat. But she’d grown up on the river and she’d memorized each submerged boulder from when the August heat drank the river nearly dry.
    The current sucked Copper below the surface, leaving only a foamy spiral over his head.
    Twenty feet away, but the distance between