Page 9 of The Promises We Were Never Meant To Keep

We sit like that for a long time, his limbs bracketing my body, his roots sinking deeper inside me with every breath scented of him that I pull into my lungs.

My gaze drifts from the still water of the glassy lake to the far side where I think I spot a burnished brown, tinted faintly with red, rooftop. I point. “Is that a house?”

“Yeah.” His voice is deep. So, so deep. And I love it so, so much. “There’s not many up here, though. Six, maybe seven, total.”

“Really?”

“See that?” He points to the massive slope of jagged rocks and trees—the mountain, quite literally—that dips into the lake. I get an odd thought that the mountain, after basking day in and day out in the hot sun, stretched a leg to dip his toe into the cool water, and just stayed that way.

“Yeah.”

“That’s why the town is named Rubble Ridge,” Holt tells me. “The town started up here, when the first settlers came to this place. There’s still an old store up there, run by Mrs. Crawley. It carries a bit of everything. She’s a stickler for preserving the town’s history. Her great, great, great granddad was one of the first in the town.” He looses a small cough. “He—uh—well, they say he died when the mountain slid.”

I blink, staring at the stretch of the mountain into the lake. I can’t unsee the toe-in-the-water-theory.

“That’s awful.”

“Before that, I think the settlers were calling the town Blue Valley. Which is probably why the subdivision up here is called Blue Valley Estates.”

Tragic, and kind of sweet.

Holt continues, “Anyway, that rubble fall convinced most of the settlers, and the new ones who came, to build lower down the mountain. It blocked the little road they’d built as well, so that’s why there’s only one entrance, one exit.” I can hear his frown as he says, “If they got caught up there, I guess they could cross the lake to get further down the road to town.”

“Why didn’t they just clear the road?”

“Back then, I don’t know that they had the equipment. Or maybe they were just too secluded for anyone to care about the new little town.” He shrugs. I feel the movement in my own body and snuggle closer to him. He inhales through his nose, a sharp sound that spears me in the deep of my belly as he slides an arm around my waist, holding me tight like he’ll never let me go.

I hope he doesn’t.

“That’s really sad,” I say quietly.

He grunts. “It’s the way of it, I guess. Now it’s called Mount-U Road, because you’ve got no choice but to make a U-turn.”

I laugh. “Cute.”

“You think?”

“Kind of. I like the history,” I admit. “I kind of like the towns’ name more now, knowing there’s a story behind it. Even if it is tragic.”

“Yeah?” he asks. “You like it here in Rubble Ridge, then?”

The way he asks has me shifting in his arms to peer back at him. He’s gazing out over the water, but his eyes slide slowly to me. There’s something hard in the softness of his gaze that makes me frown. A shadow of cautious curiosity. Something that makes me hesitate.

Finally, slowly, I say, “I like it here.”

“More than Victoria?”

I’d missed home when we moved. When Mom and Dad told me we were uprooting all I’d ever known from life, I can’t say I’d been pleased. Now, though? I’m happy we moved. If we didn’t, I never would have met Holt.

“I’m happy here.”

“Happy enough to stay?”

A half-laugh bursts from me. “Are you afraid I’m going to leave?”

I’m only half teasing.

Holt shakes his head. “More that you’ll never want to go.”