Page 5 of The Worst Kind of Promise
Oh, I am. Hayes might have enough rage to fuel a small village, but Kit beats his already impressive strength with a six-foot-five body of pure muscle.
“I appreciate it, I do. And now I’m just asking you to keep a teensy, tiny secret.”
Kit sucks his teeth. “I’ll contemplate it if you at least let me get you under a roof. You’re half-soaked. The hotel is only ten minutes away.”
I have a feeling that’s the closest to an agreement I’m going to get from Kit, and considering he has the resolve and patience of a grizzly bear, I’m not looking to argue with him for the rest of the night.
“Okay,” I acquiesce. “But you have topromiseto think about it.”
Kit holds his pinky out to me. “I promise.”
I hesitantly hook my pinky with his, letting myself get lost in the wilderness of his umber eyes. There’s warmth nestled in the inner rings, but with it comes a dash of concern.
Fuck, Faye! This could’ve all been avoided if you just focused on yourself, your career. If you stopped chasing after guys to fill that hole in your heart.
I pull back, severing our arrangement. “I should’vedonesomething.”
“Stop,” Kit snarls, the intensity behind the command alone shaking me to the core. “This isnotyour fault. You need to understand that.”
Kit leans over the center console and hooks his forefinger under my chin, his thumb tracing the edge of my jawline. “This ishisfault, okay? This is all onhim.Hetook advantage of you. This small-dicked asshole took your freedom, your choice, and he’ll be paying for every second of it for the rest of his miserable life.”
“Why do you care so much?” I blurt out before I can stop myself.
The first smile of the night surfaces over his extremely kissable lips. Extremely kissable, and extremely dangerous.
“Because we’re friends.”
Friends?I’ve never hated one word so much in my entire life.
BAD DECISION CENTRAL
KIT
Friends.
Did I seriously just say that? Why did I say that? Why couldn’t I just tell her the truth?
I want to be so much more than just friends.
Those beautiful brown eyes of hers haven’t stopped staring at me, and she bats her lashes bashfully. God, I want to kiss her right now. So badly. But I can’t. I can’t, and the pain of it smothers me like a weighted blanket.
Not just because I’d be betraying Hayes, but because I would never take advantage of her vulnerability. The last thing she needs is for me to come in and make her life a thousand times harder. I have to be here for her as a friend. It can never be anything more.
Unspoken words press against my throat, wanting a one-way ride off my tongue, but they refuse to budge. Great. She’s made me inarticulate. My nerves have never been so out of control around any girl before.
Just being in her presence lures me to the edge of a steep cliff, baiting me to plunge into the roiling waves below, to let my body be flung every which way upon the soft chirp of her voice or the flick of her finger. She has a hold on me that she’ll never realize. A hold that, no matter how hard I fight against, is about as strong as tungsten and just as unrelenting.
She’s still curled in on herself, looking three times as small as usual in the seat next to me.
As much as I wanted to see Faye during my trip, this is the last circumstance I ever wanted to meet her under. It’s taking everything inside of me not to hunt that fucker down and make him eat his own intestines. Faye doesn’t need me playing vigilante though, and I’d just upset her more if she found out her date’s body was discovered rotting in a sewer pipe.
Swallowing my anger down, I start the ignition. “It’s late. You should get some rest,” I say.
Faye rams her teeth into her lower lip. “Okay.”
I don’t bother with making small talk, knowing how exhausted she must be. So we sit in silence for the ride to the hotel. It’s the longest silence I’ve ever experienced, every second torturous, every hitch of her breath sparking a foolish hope that it might turn into a sentence. I occasionally steal a glance at her, hoping that her furrowed brow and downturned lips will magically right themselves. They don’t. In fact, she keeps her body angled toward the window for the rest of the drive.
When we make it to the hotel, it dawns on me that I might’ve made the worst decision of my life, because when I flick on the light…it illuminates the single queen-sized bed in the middle of the room.
