Deep River Promise, Jackie Ashenden [large ebook reader .TXT] 📗

and walk out the door, and she could feel his gaze on her the whole way.

Chapter 6

Later that evening, Damon pushed open the door to the Moose’s back office to find Silas sitting on a chair behind the old desk shoved up against one wall, his lap full of toned, athletic legs and the lean curves of a pretty woman with long, dark auburn hair and dark eyes: Hope, Silas’s girlfriend, who ran the Happy Moose.

“I turn my back and look what happens.” Damon leaned against the doorframe and grinned at the pair of them. “Can you not keep your hands off each other even for two seconds?”

Silas held up a hand with one finger raised—not the middle finger, surprisingly enough—finished the kiss he was laying on Hope, then lifted his head.

Hope leaned back in Silas’s arms, dark eyes gleaming. “No,” she said. “What do you want, pretty?”

Hope hadn’t been impressed with him initially because he’d been a bit of a dick when he’d gotten here—too worried about his mom, and getting his share of Wild Alaska sold so he could get back to LA, for his usual manners. But they’d reached an understanding over the past few days: she allowed him to call her pretty if she got to call him the same in return.

He’d been called a pretty boy enough in his life that he was tired of it, but he didn’t mind it with Hope. Especially since she made a mean Long Island iced tea despite telling him the Moose didn’t do cocktails.

“Don’t you want to know why I came back?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

Hope rolled her eyes. “We’re not all interested in your every move, Damon. No matter what you’d like to think.”

“I’d like to think that you lie awake at night wondering when would be a good time to throw this asshole over for me but, you know, I wouldn’t want to assume.”

She laughed, then lifted a hand, touching Silas’s face with a tenderness that made Damon’s chest feel unexpectedly tight. “I wouldn’t assume,” she said. “You know what they say: ‘assume makes an ass out of you and me.’”

At that moment, the volume of conversation coming from the bar rose, a couple of distinct male voices rising above the rest of it.

“What?” Silas said. “It’s seven o’clock already?”

Damon looked toward the bar. Apparently at seven o’clock every Friday night, two old trappers, Joe and Lloyd, would have an argument that sometimes involved blows, but which mostly involved them being thrown out.

It was so regular you could set your watch by them. Or at least that’s what Silas had told him. He’d never seen it before himself and he wouldn’t have minded watching, but he had other things to do.

Such as talking to Silas about how he’d be staying on for another few nights.

Such as wondering what to do about one overly responsible teenage boy and his lovely, cool, and fascinating mother.

Flirting upstairs that morning with Astrid had been an indulgence, especially when there were more important issues to talk about. But he hadn’t been able to help himself.

In the army, he’d gotten good at bomb disposal. There was something about the combination of risk, precision, and keeping a cool head that he’d enjoyed. Plus the added attraction of solving how to disarm various devices. They were puzzles and he liked puzzles.

Astrid was just such a puzzle. Or no, maybe given that bristly, prickly energy she sometimes radiated, she was more like an unexploded device. Cool metal on the outside, but packed full of explosive material on the inside, not to mention difficult to disarm and maybe lethal if set off by mistake.

He was going to have to proceed carefully, treat her gently and with caution. Because dealing with Connor meant dealing with her, and everything would go a lot easier if he could maybe get her to trust him even just a little. She was very wary, that was for sure.

Was that because of Cal? Because of the way he’d hurt her all those years ago? Or was there something more going on behind those misty gray eyes?

Yeah, there was more, he’d lay money on it, and he needed to find out what more. Certainly if he was going to help Connor he’d need to.

Hope was in the process of pushing herself out of Silas’s lap before heading toward the door. “Axel’s having the night off,” she said to him as he protested, mentioning the bouncer and sometime barman who usually handled Joe’s and Lloyd’s antics. “I’ll deal with it.” She paused beside Damon and gave him a warning look. “Don’t start drinking now, please. He was quite useless to me last night and I was not happy.”

“Hey,” Silas called after her, looking annoyed, but she’d vanished into the bar.

Damon stepped into the small office cluttered with bookshelves, a battered filing cabinet, and the desk pushed beneath the window that looked out over the main street. He didn’t bother shutting the door.

“How’s married life?” He gave Silas an amused look as he came over to the desk.

“I’m not married yet, you know.” Silas leaned back in the chair, stretching his long, denim-clad legs out in front of him. “Though I’ve been thinking about it.”

Damon was unsurprised; Silas barely said a sentence without the word Hope in it. “Congratulations. When can we expect the happy event?”

“When I ask her. And when she says yes.” Silas gave him a direct look. “So? Spit it out, then. Why did you change your mind about leaving and this financial stuff?”

Damon sat on the edge of the desk. He’d been thinking most of the afternoon about what he was going to tell Silas without giving away the fact that his change of heart had been Connor, which meant he was going to have to lie.

He didn’t like that, but there wasn’t any way around it, not without giving away Cal’s secret, and since it didn’t only concern him, it wasn’t his place to reveal it.

“I found out