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

share of Wild Alaska and moving back to LA to take care of her was going to take time, though, so he’d hired Rachel in the interim. His mother hadn’t liked having someone else in the house, but Damon had sold it to her as a way of keeping him off her back, and she’d reluctantly given in.

The decision to leave Alaska hadn’t been a hard one. He’d enjoyed his time in the great outdoors, just like he’d enjoyed his time in bomb disposal in the army, but his mother had single-handedly brought him up, and she had no one else to look after her but him.

He had to leave. He just thought he’d have a bit more time up his sleeve with which to tie things up here. But from the sound of Rachel’s message, that wasn’t going to be the case.

His mom had left an empty pot on the stove to burn, and he’d been out of contact for three days. Hell. Rachel had been fine about keeping an eye on his mom for the past week while he brought to a close his life in Juneau, but he couldn’t put that responsibility on her for too much longer. It wouldn’t be fair.

It was Damon’s responsibility and no one else’s.

There was mercifully service, so he hit redial, calling Rachel back. There was no answer, so he left a message saying he’d be leaving Deep River today and that he’d be back in LA within the next couple of days with any luck.

Then he dropped the phone back down on the bed and headed for the shower.

Silas was going to be unhappy his powers of persuasion hadn’t worked, but there wasn’t much Damon could do about it. It didn’t help, either, that he knew he’d been an asshole to Silas the past couple of weeks while Silas had been here and Damon had been back in Juneau. He’d hassled his friend unmercifully to come and deal with Wild Alaska, so he could get to his mom, and it had been an added complication that Damon hadn’t been able to tell Silas why he had to return so urgently to LA. His mother had been very clear that she didn’t want anyone to know about her condition, not even that she was sick, which meant he’d had to be deliberately vague about why he had to return.

Ah, well, there was nothing to be done about it. Silas would just have to suck it up.

Haven’t you forgotten the other thing you were supposed to do here?

Damon shut his eyes as he turned the shower to cold and stepped beneath the icy spray of water.

No. He hadn’t forgotten. But he was going to need a whole lot of coffee before he got into that.

* * *

“See what I mean?” Connor gestured emphatically at the Happy Moose’s by now empty balcony. “Who stands around on a balcony without any clothes on?”

Astrid, current mayor of Deep River, surveyed her fifteen-year-old son dispassionately.

They were on the boardwalk by the Nowhere pole—one of the marketing ideas of the tourist information center’s manager, Sandy Maclean—and the sun was shining and it was a beautiful blue-sky day, which was a rarity in late spring in Deep River.

She had a lot to do, and what she didn’t really have time for was to listen to her son’s current theories about Silas’s friend. Not to mention that he shouldn’t be skulking around outside the Moose, but catching Kevin Anderson’s ferry in preparation for getting the school bus.

She unzipped her parka a little way, enjoying the sun’s warmth. “You should be on your way to school, Con. Not skulking around spying on people.”

“I wasn’t spying,” Connor said, incensed. “I was watching.”

She shouldn’t find her son’s outrage amusing, but she did.

Connor had been very firmly convinced that Silas Quinn’s friend, and one of the new owners of Deep River, was up to no good and had been determinedly following him around, watching him with all the suspicion of a Deep River native.

Which, considering he and Astrid were relative newcomers to the town, having only been here five years, was an impressive feat.

“You don’t need to watch him,” she said with some patience. “He’s just a friend of Silas’s.” And an impressive specimen if what she’d observed of him on the balcony had been anything to go by. Not that she should have been looking herself, of course.

“Yeah, I know. But he’s from the city.” Connor scowled up at the balcony on the second story of the cheerfully rundown old building. “And city people are weird.”

A fair comment and one Astrid couldn’t argue with. But Damon Fitzgerald had been in Deep River for three days now, and while she hadn’t met him directly, going by the comments from the people who had he didn’t seem especially weird.

Ridiculously handsome, with an easy smile and a charming manner—according to April in the diner at least—but not, fundamentally, weird.

“Just because he’s from the city doesn’t mean you need to watch him,” she said. “Come to think of it, why are you watching him, anyway? What on earth do you think he’s going to do?”

“He could be an oilman,” Connor said darkly.

Astrid sighed. Ever since the town had found out that oil had been discovered beneath it, it was all anyone ever talked about. Well, that and the new tourism ventures that the town had collectively decided to contemplate.

They’d had to do something to combat the oil company offering people money for their leases and/or drilling rights, something that would return power over the town to the people who lived there and that would enable them to build a more sustainable, reliable income that wasn’t dependent on outsiders.

Still, everyone was on edge and even more suspicious than they normally were. Including, apparently, her son.

Ever since the news broke that Caleb West had died and the town had been given new owners, Connor had suddenly become very protective. He’d always been a caring kind of kid, but this