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

her. “You might be the law, but there’s only one of you and sorry, but you’re not very big.”

He’d only stated the truth, but she still looked affronted. “I’ve done a lot of physical training, and I can and have put cuffs on people bigger than you. And if the worst comes to the worst, I have backup from the detachment in Ketchikan.” She gave him a very stern stare. “So don’t cross me.”

Okay, so he was blunt, but it seemed as if Morgan was one of those people who didn’t appreciate his bluntness. Which wasn’t good since if he was going to do what Cal had asked of him and take care of her, he needed her to not view him as a serial killer at the very least.

Still, he was glad she’d let him know where her line was, because he hated game players. He also rather liked her tartness, like an almost-ripe peach.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “People bigger than me, huh? What did you do? Bite them on the ankles?” He wasn’t sure what else she could do.

She didn’t appear charmed by this response. “You’re assuming I’m not carrying a weapon.”

“I’m not assuming you’re not carrying one. I’m assuming that you don’t use it on people who aren’t actually threatening you.”

Her cheeks went pink and for some reason she looked very cross. “As it happens your very presence threatens me. Which means you have two choices. You can leave now and I won’t arrest you for trespassing. Or you can stay and I’ll shoot you with my Taser.” Her little chin came up, confrontational as hell. “Well? What’s it to be?”

* * *

Zeke Montgomery was turning out to be the most stubborn-ass man Morgan had ever met, and as she lived in Deep River, a town noted for being full of stubborn-ass men, that was saying something.

He towered over her, solid and immovable as a rock wall, all black hair, unshaven black stubble, and the fathomless black eyes that she remembered from the bar back in Juneau, the night of Cal’s funeral.

He had his hands in his pockets and he looked just as wild and uncivilized as he had a couple of months back. Perhaps even more so. He wore a worn-looking, long-sleeved black Henley, a pair of dark jeans with holes in the knees, a battered parka, and hiking boots, and he had the unkempt, rumpled air of a man who’d spent considerable time camping out in the bush.

She had no idea what he was doing on her porch, and to be honest, his appearance was a bit of a shock. But given how her brother’s pal Silas had arrived in Deep River, and then his other pal Damon a couple of weeks after that, it had only been a matter of time before Zeke turned up.

Since he’d basically told her that night he’d failed to give her his number in the bar that anything she needed she only had to call, it made a weird kind of sense that when he had turned up, it was to stand on her porch like a large, rumpled black bear.

Her reaction to him, though, did not make sense.

The night in Juneau, when she’d first met him, she’d only been aware of a vague kind of…unsteadiness in his presence. But that she’d put down to grief.

Yet even though grief had lost its sharp edge now, she still felt unsteady and had no idea what to make that—or of how she’d blushed under his steady, dark stare.

She never blushed. She was a village public safety officer (VPSO), and she was the law in Deep River, and not only that, she was a West—the family that had once literally owned the town—and no one tended to tangle with her.

Which was just the way she liked it.

Men, though. They were far too much trouble.

Exhibit A standing on her porch, for example. Who’d inexplicably made her blush like a teenage girl and who also wasn’t taking no for an answer. He also didn’t appear to be leaving.

What had her stupid big brother been thinking? Why had Cal thought she needed “looking after”?

Ridiculous, not to mention ironic coming from the man who’d ceased being her protective big brother the moment he’d left Deep River for Juneau. Certainly, him getting all worried about her from beyond the grave was a little late in the piece.

Especially when she was a grown woman of twenty-six, who’d been taking care of herself for years already, not the thirteen-year-old girl she’d been when he’d taken off.

Zeke still hadn’t said anything, midnight eyes giving her a thousand-yard stare. Another woman might have been intimidated by his massive height and his heavily muscled torso, not to mention the whole beard thing he had going on, but Morgan had never been that woman.

Plus, although Cal had left Deep River years ago, he’d kept in intermittent contact and had told her a little about his friends. Zeke, he’d said, was very stubborn, a man of few words, and didn’t much like people. However, he was also protective, generous, and very honest. A good guy to have in a tight spot.

All well and good if you were in a tight spot, but she wasn’t. She was home and what she wanted was to go inside, make herself some dinner and relax after a busy day, not make a tour of all the things wrong with the house purely to entertain Cal’s annoying, taciturn, and erstwhile missing friend.

The missing friend who didn’t seem to be all that bothered that his other friends, Silas Quinn and Damon Fitzgerald, had been getting worried about him, though they tried to pretend they weren’t.

Morgan let out a silent breath while Zeke simply stood there. Silently. Like a granite statue of a man. Making curiosity tug lightly inside her about why he’d decided to turn up now, at least a couple of months after Cal’s death, and what he’d been doing in the interim