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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2021 by Jackie Coates

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Eileen Carey/No Fuss Design

  Cover images © Johnny Johnson/Getty Images; Myimagine/Shutterstock; Lillian Polley/Arcangel

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from That Deep River Feeling

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To Billy Gumboot, the goat. First elected animal. Don’t let anyone tell you that eating other challengers’ ballots in order to win doesn’t pay. ;-)

  Chapter 1

  Damon Fitzgerald woke with an excruciating headache and the sense that he was being stabbed slowly but relentlessly through one eye. The headache was familiar—usually a sign he’d imbibed a little too heavily the night before—but the stabbing sensation not so much.

  Cautiously, he raised one hand to touch the eye currently being stabbed only to encounter his own eyelid. So. Not being stabbed then. That was a relief.

  He was still a little disoriented though, and his mouth felt like the bottom of a birdcage, so it took him some time to realize that the stabbing sensation was coming from the sunlight shining through a gap in the curtains and straight into one eye.

  Sun. He hadn’t seen the sun for at least three days, due to the weather being crap, which was strange for LA…

  Which was when he remembered that he wasn’t in LA. He wasn’t even in Juneau, where he’d been for the last couple for weeks.

  No, it was worse than that. Way worse.

  He was in a room over the Happy Moose bar in a tiny, privately owned town called Deep River, smack bang in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. And he’d been stuck here for three days because the weather had been so bad he hadn’t been able to fly out.

  Damon lay there for a moment as the realization settled through him, trying to reorient himself, because he’d definitely over imbibed the night before and this hangover had teeth. Then with a sudden start, he remembered that sun was a good thing.

  Sun meant the weather was better, which in turn meant he could get the hell out of here and back to LA.

  Rolling off the bed, he dragged himself over to the french doors that led onto the room’s tiny balcony, shoved them open, and stumbled out onto the balcony itself, just to check that the sun was real.

  Sure enough, though it must have been early in the morning, the sun was actually shining, the sky a bright, almost painful blue, making the white caps of the mountains looming on all sides look extra white and extra sharp.

  Ahead of him was the deep, rushing green of the river the town was named for. Deep River. It had been settled during the gold rush at the end of the nineteenth century by the West family, who’d bought the land Deep River sat on and leased out bits of it to anyone who wanted a place to call home.

  A quirky little town, as Damon had spent the last three days finding out.

  Deep River consisted of a ramshackle series of buildings clustered on the side of the river, connected by a boardwalk that projected out over the water and a narrow street that ran behind the buildings on the land side. They were old, those buildings, the paint on them faded, the wood cracked and worn through long exposure to rain and sun and snow. Not as picture-postcard as the ones in Ketchikan to the south, but there was definitely a certain vintage charm to them. Like a group of elderly ladies whose beauty was a little faded and careworn, they still possessed the ghost of their stunning youth, a certain timeless magic that tugged at the heartstrings.

  Houses very similar to those at the water’s edge were scattered up the hill behind the town, and there were a few more buildings along from the boardwalk, huddling against the hill’s side.

  A set of wooden steps led down from the boardwalk to a dock where several fishing boats and trawlers were tied up, but since it was comparatively empty, most of the boats must have gone up the river to the sea for a day working the nets.

  Damon took a deep breath and then another, the fresh bite of the air settling his headache and cooling his skin, waking him up. He wasn’t a small-town kind of guy, but there was something quite majestic about the mountains and the forested hills that loomed above him. Especially now the sun was shining.

  He’d complained about the rain the night before to one of the locals, who’d then informed him of Deep River’s average rainfall, which was some horrendous amount that sounded just wrong to someone from LA.

  Still, it did explain the solid three-day downpour and made him feel lucky that it was a beautiful day now.

  Movement below him caught his eye, and he glanced down at the boardwalk.

  The kid was there again, skulking by the big wooden pole stuck in the boardwalk that had “Middle of Nowhere” painted down the side. A tall, gangly teenager dressed in jeans and a black hoodie.

  He always seemed to be in Damon’s vicinity, and if Damon didn’t know any better, he’d say he was being followed.

  Though surely it was a little too early in the morning for teenagers? Weren’t they supposed to sleep past twelve or something?

  The kid was looking straight at him, though he was too far away for Damon to see what expression was on his face. The fixed way the kid was staring was slightly unnerving.

  A woman came suddenly into view. She had shoulder-length blond hair, and it was blowing around in the wind, a bright counterpoint to the plain jeans-and-T-shirt-combo she wore, a parka pulled on over the top, and she moved with great purpose to where the kid stood. Sh
e spoke to him a second and then turned her head, and Damon found himself under the intense scrutiny of two people.

  His skin prickled, cool air moving across it. Moving everywhere across it.

  Aw hell. He’d neglected to dress before stumbling out onto the balcony, and since he always slept naked… Yeah, no wonder both the woman and the kid were staring.

  He might have been able to get away with that in LA—people did things on the Sunset Strip in broad daylight that would make a streetwalker blush—but here in small-town Alaska? Not so much.

  Cursing, Damon made a reflexive grab for something to cover himself with. His fingers closed around a handful of curtain, pulling it over his groin as he backed hastily through the doors and into his room.

  Great. Wonderful. Way to endear himself to the population.

  Not that he particularly wanted to endear himself to the population, but standing around naked on a balcony in a tiny town wasn’t exactly his finest hour.

  Too many beers with Silas in the Moose the night before, that was the problem. And then on top of that, some home-brewed whisky with a kick on it like a mule.

  Irritated both with himself and his hangover, Damon sat on the bed and rubbed at his temples, trying to massage away his headache.

  He’d come to Deep River mainly to see where the hell his friend Silas Quinn had gotten to and yell at him about how he needed to come back to Juneau because Damon wanted to get rid of his share of Wild Alaska Aviation, the aviation company he’d gone into with Silas, Caleb, and another friend, Zeke, after they’d all gotten out of the military.

  But it turned out that Silas wasn’t coming back to Juneau, and it was difficult to yell at a man who was blissfully happy, having found love with the owner of the Happy Moose, his erstwhile best friend, Hope Dawson.

  And most especially difficult when that happy man had spent three days plying him with whisky, towing him around Deep River, introducing him to all and sundry, and talking about tourism opportunities and investments and how much Damon’s financial knowledge was needed.

  Damon dropped his hands from his temples and sighed.

  Silas had been very persuasive last night, both with his talk of tourism ventures and with the whisky, and if Damon hadn’t had urgent responsibilities back in LA, he might have considered sticking around for a while. Caleb, Deep River’s former owner, had left the whole place to Damon, Silas, and Zeke in his will, and although none of them had actually wanted to own an entire town, he couldn’t exactly leave the rest of them in the lurch. Even if being tied down to Alaska was the last thing Damon needed right now.

  Hell, if that had been the only issue, he’d have found someone else to take up the mantle of ownership by now. But that wasn’t the only issue.

  Deep River was sitting on a huge oil reserve, which had complicated things immeasurably, and not only had Silas decided to stay in his hometown, he’d also decided to take on responsibility for the town himself.

  Damon could only commend his friend’s decision, even if it wasn’t something he’d ever decide for himself. He liked the wilderness—Alaska was a special place, with challenges that he found exciting—but he had responsibilities in the city he couldn’t afford to leave hanging for too long.

  As if on cue, his phone, which had been just about silent for the past three days due to Deep River’s intermittent cell phone coverage, suddenly started vibrating on the nightstand beside the bed.

  Damon reached for it immediately, concern twisting in his gut.

  A whole lot of notifications on his screen popped up, texts and voicemails and emails that he’d missed. He scrolled through them until a name jumped out at him.

  Rachel. The housekeeper he’d hired to come in and help his mother a couple of hours a day. She’d left him a voicemail.

  Shit.

  Damon called his voicemail immediately, cycling through the messages until he got to Rachel’s.

  “Damon? You told me to let you know if anything of concern happened with your mother, so I’m calling now to let you know that when I arrived this morning, she was watching her shows, but there was a pot on the stove, cooking away with nothing in it and the kitchen was full of smoke. Of course, Laura swore blind she hadn’t put that pot on and that she had no idea who did, but I know she put it on herself and forgot about it. No harm done this time, but…well. Just thought you should know.”

  Damon’s heart sank as the message ended.

  Typical of his mother. She was tough and proud, always had been, and she hated getting sick. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know about her diagnosis of early onset dementia, had tried to hide it even from him for months before he’d eventually found out.

  Yet he’d found out all the same and not too long before the accident that had killed Caleb. And he knew immediately that it would spell the end of his time as a bush pilot. Selling his 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 fr
iend. 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.