Deep River Promise Read online

  The guilt inside Astrid bit deep. She lifted her glass and drained the rest of the whisky, trying to ease the feeling.

  Her poor boy. All of this was her fault, wasn’t it?

  “Hey.” Damon’s deep voice was soft. “Don’t beat yourself up about any of this. Nothing you can do about the past. It’s what you do now that matters.”

  Damn the man. Could he read minds or something? Her ability to hide her feelings must be slipping. Either that or she’d had too many whiskies.

  “I’m not beating myself up,” she lied smoothly. “I’m only feeling sorry for him.”

  “Sure.” He tilted his head, watching her, that reassuring smile still curving his beautiful mouth. The sun in his hair made it seem more deep amber than brown, his eyes that astonishing blue; he looked like a fallen angel, all sexy and wicked and ready to sin. “But if you are, don’t.”

  Astrid had to look away. He was like the sun: blinding if one looked too long at him. “I’ll take that under advisement, thank you.”

  A brief silence fell.

  Then Damon said, “So the real reason I decided to stick around for another couple of days is to give Connor some time to come and talk to me about Cal if he wants. Or I can talk to him, it doesn’t bother me which. He doesn’t know I changed my mind, so if you could tell him I’m staying, I’d appreciate it.”

  She’d already gathered that he wasn’t leaving and his decision to stay…well, she wasn’t exactly thrilled by it. Him hanging around here, involving himself with her son…

  It’s only a couple of days.

  That was true. But she didn’t trust him—or rather, she didn’t trust her own gut instinct that was urging her to trust him. He might have been Cal’s friend, and Cal had clearly trusted him enough to look out for Connor, but Astrid didn’t. She knew nothing about him other than he was from LA, had a beautiful smile, and was as handsome as the Devil himself.

  She’d made a bad choice in hoping Aiden would be a good father figure for Connor and instead had put him at risk. She’d never willingly make that mistake again.

  “Like I said.” Astrid kept her voice cool. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  If Damon was annoyed by her tone, he didn’t show it. He merely studied her with those warm blue eyes.

  “You don’t trust me,” he said eventually, and it wasn’t a question.

  There was no point in pretending otherwise. “Would you? In my place?”

  “No.” His smile turned rueful. “Not sure I’d trust anyone I first saw hanging out on a balcony stark naked.”

  She didn’t want to smile back, but it was almost impossible with him looking at her like that, so she glanced at the floor instead and bit her lip. “Not a great start, no.”

  “So what can I do to help the process along? More whisky maybe?”

  The thought of sitting here in the sun sipping whisky with a charming man was all too attractive, which meant that she shouldn’t. No, it was more important to get out of here and get on with the stuff on her to-do list. Number one being figuring out what to do about her son.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said shortly, getting to her feet and moving to the desk where he stood, placing the glass back on the desk next to his hip. Then she looked up at him. “Though don’t hold your breath it’s going to happen anytime soon.”

  A mistake to get near him. A mistake to look at him too, she knew that immediately.

  He was very tall, and the way he lounged against the side of the desk seemed designed to highlight the masculine perfection of his long, lean body. Wide shoulders and narrow hips, powerful chest. Flat stomach. The sleeves of his T-shirt stretched over sharply defined biceps, the deep blue contrasting with the deep gold of his skin. He smelled of something warm and a little spicy, like sandalwood or cloves.

  He didn’t seem at all angry or even mildly annoyed at her response. “Fair enough. If you don’t want to trust me, I’m not going to force you.” He paused, his smile fading, though warmth still lingered in his eyes. “But if Connor comes to me wanting to talk, I’m not going to send him away.”

  His voice was the same, rich and deep. Yet there was something in it she hadn’t heard before: a note of iron.

  And it came to her in a sudden rush that although he might on the surface be calm and easygoing, laid back and unbothered, that didn’t mean he was any of those things. There was something hard in him; she could sense it. A core of strength that wouldn’t bend and wouldn’t break. That would remain immovable, no matter what she did or what she said.

  It should have irritated her immensely, and it did—yet another part of her found it deeply reassuring, and she had no idea why.

  Time to go.

  Oh yes, it most certainly was.

  “Is that a warning?” she asked, staying right where she was, because apparently she was also an idiot.

  “It can be.” His gaze searched her face, heat curling through his melted-honey voice. “If you want it to be.”

  She didn’t want it to be. No, most definitely not.

  Are you sure? You’d love a challenge like him.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, both to him and the voice in her head. “Thank you for the drink, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  He inclined his head. “Anytime, Ms. Mayor.”

  Astrid had to force herself to turn 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 to
ld 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 I could spare a couple of days after all,” he said casually. “So I figured I might as well stick around and have a look at these tourism ideas, check out the financials, help with business plans, that kind of thing.”

  Silas gave him a narrow look. “So nothing at all to do with the mayor, then.”

  Shit. Was that what Silas thought? That he was here for Astrid?

  And you’re not?

  Hell no. This was all about Connor and Damon’s promise to Cal. An inconvenient attraction to Astrid was something he could easily ignore.

  “No,” Damon said firmly. “Nothing at all.”

  Silas’s suspicion in no way lessened. “Be careful, Damon. She’s a woman with a difficult past, and she really doesn’t need a difficult future, okay?”

  Interesting. What did Silas know?

  “Difficult past, you say?” he asked, ignoring Silas’s suspicion for the moment.

  Silas shook his head. “I don’t know anything for certain, but even if I did, it’s not my story to tell. Hope’s mentioned a couple of things about her is all, and it sounds to me like she’s had enough bad crap in her life without anyone else adding to it.”

  Damon didn’t take offense. He liked women and that was well-known. Silas was only looking out for a fellow townsperson. Still, he didn’t need to worry. Damon wasn’t in the market for anything more than casual, and that ruled Astrid out completely.

  “Hey.” He raised his hands. “I hear you. No dick moves, I promise.” And he meant it, yet his brain kept circling around the words difficult past as he remembered that lost look on her face and that air of fragility…

  He wanted to know what had happened to her, because something had. Something that would have had an effect on Connor, that perhaps had prompted the kind of behavior the kid was displaying now.

  Silas eyed him. “Damon…”

  Damon met his friend’s gaze squarely. Silas had a white-knight streak in him and that was commendable, but sometimes the guy went tilting at the wrong windmills.

  “Give me some credit,” he said without heat. “The mayor’s attractive, sure, but I’m not here to hook up. She’s not interested anyway, she made that clear.”

  His friend let out a slow breath, his harsh features relaxing. “Okay, fine. Well, I can’t say I’m disappointed you’re offering advice. Like I’ve been trying to tell you, Deep River could use it. We need to make sure everything’s rock-solid when it comes to taking on these oil assholes.”

  Silas had already told him about the oil company executives who’d been calling people in town, trying to get them to sell their leases and/or hand over their mineral rights. The town had voted not to sell, but the money had been a strong draw. People in the town didn’t have much, and everyone had families to support. Having alternative sources of income would strengthen people’s resolve against the oil companies and hopefully keep them out of Deep River for good.

  A little arrow of guilt pierced him. He’d been difficult over the past few weeks and he knew it, complaining about being stuck in Juneau and hassling Silas about staying in Deep River, wanting to walk away from his responsibility to the town. And it had been made even harder by his mother’s insistence on no one knowing about her illness.

  Yeah, but you told Connor.

  That was true, he had. And Silas was owed some truth, especially considering what a dick Damon had made of himself. Silas didn’t know his mom and Damon didn’t have to be specific about what kind of illness she had.

  “About the past few weeks,” Damon said slowly. “I wasn’t deliberately trying to be an asshole about selling up and going back to LA. I do actually have some good reasons for it.”

  “I figured.” Silas’s gaze was measuring. “But if you didn’t want to tell me about them, then I wasn’t going to force you.”

  “Okay, so the truth is that my mom isn’t well and she needs some help. I’ve got a housekeeper coming in a couple of hours a day to keep an eye on her, but she doesn’t like having a stranger in the house, so it’s not a great permanent solution.”

  Silas’s expression turned sympathetic. “Ah. Well, that’s crappy.”

  “Yeah, it is.” Damon shoved away the inevitable tight feeling that filled his chest whenever he thought about the situation with his mother. She didn’t like Rachel being around but never liked it when he looked after her either, which was going to make the future difficult. “What about Zeke?” he went on, changing the subject. “I presume you’ve told him about all of this?”

  Silas shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I haven’t been able to get ahold of him since Cal’s funeral.”

&nbs
p; That was weird. Then again, given Zeke’s whole “wild man” schtick, not completely out of character. The guy would take off into the bush for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, before turning up and acting like nothing had happened. He’d been the same way in the military, though with less disappearing.

  He wasn’t a man who explained himself, so Cal, Damon, and Silas never knew why he kept leaving, despite having asked him on numerous occasions. However, he was always around when he was needed, so while his disappearance wasn’t out of character, the fact that he was needed right now and wasn’t around made Damon wonder.

  He’d been the one meant to do the cargo run that had ended in Cal’s death and hadn’t been able to go at the last minute for reasons he wouldn’t disclose to anyone else. He hadn’t said anything, but Damon and Silas both knew the accident had hit him hard because he’d up and left the minute Cal’s funeral had ended.

  Damon frowned. “Any idea where he went?”

  “Nope. I’ve left a ton of messages on his phone. I texted him, emailed him, and got nothing back, so who knows?”

  Worry turned over inside Damon’s gut, but that was another feeling he didn’t let take root. Vague concern was fine, but nothing deeper, not these days. Anyway, sometimes a man just needed to go somewhere else for a time to clear his head, so perhaps that’s what Zeke was doing right now.

  “He’ll turn up,” he said, partly for Silas’s benefit and partly for his own. “He always does.”

  “True. But no harm in seeing what I can dig up about where he might have gotten to.” Silas abruptly spun his chair around to face the computer. “I don’t like the idea of him being in some sort of trouble and not having any help.”

  Damon pushed himself off the edge of the desk. “Yeah, I agree. Let me know if there’s anything you need.” He glanced down at a folder that was sitting on the edge of the desk, helpfully labeled Deep River Potential Tourism Ideas. “Can I take this?” he asked. If he was going to offer advice, he’d better have a look at what was being suggested.