Come Home to Deep River

by Jackie Ashenden

  Weirdly, it made her skin prickle, but she ignored the feeling, not wanting to examine it too closely. Just like she’d decided to ignore the conversation they’d had just before in the Moose. Not to mention the way her stupid heart had jolted in her chest when she’d realized he’d come downstairs and been watching her while she swept the floor.

  As well as checking out your ass, apparently.

  Okay, she did not need to be thinking about that either. Or how uncomfortable that thought made her. A discomfort that had nothing to do with the fact that she didn’t like it, but because she had a horrible feeling that she did. It had been a long time since anyone had checked her out, after all. She’d long since become part of the furniture with the locals and had rebuffed any advances from tourists. She wasn’t going to be like her mother, falling pregnant by some stranger who was passing through and ending up a single mom with bad postpartum depression and living with her parents. Yeah, that definitely wasn’t happening.

  She’d once had a fling with one of the seasonal workers who came to Deep River on occasion, looking for work on the trawlers. He’d lasted a month, and she’d given the whole sex thing a go, got rid of her pesky virginity. But sex hadn’t impressed her. She hadn’t been able to understand what the fuss was about, and when he’d left, she’d given him a wave and hadn’t thought about it twice since.

  You’re thinking about it twice now.

  No, she wasn’t. Silas was a friend—that’s all he’d ever been and that’s all he’d stay. And the weird, prickly sensation was only her ancient libido giving a couple of last gasps before it died completely, like one of Jason Anderson’s old trucks.

  Hope forced away the feeling, though her brain kept registering odd things like how the soft, well-worn cotton of Silas’s dark green T-shirt was pulling tight across his wide shoulders and muscular chest. Or how the black shadow of his morning beard outlined his strong, sharp jaw. He’d looked dark and disreputable back at the Moose and he still did in the early-morning sunlight coming through the window, turning his black hair glossy. And apparently other people thought so too, given the number of female patrons in the diner looking his way.

  He had his elbows on the table, the way his palms lay flat on the old Formica drawing attention to his long fingers. They were big, capable hands. Strong too, and crisscrossed with scars.

  You idiot. Stop looking at his damn hands.

  Hope gritted her teeth and dragged her gaze to his face instead, which, with the gold glinting deep in his eyes, wasn’t any better, to be honest. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “How quickly to organize a town meeting?” she repeated, just to be sure she’d heard him correctly and not give away the fact that she’d been staring at him like a lovesick teenager.

  “Yeah.” He frowned slightly, and it made him look very stern and rather intimidating. Same as it had years ago. “The whole town needs to be there to hear the news.”

  “What news?” someone else asked.

  They both looked up to find a small, very round elderly lady in a pink-and-white uniform straight out of the fifties standing next to the table, looking at them. Her sharp blue eyes widened with sudden interest. “Silas Quinn?” Her softly wrinkled face broke into one of the brightest smiles this side of the Deep River. “I knew it was you! The second you walked in. Where you been, honey?” April Jones still had traces of a New Jersey accent, even though she’d left the East Coast behind over fifty years ago to follow her husband to Alaska. Now that husband was long gone, but April was still here, dispensing the murder brew she called coffee, freshly baked goods, and breakfasts, along with a fair helping of cheerful and mostly unwanted advice.

  “Hey, April.” Silas’s hard mouth curved in a rare smile as he shoved back his chair and got up to receive April’s hug. “How you been?”

  Hope realized suddenly that if they were going to have a private chat about Silas’s news, April’s was probably the wrong place to do it. She could see April’s son, Jack, behind the counter, looking interestedly their way. And that was a problem. Because if April liked a bit of gossip, Jack liked it even more.

  Dammit.

  Hope stood up too. “We’ll take some coffees to go, April. Oh yeah, and a couple of those pies Jack makes. If there are any left.”

  April released Silas and tipped her head back, looking up at him, giving no indication she’d heard Hope. “My,” she breathed, her eyes wide and admiring. “Haven’t you grown up big?”

  “Military rations.” Amusement played around Silas’s mouth, and Hope found herself staring at that mouth and the way it curved for no damn reason that she could discern.

  “Uh-huh,” April murmured. “So what’s bringing you back to our neck of the woods?”

  “Two coffees and a couple of pies,” Hope repeated before Silas could answer. “To go.”

  Silas glanced at her, his gaze unreadable. But he must have figured out her reason for leaving because when he spoke, it was only to say, “Long story, April. I’ll tell you about it some other time.”

  Five minutes later, they were outside on the boardwalk facing the river, sitting on one of the rough wooden benches that Filthy Phil, a retired hunter who’d taken up the mantle of town eccentric with pride, had carved for tourists to sit on in the summer months.

  “Sorry.” Hope handed Silas the steaming cardboard cup full of coffee. “Too busy in there. And too many people who might overhear.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” He took the cup, his eyes gleaming, though with what she couldn’t tell. “Maybe you’ll have to cook me breakfast after all.”

  Another current of that uncomfortable emotion rippled through her. The sun was in his dark hair and she was weirdly conscious of how much room he took up on the bench. One powerful, denim-clad thigh was right next to hers, and she’d only have to move an inch in order to brush up against it.

  Great. Now she was thinking about his thighs. Not good.

  Maybe if you’d played the field a bit more, you wouldn’t be having such a strong reaction.

  Maybe. Then again, what field? There was no field, not in Deep River. Not for her at least. She was the tough-talking, take-no-shit, capable owner of the Happy Moose bar, and no one thought of her as anything else. Not even as a woman.

  And that was fine, absolutely fine. If she needed a salutary lesson in the dangers of hooking up with the wrong guy, she only needed to look at her mother, who spent most of her time sitting on the couch in front of the TV, watching soaps.

  Hope glared at Silas and shoved the paper bag with the pie in it at him. “Absolutely not. Eat that instead.”

  He took it, opening the paper bag and glancing inside. “What is it?”

  “Beef pie. Jack went to Australia and New Zealand last year on some kind of backpacking trip. This is apparently a speciality.”

  “Huh.”

  Neither of them said anything as they both ate their pies, sipping their coffee as the last of the fishing trawlers left the docks and the silence of the mountains descended on the town. And for a moment, Hope felt like she was twelve again, fishing with Silas and Cal by the river like she had in the old days. It was the only time Cal had ever been quiet, the three of them sitting in companionable silence with their rods, the hot sun on the backs of their necks…

  Silas shifted, balling up the paper bag and throwing it in a nearby trash can with unerring accuracy, and Hope was back in the present again. Cal was dead, Silas wasn’t the friend she remembered, and the kids they’d once been were long gone.

  “A town meeting,” Silas said, breaking the silence as he settled back against the bench, holding his coffee loosely in one long-fingered hand. “I need to organize one in the next day or two. The sooner the better.”

  A weird sense of regret had settled in Hope’s gut and she didn’t know where it had come from, but she was very clear she didn’t like it. Ignoring it,
she balled up her paper bag too and threw it in the direction of the trash can. It went in, much to her satisfaction.

  “Why the sooner the better?” she asked, relishing the burn of the coffee as she took another swallow, the caffeine buzzing in her veins. “Got something more important to do?”

  Silas gave her another of those enigmatic glances. “I’ve got a business to run back in Juneau. Summer’s nearly here, and it’s going to be busy, and Damon can’t handle it by himself.”

  The regret sitting inside Hope twisted, turning into a disappointment that she didn’t quite understand. He’d mentioned that he wanted to get back to Juneau quickly before, which was fine. She didn’t have a feeling about that one way or the other, right?

  “So…what? Your plan is to call a town meeting, dump this news on them, and then go back to Juneau?” she asked, unable to keep annoyance from her voice.

  He didn’t react, simply eyeing her, the look on his handsome face unreadable. “No. I was not planning on ‘dumping’ the news. I was planning on handing this over to someone who was more qualified than I am to handle it.”

  “Well, Morgan should be—”

  “Morgan didn’t want it,” he interrupted before she could go on. “We offered it to her after the will was read, and she refused.”

  Hope blinked, not understanding. “She refused? She refused what?”

  “All of it. We offered to sign over the whole damn town, and she said no.”

  That was surprising. Morgan was Deep River’s sole police officer, and she took the job of protecting the town very seriously. Hope would have thought she’d jump at the chance to keep the town as part of her family’s legacy.

  “Oh,” Hope said. “Did she say why?”

  “No. And I didn’t sit down and give her the third degree about it.”

  The cardboard sides of her coffee cup were hot against her fingertips, but Hope barely felt it. She stared at Silas. “So you’re really just going to dump and run?”

  He looked down at his own cup. “I haven’t lived here for thirteen years. I don’t know the town anymore, or the people in it.” He glanced up, his intent gaze catching hers. “I shouldn’t be the one responsible for the Wests’ legacy, and neither should Damon and Zeke. Hell, Damon doesn’t even want to stay in Alaska, let alone be part owner of a small town like this one.” He let out a breath and glanced away, out over the water glittering in the sun. “And you know the rules about absentee landlords. You have to live here if you want a lease, and that goes for ownership of the land too.”

  She did know the rules. The Wests had always been here, and Cal’s father and his father before him had been very clear about the importance of living in the town that they owned and being part of its day-to-day life. That belief extended to the people living in Deep River too. Cal had told her that his father had often been approached by people looking to buy the land that Deep River was built on. For holiday homes for rich city folk and people wanting to build hotels and other tourist nonsense. But the Wests had always refused to sell. And it was even a condition of the leases they granted that the leaseholder had to live in Deep River.

  So if Silas wasn’t intending to stay, it was only right that he give responsibility over to a local. But the sense of disappointment sitting in her gut didn’t budge, and she wasn’t sure why. Because she didn’t care. It had been thirteen years, as he’d said, and although he’d once been one of her closest friends, he wasn’t that now.

  It shouldn’t matter that he wasn’t planning to stay. It shouldn’t matter at all.

  “So what are you going to do?” Her voice sounded a little weird, so she took a sip of her coffee to cover it. “I mean, if you can’t sell the land, where does that leave you?”

  Silas’s thumbs were moving on his coffee cup, rubbing slowly up and down in an absent movement that for some reason Hope found vaguely mesmerizing. “I want to sign the whole lot over to someone who loves this place. Someone who can look after it better than I can. Who’ll look after its interests the way the Wests always did. I talked to the lawyer before I got here, and he said that it was possible.”

  Hope frowned, trying to think of someone who might fit the bill. There were plenty of people here who loved this town, it was true. Plenty of people who never wanted to go anywhere else. But when it came to looking out for Deep River’s interests? To putting the town first before their own needs?

  Yeah, that was tricky.

  She sat there for a second, watching Silas’s thumbs moving on the cup. He had a scar on the knuckle of his right thumb, the white line of it standing out on his tanned skin. “Who are you thinking, then? Do you have someone in mind?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced at her again, the gold deep in his eyes gleaming. “I was thinking of you.”

  Chapter 4

  Hope stepped into her office at the Moose, shut the door, then leaned back against it and closed her eyes.

  After delivering his bombshell, Silas had gone off to talk to Astrid James, Deep River’s current mayor, about organizing a town meeting, leaving Hope to deal with the effects of said bombshell by herself. Which was the way she preferred it since she’d been dealing with everything by herself since the day he and Cal had left.

  He wanted to sign the town over to her. The entire town.

  Pushing herself away from the door, Hope crossed over to her desk, jerked out the chair and sat down. Then she pulled open the desk drawer that contained Harry’s whisky and took out the bottle. She tugged the cork out, pouring a healthy dram into the teacup she’d used last night. It was far too early for alcohol, but this was an emergency.

  She leaned back in her chair and sipped, the whisky sliding easily down her throat to sit warmly in her stomach, her thoughts careening wildly all over the place.

  Steve the stag’s eyes gleamed glassily at her from the wall.

  After her grandfather had died, she’d known she wouldn’t be able to leave the town, that she’d have to put on hold her dreams of going to college and getting a literature degree, of a life beyond Deep River’s mountains. The Happy Moose had been owned by her family for decades, her grandfather’s legacy, and she couldn’t walk away from it. Couldn’t walk away from her mother either. Angela Dawson had given up her own life and opportunities in order to have Hope, and Hope hadn’t been able to bear the thought of abandoning her. She’d had severe postpartum depression after Hope was born, and if Hope had left, she would have no one and nothing but the Moose, which Hope knew full well her mother couldn’t manage on her own.

  So Hope had stayed. Put her college dreams aside and stayed while her friends had left. And she’d come to terms with that a long time ago. She was generally happy with her lot—after all, she could read wherever she was; she didn’t have to study literature to enjoy books—and hadn’t regretted the choice. So Silas handing over the town to her shouldn’t have made her think twice.

  Sure, there were a lot of better, more qualified people who’d perhaps manage Deep River better than she could, but if push came to shove, she’d step up. She wasn’t one to shirk her responsibilities. Apart from anything else, she loved this town and the people in it. They all had their issues and some more than most, but they were good people at heart.

  Except she’d felt a terrible sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach as soon as he’d said he wanted to sign ownership of the town over to her. A weight settling on her shoulders, like hands pressing down on them.

  She couldn’t work out why she felt that way. Or why her instinctive response had been no.

  Silas had stared at her, and she’d had the uncomfortable feeling he’d seen her exact feelings about the subject—which may not have been much of a giveaway since she hadn’t given him a rousing oh yes, please immediately. He’d only nodded, told her to think about it, then muttered something about needing to see the mayor before getting up and leaving her sitting on the bench.r />
  The second time he’s dumped you in it and walked away.

  Hope knocked back some more of her whisky and glared at Steve, the stag’s glass eyes reflecting the sunlight coming through the window.

  Okay, she was being unfair. Silas hadn’t exactly “dumped her in it” that first time. She’d chosen to stay. And yes, she’d asked them both not to leave, and he’d been the one to offer. She’d just refused him.

  Anyway, he had a successful-sounding life he clearly wanted to get back to in Juneau, so it wasn’t any wonder he didn’t want to come back here.

  Yeah, he gets to cut and run, while you stay behind to pick up the pieces. Like you did after Granddad died. And like you’re going to do after Cal’s death now.

  Hope shook her head to get rid of the thought, but it stuck like a thorn. It did feel that way, that once again she was the one having to deal with the fallout of someone’s death, while Silas Quinn got to fly away in his plane and never come back.

  Her hand tightened on the teacup, and she drained the rest of the whisky, wanting to drown the anger that had seemingly come out of nowhere to coil like a dragon in her gut.

  It was ridiculous. If he wanted to sign the town over to her, then she’d take it. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  You’re certainly not going anywhere now.

  Hope put down the cup and shoved back her chair. She couldn’t sit here all day, brooding. She had stuff to do. Such as going next door to Mal’s, the general store, and asking him to put up a sign letting people know about a meeting.

  Mal’s sold everything and anything, from hunting supplies to fishing gear, from ladies’ clothing to stationery, from basic pantry supplies to gourmet ingredients (season and Mal’s contacts dependent), and from books to souvenirs. Basically if you wanted something, Mal’s would probably have it. And if he didn’t, he’d get it in for you. Such as the collection of Charles Dickens’s classics that she’d wanted that the library didn’t have, plus some Jane Austen and Wuthering Heights, since she had a passion for nineteenth-century literature.