Come Home to Deep River

by Jackie Ashenden

  Si pressed his thumbs gently against Hope’s cheekbones. “So, what? Are you going to let her sell the lease to someone else? Give up the Moose?”

  Hope let out a breath. “I don’t want her to. If she sells the Moose to someone else, I’m screwed.”

  “Or,” he pointed out gently, because he could see even if she couldn’t, “you’d be free.”

  Something crossed her face, and he wasn’t sure what it was, but it vanished before he could name it. “I can’t give up the Moose,” she said, and this time there was nothing but determination in her dark eyes. “It’s all I have left of Grandad.”

  She’d always been close to her grandfather. Bill had basically brought her up since Angela had spent the first couple of years of Hope’s life in bed, in a fog of depression, unable to care properly for her daughter. So no wonder she wanted to keep the bar.

  She wouldn’t have had it though, not if her grandfather hadn’t died and you know whose fault that was, remember?

  His father’s. Because his father had spent the night drinking at the Moose and then decided to go fishing. And her grandfather had gone after him…

  Your fault.

  “You wouldn’t have had to deal with that if it hadn’t been for Dad,” he said roughly, unable to help himself.

  Her expression softened. “Please don’t tell me you’re beating yourself up for that. It wasn’t your fault your father decided to drink himself insensible that night.”

  “No, but he did. And Bill died rescuing him.” There was no escaping that fact, no matter how badly he wanted to.

  “Yes, I know,” Hope said slowly. “What? Did you think you could stop him from drinking?”

  You knew why he drank. And you never tried to stop him.

  He gave a short, bitter laugh, ignoring the thoughts in his head. “Hell no, nothing could stop that bastard from drinking. I just should have been keeping an eye on him.” But he hadn’t. He’d wanted to sit with Hope down by the river, talking with her and drinking the illicit beers he’d stolen from his old man’s beer fridge.

  “You can’t change what happened,” she said. “No one can. And I don’t blame you for it. I never did.”

  “But you would have had a different life.” He had to name it, had to point it out. “You could have left if you’d wanted to.”

  “But I didn’t.” She touched his forehead gently, smoothing away the lines he knew were there. “I have the life I have, and I’m fine with it.”

  Except he couldn’t shake his memories of the plans she’d made for college and the travel she wanted to do. See the world, be somewhere different. Learn new things, have new experiences.

  Things she would never have now, and instead, he’d had them.

  “Hope—”

  But she put her finger over his mouth, silencing him. “No, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Her expression changed, becoming dark and smoky. “Show me something new, Si.”

  His body hardened almost immediately at the look in her eyes, and he became suddenly very conscious of the warmth and softness of her beneath him.

  Yeah, perhaps now wasn’t the time to talk about this, especially when they had better things they could be doing. He only had her for a limited time anyway, and it seemed a pity to waste it talking about things they couldn’t change.

  He took the tip of her finger in his mouth and bit it gently, making her breath catch. Then he gave it a teasing lick before gripping her wrist and pulling her hand away from his mouth, pushing it down onto the pillow beside her head. He did the same with the other hand, holding both of them down. Then he bent and kissed her deep and long.

  But the conversation stayed in his head, and he couldn’t shake the thought that she wasn’t fine with it, no matter what she said.

  She wasn’t fine with it at all.

  Chapter 11

  Hope came into the kitchen the next morning and found her mother sitting at the small kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her and a frown on her face.

  “Where were you last night?” she asked before Hope had a chance to open her mouth. “I looked for you and couldn’t find you.”

  Well, that’s because she’d been in Silas’s bed all night.

  Does your mother really need to know that?

  No, she didn’t. Especially when being with Silas was only going to be temporary anyway, and her mother tended to be judgmental about such things. With good reason admittedly, but still. Things were already thorny with the lease business, and she didn’t need yet something else for her mother to use against her.

  In fact, no one needed to know about her and Silas, and she’d make a note to tell him the next time she saw him. She’d woken up that morning alone, and she’d been quite happy about it, not wanting to go into a rundown of everything that had happened between them the night before.

  And there had been a lot of things that had happened between them the night before. Interesting things. Very pleasurable and sexy things…

  Heat coiled inside her, her breath catching at the memories.

  “You’re blushing,” Angela said, frowning. “Please don’t say that you and he—”

  “No, of course not,” Hope interrupted, irritated with herself. “I went to bed early.”

  She moved over to the kitchen counter and took a mug from the cupboard before going over to the stove. Her and her mother’s one indulgence was the stovetop espresso maker and the beans she got Mal to special order.

  Picking up the coffeepot, she poured herself some of the thick black liquid, conscious of her mother’s gaze boring into her back.

  “Anything in particular you want to talk to me about, Mom?” She put the pot back on the stove and then turned around. “I can see you’re dying to.”

  “What do you think?” Angela’s dark eyes gleamed. “I want to sell the Moose’s lease.”

  All the pleasant heat and satisfaction that Hope had been feeling dissipated as if it had never been.

  Slowly, she picked up her mug and wrapped her fingers around it, letting the hot pottery warm them. Normally she had cream in her coffee, but right now, she needed an intense hit of caffeine. “What? Just like that? You don’t want to talk about it more?”

  “You knew where I stood with this, Hope,” her mother said flatly. “Surely you’re not surprised.”

  “Yes, but I thought the meeting would have changed your mind.”

  “Why would it?” Angela stared at her. “Who cares if the guy wanting to buy the lease is from an oil company? He offered me a lot of money.”

  Anger gathered in the pit of Hope’s stomach. “Who cares? Mom, I care. You know what that’ll mean, right? Strangers in the town. Machinery. Drilling. They might have to tear down half the town to get to the oil.”

  Angela lifted a shoulder. “So? It won’t make any difference to me. I won’t be here.”

  Hope stared at her, shocked in spite of herself. “So you don’t care? About the town and what might happen? Is that what you’re saying?”

  For the first time, Angela’s hard gaze flickered, and she glanced down at the tabletop. “Why should I care about the town? They never cared about me.”

  She should have known. And her mother wasn’t wrong. Angela’s unplanned pregnancy had apparently been the source of gossip for weeks and not a few people had had opinions about it. That they shared around and frequently.

  At least until Bill had stepped in and told everyone to quit gossiping about his daughter; otherwise, they might find themselves unable to buy a drink in the Moose for the foreseeable future.

  The gossiping had stopped then, or at least that’s what Hope had thought. Because people had never treated her differently or made comments to her, not that she’d experienced.

  Perhaps it was different with her mother though? Perhaps Bill hadn’t protected her the way that she
should have been?

  An old and familiar guilt twisted in her gut at the thought. God, if she hadn’t been born, none of this would have happened.

  But it did. As you told Si last night, it happened and you can’t change it.

  Except she just couldn’t quite stop wishing that she could.

  You can’t start thinking like that again. You can’t.

  No, she couldn’t. If nothing else, having dreams and plans for a future that had never happened had taught her that sometimes it was better to take things as they came. To not think about what more she could have had.

  “Mom,” she began, not quite sure of what else she wanted to say.

  “Well, they didn’t,” Angela snapped before Hope had a chance to go on. “No one cared that I was alone with a baby. That I had to bring that baby up by myself. Yet everyone had something to say about it.”

  “I thought Granddad told them to back off.”

  Angela turned her coffee mug around in a slow circle. “He did. But the damage was done. No one here gave a damn about how I felt.”

  Hope could hear the bitterness in her mother’s tone, and it made the sting of guilt worse, though she tried to ignore it. She knew it wasn’t her fault that her mother had ended up with severe depression. It wasn’t her fault that her mother had ended up pregnant with her at all, yet that didn’t stop her from feeling it.

  Didn’t stop her own defensive anger either.

  “That’s not strictly true,” she pointed out. “Granddad gave a damn. And you weren’t on your own. He helped you.”

  “Yes, well, regardless of that,” her mother said, brushing that away, “I’ve finally gotten an opportunity to leave this godforsaken place and I’m going to do it.”

  The conversation she’d had with Silas the night before suddenly loomed large in Hope’s brain, and she found herself asking before she could think better of it: “So why didn’t you leave earlier?”

  Angela looked up from her coffee mug, her dark eyes narrowing. “I never had the money, you know that.”

  “But you earn enough at Mal’s for a plane ticket. So…why didn’t you just go?”

  Her mother shifted uncomfortably on her chair. “You kept telling me that I shouldn’t go by myself. And that living somewhere else was expensive, so of course I had to stay here.”

  Perhaps a couple of days ago, Hope would have heard only the bitterness and resentment in her mother’s voice and would have taken that to heart. Would have felt guilty for popping her mother’s bubble with reality, and then felt angry for feeling guilty about it.

  But today she heard more than anger and bitterness. She heard instead what sounded like justifications, and that was especially galling because her mother had said it in exactly the same tones as Hope had used last night when Silas had asked her exactly the same question.

  “Are you sure about that?” she asked, recognizing that it hadn’t been true for her either. She did love the Moose, and she’d stayed because of her granddad. But there was more to it than that. “If you’d really wanted to leave, you would have. Except you didn’t. Why not?”

  Angela sniffed and looked away. “I couldn’t leave you, could I?”

  Which would have sounded better if there hadn’t been so much annoyance in Angela’s tone.

  “When I was a kid, sure. But I’m nearly thirty, Mom. You could have left at any time in the past ten years.”

  Her mother turned her coffee mug slowly around once more. “Why does it matter? I’m deciding to leave now.” She met Hope’s gaze again. “You should come too, Hope. You had so many plans for the future. Why stay here in this old place?” She waved a hand at the kitchen area. “We could start again somewhere different. Somewhere out of this town. You could get the degree you always wanted, and I could get a job doing something more interesting that stocking shelves.”

  “Mom—”

  “I know I’m the reason you’re still here. That you stayed because of me. And I don’t want you to do that anymore.”

  A small shock pulsed down Hope’s spine because her mother had never said anything about this before. And Hope had thought she’d had no insight into how her mental health had impacted on her daughter either.

  Clearly, though, she’d been underestimating her. Angela had not only thought about it, but she’d also felt unhappy about it.

  “That’s not why I stayed,” Hope felt compelled to say. “It was the Moose and Granddad, and—”

  “No, it wasn’t. And don’t try to placate me. I know when you’re lying.”

  Hope bit off the rest of what she’d been going to say. Her mother wasn’t wrong; she was placating her. “All right, fine,” she said. “I did stay because of you. But I’m happy here, and I don’t particularly want to leave.”

  “Are you happy?” Angela shot back. “Or am I just a convenient excuse?”

  “No, of course you’re not,” Hope replied, irritated and not sure why.

  Isn’t she, though? Isn’t she the reason you’ve been giving yourself not to leave?

  But Hope didn’t want to examine that thought too closely. It made her feel like she had the night before, in Silas’s arms, his green-gold gaze looking down into hers, asking her questions she didn’t want to think about the answers to. Seeing her clearly, too clearly. Disturbing all the little fictions she’d been telling herself about her life here in Deep River and how she felt about it.

  She had to tell herself that she was content here, that she was happy, because what was the alternative? Thirteen years of doing all this for nothing, that was the alternative. And she couldn’t face the thought of that. Wasting her life sitting here at the Moose when she could have been—

  But no. She didn’t want to think about what might have been.

  Angela eyed her as if she could see every one of her daughter’s thought processes. “Fine, tell yourself whatever you need to.” She abruptly shoved back her chair and stood, picking up her coffee mug. “But just remember that I’ll be doing this for us, not just for me.”

  And before Hope could say another word, her mother walked out.

  * * *

  Silas spent the day talking to people. He would have much rather spent the day in bed with Hope, but since they actually had stuff to do, he thought he’d better get on with it. Though if he was honest with himself, he needed some distance.

  Every time he thought about the night before, her in his arms, his hands at last on her beautiful body, moving inside her, he got hard. He got breathless. He started to think about what it would be like to keep her in that bed for the foreseeable future, and since that wasn’t happening, distance it was.

  At least enough to get his head back into the game with the town.

  He’d left Hope asleep that morning, and because he hadn’t wanted to wake her up for another round, he’d gone for a run instead, to try to burn off the lingering desire that still gripped him. Then he spent the rest of the morning visiting the various stores in the town and talking to people. April in the diner and then Nate at the Gold Pan. Sandy in the information center. Clare at Clare’s Bed-and-Breakfast.

  It had been all very useful, especially considering that none of the store owners were interested in selling their leases to any kind of oil company. None of them were happy about oil companies, period. Or the oil that Caleb’s prospectors had found beneath Deep River. They weren’t happy about a future containing oil company employees and drills and machinery. They weren’t happy about the thought of the town changing.

  They asked him a lot of questions about what would happen if the rest of the town wanted to sell and what was going to happen, and the prospect obviously worried them. He wanted to tell them it would be okay, but he didn’t know whether it would or not, and he had no right telling them that anyway, not when he wasn’t going to be here.

  It would be one more thing Hope had t
o deal with after he was gone, and he didn’t like that thought either. They were definitely going to have to think about a plan for dealing with the people who liked the idea of money and wanted to sell.

  It was nearing noon by the time he stepped into Mal’s Market, and he had to stop and take a breath at the sudden flood of nostalgia that filled him as soon as he walked over the threshold. The same scent of wood and spices and dust. The same feeling of magic at the towering shelves piled high with all kinds of things. There wasn’t another place like Mal’s, not anywhere. Not in all the towns and cities he’d been in, and he’d been in a fair few.

  He had a sudden vision of Mal’s not being here anymore, of a supermarket taking its place, and he didn’t like that, not one bit. Mal’s was part of the fabric that made up Deep River, and to not have it, or for it be a store reduced to selling cheap tourist knickknacks, would be to have a great gaping hole cut in that fabric.

  Si walked through the aisle displaying candy, remembering how he and Cal had once dared each other to steal something when they’d both been kids, and how he’d nearly managed to smuggle a candy bar out under his sweatshirt before Mal had laid a heavy arm on his shoulder and demanded to know what he thought he was doing. There had been the rush of adrenaline and then the terror of being caught, and then the shame. Mal had made them dust the shelves for a whole month after that.

  “Not thinking about stealing another candy bar, are we?” Mal asked, watching from behind the counter as Si approached.

  “Nope.” Si grinned. “Not after you made us dust those damn shelves. I sneezed for weeks afterward.”

  “Scared you straight, huh?” Mal grinned back. “Good to see you, Silas. Been a long time. Too long.”

  “Good to see you too.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I expect you know what I’ve come to talk to you about.”

  “If it’s what Hope came to talk to me about yesterday, then yeah, I do.”