Deep River Promise Jackie Ashenden (best life changing books .txt) 📖

had to deal with his grief alone and it had been immeasurably hard. He didn’t want that for Astrid.

Did she have anyone to talk to about it? Anyone at all? She’d been keeping Connor’s secret a long time. No one knew here. So was this another secret? Another burden she had to carry?

“Well, he told me.” Damon made sure his tone was matter-of-fact. “And you can tell me too, you know that, right?”

Her chin came up, her eyes flashing. “Why should I tell you? What right do you have to my secrets?”

She was guarded and he got it now. It made sense. That Aiden asshole had hurt her and hurt her badly. Connor had said that Aiden hadn’t been physically abusive, but emotional abuse could be just as bad and she wouldn’t trust easily, not after it had been broken like that.

And he wanted her to trust him. If he was going to help Connor, he needed to help Connor’s lovely mother too.

It’s not just about helping the kid, come on. You want to help her for yourself as well.

No, because this wasn’t about him. This was about Astrid and Connor and what they needed, not about what he needed. Not that he needed anything.

Whatever—if he wanted to gain Astrid’s trust, it wasn’t going to be as easy as sharing a beer. He was going to have to give her something else, something meaningful and precious. A secret of his own.

“I don’t have a right,” he said. “And you don’t have to tell me anything. But secrets are hard to carry by yourself and I think you’ve been carrying Connor’s for a long time.”

She looked down at her mug, her hands placed on the scrubbed wooden tabletop on either side of it.

He didn’t wait, though; he carried on because now he was committed. “I have a secret too that I don’t tell anyone. Because it’s hard to talk about.” He could feel traces of a familiar tension gather inside him, pulling at his muscles. An old grief and the need to protect, even though the object of both that grief and that need was long gone: Ella, his daughter.

Astrid’s head came up, her expression wary. “What secret?”

“I was like you a long time ago. I had a kid when I was only seventeen, a little girl.”

Astrid’s gray eyes went wide with surprise and not a little shock.

“She wasn’t planned,” Damon went on, the tension pulling tighter. “But she was very much wanted, and both Rebecca—that was her mom—and I did our best for her.” The pain was still there despite the years, a deep, abiding ache that he carried close to his heart. And it felt wrong to tell Astrid about it, to put that pain on her, but he’d wanted her to have a secret of his, and his daughter was the secret that he held most precious.

“When she was two, she contracted one of those rare childhood cancers,” he went on. “It was very aggressive and there was nothing the doctors could do. She died.” There, he’d said it now. That was enough.

More shock flickered over Astrid’s face, followed by a pain that was intimately familiar to him. The pain of a parent losing a child.

The grief had long since blunted so he didn’t know why the sympathy in her eyes seemed to conjure it up again, and sharper than it had been in years.

He had to look away, his chest tight. This was crazy. Ella’s death had been hard, but he’d gone through the darkness that had fallen around him after she’d died and come out the other side. So why should telling Astrid bring it all back? And why should he feel it so acutely?

A silence fell and he waited for her to tell him how sorry she was. Tell him she didn’t know what to say. How she couldn’t imagine how dreadful it was for him, all the trite bullshit that people trotted out when they were confronted by something they didn’t want to face themselves. Before they changed the subject so they didn’t have to talk about it.

But she didn’t speak. Instead, she put out her hand and covered his where it rested on the table beside his mug. An instinctive, very human gesture of comfort. Her touch was warm, and there was a firm pressure to it, and he could feel the sensation of it flow up his arm and center itself in his chest.

No one had held him after Ella had died. No one had put their arms around him and given him a hug. No one had even touched him. And not one single solitary person had told him it would be okay.

So how strange that it should be a woman he’d known only a couple of days, with very real traumas of her own, who gave him the first significant, meaningful comfort he’d had in years. No platitudes. No trite phrases. Only a warm hand and a light pressure, an offer of strength, of wordless understanding.

When she spoke, it was soft and she didn’t remove her hand. “Oh, Damon. I’m so sorry.”

He looked at her at last. Her face was pale, but her gaze didn’t waver. She wasn’t afraid of his pain or his grief, that was clear, and was offering what she could: sympathy and comfort.

Deep inside him, so far down he was barely conscious of it, something jolted like he’d been given an electric shock.

“This isn’t a quid pro quo,” he said, ignoring the sensation. “I didn’t tell you to force you into giving me something you don’t want to give.”

“Then why did you tell me?” The question was soft and genuine.

Damon met her misty-gray eyes. “Because Ella is my secret. And carrying her alone is hard.”

Astrid’s grip on his hand tightened and a small silence fell. Then she said, “I find it difficult to trust people. Especially men. And most especially men who seem to be too good to be true.”

“Me?”

“Of course you.”

Well, he wasn’t totally evil,