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

sex, because if it had been, he’d have easily resisted. And he hadn’t resisted.

It wasn’t sex that he needed, but a connection, and a connection that went deeper than physical. That was about more than a joining of bodies. It was about the sympathy and understanding he’d seen in her silver eyes. Her lack of fear and the warmth in her hand as she’d laid it over his. The way she’d touched his face as he’d undressed her, something tender in her expression that he hadn’t known he’d craved until he saw it.

He’d always been fine with his surface life, but something in him wanted more. At this moment, he felt the lack of deeper and more lasting. He was sick of drifting.

Yet deeper was something he couldn’t have. After Ella had died and Rebecca had left him, his capacity for deeper had been burned right out of him. And if he’d felt small flashes of intense emotion in the past couple of days, he was pretty sure those were just the last electrical impulses of a dying brain.

His ability to care for anyone beyond the strictly impersonal was as dead and gone as his daughter.

Not that it mattered. He’d had a magical night with Astrid, where they’d both barely slept, and he’d remember it for a long time to come. But a night was all it could ever be. Tomorrow, he’d be going back to LA.

Silas cleared his throat ostentatiously. “You were saying?”

Damon, who hadn’t in fact been saying anything, immediately glanced away from Astrid, who was blushing, and down at the table where all the papers were.

Right. Back on track.

“I’ve been talking to Sandy,” Damon said, ignoring his pesky libido. “And she mentioned pushing to put Deep River in the cruise ship schedule. Juneau and Ketchikan already are, so there’s no reason we can’t be.”

“‘We’?” Silas raised a brow.

A flicker of irritation shot through him. Since when had he included himself as part of Deep River? He wasn’t staying. There was no “we” about it.

He shrugged. “‘We,’ ‘you,’ it doesn’t matter. The point is that getting this place on that schedule would be fantastic when it comes to getting tourists in the town.”

“Sure,” Silas said, “but how does she think that’s going to happen? I’m not saying it isn’t a good plan, but we’re tiny and there’s nothing here for tourists as it is.”

“No, but isn’t that the whole point of getting these tourism ventures together? To get them here?” He pushed a couple of the notes he’d made in Silas’s direction. “Sandy’s got some contacts from her old job with the Alaska tourism board, and she thinks she could reach out to some of the smaller cruise companies at least to make a case. Then we need to make sure we’ve got something to show them in terms of why they should make Deep River a stop. She thinks we could have something in place for the summer, even.”

“I think that’s a great plan.” Astrid was smiling and it felt like the sun shining directly on him. “I’ve been talking to Gwen about the farmers’ market thing she does in the community center and there’s a few other people who wouldn’t mind getting involved. Especially if there are tourist dollars on the table.”

Silas looked skeptical. “Sure, but that’s it? A farmers’ market? I wonder if we wouldn’t be better placed to start with Kevin and Mike’s fishing charters, since everything is in place for that already.”

Damon sat back in his chair and eyed his friend. “Is there any reason we can’t do all of it? Fishing charters wouldn’t require much capital, since they already have the equipment. They’d only need a bit of promotion, and in conjunction with Wild Alaska running flights from Juneau to here, I don’t see that it’s a straight one or the other.” He grinned, ideas beginning to form in his head. “I’ve got a few contacts in Juneau myself who could put out the word. We could do that, do a few interesting wilderness promotions—Sandy’s got some great ideas for that too, by the way. She had this ‘finding love in the middle of—’”

“‘Nowhere’ campaign, yeah,” Silas interrupted. “I know. She ran it last year too. Didn’t you have to get back to LA?”

“Yes, but email works,” he said easily. “It’s no drama.”

Silas nodded. “Okay. And you’re still wanting to sell your share of Wild Alaska?”

“Yeah,” he said, because he had to. It was a significant amount of money tied up in a business he couldn’t be part of. Money he’d need when his mom eventually had to go into assisted living. “I haven’t got a lot of choice about it.”

Silas was quiet a moment. “You ever thought about staying here?”

Damon frowned. “I can’t, you know that. I have to be near my mom.”

“You could bring her here. Or does she need hospital care?”

A nice thought, but impossible even if he’d wanted to live here. He liked Deep River and its people, it was true, and he was enjoying helping sort through tourism ideas. But he couldn’t uproot his mother from everything that was familiar to her and bring her to live in the middle of nowhere. It wouldn’t be fair to her.

It wasn’t fair the way she basically abandoned you after Ella died.

The thought wound through him, poisonous and just flat-out wrong. Sure, his mother hadn’t been the most supportive, but she’d never been comfortable with strong emotion. She was very much a “suck it up and carry on” kind of person. Yes, it had felt like being abandoned at the time, but he’d put that behind him now.

Anyway, she’d sacrificed a lot to bring him up on her own. She’d taken care of him and now it was his turn to take care of her.

“No,” he said carefully. “She doesn’t need hospital care. But I can’t just take her away from everything that’s familiar to her.”

Silas gave him a curiously direct look. But all he said was, “Okay. Fair enough.”

His