That Deep River Feeling (Alaska Homecoming #3) - Jackie Ashenden Page 0,4
be leaving.
What had her stupid big brother been thinking? Why had Cal thought she needed looking after?
Ridiculous, not to mention ironic coming from the man who’d ceased being her protective big brother the moment he’d left Deep River for Juneau. Certainly, him getting all worried about her from beyond the grave was a little late in the piece.
Especially when she was a grown woman of twenty-six, who’d been taking care of herself for years already, not the thirteen-year-old girl she’d been when he’d taken off.
Zeke still hadn’t said anything, midnight eyes giving her a thousand-yard stare. Another woman might have been intimidated by his massive height and his heavily muscled torso, not to mention the whole beard thing he had going on, but Morgan had never been that woman.
Plus, although Cal had left Deep River years ago, he’d kept in intermittent contact and had told her a little about his friends. Zeke, he’d said, was very stubborn, a man of few words, and didn’t much like people. However, he was also protective, generous, and very honest. A good guy to have in a tight spot.
All well and good if you were in a tight spot, but she wasn’t. She was home and what she wanted was to go inside, make herself some dinner, and relax after a busy day, not make a tour of all the things wrong with the house purely to entertain Cal’s annoying, taciturn, and erstwhile missing friend.
The missing friend who didn’t seem to be all that bothered that his other friends, Silas Quinn and Damon Fitzgerald, had been getting worried about him, though they tried to pretend they weren’t.
Morgan let out a breath while Zeke simply stood there. Silently. Like a granite statue of a man. Making curiosity tug lightly inside her about why he’d decided to turn up now, a couple of months after Cal’s death, and what he’d been doing in the interim since Cal had left Deep River to him, Silas, and Damon.
The other two now lived here, Silas with his fiancée, Hope, who owned the Happy Moose bar, and Damon with his soon-to-be wife, Astrid, Deep River’s mayor.
Morgan had been going to ask them if they wanted her to open a missing person’s investigation, but it hadn’t quite gotten to that point.
No need now, since he’d arrived here all by himself. A camp, he’d mentioned, which indicated he’d been living in the bush for…how long? And why? Why hadn’t he let them know he was here? And why hadn’t he gotten in contact with her earlier if Cal had supposedly told him to look after her?
Zeke’s eyes glittered in the late-afternoon light, and she thought he might say something about her threatening to shoot him with her Taser, at least.
But he didn’t. He simply turned around without a word and walked down the porch, disappearing around the corner of the house.
For a second, Morgan could only gape after him.
Perhaps it was a dream he’d been there. Perhaps the single beer she’d had at the Moose just before she’d headed home had been one too many. Then again, could you really say one beer was one too many? And more importantly, what in God’s name was he doing?
The porch wrapped around the house and she went after him, peering around the corner. This side faced the river, and on summer days, if you sat on the chairs outside the living room windows, you could see the green water rushing by, glinting off rocks and sparkling in the sun. Her favorite view in the whole wide world.
It was that time of year now, the Deep River filling the afternoon with a liquid sound, the same soundtrack that had punctuated all the important moments in her life.
Along with the noise of the river came the spicy scent of the bush that surrounded the house, mixed with warm, dry earth and the green dampness of the river itself. The scent of home. It was a familiarity she never got tired of and never would.
Zeke had gone down the steps and out onto the lawn that lay between the house and the river and was now looking back up at the house. The sunlight threw his shadow against the stand of spruce and fir at his back, making him seem almost as tall as they were, a giant…
No, not a giant. A bear. A big black bear wandering into her home and sniffing around like he wanted to make it his den.