Deep River Promise (Alaska Homecoming #2) - Jackie Ashenden Page 0,2

screen popped up, texts and voicemails and emails that he’d missed. He scrolled through them until a name jumped out at him.

Rachel. The housekeeper he’d hired to come in and help his mother a couple of hours a day. She’d left him a voicemail.

Shit.

Damon called his voicemail immediately, cycling through the messages until he got to Rachel’s.

“Damon? You told me to let you know if anything of concern happened with your mother, so I’m calling now to let you know that when I arrived this morning, she was watching her shows, but there was a pot on the stove, cooking away with nothing in it and the kitchen was full of smoke. Of course, Laura swore blind she hadn’t put that pot on and that she had no idea who did, but I know she put it on herself and forgot about it. No harm done this time, but…well. Just thought you should know.”

Damon’s heart sank as the message ended.

Typical of his mother. She was tough and proud, always had been, and she hated getting sick. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know about her diagnosis of early onset dementia, had tried to hide it even from him for months before he’d eventually found out.

Yet he’d found out all the same and not too long before the accident that had killed Caleb. And he knew immediately that it would spell the end of his time as a bush pilot. Selling his share of Wild Alaska and moving back to LA to take care of her was going to take time, though, so he’d hired Rachel in the interim. His mother hadn’t liked having someone else in the house, but Damon had sold it to her as a way of keeping him off her back, and she’d reluctantly given in.

The decision to leave Alaska hadn’t been a hard one. He’d enjoyed his time in the great outdoors, just like he’d enjoyed his time in bomb disposal in the army, but his mother had single-handedly brought him up, and she had no one else to look after her but him.

He had to leave. He just thought he’d have a bit more time up his sleeve with which to tie things up here. But from the sound of Rachel’s message, that wasn’t going to be the case.

His mom had left an empty pot on the stove to burn, and he’d been out of contact for three days. Hell. Rachel had been fine about keeping an eye on his mom for the past week while he brought to a close his life in Juneau, but he couldn’t put that responsibility on her for too much longer. It wouldn’t be fair.

It was Damon’s responsibility and no one else’s.

There was mercifully service, so he hit redial, calling Rachel back. There was no answer, so he left a message saying he’d be leaving Deep River today and that he’d be back in LA within the next couple of days with any luck.

Then he dropped the phone back down on the bed and headed for the shower.

Silas was going to be unhappy his powers of persuasion hadn’t worked, but there wasn’t much Damon could do about it. It didn’t help, either, that he knew he’d been an asshole to Silas the past couple of weeks while Silas had been here and Damon had been back in Juneau. He’d hassled his friend unmercifully to come and deal with Wild Alaska, so he could get to his mom, and it had been an added complication that Damon hadn’t been able to tell Silas why he had to return so urgently to LA. His mother had been very clear that she didn’t want anyone to know about her condition, not even that she was sick, which meant he’d had to be deliberately vague about why he had to return.

Ah, well, there was nothing to be done about it. Silas would just have to suck it up.

Haven’t you forgotten the other thing you were supposed to do here?

Damon shut his eyes as he turned the shower to cold and stepped beneath the icy spray of water.

No. He hadn’t forgotten. But he was going to need a whole lot of coffee before he got into that.

* * *

“See what I mean?” Connor gestured emphatically at the Happy Moose’s by now empty balcony. “Who stands around on a balcony without any clothes on?”

Astrid, current mayor of Deep River, surveyed her fifteen-year-old son dispassionately.

They were on the boardwalk by the Nowhere pole—one of the marketing ideas