by Jackie Ashenden
Publication Date: 7/28/2020
Coming home was
the easy part. Facing her will take everything he’s got…
Silas Quinn hasn’t
been back to Deep River, Alaska, in years, not since he joined the army. He
left behind the best friend he’d ever had. But he knew Hope Dawson was meant
for bigger things than Deep River—and he—had to offer. What he didn’t know was
that when he left, he took Hope’s dreams right along with him…
Then tragedy
strikes and sends Silas home, and the entire town is thrown into chaos when
they learn what brought him back—he’s inherited ownership of the town and the
newly discovered oil reserves under it!
Hope gave up on
ever getting out of Deep River. Her mom needed her, then her grandfather died
and left her the local hangout to run. Now Si is back in town, stirring up old
feelings—including her anger at being left behind. His return brings Hope an
offer that can change her life. Love, or adventure, are almost within reach—but
she can’t have both…
Jackie has been writing fiction since she was eleven years old. She used
to balance her writing with the more serious job of librarianship until a
chance meeting with another romance writer prompted her to devote herself to
the true love of her heart – writing romance. She particularly likes to write
dark, emotional stories with alpha heroes and kick-ass heroines. She lives in
Auckland, New Zealand.
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Flying into Deep River, Alaska, took a special kind
of grit. The airstrip was a narrow bit of gravel to the side of soaring
mountains, with a river running along one edge, and there was always some kind
of crosswind happening that would challenge even the most experienced pilot.
It wasn’t a forgiving landing, and there was no
room for error.
Luckily, Silas Quinn hadn’t made an error in all
the time he’d spent flying around the wilds of the Alaskan backcountry, and he
wasn’t about to make one now.
Particularly not when he was flying into the
hometown he’d left thirteen years earlier and hadn’t been back to since.
Especially not when he was coming back to what
would probably turn out to be the most hostile reception since Mike Flint had
once said at a town meeting that he thought the idea of a luxury motel on the
side of the Deep River would be good and why didn’t they build one.
Considering the reason Si was here was fifty
million times worse than the idea of a luxury motel, the response he was likely
to get once he’d broken the news would probably be more than the one month of
cold-shouldering that Mike had gotten.
Si would be lucky if the town didn’t kill him.
That was if this damn airstrip didn’t kill him
first.
The clouds were lowering, and the rain was coming
down hard, and the wind was a problem, but with his friend Caleb’s death still
fresh, Si was in no mood to let the elements have their way with him.
He’d survived three tours in Afghanistan.
He’d survive this, even if it killed him.
He kept his nerve and brought the tiny plane down,
the wheels bouncing on the gravel as he rolled up just shy of the lone hangar
that housed Deep River’s entire aviation industry.
As the spin of the Cessna’s propellers began to
wind down, Si sat in the cockpit trying to handle the rush of emotions that he
had known would grip him the second he touched down. The usual mixture of
grief, anger, and longing that Deep River always instilled whenever he thought
of his hometown.
There was a special poignancy to it today though.
Because Caleb was only a few weeks dead and the shock of the will was still
ringing through Si’s entire being like a hammer strike.
Deep River was an anomaly. The entire town was
privately owned and had been since the gold rush days, when town founder Jacob
West had bought up all the land around the Deep River and declared it a haven
for the misfits and rogues who didn’t fit in anywhere in normal society. He’d
leased out the land to anyone who wanted to join him, getting them to pay him
whatever they could afford in terms of a nominal rent, and in return, they
could have a plot of land to call their own and do whatever they wanted with
it.
The People’s Republic of Deep River, some called
it.
Most just called it home.
Even over a hundred years later, the town was still
owned by the Wests.
And that was the difficulty. Caleb was the oldest
West and had inherited the town after his father, Jared West, had died five
years earlier. And he’d ran the place since then—or at least he had until his unexpected
death in a plane crash while running supplies up to a remote settlement in the
north.
But that hadn’t been the end to the shocks that Si
and his two other friends, Damon and Zeke, had had to endure in the past few
weeks.
First, there had been finding out that Caleb had
left the entire town to them in his will. And second, oil had been discovered
within Deep River’s city limits—oil that the town had no idea was underneath
their land.
Oil that, once they knew about it, was going to
turn the entire place upside down.
Heavy stuff for three ex-military guys who had
nothing to their names but a small company doing adventure tours for tourists,
transport runs for hunters, and supply runs for everyone else in the Alaskan
bush.
Si stared out at the rain beyond the windshield of
the plane.
It hid everything from view, which was probably
just as well. He hadn’t wanted to come back here, not considering what he’d
been trying to leave behind, but it hadn’t made any sense for either Damon or
Zeke to be the advance party.
This was his hometown. He was the one who knew Deep
River and the people in it. And he was the one who’d been closest to Caleb.
Therefore, it made sense for him to be the one to
break the happy news that firstly, the fact that he, Damon, and Zeke were the
new owners. And secondly, there was oil in them there hills.
Some men might have kept the oil a secret and kept
all the riches for themselves too, but Si wasn’t that kind of man, and neither
were his friends.
He’d been brought up in Deep River, an extreme
environment where everyone learned to rely on each other since that could be
all that stood between you and a very uncomfortable death. There was no time
for petty grievances—though to be fair, there were a lot of those as well. But
when push came to shove, the town pulled together. Because fundamentally, they
were all the same. They’d all come here because they didn’t fit anywhere else,
because they were escaping something, because they liked the quiet and the
isolation and the return to nature.
Because they just plain old liked it.
Si let out a breath.
And now he was going to give them news that was
going to blow it all apart.
***
Excerpted from
Come Home to Deep River by Jackie
Ashenden. © 2020 by Jackie Ashenden.
Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks
Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.
Come Home to Deep River is a small town,
friends to lovers romance set in Deep River, Alaska.
I was drawn to the cover and the synopsis
sounded quite intriguing. Whilst I liked
the hero and heroine, and they had undeniable chemistry, I felt they both
lacked depth.
Hope lives a very isolated life, running her
family’s bar. She’s loyal, hardworking and
feels trapped by her life.
Silas grew up in Deep River, but left to join
the military and hasn’t returned for thirteen years. He’s a brooding, hero with his fair share of demons.
I honestly didn’t love this story, but I did
enjoy the quirky side characters, but also found elements of the plot to be
quite repetitive.
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