Page 8 of Demon Loved
She found herself saying, “First time in Jerome?”
He turned back toward her and smiled. There was nothing practiced or flirtatious in his expression.
No, she saw what looked like relief.
Was he glad she’d been the one to open the conversation? In general, she didn’t put herself out there like that — she was far more used to being pursued — but something about the stranger felt almost lost, and that quality about him seemed to have stirred her protective instincts.
“It is,” he said. “I’d read about it, of course, but this was the first time I made the trip.”
His voice was warm and deep, almost velvety, the kind of voice that made her think of hot cocoa and snuggling in a warm blanket on a cold winter night. Never mind that it had been pushing eighty-six degrees today, and even with the sun beginning to go down, the air was still plenty warm enough.
“So, what do you think?” she asked, doing her best to sound casual.
A lot of guys would have given her a significant look and then said something like, Oh, I’m liking the view pretty well from here.
But this man was obviously not the kind of person to play those sorts of games.
“It’s very interesting,” he said, his tone both thoughtful and serious, as if he was answering a question posed to him in class by the teacher and not by someone trying to have a casual conversation. “Older-feeling than I’d thought it would be.”
“Well, we’ve done our best to preserve whatever we could,” she said lightly. “Some buildings have already slid down the hill and couldn’t be saved, but most of them have mostly stayed where they were supposed to be.”
He absorbed her comment without even a blink. Then again, lots of people did at least some research on Jerome before they came up here, so she supposed it wasn’t too strange that he would have already heard about how unstable parts of Jerome were, thanks to the extensive mining that had stripped away large chunks of the earth on Cleopatra Hill. You couldn’t see the open mines from the center of town, but if you went up the hill a little way, it was fairly obvious that no one had worked too hard to remediate the mining pits, and they still gaped raw against the hillside.
“I’m glad so much was able to be saved,” the man replied. “I find local history fascinating, so it’s good to see the buildings in much the same shape as they were a hundred years ago.”
If he really was a history buff, Bree was a little surprised that he hadn’t visited Jerome before now. But then, she had no idea where the guy was even from. She couldn’t detect a trace of any kind of regional or foreign accent in his voice, although she knew that didn’t mean a whole lot. Plenty of people worked hard to erase all signs of their origins from their voices, whether out of embarrassment, a need to sound more professional, or any of a score of other reasons.
“Are you from Arizona?” she asked.
A pause. Then he smiled again and said, “No, I’m from Los Angeles.”
Maybe he was an actor. They’d been standing a few paces away from each other, as though he hadn’t wanted to intrude on her personal space, but now she moved a little closer to him and extended a hand. “Brianna McAllister,” she said. “People mostly call me Bree.”
Another of those hesitations, but then he reached over and shook her hand very gently, almost as if he thought it would break. Despite his caution, she could still feel the strength in his fingers…and in his well-muscled arm as well.
Dear Goddess, he was gorgeous.
“Bill Garrett,” he told her. “I’ve been studying old ghost towns, and Jerome came up in my research.”
He stopped there and looked around. Because it was nearly six, a lot of the people who’d come to town for the day had already decamped, but lights still glowed in the shop windows, and the traffic on Main Street never really ceased, thanks to all the people driving to Prescott from the Verde Valley or vice versa. Sure, there was a way to go around that didn’t involve going up and over Mingus Mountain, and yet plenty of people would still rather brave the twisty highway to save themselves a little time.
“Although I suppose this isn’t really a ghost town,” he observed, expression now almost amused. “Not with so many people living and visiting here.”
“It almost was,” she replied, thinking of how Jerome had begun to dwindle after the mines closed in the early 1950s. Some brave members of the McAllister clan had hung on and joined forces with the free-spirited civilians who came to squat in the abandoned houses here back in the 1960s. Together, they’d kept the little mining town from turning into nothing more than a memory. “But it survived, unlike so many of those other towns.”
“I’m glad it did,” Bill said. “It’s very charming.”
Most of the time, the word “charming” wasn’t something she would have expected to come out of the mouth of a guy who looked like he was in his late twenties, maybe thirty at the most. When Bill Garrett said it, though, there was something about the word that was, well…charming.
“We like to think so.”
His head tilted to one side as he appeared to consider her comment. “Are you from here?”
“Born and bred,” she replied. Her origins weren’t a state secret or anything, so she didn’t mind giving him that small piece of information. “Just like most of the McAllister family.”
Again, not a secret. People found out pretty quickly that the McAllisters had been here for almost a hundred and fifty years. True, the clan had spread into Prescott and Payson and even down to Wickenburg, nearly to the edges of the de la Paz clan’s territory in Phoenix and beyond, but Jerome would always remain its heart and soul.
Bill looked almost pleased by her response. “It must have been fun to grow up someplace so interesting.”
