Dig Deeper (Keepers of the Swamp Book 2)

by T. S. Joyce

  DIG DEEPER

  (KEEPERS OF THE SWAMP, BOOK 2)

  By T. S. JOYCE

  Dig Deeper

  Copyright © 2019 by T. S. Joyce

  Copyright © 2019, T. S. Joyce

  First electronic publication: August 2019

  T. S. Joyce

  www.tsjoyce.com

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Published in the United States of America.

  Editor: Corinne DeMaagd

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Up Next in this Series

  New Release Newsletter Sign-Up

  More Series by this Author

  For More From this Author

  About this Author

  Chapter One

  “What do you think about it, Morgy?” Cal asked low.

  Startled, Morgan Holland jerked the wooden spoon she was stirring the roux with and splashed the sauce onto her shirt. Aw, shoot. This was her favorite work shirt.

  “Think about what?” she asked.

  “About what your dad’s talking about.”

  Morgan tossed a look over her shoulder at the big table where Dad and his swamper friends were hanging around, drinking moonshine, and talking shit about everyone in town.

  “Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention.” She had her own problems to worry about, and Dad was always complaining about something.

  “Well,” Cal murmured, sliding his hands to her hips from behind. “What do you think about what I was saying?”

  A sick feeling filled the pit of her stomach. “Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention to that either,” she gritted out.

  “Come on, Morgan!” he barked. “I’m sick of you putting us off.”

  “Hey! What’s going on in there?” Dad yelled at a way louder volume than necessary.

  Everyone was always yelling around here. Sometimes Morgan just wanted to be left in peace.

  “Nothing,” she muttered, glaring at Cal.

  He threw up his hands like he surrendered and then ran a hand through his platinum crop of hair. His icy blue eyes flashed with anger before he turned to sit at the table with her dad and his friends. “Just trying to make an honest woman of your daughter, sir.”

  “Well, what the fuck’s the hold up?” Dad demanded.

  Morgan rolled her eyes and then stared out the window above the stove. Step one to being a woman and surviving a poacher’s camp deep in the swamps: have a good imagination. For example, she was now imagining herself lying in a hammock by a crystal blue beach somewhere.

  The landline rang, startling her from her fantasy. The phone was an old chipped maroon one with a curly cord that was all stretched out and hung to the floor. Everything around here was ancient. Dad rushed to it and answered. “What?”

  Whoever was calling had some bad news because Dad’s angry-vein, as she liked to call it, popped out on his forehead immediately. “Four of ’em?” He got quiet and looked back at his buddies, waiting silently at the table. “You think it’s Lachlan?” There was that pissed-off growl in Dad’s throat. He only got it when he was drunk or when someone was messing with his gator traps. “Snapped in fuckin’ half? That’s him all right. We’ll be right there.” He snapped his fingers at Bob, Gene, and Rick, and then at Cal, too. Load up. “What do you think I’m gonna do?” Dad yelled into the phone. “I’m gonna kill him. And then I’m gonna kill the other one, too!”

  Well, that perked her right up. She parted her lips to ask, “What other one?” but Dad slammed the phone in the cradle and stormed toward the back door where their boat was docked just outside. The phone tried its best to hold on for a second, but then the old thing lost the battle and clattered onto the floor.

  Morgan side-stepped down the counter, trying to stay invisible from all their anger. Getting noticed never worked in her favor when her dad and his friends were riled up and ready to hunt. She knelt down and picked up the phone, and when she stood to settle it back on the wall, Cal was waiting there. She froze.

  His icy blue eyes were narrowed. “Did you know there was another one? I watched your face when your daddy said that.”

  Yes. Yes, she knew. She was hoping she was the only one who would ever find out. Her voice would tremble if she talked, so she shook her head instead.

  “Hmm.” Cal’s eyes tightened even more in the corners. “Have dinner ready for us when we get back. The boys will be hungry after a kill.”

  Just before he walked out, he grabbed a rifle off the wall, and she squeezed her eyes closed as the door slammed behind him. After a kill. Only they weren’t hunting gators anymore. They were hunting shifters. They were hunting people, or at least they were people half the time. They usually went gator at nighttime.

  The sound of the boat engine rattled the house so much that Morgan leaned her back onto the counter, gripping the worn woodblock edges.

  Have dinner ready? She was tired. Tired of everything. She was more than a cook. More than a wallflower. She had opinions, and lately, those didn’t match up with her family. Because that’s what they were, right? Her dad, her childhood friend, Cal, her dad’s friends…they called themselves family so that’s what they must be. Only, lately, she was getting tired of being the value-less one at the table, and she was questioning the real definition of family.

  She turned off the stove and put the pot of roux on the back burner that didn’t have any heat. She didn’t even care if it ruined because, right now, something awful was playing in her mind. Holt Lachlan was somewhere out in that swamp being hunted by her dad, who shouldn’t be hunting any gators right now. It wasn’t gator hunting season. She loved him, but when it came down to it, he was a poacher, and those were no good. His moral compass had been crushed the day he’d come out of his swamper momma, and Morgan knew down to her bones her grandma was just as dark as her dad. And then Morgan had come along, a shame, a girl instead of the boy her dad had so desperately wanted, and to boot, she was soft in his eyes.

  This could be her life for the rest of her days.

  Cheeks flushing with heat, Morgan pushed off the counter and made her way down the short hallway to her tiny room. She’d grown up here, but these walls didn’t feel like a sanctuary anymore. They felt like a prison. It had all started the day Holt Lachlan’s mate, Bre Hayne, had gone on a public news station and talked about Holt like he wasn’t a monster. She had humanized someone that her dad had convinced Morgan was a mo
nster. It had touched something deep inside of her because Morgan had a secret.

  She’d seen the other Caddo Lake Monster three years ago, and she hadn’t talked about him to anyone. Why? She didn’t know exactly. Part of it was fear, but a tiny part of it, deep inside, was that she wanted to protect a man she’d never even formally met. Once upon a time, Holt’s cousin, Liam, had been sitting on the edge of Caddo Lake, and Morgan had watched him turn into a monstrous alligator. Before shifters had been discovered by humans, Morgan had seen one in real life.

  She checked the hallway behind her, listened to make sure none of the boys had stayed behind, and then she made her way to her small, rickety twin bed and scooted the metal frame to the side. Under a box of trinkets, there was a loose floorboard. She pried the nail up with her thumbnail and then settled the floorboard to the side with a soft clunk. Inside the hole was her treasure. It was hope. Hope for a change, hope for a future, hope for a better life. There was the scarf her momma had left behind, and wrapped inside was a plastic bag and $731.52. When she reached $900, she had enough for a deposit and first month’s rent for a tiny efficiency duplex she’d found in town.

  She had a job as a server at Tacky’s, but Dad took most of her pay. He called maintaining this ratty house a “team effort.” She’d been managing to set aside a little cash each shift, though. She had plans for a better life, but just wasn’t there yet.

  She counted her money twice and imagined her apartment. It would only have a mattress in it for a while until she could get her feet under her, but it would be her castle. She would cook for just her, not a bunch of rowdy men. She could get some peace.

  After a kill.

  Those three words were rattling around in her head. Bre had asked the town to protect her shifter mate in that video, and Morgan wanted to be one of the good guys. She’d stood in Tacky’s the night the news story had come on, and she’d watched the town’s reactions to finding out Holt was a shifter. He’d been sitting at the bar with his dog, looking shocked as hell any time someone shook his hand and let him know it was okay to be what he was. It was that look of shock that had touched her heart. She understood him in some strange way.

  She, Morgan Holland, was trash. That’s what everyone saw her as. She came from a trash daddy, couldn’t speak well, wasn’t book smart, didn’t have nice clothes, and she’d been raised too deep in the swamps to ever be a real townie. If someone shook her hand like that and told her it was okay to be what she was, she would’ve looked that shocked, too.

  It was a good moment for her, seeing that people who were different in this town could still be accepted.

  After a kill.

  Holt had a right to snap them illegal bait poles. Gator season wasn’t for several months still, and Dad was hunting illegally the swamps at night, still killing gators, still skinning them out and selling the hides and meat. She got it. Holt liked the gatahs—he was one of them in a way. He was trying to protect them by destroying the bait poles. And Dad would kill him for it.

  “Fuck it.” She wrapped up her money, set it gently back in the floor, and then covered it all up. She put her bed right back in the divots of the worn wood floorboards, grabbed a hoodie, and walked straight out of the house before she could chicken out and change her mind. Her old Chevy was sitting in the yard, beckoning her. Sometimes she just drove to escape her head. Tonight was gonna be one of those nights, but with a mission.

  She jumped in, started the engine, and tossed it into gear in a rush. Don’t chicken out.

  She hit the gas and fishtailed out of there, made it through the woods as fast as she could without slamming into a tree. Took her ten minutes to get out of the swamps and to the main road and then another ten to get to the entrance of Holt Lachlan’s territory. There was a split in his driveway, the right one pointing to his swamp tour business and the left one telling her not to trespass. She took that one, straight to the gatahs nest. She was probably gonna die tonight. If Holt didn’t eat her, her daddy was definitely going to figure out something was amiss when she wasn’t waiting at home with his dinner.

  There was an old blue Ford Highboy in the yard, parked up next to an equally old cream and brown Bronco. She pulled up next to the blue pickup and got out, made her way up to the porch, opened the screen door. Don’t chicken out, don’t chicken out! Morgan knocked on the wooden door, and then she stood back.

  Please be here. Please let Holt be here and not out in those swamps with her Dad hunting him.

  Bre Hayne, the reporter and Holt’s mate, opened the door. She was a pretty redhead, freckled, wearing an oversize T-shirt with the Lachlan Swamp Tours logo on it and shorts so short, Morgan could barely see them under the hem of the shirt.

  “Can I help you?” Morgan asked with a frown.

  “Uuuuh. Shit, I didn’t think this through.” And she wasn’t good with words. Morgan kicked at the whitewashed porch floorboards with the toe of her flip flop. “Um, is Holt here?”

  “No, he’s out at the moment.”

  Heart sinking to the chipped pink nail polish on her toes, Morgan asked, “He’s in the swamps?”

  Bre’s face closed down, and the smile faded. “Who wants to know?”

  Morgan cracked her knuckles. Don’t chicken out. “It’s just I think he’s being hunted. Can you call him back? Get him out of the water?”

  Bre chewed her bottom lip, her eyes steady on Morgan. “Whose hunting?”

  Morgan shook her head. Couldn’t give up her family. Couldn’t be that big of a traitor. “Just…trust me.”

  Bre shook her head, her red locks twitching with the movement. “There’s no calling him back.”

  “I’m Morgan,” she blurted out, dropping her gaze to the porch. “Morgan Holland.”

  “Seamus Holland’s daughter?” she asked. Smart woman, learning the names of the community this fast.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ I’m probably the same age as you. You can call me Bre.” She asked suddenly, “Morgan, is this a trick?”

  Morgan looked her in the eye so this woman could see her honesty when she murmured, “No ma’am. I mean no…Bre. I saw your video in Tacky’s. It was good. If he makes it through tonight, can you tell him to be careful? Stay out of the southside of the swamps for a week if he can. Let things die down.”

  “There’s no telling that man anything. When he’s Changed, the animal is in charge.”

  Morgan bit on her lip and backed toward the porch stairs. “My dad’s gonna be back soon, and he’ll see me missing.”

  “Morgan? Are you okay to go home? Do you want to stay here?”

  “I wish,” she blurted. “Shit. I wish a lot of things. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  Morgan looked down at where Bre was resting her hand protectively over her stomach. “For my family puttin’ yours at risk.”

  Bre dropped her hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah. Good night, okay? And good luck with everything.” Morgan made her way down the stairs and into the yard. She shouldn’t have come here, but now that she’d chosen Hell, she might as well do it thoroughly. She trusted Bre. She was a smart woman, and she would know things. “Hey, Ms. Haynes?”

  “Bre, please.”

  Morgan cleared her throat and said softly, “Bre. Can you give a heads-up to Liam, too?”

  “You know Liam?” she asked, making her way to the edge of the stairs.

  “No. Not really. I just know it would be sad if Holt and him weren’t in the swamps anymore. You have a good night.”

  Morgan ducked her head and then turned around and made her way back to her Chevy. As Bre stood on the porch, cupping her still flat tummy, Morgan gave a two-fingered wave and did a U-turn, then drove away from the Lachlan house.

  Well, tryin’ to be the good guy, she’d chosen to betray her family. Hopefully, something good came out of it, because if Dad ever found out she’d talked to the shifters, she would pay dearl
y.

  But tonight…the risk felt worth it.

  Chapter Two

  Liam sat in the back corner of Tacky’s in his favorite booth, watching her.

  Morgan Holland. Yeah, he knew who she was, but up until this morning when Bre had called him, and mentioned her name, he hadn’t paid too much attention to her. He didn’t pay attention to any girls in this town. He couldn’t afford to get close to any of them. If they figured out what he was, it would put him in danger, sure, but it would put them in danger, too. His alligator was big and dominant and at the age and maturity where he wanted a mate to protect. If he got close to a townie girl and she left him? Well…Liam couldn’t afford to deal with the aftermath, and neither could the town. So Morgan Holland got lumped in with all the other off-limit girls that dwelled in Uncertain.

  Liam studied her. She was perhaps a little different. If he was honest, maybe he had paid a little more attention to her in the past than most, and here was the reason why: three years ago, almost to the month, they’d shared a moment. Oh, he knew who she was, because she’d seen his gator late one night, and as far as he knew, she hadn’t told anyone about him.

  Morgan was pretty. She was Seamus Holland’s daughter, age twenty-something, a swamper girl through and through. Probably got her looks from her mother because his dad was uglier than a mangy swamp rat. She had a thick accent, threadbare clothes, and old sneakers to go with her Tacky’s apron. She was curvy with an hourglass shape he’d always appreciated. She had her mouse-brown hair pulled back in a high ponytail today, and it still reached her shoulders. She didn’t wear much make-up other than mascara, but she didn’t need it. Those moss green eyes could level a man without much help. He wasn’t sitting in her section; he’d purposely chosen one outside of it so he could watch her.

  She was submissive, he could tell. She kept dipping her gaze when her tables talked to her. Mostly kept her attention on the pad she was writing orders on. Her cheeks flushed pink on a dime. Her smile was pretty, but it was tight. Morgan was a worker. She didn’t stop moving, just went from one table to another, constantly bringing out food or drinks, or giving her orders to the cook through the kitchen window. The other servers would hang out and chat between busy times, but twice he saw Morgan walk up to the hostess and ask for extra tables when she slowed down.