Harper's Bride (13 page)

"Ma'am, are you Miz Harper?"

Melissa lurched back to the present and saw
two men approach in a wagon that had pulled into the side street.
In the wagon bed they carried a large, tarp-covered object.

"Yes, I'm Mrs. Harper," she answered,
stopping her oar. Strange how easy it had become for her use
Dylan's last name. She hoped that a wagonload of dirty clothes
wasn't hidden under the tarp.

The driver nodded, then set the brake and
wrapped the lines around the brake handle. "Ma'am, we have your
order back here," he said, and both men jumped down.

"Order? I haven't ordered anything."

"Says here you did." He waved a piece of
paper at her so quickly she saw nothing but the largest print
before he jammed it into his back pocket. She had been able to read
Bill of Sale and Paid. "Leastways, we was hired to make a delivery
here."

The other man, ignoring the conversation, had
already begun to untie the ropes holding the tarp in place.

"But what is it?"

The man unpacking the delivery flipped the
canvas back with a flourish. "Here you go, ma'am."

There Melissa saw a large sign that read,
Mrs. M. Harper’s Laundry. It was beautifully painted, with scrolls
and fancy black lettering outlined in gold leaf.

"Who bought this?" she asked, astounded.

"Well, lessee." The man pulled out the bill
of sale again and handed it to her. She read Dylan's bold
signature, and the price—seventy-five dollars! It seemed no matter
how hard she worked, her obligation to him kept growing. And she
hadn't even asked for this.

"Oh, please, no, I can't accept this. You'll
have to take it back."

"You don't like it?"

"Oh, no, it's a wonderful sign, a beautiful
sign. But I can't keep it. Please, can't you take it back?"

The man rubbed his stubbled chin, obviously
unprepared for this possibility. "No, we can't do that, ma'am. See,
the thing has been bought and paid for proper, and we was paid to
put it up for you. Anyways, what would the sign painter do with it
if we took it back to him? He can't sell it to somebody else, 'less
you know another Miz Harper doing wash in Dawson."

"But I—"

"It's a gift, Melissa."

She turned and saw Dylan approaching. His
stride was graceful and long. The wind whipped his hair away from
his handsome face and flattened his shirt against his torso,
outlining the frame and muscle of him. Intermittent sun highlighted
the gold hair on his arms, making it sparkle. She wished she could
learn to ignore his striking looks.

"You said you wanted a sign. I had one
painted."

"But I meant when I could afford it. I didn't
expect you to pay for it."

He shrugged and gestured at the back of the
wagon. "Well, it's here today, and I wanted to pay for it. So—what
are you going to do, Melissa?"

The delivery man watched her expectantly.
Dylan smiled and looked vaguely triumphant, as if he knew he would
have his own way. Melissa didn't know what else to do but accept.
It bothered her that once again, she'd had no say in a decision
that affected her. But mingling with her annoyance was a sense of
pleasure that Dylan had actually thought of her, and done something
nice to surprise her.

"All right," she said to the men, "put it
up."

*~*~*

The next day was Sunday, and by strict order
of the North West Mounted Police, the lively, sleepless Dawson that
everyone knew six days a week came to a dead stop. Every business
in town, including the saloons and dance halls, closed up tight.
The only sound to be heard was the faint strains of hymns coming
from the Catholic and Anglican missionaries who had traveled to
Dawson to save those who lusted after wealth and its associated
evils. An air of grudging repentance hung over everything.

Dylan chafed at the enforced weekly
inactivity. It was one thing if a man decided to take a day off—it
was another when it was demanded of him. He couldn't even keep the
store closed and work within its walls. Businesses were required to
keep their lights burning so that the Mountie on the patrol could
see inside and be certain that no one broke the law.

On most Sundays, Dylan used the time to walk
through the hills. He missed owning a horse, but so far there
weren't that many to be had up here, or much livestock of any kind.
Two weeks ago Dawson had seen its first cow arrive, floated in by a
man named Miller, who immediately sold the milk for thirty dollars
a gallon.

Today, though, Dylan remained in the room
over the store, looking out at the deserted streets. The sky was
low and gray again. God, he really hated what this town had become.
Six days and nights a week it was loud and crowded. And although it
was surrounded by wilderness, in just a few weeks it had grown to
almost the size of Portland and Seattle.

The town hadn't been so bad when he arrived.
It hadn't been where he wanted to be, but there was a beauty to the
place, a grandeur in its harsh vastness that had appealed to him.
Now it had two banks, two newspapers, five churches, and telephone
poles lined the streets. It was like a damned carnival. The scars
of men's futile dreams crisscrossed the surrounding land, which was
further disfigured by the machinations of those dreams—sluice
boxes, ugly cabins, tailings, and mining shafts.

It seemed like a lifetime since he'd seen the
green, forested hills and sheer rock cliffs that he'd left behind
in The Dalles. The Columbia River, fierce and wide, cut a
relentless course from its headwaters in Canada through the Cascade
Mountains on its way to the Pacific Ocean. In its path it carved
the most beautiful river gorge Dylan had ever seen. He sighed and
jammed his hands into his back pockets.

The desire to see it again, to live upon that
land once more, was what made Dawson bearable. He'd have the money
he needed, he hoped within the next few months. Then he'd go back
to The Dalles and live the way he wanted to. His father would see
that a man didn't have to cheat or lie his way through life to
succeed.

Behind him at the washstand, Melissa was just
finishing giving Jenny her bath in the flowered porcelain bowl. The
sound of water splashing, and the cooing between mother and baby
were not so bad, he conceded. In fact, they were kind of homey. He
glanced over his shoulder in time to see Melissa button Jenny into
one of the dresses she'd made for her.

"How's she doing today?" he asked.

Melissa cradled Jenny in the crook of her
arm, with the baby's dress trailing over, and brought her to the
window. "Oh, she's doing just fine, aren't you, button?" she
replied with a smile, more to Jenny than to him. "She's fed and
washed, and has clean clothes."

In this muted light both mother and child
looked as pretty as the dawn. Although Melissa was busy every day
from morning till evening, Dylan realized that she looked much
better than she had when he first met her. She was still too thin,
but her shape was beginning to round out. Her gray eyes were
clearer, and her skin had acquired a luminous, peach-colored bloom.
Either hard work agreed with her, or liberating her from that
bastard Logan had helped. Hell, maybe it was both, he thought.

One way or the other, she was becoming a
distraction that Dylan hadn't anticipated the day her husband
traded her to him. Back then, clutching the baby to her thinness
she'd looked not much older than a child herself.

That had definitely changed.

He put out a finger for Jenny to grab, and
her little hand closed around it with a strong grip. She stared at
him, seemingly even more fascinated with him than he was with her.
Something about the child stirred his heart. She smelled of fresh
soap and water, not unlike her mother.

Standing this close to Melissa, he felt blood
begin to pound through his veins. The crescents of her lashes made
him think of dark, smooth sable. Her cheek, softly curved, wore a.
pale rose stain like a sunset sky. And her mouth, full and
coral-pink, parted slightly when the tip of her tongue peeked out
to touch her upper lip.

She was a married woman, and Dylan had never
dallied with another man's wife, no matter how tempting. Or, as in
this case, no matter how low the man or thin the couple's bonds had
stretched. His mind might know better, but his body didn't give a
tinker's damn about morals or ethics. It wasn't to have been a
problem when he agreed to this arrangement. But as he gazed at the
slightly damp spot on her lip where her tongue had touched, he
asked himself again what harm could be found in just a kiss—

"Would you like to hold her?" Melissa
asked.

He looked up and found her gray gaze resting
on him. Feeling suddenly self-conscious, he pulled his hand from
Jenny's fist and backed up a step. "Oh, well, no . . .
I . . . " He brushed his hands against his
pants legs and shrugged.

The baby, clearly unhappy with losing Dylan's
finger, scrunched up her face and started crying.

Melissa barely stifled a giggle. Here was
this big man-savage, who kept a nasty-looking knife tied to his
thigh and a meat cleaver under his store counter, a man who could
be so completely intimidating that he'd steal her breath. But he
backed away from Jenny as if she were a twenty-foot-tall ogre.

"She won't bite you—she doesn't have any
teeth," she teased, enjoying her advantage. She knew that Dylan was
curious about Jenny. She'd seen him stop to look at the baby while
she slept, or dangle his watch in front of her, but he'd never
picked her up.

"But she's so little," he said over Jenny's
squalling. "I'd probably hurt her."

She couldn't help but smile. "You won't hurt
her, although it looks like she's pretty upset with you for taking
your finger away from her."

Uncertainty was written on his handsome face.
"Well, I don't know how to—"

Melissa closed the distance he'd opened
between them and thrust Jenny into his arms. He held her awkwardly,
his inexperience glaring.

"You just need to support her head and back,"
she said, and pantomimed the proper technique. "Hold her a little
closer."

As soon as he got the hang of it, Jenny's
bawling stopped, and she stared up at Dylan and smiled, waving a
slobbery fist at him. He smiled back, then looked up at Melissa.
"She's soft." He sounded surprised.

This time Melissa couldn't check her
laughter. "Yes, she is. Babies are soft. Haven't you ever held one
before? Maybe a little brother or sister? Or a niece or
nephew?"

He shook his head. "No. My brother is only a
couple of years younger than me. Anyway, we were never what could
be called close."

This tidbit of information threw another log
onto Melissa's fire of curiosity. It might be her chance to learn
something about Dylan. "Did he come North, too?" Picking up the
washbasin, she walked to the door.

His laugh was short and biting. "Scott? Hell,
no. As far as I know, he's still in The Dalles, following my
father's example and learning his ways."

"Is that bad?" Balancing the bowl on one hip,
she opened the door and stepped out to the landing to toss Jenny's
bathwater over the railing.

"Yeah, it is for the people the old man
forecloses with his banking business." He shook his head and
chuckled again, keeping his gaze fixed on the baby. "He never
seemed to think he did anything wrong. I suppose his motto could
be, do unto others to serve yourself." Holding Jenny as if he
carried a priceless art object, he sat down in a chair at the
table. "Besides, Scott has a wife." This last he said with special
bitterness.

She closed the door again and considered him.
"You don't look like a banker's son. At least not the way I'd
imagine one to look."

"Yeah? And what does a banker's son look
like?"

"Well, you know, more starched, I guess." She
gestured in his direction. "Shorter hair, and probably no knife or
buckskin pants."

"That's what my brother and father thought,
too."

"Does your family know you came up here?"

He frowned then, his brows lowering to rest
on his eyelids, and making him look as fierce as he had the day she
saw him wield the meat cleaver. He stood and carried Jenny to her
crate.

"No, they don't know where I am, and they
aren't my
family
." The word was as sharp as a broken bottle.
"I was the sand in their picnic lunch—the conscience that kept
asking them what they were doing—and they were embarrassed by me.
My father and my brother put widows, children, and old men out of
their homes if they couldn't pay their mortgages. Piled their
belongings up in front of their houses and told them, it was
nothing personal . . . just business. It was
just greed. I was ashamed of them, and I don't care if I never see
them again. Not exactly what you'd call a loyal group, huh?" He
walked back to the window, beyond which drifted the tolling of a
distant church bell.

When he was mad, he seemed to fill whatever
space he occupied. He looked taller, broader at the shoulder,
bigger than ever. Strange, Melissa was less afraid of him this
time, perhaps because she realized that his anger was not really
directed at her. But it was a palpable thing, growling at the
past.

"You've cut yourself off from everyone? Even
your mother?" She thought of her own mother and that she'd never
see her again, and felt a catch in her heart.

"She died during an influenza epidemic. I was
about eleven, I guess. Anything else you want to know?" He turned
and faced her then.

The question sounded more like an accusation,
and she realized that he was more vexed than she'd thought.

"Yes, what do you want for dinner?" It was a
silly question, but it just popped out of her mouth.

He stared at her, then burst out laughing.
His smile revealed straight, white teeth, and dimples. The tension
in the small room evaporated. He shook his head ruefully and rubbed
the back of his neck. "Melissa, you're a different kind of woman,"
he admitted.