Harper's Bride (9 page)

"Are you going alone?" Melissa asked. It
seemed like a fearsome thing for a woman to do. Skagway was a raw,
wild place, far more so than Dawson.

Belinda waved her hand dismissively.
"Absolutely. I have to make sure the packers I hired don't break
those chandeliers, or cheat me."

She bade them good-bye then, and bustled down
the street like a whirlwind through the crowd toward the site of
the Fairview to harass her construction workers.

Dylan chuckled again and shook his head as he
watched her go. "She's a real piece of work, that Belinda."

He took her arm as they walked toward the
store for soap. Melissa had to admit that she liked the feel of his
hand under her elbow.

"Thank you for, well, for not embarrassing me
in front of her." She looked up at him, at the way his streaked
hair caught in the wind and blew back behind his shoulders. Had she
noticed the curve of his full mouth before?

"Oh, you mean I didn't belch or scratch where
I shouldn't?" He grinned, showing her dimples and white, straight
teeth.

The joke was so completely unexpected,
Melissa burst into laughter. The Dylan Harper she knew didn't make
jokes. Or so she had thought.

"No, that's not what I meant. You didn't have
to tell her that I'm your wife."

"What else could I have said?" His smile
faded. Releasing her arm, he shoved his hands into his front
pockets, as if suddenly self-conscious. "I don't think she believed
it, anyway."

"Maybe not," Melissa said softly, almost
wishing he still held her elbow. But his deed counted for more than
his credibility. When he had told her that she could use his name,
she never once expected that he would go out of his way to
introduce her as his wife.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Rafe Dubois had told
her the truth when he said that Dylan Harper was a gentleman.

*~*~*

"You want to work? Our agreement was that you
would work here for me. What more do you think you can do when you
have a baby to watch?" Dylan asked when they went back
upstairs.

She had broached the subject of her working
with trepidation. If he'd planned on her looking after only his own
wants, he might forbid her from doing anything else, and be angry
besides But after meeting Belinda Mulrooney, Melissa had given more
and more thought to making some money of her own.

Dylan stood at the mirror over the washstand,
barefoot and wearing only a pair of jeans while he shaved. The sun,
up since three-thirty, was bright beyond the canvas curtains and
fell across his bare back, outlining the plane of his shoulders
with light and shadow. Melissa tried not to stare at the ridges of
muscles that flanked the long hollow of his spine, or the way his
jeans seemed to hang suspended below his narrow waist and follow
the curve of his backside. She didn't want to notice any of those
things—he wasn't her husband and she didn't want another one after
Coy. But she found the sight hard to ignore.

"Coy told me that saloon girls make a hundred
dollars a night just for peddling drinks and dancing with miners,"
she replied, shifting her attention to the sink full of breakfast
dishes that she was washing.

He looked at her over his shoulder, his razor
stilled in his hand, and the lower half of his face hidden by
shaving soap. "Jesus, you want to work in a saloon?"

"No, of course I don't. But I've heard about
women running roadhouses and dressmaking shops, and making a lot of
money at it."

"How much money do you need?" His tone turned
oddly brittle. "I'm not charging you for room and board."

She took a quiet breath before answering. "I
mean no offense, but you said yourself that this is temporary. That
when you decide you've had enough you're going back to Oregon. I
have to be ready for that day."

He turned back toward the mirror. "I told you
that I'll give you enough to make a new start somewhere else," he
mumbled.

"I really want to have money of my own, as
much as I can make. Anyway, I still intend to pay you the twelve
hundred dollars Coy owed you, and any other money it's cost you to
take in Jenny and me."

"I don't expect you to cover Logan's debt. I
told you that was between him and me, and you're not responsible
for it."

He almost sounded irritated, but she couldn't
imagine why. She'd expect him to be glad to get his money back.
"Just the same, I will pay you in Coy's place."

Dylan drew a deep breath and swallowed the
surge of bitter annoyance that rose abruptly within him. Coy Logan.
He thought that if she mentioned him one more time, he'd search out
the bastard and give him the beating he so richly deserved. And she
wanted a lot of money? Elizabeth had wanted lots of money too,
badly enough to reveal the object of her true love—herself. Why did
it seem that the women he'd known in his life put a higher value on
cash than anything else?

He spoke to her reflection in his shaving
mirror. "What do you know how to do? Have you got goods to sell, or
a skill people will pay for?" He tipped his head back to shave his
throat.

She thought for a moment. "I can't dance or
sing if that's what you mean."

Dylan would dispute that. He didn't know if
she could dance, but she had the sweetest voice he'd ever heard.
The few times he'd been around when she sang to Jenny, he would sit
at the table and pretend to be busy with some task just for the
pleasure of listening to her. But for such a timid woman, she was
as stubborn as a mule.

He stole another glance at her as she
scrubbed the frying pan. Apparently she had given up trying to keep
her hair in a knot and now wore it in long, heavy braid that swung
back and forth behind her when she moved.

In the brief gap of silence, he heard her
sigh.

"I guess I don't know how to do much of
anything besides cook and clean. That was all I ever did at home in
Portland." She sounded defeated. "I never earned anything for
it."

"Yeah? Why did you get stuck with it?"

She paused a long moment before answering.
"My mother worked as a maid for a wealthy family, so she only came
home one day a week. The rest of the time I took care of my
brothers and my father." He heard a sharp edge of resentment in her
voice.

"Things weren't so good there, huh?"

She paused on her way to the landing to throw
out the dishwater. "No, they weren't."

She didn't elaborate, and Dylan didn't ask
her to. He knew the story wouldn't be a happy one, and hearing the
details would just make it harder to keep his distance.

And he was having some trouble with that as
it was. Sometimes her image rose in his mind when he least wanted
to see it. Hell, he was just a man, and having her in his bed, even
with that damned rice sack between them, gave him all sorts of
notions. He kept telling himself that it was because he hadn't had
a woman in months. It had to be that—it had to be the reason he
sometimes woke in the middle of the night and propped up on his
elbow to watch her sleep.

Let her find work, he decided, shrugging off
the picture in his head. So much the better for him—he wouldn't try
to stop her. If she learned a way to make a living, he'd be able to
send her on her way without a twinge of conscience over how she
would fare alone in the world with an infant. And he could go back
home to The Dalles, buy the land he longed for, and get on with his
own life.

He wiped the rest of the soap off his face
and put on his shirt. It was nicely ironed. The collar and cuffs
bore just a touch of starch, and all the buttons were sewn on.
Until Melissa had moved in, he'd usually washed his clothes in a
bucket and draped them over the chairs to dry. Then he'd put them
on as they'd dried, wrinkled and stiff as boards. This was a
luxury. A man could get used to sweet singing and good meals and
ironed shirts.

He stopped himself. Yeah, a man could get
used to a lot of things—the scent of a woman's hair, the lure of
her body, the teasing softness of her voice. And that was when his
troubles would begin.

*~*~*

After dragging the rest of the wash
downstairs, Melissa put Jenny in her crate and set the box on a
chair next to the washtub. The morning clouds had burned off, and
the sun began to emerge. Dylan had put up an awning to create a
roomy shelter, and strung rope between two pairs of poles to give
her a clothesline. A little stove that he'd set up just behind the
building provided her with a place to heat water.

It wasn't the best arrangement—she didn't
know what she'd do come fall when the weather began to grow cold.
And it felt strange to do wash in full view of the passing throng,
who had only to look down the side street to see her working here.
For now, though, the days were mild and this spot would have to
serve.

Up and down Front Street the incessant racket
of hammers and saws echoed as new three- and four-story buildings
rose from the place that, until a little over a year ago as Dylan
had pointed out, had been nothing more than a few tents and a moose
pasture. At least the muddy streets had finally begun to dry out
under the June sun.

Jenny gurgled and waved her fists, apparently
pleased with her change of location. Looking at her, Melissa felt
her heart swell with love. She was such a beautiful child, so full
of promise, her future bright with whatever possibilities Melissa
would be able to give her.

"Would you like to hear a song, button?"
Melissa asked as she plunged her hands into the soapy tub to scrub
a diaper. She took up Stephen Foster's ode to Jeannie, but changed
her name to Jenny, and her light brown hair to pale blond. The
little girl smiled and watched her, fascinated, as though she
understood the words.

After she washed her own things, she began
Dylan's clothes. They carried the scent of him, not an unpleasant
smell, and one that Melissa had come to recognize, just as she knew
the sound of his footsteps on the plank flooring in the store.
While she worked, she sang softly, as much to amuse herself as to
keep the baby happy. Melissa was in the middle of "Shenandoah" when
she looked up and saw a man standing just at the edge of the
awning.

She sprang up straight from the washtub, her
heart lurching around in her chest. "Wh-what do you want?"

He looked like any of the other grimy, tired
men she saw on Front Street, bearded and wearing a battered hat. He
was about thirty, she thought, perhaps a few years older than
Dylan.

" 'Scuse me, ma'am, I don't mean no harm. I
was just passing by"—he pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward
the duckboards—"and I thought I heard singing."

Melissa put herself between the stranger and
Jenny. "I was singing to the baby," she said while mentally
calculating the distance to the front door of Harper's Trading.

He nodded, his face shadowed by a trace of
melancholy. The clearing sky behind him contrasted with his
expression. "It sounded so sweet, I just wanted to listen for a
minute. Sort of reminded me of home, that's all."

Melissa relaxed slightly. "Have you been gone
long?" She didn't bother to ask if he'd come from far away.
Everyone had traveled a long distance to get to this place.

He nodded. "Yes, ma'am, I left Sacramento
just about a year ago now, but it seems ten times that. The missus
and my two girls are waiting there for me. I promised I'd come home
a rich man." He chuckled humorlessly. "I guess I can't go yet, but
I sure miss them."

"I imagine they'd rather that you were there
with them, rich or not."

"Oh . . . after I talked so big about what a
grand life we'd have, and all the fine things we could buy, I don't
feel like I can go home a failure." His rueful smile all but
admitted the foolishness of his logic.

He sounded determined and yet hopeless at the
same time, and Melissa could think of nothing else to tell him.
"Well, good luck to you. I hope you don't have to be away from your
family much longer."

"Thank you for the singing, ma'am. And good
luck with your business, too." He gestured at her washtub.

"Oh, no, not a business. This is just my
family's wash. My baby's." She glanced at Dylan's wet shirt in her
hands. "And my husband's."

The stranger looked down at his own muddy
clothes, and then at her. "Ma'am, forgive me if I seem like I'm
getting above myself, but— Being out in the gold fields most of the
time, I don't get any clothes washed regular-like. Generally, I
wear them till I can't stand them no more, then I buy new duds and
throw the old ones away. I guess it seems like a waste of money.
Would you consider— Well, ma'am, could you be persuaded to do
laundry for me if I paid you?"

Someone wanted to pay her to wash clothes?
All these years she had performed such work in exchange for nothing
more than a roof over her head.

"I should probably ask my husband," she said.
Melissa was unaccustomed to being permitted to think for herself.
In fact, none of the men she had known believed a woman capable of
intelligent thought.

Then she remembered Belinda Mulrooney and her
enterprising spirit, and the germ of the idea she'd discussed with
Dylan began to take hold. Melissa could probably do very well in a
town with thousands of men who were far away from the domestic
services of home. This might be just the chance she was looking
for.

"On second thought, I'll do your wash, Mr. .
. ."

"Willis, ma'am, John Willis."

"I'm . . ." She faltered a moment. "I'm Mrs.
Harper, Mr. Willis. Bring your clothes." In one of the most daring
decisions Melissa had ever made, she added, "And tell your friends
to bring theirs, too."

*~*~*

"I'm going to need a lot of soap, I guess,
and starch, and a couple more washtubs." Melissa ticked the items
off on her fingers as she paced in front of Dylan's counter. She'd
hurried into the store with Jenny, anxious to get her new venture
under way. The prospect of planning for her own destiny was
terrifying but exciting, too. "Oh, and I'll need to string more
clothesline. I guess I'll have to get a pair of those gold scales
too, since I'm starting tomorrow." She stopped then and considered
both Rafe and Dylan. She realized that she was the only one
talking, and an alarm sounded in her mind. In making her grand
plans she'd forgotten how much men disliked women to think for
themselves. "That is, if it's all right with you. I'll still take
care of the chores upstairs."