Harper's Bride (11 page)

She wasn't surprised by his veiled objection
to her laundry business. She'd sensed his disapproval yesterday.
Plunging the shirt into clear rinse water, she laughed. "Mr.
Dubois, if women sat on their tuffets like Miss Muffett, sewing a
fine seam and drinking tea, not much would get done. There would be
no clothes washed or meals cooked or children reared." Wringing out
the shirt, she flung it over the clothesline and groped in her
pocket for clothespins.

Rafe gestured at the crowd moving in both
directions on Front Street. "But in a frontier mining town, the
public location of your business might create a problem for
you."

She took a clothespin out of her mouth. "Mr.
Dubois, I hope you know how much I appreciate everything you and
Dylan have done for Jenny and me. I don't know what might have
happened to us if not for you both. But I don't want to have to
depend on anyone except myself." She faltered a moment, hating the
little catch she heard in her voice. "Dylan has plans for his
future that don't have anything to do with us. He's told me that
he'll leave here when he's had enough of it. Where will that leave
us if I don't do something now? To be alone in the world with a
child to care for, and no way to do it . . ." She couldn't finish
the sentence.

Rafe glanced at Jenny, sleeping in her little
nook, then rose stiffly from his seat. "I certainly see your point,
dear madam." He patted her arm, then turned to leave. "I see your
point."

*~*~*

By the end of the day the front of Melissa's
dress was wet from waist to knees, her back ached as if it would
snap, and her hands were chapped. Except for quick breaks to tend
the baby and have lunch herself, she had worked twelve hours.

At seven in the evening, under a sun as
bright as midafternoon back home, she trudged upstairs with Dylan's
clothes and a bundle of ironing in one arm, and Jenny in the other.
She felt almost as weary as she had the day she'd crossed Chilkoot
Pass on the journey up here. The muscles in her shoulders and arms
ached from the scrubbing and wringing, and her hands shook a bit
from the strain.

But even in her exhaustion she smiled to
herself. Inside her apron pocket was a small leather pouch that
contained nearly forty dollars in gold dust. And that was something
she hadn't gotten for crossing the pass. Forty dollars! Back home,
laborers received about a dollar and a quarter a day.

In her whole life Melissa had never had more
than a dollar she could call her own. This gold dust she had earned
herself, and no one would drink it up or take it from her.

Unless, of course, Dylan Harper took a mind
to do just that. At the thought, Melissa pressed a protective hand
over the bulge in her pocket, knowing even as she did that she
wouldn't stand a prayer against him if he decided to take her
money. Or anything else, for that matter. He was a big, strapping
man—every inch of him hardened to lean muscle by hard work. She
would do well to remember that he held the upper hand in their
arrangement, and that he could change the rules to suit him anytime
he wanted.

It wasn't a pleasant thought. Yet, even so,
Melissa couldn't help but recall how kind he'd been to her thus
far. Until fate had flung her into Dylan's path, she'd believed
that the years of grinding poverty had nearly smothered out all the
hope in her, and that her marriage to Coy had finished the job. But
she felt hope stirring again, coming to life after years of
silence. Maybe today was just the beginning of something a bit
better.

"We're going to be all right, little Jenny,"
she whispered to the sleeping baby, then kissed her silky cheek. "I
think we might be all right."

Apparently all the activity and new sights
had worn out the little girl, because she slept the deep,
untroubled sleep of childhood. Melissa couldn't help but smile. The
baby's tender mouth made suckling motions, but otherwise she was
far away in a dreamy landscape.

Inside the small room Melissa dumped the load
of dry wash on the bed and put Jenny down in her crate. Dylan
hadn't come upstairs yet, and she was relieved he hadn't. With all
the goings on, she hadn't given a thought to dinner yet. Heavens,
she hadn't even stoked the fire in the stove.

Eyeing the kitchen chair with yearning, she
decided to sit for a moment, just to take the ache out of her back.
But she didn't have time to dawdle—if Dylan's meals weren't ready
when he wanted them, or if she didn't do the other chores he
expected of her, she worried that he'd put an end to her business.
She couldn't risk that.

After a brief rest Melissa hurried to the bed
to sort out and fold Dylan's clothes. Holding up one of his shirts,
she paused to study it. She let her hand skim over the fabric and
envisioned the span of his shoulders, the length of his torso.
Putting the shirt aside to be ironed, she picked up a pair of his
denims, lean-waisted and long-legged.

She knew so little about the man who wore
these clothes. Outwardly, he was handsome, rugged, and tall. His
features were even and well proportioned. But what life he'd come
from and why he was here were mysteries to her. He'd been in Dawson
before the gold rush began, so Klondike fever hadn't been what
brought him North.

He was by turns, gentle and savage. He had
taken her in when he didn't have to, and in doing so had let Coy, a
worthless deadbeat, wriggle out of a large debt that Dylan didn't
expect to be repaid. Yet when a man in his store had attacked his
integrity, his reaction had been swift, violent, and
frightening.

But the one thing Melissa found the most
troubling was her growing attraction to Dylan. She told herself it
was only a silly, girlish infatuation for the man because he'd been
kind to her and Jenny. That he was almost as fearsome as he'd been
the first day she met him. And the arguments nearly worked. But not
quite.

Something in her made her breath catch when
Dylan was near. And it wasn't giggling or girlish at all.

Impatiently, Melissa shook off the thoughts
and hastily folded his shirts and jeans. Her most important task
was to keep her mind on her own business and her future a tall,
blond man was not part of either. Nor were she and Jenny part of
his plans. He'd made that clear from the beginning, and after all,
legally she was still bound to Coy.

She carried Dylan's clothes to the big trunk
at the end of the bed, where he stowed his belongings. Lifting the
lid released the heavily masculine scents of buckskin and shaving
soap that she found alluring. It was like sniffing freshly ground
coffee, or the sweet odor of pipe tobacco. Inside, she discovered
the usually neat contents in a tangled hodgepodge of drawers,
socks, pants, shirts, and long johns. She remembered his plowing
through the trunk early this morning. He'd dressed in a hurry to
meet a steamer captain down at the waterfront.

She was tempted to leave this mess as she'd
found it. She had worked hard all day, and this was an extra chore
she didn't want. But she couldn't very well throw tidy things on
top of the jumble and slam the lid closed. Sighing, she knelt in
front of the trunk and began repacking everything. When she pulled
out a pair of buckskins, something metallic fell out of their folds
and clattered to the floor.

Glancing down, she saw a small oval picture
frame lying on the planking. It held a photograph of a beautiful
dark-haired young woman. Slowly, Melissa picked it up to study it.
The woman wore her hair up, but the style couldn't disguise its
rich, heavy waves. The low-cut neckline of her gown revealed a
long, slim throat graced with a strand of pearls. Matching pearl
eardrops hung from her small lobes, and in her face, captured for
all time by the photographer, Melissa saw supreme self-confidence.
She looked like a woman who had never asked for a man's permission
in her life, and was accustomed to having her own way.

Melissa sat back on her heels. A sweetheart?
she wondered. A wife? That was an unsettling thought, but of
course, it was possible. Many of the men up here had left behind
wives and families. The picture frame itself was silver, wrought
with intricate detail that bespoke the photograph's importance. But
as Melissa considered the woman's image, she thought that something
about her seemed slightly off kilter.

Beautiful though she was, she didn't look as
if she were the type to attract Dylan Harper. She didn't know why;
if she'd thought she knew little about Dylan before, now she felt
even more ignorant.

Melissa wiped the glass with the hem of her
apron and examined the picture again. Had he held this woman's
hand? Stroked the curve of her cheek with a gentle touch? Almost
unconsciously, Melissa reached up to graze her fingertips over the
nearly healed bruise on her own cheek.

Had he held her in his arms and kissed her?
Suddenly, the door opened and Melissa, still kneeling before the
trunk with the photograph clutched in her hand, looked up to find
Dylan towering over her. She'd been so engrossed with her own
thoughts, she hadn't heard him come up the stairs. Flooded with
guilt and frozen by spontaneous terror, she felt the hot blood of
embarrassment fill her cheeks.

He was a giant glaring down at her—a wild,
frowning man with a long torso set upon longer legs. "Did you find
what you were looking for, Melissa?"

She glanced at the pile of clothes, and then
at the photograph as if seeing it for the first time. She realized
how this must look—as if she were snooping through his belongings,
and, oh, God, maybe even stealing something. Hastily, she dropped
the picture frame back into the trunk as though it were a burning
coal.

"I—" she began, but her voice was just a dry
croak. Her throat felt as if it were closing. She gripped one of
his shirts that she'd washed earlier and held it out. "I was just
folding your things. Th-they were all— I wasn't prying! Truly I
wasn't. The photograph was tangled in your clothes and it fell
out." To her horror, she felt her eyes begin to sting with rising
tears. She was so tired, she didn't have much strength to
completely stop them, so she turned her head and quickly brushed
them away.

He took the shirt from her and stuffed it
into the trunk along with everything else, then dropped the lid.
"From now on, leave my clothes out. I'll put them away," he said,
his voice deadly quiet.

She looked at his set, blank face, but could
see nothing there, not accusation, not clemency. It was as if his
thoughts were far away. Miserable, she nodded and rose from her
knees to begin dinner.

Dylan flopped on the bed and sighed, his
stomach drawing into a knot. Plainly, she was still afraid of him,
but he hadn't meant to scare her.

She wasn't being nosy, he supposed, but he
didn't like her poking around in his gear. He might not have minded
so much if she hadn't dug up that photograph.

He hadn't looked at Elizabeth's picture since
the night he threw it in his with his clothes almost three years
ago, and he wished he hadn't seen it just now. He still remembered
that night so clearly—Griff Harper ordering him off the property,
the hired hands scurrying for the bunkhouse in the face of that
final, and ugliest, explosive family battle. After gathering up his
belongings in a fit of white-hot fury, Dylan had gotten on his
horse and galloped through the moonlight down to the dock in town
to wait for the steamboat that would carry him downriver and away
from The Dalles. Before he'd left, he paid a kid to take his
gelding back to the house; he'd wanted nothing that Griff Harper
thought belonged to him.

Dylan had managed to bury most of the
memories, but not the one of beautiful, scheming Elizabeth. It was
dumb, he supposed, to hang onto her photograph. It only reminded
him of what a damned fool he'd been to let himself fall prey to her
manipulating. But she had been so good at it, so accomplished, he
never once suspected that she didn't care about him.

Ned Tanner didn't want a woman who was
smarter than he was? He had news for Ned—there were far worse
trials a woman could heap upon a man, and no one knew that better
than Dylan.

He glanced up at Melissa as she peeled
potatoes. "How did your first day go?" he asked, breaking the
silence.

Keeping her back to him, she pumped water
into the pot holding the quartered potatoes. Her movements were
guarded, as if her arms were stiff. He wondered if she might be
sore from the unaccustomed work.

"I washed a lot of clothes."

Dylan already knew that. He tried to imagine
Elizabeth standing over a washtub for hours, doing laundry for
less-than-fastidious miners, but the picture wouldn't even form in
his mind.

He hoisted himself from the bed and walked
over to Jenny's crate. She was just waking from her nap and still
had one thumb fixed firmly in her mouth. He didn't know anything
about kids, but he had to admit that she captivated him. Sometimes
he was almost curious enough to pick her up and hold her to his
shoulder. But what if he dropped her? Even if he didn't, she was so
little, he might hurt her somehow.

So he settled for brushing her velvet cheek
with the back of his finger. Compared to her head, his hand looked
enormous. When she saw him, she didn't flinch in fear. She waved
her arms and kicked, and gave him a big grin, showing off her
toothless gums. He couldn't help but smile back at her. "Hey,
little Jenny," he whispered. Then louder he asked, "And the baby?
Did she get along all right?"

"I think she enjoyed the change of scenery
and all the activity." Melissa tried to carry the heavy iron pot to
the stove, but obviously her overused muscles wouldn't cooperate,
and it clanked back into the steel sink.

Watching her struggle while he did nothing
made him feel a bit like a heel. He knew she'd worked even harder
today than he had. He crossed the floor. "Here," he said, and
reached in front of her to grab the wooden grip, "let me."