Harper's Bride (18 page)

"That's all right. I don't mind."

He poured a cup of the bitter black liquid
and gave it to her. She held it without drinking it, as if she were
a mannequin in a shop window. Pulling up a stool, he sat down,
wishing he could think of something eloquent to say. Under the
circumstances it didn't seem right to tell her he was glad that
Logan would never pester her again.

"I'm sorry, Melissa."

At that, she looked up at him with eyes
glittering with tears. God, did she still care about that no
good—?

"But I'm not sorry," she said. He heard anger
and fear creeping into her voice. "I'm not sorry at all. I'm glad
he's dead, and I shouldn't be. I feel so guilty about it. Remorse
is one of the only feelings that elevates us above animals, and I
feel no remorse for Coy." She leaped from the chair so suddenly,
Dylan worried that she might drop Jenny. But she put the coffee on
the counter and with a kiss, laid the baby in her crate.

"You don't have to be sorry, Melissa," he
said. "He chose his own path and made his own decisions. He was a
grown man, even if he didn't act like one."

Color returned to her face, and fury, perhaps
a lifetime's worth, erupted in her. "But he's dead now. I should be
able to forgive him. Forgive the times he hit me and belittled me
and ordered me around like I was a—a dog. I should overlook the
names he called me—stupid, dummy, wh-whore. Just like my father!"
She paced the plank flooring, and her damp skirts slapped against
her ankles. She held her hands interlaced in front of her as if she
appealed for understanding, while tears streaked her face. "I can't
forgive any of it. I never loved Coy, but if he'd treated me
decently, I could have been a good wife to him. Maybe I could have
even learned to like him. Instead, I hated him and I wished him
dead so many times that now it's come true!"

The mousey, timid female Dylan had first met
was completely gone. In her place stood a person outraged by the
wrongs she had endured. She scrubbed her tear-wet face.

At that moment Ned Tanner walked into the
store, raindrops beading on his oiled hair. His curious, eager gaze
swept over Melissa, who looked as wild-eyed as a harpy. Dylan
jumped from his stool and literally pushed Ned back out to the
duckboards.

"But Dylan, I need a new ham—"

"I'm closed, Ned," he barked and slammed the
door.

The interruption took some of the fire out of
her tirade. Dylan gripped her shoulders on her next pass over the
flooring. She wasn't a small woman, but she felt as delicate as a
bird beneath his touch.

"Honey, you know you can't wish someone dead.
It doesn't work that way. And it doesn't matter if you don't
forgive him. That he died didn't change what he did to you. Logan
was a drunk and a bully, and he was headed for a bad end." Dylan
thought back to the raging fury that had coursed through his own
veins when he'd held his knife to Logan's scrawny neck. "If he
hadn't died of pneumonia, somebody probably would have killed him
eventually."

She turned her face up to his, and the
anguish he saw in her expression twisted his heart. He hoped that
Coy Logan was in hell, getting his worthless ass fried for what
he'd done to Melissa.

"But in a way, if I can't at least be sorry
that he's dead, it makes me no better than he was."

He shook his head. "It makes you human. It's
human to be angry at someone who hurts you."

"Do you think so, Dylan?"

Oh, she had a way of looking at a man as if
he knew more than God himself. "Sure. Otherwise you'd be a martyr.
And martyrs are so tiresome."

She gave him a wobbly little smile that went
straight to his soul. "Maybe."

He dropped an arm over her shoulders. "You'll
never forget how he treated you, but I'm betting that after enough
time goes by the memory of it will fade. It will be a part of your
life that's in the past." He nodded at Jenny. "And she won't
remember it at all."

"That matters more than anything," Melissa
agreed. "It was so horrible to hear my father call my mother those
awful names and treat her like she was his servant. He—he must have
been kind to me some times in my life, but I can't remember them. I
only remember the bad times."

He sighed. "Maybe someday they'll fade too."
Though their pasts were vastly different—hers one of poverty and
his, privilege—neither of them had good memories to hold to their
hearts. And as he looked down into her face, for just this moment
it seemed as if they had only each other.

Giving in to the greedy urge to hold her,
Dylan enfolded her in his arms. To his surprise, she relaxed in his
embrace, and his body responded with a pounding ache that made him
think about flinging the rice sack upstairs out the window. Her
lips, soft and pink, were just inches from his own. Her hair,
fragrant with rain and soap, lay against his jaw. The other night
he'd called himself a fool for nearly kissing her, and he'd
promised it would never happen again. Right now, with her so close
to him, sweet-smelling and soft beneath his touch, he couldn't
remember why . . . 

Melissa felt Dylan's finger under her chin,
tipping her face up to his, and it seemed like the most natural
thing in the world. She stood mesmerized by his eyes, entranced by
the long, sun-streaked hair that brushed his wide shoulders. Just
above the hollow in his throat she saw his pulse beating, strong,
steady. His wild maleness called out to her, asking her femininity
to answer.

When his mouth covered hers, thoughts of Coy
and her father and Dawson retreated like fog under a blazing sun.
His lips were hot and full and soft, and the feel of them was like
nothing she'd ever known. The peculiar quickening that she had felt
around him before doubled its tempo now, suffusing her body with
heat and restlessness. He traced her lips with his tongue, silky
and warm, so that they were as moist as his own. Melissa's pulse
jumped and her breath deepened. He tasted ever so faintly of
coffee, and smelled of buckskin and freshly cut wood. Returning his
kiss, she reached up timidly to put her arms around his neck,
bringing her torso in contact with his. At her touch, he drew in a
swift, deep breath.

Nothing existed for Melissa but Dylan and his
kiss.

Jenny began fussing for her dinner then, and
the moment ended.

Melissa pulled back, feeling a little
awkward. "I guess she's getting—"

"You'll want to be feeding—" They both spoke
at the same time.

He smiled. "Will you be all right now?"

"Yes." She smiled shyly.

Leaning over, he put a light kiss on her
cheek. "You go on, then. I'll be up a little later for dinner."

She plucked Jenny from the crate and cast a
lingering look at him. "Then I won't rush to get it started."

He opened the door for her, and as Melissa
walked out to the duckboard, she realized that she felt a lot
better.

That was due mostly, she knew, to Dylan
Harper.

*~*~*

It took a while, but mingled with the turmoil
in her heart over her feelings for Dylan, and the stunning news of
Coy's death, Melissa finally realized one important thing.

She was free.

Not just because Rafe Dubois had said so in
the Yukon Girl Saloon. And not simply because she had stopped using
her husband's name.

She was truly free—an independent woman. Coy
Logan would never appear at her washtubs again, demanding that she
come with him. He would never hit her again or call her names or
make any other demands of her.

She had the right and the freedom to live her
life as she saw fit, to raise Jenny and give her every advantage
she could afford. Just how she would do it, and what it would
entail, she didn't know yet. That evening after dinner, while the
baby slept in her new cradle, a conversation with Dylan made her
stop and think about it.

"What do you want from life?" he asked. He
sat at the table with his chair tipped back against the wall. From
the window a shaft of evening sunlight fell across the chiseled
planes of his face, touching his lashes with gold.

Melissa sat across from him, taking small,
careful finishing stitches on a new dress she'd made for Jenny.
What did she want? She had never really stopped to think about it,
although she supposed the truth had been there all along.

"To be safe and comfortable." She paused to
wet the end of her thread before putting it through the needle's
eye. "I never wanted to be rich, really. Well, I guess I used to
daydream about the grand house where my mother worked, and I'd
pretend that I lived there and had servants to wait on me and a
driver to take me around in an automobile. But that was like
putting myself in a fairy tale."

"Safe and comfortable. That sounds
reasonable. I just want to raise horses."

"Horses?" This was a revelation, she thought.
As far as she knew, he didn't even own a horse in Dawson.

"It's all I ever wanted."

"You must have wanted a wife, a family?"
Melissa blessed the opportunity to pose the question.

He frowned. "At one time I thought I did. I
know better now."

Disappointed by his ambiguous reply, she
asked, "How did you get interested in horses?"

"My father and brother were all caught up in
their banking and mortgages and damnable loan foreclosures. Even if
they had been less ruthless, that wasn't the kind of business I
wanted to be in. I told the old man that I could make a success of
horse breeding if he'd let me give it a try. I invested everything
I had to get started, and his bank loaned me the rest. When he
realized that I could make money at it, he agreed to let me use his
stables."

"Who did you sell the horses to?"

"A couple of the ranchers in the area took a
few. But most of them went to the army at Fort Vancouver. These
weren't nags rescued from the glue pot—I sold them fine, blooded
horseflesh that were to be ridden by officers."

She adjusted her thimble. "You must have come
North with a lot of money."

He shook his head. "I was down to about four
mares and a stallion when I left The Dalles. I'd sold the rest to
pay off most of that bank loan—I hated having that thing hanging
over my head. Then I planned to rebuild my stock. But those plans
fell through."

She wanted to ask why he'd left, what had led
to his split with his family. But the last time she'd asked about
it, he'd gotten angry.

Once he'd started, though, he continued as if
in answer to the question she didn't dare ask. His eyes had taken
on a distant look, his expression conveying that he was no longer
in this small room above the store, but far away and trapped in the
past. Melissa had an almost overpowering urge to lean across the
table to touch his hand, to let him know that his feelings mattered
to her, to tell him she understood how it felt to be plagued by
memories.

"I knew I didn't fit in with the rest of the
family," he said huskily. "I was always different. I grew up in a
big house with a cook and a maid, but I didn't care about that
stuff."

Melissa lowered the dress to her lap and
stared at him. This man with his long hair, with the knife on his
thigh, and an Indian amulet around his neck—he'd grown up in a
house with someone like her own mother to wait on him?

A huff of laughter rumbled out of him, as if
he'd read her mind. "Yeah, you wouldn't know it to look at me,
huh?" He toyed with a tiny pearl dress button on the table. His
hands were nicely shaped, she thought, long-fingered and
strong-looking.

"Well, I didn't think you looked like a
banker's son." To her, he more closely resembled a mountain
man.

"Nope, I never did. I moved out of the house
when I was fifteen and went to live in a room over the stables. I
hunted game in the hills and dressed like this and made friends
with a few Deschutes Indians. The old man hated it. Money didn't
mean anything to me, especially when I saw how the rest of them
lived." He let his chair drop back to the floor. "Back in the
house, he and Scott dressed for dinner every night like they were
going to the damned opera or something. They invited the mayor for
dinner, or other politicians they wanted to influence. They sat in
the drawing room, smoking cigars and drinking brandy. I tried to
stay out of the old man's way because if I didn't, we were sure to
tangle."

The dress in her lap forgotten, Melissa
leaned forward slightly, waiting for him to volunteer the reason
that he'd finally left. And what his brother's wife had to do with
it all.

"It sounds like such a lonely life," she
said.

"Yeah, I guess it was sometimes, especially
when I was young. Other kids talked about their families and the
things they did together. I always wondered what that would be
like."

"I guess you didn't have much reason to stay
there," she put in.

He shrugged. "I did, and I didn't. I'd
planned to make enough money to move the operation to my own land,
but things starting falling apart before I could do that. And there
was Eliz—" Then he stopped himself and glanced up at her before
returning his attention to the dress button in his fingers. "My
father meddled in my business. He didn't know a goddamned thing
about horses, but that didn't stop him from telling me how to run
things. His way wasn't my way. If you aren't honest in business
dealings, people figure it out soon enough. I never lied or cheated
anyone. I didn't need to. The last argument I got into with him was
because he wanted me to sell one of the mares to a business
acquaintance he wanted to impress. I refused."

"Why?"

"Because I'd seen the man's other horses. He
rode them hard, put them away wet, let them develop saddle galls.
God, it gave me nightmares to think about it. I stood in the dining
room and told him to keep looking—my horses weren't for sale to
him. And that night, hell rained down on The Dalles."