Harper's Bride (19 page)

"What happened?" she asked quietly.

He considered her for a moment, as if trying
to decide whether he wanted to open an old wound, one that might be
only half healed as it was. Then he inhaled a deep breath and
propped his elbows on the table.

"It was-an ugly scene. I went back out to the
stables, and my father followed me, ranting on and on. He covered a
lot of familiar ground about expecting me to fail in life, and what
an embarrassment I was to him. Then he threw in something new—that
he'd been a fool to pretend that my mother's bastard was his own
son."

Melissa stared at him. "Was it true?"

Dylan leaned back in his chair again and
tossed the button on the table. "It seems my mother was two months
gone with a cowboy's baby when Griff Harper married her. My
grandfather asked him to make an honest woman of her. He said he
agreed because he felt sorry for her. But it didn't hurt that she
was sole heir to very valuable ranchland over in Pendleton. He got
that after my mother died." He looked up at her. "I guess I should
have realized it sooner. I didn't look like anyone else in the
house. I never felt like I fit in."

"But you didn't know any of this before? Not
for sure?"

He shook his head. "Naw. I'll tell you,
though, when I was a kid, sometimes I thought I might be a
foundling. Scott was the one who got all the attention. In the end,
he got everything. Even my horses. Scott wouldn't even know which
end of the animal to put a bridle on. But that's okay—at least I
can sleep nights. I don't have to think about the people I cheated
or put out of their homes or threw off their land." A moment of
silence fell between them. Finally, he pushed himself away from the
table. "I guess I'll go check on the store." He did that every
night to give Melissa a little privacy to wash and get ready for
bed.

Melissa had always supposed that the reason
her life had been hard was because she'd grown up in poverty. But
Dylan's life, in a way, had been no better, and he'd grown up with
wealth.

"I guess there's misery everywhere," she
said, more to herself.

He stopped with his hand on the doorknob and
gazed at her over his shoulder. "That there is, Melissa. That there
is."

After kissing Melissa in the store and
telling her about his past—most of it, anyway—Dylan sensed a subtle
change in their relationship.

As much as he didn't want to, he found
himself following her softly rounded shape with his eyes, and his
trips to the side store window became even more frequent. When he
saw her customers hanging around her, chatting, he wanted to go out
there and tell them to stop bothering her, that she had work to do.
But deep down, he knew the miners didn't bother her nearly as much
as they did him.

Her beauty was not glamorous or queenly, as
Elizabeth's was. Melissa had an uncluttered, quiet grace that made
him think of clear, cold streams and wildflowers. He could not
begin to imagine Elizabeth changing a baby's diapers or tending to
the other messy aspects of motherhood. Melissa did it all and yet
retained her prettiness and much-improved spirits.

Whether or not she could admit it to herself,
her mood had brightened considerably since Logan's death. Dylan
noticed that she had finally begun to stop flinching at loud voices
and no longer looked over her shoulder whenever she went
outside.

He told himself again and again that a woman
and a child played no part in his foreseeable future. It was all
very well to imagine his fairy tale scene with Melissa and Jenny in
the kitchen when he came home at night, but it was just that—a
pretty daydream. He figured the first five years of his
horse-ranching operation would be nothing but hard work, and he'd
have to live in a cabin while the house and all the outbuildings
were constructed. He would have no trouble doing that—fancy
trappings didn't matter to him. But it would be too hard for a
woman. Even if it wasn't, Dylan was not willing to risk his heart
again.

And that was the crux of the matter.

A wife deserved a whole husband, and he knew
he wouldn't be able to give completely of himself. He would always
hold something back, the part of his soul that would let him love
her fully.

But still he watched Melissa with a yearning
that continued to grow every day. Just being around her was a sweet
kind of torture he felt better than when he'd lived alone, but to
have to only look and not be able to touch—it was hell.

The afternoon after Logan died, Rafe dropped
by the store. To avoid climbing stairs, which stole his already
feeble wind, he'd made arrangements to move from his rooming house
to a first-floor room at the now completed Fairview Hotel. Although
there were no guest rooms on the first floor, Belinda Mulrooney had
fixed up one for him—for a price, of course. A nice place, he
observed drolly, but all the walls were nothing more than canvas
with wallpaper pasted on them. "Anytime a guest so much as farts,
it can be heard by the entire establishment."

Rafe looked far worse than Dylan had ever
seen. His face was more ashen, and his deep-set eyes had taken on a
slightly sunken look. The skin on his face stretched tightly over
the bones. Dylan felt a chill of foreboding rush down his spine.
But Rafe's clothes were as dapper as ever, and his biting wit
suffered no debility.

From the street outside Dylan heard strains
of "Nearer My God to Thee," honked out of a Salvation Army band
that had staked out a spot on Front.

"I see you now have the luxury of musical
accompaniment," Rafe remarked, gesturing with his cane at the brass
and tambourine ensemble.

Like an old man, he lowered himself into the
chair where he'd spent so many hours pitching cards and observing
Dylan's corner of what he called man's last folly of the century.
"Except for the war with Spain," he would add with his rich drawl.
"That truly is supreme idiocy."

"Are you doing all right, Rafe?" Given his
gray-faced, appearance and shuffling gait, it seemed like a foolish
question, but Dylan had to ask.

Rafe sent him an arch expression. "Why? Don't
I look all right?"

Dylan chuckled. Even as ill as he was, Rafe
could still make him laugh. He realized that he would miss his
friend very much when he was gone.

"Have you yet realized what good fortune
befell you with Logan's death, Dylan?" he asked, his breath shorter
than ever.

Dylan was wary—he suspected this had
something more to do with Rafe's transparent effort to secure a
protector for Melissa and Jenny. Pretending indifference, he poured
a bag of coffee beans into a canister. "And what might that
be?"

"She is a widow now."

Dylan's head came up. A widow. Of all the
realities that had occurred to him since Logan's death, the most
obvious of them all had not: Melissa was now a marriageable woman.
He'd only considered that Logan wouldn't bother her again, and that
Jenny wouldn't suffer the same abuse her mother had. But the
imaginary wall that had stood between them, and which he'd used as
a flimsy shield against the hunger that she aroused in him,
suddenly had crumbled. She was no longer another man's wife.

Dylan shrugged. "Yeah, she's a widow. I'm not
going to be the one who changes that."

Rafe sighed, and it sounded like a cross
between a wheeze and a rattle. "Don't let an incident with one
woman turn you into a bitter, cantankerous man."

"Hmm, from the voice of experience," Dylan
said with a laugh, refusing to be pulled into the conversation.

"Good. If you learned nothing else from me,
at least I set an example of what not to do with your life. You
know, I was like you once, certain that I'd never let any woman get
close—I told you about that. But I never told you about Priscilla
Beaumont." His voice dropped and his tone became introspective. He
stared at a coffee can on the shelf as if a memory unfolded before
his eyes. "She was a beautiful young lady, graceful, charming,
kind, and from an old, well-respected New Orleans family. Suitors
lined up with their calling cards every day of the week to pay
their respects and to propose. Gently, but firmly, she turned all
of them down. There was another gentleman who had already captured
her affection, she told them, although she would not reveal his
name to them. That was because the gentleman in question—a cad,
really—did not want to be bothered with such foolishness as love."
He smiled faintly. "She was lovely, as fair as a spring flower. He
did everything he could to push her away, even though in his heart
he truly cared about her." He looked up at Dylan. "Obviously, I was
the cad."

Dylan had already guessed as much. "What
happened?"

Rafe took another deep breath, and the
rattling wheeze sounded again in his chest. "Eventually, her father
forced her into a marriage that he arranged with a shipowner's son.
A year after the wedding, she died from an overdose of
laudanum."

"Well, Jesus, Rafe, I'm sorry."

Returning from his reverie, he sat up a bit
straighter, and his voice took on a brisker tone. "Don't be. I'm
sorry enough for both of us. Just don't make the same mistake. True
love, an affaire de coeur, comes along only once or twice in a
lifetime, my friend. Some people never find it at all. Forget about
what happened with Elizabeth and put it behind you. I have seen the
way you look at Melissa and the way she looks at you." He hoisted
himself to his feet again. "A body would have to be blind to miss
the sparks that fly between you two."

Dylan felt his face grow hot all the way to
his scalp.

Just then, a delivery driver walked in. A big
hulking giant, he looked like the epitome of a teamster. "Mr.
Harper, I got your goods outside that came up on the St. Paul."

Grateful for the chance to escape, Dylan
pulled his shirt off over his head. "Okay, let's get them
unloaded."

Rafe caught his arm as he passed him. He
looked especially haggard suddenly, as if talking had used up his
small reserve of strength. "Don't throw away this chance, Dylan,"
he said in his low voice. It seemed to have grown huskier over the
past few weeks. "Trouble comes by the barrelful in life; good
things are doled out to us on a teaspoon."

Rafe walked out then, his progress slow and
measured, and Dylan watched his retreating back.

On the other side of the street, the
Salvation Army band took up "In the Sweet By and By."

*~*~*

Melissa automatically clutched her apron
pocket, feeling for her gold pouch. Then she picked up Jenny and
left her pot of boiling water, intending to buy a box of starch
from Dylan's stock. He might resist taking money for Coy's debt,
but she would tolerate no argument about paying him for her laundry
supplies. If she was making money from her venture, so should he.
But when she rounded the corner of the building, she stopped in her
tracks, captivated by what she saw.

Standing in the back of wagon and silhouetted
by a blue summer sky, Dylan hoisted a keg to his shoulder.
Obviously, the work was hot, and his torso gleamed with sweat that
also dampened his belt. His muscles, thrown into bright relief by
shadow and sun, contracted as he shifted the keg and handed it down
to a burly man on the duckboard. His jeans hung low and snug, and
Melissa's eyes were drawn to the hollow of his spine, to his arms
where tendon and sinew flexed and lengthened.

"Is that the last of it?" the burly man
asked. They'd stacked merchandise on either side of the front
door.

"Yeah, that's it." Not seeing her, Dylan
dragged the back of one gloved hand over his forehead, then jumped
down off the tailgate of the wagon right into her path.

"Oh—hi," he said. He looked down at his bare
chest and then gestured at the wagon. "Um, I just had some stuff
delivered from the waterfront."

Melissa tried not to gape, but this was a
different Dylan from the man who stood at his shaving mirror in the
mornings. He was more vital and earthy and powerful. And he called
to something just as vital and deep within her. She watched,
fascinated as a rivulet of perspiration ran down the center of his
flat belly to be absorbed by the low waistband on his jeans. Seeing
him this way only fanned the low, hot flame he had lighted when he
kissed her. "I—well, I just wanted to get a box of starch."

He nodded, and scribbled his signature on a
manifest that the wagon driver handed him. "Go ahead and help
yourself. I'm going to wash off in the back." He kept an enamel
washbasin and a bar of soap behind the building near her stove.

Watching him round the corner, she felt like
a silly young schoolgirl gaping at the object of her crush. But the
truth was that her feelings went deeper than a crush, and her
daydreams about him didn't end with a simple kiss. She was tempted
to follow him back to the washbasin . . . she could imagine sheets
of water flowing through his hair and down his back, sparkling in
the sun, catching on his long lashes and the tip of his nose.
Picturing it made her insides jumpy and tight.

Stop it right now, she told herself sternly.
Turning to walk into the store, she gave herself a sharp
talking-to. She would have to stop thinking about Dylan the way
she'd . . . well, that way, and as if he were
really her husband. Even if she wanted to marry again, he'd made it
plain that he had no interest in acquiring a wife.

She shifted Jenny to her other arm to reach
for a box of starch from the shelf, and as she did, she caught
sight of his blond head passing the window. Just looking at him
made her catch her breath. Melissa knew that a treacherous emotion
had begun to creep into her heart.

She was falling in love with Dylan
Harper.

*~*~*

. . . your experience with one woman . .
.

. . . put it behind you . . .