Harper's Bride (5 page)

Maybe he wouldn't come back tonight, she
hoped wildly as she lay there trembling. She'd had the same wish
about Coy. Maybe he would never come back. He might fall in the
Klondike River and drown. Or maybe a wolf would come down from the
hills and—

Suddenly, she heard a low, tuneless whistling
outside and the sound of a step on the bottom stair. He was coming.
He'd be here in seconds. Oh, please, God—

Melissa lurched up and glanced around the
room desperately. Something, anything— Her gaze fell upon a big
sack of rice leaning against the wall. Springing from the bed, she
struggled with the sack, dragging its dead weight across the floor.
All the while the footsteps grew louder, closer. With strength she
didn't know she possessed, she flung the sack up to the bare,
blue-striped ticking, and rolled it to the center of the mattress.
It was dumb, it wouldn't stop him, but she had to try.

Climbing in after it, she squeezed her eyes
shut and tried to slow her breathing. Around the edges of the
canvas curtains the sun blazed in the Arctic sky. She wished the
night was dark, as it would be back home, so that she could hide
her state of undress in its shadows.

Dylan lifted the latch and walked in to find
Melissa lying in his bed. Something lay beside her, and it was way
too big to be the baby. It took up the full center of the bed,
leaving not much room on either side. He narrowed his eyes. Damn if
it wasn't the sack of rice. He drew closer to the mattress to study
her. Her eyes were clamped shut, and a slight frown drew her brows
as if she had put all of her concentration into her charade. She
clung to the edge of the mattress, but he knew she wasn't asleep.
She was panting, probably from lifting the rice, and a light dew of
perspiration shined her forehead. God, he knew that sack weighed
seventy-five pounds. He'd carried it up here himself.

He would have laughed at the whole thing, but
she was afraid of him and that bothered him. Coy Logan and maybe
other men before him had made her fear Dylan, and all she had to
defend herself with was a bag of rice. And there was no humor in
that. Or in the bruise on her cheekbone that was beginning to turn
green and yellow.

But even more disturbing to him was his
body's response to seeing her in his bed. Her long, pale hair
fanned out over the pillows, and the swell of her breasts strained
against her flimsy chemise. She was too thin, so unlike the
Eliz—

Impatiently, he turned on his heel and saw
the baby. He took a step closer. She slept in her little crate,
like a soft flower bud. A hint of long-forgotten tenderness brushed
his soul as he looked at her. Oh, she was kind of cute, he
supposed. Her hands were clenched into fists on either side of her
downy head, and he stared at them, fascinated by their tiny
perfection. She looked like her mother, lucky girl, and not Coy
Logan.

Pushing aside one of the canvas curtains, he
saw the sun resting on the horizon, as low as it would set at this
time of year. In three hours it would begin to rise again, and
three hours after that, his work day would begin.

Sighing, he turned his back to Melissa and
sat on his side of the bed to pull off his boots. Then he stripped
to his drawers and lay down between the hard rice sack and the edge
of the mattress, feeling like a stranger in his own place. He
stretched out on his back, with his hands under his head. The faint
fragrance of soap drifted to him from the other side of the
bed.

Dylan knew it would be a long night.

The next morning, Melissa woke with a start,
disoriented and groggy. Her bleary gaze shot from a timbered
ceiling overhead to a fur-covered throw at her feet. A pair of
jeans hung over the end of the bed, and she saw a belt looped over
a branchlike bedpost. Where was she? Then it all came back to her.
This was Dylan Harper's room.

Peeking over the hump of the rice sack, she
saw that Dylan was already gone, but the scent of buckskin and man
lingered in the bedding.

She must have finally drifted off during the
night, she realized, but she was exhausted just the same. Lying
there, vigilant and as taut as a fiddle string for hours, she'd
been aware of his every breath. Her muscles had drawn even tighter
whenever he moved. She couldn't forget about his
reputation—everyone knew about Dylan Harper, and they walked a wide
path around him.

Once, she had chanced a quick look at him.
There he lay with no shirt, in his drawers, for heaven's sake, and
all that long, sun-streaked hair. Certainly none of the men she had
ever known, not her father or her brothers, not Coy, had ever
refrained from crude behavior in front of her—and Dylan's behavior
was not really crude. But it seemed to her that stripping to his
underwear in her presence when they had just met was shocking. That
she had also slept in her underwear wasn't the same—hers covered
more. And he had seemed to have no trouble sleeping at all, she
thought grumpily. He'd rolled toward the rice sack and had even
thrown a muscled arm around the thing, as if he were embracing it.
God, that could have been her, she thought, glad she'd erected the
barricade between them. Asleep he'd looked different, not quite as
forbidding, although a slight frown had crimped his brow even in
sleep, as if some worry that he bore never let him truly rest.

At least he'd left her alone, and she was
glad for that. She climbed out of the bare-ticking bed and plucked
Jenny from her crate. Creaky pain shot through her arms and
shoulders, reminding her of last night's exertion with the heavy
sack. Melissa had given little thought to its weight at the time,
but now her arms and shoulders ached from dragging it up to the
bed.

"How's my button?" she whispered with a
smile. The baby waved her fists sleepily. No matter how tired or
discouraged Melissa might be, Jenny never failed to lighten her
heart. In her mind the baby was her reward for enduring Coy, and
for that single reason she did not entirely regret marrying
him.

Jenny gurgled at her and smiled back. Thank
God she slept through most nights and wasn't a fussy baby. Whenever
she had cried around her father, and it hadn't been often, he'd
threatened to smack both her and Melissa if she couldn't quiet her,
"and right now, damn it." Although he had never hit the baby,
Melissa had feared it was only a matter of time. She had never
struck anyone herself, but if that day had come, if Coy had once
raised a hand to her Jenny, she believed she would have killed
him.

After she fed Jenny and gave her a clean
diaper, Melissa washed, this time avoiding her reflection, and put
her old clothes back on. Between bites of a cold biscuit from last
night's dinner, she spread her carefully mended skirt between her
hands and looked at it. The gray muslin was so thin in some places
she could see her white petticoat showing through the sheer spots.
She dropped the folds and sighed. Melissa had never owned fine
things; no one in Slabtown did. People like the Pettigreaves, the
family her mother had worked for, had indoor plumbing and electric
lights, and even an automobile with a man to drive them around in
it. Her mother had told her about their wonderful hillside house on
Park Place—it even had an elevator—and the lavish parties they gave
with such exotic foods as lobster and oysters and goose liver
paste. Once, Melissa had even gotten to taste a bit of lobster when
her mother brought it home, wrapped in clean waxed paper. The paper
was another luxurious convenience that she had only seen before on
blocks of butter.

No, Melissa had not grown up with fine
things; most of her life had been one of want and making do. But
she'd always had sheets on her bed, even if they had been as thin
and translucent as onionskin. And never had she faced having no
other clothes to put on her back until now. She glanced down again
to her shabby skirt. Dylan had said he'd take her out to buy things
for herself and the baby, and it bothered her to accept them. Yet
just as she was without clothes, she was also without choice. For
Jenny, she thought; she had to do it for her.

The door opened suddenly, startling her, and
Dylan Harper walked in. This time she hadn't heard his approach on
the stairs. He had to duck under the top of the door frame, she
noticed. His tall, lean-muscled form dominated the room, dwarfing
everything else in it, and his intense eyes swept the room, resting
briefly on the rice sack in his bed. Finally, he shot her a probing
look before she dropped her gaze. She retreated a step.

"Ready to go down to Wall Street?" he asked,
as if he had read her mind.

She nodded, and with obvious stiffness,
picked up Jenny who slept on unconcernedly. She felt his eyes on
her, but didn't look up. Dylan stood aside to let them pass, then
followed her down the narrow staircase. With each step she took,
Melissa was aware of him behind her, his physical presence and the
strength he emanated was a force to be reckoned with. She just
prayed she could reckon with it later.

Below, the crowd continued to wander the
knee-deep morass that was the street. The morning sun was warm, and
a breeze blew in from the rivers, but the mud was slow to dry out.
Dylan walked between her and the busy, jostling herd, sheltering
her from a careless elbow and the pack animals that slogged by.

"Did you sleep all right last night?" he
asked, breaking the silence between them. She felt his boot heels
reverberating on the boards under her own feet.

"Yes, thank you," she said.

"And did the rice help?"

Melissa glanced up quickly; was that anger
she heard in his voice? But his handsome face wore a faintly amused
expression. "Well, um, I thought—it seemed like the right thing to
do, I guess."

He lifted his hat and resettled it. "You must
be stronger than you look—that sack weighs seventy-five pounds. And
it takes up a lot of room. I never had the urge for more than two
in my bed."

His insinuation brought heat to Melissa's
cheeks. A man with his good looks certainly wouldn't suffer for
female company. But the range of this man's reputation that Melissa
had heard about did not extend to women, she realized. He was known
only to have a drink or two in the saloon with Rafe Dubois, or by
himself, and then go on his way. The few saloon girls and camp
followers who approached him were given a smile and sometimes a
tip, and nothing more, it was said. If he had dalliances with
women, he kept it very quiet. But as she walked beside him on the
duckboards, she sensed a raw, restless energy that was so powerful,
she quailed a bit. And whenever her arm brushed his on the narrow
walkway, she felt a peculiar quickening in her chest.

But she forgot about Dylan Harper and
everything else on her mind when they turned the corner toward the
waterfront. Laid out before them was Wall Street, and beyond that,
Broadway Avenue. Thinking they would have escaped the crowd down
here, Melissa halted, amazed at the display that stretched for
blocks. Lining these streets were people selling all manner of
goods, and the throng swarming Front Street surged down here to see
the marketplace. It had the air of a bazaar, as vendors told of
their wares from every booth and tent. Patrolling the proceedings
were a few scarlet-coated Mounties.

Although Melissa had been in Dawson nearly
two months, she had seen none of this up close. Everyone wanted
cash down here, Coy had said, and saw no point in going. The
display was astounding.

"Lady, gentleman," a young man called to
them, "I have fresh grapes here, and tomatoes. Sir, how about a
glass of pink lemonade to refresh yourself and your wife?"

"Oxen! Look at these fine beasts!" A
gap-toothed man pointed to a pair of sharp-horned bovines in a
small pen. "No hard overland passage for them, no, sir and no,
ma'am. They made the trip on a steamship and are ready for work in
the gold fields—"

"Rifles, friends, and good ones, too! A gross
of them—one hundred and forty-four rifles for a dollar! Just a
token payment, they're almost free!" Of course they were cheap. It
was illegal to carry a gun in Dawson.

"What price would you pay to save your
immortal soul from this greedy, godless place in the Arctic?"
thundered a man dressed in ministerial black. "I bring you Bibles,
God's own word right here, on sale for coin or gold dust—"

Dylan took Melissa's elbow to guide her past
the displays of clothes, furs, jewels, opera glasses,
patent-leather shoes, dime novels, ostrich feathers, and complete
sets of Shakespeare with gilt edges. Against the blue sky, signs
flapped in the breeze over tents, advertising dentistry and medical
doctors, palmistry, and massage. There were dry goods and music,
fresh-baked bread and ice cream made from condensed milk—as of yet,
no dairy cows had arrived in town. There were seventeen-dollar
brooms and twenty-five-cent slickers. One man offered a rare,
recent copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for fifty dollars—and
got it. Newspapers and reading material were scarce.

And everyone called out about their goods at
the same time.

"Mercy," she said, left nearly breathless by
the noisy commotion around her. Across the way a particularly loud
man's voice made her flinch. She had never learned to ignore a man
yelling.

"Yeah, I hate crowds too," Dylan said, his
expression grim. "We'll find what you need and get out of
here."

She clutched Jenny to her, and Dylan took her
elbow to guide her. Coy had always walked ahead of her and left her
to manage on her own. Although she could not ignore Dylan's size
and height as he towered over her, she appreciated his help.

But she was still wary of him.

"What are these people doing here? Are they
here because it's Saturday?" she asked, puzzled by the display.
Back home in the summer, she saw farmers come to town to sell their
crops on Saturdays. "They can't have come all the way up here to do
this."