Harper's Bride (10 page)

Dylan shrugged indifferently, shifting his
sun-blond hair. "I don't care what you do with your time as long as
you keep your end of your bargain with me." He took a sip from a
thick-lipped white coffee mug, then began piling bars of yellow
soap in front of her on the counter.

"I can do both," she hurried to assure him.
"I can still cook and clean for you, and do this, too."

"Then do what you want."

She shifted Jenny to her shoulder. "Maybe I
should have a sign painted. You know, so people will know I'm here.
MRS. HARPER'S LAUNDRY, or something like that. Are signs
expensive?" It was a silly question, she realized—everything in the
Yukon was expensive.

Dylan hoisted a forty-pound crate of
Kingford's Silver Gloss Starch to the counter. "You don't need a
sign. I can promise that you won't lack for business. Once the word
gets out, you'll be buried under a pile of dirty clothes." His tone
had that funny brittle edge that she'd heard once or twice
before.

He didn't like the idea. She could tell by
his voice and the flinty expression in his eyes. She didn't even
think that Rafe liked it—he sent Dylan a look that was even more
forbidding than his friend's hard, blank expression. But at least
Dylan didn't object outright, and she had gained enough wary
confidence in him to believe that he wasn't simply waiting until
they were alone to explode in a boiling fury.

About that time Jenny started fussing for her
afternoon meal, and Melissa welcomed the chance to escape. "Oh,
dear, I'll have to come back for everything."

"I'll put it under the stairs for you," Dylan
said, and her last thought of him was that he was the most complex
man she had ever known.

*~*~*

Dylan watched Melissa leave, and heard the
swish of her calico skirt as it brushed around the door frame. This
was a hell of a change from the silent, terrified rag doll he'd met
three weeks ago. She was still too thin, but her new clothes helped
to hide that.

With no little effort, Rafe unfolded his long
cadaverous frame from the straight-backed chair that now took the
place of the rocker. Dylan could hear his breathing again today.
"I'd almost believed that I made the right decision in giving
Melissa and her child over to your protection." Walking to the
counter, he removed a small silver flask from the inside pocket in
his coat and took a drink from it. "I admit that I'm wondering if I
did the right thing."

Dylan stared at him. "Why?"

"I'd hoped that you'd make her life a little
easier—obviously that woman has been sorely abused. But now I find
that she feels she has to wash clothes in the street to earn her
own way. She'll be prey to every unsavory opportunist in Dawson.
What did you say to give her the impression that she has to work?"
Rafe's slow, melodic drawl could cut like a whip when he was
peeved.

"Not a goddamned thing! And she won't be in
the street," Dylan retorted, surprised that Rafe would care about
his relationship with Melissa. "This was her idea, not mine. She
told me she wants to earn as much money as she can."

The lawyer coughed, then drew a gasping
breath that sounded like his last. "Have you wondered why that is?"
he asked when the fit had passed.

Dylan knew perfectly well why, and the reason
made him feel guilty somehow. But he wasn't of a mind to discuss
his earlier conversation with Melissa. He shrugged. "Well, what
woman doesn't want money?" he asked. "At least she's willing to
work for it." Rafe shrugged and took another drink. "I wouldn't
subject my wife to that."

Feeling beleaguered by the interrogation,
Dylan snapped, "She's not my wife!" From the first day he'd agreed
to this temporary alliance with Melissa, he'd had the uneasy
suspicion that his friend viewed the arrangement as permanent "And
I don't want one."

Rafe gazed at the street through the open
door, as though another voice called to him. "Dylan, do you ever
think about your own death?" The anger had left his voice.

Puzzled by the change of subject, he replied,
"Sure, once in a while."

"Probably on those nights that seem to have
no end, when the rest of the world sleeps but you can't? All kinds
of thoughts are apt to cross a person's mind in the hours that
should belong to Morpheus."

Dylan had to admire his friend's classical
education. "True, but it isn't a subject that I dwell on."

Rafe nodded. "Probably not. Nearly every man
dies with regrets, though." He tapped his thin chest "Keeping this
heart, faulty though it is, all to myself is one of mine." It was
as frank a comment as he'd ever made. He considered Dylan with
dark, deep-set eyes. "Don't let it be one of yours."

Dylan proved to be right. The first morning
that Melissa stepped outside to begin her business, a swarm of
helpless masculinity with dirty clothes beat a path to her washtubs
as if called by a siren's song. How word got around so quickly she
didn't know. John Willis, her first customer, could not have been
responsible for all of it.

Certainly, any woman with a washtub and soap
could go into the laundry business, and several had. But with
thirty thousand people, mostly men, in and around Dawson, there was
more than enough work for all.

Even when Melissa had lived in Portland with
her father and four brothers, she had never seen so much filthy,
mud-caked laundry in her life. The long, sweltering day was an
endless cycle of heating water, scrubbing, rinsing, and hanging wet
wash. The area surrounding the back stairs became a cat's cradle of
clothesline strung in every possible place, with clean shirts,
pants, and underwear flapping in the breeze.

To make things a bit easier for her, Dylan
had broken down the sides of a tea crate to make flooring so she
wouldn't have to stand in the mud. From another box he'd fashioned
a little nook for Jenny that kept the baby within easy sight and
reach. These were small blessings when she discovered how hard the
work would be.

To lessen the drudgery, and because Jenny
seemed to like it so much, Melissa sang through most of her day.
Although she kept her voice low, now and then miners would straggle
down the side street to find its source, as had John Willis.

It was in the middle of "Lorena," however,
that she looked up to see three men standing in a triangle of shade
near the building on the other side of the narrow street. Two of
them brushed at their damp eyes self-consciously. The third blew
his nose with a trumpeting honk on a large red handkerchief.

Melissa cut off Lorena's sad lament in
mid-verse, baffled.

The man with the red hankie stepped forward.
"You'll have to excuse us, ma'am. That song has made many a soldier
and weary traveler homesick. I 'spect we're no different."

She straightened and put her hands to her
stiff back "Oh, dear, I'm sorry. Really, I'm just singing to my
little girl. She doesn't know the song is sad."

"But I bet she knows what an angel's singin'
sounds like now," one of the other men said, his voice breaking
slightly.

At the extravagant compliment, Melissa felt
herself blush and dropped her gaze back to the washtub. Heavens,
what a fuss Dawson miners made over her little songs. She had lived
her whole life trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible
and didn't care for being the center of attention. The men moved
along after that, but returned two hours later with their wash.

*~*~*

Curious, despite his resolve that Melissa's
laundry business didn't concern him, Dylan found all kinds of
reasons to walk by the side window in the store. He had a few dozen
parade-size American flags nailed to sticks that he'd bought in
time for the coming Independence Day—they'd make a good display
right here in this empty keg near the window. Was it going to rain?
he wondered a few minutes later, and ambled back to the glass to
look out at the bright, cloudless sky. Shortly after checking on
the weather, Dylan saw Sailor Bill Partridge walking by and was
drawn to the window yet again. It was said that the man spent all
of his money on clothes and that he never wore the same suit
twice.

Dylan could tell himself that he wasn't
paying a whit of attention to Melissa, but in his trips to the
window if he leaned against the right side of the frame he could
see her working there. And he did that often. Her back was to him
as she hung shirts on a clothesline, showing off her slim waist and
back. Her long braid swung like a hypnotic pendulum over her gently
rounded hips. He imagined his hands on those hips, warm beneath his
touch while she arched her back against his chest. With the thought
came swift, hot arousal that carried his imagination further. He
inhaled the sweet scent of her hair and grazed her neck with soft,
slow kisses that made her sigh and realize she need not fear
him—

"Dylan, have you gone deef or what?"

Jolted out of his daydream, Dylan swung
around to see Ned Tanner standing at his counter.

"Sorry, Ned, I didn't hear you come in," he
said and left the window, hoping his face didn't look as red as it
felt.

"I came by for more nails. How much are they
today?" Ned Tanner had come to Dawson with the first wave of people
last fall, arriving just as winter descended upon the North,
closing the rivers with ice. He'd opened his restaurant in a tent
and had done so well that he now was expanding to a new building on
Front Street. Homely, with a pronounced overbite, oiled hair, and a
personality to match, he fancied himself to be something of a
ladies' man, a notion that gave Rafe Dubois no end of
amusement.

"Same as last time, seven dollars a pound,"
Dylan said on his way to the storeroom to fetch a fifty-pound
keg.

"That's what I like about you, Dylan," Ned
called. "You keep your prices the same even though other folks are
raising theirs. Competition, they call it. I call it thievery."

Dylan carried the nail keg out on his
shoulder and set it down next to Ned. "That works for them, I
guess. But I paid the same for this keg as the last one I sold you,
so I'm charging you the same. I do well enough in this store
without getting greedy."

Ned pointed at the side window. "Say, it
looks like you've branched out some, though. Who's that little gal
you got running your laundry business for you outside?"

Dylan stepped behind the counter and put
weights in one pan of his gold scales. "It's not my business, it's
hers. That'll be three hundred and fifty dollars for the
nails."

Ned brightened up. "Well, a woman of
enterprise. She sure is a pretty little thing, and she sings nice,
too." He handed Dylan his poke, the same kind of leather pouch that
everyone in Dawson used to carry their gold.

"Yeah, I guess," Dylan muttered, not certain
he liked the eager gleam he saw in the man's eye.

Ned reached up to straighten his tie, then
ran a finger over his enormous mustache to smooth it. "There aren't
many females up here that look so nice. And she's an ambitious one,
too. I might be interested in making the acquaintance of a woman
like her."

"Go talk to Belinda Mulrooney. She's plenty
ambitious."

Ned shuddered. "Naw, Belinda is too danged
outspoken and too smart for her own good. She'll never catch a
husband—a man doesn't like to feel as if his wife knows more than
him,"

Dylan laughed. Ned might have a hard time
finding one who didn't. "I guess it would depend on how smart the
man is. It sounds like you want a woman who'll work hard, hand her
money over to you, and keep her mouth shut."

Ned grinned. "The idea sure has its charm,
doesn't it? Now what did you say that little gal's name was?"

Dylan pictured Melissa out there, scrubbing
clothes and talking to every damned miner in Dawson. "Her name is
Mrs. Harper." He told himself that he was only protecting her from
pests like Ned Tanner, but the truth of it was that a surge of
unaccountable jealousy boiled up inside him. He didn't like the
feeling, but there it was. "And I'd advise you to forget about
'making her acquaintance.' "

"She's married?"

"Yeah" Dylan leaned across the counter. "To
me." The man laughed. "That's a good one, Dylan."

"I'm not joking."

Ned stared at him, mouth agape and buckteeth
well displayed. "N-no, I see that. No disrespect intended, Dylan,"
he mumbled, his face tomato red. "Hell, nobody around here heard
that you took a wife."

"Now you know."

In that moment Dylan thought that maybe
everyone else should know it, too. Melissa might get the sign she
had talked about, after all. It would put a damned quick end to
notions like Ned Tanner's.

Mrs. Harper’s Laundry

*~*~*

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Harper."

Melissa looked up from the blue work shirt on
her scrub board to find Rafe Dubois standing there.

"Mr. Dubois, how nice to see you." She had a
special fondness for the lawyer, especially since he'd liberated
her from Coy. Further, she enjoyed his elegant manners and turn of
phrase. They were so different from what she was accustomed to. Coy
would have made some derisive remark about his "ten-dollar words,"
given the chance to express his opinion.

"I must admit that I'm a bit surprised you've
undertaken this venture."

"I'm not sure you should be," she replied,
taking up the shirt again. "Women have always worked. I've always
worked. This time I'd like to be paid for it."

Rafe lowered himself to an upended packing
crate that served as her guest chair, moving as if his every joint
ached. Then considering her for a moment, he nodded and chuckled.
"I suppose you're right. You must forgive me—I'm from a part of the
world where women do indeed work hard, sometimes from morning until
long after sunset. But custom prevents them from allowing it to
show. In fact, they would be considered unladylike if they did.
Rather, they are to be viewed as delicate flowers who tire easily,
faint with little provocation, and must be sheltered from the
world. They retire to shuttered porches and sitting rooms in the
heat of the day, to do fine needlework or sip tea." He laughed
again. "I was stunned to discover just how strong many of the fair
gender can be."