Harper's Bride (23 page)

Reality intruded and shook Dylan. Elizabeth
hadn't accepted him for what he was and had worked hard to change
him. He wouldn't change for anyone, and he sure as hell wouldn't be
forced to suffer for the sins of another man. "Then I'll go."

Feeling as lost and alone as he had when he'd
come up earlier, he stormed to the door, slamming it so hard the
windowpanes rattled.

Swiping angrily at tears that would not stop,
Melissa took off the silk stockings and new chemise she'd bought,
then changed into her everyday clothes. She moved woodenly, feeling
as if the world and all its trials had settled on her shoulders.
She wished she could go to bed and wake up in the morning to
discover that the today's events—Rafe's death and the scene with
Dylan—had been nothing more than a horrible nightmare.

But too edgy and overwrought to sleep, she
put her irons on the stove to heat, hoping that work would distract
her. Dylan's hurtful words had reminded her of the importance of
her original goal, to gain independence.

He'd been right, of course. She'd had no
right to tell him what to do—her own bad memories had gotten in the
way of her judgment. And regardless of what they had told the
world, and despite the fact that she sometimes caught herself
thinking otherwise, Dylan was not her husband. His commitment to
her and Jenny was a temporary one, and no amount of wishful
thinking on her part would change that.

How, then, had she let him kiss her, fondle
her, as if she were a—a strumpet? Deep in her heart, though,
Melissa didn't feel cheapened by his touch. Rather, she only longed
for more. She had no explanation for the heat and wild yearning
he'd evoked from her. The feel of his fingertips on her neck, his
palm hot against her breast, his lips on her throat, gentle yet
predatory and demanding, beckoning her in a way that she felt
compelled to answer—she'd never known anything like it.

Dipping her hand in a pan of water, she
sprinkled a shirt and smoothed it flat on the board. The twill
sizzled beneath the hot, heavy iron, raising a cloud of steam.
Maybe she wouldn't really make Dylan a good wife anyway, she
thought, her tears running faster. She'd driven him out of his own
home to deal with his loss by himself.

In the cradle Jenny's cranky wailing grew
worse. Sighing, Melissa set the iron back on the stove and went to
give the cradle a nudge to make it rock. It was so unlike the baby
to be this cross, but everyone else here had had a hard day.
Melissa supposed Jenny was entitled to one as well.

But when Melissa picked up Jenny, the baby
felt hot with fever, and instead of quieting, her squalls grew
louder. Melissa touched frantic hands to the little girl's head and
face.

"Oh, God—oh, Jenny, honey. You're burning
up!" No wonder she had been so irritable all afternoon.

Melissa clutched the baby to her, uncertain
of what to do. She had no experience in caring for a sick child—for
all of her short life Jenny had been healthy. How she wished for a
mother or grandmother or sister to consult, someone who could tell
her what should be done. The baby in her arms was so hot—

With only maternal instinct to guide her, she
laid the baby in the center of the small table and snatched a
washcloth and an enamel pan from the shelf. Hardly taking her eyes
from Jenny, she hurried to the tin sink and pumped water into the
basin.

She charged back to the table, sloshing water
on the floor. What was Jenny sick with? Melissa wondered as she
wrung out the cloth to put on the baby's forehead. The town was
full of illness and disease, and nowhere was it worse than in
Lousetown across the river.

Over there, the lights did not shine
brightly. The wealth and excess of Dawson's Klondike Kings were
absent. Sewage oozed through the narrow, muddy streets, spreading
sickness. People without money, or the hope of escape, crowded
together in tents and in squalid, makeshift dwellings. These
luckless stampeders lived in filth and poverty, and died from
typhoid and cholera. Maybe some contagion had found its way to
Jenny. It might have even been one of Melissa's customers who had
carried some miasma to her as she lay sleeping in her little
nook.

The cold compresses seemed to have no effect,
and the baby's wails continued. Maybe she was hungry, Melissa
thought. With shaking fingers she ripped at her bodice and sent
buttons flying across the table. But again and again, Jenny turned
her face from Melissa's breast, refusing to eat. She kept
screaming, the likes of which Melissa had never heard from her
before. She tried to soothe Jenny every way she could think of, but
after nearly a half hour of more cold cloths and rocking, the
little girl showed no improvement. If anything, she seemed
worse.

With Jenny in her arms, Melissa went to the
open window and looked out on the twilit street below. There crowds
still elbowed each other on their way to the saloons, dance halls,
and the opera house. Her child needed a doctor, but Melissa didn't
want to take her out, possibly exposing her to the chill night air
or something else that might aggravate her condition.

Perhaps she could hail someone on the street
to send a doctor here. Scanning the passing faces for a likely
rescuer, she saw a man with kind eyes. "Excuse me! Please, I need
help!" she called down.

But he didn't hear her and soon passed from
view.

"My little girl is sick—can someone bring a
doctor?" No one looked up at her window. Two more tries with a
louder voice yielded nothing. Apparently her words couldn't carry
over the clash of voices and music and tramping feet.

Whirling away from the window, she cursed
herself for making Dylan leave. She'd never seen him drunk—so what
if he'd stayed here and had a drink or two? It seemed so trivial
now in the face of this calamity. Jenny's life was in danger.

Her only remaining choice was to go down to
the street and stop someone. Melissa carried Jenny back to her
cradle, then ran to the door and flew down the steps, nearly
tripping on her cumbersome skirts.

Emerging from the side street, she almost
collided with a young man pulling a tired-looking mule behind him.
His face was familiar, and she recalled that she had done laundry
for him once.

"Whoa, careful there, ma'am." He shot out a
hand to steady her, then his eyes dropped to her open bodice.

Too frantic for much modesty, with a
trembling hand Melissa dragged the-edges of her dress together to
cover her camisole. "Oh please," she babbled. "Please, I need help
for my little girl. She's burning up with fever. Can you get a
doctor?"

Apparently galvanized by her urgency, he
tugged at the brim of his hat and nodded shortly. "Yes, ma'am! I'll
find Doc Garvin. He fixed me up when I caught my hand chopping
wood." He held up a hand that was missing its index finger. "Come
on, Susannah," he said and tugged on the mule's lead to get it
started.

Melissa turned and ran back up the stairs to
Jenny. When she flung open the door, the baby was still yelling,
but Melissa thought she sounded weaker. She picked her up and
pressed her hot, silky head to her own cheek.

"Help is coming, button. The doctor is
coming." Jenny was so small, so new—her life hadn't even begun yet.
Melissa struggled to hold a demon of fear at bay, the one that
whispered to her that babies died every day. Fevers, measles,
influenza and more—they snatched away young lives to leave behind
heartbroken mothers and gray-faced fathers.

No, not her child, God, she prayed fiercely.
Not her Jenny. If she were taken, Melissa thought she might as well
be dead too.

If she lost her baby, she would have no
one.

*~*~*

Dylan sat with Seamus McGinty at the back
table in the Yukon Girl Saloon. The place was as busy as any other
night, and a dense layer of tobacco smoke hung over the crowd of
gambling, drinking, dancing miners. Dylan couldn't decide if Rafe
would have appreciated this atmosphere for his wake, but for his
own part, he wished he had somewhere else to go.

After trying to remember the number of times
Rafe Dubois had sat at this very table, Seamus had declared that no
one would be allowed to sit at this shrine henceforth. Then the
husky, blue-eyed Irishman had required Dylan to witness that oath
with a shot from his cherished bottle of poteen. Angel's tears,
Seamus called it, and had drunk nearly half of it lamenting the
news of Rafe's passing.

Dylan thought he'd never seen a man who so
enjoyed mourning.

"Angel's tears, Dylan," he repeated, and
lifted his glass, "to send him off proper, and may God speed him on
his way. Jaysus, they're crying in heaven tonight, they are."

"I think you're right, Seamus." Dylan raised
his glass too, but he still nursed his first drink. The Irish
moonshine was powerful stuff that tasted as if it could blister a
man's insides.

He really wished he could get foolishly,
insensibly drunk, to forget about Rafe's death and Melissa's
shrewish rejection that had driven him to sit here with McGinty
when he'd have rather been with her. What the hell did she want
from him, anyway? He'd done everything he could for her, given the
circumstances, and still she had made him leave.

But mingled with the dull anger over being
banished from his own home was the memory of Melissa in his
arms—soft, warm, and so damned womanly he'd wanted to carry her to
his bed right then and there. To show her how a man—a real man—made
love to a woman, wild but tender, conquering her not with brute
force, but with her own desire. Just the thought sent the blood
coursing to his groin again.

"Dylan, man," Seamus said, interrupting his
thoughts, "will ye be drinking that poteen or sipping at it like a
kid with a sarsaparilla?"

Dylan looked at his glass and picked it up.
"What the hell," he muttered, "she's already mad at me." He held
the glass to his mouth, ready to pour the fiery liquor down his
throat, when a miner elbowed his way through the crowd to the
table.

"Hey, McGinty, have you seen Doc Garvin?" he
panted.

The Irishman looked him up and down,
amusement mingling with his tragic expression of mourning. "What's
your hurry, son? You lose another finger?"

The miner shook his head, then pointed over
his shoulder. "I need to find him for that singing laundry lady.
Her baby is ailing."

Dylan froze, his fingers locked around his
glass. "The singing laundry lady? The one next door?"

The miner nodded. "Yeah, that's her. She flew
down her stairs and stopped me on the street, looking as pale and
wild-haired as a ghost. She said her little girl is sick with a
fever."

Gripped by the greatest terror he'd ever
known, Dylan jumped from his chair and knocked it over. His heart
pounded in his chest, and adrenaline sent a prickly feeling
shooting down his arms and legs. He whirled to face Seamus. "Is
Garvin in here?"

"Yeah, I think he's at a table by the window,
eating his dinner," McGinty replied, looking stunned as well.

Dylan plowed back through the crowd with the
miner on his heels. Several tables were lined up along the front
windows, and all of them were occupied.

"Which one is he?" Dylan demanded, dutching
the miner's sleeve.

The other man peered at the faces of the
diners. "I-I'm not sure now. I haven't seen him for a while, and I
was pretty shook up at the time, getting my finger chopped off and
all."

Impatient, Dylan turned away. "Doc Garvin,"
he thundered. His voice carried over the blur of all the other
conversations, rising above the din of the piano amid shuffling
feet and clinking glasses. The noisy saloon fell silent. "Is Dr.
Garvin here?"

At the farthest table, a customer with a
weary youngster's face held up his hand. "I'm Dr. Garvin."

Dylan didn't want to insult the man by
voicing his first impression, but despite his formal suit Garvin
appeared to be no older than sixteen. Dylan looked at the miner for
confirmation.

"Yessir, that's him."

Dylan strode forward. "There's a sick baby
who needs your help."

Dr. Garvin nodded, then gestured at his
barely touched chicken dinner. "I'll be right with you as soon as I
finish eating."

Dylan clamped his hand on the man's wrist.
"I'm sorry to interrupt your dinner, Doc, but I need you to come
with me
now
. That little girl won't wait."

Dr. Garvin glanced at Dylan, then at the long
knife tied to his thigh. Tossing his fork onto his plate, he wiped
his hands on his napkin and picked up his bag from the opposite
chair.

"Very well, then. Let's go."

*~*~*

When Dylan led Dr. Garvin up the
dusk-shrouded stairs, the first thing he heard was a peculiar
squalling sound coming from the other side of the door. It was a
baby's cry, sort of, but so unlike anything he'd heard from Jenny,
he wondered if there was a mountain lion cub inside.

Dylan opened the door, and he saw Melissa,
pacing in a circle with the baby clutched to her. She looked ashen,
and her hair hung in fine, pale strands around her face, just as
the miner had said. The front of her dress gaped open, revealing
her plain camisole beneath.

As soon as she saw him, she stopped. Her
earlier anger was gone, and the terror he felt in his own heart was
written on her face. "Oh, Dylan, Jenny is sick with something—she
has a fever and—"

He gripped her shoulders lightly. "I know,
honey, I heard about it. I brought Dr. Garvin."

She pulled away from his hands and lurched
toward the young man following behind, apparently just now seeing
him. The agony of fear and heartbreak was in her voice. "Doctor,
please—you must save my child. She won't eat and she's burning with
fever. It just started today."

Putting down his bag, Dr. Garvin took off his
coat and draped it over the back of one of the chairs. "Bring her
to the table, madam, and also a lamp if you have one."