Harper's Bride (3 page)

In truth, she knew that she would not miss
him. Despite his big talk about the future during their very brief
courtship, he had proven himself to be short-tempered and lazy,
like her father and brothers. But what about Dylan Harper? Though
he claimed otherwise, and while he actually worked—at his own
business, too she had learned the hard way not to take any man at
face value.

If looks alone reflected a person's
character, if good people were handsome and the wicked ugly, life
would be simpler. But sometimes beautiful faces hid dark hearts,
she knew, and while Dylan was much better-looking than Coy, that
didn't tell her much. Tall and broad and muscled, his form
suggested a life spent at work on tasks more physically demanding
than sitting on a tree stump, lifting nothing heavier than a
whiskey bottle, or complaining about the government, as Coy had
been apt to do.

She had seen a sharp, untamed intelligence in
Dylan's green eyes. His hair was the color of buckskin—blond, but
darker than her own. He had a wide brow and a long narrow nose that
snubbed slightly at its end, and his square jaw suggested a
stubborn, determined temperament. His mouth was full and sensuous.
He was savage, magnetic—he could draw people as strongly as he
pushed them away. She sensed a hunter in him, wild and independent.
There was no question that he was attractive. In fact, she thought
he was the most handsome man she had ever seen. But how would he
treat her and the baby? And if he got tired of their arrangement
and decided not to see it through as he'd promised, he might toss
them out in the muddy street if he wanted to.

Melissa knew she had to think of some way to
protect herself and her child. There were no guarantees in
life—this afternoon she'd learned that not even marriage protected
a woman.

Jenny began to wail then, her patience
exhausted, and Melissa was dragged back from her ruminations. She
took two steps deeper into the room, looking for a place to change
the baby. Dirty dishes cluttered the little table and clothes were
slung over the two chairs. The quarters were close up here, just as
Dylan had said, with a low, timbered ceiling. In fact, with him in
the room, it had seemed even smaller still. His lean male ranginess
filled the whole place in a way that she found more than a little
threatening. Finally, she laid the baby on the floor and unpinned
her soaked diaper.

"Hushabye, little love," she crooned as she
fashioned the coarse flour sacking around Jenny's bottom. Trying to
keep the quiver out of her voice, she forced herself to ignore the
words Emerald Milling stamped on the fabric in blue ink. This was
not the life a mother envisioned for her child. She herself might
be dressed in old, worn clothes and feel just as old and worn. But
she wanted so much more for Jenny Abigail. She lifted the baby into
her arms. "Everything is going to be fine. Tomorrow I’ll get
material for some new clothes, and I'll make you better diapers."
Jenny stopped fussing and considered her with solemn eyes. "We're
not off to a very good start together, are we?" Melissa whispered
and rose to her knees. "But I'll get us out of this, just you wait
and see."

Pushing aside the shirt that lay on one of
the chairs, Melissa unbuttoned her bodice. Jenny was too thin as it
was, and she didn't want her to miss any meals. The baby rooted
around until she settled down to suckle. A sense of contentment
washed over Melissa, and she snuggled her child close, smoothing a
hand over her silky head. The silence gave her a moment to rest and
study her surroundings.

There was only enough space for her to make a
little corner for herself and Jenny. Glancing around, she spotted a
crate the baby could sleep in. The poor little thing had never had
a cradle, a fact that bothered Melissa a great deal. A baby ought
to have a cradle, even if she had nothing else.

A year ago, she had viewed Coy as her
deliverer. That he was a friend of her brothers should have given
her pause, but it hadn't. She had been so anxious to get away from
the tiny back street rooms she grew up in, away from the
drunkenness and Pa's constant angry harangue, she had ignored the
nagging doubts that had nipped at her and decided to marry Coy in
spite of them.

She could still see Coy sitting at the
kitchen table that rainy spring afternoon with Pa and her oldest
brother, James. It was before her mother had died. Melissa hadn't
been included in the discussion that decided her future, but she'd
eavesdropped from her place at the stove and peeked at them now and
then.

"Take her if you want her, Coy Logan," her
father had groused with a dismissive wave of his hand. He passed a
bottle of cheap corn whiskey to Coy after taking a long swallow for
himself. "She'll be one less mouth I have to feed."

Hearing that, Melissa turned to face the
stove again. Jack Reed had not earned a full day's pay or put food
in any of his children's mouths in more than ten years. Her mother
had been the one who worked—the one who had kept food on the table,
as poor as the rations had been. Melissa had stolen another glance
over her shoulder.

"I don't like it, and no offense to you,
Coy," James had said, idly scratching his crotch. "But who's gonna
take care of us if Lissy leaves? With Ma working for the
Pettigreaves in their fancy house, there won't be anyone to cook
and wash. Ma don't get home except on Thursdays. We have to eat in
the meantime."

This had raised a heated discussion, but in
the end Coy had won her hand. And although she hadn't known it at
the time, that was the day her dreams had begun to crumble.

But all of that couldn't be helped now. She
had more immediate concerns. She put Jenny over her shoulder and
gently patted her back. The baby's velvety temple pressed warmly
against Melissa's cheek, filling her with warmth that quickly
turned to an almost overpowering urge to weep. She tightened her
hold on her daughter, trembling slightly with the force of her
emotions. Please, God. Melissa had long since realized that her own
dreams had drifted away like dandelion fluff on the wind. But even
so, deep in her heart, she still held dreams for her baby. She
wanted more for her than hunger and betrayal and the stunning
impact of a man's brutal knuckles against her jaw if she so much as
dared to speak her mind. Those weren't outlandish dreams. Melissa
wasn't young enough or foolish enough to set her sights too high
these days. But she prayed that Jenny got chances that she'd never
had, and that she would somehow figure out a way to smooth the path
for her daughter.

Resolutely, she lined the crate with a piece
of the blanket Dylan had given her and laid Jenny inside. The baby
waved her fists vigorously, apparently pleased enough to have a dry
diaper, a full stomach, and a place to rest. Swallowing hard to
ease her tight throat, Melissa chucked the infant under the
chin.

"Well, it isn't a real crib, button, but at
least you don't have to share it."

Melissa's gaze skittered to Dylan's big,
roughhewn bed. It was made from slender tree limbs, the headboard
and footboard bent into arches and secured at the joints with
rawhide thongs. Rustic, she thought, but oddly pleasing to the eye
and considerably better than anything Coy had ever provided. A
couple of animal hides that had been stitched together—wolves'
hides, Melissa thought-were draped over the end and appeared to
serve as a blanket. Long-legged jeans were slung over the pelts and
a pair of boots sat on the floor.

Just as Dawson was basically a man's town,
this room lacked any hint of a woman's touch. But at least the
windows were glazed with real panes of glass, and they opened. The
tiny miner's cabin she and Coy had lived in had just one window,
and it had been made of empty bottles held together with dried mud.
Dylan's windows even bore heavy curtains to close out the light of
the midnight sun. Well, they couldn't be called curtains, exactly.
They were just rectangles of canvas with raw edges—they had
probably been cut with the same knife and method that had created
Jenny's diapers from the sacking.

A small galvanized steel sink with a pump
stood against one wall. There were homes in Portland that had real
faucets with running water, but she had never seen one. This she
was accustomed to, and it meant she wouldn't have to haul water to
wash dishes and clothes, as she had at Coy's cabin. Beneath the
jumble of dishes, an oilcloth graced the table, another step up
from her last dwelling. But the place needed a good cleaning.

She rolled up her thin sleeves and put a
kettle of water on the stove to heat. Then grabbing the corn broom
that stood in the corner, Melissa began sweeping.

Staying out of Dylan's way would be difficult
in a place this small, and tight living conditions tended to make
tempers short. And he'd made it no secret that he really didn't
want them there. But experience had taught her that she had to keep
him in a good humor. That was the only way she knew to protect
herself and Jenny.

She intended to do her best.

*~*~*

Downstairs at Harper's Trading Company, Dylan
stood over a crate of oranges, unloading it into smaller baskets.
The fruit was a little soft from the trip up here on a steamer, but
the captain who had sold it to Dylan had given him a fair
price.

Although it was after nine o'clock at night,
the sun threw a wedge of bright light across the plank floor, and
crowds still wandered the street outside as if it were the middle
of the afternoon. After two years up here, he still hadn't grown
accustomed to a summer sun that shone until midnight. He was glad
for the light tonight, though. It gave him an excuse to work in the
store and keep his mind off the footsteps he kept hearing
overhead.

Unloading a crate of oranges didn't take much
concentration, though. And that was the problem.

It was a rare moment that found him alone in
the store, and the thoughts spinning through his head were
glum.

Business was good, he couldn't complain about
that. With thirty thousand stampeders surging into Dawson to strike
it rich in the gold fields, he was making more money than he would
have believed possible.

Initially, he'd planned to dig for gold too,
just like the rest of them. And he'd had the advantage of being
here when George Carmack made the big gold discovery on Rabbit
Creek that had started all this. Good claims had still been
available then. But mining was grueling work, and there were no
guarantees. Despite the men who became rich, many more did not.
Dylan expected to work hard, but after trying his hand at mining,
he had decided that he'd rather spend his energy on a sure thing.
And it was a sure thing that these men needed equipment and
supplies. So he let them dig for the gold, and they brought it to
him when they bought whiskey and flour and tobacco, and anything
else he could find to sell them. No, it wasn't business that put
him in this sour mood.

Melissa Logan had done it for him.

His thoughts were interrupted when a
stampeder who looked as if he'd been a teacher or a bank clerk back
home stopped in to buy pipe tobacco and one of the oranges. But
Dylan wasn't distracted for long. As soon as the man left, Dylan
returned to his brooding.

He'd seen a number of astounding things since
coming North—moments of foolishness, greed, and great compassion.
There had been the time in Joe Ladue's saloon when a lovesick miner
solemnly offered to pay one of the saloon girls her weight in gold
if she'd marry him. She had agreed. He'd watched two partners who
had made the harrowing trip to Dawson separate in a fury after they
finally arrived. While dissolving the partnership, they had gone so
far as to try and split their one skillet in two with a hatchet. He
had contributed money to the emaciated Jesuit missionary, Father
William Judge, called "The Saint of Dawson," who worked himself to
exhaustion tending those who jammed his hospital, day and night,
with scurvy, dysentery and malaria.

But all of those things had involved other
people—he'd been merely an interested spectator. Today, though, he
had been right in the thick of it. Today had just about beaten them
all.

Now a woman and baby were upstairs in his
room, and would be there for the duration, however long that might
be. He didn't want a woman and her kid. He was already kicking
himself for letting Rafe talk him into taking Coy Logan's
gaunt-eyed, lank-haired wife. He paused, an orange in each hand,
and thought about her appearance. Well, maybe she wasn't so bad as
all that. Those unsettling gray eyes were downright attractive,
when she lifted her head to look at you. And while she was too
thin, her recent motherhood gave her a hint of roundness that would
probably bloom if she had three squares a day. But she looked worn
out. Life with Logan had probably been no picnic, he conceded.

But Melissa or not, Dylan would not let
anything get in the way of his goal—to make enough money to go back
to Oregon and buy the land he'd yearned for, where no man could
tell him how to live. He'd wanted to breed horses, but money had
never meant anything to him. Not even she could make Dylan change
his mind. Now he would prove to his father it didn't matter that
he'd banished his eldest son from the Harper fold; he was doing
just fine on his own, and without cheating anyone.

Dylan straightened and let his gaze run the
length of the shelves. He sure as hell had never pictured himself
doing this kind of work.

At that moment Rafe Dubois walked in. Even
without looking up, Dylan would have known he was there. The man's
breath was so short, he sounded as if he'd run up ten flights of
stairs with a horse on his back. In the midst of all the mud and
rough-dressed men, his immaculate attire seemed incongruous. In
fact, Dylan sometimes wondered how he had become friends with a man
whose background and views on life, sardonic and lyrical by turns,
were so different from his own.