I do, I do, I do (19 page)

The Chilkoot trail, or the Poor Man's Trail as it was also called, twisted through twenty-five miles of steep, tangled terrain. But the first five miles hadn't been too difficult, Clara decided, stopping to swing the pack off her back.

The day was bright and crisply cold, a grand day for new beginnings, a day to absorb nature. The ragged beauty of abruptly rising mountains awed her, and the flow of humanity ascending toward the pass made her feel part of something momentous.

Choosing a rock beside the trail, she sat down and rummaged in her backpack until she found the sandwiches she'd made early this morning out of canned ham. She also had an apple, a piece of hard cheese, and a bottle of her carefully hoarded German ale, but she would save those items for her lunch.

While she unwrapped a sandwich to eat now, she watched the steady stream of men trudging past her. Some pushed wheelbarrows piled high with boxes and crates, most carried huge loads on their backs, and others led pack animals even though the actual pass was too steep for horses or mules to climb. Clara wondered what happened to the animals when the prospectors reached Sheep Camp at the bottom of the pass.

"Well, well, if it isn't Miss Klaus."

Bear Barrett stepped out of the stream of foot traffic and approached the rock where she sat. His shaggy golden hair hung below a well-worn hat with a brim large enough to keep the sun off his face. He wore a heavy green sweater over loose trousers and sturdy walking boots.

"Mind if I join you?" he asked, already sliding his pack to the ground beside her. "What have you got there? Ham? I've got fried egg and bacon. Would you like to trade one of your sandwiches for one of mine?"

Clara accepted his offer and then pulled her corduroy skirt to the side to make room for him on her rock.

"How many of those cheechakos do you think will make it all the way to Dawson?" Bear asked before he bit into one of Clara's ham sandwiches. His sharp gaze studied the men hiking past them.

"I keep hearing that word,
cheechako
. What does it mean?"

"It's the Chinook word for newcomer."

"I suspect it means a bit more than that. Like stupid greenhorn. Or, idiots. Something not too complimentary."

When Bear grinned, his craggy almost-menacing face relaxed into near handsomeness. Looking at him, Clara tried to imagine him without the broken nose and minus the scar through his eyebrow, but she couldn't. His crooked nose and dented face were part of who he was, and part of the reason her skin flushed when she gazed at him too long.

"After you've been in the Yukon a year, you're entitled to call yourself a sourdough," Bear explained, "but not before."

She smiled and nodded, feeling his physical presence as she felt the chill wind on her cheeks—as a tangible thing. He enveloped people with his size and his energy, overwhelmed most, Clara guessed. He didn't intimidate her, but she felt his warmth and size and vigor, and she responded strongly to the challenge he represented. He was a mountain, and mountains were there to climb, or to whittle down to size.

They ate in companionable silence, watching the tide of prospectors struggle up the trail. "I behaved badly yesterday," Bear said suddenly. "I don't know what happened. Hell, I wanted to buy you a cup of coffee. Instead, I got mad." After a minute he added, "I'm always explaining myself to you. I don't do that with anyone else. But whenever I see you, I feel like I need to explain whatever I did or said the last time I saw you."

"Explaining spares a lot of misunderstandings." Clara didn't dare turn her head, or she'd be looking directly into those brown-bear eyes and then her stomach would flip over and fall to the ground.

"If I'd asked, would you have let me buy you a coffee?"

"I don't know." She was playing with fire here. "I might have." Surely no one got burned sharing a simple cup of coffee. She couldn't see any harm in it, not really.

His teeth flashed in a smile, and his eyes narrowed down in a crinkly way that made it impossible not to smile back at him. "Then I'll ask you again sometime."

They ate their midmorning snack and watched the cheechakos, and Clara tried not to feel the heat of him against her side. Tried to ignore the clean outdoor scent of his hair and clothing.

"How long have you been in Alaska?" she asked, mostly to focus her thoughts away from wanting to lean against him.

"Sometimes it feels like I've been living in one wilderness area or another for as long as I can remember. I like the raw vitality of the boomtowns. And the opportunities. Men have gotten rich chasing prospectors."

"Then you search for gold, too?"

He laughed. "No, ma'am. I make more money selling one bottle of liquor than most miners earn in a week. I guess you could say I mine the miners."

Clara nodded approvingly. She understood this thinking. Providing food, drink, and shelter would lead an ambitious person to prosperity. That's what her papa had always said.

But Papa was a man to stay put, not a man like Bear who followed opportunity wherever it led. As for herself, she'd been willing to sell the inn and chase opportunity to Seattle, so she guessed she was more like Bear Barrett than like her papa.

Feeling him stiffen next to her brought her thoughts back to the present in time to notice a scowling man who had halted on the trail. He stared at Bear with such hatred that Clara gasped.

"Who's that?" she asked. The man spit on the ground as if the sight of Bear had left a bad taste in his mouth, then he snarled something beneath his breath and moved on.

Bear frowned at the clouds gathering to the west. "His name is Jake Horvath. I won the Bare Bear off him in a poker game. He claims I cheated."

An odd expression tightened his face as he paused and studied Clara. After a minute she realized he was waiting for her to ask if Horvath's accusation was true. When she said nothing, he nodded, then intensified his gaze and looked deep inside her.

How long they sat on the rock staring into each other's eyes was anyone's guess. Finally Clara blinked and turned her face toward the trail, pressing her palms against fiery cheeks. "Oh, my," she murmured in a breathy voice.

"You know, things would be a lot easier if you weren't a respectable woman."

"I beg your pardon," she said, abruptly coming to her senses. Surely she had not heard him correctly.

"There are things I'd like to say to you, but it's hard to talk to respectable women. I have to be careful what words I choose and where I look."

The fire continued to blaze on her cheeks as she imagined the kind of women he must usually speak to. "Well! I'm sorry that my respectability inconveniences you." The idea. She shrugged her arms through the straps of her backpack, not allowing him to assist her. "If you'll excuse me," she said coolly.

"Wait a minute."

Striding forward, she fell into the line of cheechakos hiking over terrain that steadily worsened and became more difficult to cover. Once she looked back and saw Bear standing to the side of the trail, glaring after her with an expression of annoyance and exasperation. That's how she felt, too.

Much of the time he had an infuriating way of disappointing her or making her angry. She didn't know why she thought about him so often anyway. Well, yes she did.

Whatever spark flared between them was strictly superficial. She wouldn't have admitted it to another soul, but a large part of his enormous appeal was purely physical. Her skin tingled where she brushed against him. When their eyes met, her chest tightened and an earthquake shook her stomach. Sunlight shining on the golden hair on his hands and wrists made her mouth go dry.

Jean Jacques had caused a similar reaction, but not as strong, and she knew where that mistake had taken her. Frowning, she grabbed hold of a cottonwood branch and pulled herself up a steep incline. The ground was a damp tangle of exposed roots.

Ironically, after years of zealously protecting herself from fortune hunters, that's whom she had impulsively married. And she'd done it largely because Jean Jacques made her itch somewhere deep down inside. It was enough to make a cat laugh.

Well, it wouldn't happen again. Tingling nerves and hot shivery stares were not going to lead her astray this time. But she almost understood Bear's comment about wishing that she was a woman of loose virtue. If that were the case, she and Bear could spend a rollicking night together, she could get him out of her system, and that would be the end of it.

But since she was a respectable woman, his comment had to be viewed as insulting. Quivering with moral indignation, she hardly noticed how the trail had deteriorated.

If Juliette died, and she thought she might, it would be Jean Jacques's fault. If it wasn't for him, she wouldn't be here, struggling up the steep slope of a mountain, panting like a dog and perspiring as no lady ever should.

Stepping out of a quagmire of churned earth and animal droppings, she leaned into the hillside, placed her hands on her knees, and fought to fill her lungs with enough air to survive.

This was madness. There wasn't even a trail. Men and animals picked their way up as best they could, climbing around boulders ranging from skillet size to the size of carriages. Hemlock and spruce grew thick enough to snatch at hats and clothing. And she'd overheard someone say they were only halfway to the first night's camp.

Easing herself down on a fallen tree trunk, she yanked off her pack and rubbed sore shoulders. The pack couldn't weigh more than fifteen pounds, but after three and a half hours, it felt as if she carried a block of marble on her back. She didn't know how the men bore it, those who carried towering packs that must have weighed near a hundred pounds. And when the men reached Canyon City, the first night's campsite, they would turn around and return to Dyea to fetch another hundred pounds of their goods and continue back and forth over this hellish trail until their outfit was reassembled. A shudder rippled down her spine.

"You're shivering? You can't possibly be cold," Zoe gasped, climbing around a boulder and staggering toward Juliette. She doubled over and gulped huge mouthfuls of air. When Zoe's skirt tipped up in back, Juliette noticed that Zoe's legs were twitching as badly as her own.

"It starts to feel cold after you rest for a minute."

Perspiration had dampened Zoe's collar, and her cheeks were bright pink from the sun. Juliette supposed she looked equally disheveled. For once she didn't care. "If I had to walk this horrible so-called trail a couple dozen times like most of those men, I'd give up and go home." She thanked heaven for their mysterious benefactor.

Zoe nodded and dropped on the log beside Juliette. "For once I agree with you. Right now I don't care that you paid for us. I'm just grateful that I don't have to pack one more ounce than the two tons I'm already carrying."

Juliette didn't waste breath denying she was the benefactor. Nothing she said would convince Zoe. She closed her eyes and sighed. "I don't think I have the energy to eat lunch."

"Me neither. I'll tell you one thing. Tomorrow I'm not wearing this corset. I don't care if Ma hears about it from a dozen sources, I'm not lacing tomorrow."

Juliette wished she could fall asleep and wake up in Linda Vista with all this behind her. She wished she had never met Jean Jacques Villette. "Sometimes I think I could shoot Jean Jacques myself. If it wasn't for him, I'd be warm and comfortable at home." But she could never shoot anyone. Not even the man who had ruined her life. At the moment this seemed like a character flaw. "Could you really shoot someone you love?"

Zoe didn't answer immediately. "I'm not sure anymore if I actually loved him. Maybe I loved the kind of life he offered. I'm not proud of that, but maybe that's how it was." She fished around in her backpack and pulled out a hard-boiled egg, but cracking and peeling it seemed beyond her.

Juliette picked bits of bark off the log they sat on. "Sometimes I remember how fast everything happened, and it shocks me. How could I have married someone I knew so slightly?" She shook her head. "Was I that afraid of ending on the shelf?"

She kept circling back to that question. Maybe Jean Jacques had been a desperate last attempt to save herself from spinsterhood. She was beginning to wonder if love had even been involved. How could she love someone who had never existed? He was none of the things she had believed him to be, but he was many of the things Aunt Kibble had taught her to despise.

He was a thief who preyed on women. That was the unvarnished truth. A man who cared nothing for the marriage sacrament. He was a hollow wisp wrapped in charm and possessing a gift for saying what women wanted to hear. A liar and a fraud.

"If I ran into Jean Jacques right now, I'd give him a piece of my mind that he'd never forget!" The muscles in her calves still twitched, her shoulders ached, and she was damp with perspiration. She deeply resented how she looked and felt. "I wish I'd never come here."

"I wish you'd never come here, too," Zoe said with a sigh.

Maybe it was the improbable circumstance of sitting on the side of a boulder-strewn mountain in Alaska. Maybe the altitude had made her giddy. Maybe switching from the heat of laboring uphill to sitting still in cold air had affected her mind. Maybe Zoe's acerbic comment broke the spell of confiding in each other. But Zoe's remark struck her as humorous.

"I don't want to be here, and nobody wants me here, yet here I am." A decidedly unladylike laugh shook her body and burst out of her like a cork under pressure. "I hate this, I truly hate it! So why on earth am I here in Alaska?"

Zoe stared at her. Then her lips twitched and a faint smile brushed her lips. "You're here for the same reason I am. Because of that son of a bitch, Jean Jacques."

"He is a son of a bitch, isn't he?" She'd never said such words in her life, had hastened away in offense from men who used coarse language, had never known women who spoke such phrases until she'd met Zoe and Clara. But by heaven, it felt good to say the words herself. It felt good to let the fury and resentment finally boil out of her.

Struggling to her feet, she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted down the mountainside. "Jean
Jacques Villette is a rotten son of a bitch!" There. She'd told everyone in the world what she thought of him.