Gold Rush Bride

by Debra Lee Brown

  Not that she’d need reminders.

  The image of the man sleeping naked in the bed not a foot from where she stood—one muscled arm thrown casually over his head, dark hair framing features she knew by heart—was permanently etched in her mind.

  She stood there for a moment watching his chest rise and fall with each steady breath, and knew she’d always remember with perfect clarity what his hands felt like on her body, the dizzying rush of heat and want and fear she felt when he kissed her.

  Last night they’d made love slowly, wordlessly, with an aching tenderness between them that seemed almost a living, breathing thing to her. For a moment she’d thought his feelings for her had changed.

  And in that moment perhaps they had.

  But she knew when he woke he’d be the same man he was yesterday and the day before that. The same man who, after each intimate encounter with her, would distance himself abruptly, as if to disavow the ungovernable want his body betrayed but his heart did not share.

  She knew she couldn’t bear it were he to wake and look at her with that familiar edge of bitter remorse glittering in his eyes.

  It was time for her to go.

  The ticket Will had procured for her journey home stared coldly at her from the night table. She took it and stuffed it into the pocket of her calico dress. She ignored the bag of coins.

  After one last look at the man who for a turbulent month had been her husband, she turned toward the door, her cloak and satchel in hand.

  Will’s buckskin jacket lay in a heap blocking her exit. She picked it up, then stifled a gasp as something thunked to the floor. Kate went still as a statue, her eyes darting to Will. From the bed he let out a deep, contented moan and turned restlessly in his sleep. When his breathing slowed again, she knelt to retrieve the object.

  Whatever it was had rolled under the bed. She reached for it blindly along the green floorboards, and after a few seconds her hand closed over something small and hard with surprisingly sharp edges.

  Dawn’s light bleeding through the window shone on the keepsake when she opened her palm. Her breath caught. Staring up at her was her own image painted on an oval sliver of ivory encased in fine silver filigree. The memento had belonged to her father, and she’d wondered what had happened to it when she didn’t find it among his things.

  She wondered why Will had it, and why he’d kept it from her. Why he kept it at all. She told herself it didn’t matter, and set it on the table beside the money pouch.

  Cold, damp air hit her like a sobering force when she stepped into the street. It was early and still quiet, though merchants were already up and about preparing for another day of commerce.

  The walk back to the wharf took her less than five minutes. Gulls cawed overhead, circling fishmongers out on the pier cleaning the morning’s catch. The salt air smelled surprisingly good to her, reminding her a bit of home.

  Her gaze slid along the line of ships anchored in the bay and listing in the light breeze. A steamer caught her eye, one she’d seen Will glance at yesterday when he thought she wasn’t looking. The name stood out in bold white letters. Orion. She remembered it from the discarded letter sheet Will had meant her not to see.

  After a moment she moved on toward the building Will had pointed out to her yesterday at the end of the long street where shipping agents and importers gathered to do their business.

  Through big double doors men were already coming and going, leather-bound journals and stacks of paperwork in hand. One of them tipped his hat to her as she entered.

  “May I help you, ma’am?” a bespectacled agent said to her when she reached the front of the line.

  “I’ve a ticket for Dublin.” She fished around in her dress pocket for it and frowned. “What on earth…?”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Um…no. Here it is.” She pulled the handwritten ticket from her pocket along with a wrinkled parchment. Suddenly it dawned on her what it was—the last letter Michael had sent her father from home.

  She remembered stuffing the letter into the deep pocket of her calico dress the morning she and Will had left Tinderbox, but she’d changed into her old dress for the journey, and hadn’t worn this one since. In the blur of the past few days she’d simply forgotten it until now.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Oh, sorry.” She pushed the ticket across the counter to him. “My…husband bought it for me yesterday, and said that this morning I might…” She stared at Michael’s unread letter and promptly forgot what she was going to say.

  “Mrs. Crockett, isn’t it?” The shipping agent inspected the spidery script on the front of the ticket.

  “Oh, aye,” she said, snapping back to the moment.

  “I remember your husband. Sold him the ticket myself.”

  She looked at the letter again, and for some odd reason all the hairs on her nape prickled.

  “Crockett,” the agent said again, flashing her a look of approval over his spectacles. “Just like the banker.”

  At their brief reunion yesterday afternoon, Kate had seen the pain edging both Will’s face and his father’s when they’d thought neither of them was looking at the other. “Aye, you might say that.”

  “Now, if you’d like to board early—”

  “Actually…” She unfolded the crumpled letter onto the counter and spun it around so the agent could see it. “Before I do…could you…would you mind very much?” She nodded at the unintelligible scribble.

  “Want me to read it to you?”

  There was no one else waiting in line behind her. “If you would, I’d be most grateful.”

  The agent gripped the letter between inky fingers and started to read it aloud. Less than a minute into Michael’s chatty dialogue, Kate’s heart stopped.

  “Wait! Read that part again.”

  The agent’s eyes narrowed on the words. “Says they’re sailing ’round about August twelfth.”

  Nearly four months ago! Kate gripped the counter, sure she would faint dead away. “You mean my…my brothers are coming here? When?”

  Pointing out the double doors, the agent squinted toward the high drafting clipper anchored fifty yards offshore. Kate’s gaze followed, her eyes stretching so wide they hurt.

  “There she is right there—the Marta Marie.” He glanced again at the letter. “Yep, that’s the one.”

  “You mean…?”

  “That’s right, ma’am. Your brothers are already here.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He knew before he even opened his eyes that she was gone.

  Will sat on the narrow bed in the squalid boardinghouse room staring blankly at the painted miniature on the table. Kate’s guileless blue eyes stared back at him. Her ticket was gone, the money bag left untouched. He should have realized she’d refuse the coin.

  Gray light shone through the window but gave off no warmth. For a long time he just sat there, not bothering to dress, watching the play of light on the floor, thinking he’d been wrong after all.

  He was a changed man.

  Kate had changed him.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there sifting over the tiniest details of their month together. Remembering her stalwart pride and her matter-of-fact acceptance of the harsh realities she’d faced—not only here, but in Ireland.

  She simply dealt with what life heaped on her, and moved on. For Kate, it was as uncomplicated as that. She wasn’t bitter, didn’t hate. When there was blame to be laid, she almost invariably forgave, and when she couldn’t, she at least sought understanding.

  He thought, too, about the brief meeting last night with his father and how, after five years, Coldwell Crockett wasn’t quite the same man Will remembered.

  Perhaps it was because his father was alone now. Will’s mother had died a year or so after he’d taken Sherrilyn west. Will had found out by accident, from an acquaintance he’d run into at Sutter’s Fort.

  There had just been Will and his mother—no other family. Mean
ing all his father had had to keep him warm these past years was his money. Once, that would have been enough.

  But for a fleeting moment last night, as they’d stood together in his office talking, Will suspected it was not. And that the realization, when it had finally come, had hit his father hard.

  He closed his eyes, pushing all of it from his mind, and to his frustration breathed in the lingering scent of Kate on the bedsheets. The everyday clamor of people in the wakening street below the room called him back to the present.

  He’d need to get a job of some kind, he supposed. Something to fill his time until spring, a way to make up the cash to repay the loan. His father had wanted to make him a gift of the money, had wanted him to take more. Will had refused. He’d pay back every cent if it was the last thing he did.

  But a job could wait until tomorrow. For now, he rose and dressed, and a few minutes later found himself wandering down Clay Street toward the wharf.

  The Dublin-bound clipper sat in the bay taking on provisions. Will wavered as to whether or not to hire a dinghy to carry him out there, just to make sure Kate had gotten safely aboard. A second later he dismissed the idea.

  Hell, she was a grown woman and had been perfectly capable of traveling all the way here without his help, or anyone’s. She’d likely have no trouble finding her way without an escort a mere fifty yards from where he now stood. Besides, he’d paid both the shipping clerk and the captain extra to see that no harm came to her until she was dropped safely back on Irish soil.

  He stood there a moment longer and watched as stevedores loaded barrels into the hold, and realized that by tonight there’d be an ocean between them.

  It was better this way. For him and for her.

  He couldn’t give her what she wanted, what she deserved. He wasn’t cut out for it, didn’t have it in him. He simply had nothing to give. Moreover, she had to go back. She wanted to go back—she’d said so all along. That’s what had driven her to marry him in the first place.

  He watched the clipper a second more, then turned into the first saloon he saw—a clapboard building that looked as if it had been constructed overnight and would collapse in the first stiff wind.

  The bar was little more than a row of barrels with planks laid across them. Hogsheads served as stools for the amazingly diverse collection of men lined up along the bar. Will heard foreign languages he didn’t recognize as he walked through a haze of smoke that made his eyes burn. There were no women, and the only drink served was whiskey.

  This was the place.

  He pulled a barrel up to an empty spot at the middle of the bar and nodded to the man selling drinks. Didn’t matter that it was barely breakfast time.

  The short, balding Irishman waddled over with a tin cup and a full bottle, took one long look at him and said, “Want me to leave it?”

  “Yeah,” Will said, and slapped his money pouch on the bar.

  It didn’t take Kate very long to find her brothers.

  The shipping clerk had pointed her in the direction of a rooming house catering especially to the Irish. The first thing she saw when she stepped inside the downstairs parlor was a wrestling match on the proprietor’s Turkish carpet—the combatants her twin brothers, Patrick and Frank, who’d grown considerably since she’d last seen them.

  They were all there—and all safe, thank God. Michael and Hetty and their new babe who’d been born just before they sailed. Sean, who was now taller than Kate, and had a mouth on him that she longed to wash out with soap. And, of course, the twins.

  She burst into tears the moment she saw them, and then spent nearly the whole of the morning with them gathered around her, recounting much of what had happened in the seven months since she’d left home.

  In the early afternoon Hetty took the twins out to purchase some things for supper. Up in the sleeping room Michael had rented for them for the night, Kate had a frank conversation with her brother as she rocked his baby in her arms.

  “I still can’t believe you’re really here.”

  “And I can’t believe Da’s dead,” Michael said, his eyes glassing again.

  He’d taken the news hard. Sean and the twins seemed much less affected, which made sense, really, since their father hadn’t spent much time at home these past years. Only Kate and Michael really remembered him well.

  She reached out and stroked her brother’s downy cheek, reminding herself he was barely nineteen. The weight of the world—a wife, a babe, carting his entire family five thousand miles to a place he knew nothing about—had hardened his boyish features.

  “Tell me again about Mother’s sister.”

  Michael’s face lit up again. “Oh, it was grand, Katie. When her husband died and left us all that money, Aunt Olivia was fit to be tied.”

  “You paid my debt with part of it.”

  “Our debt,” he said. “We’re a family, aren’t we?”

  She smiled. “That we are.”

  Michael went on, elaborating on some of the details he hadn’t related in his first frantic telling of the tale. “The tight old biddy would have rather cut off her own arm than give over the rest of the coin. Even hired a solicitor of her own to contest her husband’s will.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me.” Kate had only met her aunt a few times, and the reception she’d received on all those occasions, particularly the last, had been frigid at best. “So you settled for passage to America for all of you.”

  “Aye. She paid her cousin—the one in the shipping business—a pittance for our transport compared to what we’d likely get if we’d waited for the court to sort it all out. But at the time it seemed the best move. Had I not done it, we’d no doubt still be waiting to receive a farthing of what her husband had left us.”

  “It’s a smart man you are, Michael Dennington.”

  “Not so smart as desperate. There was nothing left for us in Dublin. I lost my job a month after you sailed, and we had to take the twins out of school to make ends meet. We were close to starving, Katie.”

  Her stomach twisted in a knot. “I was wrong to leave you.”

  “Christ, no. It was the best thing in the end—what drove the idea for us to come in the first place. With you and Da here, well, naturally we thought…” He shrugged, and a bittersweet smile graced his lips.

  “You thought right.” She handed the baby to him and walked to the small window overlooking the bustling street.

  “We’ve a bit of savings to get us started, too.”

  “That’s grand, for I haven’t a cent of my own.”

  Turning away, toying idly with a tendril of hair that had come loose from her twist, Kate wondered where Will was now, and what he was doing—if he’d already put her neatly out of his mind.

  “Tell me about him, Katie.”

  “Hmm?” She’d been drifting.

  “Your…husband. This…Crockett.”

  “Oh, there’s not much to tell really.” She pressed her hands against the cool window glass and watched the parade of faces in the street below, alternately hoping and fearing one of them would be Will’s.

  “You’re a poor liar, Mary Kate.”

  She flashed her brother a somber smile. “Da used to call me that.”

  “I know.”

  Earlier, when the younger boys had been part of their conversation, Kate had parted with only the sketchiest details of how she’d survived the last month, and what her plan had been. Michael had known instantly she was holding back.

  “What you said downstairs—about the marriage being in name only…” He paused, willing her to his gaze, but she refused to look him in the eye. “That bit wasn’t true, was it, Kate?”

  Her lips thinned as she turned back to the window and stared blankly into the street. “No.”

  “Aye, that’s what I thought.”

  “Is it that obvious?” She shot him a quick glance.

  “No, but you do seem changed. More…I don’t know…grown-up.”

  You don’t know the half o
f it, she thought, recalling a dozen precarious situations she’d gotten herself into since the day she’d arrived in Tinderbox.

  “Do you love him, Katie?”

  Father Flanagan had asked her the same question. She met her brother’s steady gaze, not prepared to answer. Her silence, it seemed, was enough.

  “Aye, you do.”

  “That’s obvious as well, is it?” She watched as Michael laid his sleeping son on the bed, then joined her at the window.

  “Where is he, Kate? Why isn’t Crockett here with you?”

  She hadn’t told him the truth about why she was here in San Francisco. She’d let all of them believe she’d come to meet them, that she’d read the letter and had known exactly when they would arrive.

  And now that they were here, she could think of no good reason to tell them that she’d been minutes away from boarding a clipper back to Dublin, and might have missed them all together had she not found the letter in her calico dress.

  “Well?”

  She knew Michael, and knew, too, he wouldn’t let it go until he’d wheedled every last detail out of her. She was the eldest, but he was the eldest son and fiercely protective of her.

  “He’s gone,” she said, having made up her mind to tell him the whole of it. “Well, not gone yet. Not exactly. He’d planned to be on the Orion when it sails day after tomorrow.”

  “What?” Color flooded into Michael’s tight face. “You mean to tell me he’s ruined you and now he’s leaving?”

  Kate raised her voice in order to be heard over the string of foul words rolling off her brother’s tongue. “Calm down. I told you earlier, it was all arranged at the beginning.”

  “Aye, but the dallying between the sheets was not part of the bargain, or am I wrong?”

  “No,” she said quietly, her face heating under her brother’s angry scrutiny. “You’re right, it…wasn’t part of our…bargain.”

  “The bleedin’ bastard. When I get my hands on him, I swear to God I’ll—”