These Golden Pleasures

by Valerie Sherwood

  “Was—was breaking that woman out of jail your only crime in the States?”

  “No.” His deft fingers had found her upper breasts. “I killed a man.”

  She took another quick drink and choked. “Why?” she gasped.

  Somehow even as she coughed more buttons had come undone. His competent fingers were moving more swiftly now. Impatiently they had released the ribbon that held the top of her chemise, and it slid down softly, leaving her breasts bare and gleaming pale in the lamplight. He bent his head low over her shoulder, nuzzling her hair while his fingers lightly stroked her breasts. Her breathing came faster. “Would you like the light out?” he murmured.

  “No. Why did you kill him?”

  Case’s head came up. From very close, he looked into her eyes. For a moment she believed he saw through her, to some dim vision from the past. He spoke slowly, meditatively. “He drew a gun on me, claimed I’d cheated him in a game. He was going to kill me, but I was quicker.” His dark face softened. “It was long ago. Let’s not talk about it.”

  “No.”

  “You have things to forget too, Roxanne.”

  “Yes.” Oh, God, yes, she had things to forget. . . . Suddenly she clung to him.

  “Make me forget,” she whispered.

  His lips found hers then, a swift sweet pressure, and his hands clasped her waist and lifted her up so that she was standing. With one arm around her, while his lips and tongue gently probed her mouth, he finished undressing her. First her dress slid away, then her petticoat, billowing lightly to the floor, leaving her body deliciously free and yielding in his arms. Eyes closed, she swayed against him.

  His lips left hers, and she opened her eyes to see him smiling down at her. With a lithe gesture he swept her up, carrying her to the big brass bed and laying her down upon it gently, so that only her feet with their muddy boots hung over. Gently he removed them. Beneath were silk stockings—mended but still silk.

  He sat down on the bed beside her. His hands gently caressed the silk of her stockings. “These are the same garters you wore in Seattle,” he murmured. “Pink satin.”

  “They’re the only pair I own,” she said ruefully. “Worn out, like all my stockings. This is the best pair I have left.”

  “The stockings may be worn,” he said, “but the legs are the best in town.”

  She closed her eyes and turned her head from him as he lightly caressed her inner thighs and eased down her stockings. Through half closed lashes she saw him stand up abruptly and remove his clothes—all of them. She kept her face averted from his long aristocratic body, and all her senses snapped awake as he bent toward her and gently fitted that long hard body to her own soft yielding one.

  His hands seemed to be everywhere, caressing her tingling nipples that hardened ecstatically at his touch, moving fierily along her spine, tracing a flaming path across the silken skin of her stomach and her rounded buttocks, tingling their way along her inner thighs. Gently but strongly he entered her, moving with pulsating rhythm. Tension mounted in Roxanne. Aching desire flamed up, trembled to waiting stillness, flared up again.

  She felt swept up and passionately, recklessly alive in a way that she had never felt with Denby. It was Seattle all over again—but better.

  And then, knowing her response bespoke a white heat of passion, he took her fully, wildly, letting his own passion drive him. Tender explosions flowered swiftly within her, and subsided only to explode again. A wild sweet ecstasy overwhelmed her and lifted her up and up into a dream world. They drifted together through a passionate interlude of clinging bodies, agonizingly close, drinking deep of fulfillment.

  And after, they lay together in silent, naked peace. Her bare hip touched his and his right arm cradled her shoulders. Downstairs, the honky tonk piano tinkled while a hoarse young female voice wailed out a sentimental song about a woman wronged. Downstairs, there were stomping feet and applause. It all seemed so far away.

  Roxanne turned to the man beside her with a dreamy look. “I think I love you a little, Case.”

  His gaze was wistful and tender. He rested a gentle hand on her satiny breast, caressed it lovingly. “No, but I wish you did.”

  She sighed. “How can you tell that?”

  “You enjoy me as a lover, but I don’t think you quite approve of me as a man. Otherwise you wouldn’t have stayed away all winter out there on Bonanza Creek.”

  She smiled lazily. “I’m here now.”

  “Yes.” He bent to plant a kiss on a pink nipple. “You’re here now.” Roxanne was silent, her breath coming fast and shallow.

  He lay there fondling her in silence. Then suddenly on a gust of passion he took her again, and they strained together in wordless wonder at this bright flame that gripped them, exalted them, consumed them, and then cast them back panting and spent.

  He lay beside her looking up at the ceiling. “I’d leave the Klondike for you, you know,” he said. “I’d take my chances in Nome or anywhere you wanted to go.”

  Her heart lurched. It was a tempting offer. “Anywhere, Case?”

  “Anywhere.” It was a solemn declaration.

  She lay there imagining it. Traveling the world with Case. Cities as she had never seen them—gambling halls, dance halls. Walking beside a man all men feared.

  “I can’t,” she said, sitting up. “There’s Denby.”

  “You don’t love him.”

  It was a flat statement. She hesitated. “No, but I feel guilty about him. If he’d struck gold . . . but he didn’t.” Feeling suddenly sad, she looked away, felt his hand run delicately along her spine. She sighed and turned to see that his expression was puzzled. “How could you be raped by mistake?” he wondered, toying with her breasts. “How any man could mistake your body puzzles me. Surely there could not be another so lovely.”

  “I was wearing a mask and a wig and another girl’s costume,” said Roxanne gloomily. “And it was dark.”

  “Ah,” he said, “that explains it, then. I did not think you could love a madman.”

  She tensed in fury. “I do not love him!” she cried. “I only thought I did—and it was only for a little while! I hate him and am glad of what you did to him.”

  Something flickered deep and dark behind the murky silver of his eyes—it might have been mirth. “Then stay with me,” he said. “Sleep with me every night and punish him, Roxanne. I promise you he will writhe in misery.”

  She gave him a black look and would have risen, but for his restraining arm that rested lightly on her lap. His fingers idly played with the triangle of dark-blond hair. “Don’t go yet,” he said.

  “Case, I must. It’s nearly morning.”

  “I’ll buy you from Denby. I’ll send him away with as much gold as if he’d struck it rich on French Hill.”

  Her face softened, and tears glittered on her lashes as she suddenly flung herself forward and kissed him—kissed his eyebrows, his eyes, his mouth, pulled him to her for a last embrace. “I do love you a little,” she murmured. “But I must go. I’d never forgive myself, otherwise.”

  He held onto her wrist. “But you’d rather stay?”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “I’d rather stay.”

  He let her go then and got up, strode to the other side of the room and, picking up her clothes, handed them to her. When she put on her stockings, she discovered he’d handed her a new pair, and that her garters were new too, beautiful ones of red satin.

  “I want to keep these,” he said to her quizzical look, indicating the pink satin garters she’d been wearing. “Souvenir of the prettiest girl in the Klondike.”

  She looked up from fitting the garters over her shapely legs and smiled at him. Regret passed, over his face as she stood up, slim and elegant and naked except for her stockings, and slipped on her chemise. He stood watching as she pulled it down over her white breasts and tied the satin bow that held the drawstring. Quickly she donned her petticoat and dress. She gave him another smile as she put on her hat. “Your h
air’s awry,” he observed. “Want a comb?”

  She sensed he was finding excuses to keep her there; the thought warmed her. “Thanks, it won’t show under my veil. I’ll comb it back in Marge’s room. I must get back.”

  “I’ll escort you.”

  She hesitated—but yes, of course he must escort her through that rowdy crowd in the saloon downstairs, and through the almost equally rowdy street. She’d have to take the chance Denby might see her.

  She tossed the black veil over her head. Gravely, as if she were a great lady, Case offered her his arm. With a little smile, she took it. He had an elegant walk, she thought. A tall aristocratic sway, lithe and supple, as he moved down the stairs, making way for her through the drunken carousing crowd below.

  Midway across the room a woman in a red dress lurched against him. “Damn you, Case, you two-timing so-and-so!” she muttered. Case frowned at her and she subsided, but Roxanne recognized the woman as Yvonne. Case's woman, she thought with a pang, and hurried on where he led.

  In the street the crowd was thinning out, but Roxanne kept her head bent and stayed close beside Case, holding up her skirt against the mud. He lifted her over one deep rut, holding her for a moment before setting her down with obvious regret.

  At her hotel, she turned to him suddenly. “Case, in Seattle you said I reminded you of someone. Who?”

  “A girl who’s dead,” he said. Suddenly he swept aside her veil and kissed her, lingeringly. Then he threw open the hotel door and led her inside. “I’ll see you to your room,” he said.

  “No.” Her cool fingers rested on his arm. “No. We’d better say good-bye here.”

  She was aware that he stood and watched her as she ran lightly up the wooden stairs.

  At the head of the stairs, she collided with a man, and his arms closed around her to keep her from tumbling backward. The impact caused her hat to fall off, taking the veil with it. She looked up and realized it was Leighton who had caught her. The look of complete consternation on the golden giant’s face shook her.

  “Where is Denby?” she asked fearfully.

  “Gone to bed,” he said. “Roxanne, where’ve you been?” His blue gaze took in her disheveled hair, her hastily buttoned dress that hadn’t come out quite evenly at the neck.

  “This had nothing to do with Denby,” she whispered desperately. “It had to do with me and a person from my past. It was something I had to do, Leighton.” Looking up at him, she could see he wanted to believe her, but his world was struck down at the sight of her like this.

  “Leighton,” she pleaded. “Oh, Leighton, don’t tell Denby. So much has gone wrong—it would destroy him.”

  “I won’t tell him,” he said stiffly. He had a wounded air. “After all, it’s not my affair, is it?”

  He reached down and picked up her hat and veil. As she put them back on her head, she knew she had hurt him too.

  Quietly she slipped back to Marge’s room, gave the ghost of a knock. Marge threw the door open. “Well, about time!” she muttered. “A little longer and you might have missed the boat!”

  “Has Denby been by?”

  “Nope.”

  Roxanne tossed her hat on the bed, stood before the wavery mirror and rebuttoned her bodice carefully. “Can I borrow your comb, Marge?”

  Silently it was passed to her.

  “I suppose I owe you an explanation, Marge.”

  Marge shrugged. “Not unless you want to give it. You’re a grown woman, Roxanne. I guess you know what you want to do with your life.”

  Roxanne, combing out her hair, hesitated and gave the older woman a sober look. “Yes,” she said sadly, “I suppose I do. At least I know what I have to do with it.”

  Marge snorted. “If you’re throwin’ in with the Hard Case, you’re makin’ a big mistake. Any day some sharpshooter might take a potshot at him and remove him—permanently. He’s got enemies who don’t like the way he deals the cards.”

  “I’m not throwing in with Case,” said Roxanne wistfully. “I’m going back to San Francisco with Denby.”

  “That’s the spirit,” approved Marge. “Although to be honest, I thought someone would get you before you left here. I just thought it would be Leighton.” Comb upraised, Roxanne stared at Marge.

  “On account of he loves you so much," amplified Marge.

  “Leighton is going exploring up the Koyukuk—not to San Francisco. If he loves me so much, why isn’t he taking the boat?”

  “He’s tryin’ to get over you,” Marge told her soberly.

  Roxanne remembered the hurt look in the golden giant’s eyes. “I met him just now,” she said. “On the stairs.”

  “Maybe that’ll help him get over you,” said Marge dryly. “Now shut up and let me go to sleep. I paid good money for this bed and I mean to get my money’s worth. You can sit up in that chair or you can go down and tell your husband I’m better, whichever you want. He’ll ask you where you got those red garters and those new stockings though.”

  Roxanne, who was adjusting her garters and smoothing her stockings, said, “I’ll tell him they were a going-away present from you.”

  “And I’ll back you up,” sighed Marge. “I got no sense either.”

  But Denby noticed neither her red garters nor her new stockings when she changed her clothes in their room before leaving for the steamer, even though she made a point of letting him see them. He was excited and preoccupied. She supposed he was thinking of San Francisco and the new problems he must face there. Certainly he was intent on hurrying her to the boat; it was obvious that he could not leave Dawson fast enough.

  Hurrying along beside them down Front Street, Marge grumbled to herself; she looked sleepy—understandably. Leighton loped along in silence. Roxanne looked up to find him watching her, a hurt, perplexed look on his face. She gave him a tender smile and patted his hand. He had kept faith with her; he had not told Denby. Impulsively, just before they went up the gangplank, she pulled his big shaggy head down to hers and kissed him good-bye. He looked very shaken.

  From the rail, she thought she saw Case in the crowd watching the steamer depart, but she could not be sure. Then the gangplank was up, and the ship was moving, and a roar from the crowd on the river’s edge enveloped them. As they moved downstream, Dawson slipped away and out of sight.

  It was all over for them, the Klondike experience. They hadn’t found gold—only trouble. But at least they were getting out alive, which many had not. Roxanne leaned on the rail and thought dreamily of Case, of his silken lovemaking, of the yearning in his face when he’d offered to buy her from Denby. As if she were for sale for mere money! In Seattle she had given herself to him in sudden revulsion against everything in her life. In Dawson she had given herself to him for revenge.

  But the taste of revenge was not sweet in her mouth. Somehow she did not like the thought of Rhodes lying beaten and drugged and broke in some whore’s bedroom. He’d be waking up soon . . . he’d get her message. Her revenge, which she had wanted so much, would be complete.

  She leaned on the rail and considered her feelings. It seemed to her she should feel better than she did. Her old score with Rhodes was at last settled. Case’s lovemaking had been wild, an outlet for her pent-up desires. Denby didn’t know, would never know. She should be happy.

  Why then did she feel so wounded? She decided she did not understand herself. On the other hand, she thought, people in general probably didn’t understand themselves, and if all of us staggered blindly through life marking our shins, perhaps she was no more blind than the rest.

  “Look at the boats.” Denby interrupted her musings, his voice awed. “Looks like the whole population of Dawson is afloat and heading downriver. It’s the rush to Nome, Roxanne.”

  Roxanne lifted her troubled eyes. It was true. The Yukon was alive with boats, rafts, Peterborough canoes, craft of every description. And as the day wore on their boat kept passing others that had started out the day before but were moored while their passenger
s camped on shore for the night. Later Roxanne would hear that seven thousand people had started out from Dawson, to be borne on the swift current for the seventeen hundred-mile journey to the Bering Sea.

  Although Denby talked constantly and vivaciously of Nome, Roxanne hardly heard him as the days went by. Gloomy and sad, she stood by the rail and watched low blue hills glide past. The hot, short subarctic summer had painted the landscape with bright splashes of yellow daisies and arnicas, drifts of blue lupines, crimson-red fireweed. Past clumps of birches and through fragrant spruce forests the current swept them, their smokestacks a blotch against the brilliant blue of the sky. It was a world where birds sang and hawks hovered, blown by the wind.

  Roxanne’s glorious blue eyes reflected the blue of that sky and of the low pale clouds that scudded past to the accompaniment of Denby’s enthusiastic running talk of Nome. Some Scandinavians, he said, had struck it rich on Anvil Creek in the Snake River Valley.

  Roxanne pitied them. This brief and lovely subarctic summer would soon be gone, the mud would freeze to granite and ice cakes as big as houses would pile up in the rivers and blizzards would howl at seventy below zero. She couldn’t see how Denby could envy anyone who must make his living here.

  On a particularly lovely day when the birches seemed full of robins and even the Yukon’s tawny face seemed to smile, Roxanne, in the tiny cabin she shared with Denby below decks, gave a last brush to her hair. Denby had already gone up on deck; he seemed nervous now that they were approaching the Yukon Flats and would soon enter the labyrinth of the delta. No doubt he was worried about finding a job when they reached San Francisco. She laid down her hairbrush and accidentally knocked her purse to the floor. As she picked it up she felt the sharp corner of Rhodes’s wallet. She had forgotten it was in there.

  It occurred to her that she should get rid of that wallet, throw it over the ship’s rail. Case had said it contained lots of identification. Jealous Denby, who once again was an eager if incompetent lover, must not see a wallet with the name Coulter in her possession.

  Soberly she took the wallet out, held it in her hands. It belonged to the man she hated, and over whom she had at last triumphed. But staring at it she felt no sense of triumph, only of loss. She turned it over in her hands and opened it slowly. Perhaps, she thought, wincing, he’d have a picture of a woman in it, one of his fancy women. He did! Three pictures, in fact. Her hands trembled slightly as she pulled them out. She froze and stared down at the pictures, transfixed. Her own face was smiling back at her. They were pictures that had been taken that first summer when Rhodes seemed to be courting her. Rhodes had taken them himself, telling her later they had not turned out, that the film had been bad. He had wanted them for himself, she now realized, and he had kept them with him all this time.