Harper's Bride

by Alexis Harrington

  Dylan kept his grip on Coy, the fury still pouring out of him, his jaw locked. He didn't lift his gaze or acknowledge his friend's approach. Melissa believed he was aware of nothing around him except the debate in his own mind either to kill Coy or to spare him.

  Coy's eyes were as wide as stove lids, and the color had drained from his sallow face. Acrid, fear-scented sweat leaked from him in sheets, adding to the already foul odor that he exuded.

  "Let him go," Rafe ordered. His commanding tone almost disguised his winded panting. He stood a scant two feet from Dylan with Coy sandwiched between them. "Dylan, goddamn it . . . let him go! If you kill him . . . you'll lose every . . . thing . . . think, man . . . he's not worth it!"

  Rafe backed off then as a coughing fit overtook him, the worst Melissa had heard yet. Gray-faced, he stumbled to an overturned lard barrel next to the clotheslines and sat down, pressing a fist to his heart. Melissa hurried over and put a hand on his bony shoulder. His lips were tinged a faint blue, and his eyes bulged alarmingly with each round of coughing, but he kept his gaze fixed on his friend.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Dylan released Coy's hair and gave him a hard shove that pushed him into the dirt. Dylan's own breath was coming fast, and the muscles along both of his jaws rippled with tension. Coy skittered sideways along the ground, his legs working as if he pedaled an imaginary bicycle.

  "This is the last time, Logan," Dylan said between gritted teeth. "If you ever show your face around here again, no one will be able to save you. No one."

  Incredibly, Coy made one last protest after he gained his feet. "Lissy's my woman, and that's my kid. They belong to me, and I know my rights," he harped with watery bravado, waving a shaking finger at them as he backed away. "I got rights, by God!"

  Still gripping his knife, Dylan took two menacing steps toward him and spit at his feet. Coy danced backward. "You've got shit. You gave away everything—your wife, your child, and the right to call yourself a man—the day you sold them to me for twelve hundred dollars. Melissa belongs to herself now. The next time I see you around here, you won't be walking away. I'll have to call Father William to take you off to his hospital."

  Gawping like a landed fish, apparently Coy could think of no reply. His small eyes full of fear and impotent hate, he turned and hurried back toward Front Street as fast as his skinny legs could carry him. To return, Melissa hoped, to the rock from beneath which he'd crawled.

  No one spoke for a moment, and the ensuing silence was broken only by Rafe's ratchety breathing and Jenny's diminished wails. Dylan put his knife back in its sheath, then strode to Melissa. "Are you all right?"

  Putting her finger under her chin, he tipped her face up to his, and she saw the fury rush back into his green eyes. Flinching, she tried to pull back.

  "Jesus—Jesus Christ! Did he hit you?"

  She supposed that Coy must have left a red imprint of his open hand on her cheek. She nodded, trying to find her voice, but her throat was too tight. Her insides quivered like Fannie Farmer's aspic, and her outsides didn't feel much better.

  Dropping his hand, he paced in front of her, his rage back in full force. "I should have killed the son of a bitch! Damn it, I should have! I'll find him—"

  Melissa found her voice and pulled on his arm. "No, Dylan, no!" she begged. "Rafe is right. The police would banish you from Dawson. He won't come back now. Just let him go." Beneath the fabric of his sleeve she felt tightly drawn muscle.

  After pacing a moment longer, he nodded grudgingly, then slipped an arm around her shoulders. She yearned to lean against him, to give into the infinite comfort of his strength. Was it possible that such comfort and safety might be found in a man's embrace? Melissa had thought so once and had been fooled by the very man who had just left. She wouldn't take the chance again. She straightened and pulled away from Dylan's arm.

  "What about the baby?" he asked, and reached down to draw Jenny's blanket away from her face. The baby's whimpers ceased.

  "Oh, she's fine now." She pressed a kiss to Jenny's forehead. "Thank you," she whispered from her tight throat.

  "And you?" Dylan asked Rafe.

  "By God," the other man wheezed, "no one can call this a dull town. I was on my way to the saloon when I glanced down here and saw you in an altercation with Logan. It's a good thing I happened along before the Mounties did."

  Melissa thought it was a good thing that Dylan had happened along before Coy could do anything worse.

  Chapter Eight

  Dylan led Melissa up the stairs. "I have to finish Big Alex's shirts," she fretted. "He promised me two hundred dollars extra if I have them ready by morning."

  "Don't worry about that now," he said, and opened the door for her. He didn't begrudge her the money, but privately, he thought that Alex McDonald was a fool, wealthy or not.

  "But I have to worry about it. I promised Big Alex, and two hundred dollars is a lot of money. It would feed a family for a year back home." She stood on the landing, her face paper white except for the fading red imprint of Logan's hand. Pale blond strands had worked themselves loose from her braid and hung on either side of her slender face. Looking closer, he saw a bit of swelling just below her eye.

  He sighed. The sight of it, added to everything else that had happened in the last few minutes, shook him to the core. He had just come back from meeting the steamboat Athenian down at the waterfront when he'd seen Melissa struggling with Logan. Not only had the bastard pushed Melissa around, but he'd held a blanketed bundle that Dylan knew could only be Jenny. And for an instant when his anger had made time seem to stop, he'd gripped Logan's hair and felt a driving desire to dispatch him to hell. Rafe's thundering voice, warning him about loss and deportation, had finally penetrated the red mist of Dylan's rage.

  "Melissa, I want you to give up this laundry business," he said after he waved her inside.

  She was putting Jenny down in her crate, but sprang back up again, the baby still in her arms. "Give it up! No, no, I can't do that."

  He sank into a chair at the table and crossed his ankle over his knee. He could smell Logan's stink on him, and it made him want to pull off his clothes and burn them. "I think I gave Coy Logan a good scare, but I can't guarantee that he won't be back. He's mean and stupid, and that's a bad combination. He could hurt you—he could even steal Jenny to get even with you, or to punish you. He could—" He threw his hat on the table in weary disgust and plowed both hands through his hair. "Oh, hell, who knows how the pea brain works in a man like that?"

  "But I'll be safe. The Mounties come by every day," she offered hastily, and put the baby down.

  "They didn't today, did they?"

  "Yes, earlier—"

  He shook his head. "Nope. I think you ought to quit. I don't want to have to worry about you every time I leave you alone."

  She stood there for a moment, silent, and still quivering from the horror of her experience with Logan. Or so he thought.

  "No. I won't quit. I refuse to quit, and I told you why." She kept her eyes down, and her voice was almost a murmur, but there was no mistaking her resolve.

  Dylan's eyebrows rose. He was so astounded that she'd spoken up, he stared at her, his mouth partially open. "Melissa, there's more to life than just money."

  "That's true if you've never been without it. I have, and don't intend to be again. Do you know why I married Coy?" she asked, gripping her apron pocket, the one with the button on it "Can you guess?"

  He shifted in his chair. The question had certainly crossed his mind. "I thought maybe Jenny had something to do with it," he mumbled.

  She frowned, then blushed back to her ears. "You mean I was desperate and in trouble and had to marry him?"

  He shifted again, beginning to feel damned awkward. "Well, yeah, something like that. It happens all the time." He wanted to add, why else would a woman like her, smart and pretty, have shackled herself to a man like Logan?

  "Well, it didn't happen to me. I was desperate and in
trouble, but not the kind you think. In the house where I grew up, I lived my whole life tiptoeing around my drunken father, hoping not to be noticed. If I was noticed, I got hit, or yelled at. There were nights when he came home drunk, with a mean drunk's temper. It happened a lot, but on the days when he set out supposedly to find work, it was guaranteed. He never failed to run into a pal, some old friend he wanted to catch up with, and he'd spend his days and what little money we had—finding the bottom of a whiskey bottle instead of a job. We wouldn't have had anything to eat if my mother hadn't worked for the Pettigreaves. She kept the roof over our heads and food on the table."

  She twisted the hem of her apron into a wad in her hands as she paced in front of the stove. Her braid, looking like a frayed rope, swung back and forth behind her. "I remember one night when I was five or six years old—my father was arguing with my mother. He was horrible—drunk and calling her names, filthy names. I crept into the parlor, scared for her. I was carrying a little sailboat that she'd just given me for my birthday. My father saw me, and, oh, he was so mad. He slapped me, and then he jerked the boat out of my hands and smashed it under his heel. He said that would teach me not to spy on people.

  "My brothers weren't much better, but I think that's because my father beat them with his belt until they couldn't sit down. He thought it would make them behave. All he did was turn them into men just like himself."

  Her voice began to quiver, and Dylan saw that her eyes were filled with tears that didn't quite spill over. He stood up and caught her upper arms, fighting the urge to take her into his embrace. "Melissa, you don't have to do this."

  She pulled away from him. "Yes, I do! I want you to know why I married Coy Logan. I was a fool, but not the kind you think. I wasn't . . ." Impatiently, she scrubbed at her wet eyes with the hem of her apron, and her brow furrowed as she searched for the right word. "I wasn't dazzled by Coy, or swept off my feet like a heroine in some romantic story. He was a friend of my brothers, and he dawdled in our kitchen and made jokes with me sometimes. He made me laugh He was kinder to me than my own father or brothers." She laughed now, a funny little chuckle that sounded as if her heart were breaking. "It's hard to believe, isn't it?"

  Dylan wanted to kick himself for starting this. Though Melissa hadn't discussed it in much detail until now, he'd guessed that her life hadn't been an easy one. Listening to her talk about it was painfully hard—her words twisted his heart. But he thought he owed it to her to let her finish the story. He leaned against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest.

  She stood by the sink and gazed at the floor, as if watching the events of her life roll by on the planking. "When he said he wanted to marry me, I knew I didn't love him and that I never would. But I liked him. Sort of. My mother urged me to accept him—I guess she thought the same thing I did. That marrying Coy would get me away from the arguing and yelling . . . the hopelessness." She raised her eyes and looked up at Dylan. "But he was just like my father, after all."

  "Does your mother know that?" Dylan asked.

  Melissa swallowed hard, and her voice quivered again. "No. She died right after Coy and I got married. It—it was as if she wanted to see me on my way, and then was too tired to go on. She went to sleep one night and didn't wake up. The doctor said her heart just gave up. I think it was broken, from hard work and all those years of disappointment."

  Dylan pushed himself away from the wall and sat down opposite her. He wanted to keep his distance from her, to hold her at arm's length from his soul and his body, but the armor around his own heart wasn't as impenetrable as he'd believed. How could he envision the lurid scenes her words painted and remain completely detached? An instinct to protect her made him wish he could sweep her out of her chair and onto his lap. Instead, he reached tentatively across the table and covered her trembling hand with his own. Despite the punishment it took every day in wash water, her skin was remarkably soft.

  "Melissa, I'm sorry."

  Melissa felt as if a low jolt of electricity had shot through her arm. Dylan's hand on hers was warm and vital and comforting. Though she kept her gaze fixed on the oilcloth covering the table, she sensed him watching her. Without wanting to, once more she thought about the inevitable time when they would go their separate ways. Despite her desire for independence, in her heart she had begun to anticipate that day with dread.

  "Feeling a little better?" he asked.

  She nodded and took a deep breath. "Thank you. Now maybe you understand why I want to make as much money as I can. I want to take care of myself and Jenny, and not have to depend on anyone. I'm learning that cash is the best friend a person can have."

  Dylan's brows drew together slightly, and he let go of her hand. "I wonder why I've known women who were only interested in money," he muttered, more to himself.

  Melissa remembered the day he'd found her with his trunk open, and the dark-haired woman whose picture he kept buried inside. Whoever she was, Melissa guessed he shared a history with her that now gave him no happiness. "That woman in the photograph—Dylan, who is she?" she blurted.

  His expression turned as dark as thunderheads, and he said nothing. In the gulf of awkward silence that opened between them, the sound of a jangling saloon piano from the street below floated through the open window. Melissa wished she had the. question to take back again.

  "I'm sorry, it's none of my bus—"

  "Her name is Elizabeth Petitt Harper," he answered, surprising her. "She's my brother's wife."

  Melissa digested this for a moment. At least the woman wasn't his own wife. But it seemed a bit odd that he would carry a photograph of his sister-in-law, especially since there seemed to be no affection among the Harpers. Unless of course, the real reason that Dylan had left the family had something to do with her and him—

  "Your brother's wife?"

  He drummed his fingers once on the tabletop, then pushed his chair back and stood up. "If you and Jenny are going to be all right, I have to get back to the store."

  She looked up at him, feeling foolish, as if she'd asked him something far more personal. "Oh—well, of course—we're fine."

  He plucked his hat from the table and turned it in his hands. "You go ahead with whatever work you feel you need to do, Melissa. If you want to keep doing wash for people, I won't say anything more about it." He put on the hat and walked toward the door, then turned to consider her for a moment. "You're right—it doesn't matter how a person plans, there's never any telling what the future will bring."

  *~*~*

  After Dylan left, Melissa took Jenny downstairs and finished Big Alex McDonald's shirts. She would collect that bonus, despite what had happened today. Coy's surprise visit had rattled her more than she wanted to admit, even to herself. But with shaky resolve, she gathered the shreds of her thin courage and determined to go on.

  As she stoked the fire in the little stove behind the building, she knew she couldn't live her life cowering in the shadows. She had done that for too many years. In trading Coy's debt for her, Dylan had done more than just rescue her from a life of abuse. Though laconic and enigmatic, he had unwittingly given her the chance to escape, to discover who she really was.

  Anyway, she decided, even if Coy meant to return and harass her again, she didn't believe he'd come back that same day, especially after the furious warning that Dylan had given him. Nevertheless, as she rung out the shirts, she cast so many wary, searching looks at the entrance of the street she began to get dizzy. Each time she found no one there.

  But if there had been, she knew that Dylan was in the store, close at hand.

  Dylan.

  She had tried to ignore the picture he presented every morning as he stood at his shaving mirror, his bare back sculpted with light and shadow, and the sun glinting on his streaked hair. She tried, but her pulse told her that she failed. She had done her best to stop wondering how Dylan's full mouth would feel if he kissed her—would it be better than Coy's brutal, sloppy attentions? Her imagination ha
d her believing so. She had struggled to convince herself that Dylan was only a man, better than most she'd known, but nothing remarkable. That, she had begun to suspect, wasn't true either.

  The significance of Elizabeth Petitt Harper remained a mystery to her, and Dylan seemed unlikely to reveal it. But to her chagrin, Melissa realized she felt a niggling bit of envy. Obviously, he cared enough about the woman to carry her picture with him all the way to Dawson. And whatever she had been to him, she'd burned a lasting memory into his heart.

  She flung a dripping shirt on the clothesline and jammed the wooden pins over the tails. Melissa might share Dylan Harper's food and sit at his table; she could wash his clothes and even sleep in his bed, with the sack of rice still in place, of course. But despite all of that, he'd made it plain that he didn't welcome personal questions.

  Envisioning his bare back again, she thought that perhaps it was just as well.

  *~*~*

  That night Dylan didn't go upstairs for dinner. Instead, he sat at his counter in the store, eating stew and cornbread from a tray he'd ordered at one of the chophouses on Front Street. He'd eaten a lot of his meals this way before Melissa had come to stay with hint, and he'd never given it much thought. Now it seemed lonely. The coffee was cold and not as good as hers. The biscuits weren't as flaky, and even the stew seemed greasy. And he knew that she would be waiting for him—he felt a little guilty about that. But he wanted some time to himself to think, without her simple beauty to distract him.

  He let his gaze drift to the tarp-covered object sitting in the corner. He'd asked the captain of the Athenian to buy it for him in Seattle, and it was the reason he hadn't been in the store when Logan had appeared.

  When he thought of that dark slime of a man, Coy Logan, touching Melissa, every jealous instinct inside him came alive. At first he hadn't recognized any feelings beyond outrage, but now he knew what they were, and he didn't like it.

  He took a sip of the lukewarm coffee and looked around the walls of the store. His simple life in Dawson sure had become complicated. He'd drifted North, hoping to leave behind all of his memories of Elizabeth and his falling out with the old man. He'd been able to escape them for a while. In fact, he'd pushed everything and everyone far, far away from him. A loner by nature, he hadn't missed the company at first. But the Yukon winters were longer and harder than any he'd ever known, and one dark afternoon he'd waded through the snow to the saloon next door. There he'd traded drinks and conversation with a laughably out-of-place, dandified newcomer from Louisiana named Raford Dubois. Rafe's frail appearance had proved to be deceiving, however. What he lacked in physical strength his wit made up for. He could skewer a man with words as neatly as a fencing master wielded a rapier. He and Dylan had had nothing in common, but Rafe had turned out to be a loyal friend. Dylan had enjoyed watching Rafe lampoon the occasional sourdough with his razor-sharp intelligence. And tipping a few with Rafe had not distracted Dylan from his single-minded goal.