"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.
Zoe burst into laughter.
"You used us and threw us away, and I hate you! I hate you, I hate you!" Juliette's face was hot and her hands shook, but she had admitted her own truth. The words exploded up from deep inside, burning the back of her throat. And she didn't know if she wanted to laugh or cry because she had finally conceded that Jean Jacques was an unscrupulous scoundrel just as Aunt Kibble had insisted he was. There were no excuses for what he had done, no justification. No explanation she could accept.
She turned to Zoe. "I don't think I've heard you laugh before. You're very pretty when you smile."
"Being pretty never did a thing for me," Zoe said, her smile curving down into a frown. She tapped the egg against the log and then peeled away bits of shell. "I used to think that being pretty would somehow save me from a life of work and babies. Instead it brought me a no-good bastard who ruined me for any other man. So yes. I'm really going to shoot him. And if they hang me for murder—so what? I have no plans beyond shooting Jean Jacques, so they might as well hang me. I don't care."
"I don't have any plans either." After they found Jean Jacques and Zoe shot him, what would she do? Spend the rest of her life listening to Aunt Kibble remind her what a fool she'd been?
"Are you all right?" Ben Dare pushed through a tight growth of thick spruce and scanned the clearing where they sat. His legs braced and his muscles tensed as if he were spoiling for a fight.
"Of course." Hastily Juliette patted her hair and brushed loose bark from her skirt. Strands of hair fell around her face, and she must have smelled of perspiration. There was nothing she could do about it.
"I thought I heard you screaming," he said, running a quick gaze over her body, checking for injury.
Circles of pink flared on her cheeks. Jean Jacques had given her a long slow look before they made love, just as Ben was doing. Jean Jacques's eyes had been a paler blue than Ben's, and Ben was taller. But the way Ben stared at her made her remember making love. The same fluttery, chaotic tingling raced around her body.
Zoe glanced up from the log. "Perhaps you heard Juliette shouting to me. Telling me where to find her."
"It didn't sound like that." He walked up to her. "But I'm glad you're all right."
"I'm fine," Juliette insisted. Except for being confused, exhausted, detested by her companions, and abandoned by her husband. "Perfectly fine."
Then she collapsed against his chest and burst into tears.
Clara had a stew bubbling and coffee perking by the time Zoe spotted the tent pole with the pink ribbon and made her way through a tent city set up in no particular order.
"We don't have our tent or camp stools yet," Clara announced cheerfully, "but there are tree stumps all over the place. Pick one and sit down. You look all tuckered out."
"I am." Zoe's feet ached, the backs of her legs were so sore that every step was a trial, and her backpack had rubbed a raw spot on one of her shoulders. "Has our medical kit arrived?"
"I don't know." Clara waved toward a tumbled mound of boxes and crates. "I thought I'd get the stew started before I began sorting things out."
Zoe had never been this tired in her life. "Where's our tent?" she asked when she'd summoned a small burst of energy. All she wanted to do was fall into her cot and try to relax her tight throbbing muscles.
"One of the pack mules went down," Tom Price said, walking up to the camp stove. Clara gave him the cup of coffee she'd been about to hand to Zoe. "My men are bringing that load up on their backs. They should be here soon."
"Did you know the Indian men can carry a hundred pounds and the women carry seventy-five pounds?" Clara spoke in the same cheerful tone that made Zoe want to hit her with a rock. "Look at this scenery," she said, waving at the narrow canyon's walls. "Isn't it spectacular? And smell the air!"
To Zoe the air smelled of wood smoke, tobacco, mule and dog droppings, and various cooking odors.
"Did you see the glaciers hanging in the high valleys to the west?" Clara's enthusiasm seemed boundless. "And wasn't it beautiful when the trail dipped down to the river?"
Tom smiled at Clara's high spirits and Zoe wanted to hit him, too. "Tomorrow you'll see the snowfields." He gazed at the clouds advancing across the sky. "It will be cold tonight. The Chilkats say it will snow before morning."
Zoe groaned, and Tom and Clara laughed at her.
Then a silence opened, but Tom showed no signs of leaving. Abruptly Clara straightened and looked back and forth between them. "Well," she said, stepping
backward. "I guess I'll go see if I can spot Juliette or find out where our tent is." She straightened her cape and smoothed the brim of her hat. "Don't forget to give the stew a stir every now and then."
"How did the first day go?" Tom asked after Clara had bustled off. He smiled at her over the rim of his coffee cup.
Zoe couldn't believe this was only the first day. "I didn't think it would be this difficult." When his eyebrow rose, she lifted a hand. "I know, I know. Everyone talks about how hard the trail is. But I expected to take it in stride as Clara apparently has." She glanced up, noting the easy way he stood, with his legs apart and braced for whatever might come. He didn't look like a man who had just kicked and coaxed a pack of mules over god-awful terrain, most of which was steeply angled, heavily treed, and littered with boulders.
"It won't get easier. A person has to be truly motivated to endure this journey."
The way his voice invited her to talk about motivation told her that he was curious about her reasons for going to Dawson City. And for one crazy moment, she considered confessing the truth. But then he'd feel obligated to try to talk her out of shooting Jean Jacques. Or maybe, as a long-standing family friend, Tom would insist on killing Jean Jacques for her. She didn't want to talk about it. Nothing he said would change her mind about killing Jean Jacques, and she didn't want someone else to pay the price for doing her job.
When Tom noticed that she didn't have coffee, he poured her a cup. Jean Jacques had been thoughtful, too, but in the end his thoughtfulness hadn't mattered for squat. She would a lot rather that he'd been truthful. In that case she would never have married him. Would never have ruined herself. Wouldn't be here in Alaska eager to make a murderess of herself.
"Why are you going to Dawson?" she asked, gazing up at him. She liked the way he wore his hat tilted at a rakish angle. "Is it really worth your while to pack anyone all the way to Dawson?"
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