Page 7

Dylan proved to be right. The first morning that Melissa stepped outside to begin her business, a swarm of helpless masculinity with dirty clothes beat a path to her washtubs as if called by a siren's song. How word got around so quickly she didn't know. John Willis, her first customer, could not have been responsible for all of it.

Certainly, any woman with a washtub and soap could go into the laundry business, and several had. But with thirty thousand people, mostly men, in and around Dawson, there was more than enough work for all.

Even when Melissa had lived in Portland with her father and four brothers, she had never seen so much filthy, mud-caked laundry in her life. The long, sweltering day was an endless cycle of heating water, scrubbing, rinsing, and hanging wet wash. The area surrounding the back stairs became a cat's cradle of clothesline strung in every possible place, with clean shirts, pants, and underwear flapping in the breeze.

To make things a bit easier for her, Dylan had broken down the sides of a tea crate to make flooring so she wouldn't have to stand in the mud. From another box he'd fashioned a little nook for Jenny that kept the baby within easy sight and reach. These were small blessings when she discovered how hard the work would be.

To lessen the drudgery, and because Jenny seemed to like it so much, Melissa sang through most of her day. Although she kept her voice low, now and then miners would straggle down the side street to find its source, as had John Willis.

It was in the middle of "Lorena,"

however, that she looked up to see three men standing in a triangle of shade near the building on the other side of the narrow street. Two of them brushed at their damp eyes self-consciously. The third blew his nose with a trumpeting honk on a large red handkerchief.

Melissa cut off Lorena's sad lament in mid-verse, baffled.

The man with the red hankie stepped forward.

"You'll have to excuse us, ma'am. That song has made many a soldier and weary traveler homesick. I 'spect we're no different."

She straightened and put her hands to her stiff back "Oh, dear, I'm sorry. Really, I'm just singing to my little girl. She doesn't know the song is sad."

"But I bet she knows what an angel's singin' sounds like now,"

one of the other men said, his voice breaking slightly.

At the extravagant compliment, Melissa felt herself blush and dropped her gaze back to the washtub. Heavens, what a fuss Dawson miners made over her little songs. She had lived her whole life trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible and didn't care for being the center of attention. The men moved along after that, but returned two hours later with their wash.

***

Curious, despite his resolve that Melissa's laundry business didn't concern him, Dylan found all kinds of reasons to walk by the side window in the store. He had a few dozen parade-size American flags nailed to sticks that he'd bought in time for the coming Independence Day—they'd make a good display right here in this empty keg near the window. Was it going to rain? he wondered a few minutes later, and ambled back to the glass to look out at the bright, cloudless sky. Shortly after checking on the weather, Dylan saw Sailor Bill Partridge walking by and was drawn to the window yet again. It was said that the man spent all of his money on clothes and that he never wore the same suit twice.

Dylan could tell himself that he wasn't paying a whit of attention to Melissa, but in his trips to the window if he leaned against the right side of the frame he could see her working there. And he did that often. Her back was to him as she hung shirts on a clothesline, showing off her slim waist and back. Her long braid swung like a hypnotic pendulum over her gently rounded hips. He imagined his hands on those hips, warm beneath his touch while she arched her back against his chest. With the thought came swift, hot arousal that carried his imagination further. He inhaled the sweet scent of her hair and grazed her neck with soft, slow kisses that made her sigh and realize she need not fear him—

"Dylan, have you gone deef or what?"

Jolted out of his daydream, Dylan swung around to see Ned Tanner standing at his counter.

"Sorry, Ned, I didn't hear you come in,"

he said and left the window, hoping his face didn't look as red as it felt.

"I came by for more nails. How much are they today?"

Ned Tanner had come to Dawson with the first wave of people last fall, arriving just as winter descended upon the North, closing the rivers with ice. He'd opened his restaurant in a tent and had done so well that he now was expanding to a new building on Front Street. Homely, with a pronounced overbite, oiled hair, and a personality to match, he fancied himself to be something of a ladies' man, a notion that gave Rafe Dubois no end of amusement.

"Same as last time, seven dollars a pound,"

Dylan said on his way to the storeroom to fetch a fifty-pound keg.

"That's what I like about you, Dylan,"

Ned called.

"You keep your prices the same even though other folks are raising theirs. Competition, they call it. I call it thievery."

Dylan carried the nail keg out on his shoulder and set it down next to Ned.

"That works for them, I guess. But I paid the same for this keg as the last one I sold you, so I'm charging you the same. I do well enough in this store without getting greedy."

Ned pointed at the side window.

"Say, it looks like you've branched out some, though. Who's that little gal you got running your laundry business for you outside?"

Dylan stepped behind the counter and put weights in one pan of his gold scales.

"It's not my business, it's hers. That'll be three hundred and fifty dollars for the nails."

Ned brightened up.

"Well, a woman of enterprise. She sure is a pretty little thing, and she sings nice, too."

He handed Dylan his poke, the same kind of leather pouch that everyone in Dawson used to carry their gold.

"Yeah, I guess,"

Dylan muttered, not certain he liked the eager gleam he saw in the man's eye.

Ned reached up to straighten his tie, then ran a finger over his enormous mustache to smooth it.

"There aren't many females up here that look so nice. And she's an ambitious one, too. I might be interested in making the acquaintance of a woman like her."

"Go talk to Belinda Mulrooney. She's plenty ambitious."

Ned shuddered.

"Naw, Belinda is too danged outspoken and too smart for her own good. She'll never catch a husband—a man doesn't like to feel as if his wife knows more than him,"

Dylan laughed. Ned might have a hard time finding one who didn't.

"I guess it would depend on how smart the man is. It sounds like you want a woman who'll work hard, hand her money over to you, and keep her mouth shut."

Ned grinned.

"The idea sure has its charm, doesn't it? Now what did you say that little gal's name was?"

Dylan pictured Melissa out there, scrubbing clothes and talking to every damned miner in Dawson.

"Her name is Mrs. Harper."

He told himself that he was only protecting her from pests like Ned Tanner, but the truth of it was that a surge of unaccountable jealousy boiled up inside him. He didn't like the feeling, but there it was.

"And I'd advise you to forget about 'making her acquaintance.' "

"She's married?"

"Yeah"

Dylan leaned across the counter.

"To me."

The man laughed.

"That's a good one, Dylan."

"I'm not joking."

Ned stared at him, mouth agape and buckteeth well displayed.

"N-no, I see that. No disrespect intended, Dylan,"

he mumbled, his face tomato red.

"Hell, nobody around here heard that you took a wife."

"Now you know."

In that moment Dylan thought that maybe everyone else should know it, too. Melissa might get the sign she had talked about, after all. It would put a damned quick end to notions like Ned Tanner's.

Mrs. Harper’s Laundry

***

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Harper."

Melissa looked up from the blue work shirt on her scrub board to find Rafe Dubois standing there.

"Mr. Dubois, how nice to see you."

She had a special fondness for the lawyer, especially since he'd liberated her from Coy. Further, she enjoyed his elegant manners and turn of phrase. They were so different from what she was accustomed to. Coy would have made some derisive remark about his "ten-dollar words,"

given the chance to express his opinion.

"I must admit that I'm a bit surprised you've undertaken this venture."

"I'm not sure you should be,"

she replied, taking up the shirt again.

"Women have always worked. I've always worked. This time I'd like to be paid for it."

Rafe lowered himself to an upended packing crate that served as her guest chair, moving as if his every joint ached. Then considering her for a moment, he nodded and chuckled.

"I suppose you're right. You must forgive me—I'm from a part of the world where women do indeed work hard, sometimes from morning until long after sunset. But custom prevents them from allowing it to show. In fact, they would be considered unladylike if they did. Rather, they are to be viewed as delicate flowers who tire easily, faint with little provocation, and must be sheltered from the world. They retire to shuttered porches and sitting rooms in the heat of the day, to do fine needlework or sip tea."

He laughed again.

"I was stunned to discover just how strong many of the fair gender can be."

She wasn't surprised by his veiled objection to her laundry business. She'd sensed his disapproval yesterday. Plunging the shirt into clear rinse water, she laughed.

"Mr. Dubois, if women sat on their tuffets like Miss Muffett, sewing a fine seam and drinking tea, not much would get done. There would be no clothes washed or meals cooked or children reared."

Wringing out the shirt, she flung it over the clothesline and groped in her pocket for clothespins.

Rafe gestured at the crowd moving in both directions on Front Street.

"But in a frontier mining town, the public location of your business might create a problem for you."

She took a clothespin out of her mouth.

"Mr. Dubois, I hope you know how much I appreciate everything you and Dylan have done for Jenny and me. I don't know what might have happened to us if not for you both. But I don't want to have to depend on anyone except myself."

She faltered a moment, hating the little catch she heard in her voice.

"Dylan has plans for his future that don't have anything to do with us. He's told me that he'll leave here when he's had enough of it. Where will that leave us if I don't do something now? To be alone in the world with a child to care for, and no way to do it . . ."

She couldn't finish the sentence.

Rafe glanced at Jenny, sleeping in her little nook, then rose stiffly from his seat.

"I certainly see your point, dear madam."

He patted her arm, then turned to leave.

"I see your point."

***

By the end of the day the front of Melissa's dress was wet from waist to knees, her back ached as if it would snap, and her hands were chapped. Except for quick breaks to tend the baby and have lunch herself, she had worked twelve hours.

At seven in the evening, under a sun as bright as midafternoon back home, she trudged upstairs with Dylan's clothes and a bundle of ironing in one arm, and Jenny in the other. She felt almost as weary as she had the day she'd crossed Chilkoot Pass on the journey up here. The muscles in her shoulders and arms ached from the scrubbing and wringing, and her hands shook a bit from the strain.

But even in her exhaustion she smiled to herself. Inside her apron pocket was a small leather pouch that contained nearly forty dollars in gold dust. And that was something she hadn't gotten for crossing the pass. Forty dollars! Back home, laborers received about a dollar and a quarter a day.

In her whole life Melissa had never had more than a dollar she could call her own. This gold dust she had earned herself, and no one would drink it up or take it from her.

Unless, of course, Dylan Harper took a mind to do just that. At the thought, Melissa pressed a protective hand over the bulge in her pocket, knowing even as she did that she wouldn't stand a prayer against him if he decided to take her money. Or anything else, for that matter. He was a big, strapping man—every inch of him hardened to lean muscle by hard work. She would do well to remember that he held the upper hand in their arrangement, and that he could change the rules to suit him anytime he wanted.

It wasn't a pleasant thought. Yet, even so, Melissa couldn't help but recall how kind he'd been to her thus far. Until fate had flung her into Dylan's path, she'd believed that the years of grinding poverty had nearly smothered out all the hope in her, and that her marriage to Coy had finished the job. But she felt hope stirring again, coming to life after years of silence. Maybe today was just the beginning of something a bit better.

"We're going to be all right, little Jenny,"

she whispered to the sleeping baby, then kissed her silky cheek.

"I think we might be all right."

Apparently all the activity and new sights had worn out the little girl, because she slept the deep, untroubled sleep of childhood. Melissa couldn't help but smile. The baby's tender mouth made suckling motions, but otherwise she was far away in a dreamy landscape.

Inside the small room Melissa dumped the load of dry wash on the bed and put Jenny down in her crate. Dylan hadn't come upstairs yet, and she was relieved he hadn't. With all the goings on, she hadn't given a thought to dinner yet. Heavens, she hadn't even stoked the fire in the stove.

Eyeing the kitchen chair with yearning, she decided to sit for a moment, just to take the ache out of her back. But she didn't have time to dawdle—if Dylan's meals weren't ready when he wanted them, or if she didn't do the other chores he expected of her, she worried that he'd put an end to her business. She couldn't risk that.

After a brief rest Melissa hurried to the bed to sort out and fold Dylan's clothes. Holding up one of his shirts, she paused to study it. She let her hand skim over the fabric and envisioned the span of his shoulders, the length of his torso. Putting the shirt aside to be ironed, she picked up a pair of his denims, lean-waisted and long-legged.

She knew so little about the man who wore these clothes. Outwardly, he was handsome, rugged, and tall. His features were even and well proportioned. But what life he'd come from and why he was here were mysteries to her. He'd been in Dawson before the gold rush began, so Klondike fever hadn't been what brought him North.

He was by turns, gentle and savage. He had taken her in when he didn't have to, and in doing so had let Coy, a worthless deadbeat, wriggle out of a large debt that Dylan didn't expect to be repaid. Yet when a man in his store had attacked his integrity, his reaction had been swift, violent, and frightening.

But the one thing Melissa found the most troubling was her growing attraction to Dylan. She told herself it was only a silly, girlish infatuation for the man because he'd been kind to her and Jenny. That he was almost as fearsome as he'd been the first day she met him. And the arguments nearly worked. But not quite.

Something in her made her breath catch when Dylan was near. And it wasn't giggling or girlish at all.

Impatiently, Melissa shook off the thoughts and hastily folded his shirts and jeans. Her most important task was to keep her mind on her own business and her future a tall, blond man was not part of either. Nor were she and Jenny part of his plans. He'd made that clear from the beginning, and after all, legally she was still bound to Coy.

She carried Dylan's clothes to the big trunk at the end of the bed, where he stowed his belongings. Lifting the lid released the heavily masculine scents of buckskin and shaving soap that she found alluring. It was like sniffing freshly ground coffee, or the sweet odor of pipe tobacco. Inside, she discovered the usually neat contents in a tangled hodgepodge of drawers, socks, pants, shirts, and long johns. She remembered his plowing through the trunk early this morning. He'd dressed in a hurry to meet a steamer captain down at the waterfront.

She was tempted to leave this mess as she'd found it. She had worked hard all day, and this was an extra chore she didn't want. But she couldn't very well throw tidy things on top of the jumble and slam the lid closed. Sighing, she knelt in front of the trunk and began repacking everything. When she pulled out a pair of buckskins, something metallic fell out of their folds and clattered to the floor.

Glancing down, she saw a small oval picture frame lying on the planking. It held a photograph of a beautiful dark-haired young woman. Slowly, Melissa picked it up to study it. The woman wore her hair up, but the style couldn't disguise its rich, heavy waves. The low-cut neckline of her gown revealed a long, slim throat graced with a strand of pearls. Matching pearl eardrops hung from her small lobes, and in her face, captured for all time by the photographer, Melissa saw supreme self-confidence. She looked like a woman who had never asked for a man's permission in her life, and was accustomed to having her own way.

Melissa sat back on her heels. A sweetheart? she wondered. A wife? That was an unsettling thought, but of course, it was possible. Many of the men up here had left behind wives and families. The picture frame itself was silver, wrought with intricate detail that bespoke the photograph's importance. But as Melissa considered the woman's image, she thought that something about her seemed slightly off kilter.

Beautiful though she was, she didn't look as if she were the type to attract Dylan Harper. She didn't know why; if she'd thought she knew little about Dylan before, now she felt even more ignorant.

Melissa wiped the glass with the hem of her apron and examined the picture again. Had he held this woman's hand? Stroked the curve of her cheek with a gentle touch? Almost unconsciously, Melissa reached up to graze her fingertips over the nearly healed bruise on her own cheek.

Had he held her in his arms and kissed her? Suddenly, the door opened and Melissa, still kneeling before the trunk with the photograph clutched in her hand, looked up to find Dylan towering over her. She'd been so engrossed with her own thoughts, she hadn't heard him come up the stairs. Flooded with guilt and frozen by spontaneous terror, she felt the hot blood of embarrassment fill her cheeks.

He was a giant glaring down at her—a wild, frowning man with a long torso set upon longer legs.

"Did you find what you were looking for, Melissa?"

She glanced at the pile of clothes, and then at the photograph as if seeing it for the first time. She realized how this must look—as if she were snooping through his belongings, and, oh, God, maybe even stealing something. Hastily, she dropped the picture frame back into the trunk as though it were a burning coal.

"I—"

she began, but her voice was just a dry croak. Her throat felt as if it were closing. She gripped one of his shirts that she'd washed earlier and held it out.

"I was just folding your things. Th-they were all— I wasn't prying! Truly I wasn't. The photograph was tangled in your clothes and it fell out."

To her horror, she felt her eyes begin to sting with rising tears. She was so tired, she didn't have much strength to completely stop them, so she turned her head and quickly brushed them away.

He took the shirt from her and stuffed it into the trunk along with everything else, then dropped the lid.

"From now on, leave my clothes out. I'll put them away,"

he said, his voice deadly quiet.

She looked at his set, blank face, but could see nothing there, not accusation, not clemency. It was as if his thoughts were far away. Miserable, she nodded and rose from her knees to begin dinner.

Dylan flopped on the bed and sighed, his stomach drawing into a knot. Plainly, she was still afraid of him, but he hadn't meant to scare her.

She wasn't being nosy, he supposed, but he didn't like her poking around in his gear. He might not have minded so much if she hadn't dug up that photograph.

He hadn't looked at Elizabeth's picture since the night he threw it in his with his clothes almost three years ago, and he wished he hadn't seen it just now. He still remembered that night so clearly—Griff Harper ordering him off the property, the hired hands scurrying for the bunkhouse in the face of that final, and ugliest, explosive family battle. After gathering up his belongings in a fit of white-hot fury, Dylan had gotten on his horse and galloped through the moonlight down to the dock in town to wait for the steamboat that would carry him downriver and away from The Dalles. Before he'd left, he paid a kid to take his gelding back to the house; he'd wanted nothing that Griff Harper thought belonged to him.

Dylan had managed to bury most of the memories, but not the one of beautiful, scheming Elizabeth. It was dumb, he supposed, to hang onto her photograph. It only reminded him of what a damned fool he'd been to let himself fall prey to her manipulating. But she had been so good at it, so accomplished, he never once suspected that she didn't care about him.

Ned Tanner didn't want a woman who was smarter than he was? He had news for Ned—there were far worse trials a woman could heap upon a man, and no one knew that better than Dylan.

He glanced up at Melissa as she peeled potatoes.

"How did your first day go?"

he asked, breaking the silence.

Keeping her back to him, she pumped water into the pot holding the quartered potatoes. Her movements were guarded, as if her arms were stiff. He wondered if she might be sore from the unaccustomed work.

"I washed a lot of clothes."

Dylan already knew that. He tried to imagine Elizabeth standing over a washtub for hours, doing laundry for less-than-fastidious miners, but the picture wouldn't even form in his mind.

He hoisted himself from the bed and walked over to Jenny's crate. She was just waking from her nap and still had one thumb fixed firmly in her mouth. He didn't know anything about kids, but he had to admit that she captivated him. Sometimes he was almost curious enough to pick her up and hold her to his shoulder. But what if he dropped her? Even if he didn't, she was so little, he might hurt her somehow.

So he settled for brushing her velvet cheek with the back of his finger. Compared to her head, his hand looked enormous. When she saw him, she didn't flinch in fear. She waved her arms and kicked, and gave him a big grin, showing off her toothless gums. He couldn't help but smile back at her.

"Hey, little Jenny,"

he whispered. Then louder he asked, "And the baby? Did she get along all right?"

"I think she enjoyed the change of scenery and all the activity."

Melissa tried to carry the heavy iron pot to the stove, but obviously her overused muscles wouldn't cooperate, and it clanked back into the steel sink.

Watching her struggle while he did nothing made him feel a bit like a heel. He knew she'd worked even harder today than he had. He crossed the floor.

"Here,"

he said, and reached in front of her to grab the wooden grip, "let me."

"No! I can do it."

Melissa recoiled, but kept her hands clamped on the handle. He saw naked fear in her dove gray eyes. He supposed he couldn't expect her to instantly overcome what might have been years of intimidation, although whenever he'd looked outside this afternoon, she seemed to be getting along just fine with her customers.

He dropped his hand.

"Why are you so damned jumpy? And why do you think you have to do everything yourself?"

He couldn't keep the impatience out of his voice.

"I don't think that," she said.

"It's just that . . ."

"Just what?"

She glanced up at him through a veil of dark lashes.

"I'm afraid you'll think I'm not doing my best for you and make me give up my laundry business."

"Why? I told you I didn't care how you spent your free time."

"You also said that I'd better keep up my end of our agreement. That's what I'm doing."

She looked him full in the face then, and her low voice held both anguish and determination.

"I need to make money for Jenny and me, money that no one can take away. I don't want her to have the kind of life that I've had. I don't want to see her sold by a drunken husband to a stranger in a barroom. She's a brand-new life—she has a chance for something better, and I have a chance to give it to her. I mean to do it."

Her breathing was labored, and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. It was the longest speech he'd ever heard her make in one breath, and Dylan felt his face flush all the way to the roots of his hair.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. All this time he'd supposed that Melissa was just glad to get away from Logan. He'd never thought about how humiliating that day must have been for her.

"Look, if you want to work, go ahead. There isn't that much to do up here anyway."

She looked relieved, then cautioned, "I'll try hard to have dinner ready on time, but sometimes it might be late."

He shrugged.

"Well, I guess that's the way it'll have to be. I'll tell you what,"

he said, "you make the biscuits and I'll finish this."

He looked around at what she'd assembled on the table, a piece of boiled canned beef and a few fresh vegetables.

"Stew, right?"

"You want to help?"

She gaped at him as if he'd suggested putting on one of Jenny's diapers and dancing down Front Street. Apparently she'd never had such an offer before.

"But I can do it, really—"

"You look as stiff as an old gunnysack left out in the rain. I'll give you a hand. But just until you're limbered up."

"All right,"

she conceded, and he reached for the pot handle again.

This time his hand brushed hers, and their eyes met. She gazed up at him, not so frightened now, he thought, but more curious. Standing this close, he caught a whiff of the soap and starch she'd used all day. The scent wasn't perfume, but in a way it suited her, clean and unadorned, and it went to his head like the most expensive of fragrances.

Stunned, Dylan stared down at her, recalling the first time he'd seen her. She had seemed plain then, a pale ghost of a female with a downcast gaze and a carefully blank expression on her face. He'd felt resentment, and maybe even a bit of distaste, when she'd been foisted upon him. When had his feelings begun to change? At what point had she ceased to be unattractive? Dylan didn't know. He only knew she no longer seemed homely to him. Just the opposite.

Although her hair was the color of frost-covered daffodils, her eyelashes were dark, he noticed, framing her eyes with thick, silken spikes. And her bronze brows were as fine and delicate as butterfly feelers. His gaze dropped to her mouth, pink and tender-looking. Would that mouth be soft under his if he were to kiss her? Would it?

Just then, the baby let out a loud squawk, the kind of noise that babies make when they exercise their lungs and voices, and the spell was broken.

"Oh,"

Melissa said, as if she too had been entranced, then pulled away.

Dylan followed her lead, widening the floor space between them. Jesus, what had he been thinking of? He took the pot and put it on the stove.

"Okay, let's get this going,"

he mumbled.

"Yes, of course,"

she said, and ran her hands over her sleeves. She went to the table to roll out biscuit dough.

He felt as awkward as a schoolboy. Why, he couldn't guess. He'd known his share of women and bedded more than a few. Kissing one wouldn't be the end of the world.

This was not an ordinary woman, though—people in Dawson believed that she was his wife. These circumstances weren't ordinary either, and by God, he didn't want to make them any more complicated than they already were.

She had a goal? Well, so did he, and he had to keep his mind on it.

He resolved that he would stop noticing how nice Melissa was beginning to look, and how good she smelled. He swore he wouldn't wonder again what

it would feel like to kiss her, or imagine his fingers twined in her long pale hair.

But as he watched her working at the table, slender and utterly feminine, he knew that ignoring her would be as difficult a feat as getting rich by digging in the gold fields with a teaspoon.

***

Late that night Dylan lay on his side of the bed, caught between sleep and wakefulness, when the baby started to fuss.

He saw Melissa get up to tend her. Her thin nightgown looked like a pale moonbeam as she crossed the room in the semidark of the Yukon summer night. She carried the child back to bed, murmuring the softest of endearments to her.

"What's the matter, button?"

she whispered in a voice mothers saved for their children.

"Are you hungry? Is that what's wrong with my button? Well, we can fix that, can't we."

He felt the mattress sag as she lay down again. Her voice, soft and lulling, had nearly made him feel drowsy when he made the mistake of glancing at her.

The bodice of her gown was open, and Jenny lay at her full white breast, suckling contentedly.

Stifling a groan, Dylan swallowed hard and turned his back to her. Watching her with the baby, he'd never expected to see anything so intimate, or worse, so arousing. Hot blood suffused his groin, and his heart began pumping hard in his chest. He'd never known such exquisite torture.

As he lay there, trying to ignore the woman on the other side of the rice sack and wishing for the oblivion of sleep, he almost wished he were digging for gold with a teaspoon.

That would be a hell of a lot easier.