Free Harper's Bride by Alexis Harrington Page A

sweet-tempered disposition, but Melissa loved to rock the baby
while she fed her or put her to sleep. Sometimes they just sat by
the window and rocked while Melissa sang to her. Jenny would stare
up at her with wide eyes and a half smile, captivated. Although the
noise from the street below was nearly continuous, it was the
quietest, most tranquil time that Melissa had known as a mother—in
fact, in her whole life.
    No loud voice assaulted her ears, no drunken
man demanded intimate access to her body, slobbering kisses on her
and using her until he passed out.
    Though she viewed Dylan as an intimidating
man, now she didn't always flinch when she heard his footsteps on
the stairs. And, true to his word, he had not made one attempt to
touch her in any way beyond the night he offered her his hand.
Except for meals, though, she hardly saw him. They settled into a
routine he spent most of his time downstairs in his store, and
Melissa kept to this room, cleaning and cooking and taking care of
Jenny.
    She was in a peculiar position. She knew that
she and Jenny were invading his privacy, and that he felt stuck
with them, as if they were a pair of charity cases. Which, she
supposed, they were. She wasn't really Mrs. Harper; she worked for
him, he said. And he had given her money last Saturday, telling her
it was a week's wages. But her job was not like a shop girl's, or a
factory worker's, or even a domestic's, at least not like her
mother's had been at the Pettigreaves's. In order to earn her keep
and pay back Coy's debt, she would have to do more than just sweep
this room and cook. At any rate, it wasn't enough to keep her
busy.
    Dawson was like a giant carnival, and Melissa
knew that a lot of gold dust changed hands in this town, more money
than she had ever seen in her life. A lot of people were growing
wealthy just by catering to miners and free-spending Klondike
kings. Dylan himself was making his money that way. There had to be
some way she could do that, too. Having cash would give her
independence and security, and the ability to safeguard Jenny's
future. Nothing seemed more important to her—not nice clothes, not
a husband, not even love.
    Her budding desire to improve her lot was
reinforced early one morning shortly after the incident with the
rocker, when she and Dylan were standing under the side stairs.
There Melissa had set up a washtub and scrub board to do their
laundry, and Dylan had carried down some of the wash for her.
    From the milling crowd, a petite,
well-dressed woman with a plain face hailed them. "Dylan Harper! I
haven't seen you in weeks."
    Melissa recognized Belinda Mulrooney, one of
the most successful entrepreneurs, man or woman, to come to the
Yukon. She was highly respected and admired for her business savvy;
Melissa wished that she possessed one quarter of her
shrewdness.
    "I'm here at the store every day, Belinda.
You keep yourself pretty busy," Dylan replied, chuckling.
    Everything about the woman, even her bearing,
seemed energetic, Melissa thought.
    "That I do. There are too many opportunities
in this town to let one get past me. You should've taken advantage
of that lay I told you about. The first one I took out measured
five hundred feet square, and I got a thousand dollars a day for
the month that I had it."
    A lay, Melissa knew, was a short-term,
temporary arrangement, whereby a claim owner allowed another person
to mine the property in exchange for a percentage of the gold found
there. A few people had suggested this kind of enterprise to Coy.
He'd rejected the idea outright, saying he was no sharecropper. The
truth, of course, was that such an arrangement would have required
him to work.
    Dylan shifted his weight to one hip and
rubbed the back of his neck, giving the impression of mock regret.
"Well, I know about horses, not mining. Besides, I didn't have any
interest in digging around in the dirt."
    Belinda grinned archly. "When that kind of
money is involved, I'd dig in a hog wallow." She