Gossamer, they floated after the shoes to the floor, and with easy grace he lowered his body onto hers, felt her flinch when his belt buckle cut into her stomach.
“My belt,” he muttered, tearing it off.
“At least,” she murmured, “you aren’t wearing your derringer.”
The belt and pants followed the shoes and stockings to the floor.
“I don’t need a gun to defend myself against women,” he said.
Her sapphire eyes dreamed lazily up at him. “You might,” she murmured.
He laughed again, a chuckle deep in his throat. Then his fingers were tracing across her resilient body, his clever hands exploring its pink-tipped hills and pale translucent valleys. Her whole being seemed to flame up as his hands moved, and she writhed and swayed toward him, clasping her hands around the back of his neck, pushing away the collar of his shirt, fiercely ripping the remaining buttons.
Sliding his arm beneath her, he raised her toward him and kissed her eyebrows, her hair, her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, her throat. His lips slid lower, down her pulsing throat and across her heaving bosom to nuzzle the soft tingling tips of her breasts. Eyes closed, lashes lying dark upon cheeks rosy with heightened color, Roxanne responded to his ardor recklessly. Forgetting Denby, forgetting the world. Once again she was held in a man’s arms, a vibrant, exciting, dangerous man who would be gone tomorrow ... a man whose arms would never hold her again.
With the desperation of the damned, she clung to him, every sense astir, the blood raging through her veins. And Case, sensing the passion he had aroused, reveling in it, suddenly abandoned his teasing explorations and gripped her to him in a hard embrace. As his manliness made its strong, savage entrance, a little moan escaped her, and she flung herself violently against him. Their bodies fused in a fierce embrace. For a long, splendid moment everything surrounding them throbbed and receded and burned. Her blood sang in her ears, and a great joyousness filled her.
Then his lean body left her, flinging itself away to lie panting beside her. Her stomach muscles tightened as she felt his fingers glide over its satin surface, and her eyes flew open to see that he had turned on his side and was leaning on one elbow looking down at her. Somehow during all of this he had removed his shirt, and seeing his long pale body stretched out beside her, she blushed.
“You’re very young, aren’t you?” he asked thoughtfully.
“In years ... I suppose so.”
He laughed, a low chuckle. “Much the answer I’d have given myself some years ago.”
She wanted to know. “The—the woman who was going to sail with you. Is she—?” She hesitated.
“Is she what?”
Reluctantly the words were forced to Roxanne’s lips, “Your wife?”
“No, she’s a madam. I broke her out of jail, where she’d no business being, and brought her to California. Once I gave her the money to set up in business, she’s grateful to me.”
“So you’re running from the law?”
“Not running exactly. Just keeping ahead.”
Her eyes were large and dark as she thought about that. “Why was she in jail?”
“She was framed by a jealous lover. They used me to frame her and I felt responsible for getting her out.”
Roxanne gave him a sweet trusting look. His answer had pleased her. “They call you the Hard Case,” she murmured.“I think they’re wrong.”
He sighed. “No, they’re right. I take what I want. If the prey is wary, I lay traps. Just as I laid a trap for you.”
“You didn’t trap me,” she said soberly. “I—I wanted you, Case.” She could not meet his eyes when she said that. It seemed so shameless, lying there naked in bed beside him.
They were silent for a while.
Then, “How could you have married him?” he asked suddenly. “That green boy?”
Roxanne turned large, honest blue eyes toward him. “Because he was willing to take me as I was—and love me anyway,” she said simply.
He stared at her. “I suppose that’s reason enough,” he muttered. “There was a girl once, a long time ago. I wish I’d taken her as she was!”
“What did she do to you?”
“She moved in with my best friend while I was away. I came back and found them together. I didn’t find out until much later that she was dying and she knew it . . . maybe it would have made a difference.”
With a stab, Roxanne remembered Buck in Kansas . . . and black-haired Julie Smith. “We all die,” she said in a sad, smothered voice.
“Eventually,” he agreed. “My own chances aren’t too bright, right now. There are three men after me, waiting to gun me down. Not to mention the long arm of the law.”
“Is that why you’re going to the Klondike, Case?”
He nodded grimly. “Nothing else would lure me to that frozen icebox. But there’s no law up there to speak of, so I’ve been told.” He rose, began to dress. “It’s nearly morning. I want to be on board before the crowd arrives.”
The watching law, she thought. “I wish I could give you that ticket, Roxanne, but I sold it for fifteen hundred dollars.”
He did not have the ticket. Then she had given herself for nothing! But no . . . Her emotions in a turmoil, she realized he was giving her money!
Scarlet with humiliation, she watched him count out one thousand five hundred dollars, lay it carefully on the night table beside the bed.
“I’d add five thousand to that,” he said, “if you’d go with me.”
Did he think he could buy her? Anger poured over her. She sat up, her naked figure as lovely as a water sprite’s, and with a violent gesture swept the money to the floor. “I’m not for sale,” she cried bitterly.
“I never thought you were,” he said quietly, his eyes flickering as they roved over her beautiful naked body and flushed angry face. “I was telling you I’d buy that half of my stateroom back—even if it cost me five thousand dollars—if you’d go with me and share it, Roxanne.”
She stared at him. He really meant it. He’d pay five thousand dollars—a fortune!—just for the pleasure of her company.
Her anger cooled as suddenly as it had been born. But she remembered that she was a married woman and she shook her head slowly. “I’m not going to the Klondike, Case. Denby won’t have enough money to take us both. But—before I take this money, Case, tell me—did you cheat Denby?”
He shook his head. “No, he lost it fair and square. Gambling takes a cool head, and Denby hasn’t got one.”
She sighed.
“Ah, Roxanne,” he said, leaning over and moving his lips gently down the curve of her neck and across her breasts. “Come with me to Alaska. I can take care of you far better than he can.”
Come with me. ... It was a siren song. Roxanne looked up for a yearning moment into that dark intent face above her, the deep eyes that promised so much. Then her back stiffened and she looked away and tried to still her aching heart. She had done enough to Denby, brought him enough ill fortune. Lifting her head, she looked back at Case, faced him bravely. “I don’t want to go to the Klondike.” Her voice was defiant.
He straightened up and studied her and his hand stroked her pink nipples once more. He sighed. “But somehow I think you will,” he said softly. “You’re too pretty for a man to leave in Seattle.” His smile faded. ‘Do you want to see me off?”
“I can’t,” she said reluctantly. “Denby might wake and find me gone.”
“What are you going to tell him,” he asked her curiously as he tossed his remaining things in an open bag, “about the money?”
“That you had a change of heart,” she said.
He laughed. “Only a woman would think of that.”
She saw now that the rest of his bags were packed. “I’ll see you in Dawson City, Roxanne,” he said.
She lay there and watched him go, her body rich with memories of the hour just passed, wanting to linger lazily on the white sheets where they had clung together and somehow
given each other life—and hope for the future. Her thoughts grew dark and brooding as the door closed, and for a treacherous moment she almost called him back. Her heart wanted to cry out, “Wait, I’m coming with you. I’ll share your stateroom —and your life.”
But she could not do that to Denby. Not to the man who half a lifetime ago had said, I love you anyway.
After a while she got up and dressed. Through the sounds of morning she walked dreamily back to her room, remembering the yearning look in Case’s eyes just as her body remembered his lean, rock-hard embrace.
Wrong? Oh, yes, it was undeniably wrong but—she stretched her arms and back deliciously—how wonderful it had been, and all too short ... to last a lifetime. For now she would go back to Denby and his brief, irresolute bouts of lovemaking. At least, she thought, she would have made amends for causing him to lose his money. And with luck, Denby would never know how it had been regained.
Quietly she let herself back into her room. Denby still lay in a drunken stupor. She bathed and climbed into bed. The money she left on the floor as if it had been stuck under the door. Wild thoughts hammered through her head. There was still time . . . time to leap up and find Case, to go to the Klondike with him. She put her pillow over her head, trying to smother her disloyal thoughts, and finally drifted into a light, restless sleep.
She was waked by Denby, who was standing by the door, dull-eyed and holding his head with one hand. In the other he had the stack of bills he had scooped up from the floor. “Where did this come from?” he was asking.
“Where did what come from?” muttered Roxanne sleepily.
“This money by the door.”
Roxanne sat up and stared. “What money by the door, Denby?”
He waved it at her. “This stack of bills,” he said wildly. “Where did it come from?”
“Your gambler friend must have shoved it under the door. Perhaps he had a change of heart, Denby. Perhaps he wanted to teach you a lesson—not to gamble.”
Blinking, Denby stared down at the money in his hand. “Why would he want to do that?”
“Who knows?” Roxanne yawned. “Gamblers do quixotic things.”
“How would you know?”
“I read it in a book.”
Denby snorted and then grasped his head and groaned. “Well, I’ll find him and damn well ask him why.”
“No, you won’t,” said Roxanne looking at the glaring sunlight coming through the window. “He sailed on the North Star, remember? It’s past noon, and she left port this morning.”
Denby stared at her and then with kindling eyes at the money in his hands. He counted it excitedly. “Fifteen hundred—I only lost a thousand to him. He must have been drunk!”
Roxanne shrugged. “Perhaps he can’t count.”
“But this means—Roxanne, I was only short five hundred! I can buy our tickets now!”
Roxanne’s eyes widened. “You mean you had enough money for your own ticket all along?”
“Of course. I was only gambling to get enough money to take you along.”
Roxanne stared at him. Then suddenly she began to laugh. Bending her head to touch her knees, she sat there in bed and rocked and laughed until the tears rolled down her cheeks. It was not for Denby’s passage to the Klondike that she had sold her honor—it was for her own!
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” said Denby stiffly.
Roxanne dried her eyes. “No, there’s nothing funny,” she gasped. “I’m just hysterical. Pay no attention to me, Denby.”
In the afternoon, having drunk a large glass of juice and somehow fumbled into his clothes, Denby took Roxanne and swaggered down to the docks to buy passage at scalper’s prices on a grimy tub up the inland waterway to Dyea. From there they would go overland, scaling the snowy Chilkoot Pass to the high mountain lakes that flowed into the upper reaches of the Yukon. Then they would drift with the current downriver to Dawson City, where the Klondike River met the mighty Yukon.
Their ship was leaving in two days, but Denby steadfastly refused to buy what was considered a proper outfit. He invested in a bare minimum of supplies. “We’ll buy ours at Dawson City,” he said blithely. “Only those who travel light will get there before winter sets in. You wouldn’t want to spend the winter trapped in the snow somewhere, would you?”
Roxanne admitted she would not. Her mind was only half on what Denby was saying. She wondered what he would do if he knew how he had gotten his money back—and the price she had paid for it. She thought of Case, the man with the silken touch and the hard body, and wondered if already he had forgotten her. Although she had been reluctant to make this trip to Alaska, she no longer felt that reluctance, and she knew it was because of Case. I’ll see you in Dawson, he had said.
Her heart swelled. She promised herself she would see him there.
The Yukon 1897—1898
Chapter 23
Everything and anything that would float shuttled back and forth to Alaska in the fall of 1897: tugs and sailing sloops, coal barges, side-wheelers and scows and pleasure yachts; ancient freighters and long-condemned derelicts patched up and set afloat. The vessel Roxanne and Denby found themselves on was one of the latter, and one of the worst equipped of this astonishing flotilla to brave the inland passage north to the land of gold.
Named the Clara V, she was a decrepit coal carrier that had been condemned some three years before by the U.S. Government. The Klondike strike inspired her owners to seize the opportunity to convert her. With amazing swiftness they had set her afloat, and sweating carpenters had worked round the clock to rough in berths for passengers—which could later be ripped out in Alaska and sold by the board foot. To the amazement of the six hundred passengers, wood shavings had been sprinkled over the floor—to obscure the fact that coal dust had not been swept out. In this grimy setting, with hay and every type of mining equipment piled high on the deck, the passengers were wedged in ten to a cabin. They were lucky—below decks two hundred horses were sandwiched in so tightly they could barely move and, maddened by their confinement, went into a screaming, whinnying, kicking, biting frenzy at each blast of the ship’s whistle. Crates of several hundred yelping dogs—bought and stolen, whose present owners mistakenly believed they would prove good sled dogs—completed the cacophony of sound accompanying them as they left Seattle. The rails were lined with eager would-be prospectors attired in business suits, natty tweed shooting jackets, brand new mackinaws and, occasionally, Paris gowns. Many would not return alive.
This floating bedlam did not travel alone. The Clara V had two ships accompanying her—one an overcrowded and ancient side-wheeler which did not even boast a ship’s compass; the other a square-rigged brigantine with a leaky hull which depended on continuous pumping to stay afloat. Even so, among the many odd rigs heading for Alaska, these were not particularly worthy of remark. Roxanne, driven on deck by the unbearable stench below, looked helplessly at tents pitched in lifeboats and asked herself what she was doing here. The small crowded dining room only could accommodate fifty passengers at a time, and so some six sittings were required to serve a meal. Due to lack of storage room slabs of meat were hung from the dining room ceiling and on gusty days when the ship rolled, the passengers rubbed against hams and cured meat—their future dinners. In these overcrowded conditions, everybody slept in their clothes for the whole voyage and starvation began to seem quite possible.
Ravenously hungry, Roxanne and Denby found themselves waiting with the rest outside the dining room door, snatching food from the trays being carried in. Roxanne’s arms were not long enough to make this venture very successful, and Denby was no good at it.
But it was there they made their first real friend on shipboard—a pleasant young blond giant, named Leighton Clarke, whose long reach conveyed badly cooked pieces of fried chicken to his hungry friends, as well as to his own smiling mouth.
Leighton fascinated Denby because he declared that his brother had made the trip to the Klondike some ten y
ears before by river steamer. He fascinated Roxanne because he was a great golden giant of a man. It was easy to imagine Leighton as an early Anglo-Saxon swinging a broad-ax, standing resolutely astride a narrow bridge and striking down the advance guard of an opposing army. With his thick blond hair and beard and ruddy skin, he braced himself against the ship’s rail, which looked too frail to hold him. Turning his blue eyes on them, he spoke—in a cultured voice that had just a touch of a British accent—of his family now residing in Washington, D.C. They had traveled all over the world, Leighton said, and he picked up the accent during the years when his father, a career diplomat, was attached to the American Embassy in London. Eventually a walloping gift by one of his great aunts to a presidential campaign had gained for Leighton’s father a full ambassadorship, from which he had since retired in glory, and now he resided in a yellow brick Georgetown mansion near Dumbarton Oaks.
Leighton told them he had been traveling idly up the coast from San Francisco with no fixed destination in mind when the news of the Klondike strike came, and he had joined the rush out of a sense of sheer adventure. Roxanne enjoyed his banter. Except for snatching food from passing platters, he was scrupulously courteous to all, and he regaled Denby and Roxanne for long hours with stories of his life in the world’s great capitals. When Roxanne asked why he had not followed his father’s footsteps into the diplomatic corps, Leighton shrugged and evaded the question, but for a moment there was sadness in his fun-loving blue eyes. She guessed that he might be sowing his wild oats, but would return one day to become ambassador to some romantic country. It was fun to imagine him as a diplomat in a silk stovepipe hat and cutaway coat, bowing to queens.
Whenever the ship put into port, Leighton was there gallantly offering his arm to Roxanne as she went down the gangplank. She marveled that Denby was not jealous and supposed it was because he was so intent on gold. Stopping at the ports of call was a matter of annoyance to the impatient Denby—and indeed to most passengers—eager to get on before the early northern winter chilled the landscape.
These Golden Pleasures Page 27
