ALASKAN BRIDES 01: Yukon Wedding

by Allie Pleiter

  The mayor’s wife.

  Mrs. Treasure Creek.

  Mack’s.

  “How come the richest fella gets the prettiest gal?”

  The question had been one yelled at Mack this afternoon by a drunk miner as he and Ed Parker broke up yet another fight on the waterfront. The docks seemed to teem with anger and blood this week. Without a town doctor, Teena Crow had been called every day, tending to injured men—half of them injured by each other. He knew enough that the drunk’s question wasn’t an honest inquiry—it was an accusation hurled by a down-and-out man at the unfairness of the world. Mack had endured too many bitter speeches hurled at him as he ferried the failed back home. This one had stuck in his craw all afternoon, and for all the wrong reasons; it felt too true.

  Ever since his conversation with Thomas Stone about funding the church windows, Mack’s sense of abundance turned strangely sour. Everywhere he turned, it seemed the world went out of its way to show him how much much more he had than others. Yes, he was a generous man, quick to help others out; but somewhere deep down he recognized an ugly hoarding instinct. A gut level greed to keep things close—mostly because he’d lost so much. Too much. Too much not to feel a niggling sense of panic at what he had to lose now. Who he had to lose now.

  The rush of warmth he felt crossing his own threshold had begun to near choke him. Georgie’s instant tackle of his knees—something that used to annoy him no end—felt like the world’s purest hug. He no longer tried to hide his grin as he swooped the giggling boy up into his arms. He cared for the reckless little tornado more than he’d ever admit, even to Lana.

  And Lana, well, Lana never left his mind. He worried about her, thought about her, wondered what she’d think of this idea or that project. He could barely think when he was with her, and he could think of nothing but her when they were apart. He panicked if he wasn’t sure of her whereabouts and her safety—a preoccupation that bothered him beyond words.

  As if to prove the drunkard’s accusation right, Lana looked absolutely stunning when he walked in the front door this evening. She’d been visiting woman friends this afternoon—something fussy involving hair and dresses that he did his best to ignore—and she must have decided to gussy up for the occasion, for she looked as lovely as she had on their wedding day. She had this way of letting one curly tendril float down the side of her neck that drove him to distraction. She fairly sauntered around the kitchen this evening, which told him she was immensely pleased with herself over something—the ladies’ thing must have gone well, whatever it was. When she caught his eye over a pot of something bubbling delicious scents into the air, Mack’s chest did some odd jump that made him feel young and foolish and slightly out of control.

  “I tell you, Treasure Creek’s men are done for,” she said in a sugar-coated voice that nearly made him cough. The remark struck too close to home for his comfort.

  “How so?” He hoped he managed to sound gruff rather than befuddled.

  “The ladies of Treasure Creek are a very pretty lot. And sweet as pie, too, most of them. We have some of the finest families in the state, you know. Or will.”

  There was a time when hearing Lana talk about “the finest families” would involve several inches in the social column of a city newspaper. Knowing she was talking about Treasure Creek families, however, meant a whole different thing. These were what his father would call “fine people.” Lana’s idea to host a townwide celebration was a good idea, he couldn’t deny it any longer. Just as he couldn’t hope to deny that his wife was a truly beautiful woman. And tonight her appearance marveled any bejeweled socialite he’d met in any ballroom. “Will?”

  “I expect after our little festival, many a match will be made. If you want to turn a man’s attentions from gold to home and hearth, I’m here to tell you there are several very determined young ladies ready to help.” She set the silverware on the table with a flourish Mack would call downright victorious. “And,” she went on with a delectable smirk, “I expect some of Treasure Creek’s husbands may see a side of their wives they haven’t seen in far too long.”

  Mack fought the urge to gulp. Evidently, the richest fellows did get the prettiest wives.

  Chapter Twenty

  He couldn’t stop staring.

  All through dinner, through the mundane tasks of the household evening, Mack found himself staring at Lana. Gawking as if she were some irresistible, unfamiliar sight. He’d seen her set the table every day since their wedding, and yet tonight the curve of her wrist distracted him madly as she lay a plate at his seat. She had a delightful way of hitching up her sleeve before she opened the oven door to check if the bread crust had reached “just the right brown,” or tucking a wayward curl behind the delicate curve of her ear. And yet, for all these physical details, there was something else, something undefined by shape or sound, something about her on the inside that drew him most of all. She looked like he felt when he’d set the cornerstone at the church—as though she’d settled into her place in the world and felt God’s favor there. There was a spot just under his ribs that thumped at the notion that her place in the world was beside him. And that insistent thumping drummed out a disturbing message: that his compulsion to protect her had grown into something else.

  If that was how a marriage ought to be, how God desired families to be, then why did the notion slip cold and icy down his spine the way it did? Was he imagining the extra warmth of her smile, the way her eyes seemed to hold on to him? Had she always smelled so distractingly unique, like flowers and spices and elegance all wrapped up at once?

  “Ouch!” Lana had been trying to pull a pot from the hearth while staring at him—at least it felt like she’d been staring at him—when the potholder had slipped and left her thumb naked to the hot metal. Mack jumped up from beside Georgie and his blocks as the pot swung on its hook where she’d let it go. She winced, shaking the burned hand and sticking the finger in her mouth. “I’m such a clod,” she moaned with a mouthful of finger.

  The ironic image of so fine a lady yelping “clod” with a mouthful of finger made Mack laugh with unchecked affection. He motioned for Lana to come near as he pulled up the latch on the floorboard where the block of ice lay buried. Slipping the knife from his belt and a handkerchief from his pocket—handkerchiefs that now held his embroidered initials, thanks to his wife, for which he’d endured no end of jeering from workers off the docks—Mack picked off an ice chip and wrapped it for her to hold against the burn. “You’re no such thing. You’re the furthest thing from a clod Treasure Creek has to offer.”

  “Why, Mayor Tanner,” Lana said, hissing as the ice hit the angry red spot on her thumb, “that was dangerously close to a compliment. I hadn’t realized injury could bring out the gentleman in you.”

  Had she realized it was she that brought out the gentleman in him? Somehow, without his knowledge or consent, she’d managed to pry under the cold, driven pioneer he’d become and unearthed the gentleman he’d once been. All this time he was busy building lives, forging this ideal community out of the greedy mud that was Treasure Creek, he’d been denying himself a real life of his own.

  Why? Because anything a man had or loved, a man could lose. And Mack Tanner knew that better than anyone. Thomas Stone’s staunch refusal to settle down in town bothered him because it reflected his own refusal to let anyone into his life. And while he’d let—no, he’d forced—Lana and Georgie into his life, he’d fooled himself into thinking it was on his terms, within the limits he’d set.

  Tonight, as he held Lana’s hand and spread one of Teena Crow’s balms on the red blister now blossoming on her thumb, Mack realized she’d gotten inside him—inside his carefully drawn limits, inside his home, inside that part of him he vowed never to let open again.

  Mack had not realized, until this moment, how much he’d wondered what Lana’s hands felt like. He’d touched them before—at their wedding or in household tasks or with Georgie—but he never held them as he held th
em now. They were so much softer than he imagined, even with the rough spots work and wind had carved. Those toughened places there both bothered and impressed him. His wife’s hands should be protected. His wife should know security, should never have to worry.

  She looked up at him and Mack felt his heart speed in his chest. The balm was warm and fragrant, and he luxuriated in the chance to touch her hands, rubbing the balm over each palm now, not just the angry red thumb. It felt too intimate and nowhere near close enough at the same time, tangling his thoughts with a storm of emotions he wasn’t ready to control.

  He cared for her. He found himself second-guessing her every word like a schoolboy, scratching for any tiny proof her affection had grown to match his. Then again, as he looked in her eyes it seemed impossible that she didn’t feel what he felt. Her neck was flushed, her breath came in the short gulps of intensity he felt in his own chest, and Mack realized if he had half the courage folks attributed to him, he would kiss her this very second. Halt the silly pretense and cross the line they’d so neatly drawn across their relationship. Be a true husband to her, not just a guardian or protector. She deserved no less. But the gulf between them was so wide and full of grief, Mack wasn’t sure it could ever be crossed.

  Instead of kissing her, Mack chose something far more daring. For the first time since Jed’s descent into desperation, Mack Tanner was going to let someone else in on his plan.

  “Lana,” he began unsteadily, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Have you now? About what?” She was still close, still looking up at him with huge, doelike eyes.

  “I’m done with all this hiding and scheming. I’m going to take all the gold and go back to what I know. Oil and land. No more gold. Land is what no man can take away from me. What no one could take from you or Georgie, either.”

  Her eyes widened. “Land? You mean you’d leave Treasure Creek?” She said the name as if it was home to her, as if leaving—the very thing she’d once begged Jed for months to do—were an awful thought.

  “No, dear.” The endearment slipped out of his mouth, surprising them both. “Treasure Creek will always be home. But there is a tract of land north of here that’s rich in oil. Oil is what will hold the future here, not gold. I can’t keep those fools from seeking my gold, but they’ll have to stop once they know the gold is gone. It’s the thing that will stop all this, getting rid of the gold by using it—all of it—to buy land. Land is security, Lana. For us. For you and Georgie and even Georgie’s children. For…” he felt something give way inside when he used the words “…for our family.” He couldn’t look at her at that moment, focusing instead on the salve he worked into her hands. She had the most delicate, elegant hands; and now that he held them he couldn’t stop touching them, working the salve all over each hand now, rather than just over the small wound. “It’s too dangerous these days.” He hated the way his voice caught, but the words clawed their way out of him, demanding to be spoken even as he tightened his grip on her tiny hands. “I need to know they’ll stop bothering you. I need to know you both will be provided for no matter what happens, and only land can do that.”

  Her eyes glistened. “We’re fine, Georgie and I.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a walking target, and I’d go out of my head if anything…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t admit what he was coming to feel, what drove him to tell her his plan when he’d kept so much to himself for so long.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated in a whisper that near undid him. Silently, she wrapped her hands around his instead of the other way around, so that she held his hands. Looking down at those hands, he seemed to watch from miles away as she raised his hands to her lips and placed a tender kiss on the back of each hand. So tender an act from this spitfire of a woman. “Gold or no gold, I’m fine.” The touch of her lips felt like the softest thing in the whole world against the weathered skin of his hand, bursting through him like the heaving cracks of the melting ice flows he’d seen in the bay. A tiny fissure that spread unchecked until even the largest of ice walls fell to its gap.

  “Lana.” The single word surged from him, as rough and uncontrolled as the tearing open he felt in his chest. He’d told her his plan, and instead of feeling awful and exposed, he felt a strange, spacious freedom that was both exhilarating and downright terrifying. As if the wide open crack in his chest wouldn’t kill him after all. Before he could stop himself, Mack leaned down and kissed her. A cautious, small kiss that wasn’t small at all, but rather enormous and powerful, lasting years instead of half a second.

  When he opened his eyes, Mack felt as if he’d just bolted out onto a wildly rickety bridge, swinging in the middle of the huge gap between them, unsure whether to keep going to the other side or lunge back.

  Lana stared at her husband, stunned. She hadn’t planned this. She had wanted a nice evening, a special meal, and even to look her best, but she had fooled herself into believing it was just a shallow indulgence. Each small pleasure she saw in Mack’s eyes, each cautious smile or lingered gaze had slowly unwound her intentions until the evening had become far more about pleasing Mack than about pleasing herself. He’d jumped in with that overprotective manner of his when she’d foolishly burned her thumb, but instead of annoying her, the strength of his reaction touched something raw in her. She felt things in his fingers, things she had caught fleeting glimpses of in his eyes, things she discounted and doubted and wasn’t sure she even wanted. She knew his hands to be rough and strong, yet they tended to her with unspeakable care.

  More than that, Mack had shared his plan with her. She knew how much that cost him, what a step that was for him to take. She did not hate this man. She had never hated him, only chose him as the target for her widespread resentment at how the world had turned for her. His slow, steady care suddenly seemed infinitely stronger than any wild declarations of love Jed had ever made. Stalwart. Trustworthy. A man whose affections, once given, would never be taken away. No, the world had not turned against her, she was coming to see that now. Slowly, through the view of the faith Mack was tugging out of her, Lana had begun to see each bend in her journey as connected segments, as a path laid out by a wiser hand. She could believe, feeling Mack’s calloused fingers make circles in her palms, feeling the catch of his breath and the glow his words produced in her heart, that perhaps God had not abandoned her at all. That He’d perhaps given her someone new to love.

  The kiss was small. Timid, even, and yet it thundered through the both of them as though the house itself shook on its foundations. His wide eyes told her Mack was no more sure of his feelings than she, that neither of them knew how to go from here. This was not a moment for sweeping romantic embraces—things were far too delicate for that. She knew, in that moment of mutual panic, that their relationship would grow in inches, in tiny but trustworthy steps. And she surprised herself by being glad of it.

  Still, Mack looked as if he might fall over any second if she did not make some sort of response to his kiss. Smiling, filled with a tenderness that she quite honestly thought she couldn’t feel ever again for a man, Lana pulled up one of Mack’s strong hands. She laid her cheek against the tanned back of his palm, eyes falling closed at how warm and strong it felt. These were hands that would protect her, defend her, and now perhaps, love her. He smelled of smoke and spice and the strange balm that still made her hands tingle. A split-second jolt of astonishment shot through Mack’s fingers as she heard him suck in his breath. A cautious, shocked delight played in his eyes and he grinned, clutching her hands.

  Pressing, unfortunately, right onto the large blister now grown on her thumb. Her yelp of pain broke the spell of the moment. Mack jumped and flipped over her hand, ever the protector, to inspect the wound.

  “Still hurts?” he said unsteadily. His composure had indeed suffered as much as hers in the last minute. “Teena Crow’s balm usually works faster than that.”

  Alarmed, Lana pulled her hands from his. The tingling in her hand
s now felt unwelcome and strange. How had she not noticed the markings on the clay jar? She’d never had been able to trust their odd practices. She’d heard too many stories—both here and from her father in Seattle—of illnesses made worse by native potions. When her papa was sick, Lana’s mother had once caught one of the staff doing strange things to Papa in the name of “healing.” Papa had died shortly afterward. Mama fired the native maid in such a torrent of accusations that Lana had never been able to override her deep mistrust of native people as healers. “What was it?”

  Mack’s eyebrows furrowed as he stepped back. “It’s a Tlingit healing salve from Teena Crow. It will help.”

  He hadn’t asked. He’d just put it on her. He was always doing things without asking. Lana’s thumb throbbed. Now both hands had a disturbing prickling sensation that wouldn’t stop, even as she fussed at them with a dishtowel. She hated the thought of crude potions on her skin. The potion frightened her. His use of it, even though she’d admitted to him that she didn’t like Indian medicine, bothered her even more. Telling herself she was overreacting, Lana scrubbed her hands with the towel as she made for the sink, but instead of helping, it tore open the blister. Now the concoction stung sharply, even as the strange tingling increased. “Why did you use that on me? You know I don’t…” She found she couldn’t finish her sentence without sounding horribly judgmental, but that’s exactly how she felt. She’d been afraid of the native Indians she’d known in Seattle and many she’d met here and in Skaguay. “Don’t put their potions on me. Ever.”