Page 36 of I Do, I Do, I Do
She couldn’t believe this. “I promise you, I’m not the mysterious benefactor. But if I were, why would that make you so angry?”
“Because I know what you’re doing! You want to tell Jean Jacques if it wasn’t for you, we would have worn ourselves to a nub carrying goods back and forth. You want him to think it was your idea to find him and you made it possible. And, you want to feel superior to us! Like you’re better than us!”
Juliette gasped. “That isn’t true! Until theAnnasettsailed without me, I was planning to return to Seattle!”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “You don’t plan anything, Juliette. You just let yourself get carried along. I suspect you’ve known all along that you wouldn’t be on theAnnasettwhen it returned to Seattle. You want to find Jean Jacques as much as we do.”
To her dismay, most of what Zoe said was true. She did allow herself to be swept along by events and people. Moreover, she couldn’t argue that she didn’t feel superior to Zoe and Clara, because sometimes she did. Sometimes she thought that Jean Jacques had married beneath himself when he wed those two.
“I’ll accept your charity,” Zoe continued, her eyes as glittery and hard as blue ice. “I’ll accept because I’m worried about how long my money will last and because using a packer will make the journey a hundred times easier. But I’ll never thank you for this handout. And I detest you for hiding behind anonymity and for putting me in a position where I have to accept your charity or feel stupid and suffer great hardship.”
After setting her soup bowl on the ground, Zoe strode into the tent and threw down the flap behind her.
Juliette blinked at Clara. “Truly, I didn’t pay Tom Price any part of our packing fees. It’s someone else.”
Juliette couldn’t eat either, she was too upset. Life with Aunt Kibble had not been a fraction as turbulent and draining as life with her husband’s other wives. And no one had ever spoken to her as directly or as insultingly as Zoe and Clara did. Nor had she ever addressed anyone as directly and, yes, occasionally insultingly as she sometimes addressed Zoe and Clara. It was a terrible thing to be forced to endure the company of people one loathed. The circumstance brought out the very worst in her.
“I don’t know why Bear’s so angry,” Clara said, studying the chunk of black crust that she turned between her fingers. “Before the match, he said he could accept defeat gracefully.” She frowned at Juliette. “Surely he knew it was possible that I’d beat him. Even if he believed it would take a miracle, he must have known it could happen.”
“So who could it be?” She scanned the closed flap of the tent, upset that Zoe was so angry at her. “Ben, that is Mr. Dare, speaks well and he has nice manners. But I just don’t think a rich man would travel all this distance to dig around in frozen sand. He doesn’t even believe he’ll find gold.”
Now that she thought about it, Ben’s trip to the Yukon didn’t make much sense. Unless he didn’t want her to know that he was as desperate as the other stampeders.
Clara dropped the bread crust into her bowl. “I never meant to humiliate or embarrass him. I didn’t think about that. I just wanted to win the prize.”
Last night Juliette had dreamed about Benjamin Dare. They had been walking along the shore, except in her dream, the shore had been white sand instead of pebbles. Overhead was the twilight sky of an Alaskan spring, but she could see stars anyway. There was no tent city in her dream, no town, no mountains. Just the shore and the sky and Benjamin. He had turned her in his arms, kissed her, then they had sunk to their knees on the sand, and she had swooned as he began to open her shirtwaist.
Lowering her head, she swallowed and blinked at the cooling surface of her soup. For months she had wanted to dream about Jean Jacques, but she never had. She didn’t want to dream about Ben Dare, but this was the second time he had made love to her in her dreams. It didn’t feel decent or right.
After a while, she looked at the closed tent flap and wondered what Zoe was doing inside. “Do you think Zoe will really kill Jean Jacques?” she asked Clara.
“What? Oh,ja. I think she will.”
For a moment Juliette felt disoriented. Surely she was not in Alaska, for heaven’s sake, dreaming about a handsome man she had not known five weeks ago and sharing a tent with a would-be murderess and an arm wrestler. How on earth had such an improbable thing happened?
Tilting her head back, she stared up at the pale night sky and wished she could go home to California, where the nights were warm, the days boringly tranquil, and where she had never heard of a disturbing man named Ben Dare.
In her dreams there was no Jean Jacques, there was only Ben, his intent blue eyes filling her vision before he crushed her in his arms.
Guilt made her touch her wedding ring. How could her dreams be filled with such longing for one man when she was married to another? What kind of person was she?
Chapter 9
The Chilkoot trail, or the Poor Man’s Trail as it was also called, twisted through twenty-five miles of steep, tangled terrain. But the first five miles hadn’t been too difficult, Clara decided, stopping to swing the pack off her back.
The day was bright and crisply cold, a grand day for new beginnings, a day to absorb nature. The ragged beauty of abruptly rising mountains awed her, and the flow of humanity ascending toward the pass made her feel part of something momentous.
Choosing a rock beside the trail, she sat down and rummaged in her backpack until she found the sandwiches she’d made early this morning out of canned ham. She also had an apple, a piece of hard cheese, and a bottle of her carefully hoarded German ale, but she would save those items for her lunch.
While she unwrapped a sandwich to eat now, she watched the steady stream of men trudging past her. Some pushed wheelbarrows piled high with boxes and crates, most carried huge loads on their backs, and others led pack animals even though the actual pass was too steep for horses or mules to climb. Clara wondered what happened to the animals when the prospectors reached Sheep Camp at the bottom of the pass.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Miss Klaus.”
Bear Barrett stepped out of the stream of foot traffic and approached the rock where she sat. His shaggy golden hair hung below a well-worn hat with a brim large enough to keep the sun off his face. He wore a heavy green sweater over loose trousers and sturdy walking boots.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked, already sliding his pack to the ground beside her. “What have you got there? Ham? I’ve got fried egg and bacon. Would you like to trade one of your sandwiches for one of mine?”
Clara accepted his offer and then pulled her corduroy skirt to the side to make room for him on her rock.
