The Unlikely Groom

Chapter Three

T he words weren’t rough enough. Lucas had wanted to say something…else. Something that would shock Ashlynne and send her running from the Star. He’d known from the beginning that he didn’t need or want her here, and her prim insistence that she didn’t drink spirits had only confirmed his conviction.

She was a teetotaler—and trouble.

How did he think his weak, sorry excuse for an accusation would convince a woman like Ashlynne Mackenzie to retreat? She had accompanied her husband to the frontier of Alaska, for God’s sake. And, teetotaler or not, she’d found the will to go from saloon to saloon, looking for the drunken wastrel to whom she was married.

A woman who did those things was not a coward. A woman like that was beyond anything in his experience, but he could be certain that she wouldn’t run from a few provocative words—and the sorry dare he’d come up with couldn’t even be considered provocative.

She was also a woman whose husband had just been shot. Murdered. And for that reason alone, Lucas’s more cowardly self couldn’t find, let alone use, any harder, more ruthless words. No matter that it was a mistake and he knew it, he simply couldn’t force himself to be deliberately cruel to her. Not tonight.

It was too bad, too. A firmer declaration would have made life simpler for them both.

“Drink your coffee,” he said instead.

“I told you. I don’t drink spirits.”

“There isn’t enough liquor in there to make you a drunkard, Ashlynne. Drink the damned stuff. You need it. Hell, I need it. It was damn cold outside.” He took a healthy swig from his own cup.

“I beg your pardon!”

She drew herself up like an outraged little hen, an image that might have made Lucas smile under other circumstances. He didn’t consider it now, not even when she gave him a frown that he guessed was meant to put him in his place. He stared back impassively.

“Hades will freeze over before I am crippled by a need for alcohol in order to survive,” she said, her voice as frosty as the coldest Alaskan night. “I will endure whatever I have to, for however long I have to, and without the aid of a crutch like whiskey.”

“Aha.” He nodded as though understanding suddenly—and he did. “The ills of the world are laid at the feet of that demon liquor. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And is that because Ian had a little trouble holding his drink?”

The question sounded like more of a taunt than Lucas had meant, but he didn’t offer an apology. He might not have it in him to be deliberately cruel to Ashlynne, but that didn’t mean he could be kind and gentle, either.

He couldn’t. Nor did he care about finding such softheartedness within himself. That could only lead to more trouble, and he’d had enough of that already.

He had to admire Ashlynne’s composure, however. She blinked at him like a confused little owl and said, “I don’t want to talk about this.” Her voice sounded prim, proper, much as he expected, but then she exposed a sudden desperation when she reached for her coffee and drank.

Did she realize what she’d done? Apparently not, he decided when she gasped and wheezed something that sounded like ack. Her eyes widened, grew watery and remained as clearly amber as the whiskey that laced her coffee.

She’d almost fooled him into believing she had more strength than she could possibly possess.

Lucas chose to ignore both her physical reaction and the reasons for it; she wouldn’t appreciate anything he said. Instead he watched as she sat there, trussed up in her heavy cloak and, once she rid herself of her cup, with her arms crossed protectively over her chest.

What did she think she was guarding herself against? he wondered as a faint smile tilted up the corners of his mouth. There was nothing and no one in the Star—or all of Skagway—who could cause her any more harm than her husband already had.

The smile died and Lucas angled his head in her direction. “Why don’t you take that cloak off before you get overheated? You’ll get sick.”

She glanced down at herself. “I…” She shrugged, as though unable to make the decision whether or not to do as he suggested.

And that was odd, Lucas thought as he watched her. She’d been quick and decisive in her disapproval of him and the Star—and alcohol in general—but she couldn’t decide whether or not to remove her cloak? Had that second taste of alcohol undermined the strength of her reasoning? Or had the reality of her predicament finally struck her?

“Unless you have somewhere else to go?” he prompted when she didn’t move.

“I…no.” She dropped her gaze to the front fastenings that held her cloak secure, moving slowly to work each one free. Finally, when the last one had been unfastened, she shrugged the heavy garment from her shoulders and it fell away, draping down over the back of the chair. “There. Is that better?”

Lucas raised an eyebrow. “You tell me. You’re the one who could have become sick.”

“I’m…fine.”

She was more than fine. He could see that in an entirely new way. She wore a plum-colored gown with a high collar and long sleeves. The only adornment was a bit of black piping and black buttons that decorated the front in an eminently proper style. But the respectable cut and fashion of Ashlynne’s clothing could not disguise the lush shape of her body.

Her cloak had done an admirable job of concealing her form, making Lucas more appreciative of what he now could see. Her breasts curved in generous proportion, and her waist dipped inward with an enticing flare. She had the kind of shape that any man would admire.

What the hell had Ian Mackenzie been thinking of to bring his wife to Skagway? Particularly a wife who looked like Ashlynne?

“What are you going to do now?” The question slipped out before Lucas could think better of it. He didn’t really want to know the answer, didn’t want to learn anything about her past or future. Certainly he didn’t want to understand the woman herself.

But then second, perhaps wiser, thoughts assailed him. Maybe such a question was for the best, after all. He wanted her gone from his life for good—and the sooner the better. A reminder of the reality of her situation might be the best way to accomplish that.

“Tonight?” she asked softly. “Or in the future?”

“Is there a difference?”

“Well, no. I don’t suppose there is.”

“And?”

She glanced away. When she looked back at him, it was for only a moment. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I have nowhere to go.”

“Tonight?” He repeated her question. “Or ever?”

“Ever.”

Damn. He narrowed his eyes and told himself not to respond to the look of forlorn confusion that paled her face. Ashlynne Mackenzie must have somewhere else to go. She had to. She couldn’t stay here, at the Star.

At least he could be certain that she’d have no desire to remain in a saloon.

I should have walked away and let Reverend Dickey take care of her.

“What about family, friends?” he asked.

“I don’t have a family. Not anymore. Ian was the last one.” Her voice grew thick with the words and she paused, blinking quickly, repeatedly, as she fought back tears. “I never had many friends. Certainly no one close enough I could turn to now.

“I’m…alone,” she added after a moment.

Alone.

Lucas was alone, too. Well, he had the Star. A place to call his own. It had started out as nothing more than a way to earn a living, but now it had become his home, and friends like Sugar Candy and his bartender, Willie, had become his family.

Ashlynne said she had no one. Lucas could believe it was true, at least in Skagway. But at home, wherever that was? There must be someone.

Lucas leveled her a deliberate look but used the guise of reaching for his cup to mask his intent. He needn’t have bothered; she had dropped her gaze once more, seeming fascinated by her hands, her lap—or something else entirely that he couldn’t see.

She had paled, even, from earlier, and her mouth seemed slack. Lucas drank from his mug and looked closer. Her expression appeared all too shocked, confused. Had her admission surprised even her then?

“Go back where you came from, Ashlynne.” Lucas spoke suddenly, using words he could say flatly and without hesitation. “Family or not, you have friends there. You don’t want to stay in Alaska.”

She shook her head as she looked up at him. “You don’t understand.” She sounded almost desperate, as though she needed to convince herself, as well. “There is no one there for me. There is no one at all. And even if there were…”

She paused for so long he gave up expecting that she would continue. When he would have spoken, prodded her, she finished, “Even if there were, I couldn’t get there. I don’t have a return ticket…and I don’t have the fare for one.”

“You don’t have—” Lucas cut himself off, suddenly recalling pieces of what he’d learned on the street.

“Are you telling me,” he began again, “that Ian lost everything? All your money?”

“Yes.” The word was barely audible. “And that isn’t even the worst of it.”

Lucas’s heart sank. Good God, there was more?

“What else?”

“It’s my fault.”

Ashlynne made the admission before she could give in to the cowardice that made her want to pretend otherwise. But she couldn’t claim an innocence she didn’t deserve. In truth, she was to blame for everything that had happened.

“What’s your fault?”

“All of it.”

“All of it,” Lucas repeated, but nothing in his tone made the words sound like a question. “Do you have more to tell me?”

“I…” She paused as she tried to think carefully about what to say and how to say it. Lucas made it more difficult than it should have been, staring at her with those sharp blue eyes that seemed to look right through her to the very depths of her soul.

Apprehension stalked her, as it had for days now. It made her angry and irritable and reckless, which explained why she’d gone looking for Ian in the first place. Now it annoyed her into reaching for her coffee and she swallowed a mouthful before she could think better of it.

She realized her mistake the moment it was too late. She might have allowed petulance to get the better of her, but her pride permitted her to do nothing less than swallow the coffee…and the whiskey. The liquor tasted stronger than she remembered—or was it only that the coffee had cooled considerably since she’d tasted it before? She uttered a soft, decidedly unfeminine grunt as she shuddered.

“Think of it this way. Irish coffee is medicinal,” suggested Lucas with unmistakable humor glinting in his eyes.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She gasped more than she spoke. “There is nothing medicinal about whiskey.”

“You might be surprised at how many tonics you can buy from any druggist that are mostly alcohol.”

She didn’t believe him, but she didn’t have the interest or energy to argue with him. Not now. Maybe tomorrow or another day, when she could think again with some semblance of intelligence. At the moment she seemed only able to feel—and her emotions didn’t seem all that dependable. They had careened up and down and around all night, urging her in one direction and then another without pause or logic, and she didn’t trust a one of them.

“Now,” said Lucas after he’d taken a drink from his own cup and settled back in his chair. “Do you want to tell me why this is all your fault?”

“No.” She bit off the word, taking satisfaction in the sharp, disagreeable sound. “I can’t say that I want to tell you anything at all.”

He leveled an impatient frown of disapproval in her direction. “You’ve got someone else who wants to listen? Someone who’s interested?

“And who’ll help you?” he added after a significant pause.

Ashlynne tried to swallow a sigh, but she couldn’t quite manage it. “There’s no one,” she stated, because it gave her at least the illusion of certainty. “I told you that. But can’t this wait?” She brushed an unsteady hand over her forehead. “Do we have to talk about this now?”

“When would be better for you? When you’re all settled into this new life that you’ve got waiting, now that you’re all alone?” She couldn’t mistake his sarcastic tone.

Ashlynne swallowed and dredged up the will to answer from somewhere, though she doubted seriously that she had the strength for it. “You’re right, of course.” She refused the tears that prickled behind her eyelids and forced back the fear and grief that waited just beyond the ironclad grip she held over her composure.

Lucas stared at her silently.

“All right.” She took a deep breath. “It’s my fault because it was my idea to come here.”

Lucas angled his head to one side and seemed to watch her with more than a trace of curiosity. There seemed to be something else in his expression, as well, though she couldn’t tell just what.

“What do you mean by here?” he asked. “It was your idea to come to the Star? Or to Skagway?”

“Alaska. The Klondike. I’m the one who wanted to prospect for gold.”

He didn’t believe her. She could tell by his narrowed eyes and the skeptical twist of his lips. He shook his head, shoving the hair out of his eyes when it tumbled over his forehead. “Women never choose adventure or places like Alaska.”

“What…” Ashlynne shook her head in startled astonishment. The movement gave her a bit of a light-headed feeling, but she did her best to ignore it. “What a narrow-minded thing for you to say.” She answered Lucas’s ridiculous claim instead. “What about your girl Candy over there? How did she get here?”

Ashlynne pointed to where Candy circulated among the men on the other side of the room. The other woman touched one man with a familiar hand on his shoulder, bent low to whisper in another’s ear. She chatted and laughed with them all, her manner casual and friendly and even intimate.

A startling regret washed over Ashlynne as she watched Candy’s relaxed camaraderie with the men. An equal sense of shock followed almost immediately. How could she, Ashlynne, experience such a sense of disappointment? It was completely inappropriate! But…she had never felt that kind of easiness with another. No one. Granddad and Grandmother had always held themselves stiffly aloof from most emotion, and Ashlynne had been so very different from her immediate family—her parents and Ian—that they’d never been close.

She hadn’t even felt that kind of familiarity with Elliott and he had been—

She cut off her thoughts with a ruthlessness she hadn’t needed in a long time, perhaps not since Elliott himself had taught her the necessity for it. But she needed the ability with a real desperation tonight. She simply couldn’t afford for her thoughts to divert in that particular direction. Not along with everything else that had happened.

And particularly not when facing a man of Lucas Templeton’s considerable will.

She ignored the distant warning in her head and drank more coffee. It didn’t burn with quite the same fire as earlier, although she wouldn’t say that the taste had much improved. Still, it gave her something to do with her hands and worked as an effective distraction from the conversation she didn’t want to have in the first place.

“Are you telling me that you’re a woman like Candy?” asked Lucas, sounding both curious and dubious—and distinctly amused.

“I—” She flushed. “No.” She shook her head emphatically and tried to ignore that same dizzy feeling that had overcome her earlier. “I have no intention of working in a saloon. But that doesn’t change the fact that coming to Alaska was my idea.”

“The lure of the gold?” Lucas’s smile didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes. “You and Ian planned to be rich, like the Carmacks and the Berrys?”

“You see?” Ashlynne pointed at Lucas, making her argument with fingers that had long ago ceased to tremble, but then she turned to fanning her face with her hand. The room had begun to seem overly warm.

“George Carmack and Clarence Berry had their wives with them when they struck gold,” she added. “You can’t tell me that Kate Carmack and Ethel Berry were dance hall girls—or anything else. I know better.”

“I see you’ve learned about your predecessors to the Klondike.”

“Yes.” Ashlynne nodded, but briefly. “It seemed important to learn all we could. To be prepared.” But her heart fell upon hearing the words. Despite whatever they might have thought, she and Ian had been sadly unprepared before arriving in Skagway.

“It’s different here,” she confessed in a soft voice, because the truth had always been the one thing on which she could depend. “Nothing like I expected.”

“You aren’t the first to say that.”

“I didn’t want to come this way.” She shrugged. “I wanted to go to St. Michael and take a ship from there down the Yukon River to Dawson City.”

“The all-water route.” Lucas nodded with apparent approval. “It’s a less arduous trip that way, that much is certain. Better for a woman.”

“It’s also more expensive. Ian said we couldn’t afford it. Besides, the Yukon River is frozen this time of year and Ian wanted to travel now. He said we were better off coming early, through Skagway, and purchasing our outfit here, rather than paying to ship it from San Francisco. We could be ready as soon as the snow melted.”

“And did he tell you how difficult it would be to cross either of the passes to get from here as far as Bennett? The Chilkoot is brutal enough, and the White Pass is no better. And that’s only the beginning of the trail.”

Ashlynne started to shake her head, then remembered her earlier dizziness and thought better of it. What if she was catching a cold? Or, worse, some strange Alaskan malady with which she had no experience.

She answered simply instead. “I don’t know how much Ian knew before we left, but I began to suspect the truth of what we faced on the Aurora Borealis. The other passengers told me what they knew, and it did sound…daunting.”

In truth, Ashlynne had been appalled to hear of the hardships that stampeders faced when climbing either the Chilkoot or White passes. But, as she’d quickly learned, those who wanted to go to the Klondike had no choice. There was no other route from Skagway to Dawson City, and the Canadian Mounties required those entering the Yukon to possess nearly a thousand pounds of goods and supplies. The only way a man—or woman—could comply was by carrying his outfit up and over the pass, trip after trip after trip.

“I thought we could do it.” She tried to sound more confident than she actually felt. “Ian did, too. He told me so—but then, he didn’t fear anything.”

A boisterous shout from a noisy card game drew her attention and Ashlynne glanced to the back of the room. If Ian had been alive, he would have been there with the others, betting his last dime—or anything else with which he’d had to gamble. She didn’t doubt it.

She frowned and turned back to Lucas. “The atmosphere of Skagway—the excitement and gambling and drinking—all took hold of him. It was like a…sickness. It didn’t take even a day before he fell in with a bad influence and…well, you know the rest of it.”

“And you consider yourself responsible for that?”

“It was my idea to come,” she repeated tightly.

“You aren’t responsible for anyone’s actions but your own.”

She smiled but with neither amusement nor understanding. “That sounds very nice, but it’s not true. Not in this case. I knew we were taking a chance in coming here, but I thought we took a bigger chance by staying in San Francisco. Ian had too many acquaintances who were a bad influence, and we’d already lost nearly everything we had. This seemed like the right thing to do. I’m not so sure anymore, but at the time, it felt as though we were fulfilling the family prophecy.”