Gold Rush Bride

“I see ya’ve noticed.” Matt elbowed him, and Will snapped to attention.

He’d been crazy to think of helping her. The last thing he needed was to get involved with another down-on-his-luck immigrant’s problems. He’d done enough on that count lately, and look where it had got him.

It was time to change the subject.

“What brings you all the way to town, Matt? How’s the claim?”

“It’s a goin’. That’s why I’m here. I thought I’d take one more shot at convincin’ ya to go in with me. Whaddya say?”

Will looked hard at him, and read in his eyes what his friend didn’t say. “You’ve heard, then.”

“Heard what?”

“You know what. The whole town’s talking about what a damn fool I am.”

“The whole territory, more like it.” Matt cracked a lopsided smile. “But you’re no fool. I’d a done the same for the old Chinaman if I’d had the money.”

Will snorted.

“Speakin’ o’ which…”

Mei Li stepped out of Dennington’s store and turned up the street toward the Chinese camp on the outskirts of town. She shot Matt a tiny smile. He plucked his hat from his head and gawked at her like a schoolboy until she disappeared around the corner.

“You’re sweet on her,” Will said.

“Have been for months.”

“You’re asking for trouble, you know.”

“I know.”

Will grinned. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.” He glanced at Landerfelt watching them through the window, and the smile slid from his face. “Seriously, Matt, if you intend to court that girl, you’d best watch your back.”

Matt shook off his momentary stupor and slapped his hat back on his head. “I was hopin’ you’d do that for me.”

“Oh no. Not me. I’ll be halfway to—”

“It’s all gone, ain’t it? The cash, your horse, everything.”

Will met his friend’s knowing gaze. “Yeah.”

“Ya’ve got nothin’ to lose then. Work the claim with me and we’ll be filthy rich come the first snow.”

Filthy rich was right.

No, that was his father’s game, not his. Will had made a new life for himself here, had put his past behind him. But the gold fever and what it had done to this pristine place and the once-honest men who lived here brought it all back in spades.

“Sorry, Matt. Not interested.”

“Damned if I can understand your reasonin’.”

His reasons were good ones, but none of Matt’s damned business. He shot another glance at the miniature in Landerfelt’s store window. “Each man has to make a life for himself, Matt. On his own, in his own way.”

“You’re set on Alaska, then?”

He studied the image of Mary Kate Dennington’s proud Irish features and bright blue eyes. “I am.”

“But how ya gonna—”

“I don’t know. All I know is, come hell or high water, I’ll be on that ship.”

It was nearly dark, and cold as any day in Dublin she could remember. Kate stood in the rain at the foot of her father’s grave, her mind made up.

She was cold and wet and she bloody well deserved to be. She’d been a fool to borrow that money on the promise of yet another of her father’s harebrained schemes. She knelt in the mud and placed a hand on his muddy grave.

“What were you thinking, Da?”

He hadn’t been thinking, and that was the problem. Liam Dennington had been a dreamer, a risk taker. Always after that next pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

She smiled in the dark, remembering.

A bit shaky on her feet, Kate rose as mud seeped into her boots. Exhaustion had finally caught up with her and gnawed bone deep against another familiar sensation. Desperation. She clenched her teeth and willed them both away.

Her gaze swept across the forested hillside peppered with the dying light of miners’ campfires. The single street that made up the town of Tinderbox cut across it, dark and quiet.

One campfire, in particular, drew her attention. But the man hunched beside it with an oiled buckskin pulled over his head against the downpour was no miner. She watched as Will Crockett stirred up the embers with a stick.

Mei Li had been right. Vickery confirmed what the girl had said about Crockett being a trapper on his way north. He was the perfect choice for her plan. Now, if she could only muster the courage to ask him.

The soft strain of a miner’s fiddle carried over the din of the rain and reminded Kate of home, though Tinderbox was certainly not like any place she’d ever seen in Ireland. It was a strange new world, and she was an outsider. That was made clear to her today by Mr. Landerfelt.

The man was pompous and, on the surface, seemed to present no particular threat, but she’d read a dangerous sort of instability in his eyes when Crockett had crossed him. Who knew what the merchant might do to protect the monopoly he seemed determined to create?

There were other dangers, too. All afternoon men had come down from the foothills where they worked their claims, just to get a look at her. It hadn’t taken long for Kate to realize she was one of the few white women here. In fact, since she’d left Sutter’s Fort two days ago, she hadn’t seen one other woman like herself—just Indians and a handful of Chinese.

It was clear she didn’t belong here. Her place was at home with her brothers. They needed her, had relied on her to care for them all the years since their mother died.

Kate had made enough just from the sale of the remaining goods in her father’s store to pay for the traveling expense back to San Francisco. Selling the horse and the mule would pay for lodging and food. What then?

She supposed she could work in a laundry or at some other decent employment until she raised enough to pay the debt owed her mother’s sister, and her ship passage home. But that could take months, and she’d experienced firsthand the tawdry San Francisco rooming houses built of green timbers and canvas walls. Walls that did nothing to muffle the sounds of what Kate could only imagine was going on in the next room between transient men and enterprising women.

No, she was better off in Tinderbox for now, where the memory of her father had garnered her one or two allies. She had a plan, and she’d stick to it.

A branch snapped behind her, yanking her out of her thoughts. Kate spun toward the sound.

“What are you doing out here in the rain? Christ, you’re soaked through.”

Will Crockett stood not two paces from her. How on earth had he crept up on her like that? Why, just a moment ago he’d been…