The Unlikely Groom

“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.”