My Darling Melissa Read online

  “I’ve ordered a set of twin beds,” Fancy announced with prim suddenness, and Jeff whirled to face her.

  “What?” he demanded in a gruff whisper.

  Fancy idly rocked Caroline’s cradle, all the while avoiding Jeff’s eyes. “I don’t think we should sleep together for a while,” she said.

  Jeff’s frustration and fury knew no bounds. “You can’t be serious,” he burst out. “Good God, woman, you’re my wife!”

  The baby started in fright and then began to shriek.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Fancy cried, sweeping the baby up into her arms and starting toward the stairs.

  Jeff hesitated for a few moments, too stunned to move, then hurried after her. She was striding along the hallway toward their bedroom when he caught up with her. Caroline was still screaming; at this rate, the boys would soon be awake, too.

  The place would be bedlam.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her.

  Fancy gave him a look that said he should be sorry and crossed their room to enter the adjoining nursery and pace the floor with Caroline.

  Jeff ached at the lack of understanding between himself and his wife, but he didn’t know how to cross the breach. He wasn’t even sure exactly what was wrong, but it had all started when Fancy had begun to share Banner’s consuming interest in the suffrage movement.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed he and Fancy had shared so happily and buried his head in his hands. The baby was settling down by fits and starts, and after several minutes had passed Fancy returned from the nursery, her arms empty.

  “What’s happening to us?” Jeff asked miserably, and she looked away for a moment, gnawing at her lower lip, her dark violet eyes brimming with tears.

  “I don’t know,” she answered after a long time.

  Jeff rose and crossed the room to lay his hands gently on Fancy’s shoulders. He kissed her forehead and then said sadly, “We’d damned well better find out, hadn’t we?”

  “Will you be going to Port Riley tomorrow about Melissa?” Fancy looked up at him with a plea in her eyes.

  Jeff was at a loss as to whether she wanted him to stay or go; in the end, he had to risk being wrong.

  “No. Somebody told me tonight that I have troubles enough of my own, and I think they were right.”

  Fancy rested her cheek against his chest. Her back moved in a small, quivering sigh beneath his hands, and Jeff never knew if his choice had been correct or not.

  Keith was standing by the fireplace in the study when Tess joined him there. Her wild mane of brown hair fell freely about the shoulders of her wrapper.

  “You’re very late,” she said, putting her arms around him from behind and rising on tiptoe to kiss the nape of his neck. “And I’m absolutely furious.”

  He turned in her embrace, resting his hands on her hips and favoring her with an insolent half grin. “Is that so?” he intoned, kissing the tip of her nose. He gave her a little squeeze. “Can’t think why you’d be the least bit put out. After all, a woman’s place is in the home, and here you are, right at home.”

  Hazel eyes dancing, Tess gave her husband a poke in the stomach. “You,” she accused, “have been talking to Jeff again.”

  Keith sighed and shook his head. Suddenly his expression was serious. “What’s going on between him and Fancy, do you know?”

  Tess held Keith a little tighter for a moment and then stepped back. “Fancy feels that she and Jeff have enough children now, and she wants to take a more active part in community affairs—”

  “The suffrage movement,” Keith put in.

  Tess looked at her husband warily. He was in favor of granting women the vote, but he was also a Corbin, strong-willed, with a tendency to dominate at times. His preferences, where a wife’s behavior was concerned, weren’t always in alignment with his political ideals.

  She nodded. “Jeff’s solution is to keep Fancy pregnant, and therefore out of trouble.”

  Keith chuckled and shook his head. “That would be his logic.” He shrugged. “Change seldom comes quickly, Tess. And that approach has served men well for a long, long time.”

  Tess felt a self-conscious blush climb her cheeks. She and Keith had only two children, whereas Jeff and Fancy had four, and so did Adam and Banner. She wondered if her husband felt cheated.

  Keith curved a finger beneath Tess’s chin and lifted. “What?” he asked softly. Insistently.

  There was nothing to do but confess, and Tess knew it. “I was thinking that maybe you wish you’d married a different wife—one who could give you a houseful of children.”

  His eyes were so gentle that Tess feared to lose herself in their soft azure depths. “Ethan and Mary Katherine are a houseful of children,” he told her with a grin. Before he could kiss her, however, or even say that he loved her, there was a frantic hammering at the front door.

  Tess steeled herself, knowing that this would be one of those nights. Someone in Keith’s parish needed him; in a few minutes he would be gone.

  The caller was a man who worked in the shipyard; his young wife had delivered a stillborn child only an hour before. Now, in her grief, she wanted the comfort only her pastor could give her.

  Tess hurried to fetch Keith’s battered old Bible while he shrugged into his coat. “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he promised, giving her a brief kiss.

  And then the door was closing behind him.

  Melissa had expected her second day of work to be better than the first; instead, it was worse. While the gloves she’d bought at the mercantile protected her hands, they also slowed down her efforts. Throughout the morning, whenever Mr. Rimley passed, he counted the oysters in her bucket with his lips moving and then glared at Melissa and shook his head.

  “They’re going to fire me,” she despaired at noon, when she and Rowina sat down on their favorite log to eat lunch. With the kind cooperation of Quinn’s housekeeper, Melissa had provided that day’s repast of roast beef sandwiches and cherry pie.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Rowina argued, but she looked worried all the same. She hesitated for a moment, then ventured to ask, “You’re that heiress they wrote about in the paper, ain’t you? My Charlie read the whole piece out loud to me last night.”

  Melissa nodded, looking down at her half-eaten sandwich instead of meeting her friend’s eyes.

  Rowina’s tone conveyed a slight sense of betrayal. “You don’t need this job,” she grumbled, watching Melissa out of the corner of her eyes. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Melissa wasn’t sure how to explain. Her reasons for wanting to accomplish something on her own sounded reasonable, even noble, when she ran them through her own mind. To Rowina, who lived in the hard, real world, they would seem frivolous.

  “Well?” Rowina prompted.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Melissa said softly.

  The Indian woman fell silent and ate no more of the food Melissa had packed so carefully in Quinn’s kitchen that morning. Clearly, Rowina’s feelings were hurt.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Melissa explained after a few awkward moments had passed.

  “How did you mean it, then?”

  Before Melissa could answer that question Flo appeared, picking her way daintily over rocks and shells to approach.

  A smug expression flickered in her pale green eyes as she looked at Melissa. “Well, here’s the princess herself,” she taunted. And then she made a curtsy and added, “Mr. Roberts sent for you. You’re supposed to go straight to his office.”

  Melissa knew what was coming, and she was crushed, even though she still had her career as a writer. After all, she couldn’t tell anyone about that. And, for the moment, she was more concerned with Rowina’s feelings. “Goodbye,” she said quietly, touching the other woman’s hand briefly with her own.

  Mr. Roberts, the squirrelly little man who had hired her the day before, was waiting for Melissa in his messy shed of an office. He regarded her thro
ugh a cloud of cigar smoke. “No work for a lady, shucking oysters,” he said.

  Melissa swallowed. “I know I’ll be able to work faster once I’ve had just a little more practice.”

  Roberts shook his head. “I’ve got strong lads who’d like your job, missy. Don’t know why I hired you in the first place, except that I could never resist a pretty face.”

  “I’m fired?”

  “You can stay till the end of the day” was the generous response.

  Melissa was faced with a decision: walk away with her chin in the air or stay and finish what she’d started. She was tempted to hurry home, do her crying, and forget that the cannery had ever existed, but her pride wouldn’t let her leave that way.

  As Daniel and Katherine Corbin’s daughter, she’d been taught to hold her head high, to keep trying when things looked their worst. She’d done that when she’d first tried to sell her stories, and no one wanted them, and she could do it now.

  She lifted her chin and went back to her bench to shuck oysters for another five hours.

  By quitting time she was not only tired but broken in spirit as well. The shame of incompetence brought her shoulders low and took the fire from her eyes. Her brothers had been right in thinking that she needed to be sheltered and fussed over, she reflected sadly. She was nothing but a failure.

  *

  Katherine Corbin gazed out at the main street of Port Riley through the window of the hotel dining room. So far she hadn’t touched her tea.

  She and Adam had spent the afternoon making discreet inquiries without turning up a trace of Melissa or that mysterious husband of hers. Mr. Rafferty, it seemed, was on the mountain, where his loggers were felling timber. The maid who’d answered the door at the Rafferty household had averted her eyes and claimed she had no idea where the mistress might be.

  The girl had been lying, of course.

  Just then Katherine was wrenched back to the here and now. She pushed back her chair when she saw Melissa passing by on the sidewalk and slowly rose to her feet.

  Katherine could feel Adam’s curious gaze, but she didn’t look away. “Oh, dear God,” she whispered, stunned at the change a few days had wrought. “My poor little girl!”

  Melissa was wearing a crumpled calico dress, a shapeless dark shawl, and shoes that belonged on someone else’s feet, but it wasn’t her daughter’s clothing that had stunned Katherine. It was the stoop of Melissa’s shoulders and the forlorn, bereft expression on her face.

  She looked as though the world had just come to a violent end and she’d been left to wander through the rubble alone.

  By then Adam had spotted his sister, and he stood with considerably less hesitation than his mother had.

  “Let me talk to her alone,” Katherine said quickly, and Adam sank back into his chair with a sigh.

  Snatching up her handbag, Katherine hurried toward the door and out onto the sidewalk. She started to call out to Melissa and then stopped herself, walking faster instead. Soon she’d fallen into step with her daughter.

  Melissa looked at her without recognition at first, and then a sort of dull surprise dawned in her hollow eyes. “Mama,” she said softly, stopping and turning to face Katherine.

  Both women were oblivious to the noisy traffic in the roadway and the people moving past them on the sidewalk. Katherine took Melissa’s shoulders in her hands. “Darling, what’s happened?”

  Melissa suddenly looked around her like one just rising from a sound sleep. “Are—are you alone?”

  Katherine shook her head and allowed herself a brief smile. “Adam is with me. Jeff and Keith planned to come along as well, but in the end they couldn’t get away. Melissa, we’ve all been very worried.”

  Melissa dropped her eyes to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry,” she said in a barely audible voice.

  Katherine took her daughter’s arm gently. “Won’t you come inside and talk with me?”

  “Just you?” Melissa asked hopefully. “I’m not up to one of Adam’s lectures.”

  Katherine nodded to show that she understood and led her daughter into the hotel and up the stairs to her room. It was small, and since there was only one chair, Melissa sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I can’t come home,” she announced before giving a word of explanation about her flight from the church, her personal appearance, or her hasty marriage to a stranger.

  Katherine’s patience had reached an end, although the loving tenderness she felt for her daughter had not. “Melissa, why did you run out of the church that way? If you’d changed your mind, you had only to tell any one of us.”

  Melissa looked small and miserable and much younger than her twenty-two years. “I was so hurt—I didn’t want to explain… .”

  Katherine simply waited, her hands folded in her lap.

  Melissa’s eyes were filled with remembered pain when she lifted them to meet her mother’s gaze. “Ajax has a mistress, Mama. He actually invited her to our wedding.”

  Rage filled Katherine at the thought, but this was no time to remind her daughter that she’d disliked Ajax from the first, so she kept her peace.

  The story spilled out of Melissa in a sudden rush. She told of riding in a railroad car with Quinn Rafferty and of their impulsive wedding and explained her need to accomplish something worthwhile. She’d gotten a job shucking oysters the day before and lost it today, she blurted out, and now she was going to have to start all over again.

  Katherine leaned slightly forward in her chair. “What possessed you to marry a man you didn’t know?” she demanded quietly.

  Melissa’s eyes filled with tears. “It seemed like such a good idea at the time,” she answered. “He’s kind, and he’s very good-looking.”

  With a sigh Katherine rose from her chair and went to the window to look out on the main street of Port Riley. “Do you love him, Melissa?”

  “Yes,” came the immediate response. “I think I do.”

  “And how does he feel about you?”

  This time the answer was not so prompt. “I—I have hopes that Quinn will come to care for me s-someday.”

  Katherine ached inside, for this was so much less than she’d wanted for her child, but she kept her voice light. “Then you won’t be coming home with us?” she asked.

  “No,” Melissa replied. “I’m sorry, Mama, but I can’t live in my brothers’ shadows anymore. I’ve got to make a life for myself.”

  Her heart in her throat, Katherine turned to face her youngest child. There was a very special bond between them, because Melissa was her only daughter. “I’d like to meet your husband,” she announced, leaving all her misgivings and worries unsaid.

  “I’ll arrange it,” Melissa promised, rising to her feet. She embraced Katherine, her eyes shining with tears. “Thank you for understanding,” she said.

  “I didn’t say I understood, pumpkin,” Katherine answered briskly. She longed to weep, just thinking what a mess Melissa had gotten herself into, but she’d been mothering too long to make a mistake like that. Much as she hated it, she had to let go of her daughter and allow her to live her life in the way she saw fit.

  Melissa glanced nervously toward the door of the room. It was clear that she’d been expecting her brother to appear at any moment. “Are the boys angry with me?” she asked.

  Katherine smiled. “It’s nothing they won’t get over,” she said. She knew her concern showed as she took in Melissa’s clothes and the cuts and bruises on her hands, but she couldn’t help it. “Go home and get some rest, darling. We’ll talk again later.”

  Melissa gave her mother another kiss and a weary hug, then left the room.

  Katherine immediately sat down, struggling to keep her composure. She longed for the comfort and reassurance of a loving partner, but it wasn’t Daniel Corbin who filled her thoughts. It was Harlan Sommers, a rancher she’d met two years before in California.

  She sighed. Harlan was pressing her to marry him, and Katherine truly wanted to be his wife, but it se
emed that there was always some crisis in the family demanding all her attention. She hadn’t even mentioned the man she loved to her children.

  Katherine touched the hair at the nape of her neck to see if it was falling from its pins. Harlan held that in a family such as hers there would always be nothing but crises, and it did appear that he was right.

  Quinn was in his study when Melissa hurried into the house. He was wearing rough-spun trousers, a flannel shirt, and work boots, and he needed a shave.

  Melissa came up short when she saw him. Her husband looked exhausted and smelled like an old bear, but as always, the sight of him had a powerful impact on her.

  “I was fired today,” she burst out breathlessly.

  The expression on Quinn’s face was a guarded one. “Oh?” he said, and he turned his attention to the blaze snapping on the hearth.

  Melissa would have liked a little sympathy or perhaps some concern for her state of mind, but she didn’t pursue those objectives. There were more pressing matters to be dealt with. “My mother and one of my brothers are here. They’re staying at the State Hotel.”

  She had Quinn’s full attention now.

  He turned to face her squarely, studying her face for a moment, then reached for his coat, which was lying over the back of a leather-upholstered chair. Melissa was finally forced by his silence to speak again.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To meet your family,” he replied. “I won’t have it said that they had to come looking for me.” His eyes touched her briefly, then glanced away. “It’s too much to hope, I suppose, that you were wearing something else when they arrived?” he asked pointedly.

  Melissa didn’t want to hear Quinn’s opinion of calico. “You’re a fine one to talk,” she said, letting her gaze move over his filthy work clothes.

  Quinn allowed her remark to pass unchallenged. “I want to meet them tonight,” he told her. He paused to give Melissa a light, nibbling kiss that awakened all her nerve endings. “Sleep well, Mrs. Rafferty.”

  Melissa grasped at his arm. “Let me go with you,” she said, knowing from the moment she opened her mouth that this was something Quinn wanted to do alone.