believed he was Mariah’s husband…and as Mariah’s husband, he would naturally be expected to sleep in this room with her.
His gaze traveled again to the bed. Sleep with her. Requesting another room or heading for the stables would drag up uncomfortable questions.
Behind him the door opened. He turned at the same moment someone entered, a flash of fabric whisked outward, and the door closed with a firm click.
Six mugs of beer had gone to his head, because he could have sworn a naked woman had joined him in this room. His mouth was suddenly so dry he wished he had another drink.
He should have turned away immediately, but not looking was impossible. She was real. Wes took in every lush curve and interesting hollow visible through the sheer white garment. He was a red-blooded, more-than-able-bodied man after all. And Mariah was incredibly beautiful.
She’d been frozen to the spot, but once she got her bearings and moved, she shot toward the bed, grabbed the coverlet and wrapped it around herself. It was too late. He had that creamy-skinned hourglass body and those lush dusky-tipped breasts seared on his brain for eternity. To what fortuitous hand of fate did he owe the privilege of meeting her son and seeing her naked all in the same day?
“I will never forgive them for this. Never!” She gathered the folds of the bedcover and dragged it behind a bamboo dressing screen with her. “You might have looked away,” she said from the other side.
“Might have,” he agreed.
Only then did he hear the soft laughter and the hushed giggles coming from the hallway.
“A gentleman would have,” she added.
“Might have,” he said again.
The rustling sound of fabric told him she was putting something on, a nightdress perhaps. A real nightdress.
“Forget that happened,” she begged.
Not if I live to be a hundred. He said nothing. His presence here was lie enough.
She came out from hiding wearing a printed cotton wrapper that covered her all the way from her throat to her ankles. She draped the coverlet over the bed before going straight to a small table with three hinged mirrors, where she grabbed up a hairbrush. She made a few brisk strokes through her lustrous mane of fair, wavy hair before sectioning it off and braiding it. Her cheeks were still crimson with embarrassment—or anger. Both probably.
“First,” she said, coming to stand a safe few feet away from him. The thick braid fell over her shoulder and swayed against her breast. “I want to know what you’re doing here.”
“Didn’t your grandfather share my letter?”
“You want my son to have a father,” she stated.
“It’s more than that. I don’t know that I can explain it to you.”
“Try.” With her hands on her hips, she pursed her glistening lips and waited, her body held stiff. Her flowery, feminine scent played havoc with his restraint. He knew what was beneath that dressing gown.
He took a deep breath and exhaled. He deserved her suspicion, of course. She didn’t know him. “Can we sit down? I’ve traveled a far piece on foot today.”
Her accusing gaze faltered, and she frowned as though she regretted having to change her opinion of him from an ogre to a human being. “Yes, of course. Take the chair there by the fire.”
With his ankle and calf throbbing, he made his way over to the chair and sat. It took him a couple of minutes to get his boots and socks off.
She appeared to wrestle with herself for a moment, but then darted forward. “Will it help to raise it?” she asked. She dragged a small trunk within reach and placed a needlepoint pillow atop it. “Rest your foot.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Though he didn’t take a shine to showing his weakness, he had no choice but to use both hands to lift his leg and set his foot atop the pillow.
She leaned over to adjust the cushion, and her braid fell against his bare ankle. She straightened, glanced away and then back. “A bear trap?” she asked.
“Can’t see ’em in the snow,” he answered. “That’s the idea, of course, but this one was set along a trail.
“Passed out a couple of times before I got the rusty contraption off. Used my first-aid supplies to clean and bandage it, but I lost a lot of blood. Would’ve died if a band of Haida hadn’t found me. They doctored my leg and took me on to Juneau City ’cause they saw the mail bags.”
“What’s a Haida?”
“A native tribe that mostly hunts whales and fish along the coast, but some travel inland. Lucky for me these did. Anyway, infection traveled up my leg, and I was in a bad way for months.”
Mariah perched on the foot of the bed, then curled her feet up under her wrapper to lean against one of the posts on the footboard as she listened.
“When I came around, the new station man said my box was full and brought me the stack. All letters from your boy,” he said. “Letters addressed to me. I shared a room right there at the station when I was in the city, so that’s where I spent the next few months, laid up and reading letters. Couldn’t figure out why this young fella was writing to me like he knew me, like I was somebody special.”
Mariah’s gaze shifted to the hem of her sleeve and she smoothed a finger over it without speaking.
“It probably doesn’t make much sense to you or to anybody…I’m kind of confused by it myself—but those letters were a connection for me. Something to hang on to. Something to look forward to and see me through another day. I searched old Otto’s room and found the rest, along with several from Louis. Eventually I wrote back to your grandfather.”
Mariah looked up and sighed. “And he told you it wouldn’t hurt if you picked up where Otto left off.”
“That’s the gist of it, yes.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t disagree with him. I never did. I just let him create this whole fantasy and played right along with it because it was convenient.”
Wes heard the concern in her voice. Her next words proved it.
“What are you going to do with this information now?”
He appreciated her freshly scrubbed face, shiny hair and pink lips. She was the prettiest woman he’d laid eyes on in a month of Sundays. “What do you mean, ma’am?”
“We used your name and your mailbox, and it was wrong of us. Have you told anyone?”
“No, of course not. I don’t care that you used my mailbox. Or my name for that matter. As it turned out John James’s letters might have saved my life.” He’d been alone for so long, that those letters had been a life connection for him. “That probably sounds a little dramatic, but it’s not much of an exaggeration.”
“What do you want from him? From me?”
“I don’t want anything, Mariah. I want to give something
