Page 37 of I Do, I Do, I Do
“How many of those cheechakos do you think will make it all the way to Dawson?” Bear asked before he bit into one of Clara’s ham sandwiches. His sharp gaze studied the men hiking past them.
“I keep hearing that word,cheechako. What does it mean?”
“It’s the Chinook word for newcomer.”
“I suspect it means a bit more than that. Like stupid greenhorn. Or, idiots. Something not too complimentary.”
When Bear grinned, his craggy almost-menacing face relaxed into near handsomeness. Looking at him, Clara tried to imagine him without the broken nose and minus the scar through his eyebrow, but she couldn’t. His crooked nose and dented face were part of who he was, and part of the reason her skin flushed when she gazed at him too long.
“After you’ve been in the Yukon a year, you’re entitled to call yourself a sourdough,” Bear explained, “but not before.”
She smiled and nodded, feeling his physical presence as she felt the chill wind on her cheeks—as a tangible thing. He enveloped people with his size and his energy, overwhelmed most, Clara guessed. He didn’t intimidate her, but she felt his warmth and size and vigor, and she responded strongly to the challenge he represented. He was a mountain, and mountains were there to climb, or to whittle down to size.
They ate in companionable silence, watching the tide of prospectors struggle up the trail. “I behaved badly yesterday,” Bear said suddenly. “I don’t know what happened. Hell, I wanted to buy you a cup of coffee. Instead, I got mad.” After a minute he added, “I’m always explaining myself to you. I don’t do that with anyone else. But whenever I see you, I feel like I need to explain whatever I did or said the last time I saw you.”
“Explaining spares a lot of misunderstandings.” Clara didn’t dare turn her head, or she’d be looking directly into those brown-bear eyes and then her stomach would flip over and fall to the ground.
“If I’d asked, would you have let me buy you a coffee?”
“I don’t know.” She was playing with fire here. “I might have.” Surely no one got burned sharing a simple cup of coffee. She couldn’t see any harm in it, not really.
His teeth flashed in a smile, and his eyes narrowed down in a crinkly way that made it impossible not to smile back at him. “Then I’ll ask you again sometime.”
They ate their midmorning snack and watched the cheechakos, and Clara tried not to feel the heat of him against her side. Tried to ignore the clean outdoor scent of his hair and clothing.
“How long have you been in Alaska?” she asked, mostly to focus her thoughts away from wanting to lean against him.
“Sometimes it feels like I’ve been living in one wilderness area or another for as long as I can remember. I like the raw vitality of the boomtowns. And the opportunities. Men have gotten rich chasing prospectors.”
“Then you search for gold, too?”
He laughed. “No, ma’am. I make more money selling one bottle of liquor than most miners earn in a week. I guess you could say I mine the miners.”
Clara nodded approvingly. She understood this thinking. Providing food, drink, and shelter would lead an ambitious person to prosperity. That’s what her papa had always said.
But Papa was a man to stay put, not a man like Bear who followed opportunity wherever it led. As for herself, she’d been willing to sell the inn and chase opportunity to Seattle, so she guessed she was more like Bear Barrett than like her papa.
Feeling him stiffen next to her brought her thoughts back to the present in time to notice a scowling man who had halted on the trail. He stared at Bear with such hatred that Clara gasped.
“Who’s that?” she asked. The man spit on the ground as if the sight of Bear had left a bad taste in his mouth, then he snarled something beneath his breath and moved on.
Bear frowned at the clouds gathering to the west. “His name is Jake Horvath. I won the Bare Bear off him in a poker game. He claims I cheated.”
An odd expression tightened his face as he paused and studied Clara. After a minute she realized he was waiting for her to ask if Horvath’s accusation was true. When she said nothing, he nodded, then intensified his gaze and looked deep inside her.
How long they sat on the rock staring into each other’s eyes was anyone’s guess. Finally Clara blinked and turned her face toward the trail, pressing her palms against fiery cheeks. “Oh, my,” she murmured in a breathy voice.
“You know, things would be a lot easier if you weren’t a respectable woman.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said, abruptly coming to her senses. Surely she had not heard him correctly.
“There are things I’d like to say to you, but it’s hard to talk to respectable women. I have to be careful what words I choose and where I look.”
The fire continued to blaze on her cheeks as she imagined the kind of women he must usually speak to. “Well! I’m sorry that my respectability inconveniences you.” The idea. She shrugged her arms through the straps of her backpack, not allowing him to assist her. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said coolly.
“Wait a minute.”
Striding forward, she fell into the line of cheechakos hiking over terrain that steadily worsened and became more difficult to cover. Once she looked back and saw Bear standing to the side of the trail, glaring after her with an expression of annoyance and exasperation. That’s how she felt, too.
