Page 38 of I Do, I Do, I Do
Much of the time he had an infuriating way of disappointing her or making her angry. She didn’t know why she thought about him so often anyway. Well, yes she did.
Whatever spark flared between them was strictly superficial. She wouldn’t have admitted it to another soul, but a large part of his enormous appeal was purely physical. Her skin tingled where she brushed against him. When their eyes met, her chest tightened and an earthquake shook her stomach. Sunlight shining on the golden hair on his hands and wrists made her mouth go dry.
Jean Jacques had caused a similar reaction, but not as strong, and she knew where that mistake had taken her. Frowning, she grabbed hold of a cottonwood branch and pulled herself up a steep incline. The ground was a damp tangle of exposed roots.
Ironically, after years of zealously protecting herself from fortune hunters, that’s whom she had impulsively married. And she’d done it largely because Jean Jacques made her itch somewhere deep down inside. It was enough to make a cat laugh.
Well, it wouldn’t happen again. Tingling nerves and hot shivery stares were not going to lead her astray this time. But she almost understood Bear’s comment about wishing that she was a woman of loose virtue. If that were the case, she and Bear could spend a rollicking night together, she could get him out of her system, and that would be the end of it.
But since she was a respectable woman, his comment had to be viewed as insulting. Quivering with moral indignation, she hardly noticed how the trail had deteriorated.
***
If Juliette died, and she thought she might, it would be Jean Jacques’s fault. If it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t be here, struggling up the steep slope of a mountain, panting like a dog and perspiring as no lady ever should.
Stepping out of a quagmire of churned earth and animal droppings, she leaned into the hillside, placed her hands on her knees, and fought to fill her lungs with enough air to survive.
This was madness. There wasn’t even a trail. Men and animals picked their way up as best they could, climbing around boulders ranging from skillet size to the size of carriages. Hemlock and spruce grew thick enough to snatch at hats and clothing. And she’d overheard someone say they were only halfway to the first night’s camp.
Easing herself down on a fallen tree trunk, she yanked off her pack and rubbed sore shoulders. The pack couldn’t weigh more than fifteen pounds, but after three and a half hours, it felt as if she carried a block of marble on her back. She didn’t know how the men bore it, those who carried towering packs that must have weighed near a hundred pounds. And when the men reached Canyon City, the first night’s campsite, they would turn around and return to Dyea to fetch another hundred pounds of their goods and continue back and forth over this hellish trail until their outfit was reassembled. A shudder rippled down her spine.
“You’re shivering? You can’t possibly be cold,” Zoe gasped, climbing around a boulder and staggering toward Juliette. She doubled over and gulped huge mouthfuls of air. When Zoe’s skirt tipped up in back, Juliette noticed that Zoe’s legs were twitching as badly as her own.
“It starts to feel cold after you rest for a minute.”
Perspiration had dampened Zoe’s collar, and her cheeks were bright pink from the sun. Juliette supposed she looked equally disheveled. For once she didn’t care. “If I had to walk this horrible so-called trail a couple dozen times like most of those men, I’d give up and go home.” She thanked heaven for their mysterious benefactor.
Zoe nodded and dropped on the log beside Juliette. “For once I agree with you. Right now I don’t care that you paid for us. I’m just grateful that I don’t have to pack one more ounce than the two tons I’m already carrying.”
Juliette didn’t waste breath denying she was the benefactor. Nothing she said would convince Zoe. She closed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t think I have the energy to eat lunch.”
“Me neither. I’ll tell you one thing. Tomorrow I’m not wearing this corset. I don’t care if Ma hears about it from a dozen sources, I’m not lacing tomorrow.”
Juliette wished she could fall asleep and wake up in Linda Vista with all this behind her. She wished she had never met Jean Jacques Villette. “Sometimes I think I could shoot Jean Jacques myself. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be warm and comfortable at home.” But she could never shoot anyone. Not even the man who had ruined her life. At the moment this seemed like a character flaw. “Could you really shoot someone you love?”
Zoe didn’t answer immediately. “I’m not sure anymore if I actually loved him. Maybe I loved the kind of life he offered. I’m not proud of that, but maybe that’s how it was.” She fished around in her backpack and pulled out a hard-boiled egg, but cracking and peeling it seemed beyond her.
Juliette picked bits of bark off the log they sat on. “Sometimes I remember how fast everything happened, and it shocks me. How could I have married someone I knew so slightly?” She shook her head. “Was I that afraid of ending on the shelf?”
She kept circling back to that question. Maybe Jean Jacques had been a desperate last attempt to save herself from spinsterhood. She was beginning to wonder if love had even been involved. How could she love someone who had never existed? He was none of the things she had believed him to be, but he was many of the things Aunt Kibble had taught her to despise.
He was a thief who preyed on women. That was the unvarnished truth. A man who cared nothing for the marriage sacrament. He was a hollow wisp wrapped in charm and possessing a gift for saying what women wanted to hear. A liar and a fraud.
“If I ran into Jean Jacques right now, I’d give him a piece of my mind that he’d never forget!” The muscles in her calves still twitched, her shoulders ached, and she was damp with perspiration. She deeply resented how she looked and felt. “I wish I’d never come here.”
“I wish you’d never come here, too,” Zoe said with a sigh.
Maybe it was the improbable circumstance of sitting on the side of a boulder-strewn mountain in Alaska. Maybe the altitude had made her giddy. Maybe switching from the heat of laboring uphill to sitting still in cold air had affected her mind. Maybe Zoe’s acerbic comment broke the spell of confiding in each other. But Zoe’s remark struck her as humorous.
“I don’t want to be here, and nobody wants me here, yet here I am.” A decidedly unladylike laugh shook her body and burst out of her like a cork under pressure. “I hate this, I truly hate it! So why on earth am I here in Alaska?”
Zoe stared at her. Then her lips twitched and a faint smile brushed her lips. “You’re here for the same reason I am. Because of that son of a bitch, Jean Jacques.”
“He is a son of a bitch, isn’t he?” She’d never said such words in her life, had hastened away in offense from men who used coarse language, had never known women who spoke such phrases until she’d met Zoe and Clara. But by heaven, it felt good to say the words herself. It felt good to let the fury and resentment finally boil out of her.
Struggling to her feet, she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted down the mountainside. “Jean Jacques Villette is a rotten son of a bitch!” There. She’d told everyone in the world what she thought of him.
Zoe burst into laughter.
