He’d said he didn’t want Richard or Heath leaving camp again to look for gold, so Richard had volunteered to cook dinner. Mikhail would normally be surprised, but the quietness on the hike had made it clear that Dr. Wetherby and Dr. Ottingford were quite put out with Richard and Heath.
Perhaps Richard making them dinner and proving he knew a thing or two about surviving in the mountains would help foster a bit of goodwill, but Mikhail wasn’t holding his breath.
Nor did he care. He might be getting paid to make sure everyone on the team reached Sitka, but after last night, it seemed like they’d all be better off if Richard decided to head back to Sitka on his own.
None of that explained where Bryony had gotten off to, though. Mikhail looked around the campsite once more. There was a creek just over the hill where they could get water and wash dishes. Had she gone there? She seemed to like sitting by creeks, but she typically waited until after dinner, when the food was put away and the dishes were cleaned, before she started journaling.
Frowning, Mikhail started toward the creek. Sure enough, boot prints too small to belong to a man indented the muddy soil. He followed them over the crest of a gentle hill and toward the soft sound of water until he spotted a flash of familiar red hair.
She was sitting on a fallen log, her back to him, her head tilted slightly downward. He expected to find her writing in her journal, cataloging the trail they’d taken that day, but the thick book was shut, resting on the log beside her while she stared into the swirling water.
She looked his direction as he approached, her eyes a dull, gloomy hazel. “Were you going to tell me?”
He frowned. “Tell you what?”
“About Sadzi and Deniki.” She whirled a hand in the air. “Richard’s first marriage. All of it.”
He sat on the log beside her. Once again, he couldn’t claim to understand everything she was feeling. He only knew it must hurt. His older brother Alexei had been devastated after his fiancée left him, and there hadn’t been a prior marriage or secret child to contend with. “If I needed to. But you had already made up your mind about marrying Richard, and the rest didn’t seem like my story to tell, at least not at first.”
“Is that why you discouraged me from marrying him?”
“Yes. That’s certainly a big part of it.”
She pressed her lips together, staring back at the creek meandering its way around mossy boulders. “If I’d been set on marrying him, would you have told me then?”
He drew in a breath, but the thick, damp air did little to relieve the ache in his chest. “Yes. Marriage is forever, and everyone should enter it being fully informed—especially women. They have far fewer resources at their disposal if something goes wrong.”
“I’ve known Richard my whole life, but I never would have imagined...” Her voice choked. “That is, how could he...” She pressed her eyes shut. “He has two mistresses back in Washington, DC, and a third with a little girl that he cast off when he learned she was pregnant.”
“So I’ve heard.” But again, it hadn’t seemed like it was his place to get involved. “I’m surprised you even know about them.”
“I wouldn’t, except that Richard and Heath are the closest of friends, and I overheard them talking one day in the library. Heath has a woman he visits, but she’s not his mistress, and Richard was offering to share one of his...” She buried her head in her hands, then let out a soft groan. “Oh, what am I saying? I’m sure you don’t want to hear this, and I certainly shouldn’t be talking about it. Heath would be mortified.”
He was tempted to tell her it was all right. After all, that seemed like the polite thing to say. The problem was, nothing was right about the situation. Not the mistresses or a hidden child, and certainly not the woman Richard had married and then left without so much as a good-bye, knowing she was pregnant. So he reached out and draped an arm over her shoulder instead.
He half expected her to shift away. He had no business touching her this way. But she leaned into him, her body softening against his side, almost as though she’d been waiting for this very thing.
He tightened his arm around her, the weight of her body pressing through his fur parka and making him once again wish that it was summer and they were on the beach in Sitka. That he knew how Bryony looked in a fitted dress that showed off a bit of her womanly shape. Her red hair would hang long and free, cascading down her back in shiny, untangled waves, catching the sunlight when she laughed or looked up at him with those bright hazel eyes. She’d turn to him with a carefree smile, the kind he hadn’t yet seen on her face, but that he could picture all too easily. And then they’d...
What?
Just what was he thinking? There was no version of his life where he and Bryony shared a picnic on the beach in Sitka in July.
There wasn’t even a version of his life where he was in Sitka during the summer. The expeditions he guided left in April or May every year. Any later, and he wouldn’t be able to get the team home before winter.
And there certainly wasn’t a version of Bryony’s life where she was in Sitka for the summer. Since she wasn’t marrying Richard, maybe she’d end up accompanying her father on his trip to Yosemite next summer after all, and who knew where she’d be the summer after that, or if she’d go to college and find some type of study program to occupy her.
She shifted and looked up at him, her head still resting against his shoulder. “Tell me more about your family.”
“My family?”
“Yes, you know all about mine, but I know next to nothing about yours. And while part of me could believe that you were carved from the mountains themselves, I know you have two sisters.”
Mikhail chuckled. “I wasn’t carved from the mountains. I come from Russian stock. My family’s been living in Sitka for almost a hundred years.”
“You’re Russian?” Their eyes met over the fur of his parka. “But you have an English surname.”
“My great-grandfather was accused of murder in Maine in the late 1700s and fled to Russian America. Then he met my great-grandmother and decided not to leave Sitka. He came from a family of shipbuilders, so he started a shipbuilding company in Sitka. Then his son—since he had ships at his disposal—started the Sitka Trading Company. And that brings us to where we are now, four generations later, with both a shipbuilding company and a trading company in the family.”
