Promises Keep (The Promise Series) (24 page)

Bracing her hands on the back of the chair, Mara grimaced with disgust. “I know, I come up with the wittiest retorts but the minute I open my mouth, some perverse spirit replaces them with the unvarnished truth.”

“I like it.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you were the one cursed with an honest nature.” She arched her back and rolled her shoulders.

“Probably not.” He noticed the stiff way she moved. “Come here.”

Her response was to take two steps back.

“That wasn’t a request.”

Mara’s head snapped up. The retort that leapt to her lips prodded his sense of humor. The smile he was trying to hide must have shown on his face because she bit back the retort and came to his side, obviously not willing to give him the satisfaction of a predictable response.

“Why do you have to be so provoking?” she asked.

He motioned for her to turn around and sit beside him. “Just my nature, I suspect. Scoot up here a bit.”

Mara shook her head as she complied. Cougar braced his hands on her shoulders and lightly began massaging the tight muscles. Mara groaned as Cougar went to work. He immediately lightened his touch. He ran his thumbs up the muscles on either side of her spine, keeping the pressure steady and light as he worked the knots he could feel bunched under the skin.

She practically collapsed into his hands.

“Feel good?” he asked.

“Lord, yes!” she moaned.

Cougar immediately imagined her sighing with just that amount of ecstasy while he was inside her. His body reacted predictably. He glanced down and promptly swore. Now he had a whole new problem, because if his wife got a look at his straining cock while she was sitting so close, she’d start worrying and stiffening up. And he rather enjoyed having her trusting little body under his hands.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder.

Cougar flicked the tip of her nose with his index finger. “Nope. I just moved wrong.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She scooted forward, obviously intending to get up.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Cougar countered, restraining her with steady pressure on her shoulders. Lord, she was tiny. Her shoulders were barely the width of his hands. He thought of all she’d done for him this past week, the buckets she must have carried, and marveled that she’d managed it at all. He resumed his massage. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

“I shouldn’t be letting you do this. You’re still in the sickbed.” The way she melted into his hands belied her words.

Cougar ran his finger down the delicate line of her spine, stopping just above her hips. “And you’re barely out of yours. How much help was Nidia to you anyway?”

With his hands on her body as they were, Cougar couldn’t help but notice the way Mara tensed at the mention of his housekeeper’s name.

“We had a brief conversation when I arrived. I didn’t see her again until this morning.”

“You mean she left you all alone to care for me?” It was worse than he’d thought.

“I didn’t need her help.”

More than likely, she’d just refused to accept it.

“And Clint?”

“Clint got the fever, too.”

Cougar leaned back and closed his eyes. After a moment, he released his pent-up breath on a heavy sigh but he didn’t let go of her shoulders. He had a feeling she’d flee if he did. Like she always did when she thought he was getting too close to something she didn’t want him to know. “Are you ever going to forgive me for all this?”

“You couldn’t help getting sick.”

“My plan was for you to have an easy time of it.”

“I’d be bored with easy.”

She tried to shrug out from under his hands, but all he had to do to keep her still was to add a ridiculously small amount of strength to his grip. He brushed a long curl of hair out of his way and worked a knot in the center of her shoulder blade. He’d have to see to putting a guard on the place. No matter what mean and nasty tricks he taught her, Mara just wasn’t built to defend herself against even the smallest of men.

“You plan on holding a grudge?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On what Nidia is to you,” Mara turned within the grip of his hands to stare at him, hurt and challenge making up equal parts of her glare.

He’d been talking about her having to take care of him and she was focused on his fidelity. Whatever Mara had seen or heard regarding Nidia, it hadn’t been good. “Shit.”

“I’ll thank you not to swear.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

“Succeed.”

“You thinking about giving me orders?” He might have put too much growl in his tone because instead of bristling and taking him down a peg like he’d expected, she seemed to collapse into herself, throwing up that wall of blankness he hated.

“No.”

His hands slid down her upper arms. “A shame.”

She cast him a surprised look. “You want me to fight with you?”

“If you feel the need.”

Her eyes traveled from the top of his head to his toes tenting the bedspread. “I’m new to arguing.”

And her tone implied she thought it would be suicide to argue with him.

“I can give you pointers if you need them.”

Her thanks to his offer was dry.

He touched her cheek and gave her the truth she needed. “At one time, I toyed with the idea of making Nidia my mistress.”

“Oh.” One syllable, and a sighed one at that, was all the answer she gave him.

“I said at one time, but I never followed through and I told her to leave before we married and again after our marriage.”

“She didn’t leave.”

“Obviously, and now I want to know what happened that’s affecting us.”

She tried to slide away.

Anchoring Mara to his side by capturing her wrist in his hand, Cougar ran his free one through his hair. The fact that not a tangle caught his fingers indicated how seriously Mara had taken his care. Damn! Something had to have happened, otherwise Mara wouldn’t be sitting beside him, her eyes big with hurt, barely masked by pride.

“What aren’t you telling me, Mara?”

“I saw you,” she whispered hoarsely.

Cougar’s grip on Mara’s arm tightened by degrees as his mind raced from one possibility to another. None of them good. “What did you see?”

Mara stubbornly studied the wrinkles in the sheets. Cougar curled two fingers under her chin and forced her to meet his gaze. “I’m tired, as weak as a newborn baby, and my chest feels like Old Red danced a jig on it last night. I don’t want to fight, and I don’t want you lashing out at me every chance you get because you’re nursing wounds I don’t understand. Now, tell me, what did you see?”

Mara shook her head. Her lower lip slid between her teeth, which immediately set to work. “I can’t.”

“Then show me,” Cougar insisted while gently removing her lip from her teeth’s assault.

That instruction got him a look so full of horror, Cougar figured he had one possibility ruled out. “From that reaction, I’d say it’d be safe to say you didn’t catch us kissing.”

“No,” Mara agreed. “I’d say that’s a safe enough assumption.”

“Then how about enlightening me?”

He met Mara’s stare, matching her stubborn for stubborn until she sighed in defeat. “You’re not going to give up until I tell you, are you?”

Cougar shook his head. “Not hardly. We’ve got enough to overcome without adding anymore bogey men to the pile.”

Mara shoved her hair back from her face. “Well, I’m not going to look at you while I tell you,” she stated emphatically.

“Fine,” Cougar agreed. She could recite his misdeeds while standing on her head for all he cared, just as long as she got the telling done.

Mara didn’t speak at first. She just stared at the far wall as if the striped wallpaper held the secrets of the world. Cougar woke up every morning looking at that wall. The only secret it held was a nail pop hidden in the midst of the third blue stripe left of the door.

Sliding carefully away from the edge of the bed, Cougar pulled steadily on Mara’s arm, until she was forced to lie beside him. She was little, but she made the most of what she had, locking every muscle tight. Her big brown eyes turned on him until he had to confess, “I want to be conscious through the whole story,” he admitted. “I’m ashamed to say, I couldn’t maintain that position much longer without passing out.”

“Do you know how galling I find it that even in your weakened condition, you can force me to do your bidding with just a flick of the wrist?” she asked.

“I have an idea.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Because I can
, didn’t sound right, for all that it was the truth, so he shrugged, his right shoulder handling the stress easier than the left. “I just wanted to lie down, and since you have to be just as tired as I am, if not more, I thought you could join me.”

“You could have just asked.”

Cougar’s response was a knowing look.

Mara sighed and dropped the subject. Truth be told, she was out on her feet, and she didn’t know how much longer she was going to be able to stay awake.

“I got tired of waiting for you to remember you had a wife,” she began. The softness of the pillow beckoned. Mara succumbed to the lure. Resting on her left side, her back to Cougar, she closed her eyes. His warmth crept out to surround her, his scent quick to follow.

“Dorothy pointed me in the right direction, and I headed out. When I got here the place was deserted. Or so I thought.”

Cougar stroked her arm from shoulder to elbow and back again with the back of his finger. “Remind me when I get to feeling stronger to chew you out for coming here on your own.”

Mara ignored his growl. “I heard a noise upstairs. I thought your housekeeper might be working there, but when I entered the room…”

The blush burned up from her toes.

“Yes?” he prompted.

Mara buried her face in the pillow. “You were naked. Nidia was straddling your chest and she was, she had…”

The words wouldn’t come out. Mara grabbed the pillow, seeing Nidia again, feeling the shock, the horror. And the hurt. It still hurt that he’d had Nidia here while she waited.

“Hell!” The fingers on her arm stilled, their weight increasing as he absorbed some of her tension into himself.

“There’s more,” Mara warned, her voice as tight as her grip on her pillow.

“There would be.” Cougar’s agreement rumbled out against her back, his drawl strangely flat.

“She wasn’t embarrassed or anything.”

“Nidia wouldn’t be.” Again, that deep drawl reverberated against her spine, his fingers resumed their stroking on her arm, the pressure slightly more than before, coaxing her harder against him.

Mara’s fingers writhed deeper into the pillow. She wanted him to say more, do more, anything to indicate he regretted killing off her hopes.

“She seemed to delight in having me watch you together.”

“I think I get the picture.” The rustle of the adjacent pillow and the slight tug on her hair when his head moved preceded his shift away. “I’m sorry.”

“So was Nidia,” Mara muttered, staring at the dust motes drifting through the sunbeams.

The pillowcase rustled again, and his rough “Care to explain?” blew tendrils of hair across her ear.

“Not really.” She just wanted it all to go away.

His palm curved over her shoulder. “Give it a shot, anyway.”

“Isn’t it enough that you were with another woman?”

“No.”

“You want it all.”

He slid his hand down her arm, his fingers curving around her forearm until he reached her wrist. “Always.”

He folded her arm across her stomach, his hand following so he cradled her back against his chest. His arm was a solid weight.

“I dragged her off you,” she informed him, trying to work up to resentment at the way he was shaping her body to his comfort. Except it comforted her, too.

“Somehow, I can’t see Nidia taking that calmly.”

“No,” Mara conceded. “She didn’t take that at all well.”

The bed lurched and the mattress dipped as he lunged up on his elbow. His grunt of pain punctuated his tug as he rolled her onto her back. His long black hair brushed her shoulder as he ran his eyes over her.

“Did Nidia hurt you?”

“Hardly.”

The skepticism in his golden gaze hit her on the raw.

“I am capable of defending myself.”

His hand opened on her stomach, pressing lightly as his gaze ran over her body. He obviously did not believe her.

“You should be asking what I did to her,” she grumbled as he rubbed her stomach in small, soothing circles.

He seemed content she was in no imminent danger, though he still loomed over her. “What did you do to her?”

“I cut off her hair.”

His eyes snapped to hers and his hand stilled. “You did what?”