Promises Keep (The Promise Series) (27 page)

“First off,” Clint retorted angrily, leaning around the tree, “I wouldn’t keep my whore within two hundred miles of my wife!”

Cougar tossed the blob of dirt and grass as far as he could. The wind blew his hair across his face. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I might have messed up there.” He shrugged as Clint slid around to settle beside him. “I thought I was being practical. Choosing the lesser of two evils.”

Clint opened his mouth to make another scathing retort and then slowly closed his teeth on the words. He shifted position so they were more side-to-side.

“Tell me, cous,” Clint asked thoughtfully, “how much experience have you had winning a woman to your side?”

Cougar swore and knew damned well the tips of his ears were red. “Enough.”

“Uh-huh.” Clint drew up his knee, and resting his forearm on the top, began to twirl his Stetson. “How many does that make if we discount that twit Emily?”

Wishing he had the mobility to land his cousin on his ass, Cougar growled deep in his throat before answering.

“What was that?”

“None, dammit.”

The hat lost its rhythm temporarily, before in that same conversational tone, Clint probed deeper. “Were you a virgin?”

Awkward as hell, and hating every clumsy jerk, Cougar struggled to get to his feet. “Not hardly.”

Reaching up lazily, Clint dragged him back down. “Don’t get your feathers in an uproar, man. I just want to know how much experience we’re talking here.”

For the first time in his life, Cougar regretted the single-mindedness that had rewarded him with his current level of success. If he’d just spent a little more time whoring rather than pulling an extra job, he wouldn’t be sitting here now feeling inferior for the first time in his life. Pushing his palms in an upward path over his cheeks, he dragged his fingers through the thick mass of his hair. Clint was right. If he wanted the man’s help, he had to know what he was working with. “There were a couple of widows, all of them just short-term. There wasn’t any persuading. They knew of my reputation and weren’t shy about getting a piece for themselves. And after we pulled in the bounty from that Spencer heiress…” he shrugged.

“Nothing like a dangerous reputation and money to make a man popular,” Clint agreed, his smile flashing in his dark eyes a second before his lips took it up.

“You should know,” Cougar countered wryly.

“I’ll have you know the ladies want me for my beauty and not because we got rich collecting bounties.”

“Uh-huh.” Part of that might be true, but as plenty of outlaws had discovered, Clint could turn rattlesnake mean in the blink of an eye, that lazy smile still on his face as he put a bullet they never saw coming between their eyes. All it took was threatening something he cared about. And Clint was passionate about a lot of things. Women, children, small animals. Pretty much anything he decided was defenseless. Which apparently, right now included Cougar.

Cougar sighed and finished answering the question Clint had asked. He tossed the grass across the yard. “Well, I spent more time leaving the taint of my father behind and left the romancing to others.”

And that was a damned pathetic thing for a twenty-nine year old man to be admitting about his life.

Clint flipped his hat to his free hand and thumped Cougar on the shoulder. “Don’t sound so glum. It’s fixable. Trust me, after a while, the thrill of the challenge wears off. Even the pleasure begins to dim and then it just becomes plain…” he shrugged and stared over the rolling meadow surrounding the house, “plain.”

Cougar reached over and knocked the hat from its spinning arc and twirled it himself before tossing it back to his now smiling cousin. “I thought the plan here was to develop a scheme to win over my wife, not to commiserate over your success with the weaker sex.”

“Well, let me ask you something. Does Mara know you were the one at Cecile’s?”

“No.”

“You planning on telling her?”

“Not if I can get away with it.”

“What if she remembers?”

“I’ll deal with it then.”

“And hope the remembering doesn’t come for a long time?”

“Yeah,” Cougar admitted, not liking himself much for the fact.

Clint sighed. “Can’t say that I’d do it any differently.”

“But in the meantime?”

Clint clapped his hat on his head, swung to his feet, balanced on his crutches, and reached down to give Cougar a hand up. “I would suggest you spend a whole ton of time convincing the woman she can’t live without you.”

It sounded simple enough.

Chapter Thirteen

It shouldn’t have surprised him that Mara could complicate simple, but it did. Cougar lounged in the doorway to the kitchen, and watched Mara as she attacked the wet floor with almost religious zeal. The way the overlarge dress kept affording him glimpses of intriguing white skin, shadowed dark and golden by the lamps, kept him quiet longer than he normally would have been. He smiled as his wife blew hair off of her face and tugged the shoulder of the dress up one more time. He really did have to see about getting her some new clothes, but then again, these dresses afforded him such…pleasure, he noted as Mara’s bodice gaped obligingly.

Her nipples were smooth and sleepy, pointing toward the ground. Large even in repose, he knew they could get larger. Would be getting much larger before the night was over.

Cougar scratched idly at his healing side, feeling the ridges of new scar tissue. The bandages had come off this morning, and the new skin was tight and irritated, driving him crazy as he worked. All of his nerves felt strung tight. He’d had about as much as he could stand of Mara’s keep-him-at-a-distance-routine.

“Are you drying that floor or trying to rub a hole straight through it?” he asked conversationally. She jerked up so hard, she toppled back on her heels. Her hair fell in tendrils around her flushed face. Her expression became guarded.

Pulling the shoulder of her dress back up, she scooped up her drying cloths. “What are you doing in here?”

“I came to say ‘hi’.”

“I saw you an hour ago.”

Not in any way he regarded as productive.

“So you did.”

Cougar advanced into the room, and reached down to help Mara to her feet. She was as light as a feather. “I also thought a cup of coffee sounded good.”

The arm under his hand trembled with tiny shivers. She pulled free of his grip and grabbed for one of the chairs stacked on the table. “I’ll heat you some as soon as I finish this.”

Reaching over her head, Cougar easily lifted the heavy chair she was wrestling off the table and placed it on the floor beside her. “Why don’t you take a seat and let me see to this?” he countered.

He pulled the other chairs down before heading to the coffee grinder. He could feel her eyes on him as he poured the beans into the grinder and turned the handle. Up until now, he’d been letting her keep her distance, set the rules, but that was changing. If she wasn’t coming to him, he was definitely coming to her.

He dropped twice the amount of grounds into the pot as she normally did to freshen it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her shudder and smiled. One of the benefits of his taking control back was going to be a decent cup of coffee.

“Want me to make enough for you, too?”

Mara managed a weak smile that, had she known it, looked rather sickly. “That would be nice.”

From the pitcher by the sink, Cougar poured more water into the big blue enamel pot. “It’s kind of late for washing floors, isn’t it?”

Mara sighed. She rolled her shoulders as if just recognizing her fatigue now that she was sitting still. “There was more dirt than I expected,” she admitted. “I meant to get to it this morning, but…” she let her shrug finish the sentence.

Cougar adjusted the pot on the burner, before coming over to settle in the chair opposite Mara. “You could plan every second of your day and stick with the schedule religiously, and you still wouldn’t be able to keep up.” When Mara opened her mouth to protest, Cougar shook his head. “You’ve done an excellent job taking care of it, and me. Hell, I have never been so pampered, but Mara, this house wasn’t designed for one person to maintain.”

Mara’s guarded expression dropped into mutiny. “I won’t have her here.”

Cougar leaned back in his chair, and lifted his eyebrow at her. “I wasn’t suggesting Nidia come back. Jackson’s sister is due shortly. Would it be such a crime to save the heavy work until then?”

If he’d been planning on compromise saving the day, Mara’s expression of horror would have ground it into the dust, let alone her gasped, “And have her see the place looking more like a pigsty than a home? What would she think of me?”

“She might think that being newly married, you’d ignored the housework for the more worthwhile pursuit of pleasing your husband,” he pointed out dryly.

Mara blushed and looked vaguely distressed. Cougar wondered if she’d ever get over that reaction to the thought of him as her husband.

“Do you think she’ll have heard about Cecile’s?”

Well, that put him in his place. Cougar reached across the table and caught Mara’s twisting hands in his own. They were cold to his touch, revealing more than that slight catch in her voice about how much this worried her. “Even if she has, I doubt she’ll judge.”

Cougar sighed as Mara looked more distressed than comforted. “Mara, Jackson assures me his sister is exactly like him, and trust me,” he assured wryly, “no one appreciates the value of practicality more than Jackson.”

Mara’s fingers stilled. Her gaze seemed permanently attached to the nick in the table, left of her elbow.

“I don’t want to shame you.”

Cougar tucked his finger under Mara’s chin. He forced her eyes to meet his. “How many times do I have to tell you, Angel? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

The eyes staring back at him were old in ways he couldn’t fight. “We both know the truth of that is irrelevant.” Her fingers clenched into fists. “No one cares if a man visits one of those places, but if a woman even glances in the door, she’s branded for life.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“You’re one person.”

“I’m your husband.”

Her smile was wry. “I guess if I never leave this house that will be enough.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. It was likely rumors would follow her for awhile. There weren’t that many women in the territory, and a young unattached one showing up at Doc’s days after Cecile and Aleric were killed by a new prostitute who’d since disappeared, had fueled the gossips but good. “So we won’t go to town for a bit.”

Her chin came up in that way that heated his blood and made him want to kiss her.

“I am not hiding on this ranch like a coward.”

“Then we won’t.” Pushing back his chair, Cougar grabbed a couple of cups out of the cupboard with one hand. Snagging a towel with the other, he wrapped it around the handle of the boiling coffeepot and brought it to the table.

When he finished pouring, he returned the pot to the stove. Mara nursed her cup between her hands as he took his first sip. Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes in pure bliss at the first decent taste of coffee he’d had in nearly two weeks. “Damn, that’s good,” he sighed.

Mara eyed him skeptically before taking a cautious sip. The shudder that shook her body shook the table. Shaking his head at her lack of appreciation, Cougar passed her the sugar bowl. She took the spoon, added three large chunks to her coffee, managed one tentative sip and went back to playing with the cup.

He was going to have to get her a smaller pot so she could drink what she liked. In the meantime, he had plans that needed to be set in motion.

“It’s a beautiful evening out there.”

Mara glanced at the window and then back to him. “It’s pretty cold though.”

“Nothing a heavy coat wouldn’t take care of,” Cougar countered, taking a last sip of his coffee and leaving the table.

Mara’s smile was small and a touch uncertain. “You mean to take a walk outside?”

Cougar lifted his heavy wool coat off the peg by the door. “I thought we both could. The smell of disinfectant is strong enough in here to knock a steer on its tail.”

He waited by her chair, holding the coat out. She took a small breath before getting to her feet.

“I might have overdone it,” she agreed as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. “I took one look at the dirt in here and dumped the whole bottle into the bucket.”

The way she wrinkled her nose on the end of that sentence begged a kiss, which he gave her. Right on the end of her nose. He ignored her gasp and turned to get his other coat.

When he turned back, she was fumbling with the buttons on the coat, struggling because of the sleeves, which kept falling down over her fingers. Her expression wavered between exasperation with the buttons and uncertainty as to what he was up to.

She was right to be concerned with his plans, because after tonight, he’d be damned if she’d treat him with the sexless disregard a sister gave a brother. He was her husband, soon to be her lover. That knowledge would be uppermost in her mind from here on out.