Promises Keep (The Promise Series) (44 page)

She was probably the only person that knew how much that meant to him.

“Of course I did.” He was her husband. She would never humiliate him in public.

“No ‘of course’ about it.” He kissed her eyes, her nose, her cheeks. “You could have turned away, and no one would have blamed you. A half-breed, used-up ex-marshal isn’t a prize in anyone’s book.”

“Neither is an ex-whore.”

He stopped kissing her, his breath sliding gently across her brow. Almost as gentle as the finger he slid under her chin to tip her face up. “You were never a whore.”

“Everyone else thinks so.”

“Everyone else doesn’t matter.”

“They do if you keep getting into fights over it.”

His expression turned hard, his touch stilled. “He put his hands on you, scared you. The son of a bitch deserved what he got and then some.”

“You can’t beat up everyone who sees me as a whore.”

“Watch me.” He took a step closer, pressing her back against the stable wall. His cock rose against her stomach and his breath brushed her ear. “I promised to keep you safe. It’s a promise I mean to keep.”

And she’d promised to love him forever, forsaking all others. Did she have a right to renege on that because of something she only suspected?

“Cougar?”

“Yeah?” he rubbed his cock against her belly. “Damn, Angel, you make me so hard.”

“I need to ask you something.”

He nibbled at the side of her neck, sending goose bumps chasing down her spine. “Can it wait?”

“No.”

His hand drifted down to her breast, plumping her slight curves into his palm, stroking his finger over her nipple. “You sure?”

She struggled to find her voice. “I need to know.”

He pinched her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing harder and harder until her knees gave out and she couldn’t suppress a soft whimper of pleasure.

He brushed his lips over her cheek. “Steady, Angel.”

“I can’t think when you do that,” she gasped.

“What’s there to think about?”

Everything. Nothing.
Oh God, when he had his hands on her body, nothing else seemed to matter. He made her burn, ache.

She caught his wrist in her hand, trying to pull his hand away. “Please stop.”

“Doesn’t it feel good?”

“We’re in public.”

“No one can see.”

“Someone could come around the corner any moment.” And that didn’t upset her as much as it should have. Not when he had his big thigh between hers and was pressing it up into her privates.

“The buggy will hide us.”

“Not completely.”

“No one would dare look. I’m Gut ’em McKinnely.”

She tugged his wrist again. “Please.”

He dropped his head against hers, but slid his hand to the safer territory of her back. “Damn, I want you.”

“Why?”

He pulled back and frowned. “You keep asking me that.”

She shrugged. “I just don’t understand what someone like you sees in me.”

“You talk like I’m some sort of prize.”

She turned her face into the hollow of his throat. “You have to know you’re every woman’s dream.”

His contentment hummed in his throat as she pressed a kiss there.

“I’ll settle for just being yours.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why, but I knew the minute I saw you, you were mine.”

At last, the opening she was looking for. So why was it so hard to get the question out? “At Cecile’s?”

Against her chest, she felt his muscles pull tight, his breath slow. His body took on a predatory wariness. His agreement was a flat, “Yeah.”

“When you took me out of there?”

“I made the decision before then.”

A quick glance showed his jaw was clenched and he was staring straight ahead. He didn’t like where this conversation was heading.

“Did you rape me, Cougar?”

“Jesus!”

He tried to push away, but she put her arms around his waist and held on, going with him when he stood straight.

She ignored his effort to separate himself from her. She pressed her face to his chest. “Answer me. Did you?”

He put his hands on her shoulder. “It wasn’t like that.”

Another glance showed him looking down at her, his golden eyes dark with indecision. It was such a foreign expression for him, it gave her the courage to push on.

“Then put your arms around me, hold me really, really close, and tell me how it was.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m afraid of what you’re going to tell me. I’m afraid that it will somehow change things, but I’m not afraid when you hold me, so I want you to hold me close and make this go away.”

He put his arms around her, and did as she asked. He held her so tightly, she thought her ribs would crack. “Nothing’s going to change, Mara.”

“It might.”

“Why?”

“Because once I know, you can’t pretend I’m an innocent. We’ll both know how many men I had that night, what they did to me. What I did to them.”

“Ah shit!” He sank to the bale of hay leaning against the building. She had no choice but to go with him. He pulled her sideways across his lap. He didn’t let her go. “Don’t think that way, Mara. Not ever.”

“How can I not? You almost gelded a man for touching me.”

“I nicked the guy’s balls for scaring you.”

“Please tell me.”

“It was just me, Angel.”

“Are you sure?”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“No, but you keep things from me.”

“And you’re thinking I’m keeping something from you now?” The question reverberated in his chest.

She thought about it for a second and then she looked up from his chest, straining against his hold to see his face. “I think,” she said slowly, the realization sinking in, “you would do whatever you thought you had to, to keep me from being hurt.”

“You figured that out yourself?”

He was stalling. “Please tell me, Cougar. I promise you, it can’t be worse than what I’m imagining.”

He stroked her hair and sighed. “It ever occur to you that I might be afraid of losing you?”

“You can’t lose me. I made a promise.”

“Maybe I want more than a promise keeping you with me.”

“Then you’re going to have to trust me that I can handle the truth.”

Her hair ruffled as he placed a kiss on the top of her head. “I didn’t want you to ever remember.”

“I know.” She touched the tangled strands of his hair. “Tell me, Cougar.”

“Here?”

“It’s as good a place as any.”

Safer too as he couldn’t seduce her out of focusing on the parts he thought would upset her.

“Some stuff I’m only guessing at or I heard later,” he warned as he rested his cheek on her head.

“Okay.”

“Are you going to have a problem with that?”

Her laugh was more of a choking gasp. “Cougar, all I have now are horrible, vivid, distorted glimpses of what happened, which leaves me scared and desperately filling in the blanks with my imagination.”

He stilled. Almost as if he’d taken a blow. “You’ve been thinking on this a lot?”

“Of course!”

He pulled back and tipped her chin up, studying her face. “I thought we agreed it was behind us.”

“It’s not something a woman can forget.”

“I didn’t think it would be something you’d want to remember, either.”

She shrugged, unable to look away from his dark eyes. “It’s scarier not knowing. It’s part of my life and I can’t account for it. I don’t know how depraved it was. I was.”

“Whoa, Angel.” He leaned back, his eyes widening in shock. “What makes you think you were depraved? Hell, that you could even
be
depraved?”

He wouldn’t let her turn her face away, so she focused on the tiny scar on the right corner of his upper lip as she confessed. “I know how I am with you. Why would I be different with anyone else?” She pressed her hands into her stomach, the sickening images running through her head. “Especially if I were drugged.”

His finger dropped from her chin. His hard arms came around her, pulling her into him, as if he wanted to absorb her into himself. “You think what we do together is depraved?”

“I love what we do, but what if I’m that way with everyone? Any man who crooks his finger?”

He shifted back against the wall. The bale beneath them rustled with the movement, the scent of hay rising to mingle with the scents of tobacco, sage, and of her own fear. And still he didn’t say anything.

“Are you being quiet because you’re protecting me?” Her knuckles dug into her stomach. She clenched her hands tighter, pressed harder as she asked, “Tell me the truth, Cougar. Do you know if there were other men? Was I…wild with them all?”

He took a deep breath, shifted her higher and said, “As far as I know, there wasn’t anyone but me, and you were nothing like you are now.”

She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. “What do you mean, as far as you know?”

Beneath her shoulder, his chest lifted as he shrugged. His hand stroked her hair from crown to the ends. Slowly, carefully, as if he were measuring his words by the rhythm he set with his hand.

 
“Cecile said she had a new woman upstairs. That I would be the first, and that you would be mine for the night.”

“She could have been lying.”

His hand paused at her shoulder. “I suppose.”

“But?” Lord, she wanted there to be a “but”.

“No one else in the saloon had heard of you, so unless you worked in a saloon before the Pleasure Emporium, I think it’s safe to say I was the only one. And to answer the question you haven’t asked, you were sweet, placid and biddable, but not a bit wild. However you got to Cecile’s, I’m willing to bet you were a virgin when I made love to you.”

Cougar had never missed a thing before, so it would be silly to hope he would have missed the telltale clenching of her body as he mentioned her arrival at the Pleasure Emporium. “Any reason you just stiffened up like a board?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s got to be something. Does it have to do with how you came to be in the Pleasure Emporium?”

He was too damned astute. “It’s not important.”

“I’m not taking any more chances with assuming.” He slid his hand around her side, over her arm and to her stomach. He worked his fingers under her hands until his palm pressed flat against her abdomen, a barrier to the bruising pressure she was applying. “And since we’re opening cans of worms today, how did you come to be at the Pleasure Emporium?”

There were some things a woman never told a man. This was one of them. She fought to swallow back the nausea, stiffening her stomach muscles. “It doesn’t matter.”

He eased his fingers wider over her stomach and stroked her gently. “I think it does.”

“Why were you there?”

His hand stilled on her stomach. There was a long pause before he asked, “If I answer yours, will you answer mine?”

“Maybe.”

Unbelievably, he chuckled. “Tough little thing, aren’t you?”

“I try.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Don’t try too hard. I like you just the way you are.”

“So?”

“You want me to just blurt it out?”

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

She waited while he searched for the words, knowing from the way his expression tightened, and his eyes avoided hers that he wasn’t proud of whatever he was about to say.

“Since my fiancée died, I’d been unable to…” He shifted beneath her. A quick glance up showed his lips were a hard line and his jaw clenched.

“Unable to what?” she prompted.

“I couldn’t bed a woman.” It came out an angry hiss of sound.

Her shocked gasp was totally inappropriate, as was her “You?”

“Yeah.” He pulled his hand from hers. “Me.”

She caught his hand before he could drag it away. “You loved her that much?”

He tugged his hand free. She grabbed it back, holding on when he would have stood. He stopped short of dumping her on the ground. She brought his hand to her mouth, kissing it gently. “I wasn’t making fun, I was just…shocked. I mean, you’re always so ready.”

He was ready now. She could feel him swelling against her hip.

She kissed his palm again, keeping her gaze on the ground before her, concentrating on the feel of his callused palm against her cheek as she forced herself to say, “I don’t begrudge you someone you can love. You’re a man. There probably have been a lot of women who’ve caught your interest. It would be silly for me to resent your past.”

“Bullshit.” He flipped his hand in hers and used her arm to pull her around until they were chest to chest.