Promises Keep (The Promise Series) (47 page)

“Well, I should hope not!”

Cougar tossed some coins on the table and pulled back Mara’s chair. Her mind still turning over the concept of an orgy, Mara followed him meekly out the door.

“All those people naked together,” she whispered as she stepped into the warm sunshine. “How unsanitary!”

Chapter Twenty-Three

It should have been easy from there on out, but it wasn’t. Somehow, while that day in town had brought Cougar and Mara closer, it also gave birth to dissatisfaction. A nagging discontent that drove Mara mad with the need to test the limits of Cougar’s control.

It was as if the day in town has shifted her knowledge of who she was and what she could do. She was filled with a restless energy to test what she now knew about herself. Unfortunately, Cougar was still determined to keep her wrapped in cotton wool.

Hence, the resumption of the argument they’d been having for the last three mornings since she’d heard Anna Dickinson speak.

“What do you mean, no?” Mara asked, dropping onto the bed, openly ogling the play of muscle on his body as he stood naked before the mirror shaving.

“Just what it sounded like,” Cougar replied, lifting his chin to run the straight razor down his throat. Dipping the razor in the bowl of water on the commode, he rinsed off the soap.

Mara grabbed a hold of the canopy post and met Cougar’s gaze in the mirror. “You’re being ridiculous, high-handed and unreasonable.”

The razor halted its downward path. “It is not my fault you woke up this morning with a bee in your bonnet about nothing.”

“Nothing?” Mara growled, one knee coming up to rest on the bed. “You call my rights as a human being nothing?”

“This has nothing to do with rights,” Cougar countered, wiping the last of the shaving foam off his face. “It does have everything to do with you attempting to become boss of this outfit.”

“That’s a lot of bull and you know it.”

“Is it?”

“Damned straight it is.”

“You looking for punishment?” he asked, reminding her he’d laid down the law about swearing.

She squeezed her thighs together and resisted the urge to melt. “You make up these rules just so you have a reason to punish me.”

“And you break them for the same reason.”

He had her there, but today was not one of those days.

“I’m not going to let you weasel out of this discussion so easily.”

“We’re not having a discussion,” Cougar said with a condescending patience that set Mara’s teeth on edge. “Because there’s nothing to discuss.”

“We are most certainly going to discuss why you refuse to sign part of this property over to me.”

Cougar set the towel on the washstand. “First off, it would just be on paper and not proof of anything. It probably wouldn’t even be legal.”

Mara shrugged unconcernedly. “Let’s pretend that it is.” She really didn’t care whether this transaction was legal or not. It was the principle of the thing.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing that I’ve ever heard.” Cougar turned to face her. “What would be the point of this whole charade if it wasn’t even legal?”

“It would prove to me that you respect me as well as love me.”

Cougar blinked twice before reaching for his blue shirt off the bed. “I never told you I love you.”

Mara brushed his argument aside. “You love me so much you can’t see straight.”

He slid his arm into the sleeve. “I do?”

“You do, but I’m not sure you respect me.”

He put his arm in the other sleeve. “You aren’t?”

“No. And that’s a problem.”

“It is?”

“Yes,” Mara tossed her hair over her shoulder. “For a man who loves me, you’re proving remarkably reluctant to grant me my rights.”

“For a woman who loves me,” Cougar countered, a hard edge sharpening his drawl. “You are proving remarkably reluctant to trust me.”

“What makes you think I love you?”

“Probably the same thing that tells you I love you.” He shoved the button through the buttonhole on his shirt. It came off in his hand. “Gut instinct.”

As romantic moments, this one was not going down in the annals of history. “Of course I trust you,” she dismissed that absurdity with a wave of her hand. “I wouldn’t be here in your bedroom if I didn’t.”

“You don’t trust me to protect you,” Cougar corrected, tossing the button into the corner of the room and reaching for his work pants.

“Maybe I don’t want to be protected,” Mara pointed out carefully as she retrieved the button. As she came back toward Cougar, she met his gaze squarely. “Maybe I’d like to run my own life.”

Cougar stepped into his pants, ignoring the button his wife held outstretched. “We’re husband and wife,” he snapped. “There is no ‘own life’ between you and I.”

Mara dropped the button into her pocket and took a deep breath and came in from another side of the same argument. “When we were speaking of the Clemence girls, you were all for them having their property separate.”

Cougar ran his hand through his hair. “That’s because their husbands are the biggest bunch of no-accounts ever to hit the territory.”

Mara threw up her hands. “Why can’t you grant the same rights to me?”

“Because you are in no danger from me,” Cougar growled. “Because I’ll always protect you. I would never take from you.”

“You already have,” Mara cried, taking a step closer, her hands clenched at her side. “Just by marrying me, you’ve taken everything I have.”

“I haven’t taken a damned thing from you,” Cougar snapped. “I don’t even know why we’re having this discussion. I’ve given you everything I have.”

“No, you haven’t,” Mara countered, regaining control. “I live here on your whim. If you decided to throw me out, I’d have nowhere to go.”

Cougar grabbed Mara’s arm. “I’ll never let you go.”

“And legally, I never could go, just by your saying that.”

Cougar dropped Mara’s arm as if the touch scalded his fingers. “You know I’d never hurt you.”

“You’re hurting me now.”

Cougar’s eyes widened at the accusation.

“You’re denying me a separate existence,” Mara continued.

“You’re my wife!”

“It doesn’t have to go hand in hand that wife means slave.”

Cougar’s head snapped back so fast, she might have slapped him. “I have never treated you with anything less than respect.”

“Don’t you understand, as it is now, I might as well be a slave? Just the fact that I have to stand here begging, begging you to grant me what should automatically be mine, proves it.”

“And just what would you do with your property if I gave it to you?”

Mara felt hope blossom. “I’d just keep it and cherish the knowledge that you thought enough of me to respect me.”

“Well, Angel,” Cougar replied, flicking the tip of her nose with the tip of his finger as he headed for the door. “You’re just going to have to trust in this man you love, because I’m not drawing up any such document.”

And just like that, he left the room.

A cock crowed the spreading dawn. The first tendrils of morning light touched Mara’s feet as she watched her husband walk out of their bedroom. Mara’s foot began to tap rapidly on the wooden floor. Apparently, Cougar didn’t realize the depth of her determination. Her husband was a good man. Stubborn, opinionated, yes, but he was a good man. With the right arguments, she was sure she could convince him to her point of view. She just had to work on her technique.

Mara pulled out all the stops over the next week, trying to get her husband to see her point of view. She’d seduced him, cried on him, ranted at him, and finally retreated into a separate bedroom. The first had been hampered by Jackson’s sister Lorie’s arrival, but none of it worked. Her husband met every maneuver with cold silence and a pointed avoidance of the subject.

Except for the separate bedrooms, Mara remembered, pulling her chemise away from her chafed breasts as she stuffed another of her new dresses into a trunk. He’d been quite diligent about pointing out her error there. Punishing her until she’d screamed for satisfaction, granting it only when he’d been good and ready. The pretty blonde’s blushes after that first morning had been hard to endure.

“So you’re really going to do it?” Lorie asked.

Mara turned to see Lorie in the doorway, a concerned frown on her face.

Mara shrugged. “I don’t seem to have much choice.”

Lorie bit her lip before blurting out, “I think he’s afraid you’ll leave him if he gives you what you want.”

“I finally realized that yesterday,” Mara admitted. “But that just makes me more determined to do this.”

“I don’t understand you.”

Mara’s smile tinged lightly with bitterness. “That’s just what Cougar said. Why can’t anyone understand that I want to be seen as a human being that counts?”

“You count with Cougar. That man loves you so much that he’d die for you.”

“But,” Mara pointed out, “he doesn’t respect me, otherwise, he’d never have ordered Jackson to watch to make sure I don’t leave the ranch.”

Lorie bit her lip. “You figured that out?”

Mara laughed as she fished through the drawer for her stockings. “It didn’t take a genius. Jackson has been trailing me around with that hangdog look plastered to his face for three days now.”

“He’s not real happy with his present duties,” Lorie admitted.

“I am,” Mara stated surprisingly, snapping the lid closed on her trunk. “Grab the other end of this. Every time I hear him behind me, it just reinforces my convictions. If I want to leave, no one, but no one should have the court-given right to restrain me. Least of all the man who claims to love me.”

“I know you’re right about that,” Lorie agreed, grunting as they maneuvered the heavy trunk out into the upstairs hall. “But I still wish you and Cougar could come to an understanding.”

“I’m working on it,” Mara muttered as they half slid, half lifted the trunk down the stairs.

“How are you intending to get to town?”

“By wagon.”

Lorie folded her hands in her skirt. “You realize Cougar left orders that you were not to be allowed to leave?”

Mara smiled complacently as she tugged on her gloves. “I also know he’d tear into little pieces the first man to lay a hand on me.”

The humor of the situation began to strike Lorie. “So you intend…”

“To walk out there and hitch up the team.”

“And calmly drive them out of here,” the blonde-haired girl finished on a laugh. “And by the time they finish drawing lots as to who’s going to have the misfortune of telling Cougar that his wife’s flown the coop—”

“I should be safely in town, tucked under Millicent’s militant wing.”

Lorie’s brows rose. “That’s your strategy, huh?”

“Got a better one?”

“Nope.” Lorie shook her head, her curls swaying around her heart-shaped face. “With Millicent to run interference for you, by the time Cougar gets to see you, he’ll be well primed to listen.”

“And damned grateful, I hope.”

Lorie sat down on the trunk, laughter shaking her sides. “I imagine that you could screech at him by then, and he’d regard it as music to his ears.”

“Millicent can be a bit harsh,” Mara agreed.

“To put it mildly, and since this is a Suffragette issue, all three hundred pounds of her will be squarely on your side.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“Do me one more favor?” Mara asked.

“What?”

“Mention to Cougar I’m having dinner with the Reverend Swanson.”

* * * * *

“Where did he go?” Mara asked Millicent who came upstairs immediately after slamming the door in Cougar’s face.

“Where all men go when faced with a problem,” Millicent muttered, dropping the curtain back over the window.

Mara dropped onto the bed, all her excitement and apprehension exiting her body in a rush of disappointment. “The saloon.”

“Yup,” Millicent agreed before issuing one of her patented snorts that meant a thousand and one things depending on the inflection. “And by the look of it, he’s mad enough to spend the night wallowing in a bottle.”

“Well, hell.” Mara glanced down at the scuffed tip of her shoe. “You’d think after three days, he’d be lonely enough to try a little harder.”

“Like you are.” Millicent patted the lace curtain back over the window.

“Like me.”

“Do you intend to sit around here like a goose fit for stuffing, letting him call the shots, or do you intend to keep control?”

Mara pushed a stubborn lock of hair back into her braid. “Well, I can’t quite see marching into the saloon and demanding he talk to me. Besides ruining my reputation, I’m sure it would ruin my stand.”

“It would that,” Millicent agreed. “Our best strategy would be to get his ornery carcass out of that all male domain.”