Keegan's Lady (40 page)

"Where will you be this morning?" she asked weakly.

"Where do you want me to be?"

"Long gone."

His broad shoulders shook with laughter. "Damn. I was hoping you might ask me to wash your back."

"Don't you have a back scrubber?"

He held up a brown palm. "See all those calluses? They work great."

Her heart skittering at the thought, Caitlin turned back to the stove and began dishing herself some eggs. She stopped after a moment, staring at the gigantic portion she'd plopped on the plate.

"Nervous?" he asked softly.

She sniffed and slid some of the eggs back into the skillet. "Should I be?"

He gave her neck another nuzzle, then left the kitchen without answering. A second later, she heard the front door open and close. She finished dishing up her breakfast and took her plate to the table. She was just sitting down when she heard the door open again. She glanced up to see Ace reenter the house carrying a huge galvanized bathtub. He winked at her over the rim as he made his way toward the kitchen.

"It ain't Saturday," Esa said in a complaining voice. "Don't tell me we all gotta take baths again."

"Only Caitlin," Ace called as he plunked the tub down on the floor in plain view of everyone in the adjoining room. "I promised her you boys would all make yourselves scarce until lunch."

David leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, "Be sure to wash your ears good, Caitlin. Ace always checks."

"Fingernails, too," Joseph said with a grin.

Caitlin managed a strained smile.

***

Before stripping down to immerse herself in the tub of piping-hot water, Caitlin locked all the doors—an effort in futility if Ace had keys, which she felt certain he must—and drew shut the front window curtains, which proved to be crookedly cut strips of old sheeting pinned haphazardly over a wooden dowel. The unhemmed panels served the purpose of protecting her privacy, nonetheless, which was more than she could say for the kitchen window, which the men had left bare.

She undressed with the harried swiftness of an actress peeling off a costume backstage between acts. Into the tub she went, the thought never far from her mind that unseen eyes might be watching her. At every little noise, she jumped with a start. What if Ace walked in?

Just the thought of being caught naked and defenseless in the tub set her heart to thudding. Quickly dunking herself, Caitlin set to work scrubbing her hair, making short work of the job for fear the door might bang open at any moment. So, he thought his calloused palm would make an ideal back scrubber, did he? Not on her life.

Wincing when her fingertips accidentally connected with the gash at her temple, Caitlin recalled her ungainly exit through the back door the other night. Gingerly, she touched the scrape on her shoulder, pleased to feel that the sores there were healing over quite nicely. The deeper ones on her hip and back were still a little tender, but not uncomfortably so. Ace's insistence that the abrasions be disinfected had saved her from getting any inflammation.

A slight frown pleated Caitlin's brow. What with all her injuries, the bruise on her cheek notwithstanding, it was no wonder Ace wasn't sneaking in here to catch her in her bath. In fact, now that she thought about it, that was probably why he hadn't yet insisted she submit to him in the marriage bed. He was squeamish. He'd admitted as much himself. If blood dampened his ardor, scabs and bruises undoubtedly did as well.

Suddenly Caitlin didn't feel quite so pleased that all her injuries were healing quickly. In her present circumstances, the unsightly sores might be all that was saving her.

Despite the steaming hot water that lapped over her skin, Caitlin shivered. Last night, Ace had completely surprised her by doing nothing, but would he be so kind again tonight?

Like poisonous spiders scrambling from a dark corner, awful memories assailed her, just as they had last night. Propping an elbow on the edge of the tub, Caitlin pressed a wet hand over her face and sobbed. She would never forget that night. Never, not as long as she lived, liven more frightening, she might endure worse treatment at Ace Keegan's hands. He was a far larger man than her rapist had been, and much stronger as well.

She remembered all the times he had touched her, the latent strength in his hands. He could easily hold both her wrists in one of those hands, leaving the other free to take liberties. Just that quickly, and she could be pinned beneath him, as defenseless as a child.

Suddenly the constant tension she'd been under the last two days seemed overwhelming. Another sob tore up her throat. She wouldn't trust him, she promised herself. All his niceness had to be an act. Sooner or later, his true colors would start to show.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Determined to follow through on the promise to herself that she would never trust Ace, Caitlin allowed nothing he did to alter her low opinion of him. When night after night passed without his forcing her to submit to him in the marriage bed, she told herself he was only waiting to spring his trap. Once he realized his ploys to gain her favor would never work, he'd turn on her just as she'd expected him to from the very beginning.

When Lucky had survived several days in the Keegan household without sustaining a serious injury, Caitlin convinced herself the cat simply hadn't done anything awful enough yet to get anyone riled. Sooner or later, poor Lucky would make one of the men explode, and then it would be left to her to protect her pet from serious, if not fatal, harm.

In Caitlin's mind, the passing days became a blur, one giving way to another, and then another, until a week had elapsed. Deep down, in a place she didn't want to explore and refused to acknowledge, she began to develop a bone-shaking fear, not that she or Lucky might come to a disastrous end at Ace Keegan's hands, but that they wouldn't.

Ace loved to laugh, deep, rich, soul-warming laughter. Sometimes when he wrapped his strong arms around her in a bear hug and refused to let go, she felt as if all the wishes she'd once made as a frightened little girl were finally coming true. A big strong man who would step lot ward from the crowd and fight for her. I'd like to pay him a social call. Introduce his tonsils to his asshole. Make him wish his mother had been a nun. Someone who would buy sugar once in a while for candy. A tub full chocolate for Caitlin. He hadn't brought her a whole tub full, of course, but he had given her a huge box filled with layers of dipped chocolate candy. And there was always plenty of sugar in the house for any sweet she led to make.

I wish I may, I wish I might.

He seemed to find the strangest things funny. One morning, when he went to find his Stetson, it was to discover that Lucky had used the inverted hat for a potty box. When he strode from the bedroom to inform Caitlin of her cat's latest shenanigan, she fully expected him to fly into a rage. Instead, he said, "Well, at least now Joseph won't be exaggerating when he calls me a shit head." With that, he burst into uproarious laughter that didn't cease until he was holding his sides and tears were streaming down his cheeks. Luckily, he had a spare the hat.

Under such circumstances, it wasn't easy for Caitlin to cling to her old convictions. Piece by piece, Ace was shipping away at her fear of him. Day by day, she became less uneasy in his presence. The change ate at her. Terrified her. If he didn't stop this infernal make-believe soon, she might find herself doing something truly stupid—like falling in love with him. In doing so, she would be thumbing her nose at every lesson life had ever taught her.

Only a fool turned her back on reality and invested her heart in fairy tales. Heroes were few and far between. She'd learned that as a little girl, and unless she'd missed some earth-shaking event, human nature hadn't changed all that much since then. Most men didn't charge into women's lives on glistening black steeds to rescue them. They did use force of arm to get what they wanted, and then used their authority as males to keep it. Women accepted what they got dished out to them.

If she allowed Ace Keegan to convince her that there were such things as heroes and miracles and magic, then she deserved any heartache he slung at her.

Oh, no . . . Not her. She was too smart for that. Never her.

After Caitlin had been there a week, construction on the house resumed. "Finish work," Ace called it. Caitlin soon began to think of it as "cussed work," for it seemed to her that Ace and his brothers spent more time cussing than anything else. Not a man among them was very adept with hammer and nails, and they were even less impressive with a saw.

Since Caitlin had come to accept the fact that she was doomed to remain at the Paradise and would consequently have to live with her husband and his brothers failures, she did the only thing a woman could do under the circumstances; she decided to help.

One afternoon, while looking over Ace's shoulder as he tried to construct a vanity table for the water closet, Caitlin said, "That isn't how you cut a forty-five degree angle."

Four pairs of eyes turned on her, none of them friendly. Around nails he held clenched between his teeth, Ace said, "Oh, really? Pray, tell me how you cut one."

"Well, a miter would help."

Joseph, who was kneeling in the opposite corner making hash of a length of mopboard, tossed down his handsaw. "If a miter is a little person who stands around with her thumb up her nose, telling everyone else what they're doing wrong, we already have one."

Sensing that none of the men were in the best of moods, Caitlin made ready to retreat, but Ace interjected, "Oh, no, you don't. You opened the can of worms. What the hell is a miter?"

Caitlin inched toward the door, the smell of sawdust stinging her nostrils. "It's, um, nothing that important. I didn't mean to criticize your work." She glanced around at the horrific mess. "You're doing—a wonderful job here. Truly."

"Caitlin . . ." Ace's voice held a note of warning.

"We're not idiots. We know how things are supposed to fit together. We just can't seem to—" He threw down his hammer. "What the hell is a miter?"

She wrung her hands. "Well, I suppose I could make you one. It's a gadget you use for cutting. It has guides for your boards and grooves in which to make your cuts. It simplifies angular sawing tremendously."

"I'll be damned," David said. "I knew there had to be an easy way to make these cuts. No wonder we're botching everything."

From then on, Caitlin became a member of the work crew. Aside from the occasional outburst of profanity when one of the men pulverized a thumb with a hammer, she rather enjoyed the experience. With her assistance, the water closet was completed in record time, the only snag being that after Ace installed the inside plumbing from the attic to the water closet, water refused to flow through the pipes.