“No, he shouldn’t have.” Mercer tightened his arm around his brother. “Je suis assez achale!”
“I don’t care that you’re angry,” Pryor said through gritted teeth. “I did what was needed.”
“So, you’re going to be okay?” Elita asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
His smile, crooked from exhaustion, made her take another step toward them. She needed to touch Pryor and see that he was okay for herself. Feel his heart beating under her palm.
“I’ll be okay,” he said softly. “But you should leave.”
She shook her head, took a deep breath and made sure all three were looking at her. “I’m going nowhere until we’ve talked. So you guys just better go ahead and accept that.”
“He needs his bed,” Wyatt said. “Why don’t you call him later?”
“No, no calls.” Pryor suddenly wouldn’t look at her. “It’s better that way.”
He slurred the last couple of words and she didn’t miss the way Wyatt’s arm tightened around his brother.
“Oh no, you don’t.” She moved a step closer to them, all trepidation suddenly gone. “You are not going to kick me out of here right now. Not until I know you’re okay because that absolute…hell you went through last night was my fault. I’m staying, at least until you can walk around here on your own.”
Elita didn’t miss the look Wyatt and Mercer gave each other as she walked to Pryor and shouldered her way under Mercer’s arm and wrapped her own around Pryor. “I’ll take care of him.” She pointed at Mercer. “You, asshole, can just stay away from me.”
“We were going to get him to his bed.” Wyatt hadn’t let go on the other side.
“He’ll sleep better with a shower,” she insisted. “You can help me get him up the stairs to the shower we’ve been using.” She put plenty of emphasis on the we in that sentence to show them she was familiar with the upstairs and was more welcome than they realized.
“We?” Wyatt shook his head, chuckling. “Oh boy, Pryor. We’ve only been gone days.”
“S’okay,” Pryor slurred. “I can get up there myself.” He slowly nodded his head toward Elita. “With her.” He met her gaze, his still so sad it was ripping her heart to shreds. “Just today, you understand?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, lying through her teeth. Just today. Right. “You’ll let me help you?”
Mercer came around and held Pryor’s chin, ducking to look into his face. “Do you know what you’re saying right now?”
Pryor pulled his chin out of his brother’s hand, frowning at him. “Stop that. And yeah, I do.”
Mercer stepped back, held up his hands in surrender. “Okay then. He’s heavy, Elita. Why don’t you let me help?”
“I’m good with Wyatt’s help,” Elita said, gripping Pryor tighter to her.
“He’ll be okay to sleep in his bed.” Wyatt started moving toward the hall. “We’re used to washing up after our er, our—”
“Your nights being punished in the swamp?” she asked.
He stopped and Pryor released a muffled growl. “You really did see us.”
“I really did and I don’t know what kind of wicked bad thing your ancestors must have done to bring on this sort of punishment but it’s wrong. So wrong it makes me furious. But none of this is going to chase me off. Not right now.”
“But Elita, I should tell you—”
She cut Wyatt off. “Let me just help get him clean right now and into bed. We can hash all the details about your pact later.”
“Damn, buddy,” Mercer muttered from behind them. “Spilled a lot of secrets in the last few days.”
“She’s worth it.” Pryor’s words were spoken so low, she barely heard them.
She hugged him close. “Come on, let’s get you clean.”
She let Wyatt and Mercer help get Pryor up the stairs.
“Wait, that bathroom we’ve been using only has a shower stall. Is there a bathtub upstairs because I’m not sure I can hold him up in a shower.”
“I’ll hold him up,” Mercer said.
She shook her head as Mercer came around in front of her. “Nope. I want to be in there alone with him.”
“You sure are bossy for such a small thing.” His expression softened.
Elita caught her breath—the man was devastatingly handsome when he wasn’t scowling. And small? She’d never considered herself particularly small, but then compared to him, she was. Mercer stood a half a foot taller than his brothers. His hand was the size of her face.
Wyatt offered up his bathroom, muttering about fixing the tile in Pryor’s the whole time. She barely paid attention, too worried about why Pryor was barely putting up a fight over any of this. He walked up the stairs and into the bathroom, leaning on Wyatt more than her. She shooed the brothers out of the room once they settled Pryor on the closed toilet seat.
Before she shut the door, she heard Mercer murmur to Wyatt, “Il est amouraché d’elle.”
She knew exactly what that one meant. He is in love with her. Pryor’s brother believed he loved her. Elita shut the door, locked it and came back to bend over and cup his cheeks with her palms. “I’m going to ask you something very important here and I don’t want you to lie or fudge the truth in any way, okay?”
His exhausted grin tugged at her heart. “After the way you just roped my brothers into following your demands, I think fudging anything right now could be dangerous.”
“You would have died if your brothers hadn’t showed up, right?”
That grin disappeared. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“Oh God, Pryor, why?” She sank to her knees on the black bath rug, not caring that her hands were getting covered with the mud caked on his jeans.
“That stupid curse was gonna kill you.” His voice rasped and he swallowed and winced. She guessed his throat was probably sore from all the screaming he’d done.
Damn. Those screams. Her heart felt shredded as she thought about Wyatt’s voice. It must be from screams and when she thought of how young they’d been when their father died? These poor, poor men. She stood and ran her hands over his shoulders, his chest, then leaned over to place her ear over his heart. It beat reassuringly against her cheek.
“I’m okay, cher,” he said softly, cupping her head to him.
She leaned back. “And what makes me more important than you, huh? You can help so many people and what can I do? I can cook. There are a lot of us out there who can do that. I don’t know anyone else who can break hexes.”
He didn’t answer, just closed his eyes.
She stood back up and reached for the bottom of his T-shirt.
He let her help him undress and then he stood and stepped into the tub. “I don’t want to sit down until I get the most of this dirt off and down the drain.”
“You guys need to remodel the bathrooms with taller shower heads.” She smiled and took the removable one out of its holder. “I’ll get the dirt off you.”
“I wish I was more up to enjoying this,” he muttered as he turned on the water and adjusted the temperature once the heat kicked in.
“I promise to bathe you again when you can, okay?” To keep from torturing him, she hurriedly aimed the warm water at all the places mud had soaked through or under his clothes. “Your hair is nothing but mud. Can you kneel and bend over so I can get it out?”
He did and she hurriedly shampooed his hair.
“Elita, you can’t come back. There are things I haven’t told you yet.”
“We’re not going to get into any of that now. I know you haven’t known me all that long, but you’ll learn that I have my moments of stubborn as hell.”
His tired snort brushed over the back of her neck as she bent to soap his legs. “I picked up on that pretty fast.”
“I like you. No, that’s not even true. I’m pretty sure I more than like you already and I’m also pretty sure that can and will turn into something pretty damned special if we let it.”
He open
ed his mouth, probably to protest again.
But she just put her hand over his mouth and shook her head. “Let me finish this and get you into bed.”
He nodded slowly and closed his eyes.
Once he was clean, she turned off the water. “Are you always this tired after those nights out there?”
“Wyatt and Mercer will sleep most of the day too.”
“They didn’t seem as bad off.”
He looked up at her, blinked water out of his eyes, then stood slowly. “I was the one paying, but once they came out, they absorbed some of the backlash.”
“That’s what it is? Paying? Paying for what—for helping people?”
“For using magic. And before you ask, we have no idea why. None. We’re compelled to help people and then when we do, we have to give a payback in pain.”
She handed him a towel, watched as he rubbed it over his body. “I hate to say this, but that looked like more than pain. That looked like—” She couldn’t say how it had looked.
“We look dead.”
“I thought you didn’t remember what happens during the night.”
“We filmed it once.” He shuddered. “I hate that you saw me like that. Saw my…face like that.”
“You’re right—that’s exactly what it looked like. Dead, but standing out there in the water. Why do you go into the water? I don’t understand.”
“Because we will die for sure if we don’t. Our uncles died because they performed a hex removal away from this part of the swamp. Away from the entire swamp from what I understand.”
Someone knocked on the door and Elita scowled at the interruption. She turned and snatched open the door.
Wyatt lifted his eyebrows at her expression, glanced over her shoulder—obviously checking on his brother—before bringing his amused gaze back to hers. He held something out to her. “He likes to sleep in these.”
She resisted the urge to tell him Pryor preferred sleeping nude because for all she knew that wasn’t true. They’d spent one full night in bed together and part of a day. What did she really know about this man?
Other than that she was head over heels in love with him already—even if she didn’t just admit that fully out loud to him.
She thanked Wyatt for the pants and handed them to Pryor, who was laughing softly behind her as she shut the door. “They don’t know how to take you. You should have run screaming from the house after what you saw last night. Any woman I’ve ever met would have been long gone by now.”
“Then you’ve been meeting the wrong kind of women. Your brothers too.” She turned back to the door. “Come on. You need to sleep and I could tell Wyatt did too. We’ll get out of his way.”
“He’s right. You are kind of bossy.”
She stopped and turned to him. “Right now, I don’t know what I am. All I know is that my curse is gone. Completely gone. What you did for me yesterday was incredible and I’m so thankful, but I’m also royally pissed off that you’d put yourself in danger like that. I’m surprised your brothers aren’t chasing me out of this house for that reason too. They love you.” She thought of the way they’d held on to him in that swamp, the way they’d tried to take away some of his pain. “A lot. They should hate me for that lime bath.”
“Why? You weren’t even awake when I did it. You couldn’t have stopped me. They know that. I explained it to them.” He swayed.
“Shit. Come on.” She held out her hand and felt something inside her—that tight knot of fear—loosen when he felt warm and alive against her skin. She almost had run last night because those skeletal faces were the most terrifying thing she’d ever seen. But the last thing she wanted to be was a wimp. And the last thing she wanted to do was leave this man. At this point, it felt like maybe this was a forever sort of thing they had going on between them. Fast or not, it felt solid and strong and maybe his brothers could see it. It certainly felt like it would be visible from the stars.
Wyatt was slumped on the floor, his back to the wall in the hallway. She waited for him to get up and go into his room before she shut Pryor’s bedroom door. For some reason, she felt a little protective toward his brothers too. Well, maybe Wyatt. She thought of him standing there, taking on his brother’s pain.
Mercer had too.
Sighing, she leaned her forehead on the back of Pryor’s door a moment before turning toward him. He was crawling under the red comforter they’d left in a heap on the middle of the bed, cursing when the sheets underneath tangled around his legs. She walked over and helped straighten them up over him.
“Since I obviously can’t talk you out of leaving yet, come here.” He held out his hand to her and she crawled under the covers with him.
Pryor tucked her close to his body, wrapped one arm under her neck and held her close around her back with the other. He sighed into her hair. “You feel so good against me.”
“You do too.” She held him just as tightly back. Warm skin, beating heart. He was okay. He was alive. His face was again his own. She finally let herself relax.
“You’ll still be here when I wake up, right? Because we have to talk more.”
“I have no plans to leave this house today.” In fact, after being up all night, all she wanted was to sleep here next to him.
It took her a while. She lay there and stared at his sleeping face, hating the lines of exhaustion, the paleness of lips that usually looked healthy and tempting in that suggestive grin. He held on to her in his sleep.
Tight. Like he never wanted to let her go.
When Pryor woke, the house was dark and the most amazing scents were in the air. The faint sounds of his brothers’ deeper voices came up the stairs. He got out of bed, expecting to feel pain in all his muscles and was surprised when he didn’t. He flexed his hands, stared at them, turned them over to find clear palms.
What the hell?
Doing that spell alone should have taken days to work out of his body. His brothers must have taken on more than usual. Wyatt’s laughter sounded downstairs. He seemed fine. Great, even. Pryor grabbed a T-shirt out of his dresser and put it on. He headed downstairs and sniffed in appreciation as he walked into the kitchen to find both his brothers chopping vegetables while something sizzled on the stove. Moochon stood next to Elita at the stove, like he guarded her.
Pryor had to stop himself from sighing. No doubt now that even his dog had become attached to her.
“Woman already knows your favorite foods, Pryor. You’re in big trouble.” Wyatt sawed through a carrot.
Elita glanced over at his cutting board and winced. “Really?” She grabbed the knife out of Wyatt’s hands. “You designed this perfect kitchen and you don’t know to use a better knife than this for carrots? It’s a shame.” She smiled at Pryor.
It was hesitant and so damned sweet, he crossed the kitchen to frame her face with his hands and kiss her. She didn’t hesitate to kiss him back and he would have kept on kissing her if his oldest brother hadn’t cleared his throat.
He pulled back, smiled down at her, then let her go. “Thanks for earlier.”
“Anytime,” she muttered, her cheeks red as she glanced at his brothers.
“What did she do earlier that requires thanks? Other than give you a bath, you lucky, lucky man.” Wyatt gave Elita a smile Pryor had seen charm many a lady out of her underwear.
He pointed his finger at Wyatt’s nose. “Hey now. Be good. Mine.” He wished he could pull the word right back into his mouth before it was all the way out. He had no business staking any claims here—even if he wanted to something fierce.
Elita opened her mouth and he knew she was about to complain about his word, but for some reason, she snapped her mouth shut and turned even more red. She walked to the stove and stirred something in his grandmother’s skillet. Moochon quietly followed her and it warmed his heart when her free hand landed on his dog’s head to scratch him lovingly.
“So how did she know you love Andouille more than you love air?” Wyatt asked.
“Maybe because there is more of that sausage than anything else in this kitchen,” Elita retorted. “Didn’t take a genius to know someone here loves the stuff.” She threw a shy smile at Pryor over her shoulder. “It’s just a simple jambalaya with the sausage and some of our leftovers.”
“Simple jambalaya, she says.” Wyatt laughed and poked his silent older brother in the arm. “She’s cooking your favorite thing too, Merce.”
“I would have picked something else if I’d known that,” Elita muttered.
Pryor walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. He sat on one of the barstools and watched his oldest brother quietly chop onions. Mercer never cooked, so he must feel he needed to make up for something. The way Elita went out of her way to ignore him told him he was right on the mark. A fierce protective anger hit him—shocked him. But he had to ask. “What happened last night before you two came out with me?”
Wyatt cursed and paid closer attention to the carrots he was butchering. Elita’s shoulders snapped straight and she threw an angry glance at Mercer.
Pryor set his beer down, narrowed his eyes. “What’d you do, Mercer?”
“What I had to,” his brother muttered.
Elita spun around and pointed her wooden spoon. “He locked me in the guest house, that’s what he did.”
“Obviously didn’t work. You got out.” Mercer growled and stabbed at another onion to bring it to the huge pile he’d already made.
Pryor couldn’t imagine what they’d need that many onions for.
Mercer surreptitiously wiped under his eyes with his shoulder. A dark spot showed on the dark blue T-shirt and Pryor had to work hard to hold back a smirk. Elita hated cutting onions, she’d told him that. And there was no way she’d need that many. He had to chomp down on his lip to keep from laughing. Big brother was being punished. Pryor hadn’t seen this side to Elita before and he kind of liked it. Especially since it wasn’t directed at him.
There were so many things to still learn about the fascinating woman.
The Brothers Bernaux [01] Raisonne Curse Page 18
