The Proviso (101 page)

Justice’s eyes widened. “That’s . . . that’s not
normal.”

Knox burst out laughing. “
Sebastian
isn’t
normal.”

He made her practice endlessly, left- and
right-handed, though he did tell her he thought she was an
excellent marksman.

When Knox was in full teaching mode, he was harsh
and biting in his criticism, but he was equally effusive with
praise. All the residents, including Justice, strove for the moment
Knox would grace them with his approbation.

Every other weekend, Knox and Justice left work on
Friday and headed south to the Ozarks. Justice was glad to get
away, though Vanessa’s gourmet kitchen only emphasized how much she
hated her own kitchen. She sometimes helped cook Friday and
Saturday night dinner, learning various tricks from Vanessa and her
sous chef. Justice, however, was much better at pastry than
Vanessa, and her cherry pie became a favorite (but surprise) treat
of the Friday- and Saturday-night dinner crowd. Knox did whatever
bad-guy dirty work Vanessa needed done and tended to guests.

Justice loved watching this side of Knox unfold
before her eyes, the wealthy, refined gentleman he was born to be.
He was a gracious host to people who thought he hung the moon, his
reputation four hours north nothing but a slightly amusing quirk.
The towns of Mansfield and Ava adored him, but he didn’t seem to
notice.

What Justice liked most about going to Whittaker
House:

“This is my wife, Justice,” he would say to whomever
he spoke, a proud note in his voice that thrilled her to the core
of her soul.

She loved being with Knox in public, being a regular
husband and wife with him without fear of anybody seeing them
together, holding hands, whispering, canoodling, kissing—

—slow dancing on Saturday nights to the band that
played standards during dinner, its singer’s voice a dead ringer
for Ella Fitzgerald’s. Along with everything else he’d taught her,
Knox taught her how to dance, something she had never had the
opportunity to do. “You’re very good at this, Iustitia,” he
whispered. It never failed that she and Knox garnered quite a bit
of attention as they danced, but Justice wasn’t sure why unless . .
.

“Knox?”

“Mmmm?” He pressed soft kisses in the curve of her
neck.

“Every woman here wants to kill me.”

He stilled and looked at her, confused and
concerned. “What makes you say that?”

“Because the hottest dude in the state is making
love to me on a dance floor.” That made him throw back his head and
laugh. She huffed. “Well, don’t stop just because I pointed it
out.”

* * * * *

Eric decided it was time for Justice to start being
a real prosecutor instead of staying in traffic ticket, deadbeat
dad, and arraignment hell. Finally, one day after he’d given her
her first fairly big case, she stepped into the courtroom and sat
at the table alone. None of her coworkers stayed with her because
Knox had forbidden it.

“She goes alone like everybody else does. She wins
or loses on her own merits. Nobody in this office is to go into
that courtroom while she’s trying it. Not to help, not to
watch.”

She’d prepared to the hilt, memorizing every speck
of every detail of the file, and Eric, Richard, and Patrick had
drilled her endlessly on the facts. Hicks taught her how to pick a
jury and Justice was shocked to learn that he was the one who had
taught Knox how to do it long, long ago when he was a junior AP,
and Knox still couldn’t pick a jury better than Hicks. Patrick and
Eric taught her how to prep witnesses.

Knox taught her how to find and draw out nuances on
the fly, how to coax and cajole and flatter obscure information out
of witnesses. He’d taken her to an empty courtroom three days in a
row and made her try the whole thing against him.

He taught her how to walk, when to talk to the jury
and not, and went through her side of the closet to pick which
outfit she should wear and why. “No pants. A woman has a different
power than a man in court and part of that is how she dresses.”

“That’s what Giselle said.”

“Giselle should open a finishing school.”

She was amazed at how much she’d picked up just by
spending all those hours and hours watching Knox do what he did so
well, how well she could imitate him and his inflections. Since
he’d never trained a woman before, he had to sit back and watch her
to make adjustments. By comparison, he had her watch Eric and the
residents try their cases and without exception, they all looked
and sounded exactly like Knox.

It took a week of incredibly intensive thinking on
her feet to win it. When she came back to the office after the
verdict, Knox muttered, disgruntled,

“Shit. Now I have to keep her.” The office howled,
shook her hand, slapped her on the back, and generally yelled
good-natured insults at her across the office until it was time to
go home.

“You did very well, Iustitia,” Knox whispered in her
ear that night. “I’m proud of you.”

* * * * *

Things changed for her after she won that case. She
was part of the team. They took her writings seriously now and they
all argued back and forth across the office about whatever opinion
she’d had online or in print. She knew she was persuasive in print
and she knew she was persuasive in court, but it never dawned on
her that she could be persuasive in her workplace with people who
held their own strong opinions, had reasons for them, and had years
of lawyering behind them.

She found she had a talent for impeccably timed
comedy and very often her wry observations, rapier wit, and cutting
asides had the office howling with laughter. Knox had begun to
leave his private office door open, she suspected, because he
wanted to hear what bomb she was going to drop next.

As she spent more time in Knox’s arms and brain, she
lost some of her innocence along with her ignorance. She didn’t
miss either. Occasionally, he’d fling an innuendo at her at work
when no one else was around to make her blush, but it made him
laugh. Under Knox’s tutelage, her language sank into the gutter
with the men’s and she didn’t care; she liked being one of them and
she wasn’t that girl in the front row her first week in law school
anymore.

“I
like
it when you talk dirty,
Iustitia.”

Justice wrote a blog article about being a
prosecutor and the practical versus theoretical. She talked about
her colleagues, the different approaches to their cases, her
friendship with Richard, Eric’s management style, Patrick’s
willingness to do anything he was asked, and Hicks’s sly and
irascible humor—although she thought it prudent to change their
names and not mention where she worked. Yet.

Knox blew his stack.

“Iustitia, if you mention the Chouteau County
prosecutor’s office, you’re going to get a lot of backlash you
don’t want, and I’m not even talking about Fen coming after you.
You’re the golden girl of conservative politics; once you mention
me or my office, you’ll carry a taint you won’t be able to wash off
and your career’ll be over before it really got rolling. It’s also
very possible that if Kevin loses this election, you could get
dragged into Sebastian’s mess. Neither Wall Street nor Washington
would take it kindly that
the
Justice McKinley is also
the
OKH Bride and possibly the mother of the OKH Baby.”

Well, he did have a point.

“I’m asking you not to write about the office,
Iustitia, not just for your career, but for Sebastian’s and
Kevin’s. Your credibility will tank if you’re associated with me
and if your credibility tanks, so does Kevin’s. Sebastian really
needs your pull right now. Please, Iustitia?”

Justice was quiet for a moment and bit her lip.
“It’s really not as simple as I make it sound, is it?”

Knox shook his head slowly. “No. It’s not. You may
lose your audience as you lose your innocence, I don’t know. You
may gain audience that thinks you’re too naïve now. But you
will
lose your innocence and you chose the quickest route to
do it, too.”

“Being a prosecutor,” she sighed.

Richard coordinated a party when she had somehow
managed to come to a newspaper’s attention and get her own
syndicated column. She’d asked Knox if he had had anything to do
with that and he’d been deeply offended.

“Iustitia, if there’s one thing you should know
about me, it’s that I strip people down and throw them in the deep
end and let them sink or swim based on their true selves. If they
swim, fine, but I don’t interfere. I just give them a safe place to
hit bottom, then I fish ’em back out again. That’s just the way I
teach.”

Hicks retired and three residents who’d been with
the office long enough, respectively, went on to new and better
things, as they always did. So now there was the core staff of
three, then Justice. Everyone who was left in the office knew she
and Knox were married, and Justice figured he’d meant it to be that
way.

“Justice,” Eric called to her one day across the
office when it was just the four of them, “since you’re here for as
long as Knox is, you’re taking Hicks’s place. You’re going to be
part of the core staff now.”

“Is this your decision or Knox’s?”

“Mine. You know he doesn’t manage staff.”

“Thank you.”

Richard and Patrick nodded and went back to work.
She had gone from being a mousy little girl laughingstock to a
tolerated coworker to a respected colleague in the toughest county
in the ten that made up the Kansas City metro area.

Knox had stripped her down, thrown her in the deep
end, and she’d swum.

* * * * *

94:
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

OCTOBER 2007

Justice was late. Again. And Knox would publicly
crucify her while the entire courthouse listened and chuckled. She
knew she deserved it, though—and he refused to wake her up in the
morning.

“You’re an adult and I’m not your mother.
Dammit
, Iustitia, why can’t you get to work on time?”

“It’s a passive-aggressive response to my asshole
boss.”

He’d laughed in spite of himself.

Not only had she slept through Knox getting ready
for work and her alarm, she couldn’t decide what she wanted to
wear. She’d grown frighteningly persnickety about her wardrobe
since Giselle had taken her shopping and she’d learned how it felt
to dress well.

She finally settled on a linen suit: black skirt,
discreet black silk and lace chemise, shoulder holster and gun,
white blazer, badge, black nylons, black sling-back heels Eilis had
given her for her birthday.

Justice decided to test the limits of the incestuous
law in Chouteau County and she sped. This was something she had
never done before coming to work at the Chouteau County
prosecutor’s office. Always prompt, never speeding so as to avoid
tickets, she’d lost herself in that courthouse. She didn’t miss
anything Knox had taken away from her because she’d gained so much
more, and all of it far superior to what she’d come to him
with.

Her reverie was interrupted by the wail of sirens
behind her and she nearly swallowed her tongue. Of course, on a day
she decided to speed because she was late again, she’d get pulled
over.

The state trooper was young and must have been
regularly stationed somewhere other than Chouteau County because he
didn’t believe her when she told him she was an AP.

“Ma’am, I happen to know there is no such thing as a
female Chouteau County assistant prosecutor and insisting that you
are one is going to make me mad.”

She showed him her badge and of course, that made
her shoulder holster visible.

He arrested her for carrying a concealed weapon
without a permit and impersonating an officer of the court. The
only thing she could think of was to say, “Please call Knox
Hilliard and ask him.”

“Don’t need to, ma’am. Everybody in Missouri knows
how Mr. Hilliard works. Except you.”

Mr. Hilliard would blow his top, that was how Mr.
Hilliard worked—and she’d to be on the receiving end of it, very
loudly and very publicly. At least it amused her colleagues.

Much commotion surrounded her arrest and Sheriff
Raines didn’t bother to hide his delight. Defense attorneys looked
at her askance, wondering whether to laugh or offer their services.
Raines felt perfectly free to book her, process her (in a white
blazer!), and detain her regardless.

Knox would probably say it served her right and she
wouldn’t be surprised if Knox had ordered him to let her cool her
heels for being late. So she took off those heels and put them on
the bench beside her, slouched against the wall, and folded her
arms over her chest.

She was
so
going to blog about this.

An hour passed before the jail cleared and she was
the only one left in the holding cell block. Out of the corner of
her eye, she saw Raines slip into the deserted area and approach
her cell arrogantly, his keys jangling tauntingly in his hand.

“So,” he said, looking through the bars and leering.
“I see you got yourself all gussied up some time back ago. Trying
to catch Hilliard’s eye, I bet. I seen how you look at him and
mebbe I want you to look at me that way.”

Justice gulped. No, Knox would never have kept her
here on purpose and at Raines’s disposal. When Raines opened the
cell door, Justice felt real fear slice through her; Knox didn’t
know she was here and she had no way to defend herself. Except
one.

Surreptitiously, she picked up one of her shoes and
stood to meet him. Heart thumping in her chest, throat dry, she
felt anger seep through her, replacing the fear.

“If you touch me, I’ll kill you,” she snarled,
surprised that that had come out of her mouth and how
viciously.