The Proviso (107 page)

As she lay there in bed feeling the warmth and love
of the two most important men in her life (albeit one of them
neutered), she hatched her plan. It needed groundwork laid, so
she’d begin that tomorrow. She knew that however long it took her
to do that, she’d work herself up into a good enough mad for her to
be able to carry it out to its end.

Just then, Knox shifted and rolled over, his hand
landing in her hair. She didn’t think he’d awakened, but he
caressed her curls anyway. Didn’t matter where he was or even if he
was lucid, he found her hair. Always.

She turned over then and saw that he was on his
back, still sound asleep, a luxury he could indulge himself in more
and more. His face looked so young, so different without that
hardness she’d come to appreciate for its own cold beauty. She
rousted Dog out of his pocket between them and laid herself out
along Knox’s side, her leg over his, her breast to his chest, her
head on his shoulder, her arm across his body. She softly kissed
his cheek, his ear, his jaw.

Justice felt his smile and she laid her hand
alongside his scruffy face. She coaxed him to turn his head so she
could kiss him because she loved kissing Knox.

* * * * *

101:
LIGHT OF MY LIFE, FIRE OF MY LOINS

“Hey, Justice, wanna go get some lunch?”

“No thanks,” Justice returned absently as she wrote,
trying to get the exact wording that would make her plan so tight
it’d take an appeal to the Supreme Court to break it, and not even
then. Maybe she’d ask Patrick for help. He was especially good at
this stuff and she’d never cared a whit about contract law.

“Aw, c’mon, Justice. Just across the street.”

“Deputy, I’m busy,” she said, so absorbed in her
task she didn’t bother to try to remember the man’s name.

“Justice, c’mon. Give me a chance.”

“I’m in a relationship. You don’t get a chance. Not
now, not ever.” Okay, which would be the better word choice in that
paragraph:
shall
or
must
?

“But—”

Suddenly a big hand dropped flat on her desk and she
resisted the urge to chuckle as she continued to struggle over the
minutiae of her document.

“Deputy,” Knox rumbled, “she said no. How many ways
do you need to be told?”

“Well, can you blame a guy for trying?”

“Yes, when the woman says no and you don’t take it
on its face.”

Justice rolled her eyes.

“But—”

“Deputy,” Knox said slowly, precisely, and Justice
tried not to laugh out loud, “she’s married.”

Oh, now that was interesting.

“Fine,” he muttered and slunk off. Justice still
wasn’t eager enough to disrupt her concentration to look at
Knox.

“This is why I don’t like what Giselle did to you,”
he muttered.

“Curious you staked your claim without actually
staking your claim,” she said absently.

He grunted. “What are you working on?”

“A personal project. I’m on lunch. I can do
that.”

“Not on county stationery, you can’t.”

“Hello? Recycling? I’m using paper from the shred
bin for scratch. As usual.”

“You’ve got a smart mouth.”

“You liked what my smart mouth did to you last
night.”

“Mmmm, yes I did. Come to my office and do it
again.”

Suddenly, she stopped writing and stared at the
blank she’d just drawn as a placeholder because she didn’t know
what to put there. “How much?”

“How much what?”

She looked up at him then, her eyes narrowed because
she wasn’t so involved in the mechanics of her plan that she
couldn’t remember and get mad about the reason for it. “How much
did you pay for me?”

His expression was somewhere amongst shock, anger,
and wariness. “I’m not going to answer that,” he said. “That’s a
sucker’s question.”

“Of course it is. There’s no amount of money that
would justify it. An actual brood mare would cost more than I
probably did, but a whore wouldn’t.”

He stiffened and his eyes widened. “A whore? Is that
what you think?”

“How much, Knox? Don’t act like I don’t have a right
to draw the worst conclusions or that I don’t have a right to know.
I have a right to know how much you value me.”

His chest began to heave and she knew she was
pushing him. She meant to. She wanted to know and goading him for
it was the only way she’d get it.

So she poked at him again. “I want to know if I’m a
Park Avenue call girl or a 63rd and Prospect streetwalker.”

His teeth ground.

“Or, in the alternative, if I’m Secretariat’s
dam.”

His nostrils flared.

“Oh, hey, here’s a thought. You know Kelly’s in
Westport, right?”

Knox’s eyes narrowed and he sucked in a breath. Of
course he would know about the shackles
still
embedded in
the brick walls of a bar that had been used for buying and selling
slaves before the Civil War. He knew exactly what she was going to
say—

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Justice,”
he finally snapped. “Happy now? A quarter of a million dollars and
he wanted more. If I could’ve gotten my hands on any more at that
moment, I’d have paid it.”

Her eyes wide, Justice gulped as she watched him
stalk off, her head spinning. Never in her wildest imaginings would
she have thought . . . She couldn’t really imagine having that much
money, much less that Knox had paid that amount for her and had
been willing to pay more if he’d been able to liquidate anything
else fast enough.

Maddening, was what it was.

She walked into Knox’s office, where she found him
pacing, his hands wiping his face and running through his hair. She
spoke low, calm.

“I don’t know if I’m more pissed at you for not
shoving a gun up his nose for daring to blackmail you, or with him
for pimping me out. I’m not going to be home until very late
tonight and for the next few evenings. I’ll also be gone all day
Saturday. Just letting you know.”

She walked out as calmly as she’d walked in, Knox
saying nothing. It was indeed very late when she got home that
night. She showered, then climbed into bed beside him. She knew he
wouldn’t be asleep—he never slept when troubled—so she wrapped
herself around him. He pulled her close.

“Do I want to know?” he asked softly.

“No. I suggest you keep your nose out of it until
I’m done if you don’t want it smashed.”

That made him chuckle. “Are you still mad at
me?”

“Of course I am. You
so
didn’t have to do any
of that if you hadn’t—”

“I know. I know. Done it the hard way. Sebastian
bashed me over the head when I did it.”

“Now, about my smart mouth . . . ”

Justice drifted off to sleep half on top of him
after her smart mouth had licked and sucked everything she could
from him, his hands in her hair, keeping her close when he came.
She sucked and licked up every last drop, then lay down between his
legs, her cheek on his belly. She absently caressed his bare hip
and thigh.

I bet she wants to fuck Knox Hilliard as much as I
do . . . She wouldn’t know what to do with him if she had him.

She snickered. “Heh.”

“Thank you,” he whispered, stroking her cheek and
playing with her curls. “I love it when you do that.”

“I love it when I do that, too.”

He chuckled, but soon she heard his breathing even
out.

Early Saturday morning she threw on jeans and a
white sweater and well-worn cowboy boots. She tucked her gun in the
back of her waistband and stuck her badge on her jeans pocket. She
threw her briefcase in her car, laid her gun on the seat, spun out
“Legend of a Cowgirl” (because she needed that little extra kick
today), and was on the road before Knox woke up. A bare three
blocks from home, her cell rang.

“Not telling you,” she said immediately before
hanging up and turning the phone off.

Two squad cars pulled her over in Chouteau City, one
in front of her and one behind. The trooper in the front car got
out, walked back, leaned against the top of the car.

His mouth twitched. His tongue was in his cheek. He
was trying very, very hard not to laugh. Justice sighed. “Uh,
Justice, Knox has an APB out on you.”

“Surprisesurprise.”

He snickered. “Where are you going?”

Justice gritted her teeth. “Hadley, you and Knox can
kiss my ass.”

He chuckled and wiped his hand across his mouth.
“You know we’re going to follow you. He said you might need
backup.”

“Bastard,” she muttered, and the trooper laughed all
the way back to his car.

When she drove up the farm’s driveway, she saw a new
car. That was the only difference she could fathom. It was
December, so the fields were fallow. Between the time she’d left in
June and now, nothing had happened here and if it had, she couldn’t
tell what.

She got out of the car, tucked her gun back in her
waistband, grabbed her briefcase, and walked up the porch stairs.
With a wave, she signaled the troopers to stay put. Once in the
house, she found Martin McKinley sitting in his easy chair, the TV
blaring nonsense. He had a can of cheap beer in one hand and the
remote control in the other. The place was littered with empty beer
cans and fast food trash. It reeked of stale beer and . . . other
things she didn’t care to try to identify.

She couldn’t tell if he’d gone to sleep and awakened
that way or if he hadn’t been to sleep all night. It was only 7:30
in the morning and she couldn’t give him that much credit for
getting up that early. He probably hadn’t moved a muscle except to
get up and go pee. If that.

“You’re so pathetic you don’t even know what to do
with a quarter of a million dollars.”

Startled, he struggled his way around in his easy
chair to look at her, his face ashen. “Justice. You’re not supposed
to be here. Go home before— Go home.”

“Before Knox gets here to take it all away again?”
He didn’t answer her, so she continued conversationally. “Knox has
no interest in taking anything away from you.”

He gave her a wary look. “He doesn’t?”

“Naw.”

“Are you sure? He’s a mean bastard.”

“Ah, so you see him differently now that calling the
FBI’s off the table.”

“He
told
you about that?”

“Of course he did. He’s my husband.”

“So why are you here?”

“
I
am going to take it all away from
you.”

He rolled his eyes and released a disdainful puff of
air. “Sure.” He turned his back on her and relaxed back into his
easy chair. He pointed the remote at the old TV he hadn’t bothered
to replace with something expensive and changed it to a shopping
channel. Justice wasn’t sure if her level of anger now stacked up
to her level of anger at Raines, but it was a close call. How dare
he dismiss her!

He’d done that her whole life and she suddenly
realized that she’d always thought she deserved it, that she’d
always acted like she deserved it so she’d gotten it everywhere she
went. She’d accused Knox of thinking he deserved no better than
what he got, but who was she to talk?

Knox was the first person ever to not dismiss her
out of hand, who’d listened to what she’d had to say. Knox had made
her who she was because he’d listened to her and validated her when
no one else had.

And she had stayed with Knox. What a pathetic,
perfectly matched pair they were.

Justice hefted her briefcase and stood between her
father and the TV. He protested with an exasperated whine. With one
swift donkey kick, she put the thick heel of her boot through the
glass of the TV and knocked it off its rickety stand onto the
floor.

That got his attention.

She pulled a document out of her case. “Sign that,”
she said flatly and handed him a pen.

“What is it?”

“Power of attorney.”

“I don’t need that. I’m fine.”

“You won’t be if you don’t sign it.”

“Oh, what are you going to do? You’re spineless.
You’ve always been spineless.”

Justice felt her brain freeze and the warmth in her
soul mist away like steam, leaving only darkness and ice behind.
Was this how Knox felt when he got that cold cynical look on his
face? She calmly reached behind her back, pulled her Glock out of
her waistband, and chambered a round. She pointed it at the easy
chair, between his legs. “Sign it,” she said in her Terrible Voice,
the voice that had come out of her at Raines.

He didn’t know what to do at first because he
obviously didn’t know who this Justice was and she felt the first
warmth of satisfaction come back into her body. He began to beg and
plead. Cry and moan. Attempt to explain himself.

It took one shot into the easy chair between his
legs to convince him she was serious, then she stuffed her gun back
in her waistband.

The documents flowed and he signed them all without
question, without hesitation. She couldn’t tell if he cried and
carried on because of her gun or because of what he was signing,
but really, he was too busy writing to read. She calmly fed him
document after document until her entire folder was done.

After that, she demanded he cough up the title to
his new car, which he signed over to her for one dollar. She didn’t
bother to give him that. She figured his old car would be
sufficient to get him to an actual job, provided he got one.

“Your first rent payment, money order, will be due
in the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office on the first of
February, addressed to me,” she said as she assembled her things
and arranged her briefcase. “If I don’t have it, I’ll come
collecting.”

“But Justice, you took everything I have. How am I
supposed to come up with rent?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care, but you have almost
two months to do it.”

“But
why
? I’m your father!”