The Proviso (111 page)

Whatever other irritating habits he could lay at
Giselle’s feet—her mood swings, her still-divided loyalties, her
refusal to spend any of his money, her overt yearning to go back to
church and to take him with her, her quest to draw him out about
his thoughts on matters of theology, his children, his fire, his
life before the fire—she would
never
cheat on him.

Because she loved him, only him, and always had.
She’d shown it in a hundred different ways, not the least of which
in the way she’d thrown herself into the building of their
foundation—the way she took care of their burn victims in the same
manner she took care of Bryce, never flinching, never looking away,
and never,
ever
failing to touch them, love on them, snuggle
them if they needed or wanted it.

To draw them into her personal space and invade
theirs, to give them human contact, to let them know someone didn’t
see them as monsters.

As he watched her do this, Bryce had come to
understand how significant it was that Giselle had been willing to
touch him, to be touched by him, to draw him to her when she didn’t
know his name. That she had allowed him into her bed, into her
body
, making him her first and only lover, after only a few
hours of conversation and without the temple marriage she’d wanted
was—

He drew in a ragged breath.

He picked up the all-too-familiar stick and his gut
clenched at the thought of another baby—another he would adore with
his whole heart and fear losing every second of every day because
of who he was, who he wasn’t, what he liked, how he liked it. Now,
to that list of his sins, he could add the way he had deliberately
broken his covenants and disgraced his wife—the one he’d fantasized
about his whole life, who gave him everything he wanted and needed
and craved and loved.

A baby made in love with a brilliant woman, well
educated, related by blood to two equally brilliant men he
respected and loved as brothers. Four, really, if he included
Morgan Ashworth, one of the country’s foremost economists, and
Étienne LaMontagne, genius, scientist, inventor. With few
exceptions, her entire tribe fell into the pattern of excellence
and courage bred by the Dunham sisters and manifested in Knox,
Taight, LaMontagne, and Ashworth. She came from good stock.

Though he’d dismissed the possibility of her
infidelity nearly immediately and most particularly any infidelity
with Knox, he’d been angry that Giselle was pregnant at all.
Perhaps it was
her
fault. Perhaps, just by wanting a child
so badly, she had magically conjured one up. He knew that couldn’t
be so and felt humiliation wash over him.

Giselle had every right to accuse him of all those
things, but she was smart and had given him an out. Not only had he
not taken it, he’d slapped her in the face with both what she’d
told him not to say and compared her unfavorably to Michelle in
every other way.

He’d called her a slut.

Again.

No excuse. The pain of having been utterly betrayed
was clearly written in her expressive face and hit him in his gut.
He knew that this might be unrecoverable and he’d lose the wife he
adored and his
fifth
child.

With no one to blame but himself this time.

He didn’t need his swimmers counted. What he needed
was time to figure out how to make her understand that he hadn’t
meant a word of it, that he had lashed out because of pain he’d
thought he’d buried deeply enough and guilt he’d thought he’d left
far behind.

The sun was setting and he gulped. He’d be alone in
his house when dark fell and he’d go to bed alone. He’d wake up
alone tomorrow morning. He’d come home from work tomorrow evening
to an empty house. With one intentionally devastating remark, his
home had turned back into a house.

Giselle knew. She
always
made sure to get
home before he did, even if that meant she had to drag her entire
desk home from work, to be there for him because he hated the dark
silence so much. In all that time, she’d spent one night away from
home, the night she had taken Eilis to Ford then stayed with her,
and it had nearly killed him then.

He knew where she’d go, where she always went when
she was in trouble. She had a home to go back to—hell, any one of
twenty-plus homes, really—and with that one comment that had hurt
her so deeply, he’d sent her straight back to the two men who loved
her and had always, without fail, picked her up and brushed her
off.

He dropped his head in his hands, wracked with
guilt, tortured by the irony and the depth of his hypocrisy.

Sebastian Taight and Knox Hilliard would clean up
the mess Bryce had made with his woman.

* * * * *

105:
WHAT NOT TO EXPECT

Giselle’s anger sustained her and she sustained it
so that she didn’t completely fall off the edge of the cliff. How
dare he! He knew very good and well that this child was his; she’d
known the second he’d accepted that fact in his heart. Still he’d
called her out—and with something worse than she could have ever
imagined.

She hadn’t had any of what she thought were the
usual signs of pregnancy. Because she had believed it to be an
impossibility, she had put it away forever.

She’d not suspected that, beyond lack of
self-control, there was a
reason
that she couldn’t stand the
smell of cooking beef and had been irresistibly drawn to chewy
pumpernickel bagels with vegetable cream cheese.

She’d thought that her more-easy-than-normal tears
were due to some softening of her personality, safe in Bryce’s
love—emotional growth, perhaps.

She hadn’t paid attention to the timing of her
periods since she’d begun having the damned things because . . .
why? and so she hadn’t noticed. Any month without a period was a
good month, in her estimation.

She always gagged up her morning vitamins on an
empty stomach.

And of
course
she was tired all the time.
Throughout the last year, she’d grown to love the courtroom the way
she’d loved Decadence. She’d put in long hours preparing and trying
cases. She spent equally long hours making love to, having sex
with, and fucking Bryce, her appetite for him more insatiable now
than ever.

Until Eilis and Justice had handed her a pregnancy
test and ordered her to use it, the possibility had never occurred
to her. Giselle had rolled her eyes and done it just to prove they
didn’t have a good grasp of the odds. She didn’t relish hearing the
smug “We told you so,” but once they finished teasing her, she
would be able to count on their guidance. What Giselle knew about
pregnancy wouldn’t fill a thimble.

“Uh, Giz, you’ve been here three days without saying
a word. Wanna share?”

“I’m pregnant,” she muttered, and she could see the
confusion on Sebastian’s face.

“I thought you said he was fixed,” he said
slowly.

“That’s what he thought, too, so you can imagine
what conclusion he jumped to when I told him.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened. “Did he think . . . ?”

“He didn’t name names, but in his mind, there would
be only one other possibility.”

“Oh,” he breathed. “Knox will be livid.”

“Don’t you dare tell him that,” Giselle snarled. “I
shouldn’t even be talking about it to you—” She choked suddenly,
then swallowed.

“Giz, I’m sorry. But . . . aren’t you happy you get
a baby now?”

“He doesn’t want any more children at all. How can I
be happy about being pregnant with a child he absolutely does not
want? A child he doesn’t want to believe is his?” She took a deep
breath. “You know, I could deal with a broken heart on my own, but
with a baby to raise . . . ?”

Sebastian gathered her up in his arms and stroked
her hair. She started to cry at his unexpected and uncharacteristic
softness. “Give him a chance, Giselle,” he murmured.
Giselle
. Not
Giz
. No
suck it up, princess
. She
cried harder. “Knox thinks he’s got some serious PTSD from his fire
and probably from Michelle, too. That’s not something you get over
just because you wake up one day and decide to leave everything you
believe behind.”

Giselle said nothing for a moment, then, “He has
nightmares about his fire, but he refuses to talk about it.”

“Knox says his father beat him over the head with
the Rule Book. He thinks that might be at the root of it all.”

She blinked and suddenly, it all fell into place.
The “Rule Book,” their Grandpa Dunham’s disparaging moniker for a
book he hated. He’d preached against it to the tribe, and had made
sure every one of his children and grandchildren knew it wasn’t
what the Lord nor the church was really about.

“I should’ve known,” Giselle murmured, heartbroken
on another level because that had never occurred to her. It
wouldn’t have; the Rule Book wasn’t part of her family’s paradigm.
“He thinks the fire, his children dying, was the Lord punishing him
for not being perfect.”

Sebastian wiped his hands down his face with a sigh.
“He probably doesn’t even know how to begin sorting it all out. I
wish my dad were here; he’d know what to do, what to say.”

She sniffled.

“I know you’re hurt, Giz, but he’s going to need you
to help him through this.”

“But how? What do I do?
He won’t let me!
”

“Wait him out. He knows where to find you and he’ll
show up. The man adores you. Don’t throw that away unless or until
you determine he’s never going to work it out.”

So she waited for Bryce to show up at her office or
at Sebastian’s house and apologize. And she waited. And waited—

—until by the time he
did
show up a week
later, she was livid. And in court.

Bryce walked in and sat in the back. She happened to
see him out of the corner of her eye when she stood to give her
closing argument. Her heart raced when she saw him, her libido went
into overdrive, and she bit her lip. She had never given a better
closing argument. She could feel her soul fill with passion,
infusing her voice with something even
she
had never heard
before.

What it was, where it had come from, how to do it
again, she didn’t have a clue.

Once court had adjourned, she waited until the room
cleared, which proved difficult because her boss waylaid Bryce. He
finally interrupted Hale’s cheerful ramblings. “Geoff, listen, I
really
need to talk to Giselle. Catch you later.”

Bryce approached her with some hesitance. “You won
your case,” he murmured.

“How do you know?” she snapped, feeling the tears
already start, too hurt and hormonal at the moment to care about
his issues.

“That was probably one of the most brilliant
closings I’ve ever heard. I— I actually didn’t know you had such a
way with words. It was almost—poetic.” She swallowed to try to stem
the tide of tears, but they began to overflow anyway.

“I read eighteenth century literature for fun. I
must have absorbed some of it,” she muttered. He moved toward her,
but she looked away.

“I’m sorry, Giselle.”

“I don’t want to talk about this here.”

He inclined his head, looking at her things spread
out all over the table and gestured toward them. “I’ll help you
clean up,” he murmured. “Then would you come with me? Please? I
need to show you something.”

Neither spoke as they worked to collect her papers
and files, then he carried her box to their SUV. They were out of
the parking garage and had turned east on Truman Road before he
broke the lengthening silence between them.

“When you told me you were pregnant, all my anger
with Michelle came back and—” He stopped, wiped his hand down his
face.

Her teeth ground. “And you compared me to that
cunt
.”

“I’m sorry, Giselle. You’re not in any way like
her.”

“Oh, I see. Michelle was giving other people what
you wanted, so that left you high and dry, but oh, so righteous and
pure in your indignation. I give you what you want and I
like
it, so that makes me more sinful than you think you are
because I don’t have any shame for what we did, what we do.”

“
No!
” She started at the intensity of his
tone. “I do
not
think that. I envy the spiritual freedom you
have, that your family has, but that doesn’t make you sinful.”

Giselle threw up a hand. “Dammit, Bryce, make up
your mind. Either it is or it isn’t. What we do together can’t be
sinful for you and not sinful for me at the same time. I swear, I
don’t know how you can be so
fucking
brilliant in a
courtroom but so
fucking
dense when it comes to your idea of
morality or lack thereof. You’re a forty-two-year-old trial
attorney. Did it not, at some point, occur to you that
The
Miracle of Forgiveness
was Victorian bullshit?”

He flinched.

“That’s not what the church is about, Bryce. It’s
not what the Lord’s about. There are two rules,” she snapped,
reaching across the car to put two fingers in front of his face.
“Love the Lord. Love your neighbor. That’s it.”

He pushed her hand away. “It’s not that simple.”

“It
is
that simple and I guarantee you that
if you went to our bishop and asked him that, he’d tell you the
same thing. That’s one of the very few things he and I agree on.”
Her mouth tightened, her tears having dried with her anger. “My
grandfather would have knocked your father’s head off for teaching
you out of that book and he was higher up on the church food chain
than your dad was.”

He cast her a quick, startled glance.

“And now
we
have a child to think about
because your vasectomy failed,” she said low. “I’m sure you just
couldn’t resist going to the doctor to verify that.”