The Proviso (42 page)

“That’s enough.” He paused. “Giselle? What can I
give you?”

“Talk to me,” she murmured. “Tell me what happened
to you. Trust me. Please.”

He took a deep breath, held it, then nodded as he
released it in a long whoosh. “Give me a few days, okay?”

She nodded and they met in the middle, but it wasn’t
a kiss of desire or arousal. It was a kiss of understanding, of
shared burdens and ended as quietly as it had begun. Bryce wrapped
his arm around her shoulders to pull her close in. They stayed that
way for what seemed hours, but the sun only marked about an hour,
if that.

“Your mortar’s drying,” she murmured.

“I can mix more.”

“Tell me about the piano.”

“Physical therapy, like the stone work. If I miss
even a day, my left hand gets stiff and numb.”

“You missed a couple of days when you were with
me.”

He laughed. “I was doing other things with my hands,
in case you weren’t paying attention. That was just as
effective.”

Giselle blushed—
again
—which made him laugh
even harder, and he kissed the tip of her nose. “I love that you
blush so easily.”

“Shut up,” she muttered and he chuckled. “When did
you start playing?”

He hesitated a moment, thinking. “Maybe, I don’t
know, five or six? It was my mother’s dream that she’d have one
child who played. That was the only area where I outshone my
siblings. I played a lot of jazz improv in high school, got away
from it in college. When my therapist found out I could play, she
thought it would be the best thing for me, so I bought a piano. She
was right.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“Anything that requires a very long hand span.”

“Will you play for me?”

“Tonight, when I usually do. Question,” Bryce said
slowly. “You said you didn’t have enough money to reopen your
bookstore. Is that something you still might want?”

She hesitated a moment because not a day had gone by
that she didn’t want it, but . . .

“I don’t think so,” she replied slowly. “That’s done
and past. I wouldn’t do it without Maisy and Coco anyway—and I
don’t think they’d be up to starting over. It’d be like trying to
get back together with an ex-boyfriend, where it never quite works
right. And I didn’t spend the last five years and oodles of money
just to go down the first rabbit trail that looks interesting
simply because I can now.”

They were silent for a while, then, “When do you
graduate?”

“May.”

“I want to take you on a honeymoon. Do you have
anyplace special you’d like to go?”

“Paris,” she said without hesitation or thought.
“I’d like to see it with my lover, not my brother.”

“Mmmm, that can be arranged. I talked to Hale this
morning while you were asleep. He wants to move you into practicing
when you’re done with law school.”

She started. “He does?”

Bryce nodded.

“Oh, I’d
love
that. He’s been really good to
me. I didn’t want to know what he’d say or do if he found out about
Knox.”

Bryce shrugged. “He likes you and he thinks you have
a lot of potential as a trial lawyer. He’s not the type to cut off
his nose to spite his face and he’s been planning to offer you a
position for the last three years.”

More warmth. More fuzzies. Giselle hadn’t ever been
this happy, this contented.

He said nothing for a long while and Giselle could
tell he chewed on something big. “I’ve been kicking around an idea
for a while that I hope you— Well, that you might be interested
in,” he said slowly. When she said nothing, he went on after
drawing a deep breath.

“I’d like to build a foundation for burn victims, to
give them the resources they need from, oh, a place to stay for
however long they need it, medical care, therapy, further
convalescence, money, legal help, plastic surgery. Pretty much a
one-stop-shopping experience for burn victims once they’re
discharged from the hospital—all the things I needed to rebuild my
body and my life that I didn’t have and had to spend time
coordinating once I found them. Say you get discharged from the
hospital with nowhere to go and the hospital sends you straight to
me. I give you a place to stay and put you back on your feet. Or,
say, you’re in the hospital and your family needs a place to stay,
legal, financial help, whatever. You come to me. And when you run
into trouble down the road, you can come back for whatever help you
need.”

Giselle pulled away from him and looked at him in
awe, again feeling that joy that had nothing to do with desire. “I
think that’s wonderful,” she said.

He started. “Really?”

“Absolutely.”

His brow wrinkled. “I hadn’t articulated it yet.
You’re the first person I’ve told.”

She sucked in a sharp little breath and felt a smile
split her face.

Bryce looked at her then and said, “What?”

“You gave me your idea before you gave it to anyone
else. That— It’s a gift.”

“Not as precious a gift as your virginity.”

“Yes, it is.”

He didn’t smile. “I didn’t choose you for my mate,
Giselle,” he murmured, tracing her jaw with a finger. “ You chose
me, and I’m honored and grateful for that.”

* * * * *

40:
THREE KINGS

“I take it you’re gonna want your security deposit
back?”

Bryce heard Sebastian Taight’s bellow when he
followed Giselle into her house the next evening. “If you’re giving
money out, I’ll take it,” Giselle hollered back. “You know how poor
I am.”

She led him down the corridor by the hand, then up
the stairs to the conference room platform. Beyond that lay an
expanse of living room he hadn’t seen before.

“There was a wall here Friday, wasn’t there?”

“It’s retractable,” Giselle said. “We usually keep
it closed.”

Sebastian and Knox sat watching a Chiefs exhibition
game, Knox on the sofa and Sebastian in a club chair, both with
their feet up on the coffee table. Knox ate cheese popcorn from a
large tin and had a gallon jug of orange juice on the table between
his feet.

Sebastian, a bottle of wine in one hand, attempted
to read but kept getting distracted by the plays. Neither looked up
or around.

“Here,” she said, letting go of Bryce. “You’re my
mate, so you’re officially part of the pack now.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Sebastian
called after her as she disappeared into her bedroom.

“No, Mom. I got the day off.”

Bryce sat in the club chair opposite Sebastian.

Knox passed him the popcorn, looked straight at him,
and said, “You
are
going to marry her, right?”

“Friday. Two o’clock. Jackson County
Courthouse.”

They both stared at him. Simultaneously they
said,

“No bishop?”

“No big wedding?”

Bryce shook his head. “Nope. She didn’t want anybody
but you guys, her mother and aunt, and a judge. Oh, and Geoff
Hale.”

“Great,” Sebastian and Knox muttered at the same
time.

“Uh, problem with Hale?”

“Hale hates me,” Knox said, “which you know and I
don’t know what he’s going to do to Giselle when he finds out she’s
my cousin—”

“Eh, I gave him the rundown and smoothed it all
out.”

Knox started.

“Chill. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t already
suspected.”

“My problem,” Sebastian volunteered, “is my mother.
I’m going to get my ass kicked for being the major contributor to
Giselle’s delinquency because nothing is ever
her
fault.”

Bryce looked at him speculatively, his eyebrow
raised. “You’re what, forty? And your mother still kicks your
ass?”

“She taught me everything I know about money, so I
figure it’s only right to let her amuse herself at my expense.”

“Really?”

“Yup. She’s one sharp cookie. Actually, that whole
batch of Dunham girls—all nine of them—brilliant. Grew up poor as
church mice, but Grandpa Dunham made damned sure they were
educated.”

Knox demurred. “My mom . . . not so smart.”

“Yes, she is,” Sebastian returned. “
Your
mother is an amoral bitch.”

“True.”

Bryce ditched any vestige of etiquette to indulge
his curiosity. “Taight. What makes you decide to fix or raid?”

Knox barked a laugh. “You would ask that right off
the bat.”

Sebastian grinned. “Trade secret.”

“Knox, do you know?”

“Whether I do or not, you can file that under
attorney-client privilege.”

“Of course,” Bryce said sarcastically.

“I do a few things that could be construed as, ah,
slightly shady,” Sebastian said, “and I need Knox to tell me if I’m
venturing into felony territory. As for the Fix-or-Raid policy, I
have very stringent criteria, but if everybody knew what it was,
the whole exercise would be pointless.”

“Go on.”

“Basically, I won’t let a badly run business stay in
business even if that means I take a loss—that’s what’s got
everybody up in arms and might still get me into some serious
trouble if Kevin doesn’t beat Fen. Congress is pissed because they
can’t figure out how I decide. I’m not sure how they intend to use
that information, but I know it’ll be bad for me and my cronies,
and I’ll go to jail before I give it up to that pack of
looters.”

“Businesses fail all the time and if they were
already on the rocks . . . ”

“It starts getting iffy when you get things like
pensions involved,” Knox offered. “There’s always the people who
end up getting laid off. They might have kept their jobs another
year if he hadn’t been called in, but by that time, the
leadership’s digging into the pensions anyway.”

Bryce nodded. “So it just looks bad.”

“Yeah,” Knox said. “It doesn’t matter that
Sebastian’s innocent of anything they can charge him with, he’s
still going to end up on the hot seat if there are enough
congress-critters who have a vested interested in seeing him
there.”

“Even if I told them, they wouldn’t get it and they
sure as shit wouldn’t be able to duplicate it,” Sebastian added.
“It all depends on a company’s leadership. They have to be
teachable. They have to be able to figure out what it is they’ve
done wrong on their own, though I’m massaging things in the
background.”

“Then they think you just stood around and
watched.”

“Hell, I don’t care. They have to learn and be
willing to do things differently. If I can see that they’re not
going to come to this epiphany on their own, I give them a detailed
list of what’s wrong and how to fix it. If they don’t get it after
that or they refuse to do what I tell them to do, I take it. I give
them about a year, maybe two at the outside. Hold off their
creditors, give them room. I want a solution that lasts and that’s
how I get it.”

“So what about Jep Industries? That went down in a
month.”

“Oh, I’m not going to fuck around with bullshit like
that. I knew the pensions were in deep trouble and I wasn’t going
to wait for Oth’s light bulb to come on before I shut it all down
to get the employees out with their funds. So I threatened to get
the feds on Oth’s books if he didn’t hand it over to me for the
price of its debt. He would’ve been indicted because everything was
set up to point to him, but I knew he wasn’t smart enough to pull
off something that complex. He knew it, too, so he took the
deal.”

“What about the dependent businesses?”

“Mitch Hollander— You know who he is?”

“CEO of Hollander Steelworks?”

“Same. My best friend. He would have gone belly up
without Jep’s products, so he bought it from me after I’d
dismantled it to the ground. He assimilated it into his operation
piece by piece, including employees. So now he supplies Jep’s
products to the other businesses that need them.”

Knox snorted. “
Except
for OKH. Turns out Fen
decided to run for Senate after Mitch refused to do business with
him. Another stake in OKH’s heart, because Fen needs Jep’s
products, too, just not as badly as everyone else. Fen can work
around it, but not easily.”

“Fen would’ve taken Jep over if I’d given him half a
chance; he was in a helluva lot better position to do it than Mitch
was.”

“I never heard about any of that.”

“Yeah, that’s because we kept it quiet. Mitch is
squeaky clean and I didn’t want Oth to start taking jabs at him
like he takes at me.”

Knox waved a hand. “It won’t stay quiet for much
longer now that Oth’s having to account for himself. The press will
follow that.”

“Oth’s only real crime is that he’s a self-entitled
old-money idiot and it serves him right to have to start answering
questions about why he’d called me in the first place. I’m not
going to let arrogant fucks like him make me their whipping
boy.”

Bryce looked at Knox then. “Speaking of whipping
boys . . . ”

“Don’t,” Knox snapped.

But he did. He always had. “
Why
would you
open your mouth about Tom Parley to your bishop?”

Knox sucked in a sharp breath, his jaw grinding. “I
notice you didn’t ask me why I did it,” he finally muttered.

Bryce raised an eyebrow.

Knox shrugged and looked away. “I was stupid.
Idealistic. Believed in the system.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No,” Knox returned, swift and sure. “Too many lives
at stake. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if he’d
killed one more person. Justice at all costs.”

Bryce remained silent for a moment, then murmured,
“You should never have been let near that case. You were too
green.”

“Arrogance of youth. Thought, ‘No problem.’”

“He didn’t go to the bishop voluntarily, you know,”
Sebastian offered. “He was called in during the investigation and
asked point blank. He went in thinking the bishop would find it
justified, but . . . ”