The Proviso (43 page)

“Shit, it was a done deal before I got there, so I
kept my mouth shut.”

“They should’ve gone along with the government’s
party line and called it good,” Sebastian said and Bryce couldn’t
disagree.

He’d sat in the gallery watching as, each day, the
fun-loving surfer he’d always known got chipped away and the
ruthless and corrupt Chouteau County prosecutor had emerged—trying
a serial killer who’d won acquittal on a technicality.

Sebastian pointed at Knox and said, “But since that
made him untouchable
and
he was no longer accountable to his
bishop, he decided to go off the rails. Exhibit A: Claude Nocek
ousted at gunpoint.”

Knox shrugged.

“Exhibit B: Leah Wincott blackmailed into bed.”

Knox curled his lip, but didn’t dispute it, his face
betraying guilt. “Yeah, okay, I went off the rails. I’d been hung
for the sheep, so I figured the Lord wasn’t going to begrudge me a
few lambs. At least I haven’t sunk to Sebastian’s level of
promiscuity.”

“Let’s see,” Sebastian drawled. “Fucking a lot of
women. Killing and blackmailing people. Somehow not getting the
sex-is-worse-than-violence concept.”

Knox harrumphed.

“I have no guilt,” Sebastian muttered as he took a
sip of his wine. “I like being a manwhore.”

Bryce pointed to the wine, a definite sign a church
member had gone astray. “What’s your story?”

“Don’t have one,” Sebastian said. “I just got tired
of the mission field bullshit. The pecking order, the poor kids
being treated like crap. Kids being sent on missions to straighten
them out. Half my companions went out carousing, leaving me to work
and calling it teamwork. I figured I didn’t need that kind of
teamwork.” He pointed at Bryce. “You know exactly what I’m talking
about.”

Bryce nodded. “Yup.”

“Didn’t like having to rely on members for meals.
For some reason I don’t know, everybody in the mission assumed I
was poor and being supported by the church, so I was at the bottom
of the totem pole. Nobody thought to ask why I—and any companion I
was with at the time—ate better than everyone else and always had
money for the subway. I didn’t bother telling anyone that I was
paying for my mission out of the interest I earned on my margin
account in Paris and that I had immediate access to unlimited funds
and it wasn’t daddy’s money, for sure.

“My breaking point came when I had this one
companion—super good kid, hard worker, true believer. He really was
poor and being supported by the church. By the time he got put with
me, he was a basket case. Being with me was a respite for him, but
it only postponed the inevitable and his next companion sent him
over the edge.”

“Went home early?”

Sebastian nodded. “Medical. His stomach ate itself.
Nine months in, I decided I’d had enough. Called my mom, told her I
was done and to wire the rest of my assets into my European
accounts because I was staying for the foreseeable future. She was
pissed. Packed up, left the apartment without a word, went straight
to St.-Germain and found a bedsit, dumped what I wanted to keep,
mailed the rest home. Went to Spain and fell in with a bunch of
degenerate bullfighters.”

“In fact,” Knox said, “that guy who went home? Mitch
Hollander.”

Sebastian nodded. “He’s still active in the church;
in fact, he’s a bishop. And his wife’s dying. No matter what
happens to him, he
still
believes.” He looked at Bryce then.
“What about your mission?”

“I was somewhere in the middle most of it,” Bryce
said after he thought a while. “I wasn’t the low man on the totem
pole, but I was never going to be a favorite.”

Knox started. “Your dad was a stake president. You
should’ve been ruling the roost.”

Bryce grimaced. “We had our share of slackers and
partiers who were all too willing to fall in with the village
girls. I ended up kicking a lot of ass, which pretty much
shit-canned whatever advantage I’d get because of how far up my dad
was in the church hierarchy.” He looked at Knox. “Did you ever find
out why Fen wouldn’t let you go on a mission?”

“He didn’t want me to spend too much time sucking up
doctrine like philosophical manna.”

“Which you do anyway.”

Knox threw up a hand.

“So, Kenard,” Sebastian said warily, “now, uh—
Giselle— That was a complete one-eighty for you. You’re just out of
the church altogether?”

Bryce pursed his lips. “Yeah. I’m done.”

Knox studied him for a moment. “What, you just woke
up one day and decided you didn’t believe in it anymore?”

Bryce said nothing, unable to answer that because he
didn’t know exactly when he’d noticed that his faith left.

“
The Miracle of Forgiveness
isn’t doctrine. I
thought you’d have gotten over that by now.”

Bryce swallowed at Knox’s statement, one he’d made
countless times in the four years they’d lived together—the one
that had earned Knox the hatred of Bryce’s father.
The Miracle
of Forgiveness
: Almost three hundred pages of every ‘thou shalt
not’ ever imagined, written by a church leader William Kenard had
idolized. Bryce could recite the list of sins major and minor in
his sleep, and had felt the fires of hell reaching up out of the
floor to punish him for committing them, even if only in
thought.

“But apparently you didn’t get over it. So instead
of rethinking one man’s puritanical rant, you decided to dump the
church altogether? You know,” he went on, “I’m not going to argue
the fact that the church has a lot to apologize for. It does, and
that book’s one of them because it’s done a lot of damage over the
years. It just has no bearing on what the Lord’s really about.”

Bryce wished he could believe that, now more than
ever, but he didn’t. He had the scars to prove what the Lord was
really about.

“So I guess that means you don’t care that you broke
your temple covenants,” Sebastian said finally.

“The Lord broke that agreement first, so, no, I
didn’t feel obliged to keep up my end of it. And look, I got what I
wanted, so what am I supposed to conclude?”

“Oh, shit,” Knox murmured with not a little shock.
“That’s— Whoa. The
Lord
didn’t do anything of the sort.
You
wouldn’t follow your instincts and
you
fucked up
and
you
compounded that by not kicking that bitch’s ass to
the curb as soon as possible. How long did it take you to figure
out I was right? A month, maybe?”

Bryce reacted like he always had when Knox
challenged him and he didn’t like it, but Knox saw it and pointed
at him when Bryce opened his mouth. “Shut the fuck up,” he barked.
“Answer this: Do you like who you are
now
? Who you’ve become
since the fire?”

He glared at Knox, who glared right back at him
until his anger dissipated when he began to understand. “Yeah,” he
finally murmured. “Yeah, I do.”

“You’ve
always
liked women like Giselle. Fact
of life: You’d be lucky to get her to flip you off if you weren’t
who you are right now. So think about that when you’re getting all
bitter about what the Lord did or didn’t do.”

“My kids—”

“You know where they are,” he snapped, “and you know
they’re happy and well cared for. They don’t have to stumble
through life getting battered and bruised and roughed up and
their
salvation is assured.”

Bryce’s jaw ground, because Knox was right—as
usual—and he hated that.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Knox said. “You
didn’t stop believing. You just got tired of that list of bullshit
rules your dad pounded into you.”

“I want to know something,” said Sebastian after a
tense moment of silence. “Have you two always communicated like
you’re about to blow each others’ heads off?”

“Yes,” Bryce and Knox said at the same time.

“And you managed to live together for four years
without killing each other.”

“Yes,” they again said in unison.

Bryce said nothing for a moment, then said, low,
“Knox was the only person who’d tell me the truth whether I wanted
to hear it or not.”

Sebastian looked at Knox expectantly, who dropped
his head back on the sofa. “And Bryce was the only one who thought
I surfed well enough to get endorsements and then kicked my ass
until I got a few.”

Bryce grunted. “You never gave yourself enough
credit for being able to succeed at anything doing it the easy
way.”

“And
you
never gave yourself enough credit
for being a good guy without feeling compelled to attain perfection
by the end of the week.”

Sebastian looked between them, then said, “Huh.
Well. Kenard, I want to give you
Rape of a Virgin
for a
wedding present.”

Bryce, shocked, took a deep breath and swallowed.
Hard.

Kindnesses from Giselle’s ruthless family. Knox he’d
known for almost twenty years, but never really understood how he
ticked until now.

Now, almost twenty years of hardship behind him, he
wasn’t intimidated by Knox’s strength; he wasn’t jealous of Knox’s
conviction of who he really was; he wasn’t stymied by Knox’s
ability to go to church and study doctrine, ignoring culture and
tradition, uncaring what anybody thought of him. Bryce would never
pass judgment on the choices Knox had made because Knox had always
been courageous in seeking truth and justice, and Bryce had had to
be backed into a corner to find his courage.

Now, almost twenty years of hardship behind him, he
was comfortable with himself, with how he’d evolved. This group of
people—this woman, these men, their tribe—were his people. Now that
he knew who he was, he could relate to them and they could relate
to him. These people wouldn’t leave him to deal with his dark soul
alone.

Once my tribe finds out
the
Bryce Kenard
is about to be assimilated, you’ll be welcomed like a conquering
hero.

“Thank you,” Bryce finally said, his chest so tight
with gratitude and humility he couldn’t express it.

Giselle finally came out of her bedroom and went
into the kitchen after putting another box on the pile outside her
door. Bryce watched her as she stopped to glance at mail, look in
the fridge, get something to drink, and do the regular things a
million other people do around their homes. And tonight, she’d be
doing those things in his home, their home—sifting through the
mail, digging in the fridge, pouring a glass of water or that . . .
pink stuff.

He swallowed at her beauty, and for only the second
time he realized how small she was. Five feet and five inches of
explosive strength and overwhelming spirit and will that he could
tuck under his chin. One hundred sixty pounds of solid muscle (and
enough padding where it counted) packed into that little body that
looked like one-twenty-five dripping wet.

White shorts that didn’t hide the gash in her thigh.
Sunny yellow bikini top that showed her scars. Gun stuck in the
waistband at her back, which she finally remembered was there and
put on the kitchen counter. Ponytail with a white ribbon. Plain
white canvas tennis shoes. Not a speck of makeup; not a hint of
jewelry except the ring she’d chosen.

To match your eyes.

Soft, patrician face. Fair skin. Barely-there
freckles. She finished her tasks and skipped down into the living
room. Bryce sat up so she could sit on his lap.

“Why are you guys so melancholy?”

Nobody had an answer for that and Sebastian got up
to go to his office. Giselle huffed and snuggled into Bryce,
wrapped herself around him and pressed her lips to his cheek. He’d
never had this; never had a woman simply . . . love on him, snuggle
him, touch him just because, without wanting something from
him.

He wrapped his arms around her and looked at her,
enjoying her spark, her nearness. She smiled at him for absolutely
no reason he could fathom, as if he’d brought down the heavens and
gift wrapped them for her, which he would if he could.

Sebastian came back soon enough and slid a printout
and a brand new checkbook in between Bryce’s nose and Giselle’s.
“That’s for you, Giz.”

Giselle took it, read it, then what little color she
had dropped. “Sebastian, what—?”

Sebastian went to his chair and plopped in it. “You
paid rent for five years. I figured it was better served in
investments. That’s your principal plus interest.”

“But—”

“Suck it up, princess. I asked you to pay rent
because I wanted you to save. You wouldn’t take any help and you
would’ve spent every last dime you earned paying off your
bankruptcy. You’d have been out of debt but no better off when you
were finished—and you were bankrupted because of the OKH proviso.
It’s a miracle you didn’t die in that fire.” Bryce felt his gut
tighten and his breath come short. Apparently, no one noticed and
for that, he was glad. “Hell, it was a miracle you survived your
shooting. I’ve tried to take care of you since your father got sick
and now I won’t anymore. So, there’s your dowry, so to speak.
You’ve more than earned it.”

Once he’d caught his breath again, Bryce got a
glimpse of the statement and his eyebrow rose. “Maybe I should let
you do my investing,” he muttered.

“He takes a hefty fee,” Knox said. “Ask me how I
know.”

Sebastian slid Knox a look. “Your operation’s so
complex I can barely follow it. I earn every penny of that and
more, so shut up before I raise it.” He gestured toward Giselle. “I
mostly put her into art. She’s owned a lot of nice pieces over the
years and she still has quite a collection. Let me know if you want
to hang any of it.”

“Thank you, Sebastian,” she whispered.

Sebastian smiled, and Bryce could see the love and
pride of an older brother in his face, and it warmed his heart on
her behalf.
How
could he ever have mistaken Sebastian for
Giselle’s lover?