The Proviso (51 page)

“Ah, so that’s where you got it and why your mother
thinks art’s a waste of time.”

“Yep. He wasn’t any happier that I left the mission
than my mother was, but he was happy I’d shown the good sense—in
his opinion—to go to art school instead. It was one thing he and I
could relate to because he certainly didn’t appreciate my bank
account and how I grew it—
especially
after I offered him
enough to retire early and comfortably, and to send him to the KC
Art Institute with paint and canvas.”

Eilis’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t understand that.
Money’s useful. More money is more useful.”

“Yes, my mother knew that. All he saw was the need
around him. He didn’t know that I was making money hand over fist
and, by extension, how much of that my mother got. She socked it
away, played the market very well once she had enough to work with,
hid it from him. But . . . the food got better and the cars got
more reliable and the house had a few repairs it couldn’t have had
before. He never noticed.

“I loved my dad, Eilis, don’t mistake me,” he said.
“He was a hard worker, very wise in other ways, and generous, which
I greatly admire. He loved and guided Giselle and Knox as much as
he loved and guided me. He taught us all a lot about generosity of
both money and time, but I wasn’t willing to work as hard as he did
for as little money as he made. None of us were.”

“What did he do?”

“He worked for the KC parks department doing the
crap jobs nobody else would do because they were disgusting or
physically difficult, which was very typical for him. His
philosophies weren’t well thought out nor were they in the least
bit practical. If someone had asked my mother for water from a
well, she would’ve let them have the water if they drew it
themselves, but made them leave a deposit for twice the value of
the bucket and kept back a little of that for a rental fee. My
father would’ve drawn the water himself, given it to them, and told
them not to worry about bringing the bucket back, leaving no way
for us to draw our own water.”

“Did you resent that?”

“No. I didn’t understand it until I was older and
had money. By then, it was irrelevant because I didn’t have to live
that way. I talked to him about it a few times and he just couldn’t
give up the idea that having a lot of money when other people had
none was evil. Worse, he didn’t understand the concept of teaching
a man to fish. I like to think I got a good mix of my mother’s
basic business sense and my father’s philanthropic bent and
artistic sensibilities.”

“That sounds like a great source of contention
between your mother and father.”

“It was, but if nothing else, my dad had a strict
moral code and a firm hand on the household, so my mother had to
sneak. They each had the best interests of the family at heart, but
they approached it from opposite points of view and they weren’t
reconcilable.”

“And you don’t have any siblings?”

“I had two stillborn brothers.” He speared her with
a glance. “Do you?”

She ran her tongue over her teeth, again hesitating.
“I have a half brother.”

“Do you get along?”

“Well, yes, I suppose you could say that.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means,” she said slowly, “that when he and I
have reason to interact, we get along very well. He’s always been
very kind to me.”

“And you have little reason to interact.”

“Yes.”

“It sounds to me like you’d like to interact
more.”

“Very much so, yes.”

“He’s not interested?”

She took a deep breath. “He, ah, doesn’t know he has
a sister, much less that I’m it.”

Sebastian said nothing for a moment, thoroughly
shocked, letting his mind run through all the implications of that.
“So . . . your parents?”

“My biological parents don’t acknowledge me unless
it’s expedient for them to do so.”

Holy shit.
Sebastian could feel Eilis’s
retreat from him the deeper he drew her down into her past, and
that was the last thing he wanted. Plenty of time to delve into her
history when she felt more comfortable with him. Changing
directions, he said,

“How did you come up with the concept of an
outsourcing human resources company? You were way ahead of the
curve.”

She smiled a genuine smile and he could feel her
coming back to him, even if only a little. “I was an administrative
assistant in an HR department and everyone there was overworked,
between managing the health insurance issues and the 401(k)s, plus
hiring and such. I did a lot of work I wasn’t supposed to be doing
and never got paid for. Nobody would let me implement my ideas
because I was
just
an administrative assistant, so I
decided—” She stopped, chuckled, and said, “I took my ball and went
home.”

Sebastian laughed.

“I knew I could do a better job than they did and
that I could become independently wealthy doing it.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.” She licked a stray drop of ice cream off her
lips and at that moment, Sebastian though he’d never been so hard
for a woman in his life—and talking business! “I didn’t sleep much
those first two or three years. I was either working or
worrying.”

Sebastian had almost scraped the bottom of his cup
when he decided that since she wasn’t going to welcome his
questions as to what made her tick, he’d talked about himself all
he could stand, and she probably wouldn’t respond well if he simply
picked her up and took her to bed, it was time to quit while he was
ahead.

He wanted to
amuse
this woman,
seduce
this Rubens goddess,
lure
her into his bed to stay awhile,
maybe a very long, long while—a lifetime or so would be a good
start.

You don’t seduce. You overwhelm.

Giselle’s words came back to him in a flash; he
realized that in this area of his life, he had never followed his
own axiom:
If what you’re doing isn’t working, think of
something else.

Slow. Easy. No freight trains allowed. As long as he
could keep the door open, he could draw her out little by
little.

Once he had set his course of action, he stood and
stretched. “Well, Eilis, I’m going to head home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Plaza.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You drove all the way up
here to take me to lunch, which was way back down there again?”

Sebastian came down from his stretch and saw his
opening. He dropped, bracing himself on the arms of her chair, and
he kissed her, deeply and long, tasting maraschino cherry flavoring
on her tongue, until she sighed and kissed him back, then continued
kissing her a while longer for good measure. Finally, he drew away
from her slowly, watching her as he straightened to his full
height.

“Sure did.” He turned toward his truck. “And I’d do
it again, too,” he called over his shoulder before he climbed in
and drove home.

Once there, he pulled up the website of his favorite
vendor, ordered the supplies he needed for a new project for
delivery to the old falling-down barn at the back of Knox’s
property. He would inform Knox later that he had appropriated his
barn for an unspecified period of time and his services as an
artist’s assistant.

Maybe he had a chance of squeezing Ford out of her
mind after all.

* * * * *

Eilis went to bed that night and looked long and
hard at
Morning in Bed
.

Usually she fantasized about what it would be like
to be painted by him, that dark and dangerous, beautiful nude man,
made love to by him.

She remembered when she’d bought the painting: In
Spain, years before, at a gallery that had only had it for three
days. She’d already begun collecting Fords by then and she knew
with the certainty of a connoisseur that though the subject was
male, Ford
had
painted it. The strokes were off, though,
different somehow, slapdash, as if the artist had some measure of
contempt for the subject.

Her
obsession
with the painting hadn’t begun
until she’d married David, lived through the hell he’d visited upon
her, felt her self-esteem shred with each cruel word David
spoke—knowing she had to stay with him until she figured out how he
was stealing from her and where he hid it. She might never have
survived that time, much less emerged quasi-victorious, but for her
garden and
Morning in Bed
.

Somewhere in the back of her mind during that time,
she’d known Ford would find her beautiful, would make love to her
to give her that precious flush of orgasm, then paint her and
present her to the world as beautiful.

Rubens . . . painted goddesses.

So did Ford. While she didn’t like the Fords that
displayed rubenesque women, she did take comfort in the fact that
he loved them well, painted them, made them beautiful.

Valued
them.

She still wanted that, but she was no closer to
finding Ford than she ever was; she had private investigators in
Chicago and Atlanta and New York, LA and Taos and Seattle
searching—and had for three years—to no avail.

It occurred to her to expand her reach to Europe,
but tonight it didn’t seem quite as important while snatches of her
date with Sebastian—had she agreed to a real date?—kept
interrupting. She smiled when she remembered the kiss in the
garden, when he had told her she was a master gardener and that
what she had created was a work of art.

The old beat-up pickup truck he drove surprised her,
but more than that, the sight of Sebastian in old faded jeans over
battered black cowboy boots, with a plain white tee shirt tucked in
his waistband, had made her catch her breath. She’d stood at her
window watching him flirt with her flowers, muscles rippling under
his shirt. His jeans rode low on his hips and caressed his tight
butt with a lover’s touch. His tousled hair shifted colors from
black to iridescent navy in the sunlight as the breeze played with
it.

He was forty, her age, and looked thirty, yet she’d
seen the white scattered amongst the black. He would never go
completely white, but ease into a salt-and-pepper perfectly suited
to that sculpted face and those ice blue eyes that randomly
darkened to lavender, then violet and back to ice.

She’d seen a weapon, a matte black gun, in his
waistband at the small of his back. She hadn’t asked about it and
he hadn’t volunteered any information, but after their incredibly
enlightening conversation concerning the fate of Knox’s bride, it
made complete sense. She wondered if he had worn it while in her
office building and decided it didn’t make any difference; he was
who he was and for some reason, she found herself feeling . . .
Safe. Warm. Protected.

She knew Knox carried a weapon. During the course of
David’s trial, she’d noticed that all the attorneys in his office
did and she wondered if that happened in the other counties in the
metro or just Chouteau County.

She gave Fen a cease and desist order at the point
of a gun.

Then there was this mysterious cousin Giselle who
carried, to whom Sebastian had briefly referred as “Boudicca with a
Glock” with more than a little affection of the brotherly sort in
his voice. Eilis felt bereft at that. She craved that sort of
affection from her brother, a man who didn’t know he had a
sister—and would hate her if he did know.

Eilis had never met anyone who could stand Fen
Hilliard down on any level. She knew CEOs who cowered at the
thought of incurring his wrath—certainly Eilis was one of them—and
yet this family, Sebastian and Knox and Giselle, had declared war
on him with no trace of intimidation. She wondered what it would be
like to not fear Fen Hilliard.

She knew Sebastian had never married and it didn’t
take a high IQ to figure out why: looks and money. She wondered if
he had ever been pursued by a woman for his brain, but somehow she
doubted it. All that genius and sensibility wrapped up in pretty
paper and a handsome bow, going to waste.

Today, she’d had a nice date with a nice man. Not
King Midas, not Sebastian Taight, not anything but an interesting
and attractive man who made her laugh, made her think, and made her
tingle . . . there. She hadn’t met a man who’d made her do that in
. . .

Her brow wrinkled and her lips pursed.

Well, not in a long time, she supposed. David had
done her no favors and she barely remembered any one of the long
string of lovers before him. She swallowed. No, not
lovers
.

Fucks.

Meaningless, worthless, some of them nameless, and,
worse—not fun or pleasurable enough to make up for the transience.
Eilis couldn’t remember when or even if she’d ever truly enjoyed
sex with anyone other than herself.

Not worth remembering, particularly as compared to
Sebastian.

Who had only kissed her.

Three times.

Slow and easy, in a way she had never been kissed,
and her breath caught again at the memory of how he made her
feel.

But now she also feared that about him, how he made
her feel. He was dangerous to her in ways she had not expected, in
ways Fen Hilliard wasn’t.

Yes, Sebastian would sell her paintings, but she
would have done that anyway had she had time to clean out her staff
herself. Their salaries would have decimated the proceeds from the
sale of those paintings and the good cash would’ve been thrown
after bad. Pointless. He comprehended that decision based on her
inability to get rid of her dead weight and respected her for
it.

But no, he didn’t want to take her company or hand
her over to Fen, as she’d originally assumed. He wanted her company
to recover from what David had done to it, wanted to put her back
on her feet. He
understood
her.

Sebastian threatened her with his warmth, his
magic.