The Proviso (73 page)

“Please, Eilis,” Sebastian repeated. “Please trust
us on this.”

She looked between them. The pain and sorrow, the
pleading, on their faces was too real, too deep. Whoever this
“daughter” was, these two men loved her and didn’t want her
or
Eilis to suffer. And right now, Eilis could afford to be
generous with the woman: She wasn’t Eilis’s sister, favored or
otherwise, and she had taken unexpected and violent vengeance on
the two people Eilis hated most in the world.

“Okay,” she finally said. “I’ll wait.” She paused
for a moment, looked down at the table because she didn’t have
anywhere else to look while she said what she needed to say.
Sebastian’s arms surrounding her helped, but not much. “Knox, I’m
sorry my father killed yours.”

She felt fingers on her chin and realized that Knox
was lifting her face so that she would look at him. “Eilis,” he
murmured, “it’s not your responsibility. You had nothing to do with
it and I don’t want you to take that on yourself.”

“Eilis, I want you to know something else,”
Sebastian said. “If anyone in our tribe had known about you, I can
guarantee you, there would’ve been eight families clamoring to take
you in and give you everything you ever dreamed of as a child. I
promise you that.”

Knox reluctantly chuckled. “Well. They’re clamoring
right now. They may not be able to wait until the Fourth of July
picnic. Aunt Dianne’s threatening a welcome-home party.”

“Dammit,” Sebastian muttered. “A hundred-plus people
using any excuse to have a party.”

“Your tribe— Are they all Mormon?”

Knox and Sebastian looked at each other as if
calculating that out. “Maybe two-thirds?” Sebastian finally said.
“We all grew up in the church, so you won’t be able to tell who is
and who isn’t by the way we talk, although by and large, the ones
who aren’t drink alcohol.”

That confused Eilis to no end. She had had very
little exposure to religion in her life and none of what she knew
about any particular religion impressed her enough to find one for
herself.

“I have employees who’re Latter-day Saints,” she
said, vaguely proud that she could say that, that she could
remember such details about them. “They don’t like the word
‘Mormon’ and they don’t act like you all do.”

Knox looked away and Sebastian sighed. “I don’t
believe what the church teaches, but it
is
possible to have
a faith and not live it. Knox and Giselle, Kenard— They’re the
minority of about five or six people in the tribe. They believe,
they have faith, but they don’t live the way they believe. Then
there’s the majority, the believers, and they’re just like the
Mormons who work for you.”

“We’re, uh—” Knox cleared his throat. “We’re not
normal.”

* * * * *

Sebastian handed Eilis into his car long after
midnight once she had drunk in every drop of information she could
get about Knox, her family, their family, aunts, uncles, cousins.
Her head spun with too much information, too much that was
significant. They were almost to the highway when Sebastian spoke.
“Eilis,” he began hesitantly, “I told you I had something to show
you and I do. What I’d like to know is, do you want to see it now
or would you like to wait until tomorrow?”

She was tired, but curious as to what could be so
bad that he’d made her wait until he’d shown her, especially after
the night she’d worn that kelly dress. “Tonight, I guess.”

He sighed. “Okay. I do have a guest room or
five.”

Her mind stopped on that and she said nothing for a
moment. “Um, guest room?” she asked slowly.

Sebastian didn’t look at her. “I’m not holding out
any hope that you’ll forgive me, Eilis,” he murmured after a
moment. “It’ll be up to you.”

Everyone is damaged. He may have secrets he’s
keeping from you. You don’t know.

Eilis sighed as the Virgin’s words came back to her
and began to tremble at what he could tell her that would be so
bad.

Silence cocooned them on the thirty-minute drive to
the Plaza, though it didn’t feel uncomfortable. Sebastian had
retreated into his head and Eilis had too much to process not to do
the same. Finally Sebastian pulled into an alley behind what looked
like a big black concrete box perched high on a steep incline on
the west side of the Country Club Plaza. From what she could tell,
the house followed the contours of the ground and had three levels.
The top level held the garage and it was mostly underground once
one drove up the alley on the west side of the house. They parked
right next to Sebastian’s old Ford pickup.

The garage door closed behind them and he helped her
out of the car, then opened a door and led her down a flight of
stairs to another door that led into the house. “Eilis,” he said as
he stopped in a corridor with a stark white wall on her left and an
open maple platform that was mid-thigh height on her left, “you’ve
had a lot of shocks today, a lot of stress. This is going to be
another one.”

“Sebastian, you’re scaring me,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

He led her down the corridor where it turned right
at a ninety-degree angle, past two doors on the left to a third. He
opened the door and it swung inward. The smell of turpentine wafted
up the stairs.

“Oh, this is your studio.”

“Yes.” He went down the switchback staircase first,
and she could see almost nothing because it was so dark. He drew
her into the room and then turned on the light. She flinched at the
suddenness of it, but as her eyes adjusted and she looked around,
her breath caught in her throat.

Her mouth went dry. She swallowed. Hard. She had no
words for the mixture of emotion that swirled within her in a
tornado.

Anger

Joy

Fear

Desire

Betrayal

Love

Shame

Happiness

There, in the middle of the room sat the magenta
chaise she had lain upon. Before she’d changed her mind. The whole
room looked just it did that night, with the exception of a few new
paintings covered in tarps.

“You—” she whispered. “You’re Ford.”

“Yes,” he murmured, “I’m Ford.”

“You— You were going to— On purpose.”

“No, I wasn’t going to. I was going to send you home
because I couldn’t do it. It would have been tantamount to rape if
I had made love to you as a man you didn’t know, but was me,
deceiving you.” He stopped, then began again. “I had planned to
tell you at Christmas, but . . . I didn’t know if you would ever
look at me as me, Sebastian, or as Ford, that guy you dreamed up in
your head, which guy is not me and which expectations I could never
fulfill, even if I knew what they were.”

She walked around touching things, and he said no
more. She didn’t know what to say, what to think, what to do.
Sebastian Taight
was
Ford and she had been too stubborn to
let herself see that because she’d been too invested in the Ford
she’d fantasized about all those years. The clues he’d dropped:

His training in art.

His anger at the mere mention of Ford and her desire
to be painted by him.

His sketchbook, which he most assuredly meant her to
find.

His Ford pickup truck that he’d bought when he was
sixteen.

He’d
wanted
her to figure it out on her own
and she hadn’t. Now Eilis didn’t know if she was more angry with
him or with herself. He’d fooled her with the same transparency
that got all the CEOs he’d ever rescued, only for her, it was in
his artist’s life. It was so obvious.

She walked to the deep, dark alcove, its heavy
cherry panels drawn back, where that magnificent bed stood on its
dais in the darkest corner and almost could not be seen at all. He
turned up some of the lights in that room and she saw it again in a
new light. This was Sebastian’s bed.

There was no Ford.

“I like Mardi Gras,” he whispered in her ear and she
shivered with a mixture of desire and anger. “I try to go every
year. N’awlins is the most decadent city in the world.”

To her left was the set of oversized French doors
that led into that red and gold salon and to the hedonistic
bathroom in stark white.

“Eilis, please go around the room and take the tarps
off the canvases.”

She looked up at him, unable to say anything. In his
face she saw worry, pleading, and uncertainty—three things she
never thought she’d see in Sebastian Taight’s face. In his voice,
the same things. So she did as he asked and left the bedroom to go
around the studio.

A tarp-covered canvas, eight feet long by five feet
high, leaned against a stack of blank five-by-five canvases. She
uncovered it carefully.

Her jaw dropped. It was
her
. And she was
beautiful. It was his nude sketch of her come to life in vibrant
colors and textured oils.

Eilis looked around at the other tarp-covered
canvases and she went to each one only to find herself, some nude,
some not, all beautiful, the way he saw her. At work, in her home,
in her garden.

And then there was that big canvas, a radical
departure from his public five-by-five hallmark. She uncovered it
to find her garden, every detail down to the last flower. And there
was no nude to be found.

“You’ve never painted anything without a nude in
it,” she whispered.

“Not true,” he said from directly behind her, and
she felt his arms wrap around her. “I just made my name in nudes.
What I have never done is paint a woman nude more than once and now
I can only paint that one.” He pointed to one of the canvases of
her, none of which were on five-by-five canvases; some were
smaller, some were bigger, but none five feet square.

Eilis knew what that meant: She was special, unlike
the rest.

“I don’t know what to say. I’m really angry. I’m so
happy I could burst. I’m shocked. I’m feeling betrayed and shamed
all over again. I’m—confused. It was so out of context that I
couldn’t—well, wouldn’t—pick up on it. I thought you hated
Ford.”

“I do. I hate the one that lived in your head. I
couldn’t compete. Wouldn’t compete.”

“You exaggerated his importance to me.”

“I’m sorry. It never occurred to me to ask you point
blank. All I heard was that you wanted a vacation so you could find
Ford, have him paint you, make love to you.”

“So you destroyed him.”

“That was the intent, yes.”

“These,” she said, indicating the canvases of her.
“Are you going to hang these?”

“Only with your permission. I want the world to know
what a perfect woman looks like. Eilis,” he murmured reverently in
her ear, “I have never, in my entire life, seen or painted a woman
so perfect as you. You are my finest work.”

Once again her breath caught in her throat, and she
was simultaneously aroused and so very deeply touched.

“In one day,” she whispered. “In one day I met
family who likes me and claims me, and I saw how Ford, how you, see
me as I’ve never seen myself. In one day—the most incredible day of
my life.”

“Better than opening bell at the stock
exchange?”

“I think— Much better.”

“Come lie with me, Eilis,” he whispered in her ear.
“Come and be worshipped by me, Sebastian, the man who’s been in
love with you since the first time he saw you.”

* * * * *

65:
NESSUN DORMA

Whatever she thought Ford could’ve given her,
Sebastian did. He was luxuriant, sensual, giving. He took her to
his bedroom upstairs, into a hot shower naked, tall and cut—a man
who could bear her weight with ease.

He took her hand and turned her around so that they
were touching from knee to collarbone. Their hands locked with
fingers entwined, he devoured her skin. Her neck, her throat, her
collarbone, her shoulders, her breasts. He got on his knees and
devoured her belly, then lower and lower. He turned her around
again and devoured the skin of her back, the skin of both her
buttocks, the crease where her thighs met her torso.

He bent lower, licked and sucked and nibbled on the
backs of her thighs, then the backs of her knees. Again he turned
her back to face him and he worked his way up her legs until his
hands gently parted her legs and he kissed her most private of
places. His tongue licked and his fingers slid through the folds of
her and she thought she’d die.

Eilis wrapped her hands in his hair as his tongue
did so many marvelous things to her that she had never expected a
man would ever do to her. Her head fell back and she panted for
air, and she knew she was going to fall over the edge—but he drew
away just as she got to the top of the mountain, and she felt cold,
bereft.

She opened her eyes and looked down at him. He
stood, sliding up her body, his hands trailing, touching wherever
they moved. He smiled at her, a crooked smile that, under other
circumstances, would have melted her heart a little. Under these
circumstances, it made her ache inside and feel her emptiness just
a bit more acutely.

Sebastian picked her up slowly, raising her far
above him so he could look up at her for a moment. She looked back
at him and what she saw astounded her: A man in love. With her.

Then he lowered her slowly and took a step forward
so that the shower wall was at her back, supporting her.

He wrapped her legs around him and slid his hard
length up into her. Immediately she gasped and clenched him. Her
mind froze as her body took over, quaking, the sensations like
nothing she had ever experienced. Exquisite pleasure, so fine and
ephemeral, like the delicate undulating lace of sunlight through
leaves. Her eyes closed and her head dropped back against the wall.
She could only feel his skin against hers, his big hands wrapped
around her hips, his body inside hers stroking in and out.

Building, building. Just as she began to slip into
orgasm, he held back, making her nearly cry with frustrated joy.
“Sebastian,” she whispered, agonized. “Please.”