The Proviso (74 page)

“Please what?” he whispered back.

Eilis arched her back in an attempt to draw him
closer, to persuade him to release her tension for her, but he held
back. A low moan escaped her when he began to move again, grateful
for anything he would give her until she sucked in a sharp,
surprised gasp: Sebastian had sneaked up on her and she began to
come when she least expected it and oh, it was divine—

—Sebastian grasped her buttocks and pushed her back
against the wall, his hand up high on the wall, supporting himself.
He crushed her mouth with his while he thrust into her, coming with
a tortured groan that Eilis heard as harmony to the melody of her
own moan of utter bliss as she came with him.

Finally, Eilis opened her eyes and stared at him as
water sluiced over his head, down his face, making his skin
glisten. His ice blue eyes had darkened to violet and he watched
her intently, a small smile on his face that made him look like an
ordinary man. She smiled at him, then, delighted that he
was
just an ordinary man, not King Midas and not Ford.

Neither said anything for a while, listening to the
sound of running water and feeling it drench them, looking into
each others’ eyes and feeling each others’ bodies. Finally, the
water that ran down Eilis’s face had nothing to at all to do with
what was coming out of the showerhead.

Then he murmured, “Was that Sebastian or Ford?”

“There is no Ford,” she whispered in return,
choking. “Only you.” She held his face between her hands just to
look at him, to study him.

He stared at her. “Are you crying?” he asked,
wondrous.

“Yes,” she replied, then laughed through it. “That
was the first time I have ever made love, Sebastian. It was the
most joyous experience I have ever had.
What
blessed magic
have you worked on me?”

“What magic have you worked on
me
, Eilis
Hilliard?”

She swallowed, another first bursting in her soul:
The first time she liked hearing her birth name, because it had
been said by Sebastian and Sebastian took pain away.

He pulled her away from the wall. Still inside her,
her legs wrapped around him, he turned off the shower and carried
her to his bed. He turned and sat, then lay back so that she was on
top of him, straddling him. She felt him harden again inside her
again.

“I want to paint you like this,” he whispered. “On
top of me, with me inside you. I want to see you pregnant with a
child I put there, my child, and paint you like that.”

Her eyes widened and she sucked in a breath. “You
didn’t use a condom.”

“No, I didn’t, and I have never
not
used a
condom in my entire life.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“Didn’t want to litter the world with a bunch of
little me’s that I’d never know about. I never intended to use a
condom with you.”

“You want to get me pregnant,” she murmured,
slow.

“Yes.”

“Pregnancy results in things that are a tad more
long-lasting than an architecturally interesting belly. What would
you do with them?”

“Love them,” he said simply. “I left my childhood
religion behind long ago, but one thing I do know is that the Man
who created this—”

He gestured to her body, running his hands down her
ribs, inspecting her with both a lover’s and an artist’s eye, with
awe and reverence. He hefted her generous breasts and laid his palm
flat on her flatter-than-before belly and swept down, caressing the
hair of her pubis. His hands gripped her generous hips and still he
studied her, his gaze caressing every part he touched as he touched
it.

“The Man who created this is a master artist and
craftsman and he loves and is in love with a Woman, a fertility
goddess. He loves her so much that he wanted to immortalize her. So
he made you, a replica of her, his woman, in all the variations he
could think of. And because you are his tribute to his Goddess, he
loved you and he loved you so much that he made you his assistant.
And as his assistant, he trusted you with his best work, which is
Homo sapiens
.

“There is a Woman, the Fertility Goddess. The Master
Artist, her lover, worships at her feet, and whatever he gives her,
she gives to us, her children. The only thing I can do as a man and
as an artist is attempt to outline a child’s character—to pencil
sketch what I see and set the child loose to finish the painting
himself. The sketch will tell me when my part is finished and to
let the child have the brushes, even when my mind, my heart, tell
me I’m not ready to let him make free with the paint.

“I want to make and raise children with you, Eilis.
I want to bind you to me forever.”

Tears ran down her face at his reverent soliloquy.
She throbbed with the passion he infused through her, the
spirituality that ran so deep it couldn’t be seen unless he chose
to show it.

She swallowed. “Sebastian, I’m forty-one and I— I
don’t even know if I want children. I don’t— Not because I don’t
like children, but I don’t know what kind of mother I’d be. Maybe
not a very good one, I think.”

He looked at her for a long time and she was afraid
to look away in case she would blink and he would be gone. “Eilis,”
he said, “I don’t agree you wouldn’t be a good mother, but I love
you. I’ll take you any way I can get you and if that means no
children, that’s what that means.” He lay his hand flat over the
tiny pooch of her belly again and caressed it. “You are
my
fertility goddess and if the only way I can immortalize you as the
Master immortalized his Goddess is to paint you, then I’ll take it
and be grateful for it.”

* * * * *

66: LE
CYGNE

“Why didn’t we sleep in the bed downstairs?” Eilis
asked late the next day as they ate together in what Sebastian
called the conference room. She wore one of Sebastian’s Oxford
shirts and nothing else.

Sebastian wore only a pair of very short cutoff
jeans shorts that rode low on his hips and showed off his body in a
way Eilis had never seen it. He hadn’t bothered to button the fly
and she couldn’t keep her eyes off the trail of black hair that
disappeared into the V of the plackets. He took her breath
away.

He caught her staring and cast her a wickedly lusty
grin. “Giselle calls this my Parisian peacock look.”

Eilis laughed, delighted, because it was true. “I
could look at that for a while.”

Chuckling, he said, “The bed up here, where we slept
last night, is where I sleep alone, where I dress, where I get
ready for the day’s business. I have never had a woman in that bed
before you and I wanted our first time together to be in that room,
Sebastian’s room.”

Eilis blushed and felt warmth suffuse her.

“The one downstairs is for love and sex and fucking.
I’ve never slept in that bed alone.” Eilis’s smile dimmed a bit,
but he went on in a wry tone, “It seems my family makes frequent
use of it. Apparently, my cousins who know I’m Ford bring their
spouses on a rotating schedule timed for my out-of-town trips. I
came home early from Italy and caught Giselle and Kenard
in
flagrante delicto
.”

“They slept in your bed?” she asked, aghast.

“No, they didn’t
sleep
in it,” he grumbled.
“That’s my point. Mind you,” he added, “that’s going to stop
because I don’t intend to sleep upstairs again anytime soon. I
haven’t slept in that bed for five years and I’ll be damned if I
just turn it over to my family.”

Eilis’s eyes widened. “Five years?”

He nodded. “Yep. Giselle is the only woman I’ve
painted nude in all that time and there was nothing arousing about
it. It was a statement on her conflicted sexuality, so it doesn’t
count.”

“Why haven’t I met her yet?”

“You have. She’s the Virgin.”

“That’s Giselle? The one Fen’s terrified of?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she breathed, re-experiencing the warmth and
love the Virgin had surrounded her with. “She’s
wonderful
.”

There was a pause and Eilis looked up to see him
studying her with an inscrutable expression. “How do you mean?”

“She took care of me that night,” she said, clearing
her throat, remembering. “She put a robe on me and helped me to the
shower. She brushed and braided my hair. She took me home and
undressed me and tucked me in bed. She took my painting down off
the wall and put it on the floor, face to the wall, so I wouldn’t
have to see it when I went to sleep and woke up.”

Sebastian was dumbstruck. “
Giselle
did
that?”

“Yes. She stayed the night in another room. She took
care of me the next day, too. She cooked for me. She rocked me and
sang me lullabies, and I poured out my soul to her and she held me
while I cried on her shoulder, and she cried with me. She brought
me dinner in bed. For a week, she was the mother I never had.

“She wouldn’t tell me her name. I never called her
anything. We didn’t talk a lot. We did a jigsaw puzzle together
that first day. Her husband came every night to sleep with her
because he couldn’t stand to sleep alone. He brought more puzzles.
And it didn’t matter that I didn’t know who they were. All I knew
was that she took care of me until I could do it myself. I never
met the Giselle you talk about and even her husband called her
‘warrior queen.’ I don’t understand that.”

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think Giselle has no
place in this world. She takes the church seriously, but she’s
steeped in the eastern ideas of war and honor and justice, and
she’s sensual to her core. She doesn’t even try to reconcile them
all and she won’t choose one over the other, so they’ve torn her
apart most of her life.”

“I never saw the warrior.”

Sebastian took a deep breath and stared at her for a
long time as if trying to decide what to say. “Giselle is the one
Fen referred to as his daughter.”

Eilis felt the bottom drop out of her world and her
breath catch in her chest. She wondered if she would ever be able
to breathe again. “I— I told her everything, all about my life,”
she whispered, swallowing, panicking. “Things I’ve never told
anybody, things I don’t ever want to talk about again. What must
she think?”

“She apparently thought enough of you to knock Fen
senseless and break Trudy’s face,” he muttered. “She didn’t want me
to bring you to me that night. She really tried to talk me out of
it, but I didn’t listen to her and I played on her sense of
obligation to me and guilt to make her do it. I wasn’t at all
honorable about it. Before she took you home, she came up here and
chewed my ass but good. She told me what to do to salvage that mess
I made, but I didn’t listen to her. She hasn’t spoken a civil word
to me since.”

Eilis blinked. “She— I don’t understand why she’d
care for me, defend me. She doesn’t know me.”

He shrugged. “That Giselle you described to me, who
cared for you and cried with you?
I
don’t know
her
. I
can’t tell you why she did what she did. Knox would know.” His
voice had a strange hollowness she didn’t understand and she looked
up at him, but he looked away from her. She didn’t press the
point.

“Her and Fen—”

He cleared his throat. “We never understood her
relationship with him until you said he had another daughter. Fen
respects her, loves her in his sick and twisted way, but he’s
always resented that he couldn’t control her the way he controlled
Knox. They always got along well as long as Fen amused her and
hadn’t pissed her off, which he did a lot. I’m positive that Fen
doesn’t care that she beat the hell out of him. His punishment is
that he can’t redeem himself in her eyes now.”

“She would forgive him trying to kill her but not
for having abandoned me?”

“She can take care of herself and she has all the
power their relationship. An abandoned child can’t take care of
itself; it has no power.”

Eilis’s head swum and she laid her forehead in her
palm.

“I’m so confused. She was so gentle.”

“You’ll have to introduce me to that woman some
time. I’d like to meet her.”

“But her husband knows this.”

“He would have to, I guess.”

“She calls him Ares.”

Sebastian gave a short laugh. “The god of war. He
caught her where she lives and breathes, which is on the
battlefield and as far as I can tell, their bed is their
battlefield.”

Eilis could feel the heat rising up in her face.
“When they were at my house, I heard them. He’s— When they— Um . .
. ”

“Vicious?”

“Yes. It bothered me. Well, bothers me. I— No, I
hate
it,” she burst out. “He’s twice her size. I thought he
would— I almost called the police.”

“Given what David did to you, I can understand why
that shook you up.” He paused. “That’s who they are, Eilis. It was
what Giselle was looking for and it works for them. They don’t act
that way outside the bedroom and you caught them in a private
moment, so . . . ”

Eilis digested this for a moment, recalling how
Ares—Bryce—had tiptoed around her that week as if afraid he might
say or do the wrong thing, but always helpful, always
thoughtful.

She sighed and admitted, “He was very kind to me. I
shouldn’t have let that color my view of him— Of them.”

“He makes Giselle happy. He’s Knox’s best friend. He
fits in with the tribe and he’s become a good friend to me, so
that’s really all I care about.”

She took a deep breath. “What did Trudy do to
Knox?”

“Kicked him out of the house with nothing but the
clothes on his back. He was fifteen.”

Eilis sighed. Her mother hadn’t wanted either of the
children she bore; she just couldn’t dispose of the second as
easily as she had the first.

“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds,” he added, as if
reading her mind. “He went to live with Aunt Lilly and Giselle. I
mean, it wasn’t like he didn’t have anywhere to go. He was the
golden boy of the tribe. Good kid, did what he was told, didn’t
drink or smoke or do drugs—basically your regulation Mormon kid in
spite of Trudy. Cheerful, optimistic no matter what. He liked going
to church and someone in the tribe made sure he got there every
week, without fail. Sometimes Oliver would take him if he wasn’t
busy. Wanted to go on a mission. Trudy made sure he was educated
and cultured. And he had an adventurous streak I’d compare to Tom
Sawyer, Huck Finn.”