The Proviso (77 page)

On the other hand, she thought with a dreamy smile,
it would have been worth every single second spent with Sebastian,
being coddled and pampered, laved and loved, seduced over and over
again. She had never known that that existed, that people really
did that, that sex wasn’t a series of nameless, meaningless
fucks.

That there were men who gave instead of took.

Eilis . . . I love you. I’ll take you any way I can
get you.

Oh, yes.
That
was making love.

In reality, though, she could never expect that he
wouldn’t have other women. She didn’t trust that what he said in
the heat of the moment would be how he’d feel in a day, a week, a
year from now. No man as sensual as that, who loved women that
much—
Ford
—could really believe in or live things like
fidelity, monogamy. She wasn’t going to presume that he’d even
entertain the idea of marriage.

On the other hand . . .
I want to make and raise
children with you, Eilis. I want to bind you to me forever.

She really couldn’t think of anything that said
“commitment” more than that.

Her heels clacking on the sidewalk, she walked into
the building to find the usual hive of activity. She couldn’t tell
any difference between the collective activity of the one hundred
employees she had now versus the two hundred fifty she’d had before
Sebastian had taken a chainsaw to it.

The floor was humming along so nicely, in fact, that
she wasn’t noticed and that was a first. She looked up when
something caught her eye. There were blinds covering the
mezzanine’s glass walls—and they were drawn!

She climbed the stairs to her office and nodded to
her assistant, who was on the phone. Louise gave her a thumbs-up,
which surprised her. What really surprised her was the roundtable
of six executives gathered in the middle of her office. Karen was
giving an informal presentation and Eilis decided to take a seat
and watch.

Why had she never noticed Karen’s genius, her
leadership ability? Well, she amended, why had she not noticed the
extent of it?
Because I’d squelched her, that’s why.

Once given the authority to act on her
responsibility, she’d blossomed like a hothouse orchid. Sebastian
had known this about her. How?
Because he talked to them. He got
to know people. He gave them what they needed to succeed.

She knew where the blinds had come from now, and
why. Karen had put them in place, to keep this roundtable together,
short, on time. No distractions. It wasn’t for the benefit of the
employees in Cubicleville. It was for the benefit of the
executives.

Finally, Karen’s portion of the meeting was over and
Sheila stepped up to the plate. Ditto Conrad Fessy. Then Michael!
How
had they gotten him to speak more than two words strung
together and in front of people, yet? Eilis looked around her and
realized that there was one superfluous person left in her company
and it was her.

Somebody passed her the financial report going
around the table. She’d caught the tail end of a comment about not
making a bunch of copies for people when all they did was throw
them away. Things got printed once, passed around the morning
roundtable, initialed, then filed for future reference. The digital
copies were always available on the server.

Conrad’s idea, she was quite sure. He hated
waste.

Eilis glanced through it and gulped at the amount of
money flowing like whitewater through this company. All of the ad
campaigns Karen had launched were working like a dream.

The money coming in from the IPO shares was
incredible.

She started when the chair beside her was pulled out
and she looked up to see Sebastian there, sitting and leaning back
to listen, just as she had. She initialed the report and passed it
to him. He looked as somber as usual and a bit of her cheer dimmed
when he looked straight at her without a change in expression.

Until he winked at her.

She couldn’t help the wave of desire that went
through her. The chocolate and the absinthe. The oils and the
music. The poetry and the blindfold. The silk stockings and
stiletto heels. It had begun all over again after Giselle and Bryce
had left last night.

He flipped through the pages, nodding approvingly,
then initialed it—right-handed—and passed it on. Her staff never
missed a beat. They didn’t acknowledge either of them in any way,
though everyone was aware of their presence. They had too much work
to do to interrupt the flow. Eilis realized that this was a daily
routine that must have begun when she went to New York with
Sebastian for the IPO.

Her employees were invested now and they acted like
it.

The meeting broke up at nine on the dot and everyone
scurried to their offices with rushed greetings to her and
Sebastian as they scattered. In two minutes flat, the office where
she’d spent the last twelve years basically alone was again empty,
save her and Sebastian.

Neither spoke until she said, “I think I need to be
laid off.”

“Eilis, you’re in a position most CEOs can only
dream about. Enjoy it. Now. I need to talk to you in the conference
room, please.”

Her heart stopped and her breath caught because she
didn’t know if she was in trouble. She preceded him in and he
locked the door behind him. His face took on a predatory look and
she backed up against the table. When he got close enough to touch,
she hoisted herself up onto the table. He grabbed the back of her
head and brought them together for a hot, hard kiss.

Oh, yes, she was in trouble all right.

“I could fuck you right now,” he growled as he
climbed up on the table.

“Please do,” she whispered, sliding herself back and
lying down.

“What about Ford?” he asked once he was on his hands
and knees over her.

“Who?”

That made him laugh and they spent an hour in the
conference room. Nobody interrupted and Eilis wasn’t sure that
their presence was even a tickle in anyone’s thought process.

“My house or yours?” he whispered to her much, much
later after he’d shown Eilis how good hard and fast could actually
be. Twice. “I need a bed; my back and my knees are killing me. I’m
not getting any younger, you know.”

She laughed. “Yours. I love your dungeon.”

“My dungeon? You make me sound like I’m the Marquis
de Sade.”

Eilis made a face. “Eww.”

“Yeah, my point exactly. Okay, then. Meet me there;
here’s a code to the front door.”

“What are you going to do?”

He gave her a slow grin. “I have to pick up a few
things.”

“A few things” meant more fruit. More exotic wines
and champagnes. More ice cream. Different oils. Toys.

And a very wide emerald and sapphire choker set into
platinum filigree.

She gasped when she opened the black velvet box he
gave her once they’d made love hidden away in that incredible bed
yet again. Her hand was on her mouth and tears began to well in her
eyes as she picked up the exquisite piece with reverence.

Sebastian’s gaze was upon her as she studied it, and
she turned it over and over, taking in every detail. It called to
her; it was familiar. She got out of bed and walked around the room
with it, looking at all the canvases that were wet, half finished,
fully finished, and then she came to the enormous canvas of her
garden and she realized what it was.

The platinum filigree that held the gems was the
layout of her garden and the sapphires and emeralds were her flower
beds. The clasps were her stone bridge.

She heard him chuckle and say, “I knew you’d figure
that out pretty fast.”

“You’re a genius, Sebastian,” she murmured.

“I know. Come back to bed so I can lick you.”

* * * * *

They’d finally decided to eat a real meal at a table
in an actual dining room and were across from each other at the
conference table. Eilis, now an expert in the preparation of the
perfect rare steak, exquisitely spiced, cooked while Sebastian went
to his office for some documents, which he piled on the table
beside his plate.

Once they’d settled in to eat, Eilis took a deep
breath and blurted, “I’m not going to tell you about my past, so
don’t ask.”

Then she saw the flinch, the slight twitch of his
muscles, the slight glance to the side before he closed his eyes
for a microsecond. She sucked in a breath and could say
nothing.

He knew. Somehow— No, she knew how he knew and she
began to feel a little sick.

“I— Um—” He swallowed. “I wanted you to tell me, but
. . . ” He trailed off. “I had hoped you would trust me with
it.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to know,” she said
with a shrug. “Exactly. It was that I didn’t want to tell you
myself. How much do you know?”

He sighed heavily. “Your foster situations. Your
pregnancies. Your poisoning. The abuse. I mean, I have no way to
know what I don’t know. Eilis, I grew up in the ghetto, same as
you, and I never saw anything like that. And that Fen and Trudy—
Why they just didn’t hand you over to one of my aunts . . . I don’t
understand. Do either of them know any of this?”

“No. I’ve never told anyone until I told Giselle.
Everything. Every detail.”

Apparently he heard the slight bitterness she
couldn’t keep out of her voice, because he said, “Now wait a
minute. Giselle hasn’t said a word of it to me. She
never
betrays confidences.”

Eilis blinked and her nausea began to seep away.
“Then . . . how—?”

“When you were so quick to jump on the IPO idea
after I told you that Knox and I were at war with Fen, I knew you
were hiding something from me. I asked Knox to see if he could find
a link between OKH and HRP.”

“You didn’t find it.”

“No. But Knox brought over a carton of documents and
made me read every last one of them. That’s the first time I’ve
ever actually been afraid of him, the way most people who don’t
know him are afraid of him.”

“Why did he do that?”

“He said I needed to know real pain, your pain, the
way everybody else experiences it. He says I’ve never known pain or
failure, and I have no mercy, no empathy.”

“Oh, Sebastian,” she breathed. “I would hope that
you
never
feel pain the way other people feel it.”

His eyes widened a bit and his fair skin paled.
“What do you mean by that?”

Eilis had no idea what was going on but there was a
roiling whirlpool inside that big chest of his. She didn’t know if
there was anything she could say that would fix it, but the only
thing she could say was what she thought.

“You make people believe that pain and failure don’t
exist because for you, it
doesn’t
. Because you haven’t known
pain, it must not exist and so then the people you’re with believe
that pain—their pain—doesn’t exist, either. You infuse people with
your passion, your fire, your joy. You give people hope that no
cause is ever lost if they look at it the right way. You make
people believe in themselves and give people exactly what they need
to succeed, without a sense of failure, without a sense of
pain.”

He stared at her for a long time, then said, low,
hoarse, “Knox and Giselle think I need to know pain. They think I
did you a great wrong by bringing you here to Ford.”

Eilis pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t have known that I
had fallen in love with you if that hadn’t happened,” she said
quietly, watching him, wanting him to know it was important for
both of them that she experience Ford the way Sebastian had made
her experience him. “I wanted something that didn’t exist and
that’s what little girls do.”

She reached across the table and laid her hand over
his, white-knuckled around his fork. “When I’m with you, it doesn’t
exist. None of it does.”

He swallowed. “Knox is mad at me. Giselle hadn’t
spoken a nice word to me since the night you came to Ford.”

“Funny. Didn’t seem too mad to me.”

He said nothing for a long time, studying her,
watching her face. She stared back at him, hoping he would
understand that she felt free. “I guess they didn’t, did they?”

Eilis smiled at him. “Eat,” she murmured. “I have
plans for you later.”

He burst out laughing then, and did as he was
told.

“What’s that stack of papers there?”

“Oh!” Sebastian muttered around his bite. He
swallowed and leaned across the table toward her. “Were you serious
when you said you were bored with your company and wanted something
different?”

“Yes. I told you this morning I thought I should be
laid off.”

“I want you to leave HRP and take over OKH as CEO on
Knox’s fortieth birthday.”

Eilis’s mouth opened and her eyes widened. There was
a jumbled mess of emotion behind her sternum and she couldn’t
think.

Joy

Apprehension

Elation

Fear

Sebastian apparently leaped to some conclusion about
her feelings, and said quickly, “You don’t have to. I think it’s a
win-win for everybody. You get to take what Fen has. Knox doesn’t
have to take what he doesn’t want. Kenard and I don’t have to run
what we’re not interested in. Knox turns his shares over to us
because we’ve purchased so much of it and goes off and does his
thing. You get out of HRP and into something more challenging.

“I’d buy HRP from you or something, I don’t
know—haven’t thought that far ahead. The only thing is that you’ll
have to rebuild OKH from the ground up.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, Kenard and I have managed to
sabotage quite a bit of its growth, which we needed to do to drive
the stock price down.”

“And for a second thing?”

“Because I’m going to finish the job we’ve started
and destroy it.”

Her brow wrinkled. This wasn’t like him. “Why?” she
asked slowly.

“Because Fen has destroyed us. The sacrifices we’ve
made can never be paid back and he needs to know I’m not kidding.
He
killed
people. If that means I have to tell him I’m going
to raze what he built to get some justice, I will.”