The Proviso (84 page)

She snarled at him but didn’t resist, still panting,
though from her run or from what her body was doing to her, she
didn’t know. The corner of his mouth curled in victory as he let
her go just long enough to finish undressing.

Justice’s hands wrapped as far around his arms as
she could and dug her fingernails into his muscles to have
something—anything at all—to hold onto so she wouldn’t collapse. He
held her and nuzzled her throat until she couldn’t breathe at all.
Overloaded with adrenaline and overwhelmed with what he was doing
to her, she could do nothing but stand and let him strip off her
barely-there pantyhose and scandalous underwear, his large, warm
hands stroking, caressing every inch of her buttocks and thighs,
calves, and feet on the way down.

He rose and her bra came off as if by magic, his
mouth again raided hers, and she gasped at how wonderful it felt to
be skin-to-skin with a man; she had never imagined anything like
this.

She started. No, not just with any man!

She was skin-to-skin, knee-to-shoulder, with
Knox
Hilliard
, kissing, having sex, his naked arousal pressed into
her bare belly. When, in the last three years,
hadn’t
she
dreamt of this moment?

From the first day she laid eyes on him—

I bet she wants to fuck Knox Hilliard as much as I
do . . . She wouldn’t know what to do with him if she had him . .
.

Justice gasped, her eyes popping open. Surprised, he
stopped and drew back, looking at her questioningly. She studied
his dark blue eyes and that gorgeous face for a long moment,
remembering that day in class when he’d touched her, defended her.
The day she’d fallen in love with him to begin with.

Then she threw her head back and laughed. When she
looked back at him, his face betrayed his shock and, still smiling
at the irony, she took his face between her hands and kissed him
the way he’d taught her.

She felt him smile against her lips, then she gasped
when he rolled her back onto the ground, taking the hit on his
shoulder.

“Iustitia,” he murmured, hoarse, still out of
breath. She felt his hand between her legs, drawing gently up the
inside of her thigh and she trembled. “Never let it be said that I
can’t or won’t give you what you want.”

She drew in a deep breath, her eyes wide, and arched
her back when his fingers slid inside her and his thumb flicked her
clitoris. He lowered his mouth and caught one of her nipples in his
teeth and she moaned aloud, then again and again.

Justice was beyond thinking. This is what she’d
wanted for three years, what she’d been taunted for wanting. His
hand, where hers went when she thought about him, and his fingers,
doing what hers did.

She felt her muscles contract around his fingers and
she spread her legs wider. In the middle of it all, her back arched
again and her body exploded. She sighed with the rhythm of his
hand. Her muscles moved around his fingers and clenched
rhythmically against them as she panted. He slid them in and out
while he nipped and sucked at her nipples and never once did she
forget who this man was.

Knox’s mouth found hers then and she pulled
everything she could out of him, again her hands on either side of
his face, holding him to her. Her knees fell wider apart as if of
their own volition, as if they hadn’t already gone as wide as they
could already, and his fingers withdrew from inside her.

Then he moved away from her, shifted—

Then
yes!
He was between her legs, the
insides of her thighs hypersensitive to the feel of his naked hips,
and he was balanced over her. She looked up into his eyes, which
were that same dark, dark blue even as she wrapped her legs around
his thighs.

“Kiss me, Knox,” she whispered, her fingers in his
coarse blond hair so that she could bring his face down to hers if
he was not inclined to do so.

But he was and he kissed her with a tenderness she
didn’t expect.

“Make love to me, Knox,” she whispered into his
mouth, then felt his soft answering sigh,

“I will, Iustitia, I will.”

She felt him, much bigger, much heavier, and much
longer than his fingers, ready to fill her body and she desperately
wanted him to. His mouth left hers so he could nuzzle at her throat
as he made his first impression in her virgin body.

And she screamed.

Her eyes popped open and she fought against him,
surprising him.

“Iustitia?”

“Get off! Get off! You’re killing me!” she cried.
“Please, please don’t. It hurts. Oh, it hurts so bad.”

Her sudden sobs shocked even herself because she
wanted this, but his body in hers was so foreign and painful, she
couldn’t stand it.
Never
had she expected—

She choked as she tried to stem the flow of tears
through her tightly clenched eyelids, but once begun, she couldn’t
stop the river of tears that poured down her cheeks.

“It goes away, Iustitia,” Knox whispered even as he
withdrew from her. “I promise it goes away.”

It barely registered in her traumatized mind that
his voice was heavy with a pleading that was just as foreign as his
body inside her. She didn’t care. She hurt too badly.

“Go away,” she sobbed. “Please don’t make me do
this. Please,” she begged.

She cried harder when she felt Knox’s head fall to
her chest and his sigh caress her flesh. She felt moisture between
her legs and she wanted to put her knees together, but couldn’t. He
was still on top of her, between her legs.

Knox shifted so that he lay half on and half off of
her, one leg still between hers. He caressed her face and ran his
fingers through her curls while she cried, in pain and humiliated
beyond belief. “I’m sorry, Iustitia,” he whispered into her ear a
thousand times if he whispered it once. “I’m so sorry. Please
forgive me.”

She closed her legs as far as she could. She turned
into him, curled up, holding onto him even though he was the one
who had caused her pain, and sobbed into his throat until she
hiccuped, then hiccuped until she fell asleep in his arms, naked in
the grass under the stars.

* * * * *

75:
SNAKE EYES

Sebastian ached in ways he didn’t remember ever
having ached. He knew he had no hope with Eilis now. It had been an
unrecoverable gaffe that had hit her in her heart, which lay with
her employees.

Yet every night he drove to Knox’s to continue with
the project he’d begun after his first date with Eilis, when he’d
stood in awe of her garden and seen her beautiful face in the
noonday sun on Brooklyn. The materials had arrived in November,
after which he and Knox had spent the winter out in the barn
hammering, stapling, painting.

Knox shared an exit with Eilis, but they lived on
opposite sides of the highway. Every night, he looked longingly to
the left to see if he could see one speck of her property, house,
anything. But she was too well secured to let that happen. She had
millions of dollars of art in that house, though many millions less
than before
Morning in Bed
had gone through the private sale
Sebastian had brokered to fund her cash reserves. He had not bought
it. He couldn’t stand the damn thing, but couldn’t bring himself to
destroy it. He’d even sold the three he’d bought back for Eilis—at
a hefty profit—figuring she’d not appreciate looking at nude women
who weren’t her, who didn’t have her body type, whom
he
had
painted, all the while knowing precisely how they’d acquired that
freshly-fucked look.

He drove into Knox’s driveway and he continued on
around the house, through the lawn where he’d cut a path with his
rickety old truck down to the barn.

Knox had grumbled about Sebastian appropriating his
barn and having his lawn wrecked by the workers who came to
reinforce the building enough so that it wouldn’t fall down on
Sebastian’s head. Once the structural work was done, the makeshift
electricity and plumbing done, lights and space heaters installed
for the coming winter, and an elaborate pulley system rigged to
Sebastian’s specifications, the rest had to be done by Ford and his
assistant—

—who had bitched and moaned the entire time he’d
helped prep the space and the canvases: twelve feet high and
twenty-four feet across total, in three sections clamped together.
Sebastian and Knox had used gallons of gesso and painted it with
rollers. They’d strung the cables through the pulley system to haul
it off the floor and lean it back against the hayloft, then they’d
assembled the scaffolding. After that, Knox had declared himself
officially done as an artist’s assistant and told Sebastian if he
wanted anything else, he’d have to recruit a different cousin, do
it himself, or hire it done.

That night, after he’d parked, Sebastian plucked a
very heavy five-gallon pail out of the pickup bed and took it into
the barn. He flipped on the switch and half blinded himself, then
turned on the music and looked up the canvas. Most of the top
quarter was finished and he had to admit he hadn’t done badly. He
had a hard time painting himself for several reasons, mostly
because he didn’t like to. It necessitated professional photography
and then painting from the photo, which he didn’t do so well.

He pulled out the paint he needed, a tray intended
to hold drywall mud, and a putty knife, then opened his pail.

Clear diamond chips. He’d already gotten the little
bit of ruby, emerald, and sapphire chips, not to mention the yellow
diamond chips and gold filings that he needed for different parts
of the painting. It was time to work on her body.

An entire tray full of titanium white, teensy bit of
chrome yellow, teensy bit of cadmium yellow. Then a fairly generous
scoop of diamond chips. He had no idea if this would work on a
painting this large. It had sort of worked on a five-by-five, but
he’d experimented until he had the paint so thick with diamonds,
the paint barely held it all together.

That night as he worked, he grew more and more
despondent as he remembered the sight of Eilis pulling away from
him, leaving him, and began to understand a little bit of the pain
Knox and Giselle wanted him to feel—what Eilis didn’t think he
should have to feel.

A goddess. She was his Goddess and he was the artist
who loved her and he was going to paint her in diamonds.

. . . don’t bother that man. You can see he’s
talking to his wife.

Almost a year ago at Bryant’s, Eilis and “wife” in
the same sentence had felt good. Right. Mrs. Van Horn occasionally
asked about the pretty blonde he’d been with the day he’d met his
little protégé Christopher. Just this past Sunday after dinner,
after all the Van Horn children had been sent out to play, he’d sat
at their table across from Christina and told her what he’d done to
kill the fantasy Ford. He’d flinched at the disappointment in her
chocolate eyes when he’d admitted that he hadn’t taken
responsibility for it, that he hadn’t done what Giselle told him
to. Christina’s husband had looked him in the eye and said, “You’re
a durned fool.”

Tonight, the idea of Eilis being his wife didn’t
seem just good and right. It seemed like an opportunity to bind her
to him with paper and ring, which he had fucked up. He wanted to
marry her, to be faithful to her, to give children to and take
children from her if she was inclined toward that.

And now he wouldn’t have the chance.

He hadn’t told Knox about their argument, nor
Giselle. He wanted to stay in their good graces as long as
possible. Since Eilis was so enamored of the fact she had a brother
who liked her and claimed her, and a cousin-plus-husband whom she
thought of as her spiritual and financial bodyguards respectively,
she’d probably end up telling them all herself.

Picking up his paint and four different sizes of
drywall knives, he climbed up the scaffolding and began. An
experienced muralist, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He
thwacked on the first plop of paint and realized that if he weren’t
careful, the diamonds would slice the canvas.

More paint, just to soften the edges of the
diamonds.

He painted for a long time. Tired. Sebastian
couldn’t remember ever being this tired. He hadn’t slept since she
left him; he’d sat in his living room drinking, which had given him
a hangover, but hadn’t put him to sleep. He didn’t know it was
actually possible to get a hangover without sleeping because he’d
never, ever gotten drunk before. Getting drunk was so . . .
gauche.

Maybe Knox would let him crash on his couch tonight,
because he sure didn’t think he’d be able to make the thirty-minute
drive home.

The tray was heavy. The spackling knife was heavy
and he didn’t dare try to paint with his right hand to even out the
load. No matter. This was a labor of love; the labor of an artist
who loved his goddess—

—who could not have her.

* * * * *

76:
ONE SOUL SHALL NOT BE LOST

Justice awoke not knowing where she was for a
moment. Her eyes blinked in the all-encompassing blackness until
she could make out silhouettes of furniture—not hers.

Not a dream.

She stiffened a bit, unwilling to turn over and see
Knox in bed with her, but after a moment of utter silence and
stillness, she realized she was alone. A thimbleful of
disappointment suffused her; after all that and he hadn’t slept
with her? Curious.

On sitting up, she winced at the soreness in her
hips and legs, triggering the memory of the details of what had
happened only hours ago. She gulped, unable to think about it right
then.

She looked down to see that she wore an enormous
pale blue Oxford shirt that smelled like Knox and a pair of soft
gray boxers. Once she stood up, she realized that the boxers would
have fallen off but for her hips. She took a step and winced.