The Proviso (90 page)

Knox sucked in a deep, quick breath. “If I’d known
that—”

“I didn’t understand it myself at first,” she said.
“When I went to pack my stuff, I was very happy to have a gun.”

“You think he—?”

She hesitated, remembering how she’d felt. “I think
it crossed his mind to test the waters. I think if I hadn’t had a
gun, he might have tried to push it. He said I looked like my
mother, so . . . I’m not sure he was seeing
me
.”

“Iustitia,” he breathed.

“So,” she went on briskly, “I’m upset you bought me,
but I’m grateful, too. You pulled me out by a hair.” There was a
long silence and she looked over her shoulder at him. He was still
chewing on the inside of his mouth. “There’s, um— There’s a
petition in the little safe that I don’t know what to do with.
Could you— Um, could you shred it for me, please?”

He looked at her sharply. “I don’t want you here if
you’re just grateful, Iustitia.”

“Give me a little bit more credit than that,” she
snapped, feeling their balance of power shift and level out for
good. She was here of her own will now and he had no more hold on
her.

“Okay,” he snapped back. “Then why
are
you
here? The
real
reason?”

Justice took a deep breath and turned back to her
folding. “I— I want to see where this, with you and me, together—
Uh, out in the grass, before—” She cleared her throat, embarrassed
because of what she was trying to say and stumbling over her words
because of it. “I mean, um, I want to know . . . If we— If you and
I can—”

She stopped. It wasn’t going to get any better.

“I want to try,” she whispered.

Deep, ragged breath. More silence. Then, softly,
“I’m sorry I hurt you out in the grass, Iustitia.”

She reluctantly chuckled. “So you said about a
gazillion times.”

“I won’t pressure you,” he muttered. “You come to me
when you’re ready.”

Shocked, she looked up over her shoulder then, and
he was gone.

* * * * *

81:
THE PARAGON OF ANIMALS

He’d disappeared completely by the time she’d
finished making his bedroom hers, too. There was an intimacy about
the task that made her feel like she belonged somewhere, to
someone—to Knox. That was just too surreal.

Unpacking and ironing done, she had free run of the
house and she was going to take advantage of it. When she opened
what turned out to be the garage door, his truck was gone. She
sighed.

To say the house had no decorative theme would be
generous. What little furniture he owned was a hodgepodge of types,
styles, fabrics, woods, and colors, some good quality and some just
cheap crap from Wal-Mart, but nothing special and in no particular
layout. It looked as if he bought the first thing he saw that fit
his immediate need.

Two of the three bedrooms were completely empty
except for a closet full of clothes she’d presumed he’d moved to
make room for hers.

The kitchen needed remodeling or—something. The
cabinetry was almost fifty years out of date. The ovens, original
to the house, hadn’t been used in years. The electric range top
looked like it saw occasional use, but she wouldn’t want to cook on
it. Her used gas Viking and old Sub-Zero were far better than . . .
this. Her lip curled. Clearly, he didn’t care. This was a place for
him to sleep and get out of the rain.

She opened a door in the hall to find a staircase
down to a full finished basement, which was obviously where he
spent his time. In one corner sat a large desk littered with papers
piled high, falling off the edge and collecting on the floor. One
cleared spot in the middle of the desk was big enough for a
laptop.

One wall had a huge TV facing a disreputable couch.
The blankets and pillow piled on the cushions told her where Knox
intended to sleep tonight and she swallowed.

Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with books
hither and thither flanked the TV. While he had as many books as
the Kenards, his were not perfectly ordered or stacked. These books
were haphazard, careless even, two and three layers deep. She
looked at some of the titles and her eyes widened. Religious texts
of all types, shelves and shelves of them. She lingered until she
realized that not only could she not tell from these which faith he
favored, she had never heard of half of them.

Knox Hilliard,
religious
?

“That might be a problem,” Justice muttered.

He had texts from economics to history to higher
math. He owned everything Joseph Campbell and Noam Chomsky had ever
written. She found several dog-eared and written-in and highlighted
copies each of
The Art of War, The Prince, Anthem
, and
Lord of the Flies
. Shakespeare alone, various editions of
collected works and single plays, took up three shelves. He had
dedicated an entire section to texts regarding the founding of the
country, the Federalist Papers, and other writings and biographies
of the various founding fathers. There were histories and books
that deconstructed the battle plans of various wars.

She pulled out a badly abused text on the naval
battles of the Revolutionary War; one section, about the privateers
who made their fortunes fighting the British, was broken out of the
spine, dog-eared, dirty, food-stained, written on, highlighted, and
obviously very, very loved. So, he was a kindred spirit in this,
and she began to smile as she ran her hand across the spines.

Her watch buzzed nine o’clock. She needed sleep
badly, but she was too wired, her mind too chock full and she
wanted to take advantage of her solitude. She needed room and time
and silence to think.

It was her day to blog, so she took her laptop into
the bedroom that had become hers only three days ago. With a deep
breath, she sat in the middle of the bed cross-legged, and cracked
it open. She had a routine:

Checked her email. She shook her head at the vitriol
some
religious
people threw at her for having dared to post
There is no God
. “I’m on your side of the political divide,”
she muttered, half amused, half annoyed. “Don’t know what
your
problem is.” Indeed, those nastygrams gave her more
ideas than she knew what to do with.

Found the streaming audio archives of the day’s talk
radio shows and started with Glenn Beck.

Typed, edited, proofed, and posted the article she’d
written in her mind. And she had a lot to say about freedom, about
bondage and slavery; property rights; living one’s convictions;
justice, mercy, morality, and revenge. That was about a
five-parter, right there.

Surfed the rounds of all the other blogs she
followed, read, commented.

Paid bills.

Pulled up the
Wall Street Journal
Online and
perused the headlines, reading what interested her, then moved onto
the
Washington Post
and
Washington Times
.

*

JMcKinley writes:

Yo, hamlet, where’d you go?

thefaithful writes:

havent seen him in a while

darrylm writes:

went back & lookd for his last post - a week

JMcKinley writes:

hamlet, name that quote: In the United States
there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is
successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a
successful person is a sinner.

*

She’d posted that yesterday in St. Louis. It
should’ve drawn him out of the woodwork in a couple of hours at
most. Disappointment settled in a knot behind her breastbone.

Lost in her thoughts, she was badly startled when
the most humongous cat she had ever seen jumped up on the bed with
her and head-butted her elbow.

Knox Hilliard had a
cat
?

“Hey, buddy,” she said softly, looking to see if he
had a tag and if so, what it said.

DOG HILLIARD

She laughed, a great rolling belly laugh.

Knox hadn’t come home by the time she took a shower
and went to bed. She looked for his shirt and boxers to sleep in
again, but they seemed to have disappeared. She went to his side of
the closet and dresser and filched clean duplicates shamelessly.
She found a pair of his socks and put those on, too.

She took a whiff of the shirt and sighed, because
she couldn’t help it.

Justice had her hand on the bedroom light switch
when the bed itself caught her eye. She went to it and stroked the
elaborately decorated antique wood.

A hand-carved sleigh bed, it was stained a rich
dark, almost black, walnut color. Because it was an antique, it was
smaller than a queen but bigger than a full. It would require a
custom mattress and custom linens; when she turned the bed down,
she realized that not only were the linens custom, they were very
fine, more so even than the ones on the bed at the Kenards’.

So. In this house, there were only three things Knox
Hilliard cared about: his bed, his books, and his cat. As she fell
asleep, she vaguely wondered if she would ever be the fourth.

* * * * *

82:
BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

Knox was in court all the next day, so she didn’t
see him, but that was okay. She did her day’s business in the usual
manner, although she had a hard time staying awake.

He hadn’t slept with her and she’d dozed most of the
night, wondering when she’d feel the lifting of the covers and the
depression of the mattress. It was nearly time to get up by the
time she’d given up and succumbed.

Once home, Knox wasn’t there. She was very tired, so
she changed into Knox’s clothes and decided to take a nap. She
awoke with a start only a few minutes later and looked at the
clock: two o’clock in the morning and it was dead quiet. No male
body next to hers breathing. No rustlings of covers that didn’t
belong to her.

Justice sighed.

Knox had made himself unavailable for talking—or
anything else—so she decided to pad out to the barn.

Sebastian was listening to Rachmaninoff tonight. He
cast her a glance when she came in and sat where she sat before. He
turned the volume down but kept working high up in the air.

“Where’s Knox?” he asked absently, busy scraping and
cutting paint, mixing and changing out the sizes of his spackling
knives.

“I don’t know,” she said after a while. “He wasn’t
in bed when I woke up.”

Sebastian cast her a sharp glance. “Really,” he
drawled, then turned his complete attention back to his canvas.
Neither said anything for about an hour, he working, she
watching.

“What makes it sparkle like that?” she asked
suddenly.

He started and looked down at her. “You can see
that?”

“Yes. Look,” she said and pointed to the opposite
wall of the barn that wasn’t lit, where millions of speckles in all
colors of the rainbow danced across it.

His mouth dropped and he sucked in a deep, amazed
gasp. “Hot damn!” he finally shouted, laughing. “Look at that! Holy
shit, I love that! Thank you!” He looked down at her again, still
grinning. Then he turned back to her. “Look at the canvas. Tell me
what you see.”

She tilted her head and pursed her lips, studying it
for a long while. “It’s skin,” she finally said.

“Yes.”

“You want it to look like mine, without the
freckles.”

He started, as if he hadn’t expected her to know
that. “Yes, kind of, but more ethereal.”

“It needs to be thinned out, not so textured. Like a
glaze.”

Sebastian raised an eyebrow, as if he were quizzing
her. “Why do you think that?”

She shrugged, not understanding why he’d ask her
such things. She knew nothing about art and cared less. “I don’t
know. I’m not an artist. You asked me what I thought, so I told
you. What’s in the paint?”

“Diamond chips.”

Diamonds
. Her eyes widened as she thought of
it, but she remained still.

Another half hour of renewed energy in his painting
and she saw what he was trying to do. She watched the wall while he
painted, cutting in the jewels with his knife as if he were
sketching them there, and the image’s main lines replicated
themselves in sparkles. He looked back at the wall, a wide grin on
his face.

Then it was Justice’s turn to gasp. He scraped every
bit of white paint off that canvas. Most came off easily; a little
he had to chip off.

“
Why
are you doing that?” she demanded.

“I’m going to start over,” he said. “I didn’t know
if this would work and it worked better than I ever hoped.”

“That’s a lot of wasted effort.”

He speared her with a glance. “There is no such
thing as wasted effort when you’re learning.” Then he was done for
the night. He climbed down from the scaffold and walked toward her.
“You shouldn’t come out here too often. Knox is very territorial
and would assume the worst.”

Her brow wrinkled. “He would just assume that I
would— With you—?” She bit it off and blinked back tears.

“Oh, no. He would assume I had taken it upon myself
to seduce you, paint you, and hang you in an art gallery for the
world to see—and believe me,” he laughed wryly, looking her up and
down very appreciatively, then again until she blushed, “if I
didn’t have my mind wrapped around one woman, I’d take great
pleasure in seducing you, Knox be damned. And then I’d paint you,
but for that, Knox would actually shoot me in the head. And he
wouldn’t blame
you
for a bit of that.”

She flushed again, deeper this time, embarrassed at
the thought of being painted nude, but strangely pleased that
Sebastian Taight thought her that attractive.