The Proviso (92 page)

“Yes.”

“Knox didn’t pressure you?”

I won’t pressure you. You come to me when you’re
ready.

“No.”

“I gave her an annulment, dammit,” Knox grumbled.
“What the hell else do you want?”

“Did he?”

“Yes. I shredded it.”

Mr. Kenard sucked in a deep breath then and studied
her for a moment before saying, “Okay. Just wanted to see for
myself.”

Give it one more week, Justice. Just one week from
the time I take you back home. Can you do that?

He’d had this rescue planned before Giselle had
kidnapped her; she had known, had asked Justice to wait a week. She
wondered if Knox had known in advance, but she doubted it. She had
not thought it possible for Knox to look as if he’d been sucker
punched.

And Mr. Kenard, well. Obviously, nobody had banked
on Knox just . . . letting her go free, no strings attached, and if
they had, no one would have bet on her coming back of her own free
will. Suddenly, she felt a bit more forgiving of the Kenards:
Willing to ambush Knox, their family, to right his wrong against
her, a stranger.

“The offer’s always open, so call me when you’ve had
your fill of his bullshit.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kenard.”

“You’re welcome, Justice,” he said warmly, his voice
hoarse.

She left then, closing the door quietly behind her,
but stayed at the door and eavesdropped. It didn’t surprise her
when she felt Eric behind her, his ear to the door, too.

“You bastard,” Knox said, his voice not muted enough
to hide the dripping sarcasm.

“You’re welcome.”

“Lucifer was a bit over the top, don’t you
think?”

“You know the answer to that, as attached as you are
to theology. I figured you’d get the point. Apparently Sebastian
thought so, too.”

No answer.

“Knox,” Mr. Kenard sighed, “not everyone is going to
abandon you. You don’t have to work three times harder to keep a
woman who’d have gone with you willingly than you would to keep a
woman who’d have left you anyway.” What did
that
mean? “You
should’ve just asked her.”

“Get out of my office. And don’t pull another stunt
like that again.”

“You got a lot of nerve, you know that? You’re on my
case constantly about my dad, but you don’t want to hear about how
fucked up
you
are. Yet
another
thing that hasn’t
changed in twenty years.”

Twenty years?

“They both need to see a shrink,” Eric muttered and
grabbed Justice’s arm to drag her away from the door—and just in
time, too.

Mr. Kenard stalked out through the outer office the
way his wife had stalked into it two weeks ago. Knox stood in the
doorway of his private office, glaring after him, then glared at
Justice where she stood next to her things on the floor by Eric’s
desk.

“Get to work, McKinley,” he snapped. “You too,
Cipriani.”

Then slammed the door behind him.

* * * * *

84:
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

AUGUST 2007

“So Sebastian tells me Lucifer left you alone for
the weekend. Again.”

Justice blushed as she held the front door open for
Giselle the Saturday morning that would begin her second weekend as
Knox’s wife, but . . . not. Surprised yet touched that Giselle had
come all that way for her, she shrugged, attempting to feign
nonchalance. “I guess so,” she murmured as she stood uncertainly in
the entryway, Giselle watching her carefully. “He didn’t come home
last night.”

Giselle snorted and said, “I could’ve called and
asked if you had plans, but I decided I didn’t care. Let’s go to
the movies.” Justice’s eyes widened. The movies! Justice couldn’t
remember the last movie she’d seen and it would never have occurred
to her to go by herself. Suddenly she realized that she now had
time to do all the fun things she’d missed so much, things other
people did and took for granted because they didn’t have chores and
school and working for actual money all at the same time. “And, oh,
hey—pack a bag or something because you’re spending the night with
us. See? I can be as autocratic as that shit-for-brains husband of
yours.”

That made Justice laugh, just because someone had
said it and made it real. She had a husband and someone other than
she knew it, had referred to it as if it were an everyday thing to
talk to another woman about her husband. It wasn’t mentioned at
work; in fact, everyone, including Justice, took great pains to act
as if nothing was different about her relationship to Knox than it
ever had been.

Giselle drove to the local cineplex, where they went
from one movie to the next. “You have to really juggle those time
slots if you want maximum return on your investment of a day,” she
said as she dragged Justice from one end to the other, only five
minutes between the end of one movie and the beginning of the
next.

“No more!” Justice finally said after movie number
four. “I can’t take another one.”

Giselle laughed and said, “Couldn’t anyway. Gotta
get home to the hubster. It’ll be dark soon.” She glanced to the
west. “I think I may have cut that a bit too close.”

Justice thought it a very strange thing for someone
like Giselle Kenard to allow herself to be accountable to a
husband, and her face must have revealed her confusion. “Bryce
doesn’t like to be home alone after dark,” Giselle murmured, almost
reluctantly, as she started the car and pulled out into traffic.
“After his fire . . . Well, I mean . . . Um, he— He just . . .
doesn’t like to be alone in the dark.”

That powerful man, afraid of the dark?

You were
so
disgusted at Giselle’s
cowardice that she kept Kenard on ice for almost a year, and it
wasn’t a month ago you pounded my head into the table for being a
coward.

You don’t have to work three times harder to keep a
woman who’d have gone with you willingly than you would to keep a
woman who’d have left you anyway.

These men, Bryce Kenard and Sebastian Taight and
Knox Hilliard—powerful, wealthy men and much older than she—had
problems and insecurities like she did? They made mistakes? They
had fears? And Giselle Cox, a coward? Justice could barely wrap her
head around any of that.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Giselle murmured as she
drove south on I-29, sliding smoothly across two and three lanes at
a time to find any opening she could rocket through. Justice looked
at the speedometer edging up toward ninety, then out her window.
Yes, they raced the sun, and it was a long way from Chouteau Woods
to Brookside.

Justice said nothing for a moment. “I don’t know how
to put it in words,” she finally said. “I guess I thought your
husband was invincible. And Sebastian. Knox. You.”

Giselle shook her head thoughtfully. “No,” she said
slowly, “just better at hiding it. You get older, you learn how to
protect yourself better. Everybody has their weaknesses, their
Achilles heel.”

“What’s yours?” Justice said before she thought.

Giselle slid her a look. “Before I met Bryce, it was
whether I’d ever find anyone who could love me the way I wanted.
And then when I did, he wasn’t what I’d expected, so it took me a
while to come to terms with it.”

“And now?”

She paused, as if deciding what and how much to say.
Finally, “Well, one thing is that I can’t have children.”

Justice’s eyes widened. “Oh,” she breathed. “I’m
sorry.” And she was because suddenly, she heard a heaviness in
Giselle’s voice she’d never heard before. Ferocity, yes. Humor,
yes. Sadness, easily explained now. Anger, definitely. But this was
. . . pain. “That’s why that painting means so much to you.”

She sighed and looked away from Justice as if hiding
something, but she caught the glimmer of something on her cheek and
her breath caught.

Giselle Cox cries.

Justice said nothing more as Giselle’s foot stroked
the accelerator down farther and she glanced between the road and
the dusk.

* * * * *

“Hey, kid,” called Bryce (he had forbidden her to
call him “Mr. Kenard” anymore) Sunday morning when she finally
rousted herself out of bed and found her hosts in the front yard .
. . building a flower bed. He flashed a smile at her that was so
warm and welcoming that she felt like she’d acquired an older
brother.

“Good morning, Justice,” Giselle said as she slapped
mortar on a brick with a trowel.

“Not that way, Giselle,” Bryce muttered when he saw
what she’d done. “Here, like this.”

Justice kept her laugh to herself as she sat
cross-legged in the grass to watch the two of them together, the
way she teased him out of his impatience, the way he teased her
into a blush. She sighed then, wondering if she and Knox would ever
get to that.

“Not if he keeps leaving me every weekend,” she
whispered to herself.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” Justice replied, then figured it couldn’t
hurt to try these people for the answers neither Knox nor Sebastian
would give her. She knew better, really, but . . . “Why am I here?”
she asked sharply.

Both Giselle and Bryce stopped and looked at her
warily, then looked at each other.

“You mean, why are you here on Earth?” Bryce asked
slowly and Justice’s eyes narrowed at his deliberate
misunderstanding.

Giselle laughed and poked him with an elbow. “You’re
not in Scotland anymore, pal.”

He cast her an amused scowl, but looked back at
Justice. “Look, Justice, we can try to make things as comfortable
as we can for you, but you came back, so you have to ride this ride
alone. Either wait until he’s ready to come to you and explain, or
demand the answers, or leave him for good. I’ll be honest and tell
you I don’t like what he’s done to you, any of it, but this . . .
Your wedding—” He threw up a hand. “I’ve known Knox for twenty
years, Giselle and Sebastian have known him their whole lives, and
none of us can figure out why he did that or what he was thinking
when he did it. It wouldn’t be fair to you for us to
speculate.”

“I doubt even he knows why,” Giselle added. “He’s
not always, mmmm . . . ”

“Sane.”

Giselle nodded when Bryce pulled that word out of
the air. “That’s it. Sane.”

So Fen really wasn’t her biggest problem; living
with Knox, building a life with him, was, just as Sebastian had
already told her. No, that hadn’t figured into her imaginings. She
didn’t quite remember what she’d imagined now, but she was pretty
sure it had involved chocolate and roses and candlelight—

—from an experienced man who would lead her through
life with him, teach her how to hold up her end of a relationship
with him. So much for that.

“I want you to know something,” Bryce said then,
with that infamous Kenard fierceness, and she understood again that
she was not the target of Knox’s family’s anger. “If we had known
Knox was planning to force you at gunpoint, it wouldn’t have
happened at all.”

“I’m sorry I took you back there, Justice,” Giselle
whispered, biting her lip. “I didn’t know how far he’d go. Please
forgive me.”

Oh. Justice gulped, the remnants of her anger and
mistrust slowly seeping away. She looked away, across the street,
and waited a few beats just to make the point, then nodded.
“Okay.”

After a few moments of an uneasy silence, Giselle
broke it abruptly. “When’s your birthday?”

“August twenty-fifth.”

“Three weeks! You’ll be what, twenty-five?”

“Yes.” Justice didn’t want to think about her
birthday. Usually, it was just a day that passed by like any other
without fanfare or notice. But until Giselle had asked, she hadn’t
known how much she had wanted and hoped that Knox would know that,
would recognize it for her somehow.

“If you could have anything in the world for a
present, what would it be?”

For Knox to love me.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Bryce sighed and turned back to work, but Giselle
still stood, her expression one of speculation.

“Don’t you have
anybody
in the world?”

Justice hesitated when, for the first time, she
realized how alone she was in space and time. “No,” she whispered,
and looked away. “Just my online friends, my followers. If you can
even count that. I try not to, but it’s difficult when that’s all
you’ve got.” She paused. “There’s one in particular,” she admitted
reluctantly. “He— Well, I mean— It’s like he always knows what I’m
thinking.”

“It’s easy to get attached to people online, isn’t
it?”

Justice looked up at Giselle, surprised. “You?”

She shrugged. “Sure. I don’t get along with women
very well and it’s really my own fault. Then I ran across a few
female kindred spirits online and when I don’t feel like talking or
rousing any online rabble, I can just walk away from the computer
for a while.”

“And they don’t get in her personal space,” Mr.
Kenard muttered absently.

“That’s a plus. I read your blogs. Who’s your
favorite commenter?”

“Hamlet.”

Giselle stilled and stared at her. “Really.” She
exchanged glances with her husband. More subtext. Always subtext
with these people.

“I would have liked to have met him in real life. I
emailed him once about a year and a half ago, but I don’t think he
got it because he didn’t reply.”

“How’d all that happen, Justice? The politics, the
blogs?” Bryce asked, looking over his shoulder at her with blatant
curiosity as he buttered and set bricks. “You’re way too young to
have that kind of influence.”

“My mother,” she began slowly, trying to coalesce
her thoughts into some logical pattern. “Her name was Liberty.
Well, Libertas. She went by Libby. And my grandfather. He taught me
about American history, about the Constitution. He was a
constitutional lawyer.”