The Proviso Read online

  And Giselle did. She ran crying back to her friends, but no one approached Giselle with accusations of what had happened in the glade.

  Sherry left two weeks later, but Giselle continued to watch over Justice long after her impassioned speech was forgotten by all but three people.

  1: THE FIRST WIFE

  SEPTEMBER 2004

  The Kansas City crime scene unit had had to dredge Leah Wincott’s body from a pond, so the casket remained closed. There was only one reason any bride of Knox Hilliard—especially one who had a child already—would turn up dead.

  Bryce knew he should probably stop sneaking glances at one particular mourner while his friend and client lay at the front of the chapel garnering her due respects. Leah’s death had too many implications to allow distraction, but he’d taken one look across the room and he could think of nothing but the woman who’d caught his attention.

  She sat in a darkened back corner alone, her arms folded across her delectable chest. In one hand, she held a Dixie cup filched from one of the funeral home’s restrooms. She took a sip, then stared down into it. She looked good in black. No, she looked like a queen in black.

  Anger, not sorrow. He didn’t know what kind of a relationship she had had with Leah, but he could feel the rage radiating from her in waves. By the time a funeral rolled around, most people had passed the anger stage of grief, or at least they hid it for the rest of the mourners. Not this woman; she seethed and her modest dress didn’t do a thing to mitigate her mood.

  He studied her from where he stood in the midst of a cluster of people who had shown up at Leah’s visitation to witness the last event in the debacle of the most awaited and debated wedding on Wall Street.

  Two weeks earlier, the OKH Bride, the woman who, with two tiny words would enable one man to inherit the majority shares of a Fortune 100 company, had been snatched from her dressing room and murdered just before she could say “I do.”

  Still the woman he watched sat slumped in her chair, her expensively shod feet resting on the folding chair in front of her. Dull blonde corkscrews cascaded just beyond her shoulders. She had already plowed her fingers through them several times in a futile effort to keep them out of her eyes. Finally, she huffed, set her Dixie cup down on the chair next to her, reached up, and began to braid her hair back.

  Bryce sighed. He wished she hadn’t done that. On the other hand . . .

  The black velvet of her short bodice shimmered subtle gold and stretched over her breasts. His nostrils flared, just a bit, at the thought of stroking gently over one of them, pausing to flick at her nipple with a thumb.

  Her knee-length silk-and-chiffon skirt had risen until the hem caught on something indiscernible about her thigh that was distinctly out of place. It took him out of the moment of sexual fantasy and into the realm of sheer curiosity at what would require one to wear a heavy black strap around one’s thigh. He couldn’t think of a reason at the moment, but it didn’t matter. She’d finished braiding and she returned to her previous attitude: slouched, her arms folded, scowling at the floor.

  An older woman in black passed behind her, pulled her fingertips lightly across her back in what seemed to Bryce a loving caress, and said something to her when she looked up.

  Now he could see her face in its entirety and he sucked in a breath. He’d seen her before, in a Pre-Raphaelite painting he remembered studying in freshman humanities more than twenty years before. Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who demanded equality with Adam and left Eden in a snit when he refused.

  Bryce had never forgotten that tale, nor the painting. The idea that Adam had had a wife before Eve had shocked him to his core at the time. Further, the particular point of Lilith’s complaint against Adam had aroused Bryce painfully. As he watched the warm, breathing Lilith across the room from him, he didn’t have to wonder if she’d demand to be on top.

  He wondered how she’d go about demanding it.

  The older woman had stopped speaking and waited for Lilith’s response. Her mouth tightened and she looked away, off into nothing, thinking. Finally, she glanced back up at the woman, nodded once, and spoke. He could read her lips.

  Okay, Mom.

  The mother walked away with a pat on Lilith’s shoulder. As she arose, her full skirt caught again, on the chair this time, and he sucked in a sharp breath. More to the point, what would require a woman to wear a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol strapped to her thigh at a visitation, under a cocktail dress, with no other trappings of law enforcement? The black lace of the top of her stocking only added to the arousing effect of the odd juxtaposition of delicate lace and lethal steel.

  This Lilith had him harder than Collier’s painting.

  Dammit, she mouthed as she swept her hand down her body to straighten her dress and cover the gun. The black-and-gold fabrics flared and shimmered when she turned from him. Her ridiculously high heels forced the muscles of her legs into sharp relief and his eyes widened at the latent power he saw there when she strutted away into the dark recesses of the funeral home until she disappeared.

  He hung back, loath to follow her. He raised his left hand to feel his face, the burn scars that disfigured him, mocked him, kept him from approaching women because he hated the flinching, the fake politeness.

  Monster.

  He’d overheard that frightened whisper long ago when the scars were still relatively fresh, and though it didn’t make him angry anymore, it did serve to remind him of his sin, the punishment for his sin.

  The image of that woman, Lilith, dangerous, muscular, on her knees in front of him, his hand clutched in her hair, her mouth around him, flared in his mind. He thought he’d never catch his breath.

  His feet took it upon themselves to trace her path, following a hint of a perfume he knew would belong to a Lilith: spice and flowers with a hint of sex. Far away from the chapel, toward a small, dimly lit room at the other end of the building, he rounded a corner and heard a delicate female voice, filled with anger.

  He stopped, ducked back a bit, listened.

  “Say it, Knox.”

  A sudden whoosh of air. “Okay, okay,” came a man’s voice. Knox Hilliard’s—the fiancé of the woman in the casket. “You were right. I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Giselle, you don’t know how sorry I am.”

  Giselle.

  Not Lilith. His disappointment was deep and sharp, but she made it disappear with the unexpected sorrow in her whisper. “Oh, I’m sorry, too, Knox. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  There was a pause, then the sound of rustling fabric. Bryce risked a peek around the corner and saw her engulfed in Hilliard’s arms, his face in the crook of her neck, her arms wound around his shoulders and her fingers curled into his hair.

  “Come home with me tonight,” he murmured, one hand undoing her braid and the other splayed across her buttocks, crushing her to him. “Please. I need you.”

  Bryce’s heart thundering in his chest, he pulled himself away from the tableau in front of him and dropped back against the wall. His mind churned through the implications of that even as the silence lengthened, only to be pierced with the soft sounds of kissing.

  He didn’t wait to hear her response. Nauseated, he pushed away from the wall and stalked out of the funeral home.

  That Leah Wincott, Bryce’s friend and client, had died for the sake of a man who had a mistress—it angered him.

  That Bryce wanted a woman he didn’t know, who wouldn’t be interested in him anyway, the mistress of Leah’s groom—it enraged him. Lilith, succubus.

  That the man between Lilith and Leah was Knox Hilliard, well . . . Bryce felt thoroughly, inexplicably, betrayed.

  Again.

  * * * * *

  2: ROMEO & JULIET

  “One night,” Knox whispered into her mouth as their kiss softened.

  In the aftermath of Leah’s death, with all the attendant guilt and grief, Giselle understood that he needed her. She couldn’t say she didn’t need him that way, too, but . .
.

  “You know what I’m going to say,” she murmured, pulling away from him. She placed her palms on either side of his tanned, ruggedly handsome face and looked into his ice blue eyes. She studied him and for the first time noticed how he had aged under the weight of constant stress. Thirty-five going on forty-five. “If we ever have sex, it can’t happen because of something like this. We’re not teenagers anymore and it’s about fifteen years too late for us. All you want right now is comfort sex and I won’t do that. I deserve more, especially from you.”

  He sighed.

  “Besides, what about last month?”

  He pulled away from her and stared at her warily. “What about last month?”

  Her mouth pursed. “You know what about last month. I was there, remember? You took one look at that girl and you were a goner. I don’t know how you planned to work that out with marrying Leah, considering your excruciating monogamy, but you weren’t subtle about it.”

  “I am not going to discuss that with you right now. Maybe not ever.”

  Giselle watched Knox pace in utter turmoil, but she had her own guilt to deal with; she could have prevented Leah’s death if she’d followed her gut.

  Honey, thank you, but I don’t need a bodyguard. I’m the most high-profile woman in the country right now and Fen wouldn’t dare have me killed. Once I’m married to Knox, Fen won’t have any reason to try to kill you again.

  Leah, I don’t have a good feeling about this.

  Giselle! Put that gun away and stop pacing. If you can’t do that, leave. I’m about to get married in front of five hundred people. I don’t need your fidgets on top of mine.

  But—

  Out!

  Okay, you know what? I’m going to go get Knox.

  You do that.

  Leah’s rich south Texas drawl still echoed in her head, even after two weeks. Giselle had no doubt that Knox loved the woman in the casket. She also didn’t doubt that his guilt over her death was now exponentially worse: not only had he taken Leah’s side of the argument but . . .

  “Now you’re stuck with the added guilt of falling in love with a woman you weren’t getting married to and can’t have anyway.”

  He flinched.

  “And you want me to kiss your wittow owwie and make it all better.”

  “Yes, I do,” he shot back. She found herself pulled into his arms again, his big hand wrapping around the back of her thigh, pressing her into his arousal, her skirt gathering over his wrist as he stroked upward. They kissed with the confidence and familiarity of thirty years of history.

  Knox didn’t do much for her, but she had her doubts as to the existence of what she really wanted. Thirty-four and at the breaking point of her quest for celibacy, finally giving in and making love with the man who’d spent half his life being her boyfriend would be . . . convenient, an incredibly elegant solution to every issue that surrounded them.

  Temptation rose within her, though only on an intellectual level. At this point in their lives, their circumstance, it didn’t much matter that his arousal for her was conditioned reflex. Why should she expect him to give her what she couldn’t give him?

  “Now, see, that’s the answer to the problem right there.”

  The kiss ended abruptly with that smug pronouncement from the doorway and Giselle groaned as she turned and walked away from Knox and the man who had sought them out.

  “Fuck you, Sebastian,” Knox snapped.

  “No, fuck her,” Sebastian drawled. “Marry her. Knock her up. I don’t care in which order that happens. Start adoption proceedings. Something.”

  Knox sighed. “Dude, I don’t need this right now. I’m burying my fiancée.”

  “Yeah, and we’re going to be burying you next since Giselle won’t actually die when she’s torched and shot.”

  That prediction held quite a bit of truth, so Giselle said nothing. Knox, too, remained silent.

  She looked at her cousin out of the corner of her eye as he stared between her and Knox. Sebastian, at thirty-eight, was six-foot-two of classic black Irish, his trademark scowl exuding darkness and danger. His handsome face did nothing to mitigate his sinister air.

  “We’d kill each other before a year was out,” Knox muttered after a long moment.

  Giselle nodded. “That’s true.”

  “You two have been together on and off since before you knew what tongues were for. Lots of people get married with less than what you have. Fen’s never going to believe you won’t end up together, so the only way to keep Giselle safe is for you to marry her. If she’s married to you, he won’t be able to go after her again without getting the entire KCPD up his ass. You hide behind the FBI, so let her hide behind you. Everybody’s safe and happy until the turnover of OKH to you.”

  Giselle’s throat clogged and she wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly chilled to her soul. “Sebastian,” she murmured over her shoulder, “just for one moment, think about the child we’d have to have to fulfill the proviso, will you? Leah came with a daughter, so that was the perfect solution. Marriage I could live with just to win the game because nothing would keep us from getting divorced as soon as possible. But a child? No. Whether we had one or adopted one would make no difference. It would bind us together for the rest of our lives. I love Knox dearly, but not that much and not that way.”

  “That about sums it up for me, too,” Knox added.

  “Oh, that explains the groping.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Giselle said, her patience strained, “I refuse to have or adopt a child on such mercenary terms. It’s immoral and it would make both of us whores, so there really is no point to getting married at all.”

  Sebastian said nothing for a moment, then, “Well. Now that you put it that way.”

  “You know what?” Knox said. “Forget OKH. I don’t want it.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t want it?” Sebastian asked slowly.

  “I have no interest in it and it’s not worth the price.”

  Giselle turned to gape at Knox.

  “Uh, Knox,” Sebastian said after a moment of stunned silence, “you’ve spent your entire life preparing to take over that company when you turn forty. When, exactly, did you have this change of heart?”

  “The minute I became the Chouteau County prosecutor,” he snapped. “I can’t manage shit. I put people in jail and I teach. That’s all I’m good at.”

  “That was eight years ago. Could you not have told us this sooner?”

  He groaned. “I didn’t know how much I dreaded it until I was waiting for the wedding to start. I never got cold feet about getting married. I had cold feet about having to take a job I’m not suited for and don’t know how to do. Now I have to take it because Fen’s killed two people to get it and keep it.”

  Giselle raised her hand. “Uh, hello?”

  “Suck it up, princess. You’re still alive.”

  Sebastian’s mouth tightened. “There are exactly two immediate solutions to the problem, neither of which you—or Giselle—are willing to carry out. So, of course it’s up to me to bail your ass out.”

  “Nobody asked you to, so don’t act like you’re the martyr of the piece.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned if I sit back and let him continue to walk all over you two like he did Oliver and Leah without consequence.”

  “Sebastian,” Giselle said, impatient. “None of this is Knox’s fault. I don’t understand why you’re taking it out on him. And he did try.”

  Sebastian grunted. “Well, that’s true. Knox, I’m sorry this is happening to you. However, since it is happening to you, you now have two options: Cut and run or stay and fight. Staying and doing nothing isn’t an option because he will not trust that you don’t want OKH anymore. How you fight is up to you, but what you’re doing hasn’t worked, so think of something else.” Giselle leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “Either kill the bastard or let Giselle do it. She’s earned the right to it at this point.”

&nb
sp; She’d certainly fantasized about it often enough.

  “Whatever gets done to him, I have to do it,” Knox muttered.

  “But you’re not doing anything,” Sebastian returned. “That’s my point.”

  Neither Knox nor Sebastian said anything for the longest time, which was uncharacteristic. Giselle opened her eyes and looked from one stubbornly set face to the other. Knox finally opened his mouth but when nothing came out, he closed it with a snap. Giselle watched him speculatively, wondering if he would tell Sebastian he’d fallen in love with another woman just a month before.

  Knox caught her look and glared at her in warning. Sebastian witnessed the exchange and awaited an explanation, but neither she nor Knox felt like enlightening him. Yet.

  Giselle huffed. “You,” she said, pointing at Knox, “go back to your crooked little outfit up there in Chouteau County and act like the corrupt bastard that you are. Whether you want your inheritance or not, the only way you’re going to get out of it is by being dead. You,” she said, pointing at Sebastian, “business as usual. Any which way this turns out, you win, so I don’t understand why you’re bitching and moaning over a smattering of extra paperwork that Jack’s taking care of anyway. You would’ve done this a long time ago if Knox had come to his epiphany earlier.”

  “Congress.”

  “Don’t use that as an excuse. There’s not enough brawn back there to string you up, much less brains. I daresay if you do get called up, you’ll find the whole thing a lark.” She pushed herself off the wall. “I’m going home. I’m tired.” Giselle strode toward the door, expecting that Sebastian would move out of her way. He did, but he raised an eyebrow in a futile attempt to intimidate her.

  “And what are you going to do, my lovely?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  * * * * *

  “Don’t move.”

  The distinguished silver-haired gentleman halted at the cold round pressure at the back of his head. He stiffened when Giselle wrapped her delicate hand around his throat, thumb and middle finger pressed just deeply enough into his carotids to keep him still.