The Proviso (106 page)

Fen reared back from her as she spoke. She sat down
on the thigh-high wall between them and spun, thunking her feet on
the floor on the other side and going toe to toe with him, getting
in his face, eye to eye, nose to nose. Her finger still stabbed his
chest. He attempted to back off, to bat her finger away from his
breastbone, but the bench behind him made that very difficult.

“I have friends. Lots of friends. Lots of
liberal
friends who are credible and influential, whom I
respect and who respect me. Don’t think I can’t take you down from
your side of the aisle without ever dirtying my writings with your
name, because all I have to do is let them know you threatened me
and your campaign’s done before you start. Do not test me on this,
Hilliard. I can make you radioactive across the Democrat landscape
with one click of the SEND button.”

He swallowed.

She relaxed and rocked back on her heels, her hands
on her hips and an eyebrow cocked. “Now,” she said calmly, “you can
leave and I’ll just forget we had this little tête-à-tête. I
suggest you spend your time raising funds so you can get through
the last few months of the campaign. Oakley’s pounding you into the
ground and apparently Boss and Tom and all their rich friends enjoy
throwing money at him. I have no idea what you think Congress could
or would have me answer for—that pesky first amendment thing, you
know—but lemme tell you something: The idea of sitting at the same
table with three of the most brilliant men in the country to tell
the Senate to shove it up its ass is damn near orgasmic.”

Lusty laughter rang through the courtroom from Knox
and her coworkers. Justice merely cocked an eyebrow at Fen’s barely
veiled fury.

“Fen,” Knox said, a wide grin on his face and
laughter heavily lacing his voice. He stood relaxed, his hands in
his pockets. “I’m guessing that means she
really
doesn’t
want the job.”

Fen snarled at her before he left in a storm. Eric
and Richard left, chuckling, as did Patrick and the deputy. Knox
waited until the courtroom was empty and closed before he spoke to
her, his amusement gone in a flash. “Congratulations, Iustitia,” he
said with heavy sarcasm. “Now he’s after you on two fronts. I
thought I told you to stay out of his way.”

“He doesn’t know he’s after me on the first front
yet and, quite frankly, I’m flattered. He came here looking for
Justice McKinley and her political clout, not the OKH bride, and he
wasn’t going to give up trying to pitch me on the idea just because
you sent me out for a brisk walk around the courthouse one
morning.”

He said nothing for a long moment as he stared at
her, chewing on the inside of his cheek, unable to refute that.
“Did you mean that about attaching your name to mine?”

“Yes, I did,” she murmured as she climbed back over
the wall and continued to clean up her things. “I don’t think you
fully comprehend the strength of your reputation as a trainer,
Knox. If you did, you’d understand why people compete over the
residencies here in spite of your reputation. Murder and
racketeering and all.”

That pulled a snort and a roll of the eyes out of
him; she chuckled.

“You believe your own bad press,” she said quietly
as she finished throwing the last file in her box. She stepped
toward him, the rail between them. She slipped her hand into his
belt buckle to draw him close to her until they were chest to
breast, nose to nose. She watched him as his ice blue eyes slowly
darkened. Her lips barely brushed his as she continued to speak in
the husky whisper she knew drove him crazy. “But you won’t believe
the good. I don’t understand why you can’t bring yourself to see
you the way I see you, the way the pack sees you, the way Vanessa
and Eric and half the Ozarks see you.

“After you told me
why me
, I still couldn’t
figure out why you’d go to such extravagant lengths to get me to
marry you when all you had to do was ask me. But I’ve been watching
you and listening to you. I know why you forced me, why you jumped
through all those stupid hoops.

“You didn’t think I’d do it any other way. You
didn’t want to hear me say no because it would’ve broken your
heart.” Knox sucked in a sharp breath. “People take everything they
can from you and then leave, so you think that must make you . . .
what, inferior to any other alternative? You truly believe that the
FBI and Wall Street think you killed Leah. Why? Because deep down
inside, you think you’re bad, therefore, everybody else must think
that also and they must be right—and that all the bad things that
happen to you, you must somehow deserve. You do things the hard way
because you don’t trust that you can be successful the easy way,
that anyone will
let
you be successful the easy way. On the
other hand, get you to Whittaker House and you’re all about
efficiency. You don’t spend so much time in the Ozarks to help
Vanessa; you go there to feel loved and valued because you
are
.”

“Iustitia,” he breathed, raising his hand to tuck a
stray curl behind her ear, then absently play with another
curl.

“
Everybody
knows you executed Parley. The
feds
know you executed Parley. I don’t know how well you
covered your tracks or if you bothered to cover your tracks at all,
but you notice you’re not in prison for it and nobody’s crying
about it.
Nobody
believes you killed Leah. They just can’t
prove Fen did.”

“They investigated me for fourteen months for that,”
he whispered.

“No, they waited fourteen months to tell the press
that you were in the clear. They probably used that time as a cover
to investigate Fen and came up dry. They use you the same way you
use them; if they wanted you that badly, they could leverage Parley
against you at any time, but they haven’t. What does that tell you?
Now,” she said in a more normal volume since she’d gotten the
result she wanted from her micro-seduction. She pulled away from
him to fiddle with his tie and brush the palm of her hand down his
chest, then back up again, straightening a button here, picking off
imaginary lint there, as any wife would do when admiring her
husband. “I’m going home. I have a lot of writing to do
tonight.”

She brushed past him, which wasn’t difficult because
he was too dumbfounded to stop her, then she turned. “And one more
thing. Fen Hilliard is a bad man. He’s pure evil. At your core, in
your soul, you’re a noble prosecutor and law professor who gets
justice for people at all costs and defends naïve, idealistic,
mousy little girls in the front row. That’s who you’ve always been
and that’s who you’re always going to be. I wouldn’t love you if
you weren’t.”

* * * * *

100:
MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE

Justice lay in the dark, unable to sleep. She could
hear and feel Knox’s slow, deep breathing beside her. Dog’s huge
body lay under the covers between them, stretched his full length
(paw to tail, probably four feet long), his fur warm and silky
against her back with a subwoofer purr that vibrated the bed.

Her side of the bed was the one closest to the
window, farthest from the door, and she lay looking out the
beautiful beveled harlequin mullions at the fractured moonlight and
thought about all the storms she was caught up in.

The storm at work never stopped, but it was the same
storm all the time, never ending, never changing. She didn’t
imagine it was any different in any other prosecutor’s office
anywhere.

Eric spread the big cases out by lottery. She got
what she got, like everyone else, even Knox. No trial case was
rated by anything other than by case number, so some weeks Justice
had a lot of work to do and other weeks, she sailed along. Just
like everyone else.

Occasionally Knox would override Eric’s system and
assign himself or someone else a particularly sensitive case,
depending on any one attorney’s strengths. Knox took Sheriff
Raines’s case and dispatched him to prison with great efficiency
and much satisfaction.

Eric was actively interviewing and for the first
time, she began to see women being interviewed. “Don’t get your
hopes too high, Justice,” Eric told her when she remarked upon it.
“I don’t plan to hire any women until your name is officially
tattooed on his ass. I’m just interviewing to make him happy.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not going to spend my time kicking some
chick’s ass who decides she needs to be Knox Hilliard’s next
conquest, that’s why, and the last thing I need is for you to be
perpetually pissed off. The minute you go by Hilliard, I’ll hire a
woman, but not until.”

She grinned delightedly. “Aw, now I feel all warm
and fuzzy inside.”

He glared at her for being amused at him. “You’re
welcome,” he snapped and stalked off.

Then there was Fen’s threatened publicity about her
association with Knox (the one that he knew of, anyway). She had
decided to start a back burn.

*

Where I Work

posted by Justice McKinley, 11/22/07, 9:38 p.m.
CST

The Chouteau County, Missouri prosecutor’s office.
Did you think I’d give up the chance to be trained by
the
Knox Hilliard when the opportunity presented itself? By the way, we
have three residencies open. Everyone entering this courthouse must
wear Nomex; a fire-breathing dragon lives on the second floor.
[email protected]

*

“Thank you ever so much, Justice,” Eric snarled at
her when she walked in Monday after she’d posted that.

“What?” she asked, alarmed, glancing at the clock.
“What’d I do? I’m on time. Today.”

“Look at this,” he snapped, slapping his hand on a
stack of papers three inches high. “Do you know what these
are?”

“No.”

“CVs. Hundreds of them. My email box is full of
resumes that I have to look through.”

Oh, was that all?

“Nomex?” Knox had asked as they sat on the basement
floor watching TV, his back against the couch and his body wrapped
around hers, both of them snuggled up in a blanket. “Nice
touch.”

“I thought so.” She took a deep breath. “Knox, I
want to be your wife.”

He started. “Uh, you are.”

“Publicly. As in, not just at Whittaker House.”

“No. I didn’t bust your head open about humiliating
Fen—” He started to laugh again. “—twice—
Priceless!
—and I
didn’t bust your head open for calling Fen’s bluff about attaching
your name to Chouteau County, but don’t push it.”

She sighed.

The third storm, the OKH game, was in play. Justice
was fully on board with everyone else, although her body hadn’t
seen fit to cooperate with the baby part of that and she thought
that was quite all right.

The pack had begun to meet regularly at Sebastian
and Eilis’s house on the Plaza for Saturday dinner when the
Hilliards were in town. It was the only house with a table big
enough for all six of them to spread out and sit comfortably with
food, drink, books, laptops, and other references to back up
positions they took. (“No, Justice, you can’t cite yourself. That’s
dirty pool.”)

They’d talk and debate long into the wee hours of
the morning until Giselle and Bryce floated off to Giselle’s old
bedroom, Sebastian and Eilis went downstairs to that hedonistic
delight that had made Justice gape in awe the first time she saw it
(“Knox, I want a Den of Iniquity, too.”), and she and Knox took the
bedroom that used to be Sebastian’s until he’d moved downstairs
permanently. No one got out of bed until early afternoon and then
they ordered in Sunday brunch before going back to their lives
Sunday evening.

One Saturday at dinner, during a lull in the
conversation, she blithely said, “I got a call yesterday from the
dean of the Brigham Young University law school.”

Dead silence when five people looked at her,
agape.

“So it seems,” she went on, taking bites of her
dinner, as if she hadn’t noticed their reaction, “he reads me. He
recognized Knox’s name—not like anybody could forget it—and looked
him up in their old records. He wanted to know my more in-depth
opinion of the way he teaches, so I told him.” She took a drink and
looked at Knox, whose reaction was complete and utter shock, then
smiled sweetly. “He wants you to call him at your earliest
convenience.”

So now she just had one last loose end to tie up,
which had been simmering under the surface for a while. It was this
loose end that had her sleepless that night and had for the last
few nights and it was time to deal with it.

I. Own. You.

She’s the woman you love and gave everything up
for.

She’d been bought and she wanted to know what
“everything” was.

Justice turned the situation over in her head,
looked at it, took it apart and put it back together again
seventeen different ways. She came back to the same answer every
time: Her father had
never
loved her. She had always been a
farm hand to him.

Martin McKinley had used her from the moment her
mother died, the mother who’d died of overwork: Backbreaking labor,
guilt, recriminations, disrespect. No free time, no books, no
study, no education. It had just been his dumb luck that he’d
married a closet scholar who’d given birth to a not-so-closet
scholar who had a grandfather who wanted to channel and exploit
that.

Then she’d come back from Giselle’s and he had been
intent on changing her purpose in his life. That still made her
sick to her stomach.

Knox had paid her father to be able to have her
without going to prison. Whether or not her father had sold her as
a whore or a brood mare to Knox was irrelevant. Certainly a brood
mare was treated better than her father had treated her. A whore,
probably not so much. To him, she was a farm implement left out in
the rain to rust when not in use, her oil never changed, her tires
worn down to the steel belts.