The Proviso (109 page)

Justice, Eilis, Sebastian, and Lilly cooked;
everyone else cleaned up. She felt that was a fair trade. Sebastian
made mulled wine for himself, Eilis, and Justice, and mulled cider
for everyone else. They all went up to the third floor sitting room
he’d created solely to watch the Plaza lighting ceremony on
Thanksgiving night.

No one had noticed her lack of delight except Bryce,
who sat beside her and seemed very, very far away, then said, “We
seem to be the odd ones out.” It hadn’t been long until Eilis
joined them.

“Look at them,” Justice said, pointing to Giselle,
Sebastian, and Knox, who were practically bouncing off the walls.
The aunts weren’t much better behaved. “You’d think, in forty
years, none of them had ever had a Christmas.”

“They,” Bryce said softly, “still have their family.
I can’t get through Christmas without thinking about my kids.”

Justice and Eilis nodded. “I like to dress my
house,” Eilis admitted. “Sebastian made that special for me, but
otherwise . . . ”

Justice harrumphed.

So Justice pulled on a pair of Knox’s gray boxers
and buttoned up one of his Oxford shirts, then rolled up the
sleeves. She found a pair of his socks and pulled them up to her
knees, but they were big and they just slid down and gathered at
her ankles.

She sighed, dragged herself into the bathroom,
brushed her teeth, dragged herself down the hall and then opened
the basement door. Christmas music floated up the stairs, being the
golden pipes of Nat King Cole. It was dark down there, with an odd
glow that didn’t come from the TV. Warily, she walked down the
stairs and as the room came into sight, she drew in a breath.

It was a Christmas wonderland and the glow was from
the incredible number of Christmas lights on a Christmas tree as
tall as the ceiling, as well as from a fire in the fireplace that
Knox had never used.

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put her
hand on her mouth, looking at everything. There was a porcelain
Victorian village in fake snow and surrounded by a tiny picket
fence. There was a fake-snow bank that had the snowman and the
Santa and Rudolph from the only thing she liked about Christmas,
which was the Rankin and Bass TV special. There, around the tree,
she could now see two tall piles of presents wrapped gaily and
waiting for . . . who?

“Knox?” she whispered. “Where are you?”

She squealed when he caught her up in his arms,
tackling her from the side and spinning her around while the lights
came up a bit, enough to see but not enough to dim the mood.

Her whole family was there, watching her, waiting
for her reaction to what they had created for her overnight.
Her
family, the one she’d come back to when she’d come back
to Knox. In St. Louis, all the time she had wrestled with what to
do next, it had never occurred to her that she might get more than
Knox if she returned. All she’d wanted was the man she was in love
with and the hope that he might possibly someday come to love her,
and the opportunity to become courageous and, also maybe,
powerful.

What she got was a group of people to love, who
loved her and doted on her. These six other people besides Knox,
these people who made up her family were kind and generous, as
lavish with their affection as Knox was. “Merry Christmas,
Iustitia,” Knox whispered and kissed her the way she loved most.
Then he planted himself on the couch and plopped her down on the
floor between his legs.

And then another surprise. Eilis, who had
participated in this scheme and had been up all night decorating
with the rest, was pulled down on the floor next to her, Sebastian
on the couch next to Knox, surrounding her. Giselle sat on the
floor by the bookcases between Lilly and Dianne, all laughing and
chatting, while Bryce enjoyed every minute of being the elf.

And the presents flowed. She and Eilis were plied
with gifts, mostly duplicates, from the silly (Silly Putty, Slinky,
Etch A Sketch, crayons and coloring books) to the fun (handheld
video games, jigsaw puzzles, and whole sets of Nancy Drew and Laura
Ingalls Wilder) to the sensual (lotions and oils for Eilis that
Sebastian had selected, new lingerie for Justice that Knox had
picked out: “Yeah, I’m tired of not having any shirts or shorts”),
but absolutely nothing cerebral (“Everybody here thinks for a
living”).

“The point of all this,” said Bryce, who still
desperately missed shopping for his children, who had had the idea,
and who had done most of the shopping, “was to give you the
Christmases you should have had as children. You’re lucky you
didn’t get pink Barbie bicycles with training wheels.”

Justice and Eilis were both laughing-crying and
hugging each other by the time the presents were finished,
especially Eilis because she’d known about all this except for the
part that she would be getting the same treatment Justice got. Knox
had left a few minutes before Justice opened her last present, and
then he came back to sit down beside her on the floor.

“Iustitia,” he breathed as he snuggled close, “this
is from me.” He handed her two pale blue boxes, stacked and tied
together with a white bow, Tiffany & Co. stamped on the
lids.

Justice caught her breath and untied the bow slowly,
not believing that a farm girl like her could have ever won the
love of a man like Knox or that such a man would ever give her
jewelry from Tiffany.

The smaller box held a pair of earrings, diamond and
platinum flowers from which pearls dropped, and then her eyes
welled with tears and she sniffled. The second box held a matching
platinum necklace, studded with diamonds and pearls every quarter
inch, all the way around.

She began to sob in earnest and reached for Knox so
he could hold her and she cried into his shoulder. He shifted so
that she was in his lap, and she cried for what seemed hours until
she hiccuped and then stilled. The rest of the family had deserted
the basement, but she could hear them upstairs in the kitchen and
she could smell the food.

“Thank you, Knox,” she whispered.

“I would give you the world if I could, Iustitia,”
he murmured, his chest vibrating deep with his words.

“I don’t have anything for you.”

“You came back to me and you stayed with me. You
believe in me and you love me. That’s all I need.”

“But—”

He silenced her with fingertips pressed softly
against her lips. “Trust me when I tell you I can never repay you
for what you’ve done for me.”

* * * * *

103:
BUSTED

JANUARY 2008

Justice drove to work in ten inches of fresh snow
and was glad for the combination of front wheel drive and manual
transmission. But she had to go back into the house and change into
thick socks and hiking boots, then throw her dress shoes in her
briefcase.

So she was late. And seriously annoyed. She walked
into the courthouse to hear—

“MCKINLEY!”

—bellowed all the way from upstairs. Only new county
employees bothered to make note of the time. Everybody else went
about their business although occasionally someone thought about it
enough to snicker.

He bellowed her name again when she was
three-quarters of the way up the stairs, which climb seemed
remarkably difficult for some reason, and her mouth tightened
because she was married to the man and couldn’t say boo about
it.

She was irate by the time she walked into the office
only to see Knox waiting for her, a hand on his hip, a glare on his
face.

“What?!” she demanded.

“You’re late.”

“I’m
always
late, Hilliard. Fire me.” The
amused silence amongst her colleagues was palpable.

Knox looked at her strangely. “Get in my office.
NOW!”

She went and he followed, slamming the door behind
him. “What’s up your ass?” he grumbled, brushing behind her toward
his desk.

“I could ask the same of you,” she shot back. “I’m
tired of you hollering my name as soon as I walk in the door—nobody
cares and it’s a waste of breath—and furthermore, it hasn’t been
my
name for the last eight months.”

That set him back on his heels.

“That’s right,” she continued, warming up to the
subject. “I’m tired of sneaking around, feeling like I’m just
fucking my boss.”

“You are fucking your boss.”

“Yeah, except there’s that little matter of the
marriage certificate nobody knows about.”

“Nobody knows you’re fucking your boss, either. No
harm, no foul.”

Justice stared at him, her mind completely fuzzed.
“Are you blind, deaf, and dumb?” she barked. His mouth dropped open
and she went on. “Almost every last person in this courthouse,
including
the sheriff’s department, knows we’re sleeping
together, not to mention every trooper from St. Joe to Grain Valley
and the entire KC North Patrol, which means it’s probably filtered
its way to the Clay and Jackson County patrols. And do you know how
they found out? Because the
Chouteau County prosecutor
put
an APB out on his
redheaded
assistant prosecutor at
seven
o’clock
on a
Saturday
morning starting from a location
suspiciously close to
his house
. I knew the minute Hadley
opened his mouth you’d blown it wide open.”

“
Oh, shit.”
He turned and wiped his hand down
his face.

“I will say,” she added wryly, “everyone’s very
grateful to me for keeping you happy, so they’re not about to make
an issue of it. But who knows what kind of damage it’s done to my
credibility as a prosecutor? It might make
you
look like the
Supreme God of Studliness and Instant Nice Guy, but it just makes
me
look like I’m not competent enough to get or keep this
job without fucking you for it.”

He gulped. “Iustitia, I’m sorry. I didn’t know
that.”

“Then you need to pay more attention to what’s going
on around you. Whatever you hoped to gain by keeping our marriage a
secret is long gone and now I’m tired of fucking my boss.” She
could see his distress, but she didn’t care. “You make this right
by me by the end of today or I’ll blog it tonight
and
I’ll
rip your cover as hamlet to shreds. No, better! I’ll call a pack
meeting and invite Fen. Maybe both.”

His eyes widened and he sucked in a breath.

She went to the door and opened it wide. She said
loudly enough so everyone in the courthouse could hear, “And
another thing! Until I have a ring on my finger and a nameplate
that says Justice Hilliard, you can forget about getting laid!”
Then she left, slamming the door behind her. Gales of laughter rang
out all over the building.

She stalked to her desk and stewed about that for
most of the morning, getting angrier and angrier as she worked. The
loud and shameless mirth around the courthouse didn’t help, though
it did serve her purpose. More deputies, troopers, KC cops, and
attorneys than usual strolled in and out all morning, every one of
them in an overly jovial mood. Dirk sauntered in to talk to Eric,
but cast Justice a smirk that made her want to slap it right off
his face.

“Don’t get too close,” Patrick called to a Kansas
City detective who needed to talk to Justice, but could barely
contain his amusement. “I hear she bites.” The detective burst out
laughing and Justice snarled at both of them.

By lunch, though, the office had cleared of all but
Dirk and Eric, who had settled in with dojo business, and Patrick
and Richard, who brought Justice a peace offering of a chocolate
malt to go with her cheeseburger. She glared at them both to let
them know it wouldn’t work.

Knox had fared no better than Justice had. He strode
into the office just after lunch and said, “Hilliard, in my
office.”

Well, that was new and different. Hilliard. Not
McKinley. No storming; no bellowing. She went
hoping
he
would fire her. She closed the door behind her to see Knox standing
over his desk, digging through a drawer.

“What.”

He didn’t look up at her. “You want me to proclaim
to the world that you’re my wife?”

“I thought I made that perfectly clear.”

He snorted and Justice gasped when he straightened
to his full height, a tiny pale blue box with a white bow in his
hand. Her hands on her mouth, she watched as he skirted his desk
and approached her with it. “The week you spent with Giselle— I
went to New York and got these,” he murmured and opened the box for
her. In it were two wedding rings of platinum, hers a solitaire
princess cut dark yellow diamond flanked by yellow diamond
baguettes—“To match your eyes,” he whispered. “If you don’t like
them, we can find something else.”—and his a band with eight small
matching diamonds embedded in it at equal distances.

She shook her head almost frantically. “No, I
love
them.”

Tears ran down her cheeks when he picked up her hand
and slid the ring on it, then let her put his ring on.

“I had Judy copy our marriage license and post it on
the message board outside her office and file the original where
it’s supposed to be filed, instead of in Wilson’s office. I radioed
Hadley to tell him to put the word out to law enforcement and I’ll
send out a memo later today in case anybody misses it. Are you
happy now?”

She looked up at him, wiping away tears, happier
than she remembered ever being in her life. “Yes. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry, Iustitia. I didn’t think how that would
look and I would never have done that to you intentionally. Please
forgive me.”

“Done,” she whispered, throwing herself in his arms
to hug him tight and bury her nose in his neck so she could smell
him. “Thank you, Knox. Oh, thank you.”

He set her down and looked in her eyes. “Next year,
when this is all over with, I’m going to give you a huge wedding
with all the bells and whistles.” Then he laughed at her stunned
expression and slapped her butt. “Go get back to work.”