The Proviso (18 page)

Ducking back into the stacks, she put her forehead
down on the bookshelf to cry.

* * * * *

17:
RECOVERING BITCH

AUGUST 2006

“Good luck,” said Miss Logan’s attorney as he
squeezed her upper arm lightly, then disappeared through a set of
courtroom doors to give her a moment to prepare.

She glanced in a mirror that added to the décor of
the quaint mid-nineteenth century American county courthouse, and
sighed at her reflection. Taken as a whole, she was entirely
underwhelming. Taken in parts, she was even less interesting than
that.

Her hair: Dirty-dishwater blonde, slicked back into
a tight French twist at the back.

Her eyes: Brown.

Her face: Plain, though perhaps sporting a little
too much makeup.

Her body: Tall, big boned, nearly five feet eleven
inches barefoot. She classified herself as less than svelte on days
she felt generous. Though she had to admit that her breasts had a
nice shape, the DD cup dismayed her. Her belly protruded enough to
make her look about six weeks pregnant, but all her attempts at
flattening it failed. Her hips—a particular point of David’s
ridicule—matched her breasts.

Her outfit: Ridiculous. No Audrey Hepburn or Jackie
O., she didn’t carry the classic Chanel look well. The color, Pepto
Pink, would have washed her out but for her makeup. Sensible low
black pumps did nothing for her feet or calves.

She had crafted every detail of what she saw in the
mirror, so her sudden melancholy over it irked her. What she looked
like at home, in private, shopping, attending the occasional
society soiree—well. She did the best she could with what she had.
She used to think herself passably pretty for an Amazon, but then
she’d married a man who disagreed.

As she intended, the world took her as she presented
herself without question as to what lay underneath. She relied on
her talent and her ladylike mien to carry her through her workday
and to garner the respect she required to do business. Once she got
into character each morning, she fooled the world and relied on her
persona to lessen her insecurity and sharpen her advantage—

—and she had done this for twelve years. She had the
act down cold.

So now here she loitered in the foyer of the
Chouteau County courthouse waiting to hear her fate. Her persona
gave her no advantage today; she dreaded whatever the prosecutor
had decided to do with her.

She turned and gracefully sat on a bench by the
courtroom doors, as ladylike as ever. She stared across the foyer
to the grand walnut staircase, lost in her thoughts.

“Miss Logan?”

She turned, startled. The time had come; they would
wait for her no longer. She cleared her throat, calmed her heart,
and arose from the bench. Slow. Easy. As if she were the most
gracious hostess of the most magnificent mansion on Ward
Parkway.

The almost ridiculously young underling sent to
fetch her smiled.

“Thank you,” she murmured, her tone perfectly
modulated. She stepped through the door he held open for her.
Thank God
, no trembles and no squeaks, though her life’s
work hung in the balance.

She couldn’t help the pace of her heart, the dryness
of her throat, the fear that ran through her as she took measured
steps down the aisle of the courtroom toward the prosecutor and the
judge who awaited her.

She
could
help how she reacted to it all.

Calm, poised, gracious as always, she stood at the
defense table by the chair meant for her, but she did not sit. It
finally occurred to her attorney to arise and pull it out for her.
She nodded her thanks as she sat.

It never failed to surprise men when she refused to
pull out her own chair. Most had forgotten what a real lady was, if
they ever knew in the first place, the etiquette lost to history.
She used that to her advantage, without fail and without mercy.

“Thank you for joining us, Miss Logan,” Judge Wilson
began. “Let’s recap for the court reporter, shall we?”

No, let’s not.

He looked down at the papers in front of him.

“You are the founder and CEO of HR Prerogatives, a
human resources outsourcing company.

“In May of 1999, you hired David Webster to be the
chief financial officer. You and he never had any relationship
other than work until you were in New York on a business trip on
September 11, 2001. You witnessed the planes crashing into the
World Trade Center, and under the stress of that, you married him.
During your marriage, you were raped and beaten, but his behavior
at home was so at odds with his behavior at work you became
suspicious of him.”

He should have won an Oscar.

“Then you realized he had been embezzling from you
his entire tenure at your company. You felt the only way you could
prove it was to stay in the marriage.”

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Judge Wilson looked over his spectacles at her. “You
should’ve called the police.”

When have the police ever helped me?

She kept her face expressionless with the ease of
twelve years of practice.

“He had access to your cash reserves and offshore
accounts set up to receive the transfer of your employees’ 401(k)
funds, which you found out only an hour before all the transactions
went through. You hacked into your own computer system from a
remote location and killed the pension transactions, but he did
manage to take your reserves and left your company deeply in
debt.”

He paused and still she remained silent,
impassive.

“You realize, of course, any other prosecutor in the
metro would’ve charged you as well.”

“Your Honor,” Knox Hilliard said with a bit of
impatience, “she doesn’t need to be sent to her room to think about
what she did.”

The judge glared at the prosecutor. “One more crack
like that and I’ll send
you
to your room to think about a
contempt citation.”

Hilliard’s cough didn’t quite disguise his
laugh.

“Miss Logan, Mr. Hilliard has a proposition I hope
you’ll be agreeable to.”

She had no choice and the implication that she did
was insulting. The man she dreaded most in the world right now—for
more than a few reasons—rose from the prosecution’s table.

To his credit, Hilliard seemed to take no pleasure
from this, despite his reputation toward the corrupt and sadistic.
During the three years of investigation into David’s embezzlement
schemes, hours of testimony prep, and a year-long trial, he had
never treated her with anything but excruciating politeness, if not
downright compassion.

“Eilis,” he addressed her then, respectfully and, as
always, pronouncing her name precisely: EYE-lish. He had used it
from the very first, never asking her her preference. Such behavior
by any other man would have warranted a cold, ladylike set-down,
but not for a man significant to her in ways he would never know.
And after the stress of her four-year journey with him, her name on
his tongue had become a comfort to her.

Until today.

“I would like to propose putting HR Prerogatives in
receivership.”

She started and looked at him sharply. Receivership!
The man whose judgment on this issue she’d dreaded so much might
have just saved her, depending on whom he appointed as her
trustee.

That was a double-edged sword.

He went on. “I’m not here to destroy you or your
company, or to put all your employees out of their jobs. Should you
agree to receivership, your appointed trustee will be Sebastian
Taight.”

She swallowed a gasp, kept her composure—but she
fought for it. Her attorney nodded sagely. That certainly tarnished
her favorable opinion of Mr. Hilliard.
How
had he suddenly
turned into her enemy?

Nauseated, she wondered if he’d uncovered her
connection to OKH Enterprises and Fen Hilliard, and decided to take
his vengeance upon her now. Of all the consultants available, he
had chosen the only one who could put her out of business
completely or hand her over to Fen on a silver platter:

King Midas.

Sebastian Taight in charge of her company frightened
her. His close family ties to both Knox and Fen Hilliard terrified
her. She quelled her instinct to shudder.

She spoke finally. “Is that the best offer I can
expect?”

The prosecutor nodded solemnly. “Yes.”

The judge broke into her silence and said, not
unkindly, “Mr. Taight has never before agreed to be the trustee for
a receivership and I’d take it if I were you. You couldn’t be in
better hands.”

Still silent, Eilis studied the ogee edge of the
table. Yeah, she could just bet why he’d agreed to take her
receivership as his first ever. She finally nodded because she had
no choice.

“That would be acceptable. Thank you.”

* * * * *

18:
BRASS IN POCKET

King Midas walked in like a medieval marauder, his
stride long and arrogant. He carried nothing in his hands or over
his shoulders: no legal pad, no briefcase, no laptop, no manpurse.
With every step he seemed to take inventory of
her
company
as if it were about to become his.

She hated him for that.

Eilis had never met him, never seen him. No one,
woman or man, had ever told her how tall, lean, and achingly,
heart-
stoppingly
handsome he was. Because she’d only heard
the horror stories, she had conjured him up in her mind as an aged
Quasimodo with a God complex.

His slightly salted raven hair gleamed and his ice
blue eyes shimmered so light against his hair and his suit, she
could see them from a distance. Sebastian Taight, classic black
Irish, who had made her immediately, unexpectedly, shockingly
breathless and aroused on first sight.

She hated herself for that.

She knew what he’d do first and she dreaded it. He
made a fortune speculating in art and he would have been apprised
of her assets. Boxed in as she was amongst the Chouteau County
prosecutor, the Midwest’s most notorious financial guru as her
babysitter, and the CEO of OKH Enterprises, she didn’t have a
chance.

The news reports of the OKH Proviso Instrument were
vague enough that no one knew quite how the three players were
allied, if at all, though everyone had their hypotheses and
theories. Before yesterday, she could have drawn no conclusions
other than the obvious one everyone drew: Taight had positioned
himself to take OKH Enterprises away from both Fen and Knox in a
hostile takeover on or just after Knox’s fortieth birthday, despite
what the proviso stated explicitly.

Eilis sucked in a deep breath, her lungs expanding
almost beyond capacity. With one bad decision, albeit made under
extreme circumstances, she had gone from frying pan to fire to ash
fertilizer. No one but Eilis knew that she had become wrapped up in
that OKH proviso mess the minute Knox had appointed Taight her
trustee. She could only have faith that if infamously thorough Knox
Hilliard hadn’t stumbled upon her secret by now, he wouldn’t. No
one would.

If either Knox or Sebastian Taight found out, she
would lose everything—Fen Hilliard had promised her that.

Truthfully, Eilis didn’t want to hate King Midas, in
the abstract or otherwise. She had observed the OKH debacle from
afar and without comment to her CEO colleagues ever since the man
had begun purchasing its shares. She had cheered quietly, hoping he
would win it in the end. When Knox announced his engagement to Mrs.
Leah Wincott, a widow with a daughter, Eilis breathed a sigh of
relief.

Leah Wincott’s murder—on her
wedding day
,
yet!—shocked the financial community to its core. The Street
rumbled and cracked with the not-so-hushed rumors of Fen’s
involvement. No one wanted to believe it (least of all Eilis), but
there could be no other explanation and suddenly, Taight’s war
became
important
to Eilis. She, along with the rest of the
country,
needed
him to take OKH away from Fen.

Unfortunately, Knox was a complication. Collateral
damage.

Now, though, she found herself at the mercy of the
man the financial community feared for his eccentricities, obscure
reasoning, and unpredictability. She swallowed a sharp pang of
regret that she’d not met this brilliant—and most definitely
beautiful—man before Knox had made him her enemy.

Scylla, meet Charybdis.

Eilis took a deep breath.
Where
had her Inner
Bitch gone now that she needed her so very badly?

From where she stood behind the all-glass walls of
her office suite, she could look down onto the labyrinth of
cubicles filled with people whose livelihoods depended on her. For
now. They knew nothing of the details and they were jittery. Many
had left for other, more stable, positions. If the deal with Midas
worked out, those who remained would survive this storm and their
lives would go on, their nerves calmed when stability reigned
again.

He walked down the main aisle alone, unnoticed it
seemed, though how such a man could go unnoticed was beyond her. If
he looked up, he would see her there, but he didn’t. His initial
inspection over with, he stared straight ahead, his long-legged
gait eating up the yards between them as if he knew exactly where
he was going—which he probably did.

He disappeared underneath the glassed mezzanine that
was her office and she knew it wouldn’t be long before he was
there, with her. Sure enough, his steps echoed on the stairs. She
kept her back turned when he reached the reception area of her
office and then her door, being deliberately rude to him. Watching
him in the reflection of the glass, her breathlessness increased as
he entered her office and came closer and closer to her without
speaking.