The Proviso (2 page)

Giselle inspected Justice closely. Her appearance
needed some serious help. She was taller than Giselle by at least
three or four inches. An early ’80s-type shirtwaist dress made of
printed chintz with a wide white collar hid a body type Giselle
could only guess at, but if the legs were anything to go by, she
had a lot of potential.

Her hair was a mess. It was a dull dark red mahogany
color, frizzy, in a French braid that went to her waist and did
nothing to contain the out-of-control frizz.

Her face was odd. That was the only way Giselle
could describe it. She had a strange color of foundation on as if
she were trying to hide acne, but the skim coat of makeup was
smooth, so she must be hiding freckles. That’d go with the hair.
Too bad, too, because the girl had exquisite bone structure.
Giselle was tempted to take the girl for a makeover just because
she’d been so fabulous in class, but cracking open her chrysalis
and letting
that
butterfly loose would have some serious and
long-lasting complications.

Heaven only knew,
Professor Hilliard
didn’t
need any more complications at the moment,
especially
considering what had happened in class. For a variety of reasons,
no one would believe for a moment his initial response to Sherry’s
proposition had been anything other than an attempt to let her save
face, but he’d be lucky not to get fired or sued—or both—over how
he had spoken to her after that and then actually
touched
a
student. The F-bomb in class, even.

Giselle snorted.
Professor
Shit-for-Brains.

No, better Justice look like this for as long as
possible in case he was tempted to do something even more
stupid.

Justice continued to look down and she mumbled
something Giselle couldn’t hear, then her eye was caught just over
Justice’s shoulder. Knox stared at her from a staircase across the
hall. He slid a cold glance over to Sherry and her brood who
huddled together, their outrage palpable. Giselle looked at them,
looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. He nodded once and
left.

Still mumbling. Dammit, she wished she didn’t have
to talk to the top of the girl’s frizzy red head.

“Justice,” Giselle murmured, dipping her body down
so she looked up into the girl’s face. She smiled gently as Justice
raised her head. “You just go about your business. Believe in
yourself and your opinions. Have faith. I don’t know you, but I’m
very proud of you.”

Another encouraging smile, then she left the
building.

To lie in wait.

“Sherry!” Giselle said brightly as the bitch came
around a corner. “Can I, uh,
talk
to you a minute?”

“Sure, Giselle!”

Giselle’s lip almost curled at the girl’s delight at
having
finally
caught her attention. There were only two
reasons Sherry would know her name after only one week in
class.

Ten years older than most of the other students,
Giselle was a third year on the five-year plan. It wasn’t the most
prestigious position to be in, that was for sure, but given her
age, the fact that she already had a PhD, and, oh, the fact that
she and
Professor Hilliard
clashed loudly, publicly, and
often, she garnered a certain deference—even from other
professors.

It also made her a target for crushes of both
genders.

Leaving her giggling friends under a tree, Sherry
followed Giselle eagerly to an out-of-the-way spot in a thick stand
of trees. Giselle turned only to find the girl backed up to a big
tree, preening for her. She smiled seductively and approached her
slowly with a swing in her hips.

“I know what you want,” Giselle murmured.

Sherry sucked in an anticipatory breath.
“Really?”

“You’ve made it clear enough all week.”

Giselle reached out a hand when she was close enough
to touch, and Sherry closed her eyes, waiting for Giselle’s
kiss.

Sherry couldn’t even screech when her head was
snapped back against the tree, Giselle’s hand clamped around
Sherry’s throat and squeezing just enough.

“I’m going to tell you this once and I want you to
make sure it gets spread around,” she whispered in Sherry’s ear.
“Leave. Justice. McKinley. Alone. If I hear even a suggestion of a
rumor that you, your skank patrol, or anyone else not even
associated with you are giving her a hard time, you’ll regret it. I
think the
last
place you want to be for the next three years
is on my shit list. You’re
so
not his type,” she muttered,
and with one last look of sheer disgust, she let Sherry go.

She turned to run, but Giselle grabbed a handful of
her hair and jerked her back, whispering in her ear. “You make sure
now, to remind people that they are to be nice to her. How’d you
like to be on
his
shit list, too?”

“No, no. I’m sorry. Please let me go,” she
whimpered. “Please.”

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.”