The Proviso (30 page)

“My field was virgin
yesterday
.”

“And then it was plowed last night. By a
squatter
. Hypocrite much? How are you going to explain this
to your mother?”

“Oh, she’ll be thrilled I finally stopped sleeping
with Knox,” Giselle returned dryly and Fen released a genuine belly
laugh.

Bryce thought it best not to get in the middle of
this conversation, no matter how bizarre. Giselle had had years of
practice at handling him and while Bryce definitely didn’t like
being referred to as a squatter, it
was
true.

He would rectify that as soon as possible.

“So what happened to your nose?” she asked
innocently.

Fen waved a hand. “I happened to be behind a door my
assistant came slamming through.”

“That’s terrible. Is it broken?”

“Yes. But I’m not going to have it reset. I decided
that a broken nose lends character to a face. I was simply too
perfect as a senatorial candidate before. So in retrospect, I
believe it’ll be a good thing. I should thank my assistant and give
her a raise.”

Both Bryce and Giselle burst out laughing.

“So, Kenard, I’m guessing you’re not on board with
my campaign?”

“Yeah, you’re not going to get any money from me,”
Bryce murmured with a sigh of false regret. “If you’d asked me in
December, I could have told you then.”

“Ah, but then you wouldn’t have met my charming
niece, would you?”

Bryce inclined his head. “That’s true, but now I
have even fewer reasons to donate. Fire. Bullets. Ponds. Insulin.
You know how it is.”

His eyebrows rose. “I see the children haven’t
wasted any time brainwashing you. And you believe their cockamamie
story?”

“Didn’t Knox tell you? He and I were roommates in
college. I have a long history of being able to see your hands
pulling the strings.”

“Ah,” he said, betraying no shock except for the
sudden, though infinitesimal, tension in his body. “You’ll believe
what you want, I suppose.”

“In any case, I’m flattered to be considered worthy
of inclusion into such august company.”

“Well, knowing my nephews, I’m sure you’ll take the
alpha position in no time.” They moved on after that, leaving Bryce
still chuckling.

“He cracks me up,” Giselle said.

“That was the most fucked-up conversation I ever
heard,” Bryce muttered, “all things considered.”

“I’m easily entertained.”

“Apparently. Does he always just casually discuss
what he’s done?”

“He’ll allude to it. He knows we can’t prove it and
calling him out publicly would get us a lot of bad publicity we
don’t want and wouldn’t be able to overcome.”

“And an easily won libel suit to boot.”

“Exactly. It would defeat our purpose and he knows
that. And really, we’re the only ones he
can
talk about it
with. Now that I’m with you and someone else has Knox’s britches in
a twist, there’s only one immediate solution to the problem.
Neither Knox nor I want to do that for obvious reasons and
Sebastian prefers financial warfare.”

“Indeed. You want something to eat?” Bryce asked
after he’d snagged an hors d’oeuvre off a passing tray.

“No,” she mumbled absently, standing on tiptoes to
look over the crowd. “I don’t trust what’s in some of that stuff.”
He thought that a little extreme and said so. That caught her
attention. “Do you like what I look like naked?”

“Very much. Sometimes I even like what you look like
not naked.”

“Do you want my nakedness to look the same always
until I’m an old lady?”

“That would be nice.”

“Then trust me when I tell you I don’t want food
because, as you should know by now, I like to eat. A lot.”

He laughed and picked her up, wrapping her tight in
his arms. He twirled her around and around, kissing and nipping her
neck. “You’re beautiful,” he said as he let her slide down his
body. He chuckled when that firearm bulge brushed against his
thigh. “You really don’t trust Fen, do you?”

“Goodness, no. He’s never gone back on a deal, but
now he’s just curious to see how many more lives I have. Two down,
seven to go.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Oh, he said so yesterday.”

For some sick and twisted reason buried down deep in
his dark soul, Bryce found that hilarious. “Let’s see this
exhibit.”

Except for his sudden obsession with
Lilith
,
Bryce didn’t get art. He had none save the books that lined his
walls. That wasn’t to say he didn’t like a few pieces here and
there. He simply didn’t care enough to study it, purchase it, and
find a place to put it. He certainly wouldn’t dislodge any of his
books for it. For
Lilith
, he would’ve dislodged his books,
but now he wouldn’t have to.

Once they reached the entrance of the actual exhibit
and he saw what “a Ford” actually was, he looked in wonder. He knew
Giselle watched and waited for his reaction, but this—this he had
not expected.

“See? I told you.”

Nudes. On canvases five feet square, each hung at a
different angle. Women in all stages of life, in all shapes and
sizes, of every race imaginable. The artist had captured them in
such a way as to make them all beautiful regardless of one’s
personal taste.

“This is—” he murmured, taking it all in.
“Magnificent.”

Giselle smiled and squeezed his hand, leading him
into the labyrinth. Each woman leaped off the canvas at him and
Bryce wanted to touch to see if they were real. He didn’t know
much, but he did know it must have taken amazing skill and talent
to pull this off.

Neither of them said anything as they roamed through
the partitions slowly with the rest of the attendees. Finally,
Bryce asked, “What do these do for you?”

“They make me want to
be
them. See, that one?
That’s what I wish I looked like. Taller. Curvier. Like—well, like
Lilith
.”

“Yeah, I’m not agreeing with you there, Giselle.”
She looked up at him, puzzled, and he bent down to speak in her
ear, “
Lilith
—these women—they’re for making love. I’m not
interested in making love. You’re solid, built to fuck. That’s what
I like.”

Giselle blushed, ducked her head, tried to hide her
smile. He loved that he could fluster her. “Don’t you ever want to
make love?” she asked softly. Her sudden shyness warmed his
soul.

“Yes,” he returned, “but that takes time to do right
and I haven’t felt like taking that kind of time yet.” He cocked an
eyebrow at her. “Have you?”

She snickered, but looked away to hide her growing
redness. “No.”

Bryce chuckled, then said, “There are a lot of
pregnant women in this collection.”

“Mmmm, that’s his hallmark. He adores pregnant
women.”

They had almost reached the end of the exhibit when
the announcement of the unveiling of the new Ford painting echoed
over the hum of the partygoers. The crowd began to move toward the
front of the gallery where it hung tarped. Giselle stayed back a
bit to study another painting.

“C’mon, Giselle. Let’s go find a good spot. Now I’m
really curious.”

“Mmmm, in a minute. I don’t like to be too
close.”

She fidgeted when he finally pulled her away from
the painting and ended up toward the back of the gathering. The
gallery director had asked for a brush-stick drum roll as he hushed
the crowd and introduced the work.

“This latest Ford painting,” he began, “marks a
sharp turn in the artist’s direction, as you will see. It is
called,” he said with a pause for dramatic effect, then grabbed the
cable that held the tarp and pulled, “
Rape of a Virgin
.”

The crowd gasped and stepped back as one. Bryce’s
jaw dropped, stepped back as if shoved.

No air, no breath.

Damn near dizzy.

The crowd buzzed, turned, stared. Somewhere in the
back of his mind, he noticed this, but he was too shocked to
care.

As of not even twenty-four hours ago, he knew that
body and bed intimately—and they were on display on a
five-foot-wide by eight-foot-tall canvas for the entire world to
see. His cock swelled as he closed his eyes and let his head fall
back with a sigh.

Bryce thought he should feel guilty for enjoying his
slide right down into the featherbed of hedonism, but he didn’t. He
was achingly aroused by the fact that other men looked between her
nude portrait and her clothed presence, their lust for her plain in
their faces, the same lust that had always tortured Bryce—and they
could not have her.

Right here, right now, she stood at Bryce’s side,
unabashedly bearing the mark he’d given her that proclaimed her his
lover.

He opened his eyes again to stare at that painting,
at her—

Mine.

Giselle trembled against him and crushed his hand
between both of hers. He returned her squeeze, but he was uneager
to break the spell. Finally her discomfort registered somewhere in
the depths of his consciousness and it did vaguely occur to him
that the silence in the room was not normal.

He was enchanted.

“I— I have no words,” he finally whispered.

Painted from directly above in the manner of
Morning in Bed
, laid out on a rumpled white sheet over a
mattress supported by a broad black platform, she lay on her
stomach on the bed at a diagonal, nude. Her right knee crooked
across the bed. Her right hand stretched out to the edge of the bed
and over it, desperately reaching, her fingers wide. Her left arm
was slung high and up over her head, bound to an iron ring in the
wall with a white strap secured by a highly stylized and detailed
padlock. Her left leg stretched far out under her, her foot
dropping off the mattress. A red strap and a padlock of a different
design, though equally stylized and detailed, bound the left ankle
to the leg of the bed.

Her honey curls, their length greatly exaggerated,
fanned out over the bed and glowed like the most vivid of flames.
The skin of her back, arms, and legs betrayed the cuts of a
weightlifter’s musculature. Her tattoo was detailed precisely, the
two Chinese characters—Warrior Queen—vertical over her spine, the
tail of the last character nearly disappearing into her cleft. Her
vulva peeked out tantalizingly from between her legs.

An open dog-eared Bible lay on the bed by her pillow
as if she had just put it down, and nearly touching her left hip
was a well-worn copy of
Intercourse
, also open but turned
over, spine up and broken. She stared at what rested beside the bed
with a desperate yearning. There, on a simple chair just an inch or
two out of reach, were two gold keys: One graphically carved in the
shape of a phallus that was clearly meant to open the lock of the
white strap that held her arm; the other in the shape of a baby’s
pacifier, which opened the padlock of the red strap at her
ankle.

Definitely
not Lilith. Not in any way.

The agony of a woman who couldn’t get what other
women got, what she should expect to get, what she very clearly
craved, had been captured with exquisite precision. Bryce swallowed
heavily when his gaze settled fully on the pacifier.

Giselle’s sniffling through the deafening silence
caught his attention then and he looked down at her. He finally
understood the depth of her anxiety when she whispered, “Talk to
me, please. Please don’t hate me.”

His eyes widened. “How could you think—”

Bryce clutched the back of her head and pulled her
fiercely to him, kissing her as wickedly as he had the night
before, taking everything she would give him and hoping she would
find value in what little he could give her.

Thunderous applause broke out when she wrapped an
arm around his neck, and Bryce smiled against her lips. He could
feel her relieved, delighted laugh and her tears that moistened
both their cheeks. “I don’t know what to say,” he murmured against
her mouth. “It’s— It’s breathtaking. You’re breathtaking.”

“It’ll be hung all over the world. You don’t mind
other men seeing it?”

“No,” he whispered harshly. “I
want
them to
look and know that woman is
mine
.” His thumb caressed the
bite mark on her nape. That she hadn’t bothered to try to hide it
made him hard. “And everyone in this room knows that.” She sucked
in a sharp breath, closed her eyes, closed her mouth on his so that
he would kiss her again. He obliged, then murmured, “You’re
not
a virgin anymore and
I
am the one who took it
from you.”

She smiled. Blushed. “Maybe we should go home. We’re
going to get attacked by the vultures any minute and there’s press
here.”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “We’re not going anywhere. I
want to enjoy this.”

That made her laugh but soon she was surrounded for
autographs and to field questions about Ford’s identity. Flashes
popped as cameras got her image to compare and contrast to the one
on the portrait.

Kevin and Jill Oakley stared at her in stunned
amusement.

Trudy, and to some extent, Fen, struggled with the
onslaught of people who, because they couldn’t get to Giselle,
hounded them instead.

Bryce chuckled to himself and shook his head as he
watched Giselle graciously speak with people and politely refuse to
give up The Name. With his arm draped possessively over her
shoulders, he answered the many questions that came his way. The
crush around them eventually lessened, then thinned completely as
the band reassembled and began its next set. Bryce took her hand
then and kissed the back of it. Giselle blushed again and smiled
shyly when he murmured, “Dance with me?”

They slow danced for an hour, Giselle staring up at
him with a love-drugged expression that soothed his soul and gave
him hope. They kissed intermittently, softly, slowly, closely
observed but uninterrupted except for Fen, who caught her arm as he
and Trudy made their exit.