The Proviso (94 page)

Justice giggled with the glee of a little sister
who’d successfully poked at her older brother, then blogged that
night on the definition of family. She went to sleep with the same
smile, feeling as if she had come home to people who had been
waiting for her.

* * * * *

86:
SYDNEY CARTON

Justice dressed for work, four weeks to the day of
her wedding to Knox. Not that anybody’d notice, since she never saw
him at home and rarely saw him at work. She didn’t know if he’d
been home this past weekend and she didn’t really care.

Fun. No guilt. No thoughts of what she wasn’t
getting accomplished back on the farm that she would never have
been able to keep up with anyway.

No hurt over being abandoned, or at least, not much
since it was possible Knox had engineered that the way he
engineered a whole lot of things.

I had my reasons.

She was still lost in “Why me?” though and the
richest irony of it all was that of all the women Knox could’ve
chosen, he’d chosen one who had a national audience and political
clout—and was ignorant of it. It would take only one well-written
letter to the editor at the
Wall Street Journal
to crack the
whole situation wide open.

But now it wasn’t just Knox at stake if she did
that; his family and friends were, too. These people respected her
for coming back on her own, staying with Knox, being in love with
him, however naïvely, for being willing to fight his fight with
him, with them, even though her only real role in it consisted of
silently bearing the name of Hilliard. There would be plenty of
time for a baby to happen if they decided not to take any
precautions against it.

Abstinence works every time it’s tried.

Her lip curled and she snarled at nothing.

She arrived home to a silent house yet again. She
had grown used to the silence, her only companion a neutered tomcat
named Dog. She liked the beauty of silence to think about the day,
about how the office worked, about her progression as a lawyer.

She’d settled in to her job and her environs, though
now that she had developed a system, the endless stream of traffic
tickets and deadbeat dads and bad checks and penny-ante
arraignments had begun to bore her silly.

It still unnerved her that large amounts of cash
came and went, but now she wasn’t so sure that its source was
illegal and she definitely wasn’t going to believe one way or
another until she had proof. But because she couldn’t quite work
out how it could be legal, she followed Richard’s lead and
pretended not to see it. Her only personal goal at the moment was
to get better at being a prosecutor.

Her coworkers’ attitudes had changed for the better
when she came back; she had no idea why. It wasn’t as if they had a
stake in her presence the way Knox’s family did. Eric’s comment
still baffled her and he’d refused to explain it.

Other than that, they didn’t care that she was
Knox’s wife and they certainly didn’t care about her writings. They
yelled at her like they yelled at each other and the other
residents; it was how they communicated all the time, a male
bonding ritual that had Justice rolling her eyes and snorting a
lot. Yet as she got better, they didn’t yell at her so much because
they had no reason to. Every once in a while, someone would point
out where she needed to fix something—nicely.

Justice hadn’t been late once since she’d come back
from St. Louis. She wasn’t up to her eyeballs in farm chores until
one in the morning and it wasn’t like Knox was making love to her
all night, every night. Oh, no. She had no excuse for not being
well rested and able to get to work on time.

I won’t pressure you. You come to me when you’re
ready.

What did that
mean
? Was she just supposed to
walk up to him and say, “’Mkay, ready now”? How was she supposed to
go about asking him for what she wanted without completely
embarrassing herself? She knew he wanted her and would definitely
not turn her away or laugh at her, but she was still just too
inexperienced and insecure to be able to initiate anything—

Make love to me, Knox.

—and too embarrassed to ask either Giselle or Eilis
to give her instructions on the proper seduction of a husband.

For the last three mornings, she had gone to the
basement where he slept to see if she could catch him just to talk
to him before he turned into At-Work Knox. He was always gone, the
couch still warm. She decided that if he wanted to avoid her that
badly, maybe she should probably take the hint. After all, if he
expected her to come to him, he should stick around so she could do
that.

At lunch, Richard pulled up a chair and deposited
both his and her lunches on her desk. This had become a ritual with
them. She’d pay for his lunch if he went across the street and got
hers, too. She’d seen the meager lunch he brought every day while
the rest of the men went out. That would be expensive for a
married-with-three-teenagers man who didn’t dip his hands in the
cesspool of possibly dirty money.

Justice had opened her laptop and checked the new
comments on the blogs while she waited for Richard to come back.
“Darn,” she muttered as she scanned them, then sighed.

“What?”

She clucked. “Oh, there used to be a regular poster
who followed my articles and he hasn’t commented in almost a
month.”

“So?”

“Well, you know, you get used to people online and
then you miss them when they don’t show up for a while. This guy,
he— He’s my buddy. His comments are always interesting and smart,
and I like him a lot. He’s been following me around the web for two
years and then just— Nothing.”

Richard didn’t get it; he was busy with real life,
family he adored. He did things with them and his life was
full.

She frowned. “It’s like he disappeared off the face
of the Internet.” She tried to explain it to him again. “Okay. It’s
like having a pen pal that you get a letter from every other day
for two years. Then one day the letters just stop coming. You don’t
know why; there’s no explanation. You only know that your friend
disappeared.”

She closed her laptop and happened to look up to see
Knox watching her, looking at her the way he had that night in the
grass, with what she now understood was desire, his eyes dark. He
wanted her. His jaw clenched and his nostrils flared. His fingers
curled into his palms and tightened.

Her eyes widened. Her heart beat a little faster,
her breathing sped up, and she bit her lip.

Take me home, Knox, please.

“You’re not sleeping with him, are you?” Richard
muttered around his sandwich, having apparently witnessed that
exchange, and she reluctantly looked away from Knox to Richard.

She couldn’t even be offended; Richard was her . . .
girlfriend? She snorted. “That obvious?”

“Quite. He doesn’t act like a man who’s getting
regular sex and you still look at him like a high school freshman
with a crush on the captain of the football team.”

“Why were you all so happy I came back?”

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then
said, “He was insufferable, the worst I’ve ever seen him. Then you
came back and . . . he wasn’t.”

That confused her, but it warmed her soul that the
office thought her responsible for some improvement in Knox’s mood
that she could not discern.

Justice sneaked glances at Knox throughout the
afternoon when she could; she, like the rest of the staff, was busy
in court and meeting with defense counsel making her plea deals—but
every time she sneaked a peek, he was looking at her, too.

That evening when she went home, she decided she’d
had enough of this. She missed him, the At-Home Knox, the one who’d
let her go, the one who had kissed her so well, because kissing
seemed to be his favorite thing in the world to do.

Justice awoke to the sound of her alarm. He had to
be sleeping at this time of the morning and she was determined to
catch him before he went to work.

She opened the basement door and saw a bluish-white
glow, the muted sound of the TV, and what sounded like chuckles. It
was three o’clock in the morning; didn’t he ever sleep?

Sneaking down the stairs, she wasn’t sure what she
expected to catch him watching—although it had occurred to her that
it could be porn—but what she saw wasn’t even on her radar.

“ . . . pondering what I’m pondering?”

“I think so, Brain, but pantyhose are so
uncomfortable in the summertime.”

A snicker came from the couch.

Pinky and the Brain?

Justice blinked and shook her head, unable to
process that. Knox and cartoons. Another snicker came from the area
of the couch at the gag that followed. He hadn’t seen her or heard
her once she reached the bottom of the stairs and she tiptoed in a
wide circle so she could approach him without his seeing her.

Knox lay on his side, clad in very short black
cycling shorts and a white tee shirt. A thick tome lay open on the
floor in front of him, next to a bucket of cheese popcorn and a
gallon jug of orange juice, half drunk. He had his head propped up
on one hand and shoved popcorn into his mouth, wiped his hand on
his shirt, turned the page of his book, and read a few lines before
he chuckled at the TV again.

His golden hair was rumpled and his jaw was
frightfully scruffy and Dog sprawled along the length of his waist
and ribs, asleep.

At that moment, Justice longed to know more about
this man who’d forced her to marry him to get his inheritance, then
set her free the very next day.

“Iustitia,” he breathed, obviously surprised, and
she loved the sound of her real name out of his mouth.

Her gaze ran up the length of his prone body to meet
his look.

“What are you reading?” she asked, because she
wasn’t sure what to say now that she’d gotten his attention.

He shrugged. “Junk.”

“And you’re eating junk and watching junk.”

His face betrayed no emotion. “What’d you expect?
The Playboy channel?”

Justice was glad he couldn’t see her flush in the
dark. She looked away and decided that maybe this wasn’t such a
good idea after all.

“Iustitia, come here.”

She blinked at his gentle tone of voice. She looked
back at him with a good measure of suspicion. “Why?”

He burrowed back into the sofa and patted the
cushion in front of him. “C’mere.”

Justice stared at him, unable to decipher his
expression or his mood. She bit her lip and looked toward the
stairs. “I really should go back to bed . . . ”

“I said, ‘Come here.’”

That hard edge was back in his voice. She did think
about defying him, but she’d sought him out—and now she couldn’t go
through with asking him for what she really wanted.

Knox’s big hand reached up and gently wrapped around
her arm, pulling her around the arm of the sofa, then down. She sat
stiffly on the edge of the sofa until he caught the side of her
neck. With a force so gentle as to be almost nonexistent, he
compelled her to lie in front of him, facing the television so that
the heat of his body seeped into her back. He settled his arm
heavily in the curve of her waist and his large palm cupped the hip
that sank into the cushion. He insinuated his knee between hers and
the twining of their legs seemed terribly intimate for so innocuous
a position. His chin lay atop her head and his other hand played
with a lock of her hair.

He liked her hair. A lot. She sighed and relaxed
back into him.

“Hi,” he murmured and tiny tendrils of her hair
moved on his breath, tickling the skin of her face.

“Hi,” she murmured in return, catching a breath when
she felt his growing arousal against her lower back. She felt an
answering heat between her legs and she closed her eyes
helplessly.

“Relax. Watch TV.”

“Why are you being nice to me?”

“Because I’m too tired to be an asshole. Enjoy it
while it lasts.”

Justice smiled a little at the wry tone and shifted
a little closer to him.

Knox said nothing else, but continued to play with
her hair, watching TV and occasionally chuckling. She liked the way
his chest rumbled when he laughed at his cartoons. She felt every
breath he took, every absent stroke of his palm as it drifted up
and down her skin along the line of her ribs and hip underneath the
gray jersey. She hadn’t stopped wearing his clothes to bed and had
even taken them to the Kenards’ to sleep in.

That had not gone unnoticed nor un-smirked upon.

She drew in a breath when his thumb brushed the
underside of her breast—every slide of his hairy legs along her
smooth ones, every shift of his hips as he tried to adjust his
arousal. She vaguely wondered if that caused pain.

She missed him. She missed him the way she’d missed
him when he’d left the symphony early, his hand not in her hair,
his shoulder not brushing hers, his mouth not on hers. She missed
the Knox she thought must be in there but had only had glimpses
of.

“You’re thinking again,” he whispered in her
ear.

Justice caught her breath, wondering what he was
going to say to her that would make her tingle more than she
already did.

“What are you thinking about?”

He didn’t need to know that. She leaned over and
looked at the book he was reading and flipped it closed yet keeping
her thumb at his place.

“Who’s Porter Rockwell?” she asked, suddenly
intrigued.

“Joseph Smith and Brigham Young’s bodyguard.”

Justice thought he must be working his way through
his religious texts. “As in Brigham Young University?”

“As in. I graduated from law school there.”

She gasped and shifted so she could look at him.
“You’re a Mormon?”

“No.” He paused, then said, “Well, not anymore.”