by Moriah Jovan
He was still chuckling when he looked back into the camera. “Looks like the wild things are up and about, so I’m gonna bail. Cass was the project coordinator, so she can explain.” Sebastian looked at Cassandra, and grinned. “Allergies?”
“It’s lavender season,” Cassandra muttered with a sniffle, turning to hide her face in Mitch’s shoulder.
“I love you, man,” Sebastian said just before the screen went black.
Mitch stood dazed. “You did it,” he whispered as he looked down at his wife, feeling a burden lift from his shoulders, one he hadn’t realized he still carried or that still mattered to him.
“Well, we did it,” she said, wiping her tears. “See, I started getting interested in J.I. when I did my thesis proposal on Sebastian Taight’s failures as a fixer.”
Mitch stared at her, confused. “There weren’t any. He’s never failed.”
“That’s what everybody thinks,” she corrected. “There was one. J.I. The underlying theory of why he does what he does was interesting, but his pattern of getting thieves jailed stopped at J.I., then picked up again with every company he went into after that. It led me to conclude that while everyone—including you—saw your absorption of J.I. as a success, albeit incomplete, he considered it a failure. Getting them prosecuted wasn’t your goal. It was his goal. His failure. That is why I almost got laughed out of my program, so I changed my thesis to something I could defend on stats and evidence.”
He blinked. “And...you didn’t ask Sebastian to help you defend your proposal because they wouldn’t have taken you seriously.”
“Right. My whole time in college and in the MBA program, I was just an uppity rich Upper East Side stay-at-home divorcée trying to keep myself occupied because my kids were old enough to have their own lives. My theories were already tenuous; it could’ve been argued that I’d just paid him to show up and validate them.”
Giselle snorted.
“So how did this all happen?” Mitch asked, knowing he was missing a big piece of the puzzle.
“Cassie’s black book,” Bryce said. “That was the key. It connected the mastermind of the J.I. operation to the head of J.I.’s human resources department—Sitkaris—although in her transcripts, he wasn’t mentioned by name. But he was then connected to the records at Vorcester & Minden. Cassie worked her magic to herd Sitkaris one way, and Knox worked the accounting backward to herd him the other way until they had him corralled. We used the evidence against him to get the others’ probable locations, then we hired a team of bounty hunters. They tracked ’em down and brought ’em in. DIY extradition.”
“Actually,” Cassandra murmured, casting a wry glance at Giselle, who lazily twirled a steak knife in her fingers, “the bad-tempered bitch over there was the one who got Sitkaris to cough up the information. Finally.”
Giselle smiled beatifically and fluttered her eyelashes.
“How—” Mitch stopped. He didn’t want to know.
“He succumbed to my sunny disposition,” she offered sweetly, caressing the blunt edge of the knife blade with a finger. Clarissa laughed, clearly at ease with Giselle and her disposition.
“They’ll be tried in federal court,” Bryce continued. “Of course, we’ll all be called as witnesses, so you’ll have to be moving home pretty soon.”
“What about the black book? That’s evidence, right? Cassandra could—” He stopped, unwilling to think about what could happen to her if it came to light.
“It’s gone,” Cassandra murmured. “I destroyed everything. The only copy remaining is the one in Knox’s head.”
“Didn’t need it to prove anything,” Bryce rumbled as he popped grapes in his mouth. “It only pointed us in the right direction. The Vorcester & Minden documents and that list of names Cassie’s friend gave her did the heavy lifting, gave us the connection in retrospect. It’s all over but the shouting.”
Finally.
The black book he resented so much—
—the one Morgan had agreed to protect without knowing why—
—the one thing they needed to finish the job they’d started so long ago, one they’d been prepared to abandon.
He gulped, gratitude heavy in his chest.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Good work, boy.
* * * * *
I didn’t leave Pennsylvania because I was unhappy or because my commitment was long over. I did it because I was bored. Bored with baking, bored with my job, bored with Prissy and Louise, bored with the perfectly provincial French mansion and the little red shoe car.
I didn’t get on an overseas flight because I was running from Pennsylvania or my job or the ward that had long forgotten I wasn’t a member of the Church, and thus didn’t realize I never would be. I did it because I was bored.
Bored with my children, who’d had the temerity to do something with their lives, leaving me high and dry with no one to fuss over. Helene and her husband, with Doctors Without Borders, were somewhere in Venezuela at the moment. Clarissa, a junior attorney at Hale and Ravenwood, PC, made no secret of where her real ambition lay: marriage and motherhood, preferably in a chichi Kansas City neighborhood—once she found the right guy. Olivia and Paige co-owned a physical therapy and rehab center that had just started to offer franchises; Olivia’s husband ran the business, Olivia did therapy and personal training, while Paige and her boyfriend, who both still danced with Ailey, taught dance classes that increased the center’s value.
Bored with my stepchildren and grandchildren, who also had the temerity not to come entertain me in my boredom. Lisette and Geneviève now both had two, and Trevor had been called to the LDS Brazil Rio de Janeiro mission to get his precious sales training in a foreign language. He felt two years of celibacy was worth it for the experience, and though his father had refused to sanction or pay for his mission (blown his top, rather), Sebastian didn’t hesitate to pony up the cash along with a stern lecture about not fucking around while he was there and to “return with honor.” From Rio. That boy couldn’t have pulled a more difficult assignment if he’d tried, what with all the women walking around nude or close to it.
Bored with my best friend and ex-husband, who’d decided to trot the globe in the other direction from me. Bastards.
Bored with my adopted family because they were a thousand miles away and, since most of them had been too stupid to start their families before they turned forty, were now in full-throttle childrearing mode. That would last a while and I had no wish to mix myself up with ten children not, in fact, related to me.
A sea of faces surrounded me when I stepped off the plane in Japan, all races, colors, heights, sizes. In front of me, a staid Nigerian businessman thumbing his hand tablet as he walked right into an exquisitely attired Filipina. Next to me, a bleach-blonde Japanese gothic Lolita with an enormous lollipop in one hand and a Hello Kitty plushie in the other. Behind me, an Australian surfer frantically trying to find out where in the world his expensive board went.
I started walking, pulling my rolling carry-on behind me, to see what I could see in this new place. I have not been to Japan, though Gordon had brought the girls at least twice that I could remember.
I left Pennsylvania and flew to Japan because I was bored. Bored without my lover of five years, my sparring partner and playmate, who had come here six days ago with his legal team to negotiate the sale of his alloy to the Japanese government. He’d bet me a cool million I wouldn’t be able to stand being without him for the entire three weeks of his trip.
There.
Standing arrogantly relaxed in jeans and a rugby shirt. Longish dark sandy curls. Marvelous blue eyes. Scruffy sandy goatee.
Victorious smirk.
Oh, please.
I refuse to accede the bet because it wasn’t him I missed. I was just bored being all alone in the house with all my reorganization projects in my teams’ hands and nothing new on the horizon. So I abandoned my friends and hopped a plane, wondering what church would be like i
n Japanese.
You aren’t ever going to get your fill of me.
I’ll have to find something else to do when he starts to bore me, because he will.
Eventually.
~ THE END ~
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
Dude and my longsuffering Tax Deductions, who hear, “Mommy’s working!” way too often.
Sabrina Darby, RJ Keller, Sheila Reams, Inez Kelley, Bettie Sharpe, Galen Dara, and Teresa Knezek for pointing out all the potholes so I wouldn’t trip over them in front of my editor (or anyone else) (I hope)
Eric W Jepson for his edit and Elizabeth Palmer for her proof
Adam Figueira for the absolutely gorgeous cover and illustrations, and Lisa Rosen for suggesting the illustrations in the first place
and
Every reader who’s taken a chance on an upstart self-published author.
Thank you.
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About the Author
Since before Moriah can remember, she wrote stories in her head to put herself to sleep at night. Unfortunately, they grew like kudzu and took over her neural pathways until, around age fourteen, she had to start putting them on paper before they choked out everything else. She’s been writing ever since, with the exception of a five-year sagging middle—er, uh, hiatus—during which a lot of stuff happened. The trouble started when she woke up one morning in 2007 with the solution to a plot problem that had plagued her since 1995...
[email protected]
moriahjovan.com
twitter.com/MoriahJovan
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For vignettes, outtakes, FAQs, stats, and more on all the characters from The Proviso, Stay, and Magdalene
The Proviso
Book 1 in the Tales of Dunham
Giselle Cox & Bryce Kenard
Sebastian Taight & Eilis Logan
Knox Hilliard & Justice McKinley
•
Stay
Book 2 in the Tales of Dunham
Vanessa Whittaker & Eric Cipriani
•
Dunham
Book 4 in the Tales of Dunham
Elliott Raxham, Earl Tavendish & The Honourable Miss Celia Bancroft
Where it all begins.
(Coming July 4, 2013)