by Moriah Jovan
He hadn’t known what it meant, either, so he’d stormed out of the house.
A week after Justice had heard her mother singing sad songs in the barn, she had almost tumbled over into sleep when she felt the familiar depression of the bed. Her mother snuggled up to her and it only vaguely occurred to Justice that she had been sleeping with her a lot more lately.
“Iustitia,” whispered her mother in the dark of her room, her body warm and soft against her, “you have no idea how badly I want you off this farm.”
Justice didn’t understand that. She loved the farm, the work, the chores, even the animals, though her mother didn’t know she thought of some of them as pets. “Why, Mama?”
“Because this is not the place for you. You have a keen mind and I want you to use it for something besides mindless, endless chores. You’ll be old before your time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t and you won’t until you’re stuck where I am. I want you to remember this, Iustitia. I want you to remember that I wanted you educated, off this farm, doing something grand and making a mark in the world. That I wanted you to have a philosophy and stick with it, believe in it, even if it’s not mine.”
That struck Justice as a funny phrasing. “What do you mean, ‘wanted’?”
“Do you know how old I am?”
Of course she did. Everyone knows that about their parents. “Twenty-three.”
“Yes. Do you know how old your father is?”
“Forty-one.”
“Do the math, Iustitia. How old was I when you were born?”
Justice gulped. She would be fourteen in five years. Did that mean . . . ?
“That’s right. I don’t want that for you. I want you to understand that having children when you’re young is a trap—not that I regret having you because I love you dearly and I wouldn’t trade you for a seat in the Senate—but I want you to make a name for yourself, something grand and wonderful. The earlier the better. Promise me this.”
Justice didn’t understand her sense of urgency, her insistence. Thinking back, everything her mother ever did or said had paved the path to this moment.
Something bad was going on.
“What is it, Mama? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know, Iustitia. I just— I don’t feel well. I need you to remember this and remember that I wanted you to get an education, to leave here. Whatever you do, do not be stupid like I was and let a man sucker you. You don’t belong here. I don’t belong here. If I had listened to my father, well . . . ”
Upon looking at her mother in her casket two years later, it occurred to Justice that she had never looked prettier or younger: twenty-five and not a day older than that. Justice had never seen her like that. The doctors said she had a heart attack, but Justice didn’t believe that. Twenty-five-year-old mothers didn’t have heart attacks.
They do if they were born with a heart problem, one doctor told her bluntly when she had challenged him with an eleven-year-old’s certainty of medicine.
“Come, child,” said an old man she had never met, his hand heavy on her shoulder to steer her away from the rest of the mourners. “I want to talk to you.”
She wrested away from him. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“Your grandfather. Libertas’s—er, your mother’s father.”
“I don’t know you.”
“No, but you will. Perhaps I won’t fail you like I failed your mother.”
They sat together in a corner, talking. Well, not conversing: Her grandfather speaking, Justice listening. Absorbing the things he said, understanding more of what her mother had tried to teach her, but had not fully understood herself because she hadn’t had time to before Justice’s father had seduced her, gotten her pregnant, and been forced to marry her or go to jail.
Justice had known none of this until that moment.
And at that moment, her father chose to make a scene, yelling and screaming about what her grandfather had done to him, and how dare he attempt to glom onto Justice for his own evil purposes.
But Justice found comfort in her grandfather’s teachings and so she did chores in the barn and waited until after her father had gone to bed. Her grandfather would come to her in the dead of night with books of histories and documents and theories and fables. The hayloft became Justice’s classroom and her grandfather her professor.
Then he, too, died and left her with no one but her father, who didn’t know what she did when he wasn’t looking and didn’t care—as long as she wasn’t “messing around with books, because books don’t do nothin’ but put ideas in your head. This is your home and I’d just as soon you stay here and take care of it with me.”
“Okay, Papa,” she whispered, seeing all her mother’s and grandfather’s hopes burn off like an early-morning fog in ten o’clock sunshine. “I will.” He was all she had in the world now.
*
“That’s enough of you,” Justice muttered as she killed the sad music before her mood tanked. But she had to push the eject button on the tape deck several times before it would obey, and her humor gradually worsened each time it refused. She had very little patience with the thing, preferring instead to play the mp3 files on her laptop, but the tape player was one of few precious links to her mother.
Her plan was simple: Fulfill her mother’s and grandfather’s aspirations for her and still keep her promise to her father. She juggled so much now that having only one regular job to work around would be a respite.
She’d wanted to be a prosecutor because her grandfather thought it a noble profession, but in order to help with the farm after she got a job, she only had two counties to choose from: Chouteau and Buchanan. The Clay and Jackson County seats were too far to drive every day. She had always figured this reality into her plans and had known nothing about the Chouteau County prosecutor until that day two months ago, when he had defended her, validated her, touched her.
Even had she been inclined to think about breaking her promise to her father, leave the farm, go somewhere else, that was out of the question now. If the Chouteau County prosecutor wouldn’t hire her, she’d work in legal aid just to work in that courthouse.
I daresay none of you have thought that deeply about what you want and why you want it.
She swept her fingertips across her chin where Professor Hilliard had touched her so gently and smiled dreamily.
She turned on talk radio and knew by the voice coming out of the speakers that it was four o’clock. If she timed it right, she could cook all evening to get her week’s orders filled and write while chili and stroganoff simmered.
Her spirit lightened considerably when she sifted through the mail and found the latest National Review. She flipped through the pages quickly to find the article she had written and submitted on a lark, bolstered by one man’s faith in her opinions.
She had never expected it to be published.
She had also never expected to be asked to write more.
The water boiled and Justice got to cooking in earnest. She assembled a plate for her father, who picked it up, fished a can of beer out of the refrigerator, and walked right back out of the kitchen without a word.
How long Martin McKinley would pout about her schooling this time, Justice couldn’t guess. It had taken him three months into her undergrad for him to speak to her. She shrugged. Sometimes it bothered her that his silence, intended to punish her, didn’t bother her.
Two hours later she had enough of a break from cooking to crack open her laptop, make the rounds of her favorite political blogs, and post a few comments. Her email chimed.
*
Subject: Come aboard!
Reply-to: [email protected]
Justice,
We’ve been following your comments for a while and we just read your piece in the National Review. We think you have a lot of potential as a columnist and we’d like to invite you to become a permanent contributor at TownSquared.
/> Let us know!
Cheers,
The TownSquared Crew
*
She gasped. Giggled. Squealed, even. TownSquared was the biggest conservative blog on the ’net and they wanted her to write for them?
Very good, Justice.
* * * * *
5: HOT, LOOSE & CLEAN
APRIL 2005
Giselle put her backpack on a remote corner of her desk, careful not to dislodge the piles of papers and microcassette tapes that littered it. She sighed. It just couldn’t happen that folks would respect her space and the clearly marked IN box she had set up to reduce just such clutter.
She hated clutter.
After collecting a bottle of water from the fridge, she set herself to putting her night’s work in order. Not as much as it looked, once it was in a nice, tidy pile, but it didn’t take into account the digital dictation on the server. If she finished early, she could go home to study or, more likely, sleep.
The clock read 4 p.m. when Giselle put the buds in her ears and began to type. Briefs, pleadings, letters, contracts—she could do them all by heart. One day, very soon, she would be the one dictating and not the one transcribing. She couldn’t wait to get the hell out of this cubicle, which she resented all the more after having built a business and nurtured it for so many years—
—only to watch it burn to the ground. Starting over again at her age and with her background really sucked.
“Thanks a bunch, Uncle Fen,” she grumbled.
Since it was still a half hour before the end of the workday, the office bustled with secretaries, paralegals, and lawyers going this way and that. Giselle sat off the beaten path, but that didn’t stop many attorneys from making pointed detours to her desk to drop off work, to chat, and every so often, in the case of the more persistent, to ask her out.
She’d typed for some time before she caught the sight of an approaching attorney out of the corner of her eye and sighed. That particular puppy had been hot to trot for a while now. She had politely declined numerous invitations, but that didn’t stop him from pursuing her anyway and making himself a general pain in her ass.
Ralph (who insisted everyone pronounce it “Rafe”) propped his hip on her desk and waited for her to finish typing a phrase. Though she would like to ignore him and work, she couldn’t. If the attorneys wanted to monopolize her time with chitchat, they could, though it threw her off her self-imposed schedule. It was now six o’clock. She wanted to leave by midnight.
“What can I do for you, Rafe?” she asked once she clicked the Dictaphone off, remaining polite but aloof, hoping he would get the hint.
“Go to the Ford exhibit at the Kemper Gallery with me on Saturday?”
Ever so thankful her weekends consisted of study groups, she shook her head. “I have plans this weekend.”
“Ford’s an artist. Have you ever seen his art?” he asked, sly.
She sighed. “Rafe, I really do have plans, but I’ve explained this to you before. I don’t date outside my faith.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it did provide her a convenient out.
“Right. How could I forget all about you nice little Mormon girls?” It was nothing she hadn’t heard before, with the same contempt, and from more interesting men than Ralph. “I think that’s just a bullshit excuse.”
Her eyebrow rose. “Oh? So are you saying that I’m using it as an excuse not to go out with you?”
His face hardened just a bit. She knew men’s moods, so she didn’t miss the change in demeanor. Ralph had always seemed relatively harmless, but now her annoyance turned to wariness. She kept her face carefully blank until—
He leaned into her personal space and murmured, “I could make things very difficult for you here.”
She stared at him a minute before she burst out laughing. “Is that the best you can do?”
Ralph drew back at that, his surprise evident. His lips thinned and the rusty cogs in his head ground to come up with a reply. Giselle chuckled. “I thought so. If you have work for me, please drop it in my box and I’ll have it done by the time you come in in the morning.”
His nostrils flared at having been dismissed. “I don’t think you want to cross me, Miss Cox.”
“Ralph,” she said slowly, pronouncing the “lph” sound with great precision. Rising from her chair, she closed the gap between them until her nose nearly touched his. “I am not going to fuck you.” Her husky whisper made his breath shorten. “Not today. Not tomorrow. Not in a thousand lifetimes.” Adrenaline pulsed through her arteries even as Ralph’s humiliation visibly warred with his arousal. “You go on with your threats and intimidation. Go to Hale. Tell him whatever you like. I dare you.” She smirked. “I guarantee you won’t like the consequences.”
She rocked back on her heel and crossed her arms over her chest, one eyebrow raised. He gulped, but attempted to save face: “You’re going to be very sorry about this, Miss Cox.”
“Ralph.” Giselle and Ralph both started at the deep, hoarse male voice behind them and turned to see who had spoken with such ice. She felt Ralph tremble as she gaped, up up up, at the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She felt a jolt of desire as she stared at him, her body tingling for a real man the way it had only once before, long ago and far away.
He continued, “When you’re feeling froggy, you just go ahead and jump.”
“Hey, buddy!” Ralph said, his bright tone manufactured and patently false.
The stranger’s bright green eyes flashed fire and his lips pressed together in a thin line. His big body radiated tension and a hint of his divine cologne wafted her way. Intimidating under any circumstances, the burn scars that matted the left half of his face and disappeared down into his collar made him fascinatingly ferocious.
Black hair. Fair skin that would tan easily and probably very dark in the summer sun. Chiseled features on the unscarred side of his face. She couldn’t place his ethnicity, but he was extraordinarily exotic to her.
Those eyes, that face: Perfect weapon.
Giselle felt the heat between her legs, the wetness, as she examined him head to toe, shameless in her inspection, wondering what lay beneath all that finely tailored silk, wool, and cotton . . .
. . . wondering how long she’d remain a “good little Mormon girl” if that man had the good sense to ask her out.
She reluctantly drew her gaze away from him to look over her shoulder at Ralph, who had lost all color. He stood to his full height, though it gave him no advantage against this beautiful stranger’s height and mass.
“Pack up your desk, Ralph,” the man rumbled.
“You don’t work here.”
“I’ll inform your boss I’ve invited you to hand in your resignation. I don’t think he’ll mind.”
“Aw, man,” he whined, but forced a laugh. “It’s just a little running gag Miss Cox and I have some fun with, right, Giselle?”
“Pffftt. Nice try.”
“Your office better be cleaned out when I leave here tonight.” His order, so final, so threatening, made Giselle want to take another quick glance. Her breath caught at his power.
“You can’t prove anything.”
The man crossed his massive arms over his broad chest and drawled, “Can’t I.”
Ralph’s lip curled and he glared at Giselle before stalking off, as if it were her fault. She supposed that in his mind, it was.
“Thank you,” she said with her most flirtatious smile. She looked at him wide-eyed, wanting—begging—him to invite her to . . . something. Dinner, maybe. Ballet-theater-symphony-opera, preferably. She would love to dress up for this man. “I was afraid I’d have to take him out back and give him a good spanking.”
He didn’t laugh at her dumb joke. “You’re welcome,” he said tersely, turning to go.
Damn!
“Well, wait,” she said and offered her hand for him to shake. Her flirting lacked finesse because she was too direct, too open, too . . . unpracticed. It had never mattered to
her before this moment when she needed to stall him long enough to figure out how to keep his attention. “I’m Giselle Cox.”
His eyebrow rose and he stared right back at her, ignoring her hand. “Miss Cox,” he murmured with a slight sneer and a curt nod. His disparaging glance swept her from head to toe, then he turned again to walk away.
Her breath caught and her chest hurt right behind her sternum the way it had the only other time a man had left her breathless. She could only stare after him, stunned, speechless, moisture stinging her eyes.
She recovered herself in time to snap, “So I guess I did something to deserve that.”
He stopped short and she studied him further while awaiting his apology.
A custom-tailored olive silk/linen blend suit accentuated the perfect musculature of his torso. The hems of his pants cuffs gathered artfully upon the leather of his Italian loafers. His sleek hair just brushed the collar of the white shirt peeping up from his lapel. Precisely half an inch of snowy cuff appeared from the sleeve of his coat. His left hand—as scarred as his face—bore no ring and contrasted sharply with his cuff. Diamond cufflinks sparked tiny rainbows in a random stream of last-gasp sunset.
Turning halfway, he pinned her with that weapon he had. She felt dizzy under that stare, his disfigured beauty radiating raw sex and power. His expression remained stony. “I’m sure,” he replied, his tone measured and precise, “that you think you’re entirely blameless.”
Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. Oh, no. No. Men did not talk to her like that. She drew up every bit of her five feet, four and five-eighths inches, done with her starry-eyed infatuation. “’Scuse you. You don’t know me from Eve.”