by Moriah Jovan
Her silent stoicism told him everything he needed to know. She had expected this; she had probably even thought of doing that herself and hadn’t been able to bring herself to.
“If you had done that six months ago, I wouldn’t be here,” he said, now thoroughly pissed off that she hadn’t blinked an eye. Taunting a client was uncharacteristic for him and he didn’t like the fact that he wanted to get a reaction from her so badly that he was willing to grind it in.
He stopped and took a deep breath before he really let loose and mentioned the second, third, and fourth things she should’ve done. That would be downright mean.
Sebastian had a speech he had perfected over the years that he used without fail. He didn’t want to break people’s spirits; he didn’t ridicule their choices and he was always careful to maintain respect for them and sympathy with their situations. Once these people in distress got to know him it seemed, oddly, that his presence was of comfort to them in their time of greatest stress and grief.
Not that anyone ever actually noticed that. They never saw what he had done to salvage their companies the minute he left for good, check in hand, and only knew what they had done. He always pulled his punches, handled everyone with kid gloves, hoping they would learn from their mistakes and from changing their business strategies. Today, though, he hadn’t used his normal speech on her, and he didn’t know why other than that she was so damned uncrackable.
“I love those paintings,” she finally admitted with great dignity.
“Sentiment has no place here, although I will admit that if you had sold them off one at a time for a quick fix, you’d be worse off now than you are.”
He saw a split-second flash of heartbreak in her face that must have been extreme to be seen through her mask of makeup. She turned away. Finally, she said, “May I keep one? It’s not on the books.”
“Does the corporation own it?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice tinged with a nearly imperceptible despair.
For reasons he didn’t understand, instead of the same flat “no” he would’ve normally given anyone in her position, the same one he’d given her about a vacation, he asked, “Which one is it?”
“Morning in Bed.”
He sucked in a breath and his eyes widened. “You own Morning in Bed?”
“Yes.”
That painting was worth tens of millions by itself. If she sold that along with the rest of them, she’d be more than half salvaged. Still, he hesitated. “Let me think about it. In the meantime,” he continued briskly, “I would like you to go to the Ford exhibit with me Saturday evening so that you can see for yourself the value of letting them all go.”
“I can’t,” she said smoothly. “I have other plans.”
Sebastian was immediately suspicious. A woman who owned nine Fords, including the most notorious one, hadn’t planned to attend the Ford exhibit where a new painting would be unveiled? Did she hate his presence so much that she would give that up rather than go with him? It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened, though, so it was entirely possible. He figured if he couldn’t get a date with her under cover of business, he may not be able to get a date with her at all.
He inclined his head. “As you wish, Miss Logan.”
Then he walked out of her office and out of her building, now even more pissed off that Knox had badgered him to do this for one entirely different reason. He wanted Eilis Logan in his bed. Badly—
—but he didn’t know how the hell he was going to get her there.
* * * * *
19: CLINICAL, INTELLECTUAL, CYNICAL
Giselle sat on a picnic table by Brush Creek just off campus, feeding bread to the ducks and geese. She couldn’t take this much longer. Sebastian, irritated, had accused her of “moping around the house like a love-struck sixteen-year-old girl for the last seven months.” Knox was angry because she had assiduously avoided him. She hadn’t returned her mother’s phone calls or emails in two weeks and Lilly had resorted to hounding both Sebastian and Knox as to Giselle’s state of mind. She hadn’t shown up at any of her extended family’s frequent functions because she just couldn’t take Fen on any level after he’d called her in the middle of class to yell at her for going to his party armed.
She just wanted to be alone for a while with no one jabbering in her ears, making demands, lecturing her on propriety, threatening her life and livelihood and grades, or shaming her for a heinous breach of trust.
She knew Bryce’s office address: downtown, in a prestigious skyscraper convenient to the Jackson County Courthouse. She still had no idea what to do with that information or if she’d do anything at all.
“Boy, you just don’t know a good thing when it steps right in front of you, do you?”
“Go away,” she muttered. “Don’t you have fathers and fiancées to avenge, women to marry, and children to sire?”
“You’re a hot mess. Move over.”
She did and he climbed up onto the table beside her.
He leaned in to kiss her and she leaned away from him. “No more. I’m done with this.”
“Done with what?”
“Done with you.”
Knox said nothing and she dared not look at him. He could tease her out of her funk now, but it would come back the next day anyway. She was worn out and overwhelmed and very unhappy.
“I’m done with this semi-incestuous relationship. Done with the Shakespearean tragedy that is your life. Knox, I have no stake in OKH, but because of it, everything I had has been taken away from me except my life and that’s only because I got lucky. Twice. I’m tired. I want— No, I need a resolution.”
He handed her a bottle of cold water, which she took. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know,” she replied with a sigh. “Me too.”
He caught her mouth then and coaxed her tongue to play, twenty-five years of familiar, so very comfortable. She sighed into his mouth, fell into the kiss, closed her eyes—
—and found herself comparing him unfavorably to Bryce Kenard. She opened her eyes then and pulled away from him. “That wasn’t fair. What if somebody saw us?”
“Oh, it’d just give your reputation another layer of mystique.”
“Pffftt. Professor Hilliard is pissing me off.”
“Miss Cox yanks my chain plenty, too, so don’t act like you’re all lily white.”
She sighed. “I’m guessing you’re here because Sebastian bitched at you to bitch at me?”
“Yeah. You’re not home enough for him to kick your ass and when you are, you’re sleeping. He thinks I know all your little hiding places.”
“Well, you don’t.”
“You’re right about that. I’ve been to every shoe store in town.”
She cracked a reluctant smile.
“Lemme guess. Bryce Kenard.”
She swallowed.
“Talk to me, Giselle.”
“He, um— At the gallery, he—” She stopped. Took a deep breath. “He wanted— He asked me to go home with him and— Um, and I wanted to, but I was there to trick him. I mean, I couldn’t— Not on a lie.”
“Oh, is that what this is about?”
“That and the fact that he thinks I’m a slut,” she said in a rush. “I’m mortified.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then, “So tell him the truth. Throw yourself on his mercy. You’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Like I want to invite someone else to read back my pedigree for me? I think not. Sebastian takes care of that quite nicely, thank you.”
“That’s a dodge. He intimidates you and you don’t like it.”
“Fuck you.”
Knox took some of her bread to throw to the ducks. Neither of them spoke for a long time, then he said, “I’ve been wanting to ask you something. Was I that obvious?”
“When?”
“That day in class last year, that week I subbed for Grady.”
Giselle had to cast back in her memory a bit before she remembered.
“I thought you didn’t want to discuss it?”
“I do now. Talk.”
“Hmm. Well. It was obvious to me. I think the rest of the class was just too shellshocked to notice.”
“Shellshocked?”
“Knox, you were . . . enraged. I haven’t seen you that angry since you tried Tom Parley and you’ve never shown that side of you in class. You turned from hottie heartthrob law professor into badass Chouteau County prosecutor. And how you looked at her— I have never seen you look at any woman that way, not Leah, not me, not any other woman you’ve ever loved.” She paused. “By the way, did you get in trouble for that?”
His eyebrow rose. “Giselle,” he drawled.
“Of course not! Untouchable Knox Hilliard strikes again.” Giselle huffed. “So if Leah hadn’t been in the picture, would you have nabbed her after class and taken her to the Den of Iniquity? ’Cause that’s what it looked like you wanted to do.”
His silence told her everything she needed to know.
“Oh, Knox,” she sighed. “More guilt?”
“I went home that day feeling like the worst bastard who ever lived. I could barely look at Leah. Then she died—” His mouth tightened. “I know you haven’t told Sebastian any of this because he hasn’t cracked my head open.”
She waved a hand. “I’m torn. I see your point and I agree with it, but this really is your fight and Sebastian has a right to resent that you want to abandon ship now that he’s steering it. Why don’t you seek her out and tell her how you feel, lay it all out for her, and let her decide whether she wants to be with you or not? She’s in love with you.”
“She wouldn’t understand it even if I recited it line and verse. And even if she did, no woman in her right mind would step into my mess voluntarily. You know I don’t like women not in their right minds and, aside from her crush on me, Justice McKinley is in her right mind.”
“I don’t think that’s fair. I mean, if I were her, I’d want to know that the man I wanted actually wanted me, too. I wouldn’t want to live my life wondering and dreaming and wishing.”
“Giselle, she’s fourteen years younger than me. She’s not old enough to know what she wants. I’ve never been one of those professors and I don’t like younger women. Forty-year-old women are hot to trot. You have no idea.”
Giselle’s mouth dropped open.
He caught her look. “Oh. Right. I guess you do know. The point is, this is killing me. She’s young enough to be my daughter; hell, I’ve raised a girl her age. What am I supposed to do with her? By the time she turns forty, I’d have to pop Viagra like they’re aspirin just to barely keep up. And then there’s the perv factor. As in, ‘Oh, gee, I was fourteen when she was born.’”
“And Leah was fifteen when you were born.” She paused. “All you’d have to do is have your executive give her a little ringy-ding, ask her to come in for an interview. Everybody would assume that you’re courting her name just as much as every other office and every other think tank in the country. Her name would skyrocket if Knox Hilliard, Trainer of Baby Litigators, sought her out and nobody would ever have to know that all you want is a little redheaded teddy bear. Keep her as an AP, train her, wait until after your birthday and then explain it.
“Or, in the alternative, hire her, train her, and let her go none the wiser. She needs a backbone and it would take her six years to get where you could get her in six weeks.”
“My world would crush her,” he murmured so low she could barely hear him. “I would crush her.”
“Knox, you gave her name to her. Do you not get that? She’s well respected across the country and powerful people have begun to court her opinions. Every time you hear her quoted on talk radio, every time you read her blog posts, every time you open a magazine or a newspaper and see her byline—you did that. You validated her, gave her some confidence.” Giselle paused. “Online and in print, anyway.
“She hides behind her computer. She still walks around school like she deserves nothing, like she’s only there by the grace of God and Knox Hilliard—and that might get taken away any day. She should be walking around like the genius that she is, but— In two, three years, you could turn her into a real power player in politics or law or both. At the very least, finish the job you started.”
Knox said nothing for a long while, then, “Her CV is on my desk. I was going to have Eric interview her and then send her on her way.”
Giselle gasped and her eyes widened. “She came to you?” He nodded morosely. It took her a bit of thought and silence to work that through; she had never expected that the girl would have the guts to seek Knox out herself.
“Oh, I get it. You think that once she sees you in your world—not as knight-in-shining-armor Professor Hilliard—she won’t look at you the same way she did that day and you don’t want to watch her get disillusioned with you.”
“I find it inconvenient that you can read my mind.”
That made Giselle laugh. “Master of the overstated understatement.”
He flashed her a grin. “Did you like that?”
“You dumbshit,” she said and pushed him off the table.
That made him laugh in turn and he hopped back up on the table. He sobered then. “Me, my name, my office—it would taint her, not make her. Her career would be over before it really began and could kill Oakley’s chances, to boot.”
Giselle couldn’t deny that. Kevin Oakley would have enough to answer for if his long friendship with Knox came to light. Now that Justice had agreed to endorse Kevin as a senatorial candidate, her employment in a corrupt prosecutor’s office would cast doubt on her character and, by extension, diminish Kevin’s credibility.
“I just want to see her again, let her go, and then find her when this is all over with. Maybe she needs the world to knock her around a little bit—and I refuse to put her where Fen’ll feel obliged to kill her. If it weren’t for his unpredictability, I’d do it, but I can’t take that chance.”
Giselle sat and thought about that for a while. “You do have a point,” she said slowly, looking off into the distance. “Well,” she finally said, “I can appreciate that you want to take the high ground, so I’ll not argue with you about it.”
“Giselle, do you know why I’m so good at what I do?”
“Not really, no. I don’t think of you that way.”
“Huh. Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s my memory. So this is what I have to say to you: ‘If it were me, I’d want to know that the man I wanted actually wanted me, too. I wouldn’t want to live my life wondering and dreaming and wishing.’”
Her breath caught in her throat. “Bastard,” she grumbled.
“Coward.”
* * * * *
20: FENEMIES
Giselle lay awake all night with Knox’s parting shot ringing in her ears.
Coward.
Her situation and his weren’t perfectly analogous, but he’d used her own words against her. Did they apply any less to her and this man, this Bryce Kenard (whose very name screamed testosterone) with whom she’d spent so little time, and every second of it in intensely erotic foreplay?
That’s a dodge. He intimidates you and you don’t like it.
Knox was right and she hated when that happened, especially when Sebastian agreed, since they so very rarely did. Knox had wasted no time in tattling on her to Sebastian, who said, “So? It’s not like you pulled off some elaborate scam and made a fool of him. But,” he added, “you need to get the monkey off your back first so you can have a fresh start. Kenard doesn’t need to be mixed up in this. He’s done nothing to deserve it.”
Knox agreed with that assessment, too. She had no chance when both of them ganged up on her.
She made up her mind and she wouldn’t wait until the family’s Labor Day barbecue to have her say, so she went to Fen immediately. Once having made the decision to seek Bryce Kenard out, she wouldn’t let it lie one more second.
Giselle didn’t dare go unarmed. She also didn�
�t bother to stop at the guard’s desk or pause when the metal detector shrieked at her, or in any way acknowledge the men who hollered behind her and scrambled to keep her from going any farther into the building.
“Stand down, gentlemen,” boomed a deep voice from the mezzanine above the massively expansive terrazzo-and-marble front lobby of OKH Enterprises. “Everything’s fine. My wayward niece just wants to throw a little tantrum at me.”
Protests followed her as she took the stairs of the grand staircase two at a time, her strong legs eating up the distance between him and her. She ignored everyone but the man she had come to see.
She had a strange balance of power with him that she’d had since she was a child. She didn’t always understand it, but occasionally it proved useful.
Yes, he’d tried to kill her twice, which had bankrupted her and obliged her to undergo emergency surgery, respectively.
Yes, she’d calmly and deliberately threatened to kill him, a hand on his throat and a gun to his head.
Yes, he felt as free to dress her down as any of her other aunts and uncles.
Yes, they usually had a good time together once he made her laugh again.
“Come in, Giselle, come in,” Fen Hilliard said graciously. He held the door to his office suite open and guided her through the floor of assistants’ desks arranged as if it were a bank lobby. They all looked at her warily, this sacrilegious woman appearing at the CEO’s office wearing tight leathers and boots, with a Glock stuck in the back of her waistband. She smiled slightly at one young male assistant who couldn’t take his eyes off of her. She winked at him and he blushed.
“Stop flirting with my people,” Fen hissed once he had ushered her into his private office and closed the doors behind them. “You dare come to me armed?”
“Pffftt. I’d be a fool not to.”