by Moriah Jovan
* * * * *
23: COCKED & LOCKED
While awaiting a table, the conversation started hesitantly, Giselle unsure what this evening would bring. Having dinner with him—being kissed by him—had not been on her short list of possible endings to her confessional. Hearing his confession . . .
He set her at ease by keeping his distance, asking her questions that made her think, listening to her answers, and making it clear that whatever evil she thought she had done him, he thought it nonexistent at best and irrelevant at worst. He made her feel honorable—
—and he obviously wished to redeem himself in her eyes.
“How did you come to work for Hale?” he asked suddenly.
She shrugged. “Answered an ad. It’s a good job while I’m in law school and I needed the money and the benefits. Transcribing has always turned out to be my fallback position. I don’t like the work itself, but it’s a good position and I like my boss. And no, he doesn’t know about Knox, so I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.”
“I could’ve busted you out on that that night if I felt like getting you fired.”
She inclined her head. “Then thank you.”
Once seated, they warmed to an easy repartee, talking and laughing without touching. It didn’t occur to her that that might be odd, considering the months and the hours, the information and the foreplay that had led up to this.
It didn’t matter that she’d drawn him into her zealously guarded personal space, wanted him to be there. At this moment, it was enough to look in his eyes, see them focus on her face; to look at his mouth, see the liberally flashing grin; to look at his brow, see it wrinkle intensely as he listened to what she said and prepared his own argument.
“Sebastian told me you’re a member of the church,” she said.
“I figured you were, considering your family.”
“So in the context of what’s passed between us thus far, does this mean we’re both a tidge left of expectations?”
“Way more than a tidge. Do you care?”
She hesitated. “Um, yeah. A little. Not as much as I should, I think.”
As the evening deepened, she relaxed completely. They ate together easily, as if they had eaten together their whole lives and nothing was a surprise anymore, and she ate as she always had without shame.
He seemed not to care that she put away a tartare appetizer, a pound of fine rare prime rib, a pitcher of water, and a dinner salad at one sitting. She blithely told him about her lifelong struggle with her weight and that Leah, a registered dietitian, had taught her how to eat. He remarked that he couldn’t argue with the results and eagerly complied with her request that he take her dinner rolls as well as his. He, like her, preferred his salad last.
“So, where’d you get your salad-last habit?” she asked with a smile.
“Scotland. You?”
“Your mission?” He nodded as he chewed. “I picked mine up all over the rest of Europe.”
“Your mission?” he returned once he’d swallowed his bite.
“Absolutely not. That’s not my gig. Sebastian lived in Paris for years and I went to visit him the summer between my sophomore and junior years at BYU. He took me all over.”
They explored each other intellectually, philosophically, spiritually, and aesthetically, bouncing back and forth from the sacred to the profane, the profound to the absurd, and touching all points in between.
“I keep hearing Senator Oth and his cronies backpedal their anti-Taight rhetoric,” Bryce said coolly, trying to stifle a smile.
Giselle laughed. “Oh, you know about that.”
“That was brilliant. I’m very impressed.”
“Don’t be too impressed. I wasn’t sure any of the parties would react the way I hoped and too much depended on decisions other people had to make.”
“When’s Kevin going to announce?”
“Not sure. September, possibly October. I’d rather he wait until he finds out whether Justice McKinley will endorse him or not. I’d also like to know how Fen’s fundraising’s been going. I know he’s spent quite a bit of money, but not as much as I wanted him to by now.”
“Justice McKinley—she’s the girl Knox is keeping on ice?”
“Oh, yes,” Giselle said with a smirk. “She shook him up but good and she has no idea.”
All four elbows shamelessly on the table, they leaned over their plates toward each other, hungry for more of each other’s minds. She had never been so engaged and entertained in all her life. She couldn’t stop smiling and laughing, and she could feel the heat rise in her face. She imagined that her eyes must be what they called “sparkling” in books, although she wasn’t sure how eyes could sparkle, really. She certainly felt sparkly.
“What’s your middle name?”
“Giselle.”
He chuckled. “Okay. What’s your first name?”
“Celia. My mother insisted I be named after my four-greats grandmother—but so were six of my cousins, which is why my father insisted I go by my middle name. What’s yours?”
“Duncan.”
“You’re a Scot through and through, aren’t you?”
“Not quite. There’s some Apache floating around in there somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know where.”
“Ah, that explains the tan,” she said and he laughed.
Gradually, the conversation turned silly. “I,” she said between bites, pointing her fork at him imperiously, “saw Mötley Crüe in concert on their Dr. Feelgood tour. That’s how much of an eighties hair band relic I am.”
He laughed yet again, another in a long series of laughs, chuckles, and grins. “Yes, but I,” he said, mimicking her fork gesture, “caught Metallica when nobody had heard of them yet.”
“Impressive!”
“But I felt guilty about it,” he muttered wryly and she laughed.
“I lift weights to Rob Zombie, but I run to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.” And they went on with their game of one-upmanship of esoteric and closeted musical tastes.
“Are you from here?”
“No,” he said. “I’m from San Diego and met Knox at UCLA after my mission; we were roommates in the freshman dorm.”
“Did you room with him the whole four years?”
“Yeah, he and I got along fairly well—wasn’t hard since he spent most of his free time surfing and I spent mine dating—so no point in changing anything. I got married right after I graduated, then we both went to BYU for law school. I got a good job offer here straight out of law school, liked it, and stayed. I’ve lived here since ninety-three and I have no plans to go back to California.”
“Surely you had job offers elsewhere?”
“None where I had friends who could introduce me to the city.”
“Ah. What was your major?”
“Finance. When were you at BYU?”
“Eighty-eight. Knox and I overlapped two years and I practically lived at his house. I’m surprised I didn’t meet you then.”
He looked at her strangely for a moment, then blinked and shook his head. “I was married then.” Ah, yes. That might have been awkward, all things considered. He paused for a long time, studying his plate, then, “I’m glad I didn’t. I was a different person then and you’d have scared the shit out of me.”
Giselle laughed. “And now you’re not quite as scared of me as I’d like.”
“Ah, you noticed.”
“Anyway,” she said in a rush, redirecting the conversation and he chuckled at her. “I graduated and came home for my master’s.”
That quelled his laughter and his brow wrinkled. “Master’s?”
With a sardonic grin, she said, “I’m way too old not to have been around the graduate school block a time or two. I have a PhD in English lit.”
“Really! So . . . law school—?”
“I owned a bookstore for seven years,” she said matter-of-factly. “I shared space with a patisserie on one side of me and a confectionary on the o
ther. Maisy and Coco weren’t my business partners, exactly; we just figured if we knocked down our walls and unified our décor, we’d all make more money and it worked.
“But it burned—Knox probably told you some of that. It bankrupted all of us because we’d taken on new debt to expand and our insurance policies didn’t cover that. We all had to start over again because we couldn’t rebuild. There’s not much else out there for an English degree that I actually wanted to do—and certainly nothing that makes any money. I don’t want to get caught up in university politics, either; I’d rather teach than publish and that’s a no-no. After I’d spent about six months curled up in bed, Knox and Sebastian kicked my ass to do something and I decided to be a bit more practical in my education than I had before.”
“An indie bookstore’s risky, with the discounters and big boys; I’m impressed you kept it open that long.”
Her brow wrinkled a bit. “Bryce, Decadence wasn’t a bookstore with food. It was a destination. I stocked romance novels of all kinds. Couple that with Maisy’s gourmet chocolates and wine, and Coco’s pastries, the events we put on every weekend . . . I was doing very well; we all were. I was never going to be independently wealthy, but I made a lot of money doing something I loved.”
“Decadence?” he murmured.
She could feel herself flush a bit, but ignored his invitation to banter; she wanted, no, needed to explain. “We were going to open locations down in Olathe and up in Chouteau County, and we gambled everything we had to get the loans we needed.”
His expression changed from sensuous to pitying in a heartbeat, which she felt deep in her soul. Sometimes it was nice to be pitied as long as it didn’t last too long; her family would not be so indulgent of her. “So . . . do you want to be a lawyer?”
Her mouth tightened a bit as she looked down. “It wasn’t my first career choice, no, but Knox had always thought I’d be good at it, and I was intrigued enough that it was a distant second. I didn’t have the luxury of doing what I wanted to do after we were burned out.” When he opened his mouth to ask the next of about a dozen logical questions, she stiffened and he stopped, understanding that that topic of conversation was closed for now. She’d explained. The loss of her bookstore was not something she wanted to revisit any further.
He had his own off-limit topics of conversation, which happened to be his wife, his children, and his own fire. Other than telling her that his wife and children had died in that fire and trading the odd fact that their respective fires had happened the same night, he closed himself off about that.
“What about your family?”
He waved a fork. “I’m the youngest child of three in a family with not too many people in it to begin with. My sister, the sibling right before me, is fifteen years older than I am. My brother is almost twenty years older than I am. Most of my nieces and nephews are older than I am. My mother had cancer and died about four years ago and my father died soon after that. I was in the hospital then and didn’t know for a while.”
“Oh, that’s horrible.”
He shrugged. “My mother was forty-five, my dad fifty-five, when I was born—and I wasn’t a welcome surprise. They thought they were finished. My dad had climbed pretty high up in the church hierarchy and he was not prepared for another child. I didn’t see him much because he was always at church meetings, so I didn’t get to know him as well as I’d have liked. And I always knew they wouldn’t be around as long as other people’s parents.”
After an interval during which their plates were cleared, coffee and dessert declined, Bryce relaxed back in his chair and studied her. While somewhat uncomfortable with that, Giselle was all too willing to have the excuse to study him right back.
Finally, he said, low and way too casually for her comfort, “Wasn’t your bookstore fire meant to kill you?”
Giselle blinked and her gut began to churn. “Yes,” she said, wary. “How much has Knox told you, exactly?”
His emerald gaze bored into her, his face inscrutable. “One gun in each hand,” he murmured, his jaw clenched. Her eyes widened and she sucked in a long breath of air. One of his eyebrows rose. “Two bullet wounds. Threatened Fen at gunpoint. You were armed at Leah’s funeral and at the gallery.”
Giselle didn’t understand where this had come from or what it meant to him. Well. She supposed she’d rather they’d parted company at the garden than have to account for herself to him here, now, after a nice dinner and several hours into intellectually orgasmic conversation. She didn’t want him to know how much she craved his regard, his approval, but she’d be damned if she’d apologize or feel shame for who she was or how she lived her life.
She took a deep breath and notched her chin up a bit. “How did you know I was armed at Christmas?”
But she caught her breath when a slow, predatory smile began to spread across his face. She could smell his sensual cologne and his eyes were unblinking.
“Did you think I wouldn’t be able to feel it?” he purred. “Are you armed? Right now?”
Biting on the inside of her lower lip, she watched him carefully. “Do you want me to be?”
“Yes.”
Giselle’s heart began to race at his tone and she felt the lava between her legs. The focus had turned; he was seducing her now and she wanted to be seduced. She sat up and leaned as far across the table as she could without actually standing. “I’m always armed,” she said on a husky whisper, startled when she found him immediately nose to nose with her.
“I like that,” he whispered back, never dropping her gaze. “I like it a lot.”
Bryce reached a hand up to her face and softly cupped her chin in his hand, his thumb drawing lightly across her bottom lip. Her body responded to the caress, as light as a feather, as devastating as his kiss that night in the parking lot. Without thinking, she touched her tongue to his thumb and it was his turn to draw a sharp breath.
“Who slapped you?” he asked in that same whisper, still touching her mouth.
“Fen,” she breathed, unable to do anything but follow wherever he led.
“You said he looked worse.”
“I broke his nose.”
Bryce burst out laughing then and all the people at the tables around them looked up to see what was so funny. He sat back and gave her a lopsided grin. Bemused for a moment, her mind cleared and she smiled as she relaxed back into her chair. He liked that, and her heart lifted.
Want me. Need me. Love me. Beg me.
A Cheap Trick song suddenly played in her head, and she knew she’d fallen in love—but not tonight. Long ago, that night in the parking lot, when he took her kiss away from her and turned it on her.
“You went to see Fen today?”
“Yes.”
“What was with the leathers?”
Giselle laughed then, startled out of the intensity of her thoughts. “That’s my kickin’-ass-and-takin’-names outfit. Fen hates it, so I wore it to annoy him.”
“I thought you were mad at him?”
“Oh, yes. He accused me of sulking for the past three years.”
“Not that you have no reason to,” he muttered sarcastically, but switched gears before she could reply. “Where do you live, by the way?” he asked conversationally, as if he hadn’t just shattered her world, as if he hadn’t just snatched her soul and wrung it out. Made her like it.
But she kept her cool and her mouth twitched. “Seven blocks from here. With Sebastian.” She couldn’t help but laugh at the look of shock on his face.
“How did that happen?”
“I moved in with him after my fire. He came and got me that night and pretty much took care of me and I just never moved out.”
“What about your parents? They seem absent in all this.”
“My father died when I was three. My mother’s had a hard life, being a young widow with nothing, and now she’s enjoying retirement with my Aunt Dianne—Sebastian’s mother. Sebastian and Knox, my mom, Aunt Dianne, they’re my immediate f
amily. My Uncle Charlie, Sebastian’s father, was my father figure, but he died about ten years ago.”
“And what does your mother think?”
“My mom keeps her opinions and speculations to herself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s figured some of it out. My Aunt Dianne’s a genius with money and she would’ve been following Sebastian’s takeover of OKH. We told them my bookstore fire was ruled an accident and that I got caught in a drive-by shooting. I’m not sure they believed us and between them, they probably have a couple of close theories.”
“Why don’t you just tell them?”
“I have a very large tribe and we all get together constantly. They’re smart; I’m sure a few of them suspect Fen murdered Leah, but most wouldn’t believe it and they certainly wouldn’t believe what else he’s done. Fen’s charming and generous; he spreads the love and money around—and he’s not insincere about it. Most of my family don’t see him any differently than the rest of the city does. If they do, they aren’t about to say so. It’s one thing for people to have their private suspicions, but another to split the tribe down the middle.”
Bryce’s face cleared in understanding. “Fen Hilliard to the rescue,” he muttered.
“Exactly.”
“I watched Knox dance to his tune when we were in college. I never trusted him, even though I’d never met him. Knox said you find him amusing.”
She shrugged. “I have a twisted sense of humor, but for us, it’s not personal. It’s business. I get that.”
“Why do you live with Sebastian and not your mom?”
“It’s convenient to all the places I really need to be. I can walk to school and work if I want or need to, not to mention the Nelson. She lives north of the river pretty close to Knox, and my car can’t take the punishment of that commute. She’d rather I live with her because she thinks Sebastian’s a bad influence on me and that I’m just way too brazen to be allowed out in public.”
“Is he? A bad influence on you?”
“He’d corrupted me by the time I was six.” She grinned at the confused look on his face. “We grew up together, in the ghetto. My mom and I lived across the alley and up three doors from Sebastian and his parents. There were a lot of . . . older single white men that lived along our route to school.” His face cleared in understanding.