The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  “And an easily won libel suit to boot.”

  “Exactly. It would defeat our purpose and he knows that. And really, we’re the only ones he can talk about it with. Now that I’m with you and someone else has Knox’s britches in a twist, there’s only one immediate solution to the problem. Neither Knox nor I want to do that for obvious reasons and Sebastian prefers financial warfare.”

  “Indeed. You want something to eat?” Bryce asked after he’d snagged an hors d’oeuvre off a passing tray.

  “No,” she mumbled absently, standing on tiptoes to look over the crowd. “I don’t trust what’s in some of that stuff.” He thought that a little extreme and said so. That caught her attention. “Do you like what I look like naked?”

  “Very much. Sometimes I even like what you look like not naked.”

  “Do you want my nakedness to look the same always until I’m an old lady?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Then trust me when I tell you I don’t want food because, as you should know by now, I like to eat. A lot.”

  He laughed and picked her up, wrapping her tight in his arms. He twirled her around and around, kissing and nipping her neck. “You’re beautiful,” he said as he let her slide down his body. He chuckled when that firearm bulge brushed against his thigh. “You really don’t trust Fen, do you?”

  “Goodness, no. He’s never gone back on a deal, but now he’s just curious to see how many more lives I have. Two down, seven to go.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Oh, he said so yesterday.”

  For some sick and twisted reason buried down deep in his dark soul, Bryce found that hilarious. “Let’s see this exhibit.”

  Except for his sudden obsession with Lilith, Bryce didn’t get art. He had none save the books that lined his walls. That wasn’t to say he didn’t like a few pieces here and there. He simply didn’t care enough to study it, purchase it, and find a place to put it. He certainly wouldn’t dislodge any of his books for it. For Lilith, he would’ve dislodged his books, but now he wouldn’t have to.

  Once they reached the entrance of the actual exhibit and he saw what “a Ford” actually was, he looked in wonder. He knew Giselle watched and waited for his reaction, but this—this he had not expected.

  “See? I told you.”

  Nudes. On canvases five feet square, each hung at a different angle. Women in all stages of life, in all shapes and sizes, of every race imaginable. The artist had captured them in such a way as to make them all beautiful regardless of one’s personal taste.

  “This is—” he murmured, taking it all in. “Magnificent.”

  Giselle smiled and squeezed his hand, leading him into the labyrinth. Each woman leaped off the canvas at him and Bryce wanted to touch to see if they were real. He didn’t know much, but he did know it must have taken amazing skill and talent to pull this off.

  Neither of them said anything as they roamed through the partitions slowly with the rest of the attendees. Finally, Bryce asked, “What do these do for you?”

  “They make me want to be them. See, that one? That’s what I wish I looked like. Taller. Curvier. Like—well, like Lilith.”

  “Yeah, I’m not agreeing with you there, Giselle.” She looked up at him, puzzled, and he bent down to speak in her ear, “Lilith—these women—they’re for making love. I’m not interested in making love. You’re solid, built to fuck. That’s what I like.”

  Giselle blushed, ducked her head, tried to hide her smile. He loved that he could fluster her. “Don’t you ever want to make love?” she asked softly. Her sudden shyness warmed his soul.

  “Yes,” he returned, “but that takes time to do right and I haven’t felt like taking that kind of time yet.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Have you?”

  She snickered, but looked away to hide her growing redness. “No.”

  Bryce chuckled, then said, “There are a lot of pregnant women in this collection.”

  “Mmmm, that’s his hallmark. He adores pregnant women.”

  They had almost reached the end of the exhibit when the announcement of the unveiling of the new Ford painting echoed over the hum of the partygoers. The crowd began to move toward the front of the gallery where it hung tarped. Giselle stayed back a bit to study another painting.

  “C’mon, Giselle. Let’s go find a good spot. Now I’m really curious.”

  “Mmmm, in a minute. I don’t like to be too close.”

  She fidgeted when he finally pulled her away from the painting and ended up toward the back of the gathering. The gallery director had asked for a brush-stick drum roll as he hushed the crowd and introduced the work.

  “This latest Ford painting,” he began, “marks a sharp turn in the artist’s direction, as you will see. It is called,” he said with a pause for dramatic effect, then grabbed the cable that held the tarp and pulled, “Rape of a Virgin.”

  The crowd gasped and stepped back as one. Bryce’s jaw dropped, stepped back as if shoved.

  No air, no breath.

  Damn near dizzy.

  The crowd buzzed, turned, stared. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he noticed this, but he was too shocked to care.

  As of not even twenty-four hours ago, he knew that body and bed intimately—and they were on display on a five-foot-wide by eight-foot-tall canvas for the entire world to see. His cock swelled as he closed his eyes and let his head fall back with a sigh.

  Bryce thought he should feel guilty for enjoying his slide right down into the featherbed of hedonism, but he didn’t. He was achingly aroused by the fact that other men looked between her nude portrait and her clothed presence, their lust for her plain in their faces, the same lust that had always tortured Bryce—and they could not have her.

  Right here, right now, she stood at Bryce’s side, unabashedly bearing the mark he’d given her that proclaimed her his lover.

  He opened his eyes again to stare at that painting, at her—

  Mine.

  Giselle trembled against him and crushed his hand between both of hers. He returned her squeeze, but he was uneager to break the spell. Finally her discomfort registered somewhere in the depths of his consciousness and it did vaguely occur to him that the silence in the room was not normal.

  He was enchanted.

  “I— I have no words,” he finally whispered.

  Painted from directly above in the manner of Morning in Bed, laid out on a rumpled white sheet over a mattress supported by a broad black platform, she lay on her stomach on the bed at a diagonal, nude. Her right knee crooked across the bed. Her right hand stretched out to the edge of the bed and over it, desperately reaching, her fingers wide. Her left arm was slung high and up over her head, bound to an iron ring in the wall with a white strap secured by a highly stylized and detailed padlock. Her left leg stretched far out under her, her foot dropping off the mattress. A red strap and a padlock of a different design, though equally stylized and detailed, bound the left ankle to the leg of the bed.

  Her honey curls, their length greatly exaggerated, fanned out over the bed and glowed like the most vivid of flames. The skin of her back, arms, and legs betrayed the cuts of a weightlifter’s musculature. Her tattoo was detailed precisely, the two Chinese characters—Warrior Queen—vertical over her spine, the tail of the last character nearly disappearing into her cleft. Her vulva peeked out tantalizingly from between her legs.

  An open dog-eared Bible lay on the bed by her pillow as if she had just put it down, and nearly touching her left hip was a well-worn copy of Intercourse, also open but turned over, spine up and broken. She stared at what rested beside the bed with a desperate yearning. There, on a simple chair just an inch or two out of reach, were two gold keys: One graphically carved in the shape of a phallus that was clearly meant to open the lock of the white strap that held her arm; the other in the shape of a baby’s pacifier, which opened the padlock of the red strap at her ankle.

  Definitely not Lilith. Not in any way.


  The agony of a woman who couldn’t get what other women got, what she should expect to get, what she very clearly craved, had been captured with exquisite precision. Bryce swallowed heavily when his gaze settled fully on the pacifier.

  Giselle’s sniffling through the deafening silence caught his attention then and he looked down at her. He finally understood the depth of her anxiety when she whispered, “Talk to me, please. Please don’t hate me.”

  His eyes widened. “How could you think—”

  Bryce clutched the back of her head and pulled her fiercely to him, kissing her as wickedly as he had the night before, taking everything she would give him and hoping she would find value in what little he could give her.

  Thunderous applause broke out when she wrapped an arm around his neck, and Bryce smiled against her lips. He could feel her relieved, delighted laugh and her tears that moistened both their cheeks. “I don’t know what to say,” he murmured against her mouth. “It’s— It’s breathtaking. You’re breathtaking.”

  “It’ll be hung all over the world. You don’t mind other men seeing it?”

  “No,” he whispered harshly. “I want them to look and know that woman is mine.” His thumb caressed the bite mark on her nape. That she hadn’t bothered to try to hide it made him hard. “And everyone in this room knows that.” She sucked in a sharp breath, closed her eyes, closed her mouth on his so that he would kiss her again. He obliged, then murmured, “You’re not a virgin anymore and I am the one who took it from you.”

  She smiled. Blushed. “Maybe we should go home. We’re going to get attacked by the vultures any minute and there’s press here.”

  “Oh, no,” he replied. “We’re not going anywhere. I want to enjoy this.”

  That made her laugh but soon she was surrounded for autographs and to field questions about Ford’s identity. Flashes popped as cameras got her image to compare and contrast to the one on the portrait.

  Kevin and Jill Oakley stared at her in stunned amusement.

  Trudy, and to some extent, Fen, struggled with the onslaught of people who, because they couldn’t get to Giselle, hounded them instead.

  Bryce chuckled to himself and shook his head as he watched Giselle graciously speak with people and politely refuse to give up The Name. With his arm draped possessively over her shoulders, he answered the many questions that came his way. The crush around them eventually lessened, then thinned completely as the band reassembled and began its next set. Bryce took her hand then and kissed the back of it. Giselle blushed again and smiled shyly when he murmured, “Dance with me?”

  They slow danced for an hour, Giselle staring up at him with a love-drugged expression that soothed his soul and gave him hope. They kissed intermittently, softly, slowly, closely observed but uninterrupted except for Fen, who caught her arm as he and Trudy made their exit.

  “Your mother’s going to swat your behind until you can’t sit down,” he murmured, and Giselle laughed.

  “What, are you going to tattle on me?”

  “I will if you don’t tell me who Ford is.”

  “Pffftt. Fen,” she drawled, “that keeping my mouth shut thing works two ways. It’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

  “Then you asked for it. You’ll get sent out to cut a switch.”

  Giselle was still snickering when Bryce swept her around and under his arm for another dance. He looked over the crowd absently until something caught his eye. Far across the immense room a man leaned against a wall, away from everyone else and in the shadows, his arms crossed, a glass of champagne in his hand. He stared straight at Bryce with a smirk on his face, then tipped the glass at him.

  It only took a microsecond before Bryce burst out laughing. When Giselle looked up at him, he gestured vaguely toward the man; once she saw who he meant, she chuckled.

  “Ford.”

  She looked back up at Bryce and murmured, “I knew there was a reason I let you fuck me. Let’s go home so you can do it again.”

  “You didn’t let me do anything, Warrior Queen.”

  She snorted, and he grinned.

  He took her back to her bed, the one on which Giselle’s torment, her hunger and agony, was on display for the entire world to see. That bed—the one where she’d lain under him, her head, heart, arms, and legs wrapped around him, matching him wit for wit, kiss for kiss, word for word, thrust for thrust.

  Bryce couldn’t imagine a future without her in it, without her in his bed, in his heart—

  —but his gut clenched at the thought of what he’d have to tell her, what he hadn’t thought to tell her before he’d staked his claim.

  * * * * *

  29: THE ARRIVAL OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA

  Sebastian attempted to mingle, but, as usual, society viewed him with utmost suspicion—which was why he didn’t get out to these soirees much. Women he might have liked to approach watched him warily, ready to bolt. He’d let it be known very publicly and very cruelly some years ago that gold diggers were not welcome in his personal space. That had made him completely radioactive around the world.

  Men he might have liked to cultivate for places on future high-level management teams hid their suspicion of him little better. Of course, he had a tendency to burn people’s bridges for them if they said the wrong thing, but only Sebastian knew what that was. That had happened in Prague. And Amsterdam. Possibly Berlin. He didn’t quite know how all the things he did in Europe followed him back to Kansas City.

  Very few people outside of his family weren’t afraid of him at first blush, and lately that had been the sum total of two people: Oakley and Kenard—

  —who was about to find out what his lover of less than a day looked like on a five-by-eight-foot canvas. Nude.

  He was pleased when the only real emotion he could see in the man’s face was awe. Then he kissed Giselle obscenely in the midst of two hundred and fifty silent people who awaited his reaction with bated breath. Sebastian was slightly surprised the man didn’t back her up against the wall and fuck her right then and there, and he almost smiled. That boded well for Kenard’s staying power with her, and, much as Giselle was a pain in Sebastian’s ass sometimes and he enjoyed the hell out of picking on her, he loved her and wanted to see her happy.

  He wandered around, watching people post-new-painting-unveiling, observing Giselle’s newfound notoriety, quietly chatting with not-yet-declared senatorial candidate Kevin Oakley, studying the rest of the exhibit, drinking a punch that was slightly less offensive than the cheap bubbly, and generally milling about brooding over why Miss Logan hadn’t wanted to be with him tonight.

  Bored and only happening to catch a glimpse of a very tall blonde entering the gallery long after the unveiling, he ambled along behind her to see what he could see. When she turned, his breath caught in his throat and he nearly dropped his glass.

  She had one green eye and one blue eye, and they sparkled merrily as she looked around her. Her mouth was full and curving in a generous yet sensual smile. She had soft, straight butter-blonde hair to the middle of her biceps where it curled at the ends and lacked the harshness of any chemical coloring.

  Her body was lush, shown to perfection in a shimmering iridescent dark copper gown cut like a double-breasted tuxedo jacket that flared out into a long bell skirt to her ankles. Her lapels were iridescent black. Her sleeves stopped just below her elbows and were turned up in French cuffs that matched her lapels. She had high heels on, which made her stand head and shoulders above everyone else.

  She was stunning, a Viking goddess, and he smiled, looking down into his glass and shaking his head. Whatever he’d expected Eilis Logan to look like under all that badly fitting Chanel, pancake makeup, brown contact lenses, and hair-darkening gel, this was not it.

  His sharp eye caught details no one else ever did, though, and he thought it odd she’d hide the scar on her face for business but not for pleasure. However, once he got a good look at it and saw that it made her look as if she were perpetually crying, h
e understood. And those eyes! No wonder she wore colored contacts. He was fascinated by the fact that her eyes were two different colors.

  He walked over to her, hooking her elbow in his right hand and gently pulling her away from the paintings. She gasped in protest and then stilled when she saw who he was, suddenly angry that she’d been caught.

  “I have an eye for detail, Miss Logan,” he whispered in her ear, not having let go of her and, in fact, pulling her even closer to him. Any excuse—he’d take it. “I will admit you have a very good act.”

  She looked straight at him, no shorter than he in heels. Her two different-colored eyes blazed. He wondered how long he could keep from backing her up against a wall, although right now, it didn’t look like his usual freight train seduction strategy would actually work. She was already fit to be tied.

  “Let me go,” she whispered hotly, and he was very pleased to know there was passion and fire under that luscious skin—and that he really could get to her. “I didn’t come here to be ‘on.’ I came here to enjoy myself without being reminded of my humiliation by every mogul in the room.”

  He could see how that would be distressing to her, now that she mentioned it. “I’m sorry,” he said and released her, stepping back and into cool King Midas once again. “I didn’t think.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she shot back, though still quiet. “I would like for you to figure out when it would be most convenient to let me have a vacation. I need one. Badly. If I must take it up with the prosecutor myself, then I will do so. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to go look at this man’s work in peace.”

  “Wait,” he said, unsure what he was going to say. She had barely turned and she stopped, looking over her shoulder at him. “I— May I accompany you through the exhibit?”

  “Why?”

  His mouth tightened. “Because I would like to, if you would allow me the pleasure.”

  Her eyes widened at his sudden formality, but he was rather impressed with himself for not making himself look like a complete buffoon. He’d said what he meant to say.