by Moriah Jovan
It didn’t matter with Knox; Knox needed her constant presence to mitigate his growing frustration and insecurity because no LDS girl would go out with him once she found out he hadn’t gone on a mission—and he didn’t want to taint any possible relationships with the details of his inheritance. Giselle needed his constant presence to make her feel as if she weren’t, as Aunt Trudy had told her more than once, “the most hideous girl I’ve ever seen.”
Without Knox, she would have no boyfriends at all; with Knox, she had an excuse. It had been enough until that man looked at her like that.
It was more than she could bear, that wedding band on his finger. The only man, a gorgeous one to boot, to look at her as if she had some sexual worth—and he was married.
“How could you?” she whispered, her faith shaken. “I’ve done everything you asked me to do. How could you do that to me?”
Heartbroken, she touched herself . . . there . . . and, for the first time, did what she knew she should never do.
Nobody else would.
*
Once three o’clock came, Giselle’s head had cleared enough that by the time she got to work, she could do her job accurately and well. Mercifully, after about an hour, she lost herself in it.
But then it was 12:15. She had finished and stopped thinking about her relationship with Bryce. She let her instincts take over and, her heart in her throat, she drove directly to his house.
He lived in Brookside, just off Loose Park, in a three-story pale yellow Italian renaissance revival all renovated and dressed up as a showcase home. The stoop light was on, as well as a small lamp in a great paned window to the right of the front door. She hesitated; after all, most people didn’t go visiting unexpectedly after midnight.
Gathering her courage, she walked up to the door and rang the bell. It took a while and another ring of the bell before she heard, “Hold on!” shouted from the depths of the house. Suddenly, the door was yanked open and he barked, “It’s twelve-thirty in the morning. What the hell—” And he stopped cold as soon as he realized who she was. “Giselle,” he breathed, and opened the door to let her in.
She stepped in gingerly and looked everywhere but at him, hoping once again she hadn’t ruined her chance by not keeping hold of him when she had him in her hand. “I— I’ve thought about it, and— I’m sorry. I—”
“Don’t talk,” he muttered and kissed her again like he had that first night when he set about teaching her how to fuck, and she lost herself in him for good. She knew she couldn’t live without this—this heat, this deep, dark level of carnal experience.
This man.
He gathered her up in his arms as if she weighed next to nothing rather than forty pounds more than what the charts said she should weigh, and carried her up the stairs, to his bedroom, and laid her gently in the massive mahogany bed, into sheets that smelled just like him. He covered her with his body and rolled her over until she lay on top of him. He only kissed her, drinking her in in silence.
How could she have ever doubted that she could live without him, no matter what the future brought? She would ride the ride and see where it went.
She was fully clothed. He wore nothing, having answered the door with a short towel hastily slung around his hips. They lay there together in the dark, not even the nearby streetlight able to pierce the heavy drapes, silent, kissing until they drifted off to sleep.
* * * * *
36: ARBITRAGE
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Giselle studied Bryce’s face in the morning sunlight that streamed through the bedroom window. He studied her in return. She shifted away from him a bit so she could look at his beautifully scarred body, touch it, caress it.
Kiss it.
“I missed you,” he whispered and gently furrowed his fingers through her tangled curls as she pressed her lips against the skin overlying his collarbone. Tasted him.
“I missed you, too,” she breathed, her hand splayed out over his heart, her thumb stroking his nipple. “I’m sorry I left you in the park Sunday. I—”
He pressed his finger to her lips, silencing her. “No. I’m sorry. I knew what you’d want and I didn’t want to think about it. I deserved to be left.” He lifted the locks of her hair only to let them slither away through his fingers, then again. And again. “So, kids? Church?”
She shrugged. “I’m here. On your terms.”
“Is that going to be difficult for you?”
“Um, yeah. It is.”
He sucked in a breath, held it, then released it in a whoosh. He looked up at the ceiling and ran his hand down his face. “We need to talk.”
“Mmmm, true. But first—”
“Pee and brush teeth.”
“Precisely.” She rolled out of bed to accomplish those tasks, then stripped. Bryce joined her in the shower as she’d hoped he would. “Don’t you have to go to work today?”
“The nice thing about owning your own practice,” he murmured in her ear, “is that you can pretty much do what you want.”
“What about meetings? Clients?”
“Nothing’s ever scheduled before eleven. My assistant rearranges my appointments if I don’t show up by nine and my attorneys can step in at a second’s notice.”
She closed her eyes and sighed, then leaned back into him. His arms around her, they stood quiet in the spray to commune silent, still, through the warmth of their bodies until the water ran tepid.
They bathed, dried, and tumbled back into bed, again skin-to-skin, and cocooned themselves in the fine linens.
“Are you hungry?”
Giselle’s ear to his chest, she could feel the vibrations of his hoarse baritone and at that moment, she found that the sexiest thing imaginable.
“No,” she murmured. “I don’t usually eat this early in the morning. Are you?”
“No.” Another moment of silence, though still not awkward. “Giselle,” he murmured, “I know we got off to a rough start and we haven’t spent any real time together doing things, talking, laying down expectations. You know, doing things by the church’s playbook. I told you not to expect a temple marriage, but no matter what, I’m never going to be comfortable having a girlfriend, lover, mistress, significant other, whatever you want to call it.”
Giselle’s gut began to clench at the possibility he’d had second thoughts after all, that he’d tell her they’d made a mistake and she should go home. “Oh,” she breathed. “Okay.”
“I do want to marry you, just not . . . by the playbook.”
Her breath caught.
“Yeah, I know it’s weird,” he said in a rush when he misunderstood her silence. “Love at first sight and all that—I never believed in that and I still don’t. I can’t say I love you because I don’t know you well enough. I know I’m in love with you and in lust with you and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to live without you. But for right now, that’s all I have to offer you. If we don’t make it, okay, but I need that sense of permanence for as long as we’re together.”
The pleading in his voice had returned. Still shocked, it dawned on her that he must fear she would say no, that he thought she wouldn’t want to commit to him.
“I— Um—”
“I mean, if you want to hold off for a while until we see how this relationship shakes out, I’ll respect that.”
“No, I—” She cupped her hand over his mouth when he would’ve continued to defend his position. “Stop. Let me talk.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not interested in being a perpetual fiancée, no. But I’m also not interested in going into marriage thinking things like ‘if we don’t make it.’ If I say yes, which I want to, I don’t want to always have it in the back of my mind that you’ve left yourself an out. I’m willing to work at a relationship, at a marriage, with you. I need to know you’ll work at it with me.”
He caressed the skin of her back with his calloused hands and she waited for him to process what she’d said. His body relaxed, the tension
draining from his muscles. “I understand. I can promise that.”
“The other thing,” she continued, clearing her throat, “is I’m afraid you might one day come to resent me for breaking your covenants with me.”
“I didn’t get caught up in the heat of the moment, Giselle.”
Her eyes widened. Her body tingled. “Oh,” she breathed. “So dinner . . . ”
“Wasn’t part of the seduction. I told you I’d have taken you home that night at the Nelson and I would have. But after Knox summoned me, I took some time to think about it. I decided to talk to you first, to confirm that I wanted to try, to see if we were compatible enough to build something on. If that hadn’t gone well, then nothing else would’ve happened. The reason I wanted to have lunch with you was so neither of us could ditch our afternoon commitments in case I hadn’t made up my mind, but still wanted to take you to bed. I needed to know where you were coming from, to let you know where I was coming from without the pressure of impending sex.”
“I was coming from Rearden. You were coming from Galt.”
He laughed and she smiled. “You’re not going to let me forget that, are you?”
“Nope.”
She took a deep breath and his body tensed again. “Next topic,” she said finally, sober again because no matter how ugly, it had to be discussed. “Money.”
He started. “What about it?”
“I don’t have any. I’m still in debt from my fire, my bankruptcy hasn’t been discharged, and I have a ton of student loans. Sebastian says you’re as rich as he is and I’m very uncomfortable with that. I would feel better if we had a prenuptial agreement.”
“I won’t agree to that,” he said, relaxing again. “You said you weren’t interested in going into marriage thinking things like ‘if we don’t make it.’ A prenuptial agreement presupposes that we won’t, so no. No prenup. Giselle,” he continued when she opened her mouth to protest, “the reality is that even if you tried to take everything away from me, you wouldn’t get it. I’d send it offshore and wrap it up so tight it’d take an act of God to break it open. I’ve already been down that road and I can make it disappear like it never existed. I’m not shy about doing whatever I have to do to keep what’s mine. As for how the money would work once we got married, well, everything I have would be yours.”
She swallowed in mixed relief, guilt, and dread. “I don’t like feeling rescued,” she murmured.
“You didn’t go under because of anything you did wrong. You went under because Fen’s evil and you’re lucky that all you lost was your business. That’s a completely different proposition from someone bailing you out of your own stupidity. And even if that had been the case— Giselle, you’re one of the few women I’ve ever met who hasn’t expected something from me. Before my fire, it was sex and money. After, it was just the money.”
“What if I’m putting on an act?”
He laughed then. “You are the worst actress in the world. Your face is very expressive and I can read you like a book. I’ve been chasing you for almost a year because you didn’t want to be caught. You could’ve asked Hale who I was and he would’ve arranged something; you knew that, but you wouldn’t do it. You knew Knox would’ve helped you get to me, but you didn’t ask him to. A woman who’s after money doesn’t do those things.”
She sighed. “The money thing is going to take me some time to get used to.”
“You live with Sebastian Taight. What’s there to get used to?”
“I don’t have access to his money. It’s his. What I have is what I earn. And you’ve seen our house—it’s a little too middle class for a billionaire, don’t you think? He doesn’t like living in his money and so it doesn’t remind me of what he has that I don’t. We’re just poor kids from the ghetto and in a lot of ways, we still live like that. Hell, he still drives the old beat-up pickup truck he bought when he was sixteen.”
“And a Ferrari,” Bryce added dryly.
“So he does, but I don’t live with King Midas. I live with my brother.”
Bryce grunted. “Well. Okay. Any more issues you’d like to discuss?”
She smiled. “No.”
“So now will you marry me?”
“Yes,” she breathed and pulled herself up his body so that she could kiss him, long and deep. Lazy like a hot summer breeze and sweet like fresh mown grass. She sighed when she felt his palms cup either side of her face.
“I want to give you a nice wedding,” he whispered against her mouth as the kiss lightened. She opened her eyes to see him watching her. “But I have no idea how people outside the church plan them.”
“Not interested.”
He blinked. “That’s the last thing I’d’ve expected Miss Fashionista to say.”
“Normally, if we were getting married in the temple and had a huge reception afterward, yes. But we aren’t—” He opened his mouth to speak and again she closed it with her fingertips. “—and I’ve accepted it. This? Between you and me? This is about us becoming lovers before getting married. It’s private. I don’t want a bishop to marry us, much less any other flavor of clergy. A judge will do. All I want is to be with you. I don’t want to spend a year being only your fiancée just to plan a bash nobody’s going to care about in six months.”
“What about your family?”
“I do what pleases me, not my family. Of course, I want my mom there. Sebastian and Knox. My Aunt Dianne. That’s all. The rest of my tribe wouldn’t fit in a judge’s chambers.”
“Is your mother going to resent me?”
Her brow wrinkled. “For what?”
“Because I seduced you.”
Her mouth tightened. “Please don’t take it all on yourself like I had no choice in the matter. I could’ve said no and you gave me plenty of opportunity to do so. My decision was as deliberate as yours.” He inclined his head in acknowledgment of that. “What makes you think my mother would resent you?”
He stared at her for a long moment, then said, “Because that’s how my siblings will feel about you.”
She swallowed, hurt to her core. “Oh.”
“They would think you must have seduced me and made me break my covenants. They wouldn’t believe otherwise even if I gave them a play-by-play. But don’t take it personally; they aren’t too happy with me, either.”
“You don’t like your family much, do you?”
He shrugged. “It’s not that so much as I don’t fit in. I was always the black sheep and I don’t even look like my siblings.”
“Maybe you were adopted.”
A chuckle rippled through his chest. “I asked my mother that once and she looked at me funny and said, ‘Bryce, I was there. For thirty-six hours. Trust me, you aren’t adopted.’”
Giselle laughed and thought she might have liked Bryce’s mother.
“Do you know how I made my money after the fire?”
She nodded. “You sued everybody who had a hint of a whiff of anything to do with the construction of your house, plus the city for having crooked codes officers.”
“Right. Filthy lucre.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mark and Serena—my siblings—think I’m immoral for having done that.”
That blew Giselle’s mind. “Why? Your children died.”
“Well, you know, the meek inherit the earth. Turn the other cheek. I don’t deal with life that way and except for my family and Michelle, the church, I never did. If I showed the proper amount of shame for my work, my money, how I got it, they’d be okay with it, but I refuse to apologize, so . . . ” He shrugged.
“Oh, Bryce,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It doesn’t bother me and they’re thousands of miles away. We don’t talk. I might as well not have any family for how much we interact.”
Giselle had to take him at his word because his voice, which could tell her so much of his feelings, betrayed nothing but statements of fact.
“Well, don’t think
I won’t get my head handed to me on a platter when my mother gets over being thoroughly delighted,” she said dryly after a moment.
“Delighted?”
“With you. My mother will love you. Once my tribe finds out the Bryce Kenard is about to be assimilated, you’ll be welcomed like a conquering hero. That filthy lucre thing? We’re all about filthy lucre.”
He laughed then. “Knox used to say your family was just a hundred-plus people using any excuse to have a party.”
“That’ll never change.”
“He’d talk about it and it was just something I couldn’t imagine. Still can’t.”
“Oh, you’ll get plenty of opportunities to see it in action. Every weekend there’s something going on, weddings, graduations, funerals, birthdays, baby and bridal showers. Stuff like that. Plus all the major holidays and at least half the minor ones. I don’t think we celebrate President’s Day. Yet.”
Bryce ran a finger across the line of her jaw. Giselle watched. Waited. Finally, he murmured,
“Considering what you said about your jewelry, perfume, and men, I’ll assume you want to choose your own wedding ring?”
Giselle blushed and gave him a shy smile then, a warm joy bursting in her soul and filling her. “Yes, please.”
“Now,” he murmured as he began to nibble at her bottom lip, “we can make love or we can fuck. Pick one.”
* * * * *
37: A LITTLE ZEN HEADED YOUR WAY
They laughed and teased each other as Bryce made Giselle brunch. Kind of. Broiled salmon with parsley and butter, hollandaise sauce, and eggs. The salmon was left over, he apologized, as was the hollandaise sauce, which had broken. She threw it out and made a fresh batch, which amazed him. He did actually cook her eggs to her specifications, which she found incredibly sweet.
“I don’t really cook,” he admitted finally. “My housekeeper does that for me.”