The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  She hesitated a moment because not a day had gone by that she didn’t want it, but . . .

  “I don’t think so,” she replied slowly. “That’s done and past. I wouldn’t do it without Maisy and Coco anyway—and I don’t think they’d be up to starting over. It’d be like trying to get back together with an ex-boyfriend, where it never quite works right. And I didn’t spend the last five years and oodles of money just to go down the first rabbit trail that looks interesting simply because I can now.”

  They were silent for a while, then, “When do you graduate?”

  “May.”

  “I want to take you on a honeymoon. Do you have anyplace special you’d like to go?”

  “Paris,” she said without hesitation or thought. “I’d like to see it with my lover, not my brother.”

  “Mmmm, that can be arranged. I talked to Hale this morning while you were asleep. He wants to move you into practicing when you’re done with law school.”

  She started. “He does?”

  Bryce nodded.

  “Oh, I’d love that. He’s been really good to me. I didn’t want to know what he’d say or do if he found out about Knox.”

  Bryce shrugged. “He likes you and he thinks you have a lot of potential as a trial lawyer. He’s not the type to cut off his nose to spite his face and he’s been planning to offer you a position for the last three years.”

  More warmth. More fuzzies. Giselle hadn’t ever been this happy, this contented.

  He said nothing for a long while and Giselle could tell he chewed on something big. “I’ve been kicking around an idea for a while that I hope you— Well, that you might be interested in,” he said slowly. When she said nothing, he went on after drawing a deep breath.

  “I’d like to build a foundation for burn victims, to give them the resources they need from, oh, a place to stay for however long they need it, medical care, therapy, further convalescence, money, legal help, plastic surgery. Pretty much a one-stop-shopping experience for burn victims once they’re discharged from the hospital—all the things I needed to rebuild my body and my life that I didn’t have and had to spend time coordinating once I found them. Say you get discharged from the hospital with nowhere to go and the hospital sends you straight to me. I give you a place to stay and put you back on your feet. Or, say, you’re in the hospital and your family needs a place to stay, legal, financial help, whatever. You come to me. And when you run into trouble down the road, you can come back for whatever help you need.”

  Giselle pulled away from him and looked at him in awe, again feeling that joy that had nothing to do with desire. “I think that’s wonderful,” she said.

  He started. “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  His brow wrinkled. “I hadn’t articulated it yet. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

  She sucked in a sharp little breath and felt a smile split her face.

  Bryce looked at her then and said, “What?”

  “You gave me your idea before you gave it to anyone else. That— It’s a gift.”

  “Not as precious a gift as your virginity.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He didn’t smile. “I didn’t choose you for my mate, Giselle,” he murmured, tracing her jaw with a finger. “ You chose me, and I’m honored and grateful for that.”

  * * * * *

  40: THREE KINGS

  “I take it you’re gonna want your security deposit back?”

  Bryce heard Sebastian Taight’s bellow when he followed Giselle into her house the next evening. “If you’re giving money out, I’ll take it,” Giselle hollered back. “You know how poor I am.”

  She led him down the corridor by the hand, then up the stairs to the conference room platform. Beyond that lay an expanse of living room he hadn’t seen before.

  “There was a wall here Friday, wasn’t there?”

  “It’s retractable,” Giselle said. “We usually keep it closed.”

  Sebastian and Knox sat watching a Chiefs exhibition game, Knox on the sofa and Sebastian in a club chair, both with their feet up on the coffee table. Knox ate cheese popcorn from a large tin and had a gallon jug of orange juice on the table between his feet.

  Sebastian, a bottle of wine in one hand, attempted to read but kept getting distracted by the plays. Neither looked up or around.

  “Here,” she said, letting go of Bryce. “You’re my mate, so you’re officially part of the pack now.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Sebastian called after her as she disappeared into her bedroom.

  “No, Mom. I got the day off.”

  Bryce sat in the club chair opposite Sebastian.

  Knox passed him the popcorn, looked straight at him, and said, “You are going to marry her, right?”

  “Friday. Two o’clock. Jackson County Courthouse.”

  They both stared at him. Simultaneously they said,

  “No bishop?”

  “No big wedding?”

  Bryce shook his head. “Nope. She didn’t want anybody but you guys, her mother and aunt, and a judge. Oh, and Geoff Hale.”

  “Great,” Sebastian and Knox muttered at the same time.

  “Uh, problem with Hale?”

  “Hale hates me,” Knox said, “which you know and I don’t know what he’s going to do to Giselle when he finds out she’s my cousin—”

  “Eh, I gave him the rundown and smoothed it all out.”

  Knox started.

  “Chill. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t already suspected.”

  “My problem,” Sebastian volunteered, “is my mother. I’m going to get my ass kicked for being the major contributor to Giselle’s delinquency because nothing is ever her fault.”

  Bryce looked at him speculatively, his eyebrow raised. “You’re what, forty? And your mother still kicks your ass?”

  “She taught me everything I know about money, so I figure it’s only right to let her amuse herself at my expense.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. She’s one sharp cookie. Actually, that whole batch of Dunham girls—all nine of them—brilliant. Grew up poor as church mice, but Grandpa Dunham made damned sure they were educated.”

  Knox demurred. “My mom . . . not so smart.”

  “Yes, she is,” Sebastian returned. “Your mother is an amoral bitch.”

  “True.”

  Bryce ditched any vestige of etiquette to indulge his curiosity. “Taight. What makes you decide to fix or raid?”

  Knox barked a laugh. “You would ask that right off the bat.”

  Sebastian grinned. “Trade secret.”

  “Knox, do you know?”

  “Whether I do or not, you can file that under attorney-client privilege.”

  “Of course,” Bryce said sarcastically.

  “I do a few things that could be construed as, ah, slightly shady,” Sebastian said, “and I need Knox to tell me if I’m venturing into felony territory. As for the Fix-or-Raid policy, I have very stringent criteria, but if everybody knew what it was, the whole exercise would be pointless.”

  “Go on.”

  “Basically, I won’t let a badly run business stay in business even if that means I take a loss—that’s what’s got everybody up in arms and might still get me into some serious trouble if Kevin doesn’t beat Fen. Congress is pissed because they can’t figure out how I decide. I’m not sure how they intend to use that information, but I know it’ll be bad for me and my cronies, and I’ll go to jail before I give it up to that pack of looters.”

  “Businesses fail all the time and if they were already on the rocks . . . ”

  “It starts getting iffy when you get things like pensions involved,” Knox offered. “There’s always the people who end up getting laid off. They might have kept their jobs another year if he hadn’t been called in, but by that time, the leadership’s digging into the pensions anyway.”

  Bryce nodded. “So it just looks bad.”

  “Yeah,” Kn
ox said. “It doesn’t matter that Sebastian’s innocent of anything they can charge him with, he’s still going to end up on the hot seat if there are enough congress-critters who have a vested interested in seeing him there.”

  “Even if I told them, they wouldn’t get it and they sure as shit wouldn’t be able to duplicate it,” Sebastian added. “It all depends on a company’s leadership. They have to be teachable. They have to be able to figure out what it is they’ve done wrong on their own, though I’m massaging things in the background.”

  “Then they think you just stood around and watched.”

  “Hell, I don’t care. They have to learn and be willing to do things differently. If I can see that they’re not going to come to this epiphany on their own, I give them a detailed list of what’s wrong and how to fix it. If they don’t get it after that or they refuse to do what I tell them to do, I take it. I give them about a year, maybe two at the outside. Hold off their creditors, give them room. I want a solution that lasts and that’s how I get it.”

  “So what about Jep Industries? That went down in a month.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to fuck around with bullshit like that. I knew the pensions were in deep trouble and I wasn’t going to wait for Oth’s light bulb to come on before I shut it all down to get the employees out with their funds. So I threatened to get the feds on Oth’s books if he didn’t hand it over to me for the price of its debt. He would’ve been indicted because everything was set up to point to him, but I knew he wasn’t smart enough to pull off something that complex. He knew it, too, so he took the deal.”

  “What about the dependent businesses?”

  “Mitch Hollander— You know who he is?”

  “CEO of Hollander Steelworks?”

  “Same. My best friend. He would have gone belly up without Jep’s products, so he bought it from me after I’d dismantled it to the ground. He assimilated it into his operation piece by piece, including employees. So now he supplies Jep’s products to the other businesses that need them.”

  Knox snorted. “Except for OKH. Turns out Fen decided to run for Senate after Mitch refused to do business with him. Another stake in OKH’s heart, because Fen needs Jep’s products, too, just not as badly as everyone else. Fen can work around it, but not easily.”

  “Fen would’ve taken Jep over if I’d given him half a chance; he was in a helluva lot better position to do it than Mitch was.”

  “I never heard about any of that.”

  “Yeah, that’s because we kept it quiet. Mitch is squeaky clean and I didn’t want Oth to start taking jabs at him like he takes at me.”

  Knox waved a hand. “It won’t stay quiet for much longer now that Oth’s having to account for himself. The press will follow that.”

  “Oth’s only real crime is that he’s a self-entitled old-money idiot and it serves him right to have to start answering questions about why he’d called me in the first place. I’m not going to let arrogant fucks like him make me their whipping boy.”

  Bryce looked at Knox then. “Speaking of whipping boys . . . ”

  “Don’t,” Knox snapped.

  But he did. He always had. “Why would you open your mouth about Tom Parley to your bishop?”

  Knox sucked in a sharp breath, his jaw grinding. “I notice you didn’t ask me why I did it,” he finally muttered.

  Bryce raised an eyebrow.

  Knox shrugged and looked away. “I was stupid. Idealistic. Believed in the system.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “No,” Knox returned, swift and sure. “Too many lives at stake. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if he’d killed one more person. Justice at all costs.”

  Bryce remained silent for a moment, then murmured, “You should never have been let near that case. You were too green.”

  “Arrogance of youth. Thought, ‘No problem.’”

  “He didn’t go to the bishop voluntarily, you know,” Sebastian offered. “He was called in during the investigation and asked point blank. He went in thinking the bishop would find it justified, but . . . ”

  “Shit, it was a done deal before I got there, so I kept my mouth shut.”

  “They should’ve gone along with the government’s party line and called it good,” Sebastian said and Bryce couldn’t disagree.

  He’d sat in the gallery watching as, each day, the fun-loving surfer he’d always known got chipped away and the ruthless and corrupt Chouteau County prosecutor had emerged—trying a serial killer who’d won acquittal on a technicality.

  Sebastian pointed at Knox and said, “But since that made him untouchable and he was no longer accountable to his bishop, he decided to go off the rails. Exhibit A: Claude Nocek ousted at gunpoint.”

  Knox shrugged.

  “Exhibit B: Leah Wincott blackmailed into bed.”

  Knox curled his lip, but didn’t dispute it, his face betraying guilt. “Yeah, okay, I went off the rails. I’d been hung for the sheep, so I figured the Lord wasn’t going to begrudge me a few lambs. At least I haven’t sunk to Sebastian’s level of promiscuity.”

  “Let’s see,” Sebastian drawled. “Fucking a lot of women. Killing and blackmailing people. Somehow not getting the sex-is-worse-than-violence concept.”

  Knox harrumphed.

  “I have no guilt,” Sebastian muttered as he took a sip of his wine. “I like being a manwhore.”

  Bryce pointed to the wine, a definite sign a church member had gone astray. “What’s your story?”

  “Don’t have one,” Sebastian said. “I just got tired of the mission field bullshit. The pecking order, the poor kids being treated like crap. Kids being sent on missions to straighten them out. Half my companions went out carousing, leaving me to work and calling it teamwork. I figured I didn’t need that kind of teamwork.” He pointed at Bryce. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Bryce nodded. “Yup.”

  “Didn’t like having to rely on members for meals. For some reason I don’t know, everybody in the mission assumed I was poor and being supported by the church, so I was at the bottom of the totem pole. Nobody thought to ask why I—and any companion I was with at the time—ate better than everyone else and always had money for the subway. I didn’t bother telling anyone that I was paying for my mission out of the interest I earned on my margin account in Paris and that I had immediate access to unlimited funds and it wasn’t daddy’s money, for sure.

  “My breaking point came when I had this one companion—super good kid, hard worker, true believer. He really was poor and being supported by the church. By the time he got put with me, he was a basket case. Being with me was a respite for him, but it only postponed the inevitable and his next companion sent him over the edge.”

  “Went home early?”

  Sebastian nodded. “Medical. His stomach ate itself. Nine months in, I decided I’d had enough. Called my mom, told her I was done and to wire the rest of my assets into my European accounts because I was staying for the foreseeable future. She was pissed. Packed up, left the apartment without a word, went straight to St.-Germain and found a bedsit, dumped what I wanted to keep, mailed the rest home. Went to Spain and fell in with a bunch of degenerate bullfighters.”

  “In fact,” Knox said, “that guy who went home? Mitch Hollander.”

  Sebastian nodded. “He’s still active in the church; in fact, he’s a bishop. And his wife’s dying. No matter what happens to him, he still believes.” He looked at Bryce then. “What about your mission?”

  “I was somewhere in the middle most of it,” Bryce said after he thought a while. “I wasn’t the low man on the totem pole, but I was never going to be a favorite.”

  Knox started. “Your dad was a stake president. You should’ve been ruling the roost.”

  Bryce grimaced. “We had our share of slackers and partiers who were all too willing to fall in with the village girls. I ended up kicking a lot of ass, which pretty much shit-canned whatever advantage I’d get beca
use of how far up my dad was in the church hierarchy.” He looked at Knox. “Did you ever find out why Fen wouldn’t let you go on a mission?”

  “He didn’t want me to spend too much time sucking up doctrine like philosophical manna.”

  “Which you do anyway.”

  Knox threw up a hand.

  “So, Kenard,” Sebastian said warily, “now, uh— Giselle— That was a complete one-eighty for you. You’re just out of the church altogether?”

  Bryce pursed his lips. “Yeah. I’m done.”

  Knox studied him for a moment. “What, you just woke up one day and decided you didn’t believe in it anymore?”

  Bryce said nothing, unable to answer that because he didn’t know exactly when he’d noticed that his faith left.

  “The Miracle of Forgiveness isn’t doctrine. I thought you’d have gotten over that by now.”

  Bryce swallowed at Knox’s statement, one he’d made countless times in the four years they’d lived together—the one that had earned Knox the hatred of Bryce’s father. The Miracle of Forgiveness: Almost three hundred pages of every ‘thou shalt not’ ever imagined, written by a church leader William Kenard had idolized. Bryce could recite the list of sins major and minor in his sleep, and had felt the fires of hell reaching up out of the floor to punish him for committing them, even if only in thought.

  “But apparently you didn’t get over it. So instead of rethinking one man’s puritanical rant, you decided to dump the church altogether? You know,” he went on, “I’m not going to argue the fact that the church has a lot to apologize for. It does, and that book’s one of them because it’s done a lot of damage over the years. It just has no bearing on what the Lord’s really about.”

  Bryce wished he could believe that, now more than ever, but he didn’t. He had the scars to prove what the Lord was really about.

  “So I guess that means you don’t care that you broke your temple covenants,” Sebastian said finally.

  “The Lord broke that agreement first, so, no, I didn’t feel obliged to keep up my end of it. And look, I got what I wanted, so what am I supposed to conclude?”