by Moriah Jovan
KH: What did you do when you realized this?
EW: I started watching him, hacking into his computer files, trying to figure out how he was doing it, where it was going.
KH: How long did it take you to figure it out?
EW: About five months.
KH: Why didn’t you call the police when you found out he was stealing?
EW: He’d set it up so all the clues pointed to me. I needed to dig deep enough to find out where the trail began.
KH: Okay and then why didn’t you call the police?
EW: I only found the proof I needed when he began the transfer of the employees’ 401(k) plans to a plan that was a front for his own account. The transactions were going to go through faster than the police could have gotten to my office, so I waited until I could block the transaction.
KH: Where were you when you did this?
EW: I was on my computer at home. He couldn’t get to me.
KH: When did he find out that you’d done this?
EW: When the police showed up to arrest him.
KH: So in effect, you saved the pensions of two hundred and fifty employees on a moment’s notice?
EW: Yes.
KH: Thank you, Mrs. Webster. Your witness.
RS: Good afternoon, Mrs. Webster.
EW: Good afternoon.
RS: I only have a few questions for you. What had you done the evening prior to the day you say you locked yourself in your house to stop these alleged transactions from processing?
EW: I’m sorry? I don’t understand.
RS: Oh, okay. Let me ask more directly and please forgive me for being insensitive. Did you not make love with your husband just the night before?
EW: No.
RS: Oh? Are you saying the deposition Mr. Webster gave is false? That he was lying?
EW: I’m saying it wasn’t making love. It was rape.
RS: I see. I suppose you’d consider it that, with what you suspected.
KH: Objection.
BW: Sustained.
RS: Thank you, Mrs. Webster.
KH: Redirect. Mrs. Webster, do you know what these are?
BW: Let the record show that people’s exhibit 19a is entered into evidence. Witness may answer.
EW: Those are medical records.
KH: From what?
EW: From the night he broke my nose and gave me this scar.
KH: What else do these records say?
EW: That I was raped.
KH: Thank you, Mrs. Webster. And I’m sorry for your pain.
*
Sebastian read long into the night, Knox sitting guard, never letting up. Never letting him escape this hell that, he suspected, he would not have felt if Eilis were any other woman. Not the woman he loved and was in love with.
“Now,” Knox said, calm, as the sun rose and shone bright in the kitchen and cast its rays onto the tabletop, “however deep you feel that is however deep you’re going to feel it. But if you have any inclination to come down on her for her choices—” Knox held up a hand when Sebastian opened his mouth in outrage at the thought. “Sebastian, you give no quarter to the people you love. You expect us to function on some level of perfection that only you know and then you turn into a hard-ass motherfucker when we don’t perform to your standard. I don’t know why; maybe it’s just your way. If you love her, if you want to stay with her, do not treat her that way. You treat your clients with kid gloves and they invariably end up despising you for it.”
Sebastian wanted to curl up in a ball and stare out the window.
“I’ll take all this with me because you’ll burn it just to get it out of your sight. If you test me on this—if you do anything else to hurt her—I’ll give her receivership to Jack and I’ll hand every bit of it over to Bryce and let him deal with you, and he’s already not happy with you about this. I think he’s the last person you want in your face, eh? Of all the people in the world Giselle chose to bring into this family, it would have to be one of the only men in the country who could actually destroy you.”
Sebastian dropped his head in his hands. “Just shoot me,” he whispered and meant it. It wasn’t as if Knox couldn’t or wouldn’t if he felt like it.
“No. You don’t deserve that much mercy.”
As soon as Knox left with that mess of paper, Sebastian curled up in a ball on his bed and looked out the window at the street, trying to block the visuals his fertile mind tortured him with. A movie, a horror movie. His mind filled in details.
A child, a girl. He remembered Giselle at ten, busy swinging in trees and balancing and twirling on high ledges. She’d wrestled Knox, getting stronger and wilier every day until she could pin him right before he hit his growth spurt. She’d flipped through fashion magazines and sighed over all the pretty clothes she dreamed about fitting into, read Tiger Beat, trying to decide if she wanted to marry Knox, or Bo or Luke Duke. Sebastian had put a gun in her hand the year before, taught her to use it, when, where, and why.
Eilis had been raped and impregnated when she was ten. He let himself feel the pain a small girl must have felt being abandoned to a foster care system that was criminal at worst and negligent at best.
Giselle at thirteen had accompanied Sebastian on his nightly jaunts to collect on his loans and bets, always armed, always confident, guarding his back—then he would watch her at church where she drowned in a gaggle of mean rich girls, thoroughly bewildered and intimidated by the cruel manifestations of jealousy she didn’t believe, understand, or know how to combat, convinced that being able to fit into a pair of Jordache jeans would solve all of her problems.
Shit, Giselle, suck it up.
Giselle at fourteen, and Knox at fifteen, slept in the same house, down the hall from each other, had discovered how to kiss with tongue, and that was about all they’d discovered by that time.
Eilis had been raped at least twice more, had had two more miscarriages by the time she was fourteen years old.
Broken bones. Cigarette burns. Poisoning made to look like a suicide attempt. He only had facts, but Sebastian thought in images.
This was the antithesis of everything he believed now or had ever believed before he’d turned his back on the church. No god or goddess Sebastian had ever read of or believed in had taken care of Eilis Logan and Sebastian loved Eilis Logan.
. . . insofar as you are capable of feeling that kind of love . . .
How did she live with this?
For that fact, how did Kenard—a man Sebastian most definitely did not want to piss off—live with his pain? A fire that killed his four children, a year of agonizing pain in a burn unit, charges of arson and five counts of homicide, the erased memories, the scars that ensured that Giselle would be the only woman on earth who’d find them attractive. Everyone, most especially Kenard, knew why he’d been unattached when he’d met Giselle—except Giselle. All she saw was the god of war, which greatly eased Kenard’s pain but it didn’t make his ugliness any less obvious to the rest of the world.
How did Knox live with his pain—and for Knox, which pain was worse: The horrors he’d had to study to try that case? The fact that he’d lost that trial and had to see a serial killer go free? Or the fact that he’d gone out that very night with the fury of gross injustice and executed a man? He’d only been twenty-five years old when he’d lost his soul and died, only to be resurrected as the hated and feared Chouteau County prosecutor.
Sebastian had never known why Knox had defied Fen to go to BYU, leaving with a law degree but not what he really wanted. How many other slings and arrows had Knox taken that Sebastian didn’t know about? And why did he always do things the hard way?
And Giselle? He had no idea what pain she lived with now. No, wait—
Take it from a woman whose man hides his soul from her.
Sebastian groaned. Knox had been right about why he’d painted her hurt so graphically, and Giselle didn’t know that. Why had she consented to become a Ford, knowing her nude body would be displayed a
ll over the world in perpetuity?
Mitch Hollander, his best friend, a companion from his mission when Sebastian still believed but had become disheartened, disillusioned, and sickened by what ostensibly honorable Mormon boys did. Mitch, whose naïveté had broken with those same deeds, who had gone home early and suffered the stares and derision of not having made it all the way through. Yet now he was one of the wealthiest men in America, powerful, feared—and had kept his faith so much that he was a bishop of a ward and on the short list for stake president.
Sebastian dropped his head in his hands.
But Eilis! What Sebastian had done to her . . . Oh, Eilis!
You treat your clients with kid gloves and they invariably end up despising you for it.
He wanted to weep, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know how.
* * * * *
59: FREEWILL
“Giselle, I don’t want to do this.”
Giselle watched Bryce as he paced the kitchen floor.
“It’s done. I already told him we’d do it and we will.”
Bryce had come inside from his current stone project for a drink of water and overheard her on the phone making plans with Knox. Since this required Bryce’s cooperation, too, she’d informed him of it the minute she hung up.
He was furious.
“We don’t have to do anything. It’s not our problem; it’s his. That’s my point. Knox is a grown man. He can figure out how to—” Bryce waved his hand in the air, searching for the word.
“Make over.”
“Yes, make over a girl who shouldn’t be in his office in the first place. Just because you want to get this mess over with and getting him married off is the last thing on the to-do list doesn’t mean you personally have to cross it off. This isn’t your project anymore.”
“You think Knox is a project for me?”
Bryce laughed, totally without humor. “No. The proviso is your project because you feel responsible for it, you feel guilty for Leah’s death, and your whole life would still be about managing that project if I hadn’t damn near fucked you on that bench a year and a half ago. Am I arrogant to demand you let it go? No. That’s my right because you married me.” He held up his hand, then pointed at her when she opened her mouth again. “No, Giselle! Let Knox clean up his own messes.”
“So we take the girl in for a week, cut her hair and buy her some nice clothes—on his tab, I might add. What’s wrong with that?”
He began to pace again, his hands on his nearly bare hips. “This is all his fault and he needs to take care of it. She shouldn’t have been in his office for any reason whatsoever.”
“Oh, yes, she should’ve!” Giselle shot back. “She needs a spine and he can give it to her—in weeks, not years. Umpteen years from now, she’s not going to be sitting in a junior attorney chair wondering where her life went and how she became irrelevant because she didn’t have the balls to stand up for herself in real life.”
Bryce’s teeth ground. “You know what? That’s not Knox’s job. He does not have carte blanche to just force anybody he wants into his personal blast furnace just because he thinks they need hardening. Now that’s ego.”
“This was my idea, Bryce. I would’ve waved a magic wand over that frizzy braid years ago if I thought it wouldn’t drive Knox out of his mind to see her on campus all drop-dead gorgeous or make him compete for a woman he couldn’t have for another four years.”
“Then let him make her look like what he wants her to look like. Wasn’t he the one who taught you how to walk and talk and dress like a debutante?”
“This is not for him. He couldn’t give a shit what she looks like as long as her hair’s red and her IQ is higher than his. It’s for her. She looks like she’s still in high school and nobody’s going to take her seriously as an attorney of any type. Whether she stays in his office or not, she needs to look professional and she doesn’t.”
“That doesn’t wash, Giselle. The girl could go to the Cato Institute and they’d let her show up in a bikini as long as she drew an audience and cash. No!” he roared when she opened her mouth to protest that. “I don’t buy that. All you’re doing now is cleaning up the mess he made with her. And by the way, why are you always cleaning up after those two? If it’s not this crisis, it’s that crisis. You—we—cleaned up after Sebastian and the mess he made with Eilis and we’re still dealing with the fallout from that.
“And Knox tore Sebastian a new one over that, but he can’t talk because he trumped Sebastian’s bullshit a hundred times over. So we get to put Knox’s woman—strike that, girl—back together again. Both of them fucked up royally and there you were, at the crook of a finger, to pick up Sebastian’s pieces and here you are now, at the crook of a finger, getting ready to pick up Knox’s pieces. I don’t want my wife spending her life cleaning up after another man’s—two men’s—messes!
“I’ve thrown in with the rest of you against Fen. I’m an adult. I have means. I’m invested. I chose for myself and I can choose to bail at any time. That girl is young, has no means, and isn’t being given any choices whatsoever, which is bad enough, but she’s got the most to lose all the way around—including her life. That’s just fucked up.”
He stopped his angry pacing and glared at her, pointing at her again. “No. It’s not fucked up, it’s immoral, Giselle. Do you get me? Immoral. Evil. He took her freedom and her choices away from her. He’s pulled some pretty shitty stunts in his time but I never thought I’d see the day he’d go this far.
“Justice is a girl. She has a crush on him. She’s not even experienced enough to get past a crush to an adult emotion, and I don’t care what the hell she writes or how influential she is or what a genius she is—when it comes right down to it, she’s just a girl with a crush on a man who’s almost old enough to be her father, and who is exactly what she didn’t fantasize about.”
“But he—”
“I don’t care ‘but he.’ But he’s a selfish bastard, is what ‘but he.’ If he really loved her, he wouldn’t do this to her. Do you not remember what Fen’s done already? Oliver and Leah are dead, Giselle! He burned your bookstore to the ground and you were supposed to go with it. He sent two men to kill you—and you have the bullet holes and blood on your hands to prove it. Do you want to have that girl’s blood on your hands, too? If anything happens to her, it’ll be on all three of you and it’ll be innocent blood.”
“Fen knows what’ll happen to him if he bothers a potential bride.”
“But then the deed’s done, isn’t it? You know, I get a hard-on that you threatened him at gunpoint. Love the scars, love the Glocks. Girls with guns. Totally fuckable. Not so crazy about the actual murder part. So she’s dead, Fen’s dead, you’re in prison. That makes it all better how?”
Giselle drew in a deep breath, angrier than she could remember being in a long time. Why wasn’t he willing to understand this?
“He wasn’t going to hire her, much less force her to stay. He just wanted to see her before he sent her on her way. That’s all.”
“Yeah, and what happened to the grand plan to wait until after his birthday and go get her?”
“Someone turned a gun on him is what happened!” she yelled. “It just—happened!”
“That’s bullshit. He should have let the investigators interview her and sent her on her way. He’s just using it as an excuse to keep her there and accessible so he can seduce her because he couldn’t bear to wait another year and a half. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me that wasn’t the first thing you thought when he told you.”
She had thought that, in fact. She didn’t like it any more than Bryce did, but she’d seen Knox’s agony, watched and felt his torment over the last three years, understood his motives.
“To wit,” he snarled when she remained silent.
Then, so angry and hurt, confused and torn, she couldn’t do anything but clench her fists and let out a howl. She only wanted a release valve for all that raw jumble of emotion,
but suddenly, she found herself crushed to Bryce’s chest and her mouth filled with his tongue. He kissed her hard and held her tight to him, one arm wrapped around her body and his hand clutching, caressing her buttocks. The other hand gripped the back of her head and held her still.
Giselle squirmed, but into her mouth, he growled, “Don’t move. Just feel.” Once he’d said that, of course, she did feel. She felt his bare chest crushing her breasts, his jersey shorts no better than a fig leaf for the cock that pressed hard against her belly. She felt the urgency of his mouth as he kissed her. She felt the hand that kneaded her as it slid down between her legs to knead there, too. She could barely breathe for the lust that coursed through her, competing with the anger and confusion, each feeding off the other, getting hotter and more intense.
He pulled away from her, tore her shorts off of her with a rip that resounded through the kitchen, then picked her up and plopped her on the counter, her knees spread wide. He had shoved his shorts down and had driven his cock inside her before she could say a word.
She was wet and she didn’t know when or why that had happened. He filled her, stretched her. She planted her hands on the smooth granite, spread her knees wider, hooked her heels on the edge of the counter. Her eyes closed. Her head dropped back against the cabinet.
“Look at me!”
She obeyed slowly, snarling at him and he her. He was so close they could kiss, leaning against her, his hands braced on the counter on either side of her hips. His whisper was harsh, hoarse.
“I’m that man you were looking for way back when to fuck you like you want and need to be fucked, to love you like you want and need to be loved. But you aren’t always in this with me one hundred and ten percent and I resent that. I will not compete with your pack and you are not the alpha. Just like I didn’t get a pass on fucking you and leaving you in the morning, you don’t get a pass on keeping little bits of yourself from me and giving it to them.”
Then he drew away from her and she gasped at the force of his first thrust. His second.