The Proviso
Page 54
And then she was in his arms and he was kissing her, his lips and tongue thoroughly engaging hers and she watched him kiss her, watched him watch her as they kissed. He deepened the kiss, pulled her down to the soft grass of Central Park so she lay half atop him, kissing. His hand cupped her buttock and caressed her, there where her buttock met her thigh, and she sighed.
“Eilis,” he whispered, “I want to make love to you so badly I can’t stand it, but I won’t until we get home and I show you my secrets. Then you can make the choice. Will you trust me?”
“Yes. I trust you, Sebastian,” she sighed.
* * * * *
63: MORNING & EVENING
The next day they went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and held hands again, which she still found oddly and deliciously endearing and oh! so twelve years old. That night, Sebastian took her to the Metropolitan Opera to see La Bohème, which, he said, was his favorite.
The day after that was the American Museum of Natural History, which amazed Eilis and without doubt, she could feel Sebastian watching her wander around in delight, unable to hide it. “Someday I want to take you to the Smithsonian,” he murmured in her ear.
Someday.
That night, Broadway, and he asked her to choose. Phantom of the Opera. They walked back to the hotel, Sebastian’s arms around her and holding her tight, then stopping to kiss her every so often. It was difficult parting company at their respective hotel room doors, but Sebastian was insistent.
Every evening, Sebastian took her to a different hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurant. The night they went to the opera, they had Thai. The night they went to the theater, they had Greek.
The day after the theater, they went to the Central Park Zoo and their only evening plans consisted of meeting Jack Blackwood and his wife Lydia for dinner at a cozy place in Little Italy.
Jack wrapped his arms around his wife, took every excuse to touch her, looked at her as if she were the embodiment of everything wonderful in the world. She returned his affection shyly, as if they’d just met. Every once in a while, though, she glanced at him as if she resented every minute she couldn’t spend in bed with him.
The contrast between Jack and Lydia, whom he called Daisy for no reason either of them would explain, was stark: He, five-ten, dark, half east Indian and half English; she, shorter than he, fair, with a mop of old gold curls and blue-gray-purple eyes that seemed mystical. With a breath, she could transform herself from a cute-cum-pretty woman to a great beauty and get any male within speaking distance to do her bidding. “I call it her magic trick,” Jack murmured wryly. “It doesn’t work on me.”
“Which was why I married him,” Lydia returned smartly.
Jack and Lydia Blackwood were gorgeous together and suddenly, Eilis wondered if this was how people saw Eilis and Sebastian, that dark male and sunny female. She ached to know if that was true.
She got her chance to find out the next night, their last together in New York, when Sebastian took her to the ballet. Eilis didn’t bother to lie to herself that she wasn’t dressing for Sebastian. He loved her body, loved her face, and he made sure to let her know as often as possible.
. . .accept that you’re a bombshell, and revel in it.
Even if she didn’t really believe that, she determined to fake like she did. She went to the hotel’s salon and got her hair curled and pinned up. The cosmetician could not stop exclaiming over her unique features.
Then she returned to her room and put on the dress.
Kelly silk charmeuse and chiffon. A very low-cut pleated silk charmeuse bodice that emphasized the size and curve of her breasts, with halter straps that tied at the nape of her neck. Empire waist, from which flowed a generous cut of chiffon-overlaid silk to the knee. Very high heels with straps that crossed over the top of her feet. Pearl studs.
Eilis couldn’t remember ever having shown this much skin or even wanting to. She certainly had never dared to wear a color so striking and vivid that it would attract attention all by itself. She looked at herself in the mirror and didn’t really believe that the woman looking back at her was . . . her. All she wanted was for Sebastian to look at her the way he’d looked at her the day he’d had her on the conference table.
She dug out the sterling silver repousse purse that she had fallen in love with oh so long ago, but had never used. She didn’t know why she’d brought it with her, but tonight was worth it.
One final check in the mirror and she was ready to meet Sebastian in the lobby, where a pianist played the Rach Three.
The look on Sebastian’s face when he saw her was beyond anything she had ever dreamed, ever hoped for, ever wanted from him. She wished she could paint, so she could remember that moment forever.
In his trademark crisp black, he strode toward her and met her more than halfway. Uncaring that they were in public, in a five-star hotel in TriBeCa, he wrapped his big hands around her face, his fingers in her hair, and kissed her. Deeply, passionately. The way people in love kiss.
And she kissed him back with everything she had, so pleased she’d made this beautiful, notorious man, whom every woman and some men in this place lusted after, desire her. Publicly.
“La fée verte,” he whispered into her mouth before he continued to kiss her. “Ma chère, si c’était pas pour peur de la loi,” he murmured heatedly as his lips skittered across her cheek to her ear, “je me dresserais un chevalet . . . te déshabillerais . . . peindrais ton image . . . ”
She gasped at his mouth, trailing kisses down her neck and across her shoulder, whispering to her, hot, rapid. She didn’t understand a word he said and she wasn’t even sure he realized he was doing it.
“Et puis,” he whispered as his teeth nipped her earlobe, “je te brouterais le cresson devant toutes ces personnes . . . ”
Her head was back and her eyes closed, Sebastian licking, nipping, and kissing in a line from her collarbone up her throat and chin, back to her mouth, speaking to her in the language of love. She didn’t need to know the language; she knew what he meant.
The complete lack of human voices in the lobby, which underscored the pianist’s exquisite playing of the urgently romantic piece, finally soaked into both their brains around the same time. Sebastian stopped speaking, stopped making love to her neck. They opened their eyes together and turned their heads slowly, to see the entire population of the lobby staring at them agape.
“I’m so embarrassed,” Eilis said, feeling her face flushing and turning her face away from the largest cluster of people.
“Why?” Sebastian asked, looking back at her and tilting her face up to look at him with two gentle fingers on her chin. “Eilis, you’re beautiful. Of course, they’re going to look.”
“You’re far more beautiful than I,” she whispered, staring into his purple eyes, “and everyone here knows who you are anyway. It’s not me they’re looking at and I only dressed for you,” she admitted.
He grinned then, lopsided, and studied every feature of her face. “You are so wrong, but that’s okay. Come with me.”
Sebastian turned then and offered her his right arm, and she took it, though glancing at him questioningly. He looked only at her, his eyes sparkling and that same lopsided grin never dimming. “I use my right hand when I think in numbers and money, my left for images, language, and sex. That’s why I offered you my right arm.”
Eilis couldn’t look away from him, either, but she was acutely aware of the stares they still garnered, although most everyone had gone back to their conversations.
“And the French?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were speaking in French.” She couldn’t help the delighted smile that spread across her face. “I didn’t understand a word you said.”
He looked genuinely intrigued by that. “I did? Really?”
“Yes. You threw in an English word here and there.”
Sebastian chuckled. “Stands to reason, I guess. I learned how to make love in French.”
The man had a heart-stoppingly handsome face, his eyes purple, alive, sparkling. Fair skin, blue-black hair sprinkled with white, broad shoulders, long legs, strong body. Crisp black suit and crisp white shirt.
The woman had a face with character and interest, one green eye and one blue eye, both dancing. Lightly tanned skin, sunny blonde curls piled on top of her head, pretty shoulders and arms, beautiful breasts, long and well-shaped legs whose musculature was defined sharply by the height of her heels.
The contrast between them was striking and she sighed. What a beautiful woman.
Sebastian chuckled. “Yes, she is,” he whispered in her ear. “Eilis, that’s you. Do you not know that?”
There were people milling all about, but suddenly, they faded. Eilis sucked in a breath when she realized that, yes, she was looking at herself and Sebastian. And they looked divine together. As divine as Jack and Lydia Blackwood.
“No, Sebastian,” she whispered. “That can’t be me.”
He bent his head and, as she watched him in the mirror, he kissed her shoulder, then worked his way up her neck to her ear, his eyes closed. His big hands stroked down her hips and she shuddered with the exquisite sensations that pulsed through her. He partook of the corner of her jaw with lips and tongue, making love to her there, in front of this mirror where she could watch.
“She is you, Eilis,” he whispered when his mouth returned to her ear and he opened his eyes to look in the mirror. “Remember this always, Eilis, because no matter what happens between us, this is how I see you. This is how I’ve always seen you, will always see you. You are a goddess, Eilis, a goddess. Never, ever forget that.”
* * * * *
64: BLOOD & WATER
They got into KCI and drove south straight to Knox’s house, as he’d requested. She was surprised to know that he lived so close to her and not in Chouteau City, which was a twenty-minute drive.
“He hates Chouteau City,” Sebastian told her. “Plus, he needed a place to hide and he can do that where he lives. You won’t find it on Mapquest and the satellite images won’t help.”
“Hiding from Fen?”
“Yes.”
“Fen killed his father. Why doesn’t he just . . . ?” Eilis couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“Kill him? Knox would rather Fen go to jail, preferably on death row, and the whole world know what he’s done. If Fen forces his hand, then . . . Yeah.”
Knox had secured his home almost as well as Eilis had hers, though one could see his entire property through the plain iron fence. An iron gate stood open, awaiting them.
Eilis was nervous. She hadn’t seen Knox since he’d unexpectedly dropped by her office last month to say hello and check on her progress—a kindness that had made her cry after he’d left. Now, for the first time, she would be meeting him as family, as a brother who hadn’t known she was his sister, but liked her and cared about her anyway.
Who didn’t hate her for being Fen’s daughter.
Eilis stepped out of the black Ferrari when Sebastian opened her door and offered his hand. She turned to find Knox striding toward her determinedly, in jeans and tee shirt, looking a lot less intimidating than he did in a designer suit. She walked around the front of the car hesitantly, but before she knew it, she was engulfed in Knox Hilliard’s arms.
She began to cry, then sob. Finally. Family who wanted her and claimed her.
“I knew I liked you,” he murmured, holding on to her as if he would never let go. She wanted to hold onto him forever, to make sure that he never went away, that he would never leave her alone and without family.
But finally he released her and said, “Come in and we’ll eat and talk.”
Eilis looked around at Sebastian, who leaned back against his car, his ankles crossed and his arms folded over his chest. He looked very . . . pleased.
Knox had ordered pizza and Eilis laughed when Sebastian groused at him for not having any alcohol in the house. “You should know better than that,” Knox retorted. “If you want booze here, pack it in and pack it right back out again.”
“I tried to keep some here and the next time I got here, he’d poured it all down the drain,” Sebastian told Eilis wryly. “It was expensive, too.”
They all sat around the table and eased into the conversation with small talk.
“So,” Knox said once they’d begun to decimate two large pizzas amongst them, Eilis letting Sebastian goad her into eating her fill, “how is it that you’re Fen and Trudy’s daughter?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “All I know is my birth date and their names. And that I’m almost three years older than you are.”
“That was during Vietnam,” Sebastian observed, around a mouthful. “Knox, didn’t your dad go? Fen did.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“You’d have to work out dates, but I can see how that could’ve happened.”
“If that was the case,” Eilis agreed. “I have my original birth certificate. I was supposed to have been adopted—several times, actually—but they all fell through and then I was past the age when people wanted to adopt children. I was luckier than most of the kids in foster care. I had a fairly decent caseworker who’d consider my requests and honor them more times than not.”
She didn’t miss the look that passed between Knox and Sebastian, but decided to keep her curiosity to herself.
“I found refuge in school. Math wasn’t my strong point, so I set out to conquer it.”
“And succeeded very well,” Sebastian said, and she smiled, warmth spreading through her. “What was your strong point?”
“History. English. I love Shakespeare.”
Both Knox and Sebastian broke out into great bursts of laughter at that, and though she knew they weren’t laughing at her, she was still uncomfortable.
“Shakespeare,” Sebastian chortled. “Giselle has a PhD in English lit. I’m passably versed. Knox knows and adores every word the man ever wrote—but don’t get him started. He’ll start reciting his favorite soliloquies and expect everyone to stay awake.”
“Really?”
“Guess that runs in the blood, too.”
“So Fen— I don’t understand,” Knox said. “He deliberately didn’t claim you?”
“Yes. I made the mistake of going to OKH for a job when I was in vo-tech learning how to be a secretary. I was nineteen. I put my real name on my application to see if that would help me get the job. Not only did it not get me a job, Fen showed up on my doorstep to tell me flat out that he wouldn’t claim me and not to try to pull that stunt again. I was the right age. He took one look at me and knew I was his daughter.”
Sebastian nodded. “I can see why. Knox’ll look exactly like Fen in twenty years and sitting together there, you can tell. Apart, though, no one would put you together.”
“He told me that since I’d gone to all the trouble to change my last name to use it. He was very upset I hadn’t changed my first name, too, because it’s so distinctive. I never told anyone and requested my records sealed after I’d gotten copies of everything I needed.”
Knox and Sebastian speculated for quite a while on why Fen had chosen to show his hand when Eilis went into receivership. Eilis ate, listening to their theories, waiting—
“Eilis, do you know?”
“Yes.” They looked at her expectantly. “He watched me build HRP. He sabotaged every business deal he could, told people what a ballbuster I was. So I started trying to think like Miss Manners, you know: What would Miss Manners do? It threw people off just enough that I got an edge and it discredited his opinion of me.”
Sebastian chuckled. “So nobody realized you were still busting their balls?”
“Or they enjoyed it,” Knox muttered wryly.
Eilis sm
iled, thrilled to finally be able to talk about it with people who cared about her, who would understand and approve.
“Things started going my way, which took a lot longer than it should have because he had his fingers in every pie I needed. But I was getting around him, so then he started buying up as much of my debt as he could, and he’d call the loans immediately. He nearly bankrupted me a couple of times.”
“And he couldn’t do anything with HRP as long as it was in the middle of a criminal trial,” Sebastian murmured.
She nodded. “All these years, he’s been working behind the scenes, but he came to my office after court the day after Knox assigned Sebastian to me— I panicked. I didn’t know who was allied with whom.”
Knox sighed. “You thought Sebastian would give you to Fen.”
“I didn’t know what to think. He said if I told either one of you who I was, he’d find a way to finish the job David started.”
They were silent for a while, both Knox and Sebastian lost in their own thoughts, then Knox asked softly, “Eilis, why didn’t you just tell me you were my sister some time during the trial? You and I spent hundreds of hours together going over your testimony and the paper trails.”
“I thought you would hate me for being Fen’s daughter and charge me in retaliation. You don’t have the best reputation in the world. I never understood why you have that reputation, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. Then after you put me in receivership— Well, I didn’t know who to trust. I only knew I couldn’t let Fen get his hands on HRP.”
Sebastian ran a hand down his face. “Which was why you never went public.”
“I’ve wanted to go public forever, but I didn’t dare. He’d do to me what you’ve done to OKH. After I found out you hated Fen, it didn’t matter because I could count on you as an ally who was stronger than Fen. He came to New York to declare war on me and didn’t think I’d call his bluff.”