The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  He sighed. “I— I never noticed. I’m sorry.”

  “I have another bone to pick with you.”

  Knox snorted. “How many more after that?”

  Her mouth twitched. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Well?”

  “You bought me. You bought me from my father.”

  He looked away then. “He would have never let you go, Iustitia. You would have been chained there forever by his need for free labor because he’s too damned cheap to hire someone, too damned lazy to work himself, always guilting you into staying. I asked his permission, blessing, whatever you want to call it. He wanted money because he thought I had it.”

  “Why didn’t you just threaten him like you did me?”

  “He told me point blank he’d call the FBI with some bullshit story and I didn’t want to take the chance they could make some oddball charge that would stick, especially since I’d forced you to stay in the office.”

  “Why me?”

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “I had my reasons,” he muttered finally.

  Justice huffed, shaking her head as she turned away from him to begin folding and smoothing the clothes that would go in the drawers. “Honestly? I don’t know whether to be grateful or to be mad. I—” She stopped, more tears welling. “When I came back from Giselle’s, he— He looked at me the way you looked at me out in the grass that night.”

  Knox sucked in a deep, quick breath. “If I’d known that—”

  “I didn’t understand it myself at first,” she said. “When I went to pack my stuff, I was very happy to have a gun.”

  “You think he—?”

  She hesitated, remembering how she’d felt. “I think it crossed his mind to test the waters. I think if I hadn’t had a gun, he might have tried to push it. He said I looked like my mother, so . . . I’m not sure he was seeing me.”

  “Iustitia,” he breathed.

  “So,” she went on briskly, “I’m upset you bought me, but I’m grateful, too. You pulled me out by a hair.” There was a long silence and she looked over her shoulder at him. He was still chewing on the inside of his mouth. “There’s, um— There’s a petition in the little safe that I don’t know what to do with. Could you— Um, could you shred it for me, please?”

  He looked at her sharply. “I don’t want you here if you’re just grateful, Iustitia.”

  “Give me a little bit more credit than that,” she snapped, feeling their balance of power shift and level out for good. She was here of her own will now and he had no more hold on her.

  “Okay,” he snapped back. “Then why are you here? The real reason?”

  Justice took a deep breath and turned back to her folding. “I— I want to see where this, with you and me, together— Uh, out in the grass, before—” She cleared her throat, embarrassed because of what she was trying to say and stumbling over her words because of it. “I mean, um, I want to know . . . If we— If you and I can—”

  She stopped. It wasn’t going to get any better.

  “I want to try,” she whispered.

  Deep, ragged breath. More silence. Then, softly, “I’m sorry I hurt you out in the grass, Iustitia.”

  She reluctantly chuckled. “So you said about a gazillion times.”

  “I won’t pressure you,” he muttered. “You come to me when you’re ready.”

  Shocked, she looked up over her shoulder then, and he was gone.

  * * * * *

  81: THE PARAGON OF ANIMALS

  He’d disappeared completely by the time she’d finished making his bedroom hers, too. There was an intimacy about the task that made her feel like she belonged somewhere, to someone—to Knox. That was just too surreal.

  Unpacking and ironing done, she had free run of the house and she was going to take advantage of it. When she opened what turned out to be the garage door, his truck was gone. She sighed.

  To say the house had no decorative theme would be generous. What little furniture he owned was a hodgepodge of types, styles, fabrics, woods, and colors, some good quality and some just cheap crap from Wal-Mart, but nothing special and in no particular layout. It looked as if he bought the first thing he saw that fit his immediate need.

  Two of the three bedrooms were completely empty except for a closet full of clothes she’d presumed he’d moved to make room for hers.

  The kitchen needed remodeling or—something. The cabinetry was almost fifty years out of date. The ovens, original to the house, hadn’t been used in years. The electric range top looked like it saw occasional use, but she wouldn’t want to cook on it. Her used gas Viking and old Sub-Zero were far better than . . . this. Her lip curled. Clearly, he didn’t care. This was a place for him to sleep and get out of the rain.

  She opened a door in the hall to find a staircase down to a full finished basement, which was obviously where he spent his time. In one corner sat a large desk littered with papers piled high, falling off the edge and collecting on the floor. One cleared spot in the middle of the desk was big enough for a laptop.

  One wall had a huge TV facing a disreputable couch. The blankets and pillow piled on the cushions told her where Knox intended to sleep tonight and she swallowed.

  Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with books hither and thither flanked the TV. While he had as many books as the Kenards, his were not perfectly ordered or stacked. These books were haphazard, careless even, two and three layers deep. She looked at some of the titles and her eyes widened. Religious texts of all types, shelves and shelves of them. She lingered until she realized that not only could she not tell from these which faith he favored, she had never heard of half of them.

  Knox Hilliard, religious?

  “That might be a problem,” Justice muttered.

  He had texts from economics to history to higher math. He owned everything Joseph Campbell and Noam Chomsky had ever written. She found several dog-eared and written-in and highlighted copies each of The Art of War, The Prince, Anthem, and Lord of the Flies. Shakespeare alone, various editions of collected works and single plays, took up three shelves. He had dedicated an entire section to texts regarding the founding of the country, the Federalist Papers, and other writings and biographies of the various founding fathers. There were histories and books that deconstructed the battle plans of various wars.

  She pulled out a badly abused text on the naval battles of the Revolutionary War; one section, about the privateers who made their fortunes fighting the British, was broken out of the spine, dog-eared, dirty, food-stained, written on, highlighted, and obviously very, very loved. So, he was a kindred spirit in this, and she began to smile as she ran her hand across the spines.

  Her watch buzzed nine o’clock. She needed sleep badly, but she was too wired, her mind too chock full and she wanted to take advantage of her solitude. She needed room and time and silence to think.

  It was her day to blog, so she took her laptop into the bedroom that had become hers only three days ago. With a deep breath, she sat in the middle of the bed cross-legged, and cracked it open. She had a routine:

  Checked her email. She shook her head at the vitriol some religious people threw at her for having dared to post There is no God. “I’m on your side of the political divide,” she muttered, half amused, half annoyed. “Don’t know what your problem is.” Indeed, those nastygrams gave her more ideas than she knew what to do with.

  Found the streaming audio archives of the day’s talk radio shows and started with Glenn Beck.

  Typed, edited, proofed, and posted the article she’d written in her mind. And she had a lot to say about freedom, about bondage and slavery; property rights; living one’s convictions; justice, mercy, morality, and revenge. That was about a five-parter, right there.

  Surfed the rounds of all the other blogs she followed, read, commented.

  Paid bills.

  Pulled up the Wall Street Journal Online and perused the headlines, reading what interested her, then moved onto the Washington Post
and Washington Times.

  *

  JMcKinley writes:

  Yo, hamlet, where’d you go?

  thefaithful writes:

  havent seen him in a while

  darrylm writes:

  went back & lookd for his last post - a week

  JMcKinley writes:

  hamlet, name that quote: In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

  *

  She’d posted that yesterday in St. Louis. It should’ve drawn him out of the woodwork in a couple of hours at most. Disappointment settled in a knot behind her breastbone.

  Lost in her thoughts, she was badly startled when the most humongous cat she had ever seen jumped up on the bed with her and head-butted her elbow.

  Knox Hilliard had a cat?

  “Hey, buddy,” she said softly, looking to see if he had a tag and if so, what it said.

  DOG HILLIARD

  She laughed, a great rolling belly laugh.

  Knox hadn’t come home by the time she took a shower and went to bed. She looked for his shirt and boxers to sleep in again, but they seemed to have disappeared. She went to his side of the closet and dresser and filched clean duplicates shamelessly. She found a pair of his socks and put those on, too.

  She took a whiff of the shirt and sighed, because she couldn’t help it.

  Justice had her hand on the bedroom light switch when the bed itself caught her eye. She went to it and stroked the elaborately decorated antique wood.

  A hand-carved sleigh bed, it was stained a rich dark, almost black, walnut color. Because it was an antique, it was smaller than a queen but bigger than a full. It would require a custom mattress and custom linens; when she turned the bed down, she realized that not only were the linens custom, they were very fine, more so even than the ones on the bed at the Kenards’.

  So. In this house, there were only three things Knox Hilliard cared about: his bed, his books, and his cat. As she fell asleep, she vaguely wondered if she would ever be the fourth.

  * * * * *

  82: BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

  Knox was in court all the next day, so she didn’t see him, but that was okay. She did her day’s business in the usual manner, although she had a hard time staying awake.

  He hadn’t slept with her and she’d dozed most of the night, wondering when she’d feel the lifting of the covers and the depression of the mattress. It was nearly time to get up by the time she’d given up and succumbed.

  Once home, Knox wasn’t there. She was very tired, so she changed into Knox’s clothes and decided to take a nap. She awoke with a start only a few minutes later and looked at the clock: two o’clock in the morning and it was dead quiet. No male body next to hers breathing. No rustlings of covers that didn’t belong to her.

  Justice sighed.

  Knox had made himself unavailable for talking—or anything else—so she decided to pad out to the barn.

  Sebastian was listening to Rachmaninoff tonight. He cast her a glance when she came in and sat where she sat before. He turned the volume down but kept working high up in the air.

  “Where’s Knox?” he asked absently, busy scraping and cutting paint, mixing and changing out the sizes of his spackling knives.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a while. “He wasn’t in bed when I woke up.”

  Sebastian cast her a sharp glance. “Really,” he drawled, then turned his complete attention back to his canvas. Neither said anything for about an hour, he working, she watching.

  “What makes it sparkle like that?” she asked suddenly.

  He started and looked down at her. “You can see that?”

  “Yes. Look,” she said and pointed to the opposite wall of the barn that wasn’t lit, where millions of speckles in all colors of the rainbow danced across it.

  His mouth dropped and he sucked in a deep, amazed gasp. “Hot damn!” he finally shouted, laughing. “Look at that! Holy shit, I love that! Thank you!” He looked down at her again, still grinning. Then he turned back to her. “Look at the canvas. Tell me what you see.”

  She tilted her head and pursed her lips, studying it for a long while. “It’s skin,” she finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “You want it to look like mine, without the freckles.”

  He started, as if he hadn’t expected her to know that. “Yes, kind of, but more ethereal.”

  “It needs to be thinned out, not so textured. Like a glaze.”

  Sebastian raised an eyebrow, as if he were quizzing her. “Why do you think that?”

  She shrugged, not understanding why he’d ask her such things. She knew nothing about art and cared less. “I don’t know. I’m not an artist. You asked me what I thought, so I told you. What’s in the paint?”

  “Diamond chips.”

  Diamonds. Her eyes widened as she thought of it, but she remained still.

  Another half hour of renewed energy in his painting and she saw what he was trying to do. She watched the wall while he painted, cutting in the jewels with his knife as if he were sketching them there, and the image’s main lines replicated themselves in sparkles. He looked back at the wall, a wide grin on his face.

  Then it was Justice’s turn to gasp. He scraped every bit of white paint off that canvas. Most came off easily; a little he had to chip off.

  “Why are you doing that?” she demanded.

  “I’m going to start over,” he said. “I didn’t know if this would work and it worked better than I ever hoped.”

  “That’s a lot of wasted effort.”

  He speared her with a glance. “There is no such thing as wasted effort when you’re learning.” Then he was done for the night. He climbed down from the scaffold and walked toward her. “You shouldn’t come out here too often. Knox is very territorial and would assume the worst.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “He would just assume that I would— With you—?” She bit it off and blinked back tears.

  “Oh, no. He would assume I had taken it upon myself to seduce you, paint you, and hang you in an art gallery for the world to see—and believe me,” he laughed wryly, looking her up and down very appreciatively, then again until she blushed, “if I didn’t have my mind wrapped around one woman, I’d take great pleasure in seducing you, Knox be damned. And then I’d paint you, but for that, Knox would actually shoot me in the head. And he wouldn’t blame you for a bit of that.”

  She flushed again, deeper this time, embarrassed at the thought of being painted nude, but strangely pleased that Sebastian Taight thought her that attractive.

  “I googled you. Well, Ford.”

  He turned and dropped to the floor beside her, stretching his legs out straight in front of him and lying back on his elbows.

  “Figured you might. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep the whole Ford thing to yourself, though. It’d really cramp my style if people knew. Did you Google anything else?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I see,” he said after a moment, when he finally understood she wasn’t going to say any more.

  “Sebastian?” she murmured, still looking out the barn door. “Why me?”

  “I’m not going to answer that,” he said immediately, not even pretending to misunderstand. “It’s not my place. Knox needs to tell you that himself and he will when he’s ready to.”

  Justice sighed and looked away from Sebastian, toward the back of the barn, her other cheek now resting on her knees.

  “He let me go,” she said after a while.

  “Huh?”

  She cleared her throat and turned to look at Sebastian again. “Knox let me go. He gave me a new car, money, clothes, a letter of reference. He let me go. Tuesday after work.” Sebastian stared at her, his eyes wide. “And,” she added, just for good measure, “he gave me an annulment.”

  His face drained of what little color it had and he gulped. “Oh, fuck,�
�� he whispered and closed his eyes, dropping his head back as if pained.

  Well, at least now Knox wouldn’t get a drubbing by Sebastian for letting loose his last chance to get out from under OKH. Her mouth tightened now that she had just lost all traces of her enchantment with King Midas.

  “Then why are you here?” he asked sharply, suddenly suspicious, his head snapping up and his gaze spearing hers. She knew exactly why.

  If he fulfills the terms of the proviso, his net worth could increase by as much as a half billion dollars.

  No, she wasn’t going to admit why she came back.

  “You read my work, right?”

  “Yes,” Sebastian said.

  “Of course you do,” she said, her newfound venom lacing her tone. “You were counting on me to endorse Kevin. You’re welcome.” That startled a reluctant, wary laugh out of him. “What I write is rhetoric. Complete theory. I suspect that very rarely in life does one get the opportunity to truly put her money where her mouth is, to choose a fight that’s worth fighting even though it has high stakes.”

  Sebastian said nothing for a long while, then, slowly, “That’s the biggest crock of shit I ever heard.” Justice started and gaped at him. “You know very good and well Kenard and I have that locked up tighter than a drum. You’re in love with Knox and it’s written in every freckle on your face. You want to ride this ride with him and see where it goes.”

  “Well then if you knew that, why’d you ask?” she snapped, disturbed at how easily everybody read her. “It’s not like you care why I came back. You’re just glad you might not have to plow through that takeover.”

  He started. “What gave you that idea?”

  “Your very obvious disgust at Knox having let me go.”

  “You assume too much,” Sebastian snarled, and Justice stared at him agape. How dare he! How dare all of them!