by Moriah Jovan
Her nostrils flared. “Look in the mirror, Mr. Taight,” she ground out in return. “In fact, all three of you need to. Talk about making assumptions! If you people would talk to me and tell me what’s going on instead of treating me like I’m three years old—and assuming you know what I’m going to think or say or do at any given moment—maybe I wouldn’t have to assume so much. If you and Giselle are so offended by the assumptions I make about you and your motives, you’ve no one but yourselves to blame. If Knox hadn’t assumed what I’d say if he’d just asked me for whatever he wanted, none of this would’ve been necessary. And another thing—my assumptions, given how much I don’t know, make a whole lot more sense than yours do about me.”
Sebastian’s face softened then and he looked away. “You’re right,” he finally said, low. “I’m sorry.”
There was a long, though not uncomfortable, silence in the barn that stretched as they each cooled off.
“It’s too bizarre,” she said finally, softly. “I can’t make head or tails of it. I just want to know why me and no one will tell me. All Knox says is he has his reasons. I know it’d all come together if I knew that.”
Sebastian sighed deeply. “And that’s the one thing I can’t tell you. If Knox isn’t ready to yet, then you’ll just have to trust me that they’re good reasons. I’m sorry.” He sat up and studied the ground for a moment. “If you stay with Knox and see this to its end with us,” he murmured slowly, “do you understand what’s at stake for you?”
“Yes. My life is at stake, possibly our child’s if we have one. That part I don’t like and I don’t want to go along with it.”
Sebastian grunted. “I can say a lot of bad things about Fen, but he wouldn’t kill a baby.”
Justice took a deep breath. “Well,” she finally said.
“Are you joining us of your own free will?”
“Yes.”
“No coercion, blackmail, death threats? Bribery?”
“No.” She glanced at him sharply. “You do understand that I could’ve gone to Washington and immediately made my own fortune on the radio, right? I wouldn’t even have had to wait for eighteen months and get pregnant and had a baby to maybepossiblymight get it if someone didn’t kill me first.” He blinked and she saw that, no, that hadn’t occurred to him. “I turned down three million a year for a two-hour radio show straight out of law school to work for Knox for reasons apparently you and the rest of the world already know. Think about that before you keep thinking somewhere in the back of your mind that I’m a whore.”
Sebastian flinched and Justice was inordinately pleased by that. “I’m sorry,” he said again after a moment. He rose then and brushed himself off. “But that only means you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”
That made Justice laugh unexpectedly. “I’m smarter than you are.”
He grinned then. “Oh, yeah? What was your major?”
“Economics. I’m betting yours was art.”
“Hrmph. Maybe you are smarter than me.” He helped her up and looked at her for a long time, his grin fading, then said, “Let Knox work through this in his own way, okay? Be patient with him and don’t get discouraged. And now I need to go home and you better go back in the house. Would you like me to walk you there?”
“No,” she said. “Not necessary.”
“You’re welcome to come watch me paint, but I wouldn’t if I were you. Your choice.”
“Yes, it certainly is. I will decide when I want to come watch you paint.”
* * * * *
83: IRRESISTIBLE OBJECT, IMMOVABLE FORCE
Justice walked up the courthouse stairs Monday morning, one week to the day of her marriage to Knox, not having seen Knox all weekend. If he had been home since Friday night, she didn’t know when. She had spent Saturday rearranging kitchen cabinets, shopping for groceries, and exploring her new home.
Sunday evening she’d decided to scope the desk where Knox paid his bills (with checks and envelopes and stamps, even!). She rifled through his haphazard files shamelessly, assuming that Knox would be thorough enough in his schemes to lock up whatever he didn’t want her to see. After a while, the only thing that scandalized her was the amount of useless information he kept and in what disarray. She began to pitch and toss and shred until he wouldn’t have a file left to his name when she finished.
“That’ll teach you to leave me alone for a weekend,” she muttered, then stormed out to the barn.
“What can I do for you, Justice?” Sebastian asked absently as he carved in oils and diamonds.
“Does Knox have a lover?”
Sebastian’s head snapped around. “Shit, no,” he breathed, horrified. “Why would you think that?”
“He left Friday night and he hasn’t been back.”
His mouth tightened. “He runs to the Ozarks when he’s upset.”
Her brow wrinkled. “What does he do there?”
“He works. If you want to know more, you’ll have to ask him, but don’t expect an answer until he’s ready to tell you.”
“Is he upset with me?”
“Doubt it.”
“But—”
“No more, Justice,” he said, somewhat harshly. “Whatever’s going on between you two, you have to work out. There’s a helluva lot more to being with a man than roses and chocolates and candlelight, especially with one who’s damn near old enough to be your father. You came back to him in spite of Fen, but you apparently didn’t think about the fact that you’d have to work out an actual relationship with him.”
She blushed at the reminder of her inexperience and, did he but know it, her fantasies—
He likes women who are older than he is . . .
—and the difference in their ages.
Then his face and tone softened. “Obviously, you can’t work at it if he’s not here and he’s a shithead for leaving you alone. But whatever else you think of Knox, he would never cheat.”
Standing in the hallway in front of the prosecutor’s office with her hand on the door, she shook her head to clear it of that conversation. She had no wish to go in, wondering if she’d see Knox. She thought it truly pathetic that she, his wife, didn’t know what he’d been up to all weekend.
The sound of Knox’s bellow through the outer office door let her know he was here, but it made her even less eager to see him. Apparently, he wasn’t any happier now than he had been the day she’d come back, when he’d ranted at Eric.
She sighed and opened the door, then stopped short when she heard the answering bellow from behind Knox’s office door. Who besides Sebastian and Giselle would have the guts to yell at Knox that way?
“You can’t just up and decide whose spine you need to replace next!”
Mr. Kenard. Of course.
“Bryce, this is my office. Do you think I’m going to let you come in here and tell me what to do?”
Mr. Kenard yelled over him as if he hadn’t said a word. “I’ve known you to pull some stupid stunts in your time, but this takes the cake. This trumps Leah all to hell and back.”
She cast a glance at Eric, who typed away, a smirk on his face. “Why is Mr. Kenard here?”
Eric looked up and pursed his lips at her, trying not to laugh. “I think you’re just about to find out.”
“MCKINLEY!” Knox roared. “In my office. NOW!”
“Well, hey,” Richard said from behind her, “at least now you know he’s not going to kill you.”
That made Eric and Patrick howl, but Justice only scowled at them and dropped her things by Eric’s desk before she opened the door to Knox’s private office. Mr. Kenard stood in the middle of the room, his arms crossed over his chest, looking at her with a kind expression that was totally incongruous to his volume just seconds before.
“Justice, Bryce seems to think you’d rather work somewhere else.”
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t—”
“I know you didn’t,” Knox said low. “Yes or no. Stay here or go with him.”
Her eyebrows rose as if considering the offer because she was angrier than she thought about his having left her to fend for herself for the weekend.
Mr. Kenard spoke before she had decided what to say. “I am giving you a choice, Justice, since Lucifer here doesn’t seem to get the whole free agency thing.”
Knox flinched and she looked between them, feeling undercurrents running wide and deep that she didn’t understand. That was the second time in a week someone had called him Lucifer. She knew it wasn’t coincidental and she knew it was a religious reference, but she didn’t understand the heavy subtext.
“Justice,” Knox said then, staring at her with those beautiful blue eyes, “I would like it if you stayed here. You’re a good lawyer.”
“DAMMIT, KNOX!” Mr. Kenard bellowed and Justice stepped back a bit. At school, she’d heard he could be vicious in a courtroom, but in the week she’d stayed with him and Giselle, she’d seen no evidence of a temper. She might have been frightened but for his unwavering kindness and gentleness toward her. “Make up your fucking mind! Couldn’t you have used that approach two months ago? Why do you have to do everything the hard way?”
Knox’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing. He continued to stare at Justice and her insides melted. Still . . .
“You’re a good lawyer, Justice,” Knox repeated. “You’ll make an excellent prosecutor. I can teach you how to be one of the best in the country. But you’d make an equally good tort lawyer, and Bryce can teach you how to be one of the best in the country—his name on your CV in civil litigation is just as prestigious as mine is in criminal law. You’ll make a lot of money at his firm. You’ll never make that kind of money here.”
She glared at him, then looked at Mr. Kenard. “I was offered three million dollars if I took my own radio show. Can you beat that?”
He didn’t seem surprised, but then she couldn’t read his expressions through all those scars. “No. Not until you’re bringing in the kind of money that would justify that. Ninety thousand.”
There’s a helluva lot more to being with a man than roses and chocolates and candlelight.
“Thank you, Mr. Kenard.”
Knox started and gaped at her. “Justice!”
“But I think I’ll stay here.”
Mr. Kenard’s eyebrow rose as he studied her. “Sebastian told me Knox let you go.”
“Yes, he did.”
“And you came back on your own.”
“I did.” Justice didn’t dare look at Knox at that moment for reasons she didn’t want to think about.
“And you know about Fen.”
“Yes.”
“Knox didn’t pressure you?”
I won’t pressure you. You come to me when you’re ready.
“No.”
“I gave her an annulment, dammit,” Knox grumbled. “What the hell else do you want?”
“Did he?”
“Yes. I shredded it.”
Mr. Kenard sucked in a deep breath then and studied her for a moment before saying, “Okay. Just wanted to see for myself.”
Give it one more week, Justice. Just one week from the time I take you back home. Can you do that?
He’d had this rescue planned before Giselle had kidnapped her; she had known, had asked Justice to wait a week. She wondered if Knox had known in advance, but she doubted it. She had not thought it possible for Knox to look as if he’d been sucker punched.
And Mr. Kenard, well. Obviously, nobody had banked on Knox just . . . letting her go free, no strings attached, and if they had, no one would have bet on her coming back of her own free will. Suddenly, she felt a bit more forgiving of the Kenards: Willing to ambush Knox, their family, to right his wrong against her, a stranger.
“The offer’s always open, so call me when you’ve had your fill of his bullshit.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kenard.”
“You’re welcome, Justice,” he said warmly, his voice hoarse.
She left then, closing the door quietly behind her, but stayed at the door and eavesdropped. It didn’t surprise her when she felt Eric behind her, his ear to the door, too.
“You bastard,” Knox said, his voice not muted enough to hide the dripping sarcasm.
“You’re welcome.”
“Lucifer was a bit over the top, don’t you think?”
“You know the answer to that, as attached as you are to theology. I figured you’d get the point. Apparently Sebastian thought so, too.”
No answer.
“Knox,” Mr. Kenard sighed, “not everyone is going to abandon you. You don’t have to work three times harder to keep a woman who’d have gone with you willingly than you would to keep a woman who’d have left you anyway.” What did that mean? “You should’ve just asked her.”
“Get out of my office. And don’t pull another stunt like that again.”
“You got a lot of nerve, you know that? You’re on my case constantly about my dad, but you don’t want to hear about how fucked up you are. Yet another thing that hasn’t changed in twenty years.”
Twenty years?
“They both need to see a shrink,” Eric muttered and grabbed Justice’s arm to drag her away from the door—and just in time, too.
Mr. Kenard stalked out through the outer office the way his wife had stalked into it two weeks ago. Knox stood in the doorway of his private office, glaring after him, then glared at Justice where she stood next to her things on the floor by Eric’s desk.
“Get to work, McKinley,” he snapped. “You too, Cipriani.”
Then slammed the door behind him.
* * * * *
84: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
AUGUST 2007
“So Sebastian tells me Lucifer left you alone for the weekend. Again.”
Justice blushed as she held the front door open for Giselle the Saturday morning that would begin her second weekend as Knox’s wife, but . . . not. Surprised yet touched that Giselle had come all that way for her, she shrugged, attempting to feign nonchalance. “I guess so,” she murmured as she stood uncertainly in the entryway, Giselle watching her carefully. “He didn’t come home last night.”
Giselle snorted and said, “I could’ve called and asked if you had plans, but I decided I didn’t care. Let’s go to the movies.” Justice’s eyes widened. The movies! Justice couldn’t remember the last movie she’d seen and it would never have occurred to her to go by herself. Suddenly she realized that she now had time to do all the fun things she’d missed so much, things other people did and took for granted because they didn’t have chores and school and working for actual money all at the same time. “And, oh, hey—pack a bag or something because you’re spending the night with us. See? I can be as autocratic as that shit-for-brains husband of yours.”
That made Justice laugh, just because someone had said it and made it real. She had a husband and someone other than she knew it, had referred to it as if it were an everyday thing to talk to another woman about her husband. It wasn’t mentioned at work; in fact, everyone, including Justice, took great pains to act as if nothing was different about her relationship to Knox than it ever had been.
Giselle drove to the local cineplex, where they went from one movie to the next. “You have to really juggle those time slots if you want maximum return on your investment of a day,” she said as she dragged Justice from one end to the other, only five minutes between the end of one movie and the beginning of the next.
“No more!” Justice finally said after movie number four. “I can’t take another one.”
Giselle laughed and said, “Couldn’t anyway. Gotta get home to the hubster. It’ll be dark soon.” She glanced to the west. “I think I may have cut that a bit too close.”
Justice thought it a very strange thing for someone like Giselle Kenard to allow herself to be accountable to a husband, and her face must have revealed her confusion. “Bryce doesn’t like to be home alone after dark,” Giselle murmured, almost reluctantly, as she started
the car and pulled out into traffic. “After his fire . . . Well, I mean . . . Um, he— He just . . . doesn’t like to be alone in the dark.”
That powerful man, afraid of the dark?
You were so disgusted at Giselle’s cowardice that she kept Kenard on ice for almost a year, and it wasn’t a month ago you pounded my head into the table for being a coward.
You don’t have to work three times harder to keep a woman who’d have gone with you willingly than you would to keep a woman who’d have left you anyway.
These men, Bryce Kenard and Sebastian Taight and Knox Hilliard—powerful, wealthy men and much older than she—had problems and insecurities like she did? They made mistakes? They had fears? And Giselle Cox, a coward? Justice could barely wrap her head around any of that.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Giselle murmured as she drove south on I-29, sliding smoothly across two and three lanes at a time to find any opening she could rocket through. Justice looked at the speedometer edging up toward ninety, then out her window. Yes, they raced the sun, and it was a long way from Chouteau Woods to Brookside.
Justice said nothing for a moment. “I don’t know how to put it in words,” she finally said. “I guess I thought your husband was invincible. And Sebastian. Knox. You.”
Giselle shook her head thoughtfully. “No,” she said slowly, “just better at hiding it. You get older, you learn how to protect yourself better. Everybody has their weaknesses, their Achilles heel.”
“What’s yours?” Justice said before she thought.
Giselle slid her a look. “Before I met Bryce, it was whether I’d ever find anyone who could love me the way I wanted. And then when I did, he wasn’t what I’d expected, so it took me a while to come to terms with it.”
“And now?”
She paused, as if deciding what and how much to say. Finally, “Well, one thing is that I can’t have children.”
Justice’s eyes widened. “Oh,” she breathed. “I’m sorry.” And she was because suddenly, she heard a heaviness in Giselle’s voice she’d never heard before. Ferocity, yes. Humor, yes. Sadness, easily explained now. Anger, definitely. But this was . . . pain. “That’s why that painting means so much to you.”