by Moriah Jovan
Sebastian ambushed her as soon as she drove through the gate, yanking her car door open before she got the key out of the ignition.
“Did you see Eilis at all?” he demanded, seeming nearly desperate, but Justice couldn’t quite believe that from someone like him.
“Yes,” she intoned warily as she stood and led the way to the front door. “Why?”
“Did she say anything about me?”
Justice stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded, her mind clicking through what few faint details she could put together to make some cohesive picture—
“Well?” he snapped. “Did she or not?”
The light bulb came on.
Justice opened the door and walked through the living room to the kitchen, Sebastian following like a puppy dog. “You know what, Sebastian? I’m not going to tell you. You don’t scratch my back, I don’t scratch yours.”
His mouth tightened.
“There’s a lot more to being with a woman than roses and chocolates and candlelight,” she said, just to rub it in, at once annoyed with his sudden idiocy and delighted to know that the great Sebastian Taight had the same problem she did. “But I’d have thought a man sixteen years older than I am with, I’m assuming, a little bit of experience with women, would know that better than I would.”
“Point taken,” he snarled at her before he threw the patio door open, then slid it closed again with an equally vicious slam. After casting her a glare through the glass, he stalked across the lawn, then disappeared around the corner into the barn.
Justice giggled with the glee of a little sister who’d successfully poked at her older brother, then blogged that night on the definition of family. She went to sleep with the same smile, feeling as if she had come home to people who had been waiting for her.
* * * * *
86: SYDNEY CARTON
Justice dressed for work, four weeks to the day of her wedding to Knox. Not that anybody’d notice, since she never saw him at home and rarely saw him at work. She didn’t know if he’d been home this past weekend and she didn’t really care.
Fun. No guilt. No thoughts of what she wasn’t getting accomplished back on the farm that she would never have been able to keep up with anyway.
No hurt over being abandoned, or at least, not much since it was possible Knox had engineered that the way he engineered a whole lot of things.
I had my reasons.
She was still lost in “Why me?” though and the richest irony of it all was that of all the women Knox could’ve chosen, he’d chosen one who had a national audience and political clout—and was ignorant of it. It would take only one well-written letter to the editor at the Wall Street Journal to crack the whole situation wide open.
But now it wasn’t just Knox at stake if she did that; his family and friends were, too. These people respected her for coming back on her own, staying with Knox, being in love with him, however naïvely, for being willing to fight his fight with him, with them, even though her only real role in it consisted of silently bearing the name of Hilliard. There would be plenty of time for a baby to happen if they decided not to take any precautions against it.
Abstinence works every time it’s tried.
Her lip curled and she snarled at nothing.
She arrived home to a silent house yet again. She had grown used to the silence, her only companion a neutered tomcat named Dog. She liked the beauty of silence to think about the day, about how the office worked, about her progression as a lawyer.
She’d settled in to her job and her environs, though now that she had developed a system, the endless stream of traffic tickets and deadbeat dads and bad checks and penny-ante arraignments had begun to bore her silly.
It still unnerved her that large amounts of cash came and went, but now she wasn’t so sure that its source was illegal and she definitely wasn’t going to believe one way or another until she had proof. But because she couldn’t quite work out how it could be legal, she followed Richard’s lead and pretended not to see it. Her only personal goal at the moment was to get better at being a prosecutor.
Her coworkers’ attitudes had changed for the better when she came back; she had no idea why. It wasn’t as if they had a stake in her presence the way Knox’s family did. Eric’s comment still baffled her and he’d refused to explain it.
Other than that, they didn’t care that she was Knox’s wife and they certainly didn’t care about her writings. They yelled at her like they yelled at each other and the other residents; it was how they communicated all the time, a male bonding ritual that had Justice rolling her eyes and snorting a lot. Yet as she got better, they didn’t yell at her so much because they had no reason to. Every once in a while, someone would point out where she needed to fix something—nicely.
Justice hadn’t been late once since she’d come back from St. Louis. She wasn’t up to her eyeballs in farm chores until one in the morning and it wasn’t like Knox was making love to her all night, every night. Oh, no. She had no excuse for not being well rested and able to get to work on time.
I won’t pressure you. You come to me when you’re ready.
What did that mean? Was she just supposed to walk up to him and say, “’Mkay, ready now”? How was she supposed to go about asking him for what she wanted without completely embarrassing herself? She knew he wanted her and would definitely not turn her away or laugh at her, but she was still just too inexperienced and insecure to be able to initiate anything—
Make love to me, Knox.
—and too embarrassed to ask either Giselle or Eilis to give her instructions on the proper seduction of a husband.
For the last three mornings, she had gone to the basement where he slept to see if she could catch him just to talk to him before he turned into At-Work Knox. He was always gone, the couch still warm. She decided that if he wanted to avoid her that badly, maybe she should probably take the hint. After all, if he expected her to come to him, he should stick around so she could do that.
At lunch, Richard pulled up a chair and deposited both his and her lunches on her desk. This had become a ritual with them. She’d pay for his lunch if he went across the street and got hers, too. She’d seen the meager lunch he brought every day while the rest of the men went out. That would be expensive for a married-with-three-teenagers man who didn’t dip his hands in the cesspool of possibly dirty money.
Justice had opened her laptop and checked the new comments on the blogs while she waited for Richard to come back. “Darn,” she muttered as she scanned them, then sighed.
“What?”
She clucked. “Oh, there used to be a regular poster who followed my articles and he hasn’t commented in almost a month.”
“So?”
“Well, you know, you get used to people online and then you miss them when they don’t show up for a while. This guy, he— He’s my buddy. His comments are always interesting and smart, and I like him a lot. He’s been following me around the web for two years and then just— Nothing.”
Richard didn’t get it; he was busy with real life, family he adored. He did things with them and his life was full.
She frowned. “It’s like he disappeared off the face of the Internet.” She tried to explain it to him again. “Okay. It’s like having a pen pal that you get a letter from every other day for two years. Then one day the letters just stop coming. You don’t know why; there’s no explanation. You only know that your friend disappeared.”
She closed her laptop and happened to look up to see Knox watching her, looking at her the way he had that night in the grass, with what she now understood was desire, his eyes dark. He wanted her. His jaw clenched and his nostrils flared. His fingers curled into his palms and tightened.
Her eyes widened. Her heart beat a little faster, her breathing sped up, and she bit her lip.
Take me home, Knox, please.
“You’re not sleeping with him, are you?” Richard muttered around his sandwich, having apparently wit
nessed that exchange, and she reluctantly looked away from Knox to Richard.
She couldn’t even be offended; Richard was her . . . girlfriend? She snorted. “That obvious?”
“Quite. He doesn’t act like a man who’s getting regular sex and you still look at him like a high school freshman with a crush on the captain of the football team.”
“Why were you all so happy I came back?”
He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, “He was insufferable, the worst I’ve ever seen him. Then you came back and . . . he wasn’t.”
That confused her, but it warmed her soul that the office thought her responsible for some improvement in Knox’s mood that she could not discern.
Justice sneaked glances at Knox throughout the afternoon when she could; she, like the rest of the staff, was busy in court and meeting with defense counsel making her plea deals—but every time she sneaked a peek, he was looking at her, too.
That evening when she went home, she decided she’d had enough of this. She missed him, the At-Home Knox, the one who’d let her go, the one who had kissed her so well, because kissing seemed to be his favorite thing in the world to do.
Justice awoke to the sound of her alarm. He had to be sleeping at this time of the morning and she was determined to catch him before he went to work.
She opened the basement door and saw a bluish-white glow, the muted sound of the TV, and what sounded like chuckles. It was three o’clock in the morning; didn’t he ever sleep?
Sneaking down the stairs, she wasn’t sure what she expected to catch him watching—although it had occurred to her that it could be porn—but what she saw wasn’t even on her radar.
“ . . . pondering what I’m pondering?”
“I think so, Brain, but pantyhose are so uncomfortable in the summertime.”
A snicker came from the couch.
Pinky and the Brain?
Justice blinked and shook her head, unable to process that. Knox and cartoons. Another snicker came from the area of the couch at the gag that followed. He hadn’t seen her or heard her once she reached the bottom of the stairs and she tiptoed in a wide circle so she could approach him without his seeing her.
Knox lay on his side, clad in very short black cycling shorts and a white tee shirt. A thick tome lay open on the floor in front of him, next to a bucket of cheese popcorn and a gallon jug of orange juice, half drunk. He had his head propped up on one hand and shoved popcorn into his mouth, wiped his hand on his shirt, turned the page of his book, and read a few lines before he chuckled at the TV again.
His golden hair was rumpled and his jaw was frightfully scruffy and Dog sprawled along the length of his waist and ribs, asleep.
At that moment, Justice longed to know more about this man who’d forced her to marry him to get his inheritance, then set her free the very next day.
“Iustitia,” he breathed, obviously surprised, and she loved the sound of her real name out of his mouth.
Her gaze ran up the length of his prone body to meet his look.
“What are you reading?” she asked, because she wasn’t sure what to say now that she’d gotten his attention.
He shrugged. “Junk.”
“And you’re eating junk and watching junk.”
His face betrayed no emotion. “What’d you expect? The Playboy channel?”
Justice was glad he couldn’t see her flush in the dark. She looked away and decided that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“Iustitia, come here.”
She blinked at his gentle tone of voice. She looked back at him with a good measure of suspicion. “Why?”
He burrowed back into the sofa and patted the cushion in front of him. “C’mere.”
Justice stared at him, unable to decipher his expression or his mood. She bit her lip and looked toward the stairs. “I really should go back to bed . . . ”
“I said, ‘Come here.’”
That hard edge was back in his voice. She did think about defying him, but she’d sought him out—and now she couldn’t go through with asking him for what she really wanted.
Knox’s big hand reached up and gently wrapped around her arm, pulling her around the arm of the sofa, then down. She sat stiffly on the edge of the sofa until he caught the side of her neck. With a force so gentle as to be almost nonexistent, he compelled her to lie in front of him, facing the television so that the heat of his body seeped into her back. He settled his arm heavily in the curve of her waist and his large palm cupped the hip that sank into the cushion. He insinuated his knee between hers and the twining of their legs seemed terribly intimate for so innocuous a position. His chin lay atop her head and his other hand played with a lock of her hair.
He liked her hair. A lot. She sighed and relaxed back into him.
“Hi,” he murmured and tiny tendrils of her hair moved on his breath, tickling the skin of her face.
“Hi,” she murmured in return, catching a breath when she felt his growing arousal against her lower back. She felt an answering heat between her legs and she closed her eyes helplessly.
“Relax. Watch TV.”
“Why are you being nice to me?”
“Because I’m too tired to be an asshole. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Justice smiled a little at the wry tone and shifted a little closer to him.
Knox said nothing else, but continued to play with her hair, watching TV and occasionally chuckling. She liked the way his chest rumbled when he laughed at his cartoons. She felt every breath he took, every absent stroke of his palm as it drifted up and down her skin along the line of her ribs and hip underneath the gray jersey. She hadn’t stopped wearing his clothes to bed and had even taken them to the Kenards’ to sleep in.
That had not gone unnoticed nor un-smirked upon.
She drew in a breath when his thumb brushed the underside of her breast—every slide of his hairy legs along her smooth ones, every shift of his hips as he tried to adjust his arousal. She vaguely wondered if that caused pain.
She missed him. She missed him the way she’d missed him when he’d left the symphony early, his hand not in her hair, his shoulder not brushing hers, his mouth not on hers. She missed the Knox she thought must be in there but had only had glimpses of.
“You’re thinking again,” he whispered in her ear.
Justice caught her breath, wondering what he was going to say to her that would make her tingle more than she already did.
“What are you thinking about?”
He didn’t need to know that. She leaned over and looked at the book he was reading and flipped it closed yet keeping her thumb at his place.
“Who’s Porter Rockwell?” she asked, suddenly intrigued.
“Joseph Smith and Brigham Young’s bodyguard.”
Justice thought he must be working his way through his religious texts. “As in Brigham Young University?”
“As in. I graduated from law school there.”
She gasped and shifted so she could look at him. “You’re a Mormon?”
“No.” He paused, then said, “Well, not anymore.”
“Why not?”
Knox laughed, a mix of bitterness and sadness, but no humor. “You have to ask? Use your head, Iustitia. What religious culture in its right mind would condone what I do? I lie, I cheat, I steal. I blackmail women into my bed. I kill people and I force people to do what I want at gunpoint.” She swallowed heavily. “So you tell me why I’d get my ass thrown out.”
The depth of bitterness was unexpected from a man like Knox, who thrived on his reputation. “Would you go back if you could?”
“No.” The answer was swift, like the sharp blade of a guillotine through a soft neck. “I don’t want the responsibility.”
Responsibility . . . what an odd choice of words. A choice that implied too much for Justice to sort through all at once.
. . . as attached as you are to theology.
“You still believe in it, thoug
h, don’t you? I mean, the religion?”
There was a long pause. Justice held her breath in wait for his answer, and waited for a while. “Yes,” he finally murmured, then cleared his throat and spoke a little louder. “But not enough to change my life.”
“But, Knox—”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Iustitia. It’s a very demanding religion and an even more demanding culture and I’ve made my choices. For better or worse. Porter Rockwell,” he said, reaching over her to flip the book back to where it was, and that, his body wrapped around hers like that—oh, that!—nearly disengaged her brain. She wanted him to stroke her and caress her the way he had their wedding night; she wanted him to tuck his hand under her shirt and undress her, kiss her . . . “Was a very powerful man. He was called the Destroying Angel of Mormondom. He did things no one else could or would do in order to protect his people and his prophet.”
His reverence brought her mind back from her need. “You admire him.”
“I do. Very much. I absolutely believe that there’s a place in society for men like him, for people like us, me and Sebastian and Giselle. Bryce. Justice at all costs. And since I showed you mine, you show me yours.”
Justice thought for a minute, because she’d never been asked this question that she hadn’t replied, flippantly or otherwise, “There is no God.”
“I believe in the republic and capitalism. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Federalist Papers, Democracy in America—that’s my holy writ. Neil Peart writes my hymns and Rush is my choir. Ted Nugent is my Porter Rockwell. You have your prophets and I have mine: James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, Walter Williams, Morgan Ashworth. I follow no other faith.”
Knox pulled her even closer and ran his fingers through her hair. He didn’t seem to be inclined to speak, but—