The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  She started when the alarm buzzed and groaned. “My boss is going to kill me today. You wore me out.”

  Knox laughed then and caught her mouth in another hot kiss that made her juices begin to flow yet again. “Once you get up and around, that goes away,” he whispered.

  He was right; once she got to work, she felt more energetic and more able to do her work even though her mind was back home, in bed, with Knox, and she couldn’t keep a smile off her face.

  Richard pulled up a chair at lunch. “Congratulations,” he murmured.

  “Congratulations what?” she asked, biting into one of the absolutely divine cheeseburgers from the café across the street.

  “Now he’s looking at you the same way you look at him.”

  She choked and then swallowed her food. “So I’m not the high school freshman with a crush on the captain of the football team anymore?”

  “I didn’t say that. Now the captain of the football team has a crush on the little freshman.”

  Justice laughed delightedly, warmed to the depths of her soul.

  “And—Justice?”

  “What?”

  “Thank you for the money.”

  “I didn’t give it to you.”

  “No, but I’m sure you put a bug in Knox’s ear.”

  She smiled and patted his arm.

  That night, Knox pounced on her as soon as she walked in the door and she was more than ready to be pounced upon, but she was tired and went to sleep as soon as she’d popped, Knox still buried inside her.

  The morning after that, she was late, and Knox yelled at her in front of everybody. She was tempted to yell back that she didn’t have a terminal case of insomnia and it was his fault for keeping her up all night, but she wasn’t quite that bold.

  “Time to get up, Iustitia,” Knox whispered in her ear the third morning as she snuggled herself into the warmth of his naked body.

  “Grrr. Can we take a sick day?”

  He laughed. “No. Especially not both of us at the same time. But would you come away with me this weekend?”

  She opened her eyes to see his face there in the pillow, suddenly with fewer lines, and a serenity she had never seen before. He gave her a crooked grin that made her belly flip over. “Say yes, Iustitia. I haven’t asked a girl out on a date in a long time.”

  “Why do that when you can threaten?” she murmured with a shy smile as she touched her palm lightly to his scruffy face.

  “I do everything the hard way, remember?”

  “Yes, why do you do that?”

  “Too early in the morning for psychoanalyzation, love.”

  Her shy smile widened a bit at the endearment and she felt her face flush, so she buried her nose into the pillow. He laughed as he bounded out of bed and went into the bathroom. “I’d really rather not have to yell at you today. You know I hate late.”

  “Knox, it’s five-thirty in the morning. Couldn’t you stand to actually get to work on time instead of an hour early?”

  “Old habits die hard,” he muttered around his toothbrushing. “Couldn’t you stand to actually get to work on time instead of thirty minutes late?”

  She dragged herself out of bed, then nearly tripped over the cat, who’d decided that since he’d already been dislodged twice, he wasn’t budging again. “Dog,” she breathed, exasperated. One loud meow let her know how irritated he was with her, and Knox laughed.

  “Guess he told you.”

  Once in the bathroom, she nudged Knox over with her hip and he protested with a grunt; then she began the task of brushing her teeth. Knox moved around her to turn on the shower and she bent to rinse her mouth.

  She gasped when she felt Knox’s big hands around her hips. One slid slowly from her hip over and around her thigh until his fingers slid up inside her and his thumb massaged her clitoris. She closed her eyes and sighed as she rose a bit so that her back was against his chest. His other hand caressed her, hip to ribs to breast until it was in his hand, his thumb manipulating her nipple.

  “Look in the mirror,” he whispered in her ear, deep and gruff. “Watch me make love to you.”

  Hesitantly, she opened her eyes and saw that girl who surprised her every time, with copper-mahogany curls as messy as they ever were in the morning; with freckles heavily layering her face; with hazel eyes that had never been anything but dull to her until right this moment.

  She saw Knox’s sunny blond hair, his mouth in the crook of her neck, nibbling, kissing, licking. She simultaneously saw and felt what his hand did to her breast. She watched the muscles in his other arm move in time with what she felt his fingers doing to her.

  Her breath came fast and hard even as she watched Knox raise his head and meet her gaze in the mirror, that dark, dark blue they turned when he was aroused, and oh! he was aroused.

  “Look at your face and your breasts; they’re flushing,” he murmured, and she looked. Indeed, they were flushing. “Look at your eyes; they’re gold.” Indeed, they were gold. “Look at your chest, how hard you’re breathing.” Indeed, she was panting as if she’d run the two-minute mile. “I’ve waited three years to make love to you, Iustitia, to watch you flush like that and your eyes turn to gold.”

  “Why did you wait?” she breathed, her eyes closing in sheer sensation.

  “It would’ve been longer if you hadn’t been in my office when Jones came barging in.”

  Then Knox slid his hands up and around her ribs, drawing away from her. She opened her eyes again to see that he was inspecting her back and buttocks, caressing her skin slowly all the way down her body until they were again at her hips, then between her legs, parting them gently until at last, his shaft was right there and she did so love that.

  He pressed her forward a little and then slid up into her, his hands flat on the counter, his big body surrounding her and pressing against her as well as inside her. She released a ragged sigh and closed her eyes.

  “Put your hands on mine, love. Wrap your fingers in mine. Brace yourself.”

  She did, then he began to move and she sighed again, deeper.

  “Open your eyes, Iustitia. I want you to see this.”

  What she was looking at was two people making love, their bodies moving, their breath coming shorterharderfaster, and their skin flushing more.

  What she saw was a man who loved her, had loved her from the beginning, and who had finally felt ready to take what she would have given him freely to begin with if he’d just asked.

  She couldn’t watch herself come; she was too busy feeling, her eyes closing yet again, her head back on Knox’s shoulder, until she had come with soft gasps. Then she opened her eyes to watch Knox.

  His head back, his shoulders tense, he moved with the grace of a lion and came with the roar of one, too.

  He was magnificent.

  He stilled for a moment, then slowly wrapped himself around her, propping his chin on her shoulder and looking at her, his eyes lightening as she watched.

  “So how about it? Romantic weekend?”

  “What about being seen together?”

  “Not where I want to take you. Whittaker House in Mansfield.”

  Justice’s brow wrinkled. “What’s that and where’s that?”

  “Mansfield’s in the Ozarks. Whittaker House is an inn that I half own.”

  Justice, taken out of the moment, stared at him agape. “You own an inn in the Ozarks?”

  He chuckled and moved away from her, then directed her into the shower. “Half.”

  “That’s where you went those weekends?”

  “Yes. My ward, Vanessa, is a chef. It’s her baby; I just put up the cash. I go down there to unwind and help out. Do the books and whatever legal work needs to be done.”

  Justice was speechless. “You have a ward?”

  “Two,” he said absently as he bent to lather soap up Justice’s legs. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you on the way.”

  She sighed in bemusement at how much she didn’t know abou
t Knox and watched him rise to his full height, then duck his head under the spray. His body was strong, his shoulders and arms heavily muscled, his chest covered in a dusting of hair lighter than his skin. Justice didn’t know what other forty-year-old men looked like naked, but she supposed she could be happy with what she had.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  “You’re gorgeous.”

  He stilled, stared at her for a moment, and then she gasped, delighted, when he blushed. “No one’s ever said that to me before,” he grumbled when she began to giggle, but he grabbed her and kissed her to shut her up.

  “I’m not going to be able to think about anything but this all day today,” she whispered against his mouth as the kiss softened.

  He gave her a goofy grin she’d only begun seeing after they’d really made love the first time, two nights before. “I’ve been having a bit of that problem myself, Iustitia.”

  “Knox? Were you waiting to make love to me until you told me about Parley?”

  He stilled “Yes,” he finally said. “I needed you to hear it from me, all of it, how I did it—I’ve never told anyone what I told you. I’m not sorry, but I didn’t want to feel your disappointment or horror; didn’t want to see the same look on your face you had when I shot Jones. And I certainly didn’t want you to leave me again. Sleeping on the couch and having you in the house somewhere was better than not having you at all.” He paused. “Thank you, Iustitia.”

  “For what?”

  “Believing in me. Coming back to me.”

  “You made me who I am. You gave me the strength and courage to put my name to my opinions and then defend them. Everything you’ve done to me, the threats, the intimidation—you wanted, needed, me to stand up to you. Telling me you owned me was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  There was that grin again. “Well, I didn’t need you to slap me that hard, but yes, I wanted to get you where you live and see what you’d do. Iustitia, you already had it in you; you’ve always had it in you. I just wanted to bring it to the surface and test its strength.”

  “Did I pass, Professor Hilliard?”

  He laughed then. “Yes and I want to explore that Professor Hilliard thing in more depth with you this weekend.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh yes,” he purred. “That older-professor-nubile-young-student thing is unexpectedly erotic. I don’t know how the hell I missed that all these years.”

  * * * * *

  92: LITTLE RESORT IN THE OZARKS

  Justice fell in love with Mansfield and Whittaker House the minute they drove onto the pastoral property complete with grazing sheep, though it did unnerve her that Knox’s ward, Vanessa Whittaker, was almost exactly Justice’s age and, along with being warm and gracious, she was very, very pretty.

  With straight chocolate-colored hair streaked blonde from the sun, vivid turquoise eyes, and perfect, faintly tanned skin (without even one freckle), Vanessa was drop-dead gorgeous. Justice had never thought of herself as a particularly jealous person, but if it had to do with Knox . . .

  She looked at Vanessa and those acid-green tendrils curled through her until Knox wrapped his big hand gently around the back of her neck and pulled her up against his broad, hard body. He caressed her backside and his mouth brushed her ear.

  Justice closed her eyes. Sighed.

  “I told you on the way down here, Iustitia. Vanessa’s my daughter. She was a twelve-year-old girl who did a tremendously courageous thing in the name of truth and justice, then needed someone to protect her from the fallout. I happened to be the AP who caught that case.” He turned her and pointed to a painting of Vanessa that hung in what was called the grand parlor. “Tell me what you see in that work.”

  Justice stared at the eight-by-five-foot semi-nude portrait entitled Wild, Wild West; she could feel Knox watching her, waiting . . . Justice gasped, all traces of jealousy vanishing in a mist.

  “Ford,” she whispered, recognizing Sebastian’s style as well as the flush of Vanessa’s skin as she posed in the classic odalisque style on a magenta chaise, her hair a chic mess, her mouth curled in a self-satisfied smile and her eyes half closed. “Vanessa—? Sebastian—?”

  “That’s right. Neither of them thinks I’m observant or smart enough to figure out how that all went down—no pun intended—so you and I will just keep our correctly drawn conclusions to ourselves, shall we?” Justice opened her mouth to ask more questions, but Knox kissed her, long and deep. “There’s a reason I wouldn’t have let Sebastian paint you, Iustitia,” he murmured against her lips, “and it’s not because I don’t want the world to know what my stunning wife looks like nude. I could have gotten on board with that as fast as Bryce did with Giselle, but you notice Giselle doesn’t look like she’s just spent a week in bed having the most incredible sex of her life.”

  Justice swallowed. “Sebastian told me that if it weren’t for Eilis, he’d have—” She paused. “I didn’t believe him.”

  Knox laughed. “Sebastian turns into a completely different man when he sees a woman he wants to paint. He’s a freight train and there’s just no getting out of that path. Now he’s obsessed with Eilis and since Sebastian never lets go of his obsessions, that’s not going to change for a couple hundred years or so. He wouldn’t paint you now even if asked, in any form, like Giselle’s or otherwise, whether Eilis goes back to him or not.”

  “What was different about Eilis?” Justice asked.

  “She went wandering through his mind and his soul. Now, let’s go up to our suite so I can wander around in you for a while.”

  * * * * *

  Justice awoke the next morning, alone in a strange sleigh bed in a suite whose opulence she had never seen the likes of. This was definitely not her bedroom. It took her a minute to remember where she was, then she relaxed back into the glorious mattress, closed her eyes, and smiled.

  She heard an elevator ding and soft footsteps across the carpet toward her. The mattress depressed from underneath her and she caught a whiff of a musky cologne before she felt lips on her earlobe and strong arms wrap around her. She smiled.

  “Happy birthday, Iustitia,” he breathed in her ear.

  Justice’s eyes popped open. “You knew! You remembered!”

  He smiled at her. “I did.”

  “Did Giselle tell you?”

  “Please give me a little credit for doing something nice without having to have my ass kicked by my family. No, she didn’t. Now, I got you something, but you have to get dressed and come downstairs before I’ll give it to you.”

  She pouted. “Bribery is a felony.”

  “Call the FBI. They might finally have something to nail me on.” And with a bounce and a laugh, he was gone.

  When she stepped off the elevator into Whittaker House’s lobby after showering and dressing, she stopped short, her senses assaulted with the sight of hundreds of balloons of every color imaginable clinging to the ceiling and some floating around on strings with weights. Paper ribbons criss-crossed the grand foyer and dining room, and what seemed like hundreds of people stood looking at her expectantly.

  She knew it was coming, braced herself for it, but—

  “SURPRISE!”

  —she still jumped at the roar. Who were all these people?

  “This,” Vanessa murmured as she looped her arm through Justice’s to pull her along through the crowd into the dining room, “is about half the population of Mansfield and Ava.”

  “They don’t know me,” she whispered.

  “No, but they know Knox and they love him; therefore, you must be pretty special.”

  “But what about Fen?”

  “Oh. Him. Wright and Davis counties convinced Fen a few years ago that it might be smart for him not to show his face south of Sedalia, and that any random snooping around about Knox would not be appreciated. If he finds out Knox has a wife now, it won’t be because of anybody down here. We protect our own.”

  “Do they know—”


  “They don’t know anything. What they suspect, well . . . That I can’t say. But we’re pretty sharp and if it looks like it could be trouble, it probably is. If we’re wrong, we’ll apologize after we shoot you.”

  Justice chuckled, then laughed. Her eyes filled with tears as she looked overhead at the twenty-foot-high embossed copper ceiling covered with balloons and streamers, walking through a throng that thought she was special because they thought Knox was special—special enough to protect him and to welcome an unknown wife with open arms.

  Then she saw Knox waiting for her at a table with a cake and a present.

  “We didn’t know what kind of cake you’d like, so I made chocolate. I hope that’s okay.”

  Justice couldn’t respond to Vanessa’s whisper before Knox took her hand to pull her down into his lap. She turned into him then, wrapping her arms around him, and began to cry the way she had that night in the grass, but for an entirely different reason.

  She didn’t know how long she stayed like that, her nose in the crook of his neck, smelling his skin, his cologne, his broad, muscular body against hers, his coarse blond hair in her fingers, his arms wrapped around her.

  “Everyone’s off eating cake and ice cream now,” he whispered after a while. “I wasn’t sure how you’d react to the crowd—that, I didn’t plan for—but I wasn’t going to send them away.”

  “It’s not that,” she whispered in return, hoarse. “It’s— I— I’ve never had— Not since my mother died, anyway.”

  “I wondered,” he breathed. “I watched you walk out of the auditorium at graduation alone. You looked so sad and lonely. You don’t know how badly I wanted to take you home right then.”

  And remembering that, Justice began to cry all over again.

  “Hey! I didn’t mean to upset you. Here,” he said and gently pried her away from him. “Open your present.”

  She half-laughed and half-cried. She tried to wipe her face with her hands, but Knox took a napkin and wiped her face for her. “You’re a hot mess,” he muttered, and Justice laughed.