The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  “It’s a book,” she finally said when she picked up the heavy package covered with haphazardly folded and taped paper. “You wrapped this yourself.”

  “I tried. I don’t do that so well. I probably should’ve had Vanessa do it.”

  “No! No, you shouldn’t have.” She carefully unwrapped it, taking her time, knowing she would save the paper because Knox had folded and taped it with his own two hands. Then she saw the name on the dust jacket and her jaw dropped. “Morgan Ashworth!” she breathed and turned the book over and over again. Her brow wrinkled. “I didn’t know he wrote novels.”

  “Nobody else does, either. Yet. Open the cover.”

  She gasped. On the inside cover, a very upright masculine scrawl said, To Justice Hilliard, on your 25th birthday. Enjoy it before everyone else does. Morg.

  “How—?”

  “No no no. Not nice to ask questions. Let’s just say I know people and leave it at that, ’kay?”

  “Knox,” she breathed. “I did my senior thesis on his economic theories. He’s a genius.”

  He snorted.

  “Do you know him? You must because he wrote ‘Justice Hilliard.’ Can I meet him?”

  “Not on your life. I’m already jealous.”

  She was completely, thoroughly delighted with her gift. “Oh, Knox,” she said again because she didn’t know what else to say. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Iustitia.” He paused. “But you know this doesn’t mean I’m going to stop yelling at you at work, especially if you’re late.”

  She burst out laughing. “I’d have to wonder what was wrong with you if you did.”

  * * * * *

  93: GETTING TO KNOW YOU

  SEPTEMBER 2007

  JMcKinley writes:

  I didn’t say I was switching positions on vigilanteism, darrylm. It’s just that I’m seeing limitations in the legal system that nobody likes, but can’t seem to change.

  darrylm writes:

  im just relly dsippointed in u, justice

  JMcKinley writes:

  I’m sorry, darrylm. I’m still thinking about it, still trying to find some moral compromise. There’s more of a gap between law and justice than I thought there was and I guess in a fight between them, my first inclination is to see justice come out on top.

  hamlet writes:

  so justice’s position is on top

  *

  “What am I supposed to say to that, Knox?” Justice breathed as she raised and lowered herself over Knox’s hips, taking her pleasure at her leisure.

  “Whatever you want to say, Iustitia,” he breathed in return, his big hands around her hips urging her to go faster, but no, she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. She liked this too much, the languid slide in and out with that depth she got when she was in control. “I’m guessing you like it on top?”

  She snickered and looked down at him, his crooked grin all but making her heart explode. “You better stop flirting with me online—the rest of the crew is going to get suspicious.”

  “Iustitia, I’ve been flirting with you for the past two years. You’re the only one who didn’t notice.” Justice’s mouth dropped open. “It was cute you never got it.”

  Justice, jerked out of the beginning of her orgasm, stopped and stared down at him. “What?” Knox closed his eyes and lifted her away from him, then pulled her back down on his cock. He arched his back and groaned when he came, and Justice’s eyes narrowed. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him until he was done. He opened his eyes slowly, took one look at her, and started to chuckle. She truly did see the humor in it, but still . . .

  “You just couldn’t wait to tell me that until after I came, could you?”

  His chuckle turned into a rolling laugh and he slid his hands up her back to pull her to his chest. They lay together in the middle of the bed and she kissed the line of his jaw while he stroked her bare skin. Their laptops had been cast aside once Knox had posted his last comment.

  “Well, now I feel a little silly,” she murmured. “Didn’t notice. Hrmf.”

  “Iustitia, your innocence is a very large part of your popularity. You see things so simply, it makes others think it doesn’t have to be difficult. My flirting with you—and I’m not the only one, by the way—and your not catching it is very . . . ” Knox searched for words, which he very rarely had to do, so Justice treasured the moment. “It gives hope that there’s still such a thing as innocence in the world, that not everyone is dipped in the acid of cynicism. On the other hand,” he said low in his throat as he kissed her; Justice could never get enough of Knox’s kisses. “You caught that innuendo fast enough. I might be rubbing off on you.”

  “You’re rubbing up inside me, is where you’re rubbing. You owe me an orgasm.”

  Knox burst out laughing and laughed until he was wiping his eyes. “Damn, Iustitia, you make me laugh. I love you.”

  “I think I’ve had enough blogging tonight,” she sighed with great smile of contentment.

  “You barely got started before you attacked me.”

  “Oh, don’t act like it was a great hardship.”

  “Don’t you still have an article to write?”

  “Mmmm, not right now,” she muttered. Justice was falling asleep, which she almost always did after making love no matter what time of day it was, orgasm or not. She felt Knox’s chuckle as she shifted around to grab the bed linens to cover them.

  Neither awoke until morning.

  Everything was still normal at work. And except for the occasional snickers or glances askance, like the money, Justice’s three co-conspirators pretended not to know that the reason Knox suddenly seemed a lot happier was because of Justice, pretended that she was just a junior AP and Knox was her significantly less disgruntled boss.

  Then they got home, in bed. Or in the yard, when she ran like she had the first time and she squealed, giggling, when he tackled her and they rolled over and over and spent hours making love in the grass (with the bug bites to prove it), the heat and humidity of a late summer Missouri night their only blanket—until Sebastian had emerged from the barn one night.

  “JUSTICE! Quit howling, dammit! I can’t hear myself think. Why can’t you two fuck in the house like normal people?”

  * * * * *

  Justice wrote articles for print, and Knox would mark them up and leave them on her desk at work. He expected her to be better than she was, better than her editors thought she was. He refused to read her work before she turned it in, but once it was in print, he took great liberty in assessing her.

  Knox took her to a remote shooting range where they wouldn’t be seen together and taught her the finer points that Giselle hadn’t had time to.

  “I really should have Giselle do this,” he said one day. “She’s better at it than I am.”

  “You seemed pretty good the day you shot Jones right between the eyes.”

  “I had to. Either Hicks or I would’ve died that day, so I couldn’t afford to miss. Giselle enjoys it. She’s a martial artist so she understands body movement better and she’s got a knack for it. I think it’s always better for a person to learn something from someone who enjoys it.”

  “Who taught her?”

  “Sebastian. He taught us both.”

  “I can’t imagine Sebastian with a gun in his hand.”

  “It’s not his weapon of choice, no.”

  “And that is?”

  “A baseball bat. And as far as I know, he hasn’t used one since he was nineteen.”

  Justice’s eyes widened. “That’s . . . that’s not normal.”

  Knox burst out laughing. “Sebastian isn’t normal.”

  He made her practice endlessly, left- and right-handed, though he did tell her he thought she was an excellent marksman.

  When Knox was in full teaching mode, he was harsh and biting in his criticism, but he was equally effusive with praise. All the residents, including Justice, strove for the moment Knox would grace them with his approba
tion.

  Every other weekend, Knox and Justice left work on Friday and headed south to the Ozarks. Justice was glad to get away, though Vanessa’s gourmet kitchen only emphasized how much she hated her own kitchen. She sometimes helped cook Friday and Saturday night dinner, learning various tricks from Vanessa and her sous chef. Justice, however, was much better at pastry than Vanessa, and her cherry pie became a favorite (but surprise) treat of the Friday- and Saturday-night dinner crowd. Knox did whatever bad-guy dirty work Vanessa needed done and tended to guests.

  Justice loved watching this side of Knox unfold before her eyes, the wealthy, refined gentleman he was born to be. He was a gracious host to people who thought he hung the moon, his reputation four hours north nothing but a slightly amusing quirk. The towns of Mansfield and Ava adored him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  What Justice liked most about going to Whittaker House:

  “This is my wife, Justice,” he would say to whomever he spoke, a proud note in his voice that thrilled her to the core of her soul.

  She loved being with Knox in public, being a regular husband and wife with him without fear of anybody seeing them together, holding hands, whispering, canoodling, kissing—

  —slow dancing on Saturday nights to the band that played standards during dinner, its singer’s voice a dead ringer for Ella Fitzgerald’s. Along with everything else he’d taught her, Knox taught her how to dance, something she had never had the opportunity to do. “You’re very good at this, Iustitia,” he whispered. It never failed that she and Knox garnered quite a bit of attention as they danced, but Justice wasn’t sure why unless . . .

  “Knox?”

  “Mmmm?” He pressed soft kisses in the curve of her neck.

  “Every woman here wants to kill me.”

  He stilled and looked at her, confused and concerned. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because the hottest dude in the state is making love to me on a dance floor.” That made him throw back his head and laugh. She huffed. “Well, don’t stop just because I pointed it out.”

  * * * * *

  Eric decided it was time for Justice to start being a real prosecutor instead of staying in traffic ticket, deadbeat dad, and arraignment hell. Finally, one day after he’d given her her first fairly big case, she stepped into the courtroom and sat at the table alone. None of her coworkers stayed with her because Knox had forbidden it.

  “She goes alone like everybody else does. She wins or loses on her own merits. Nobody in this office is to go into that courtroom while she’s trying it. Not to help, not to watch.”

  She’d prepared to the hilt, memorizing every speck of every detail of the file, and Eric, Richard, and Patrick had drilled her endlessly on the facts. Hicks taught her how to pick a jury and Justice was shocked to learn that he was the one who had taught Knox how to do it long, long ago when he was a junior AP, and Knox still couldn’t pick a jury better than Hicks. Patrick and Eric taught her how to prep witnesses.

  Knox taught her how to find and draw out nuances on the fly, how to coax and cajole and flatter obscure information out of witnesses. He’d taken her to an empty courtroom three days in a row and made her try the whole thing against him.

  He taught her how to walk, when to talk to the jury and not, and went through her side of the closet to pick which outfit she should wear and why. “No pants. A woman has a different power than a man in court and part of that is how she dresses.”

  “That’s what Giselle said.”

  “Giselle should open a finishing school.”

  She was amazed at how much she’d picked up just by spending all those hours and hours watching Knox do what he did so well, how well she could imitate him and his inflections. Since he’d never trained a woman before, he had to sit back and watch her to make adjustments. By comparison, he had her watch Eric and the residents try their cases and without exception, they all looked and sounded exactly like Knox.

  It took a week of incredibly intensive thinking on her feet to win it. When she came back to the office after the verdict, Knox muttered, disgruntled,

  “Shit. Now I have to keep her.” The office howled, shook her hand, slapped her on the back, and generally yelled good-natured insults at her across the office until it was time to go home.

  “You did very well, Iustitia,” Knox whispered in her ear that night. “I’m proud of you.”

  * * * * *

  Things changed for her after she won that case. She was part of the team. They took her writings seriously now and they all argued back and forth across the office about whatever opinion she’d had online or in print. She knew she was persuasive in print and she knew she was persuasive in court, but it never dawned on her that she could be persuasive in her workplace with people who held their own strong opinions, had reasons for them, and had years of lawyering behind them.

  She found she had a talent for impeccably timed comedy and very often her wry observations, rapier wit, and cutting asides had the office howling with laughter. Knox had begun to leave his private office door open, she suspected, because he wanted to hear what bomb she was going to drop next.

  As she spent more time in Knox’s arms and brain, she lost some of her innocence along with her ignorance. She didn’t miss either. Occasionally, he’d fling an innuendo at her at work when no one else was around to make her blush, but it made him laugh. Under Knox’s tutelage, her language sank into the gutter with the men’s and she didn’t care; she liked being one of them and she wasn’t that girl in the front row her first week in law school anymore.

  “I like it when you talk dirty, Iustitia.”

  Justice wrote a blog article about being a prosecutor and the practical versus theoretical. She talked about her colleagues, the different approaches to their cases, her friendship with Richard, Eric’s management style, Patrick’s willingness to do anything he was asked, and Hicks’s sly and irascible humor—although she thought it prudent to change their names and not mention where she worked. Yet.

  Knox blew his stack.

  “Iustitia, if you mention the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office, you’re going to get a lot of backlash you don’t want, and I’m not even talking about Fen coming after you. You’re the golden girl of conservative politics; once you mention me or my office, you’ll carry a taint you won’t be able to wash off and your career’ll be over before it really got rolling. It’s also very possible that if Kevin loses this election, you could get dragged into Sebastian’s mess. Neither Wall Street nor Washington would take it kindly that the Justice McKinley is also the OKH Bride and possibly the mother of the OKH Baby.”

  Well, he did have a point.

  “I’m asking you not to write about the office, Iustitia, not just for your career, but for Sebastian’s and Kevin’s. Your credibility will tank if you’re associated with me and if your credibility tanks, so does Kevin’s. Sebastian really needs your pull right now. Please, Iustitia?”

  Justice was quiet for a moment and bit her lip. “It’s really not as simple as I make it sound, is it?”

  Knox shook his head slowly. “No. It’s not. You may lose your audience as you lose your innocence, I don’t know. You may gain audience that thinks you’re too naïve now. But you will lose your innocence and you chose the quickest route to do it, too.”

  “Being a prosecutor,” she sighed.

  Richard coordinated a party when she had somehow managed to come to a newspaper’s attention and get her own syndicated column. She’d asked Knox if he had had anything to do with that and he’d been deeply offended.

  “Iustitia, if there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I strip people down and throw them in the deep end and let them sink or swim based on their true selves. If they swim, fine, but I don’t interfere. I just give them a safe place to hit bottom, then I fish ’em back out again. That’s just the way I teach.”

  Hicks retired and three residents who’d been with the office long enough, respectively, went on to ne
w and better things, as they always did. So now there was the core staff of three, then Justice. Everyone who was left in the office knew she and Knox were married, and Justice figured he’d meant it to be that way.

  “Justice,” Eric called to her one day across the office when it was just the four of them, “since you’re here for as long as Knox is, you’re taking Hicks’s place. You’re going to be part of the core staff now.”

  “Is this your decision or Knox’s?”

  “Mine. You know he doesn’t manage staff.”

  “Thank you.”

  Richard and Patrick nodded and went back to work. She had gone from being a mousy little girl laughingstock to a tolerated coworker to a respected colleague in the toughest county in the ten that made up the Kansas City metro area.

  Knox had stripped her down, thrown her in the deep end, and she’d swum.

  * * * * *

  94: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

  OCTOBER 2007

  Justice was late. Again. And Knox would publicly crucify her while the entire courthouse listened and chuckled. She knew she deserved it, though—and he refused to wake her up in the morning.

  “You’re an adult and I’m not your mother. Dammit, Iustitia, why can’t you get to work on time?”

  “It’s a passive-aggressive response to my asshole boss.”

  He’d laughed in spite of himself.

  Not only had she slept through Knox getting ready for work and her alarm, she couldn’t decide what she wanted to wear. She’d grown frighteningly persnickety about her wardrobe since Giselle had taken her shopping and she’d learned how it felt to dress well.

  She finally settled on a linen suit: black skirt, discreet black silk and lace chemise, shoulder holster and gun, white blazer, badge, black nylons, black sling-back heels Eilis had given her for her birthday.

  Justice decided to test the limits of the incestuous law in Chouteau County and she sped. This was something she had never done before coming to work at the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office. Always prompt, never speeding so as to avoid tickets, she’d lost herself in that courthouse. She didn’t miss anything Knox had taken away from her because she’d gained so much more, and all of it far superior to what she’d come to him with.