by Moriah Jovan
“Miss McKinley,” came Fen’s voice from behind her, and she tensed. “I’m afraid we got off on the wrong foot.”
Taken out of the moment and truly exasperated, she turned around to spear him with a look. “No, we didn’t, Fen. I’m right of conservative and you’re left of liberal. I’ve already endorsed who I like. What can you possibly think I’m going to do for you?”
“Most people will do anything for a price.”
That pretty much blew Justice’s mind and she stared at him as if he’d lost his. “I’m sorry. I must’ve misunderstood. Did you just attempt to buy me?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it that. People give up good jobs to go to better ones all the time.”
“Which part of ‘no’ don’t you understand? I do what I want and I say what I think. I can’t be bought.”
His eyes narrowed. “I doubt that highly. What if I made it known that you work in the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office? That would send your credibility down the tubes—along with Kevin’s. And you might find yourself sitting with Sebastian, Knox, and Kenard in front of a Senate panel.”
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Knox stiffen, but she didn’t hesitate. “Knock yourself out, Fen, but think about it: Every year, hundreds of people compete for a residency with Knox Hilliard and I got a spot. Why would so many people risk being investigated by the FBI, risk their careers and possibly their lives, to be trained by Knox Hilliard—that murdering, racketeering, money-laundering bastard? Do you really not understand how prestigious his name is? No, my credibility won’t go down the tubes. It’ll shoot through the roof and so will his, if my name’s attached to it. That’s how highly he is regarded as a teacher and that’s how influential I am in conservative politics.”
The muscles in his jaw twitched. “Then perhaps you could be persuaded a different way?”
Justice sucked in a long breath, her eyes widening before narrowing to a predatory stare. Never in her wildest imaginings concerning Fen Hilliard did she think he’d threaten her for her opinion. He must’ve gotten a taste for killing when he couldn’t get his way. Since he’d gotten away with it twice and would casually allude to it within the confines of a circle of players who couldn’t prove it, he must think he was immune to legal retribution. She leaned forward, her face hard and her voice cold, ringing through the courtroom, echoing, bouncing off the walls.
“I’m going to tell you this once and only once,” she declared in a rapid staccato, poking her finger in his sternum. Hard. “You threaten me again and I’ll have you arrested so fast it’ll make your head spin. And then I’ll write about it. If there is one person in this world a senatorial candidate should not want to piss off, it’s me.”
Fen reared back from her as she spoke. She sat down on the thigh-high wall between them and spun, thunking her feet on the floor on the other side and going toe to toe with him, getting in his face, eye to eye, nose to nose. Her finger still stabbed his chest. He attempted to back off, to bat her finger away from his breastbone, but the bench behind him made that very difficult.
“I have friends. Lots of friends. Lots of liberal friends who are credible and influential, whom I respect and who respect me. Don’t think I can’t take you down from your side of the aisle without ever dirtying my writings with your name, because all I have to do is let them know you threatened me and your campaign’s done before you start. Do not test me on this, Hilliard. I can make you radioactive across the Democrat landscape with one click of the SEND button.”
He swallowed.
She relaxed and rocked back on her heels, her hands on her hips and an eyebrow cocked. “Now,” she said calmly, “you can leave and I’ll just forget we had this little tête-à-tête. I suggest you spend your time raising funds so you can get through the last few months of the campaign. Oakley’s pounding you into the ground and apparently Boss and Tom and all their rich friends enjoy throwing money at him. I have no idea what you think Congress could or would have me answer for—that pesky first amendment thing, you know—but lemme tell you something: The idea of sitting at the same table with three of the most brilliant men in the country to tell the Senate to shove it up its ass is damn near orgasmic.”
Lusty laughter rang through the courtroom from Knox and her coworkers. Justice merely cocked an eyebrow at Fen’s barely veiled fury.
“Fen,” Knox said, a wide grin on his face and laughter heavily lacing his voice. He stood relaxed, his hands in his pockets. “I’m guessing that means she really doesn’t want the job.”
Fen snarled at her before he left in a storm. Eric and Richard left, chuckling, as did Patrick and the deputy. Knox waited until the courtroom was empty and closed before he spoke to her, his amusement gone in a flash. “Congratulations, Iustitia,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “Now he’s after you on two fronts. I thought I told you to stay out of his way.”
“He doesn’t know he’s after me on the first front yet and, quite frankly, I’m flattered. He came here looking for Justice McKinley and her political clout, not the OKH bride, and he wasn’t going to give up trying to pitch me on the idea just because you sent me out for a brisk walk around the courthouse one morning.”
He said nothing for a long moment as he stared at her, chewing on the inside of his cheek, unable to refute that. “Did you mean that about attaching your name to mine?”
“Yes, I did,” she murmured as she climbed back over the wall and continued to clean up her things. “I don’t think you fully comprehend the strength of your reputation as a trainer, Knox. If you did, you’d understand why people compete over the residencies here in spite of your reputation. Murder and racketeering and all.”
That pulled a snort and a roll of the eyes out of him; she chuckled.
“You believe your own bad press,” she said quietly as she finished throwing the last file in her box. She stepped toward him, the rail between them. She slipped her hand into his belt buckle to draw him close to her until they were chest to breast, nose to nose. She watched him as his ice blue eyes slowly darkened. Her lips barely brushed his as she continued to speak in the husky whisper she knew drove him crazy. “But you won’t believe the good. I don’t understand why you can’t bring yourself to see you the way I see you, the way the pack sees you, the way Vanessa and Eric and half the Ozarks see you.
“After you told me why me, I still couldn’t figure out why you’d go to such extravagant lengths to get me to marry you when all you had to do was ask me. But I’ve been watching you and listening to you. I know why you forced me, why you jumped through all those stupid hoops.
“You didn’t think I’d do it any other way. You didn’t want to hear me say no because it would’ve broken your heart.” Knox sucked in a sharp breath. “People take everything they can from you and then leave, so you think that must make you . . . what, inferior to any other alternative? You truly believe that the FBI and Wall Street think you killed Leah. Why? Because deep down inside, you think you’re bad, therefore, everybody else must think that also and they must be right—and that all the bad things that happen to you, you must somehow deserve. You do things the hard way because you don’t trust that you can be successful the easy way, that anyone will let you be successful the easy way. On the other hand, get you to Whittaker House and you’re all about efficiency. You don’t spend so much time in the Ozarks to help Vanessa; you go there to feel loved and valued because you are.”
“Iustitia,” he breathed, raising his hand to tuck a stray curl behind her ear, then absently play with another curl.
“Everybody knows you executed Parley. The feds know you executed Parley. I don’t know how well you covered your tracks or if you bothered to cover your tracks at all, but you notice you’re not in prison for it and nobody’s crying about it. Nobody believes you killed Leah. They just can’t prove Fen did.”
“They investigated me for fourteen months for that,” he whispered.
“No, they waited fourteen months to tell the press that yo
u were in the clear. They probably used that time as a cover to investigate Fen and came up dry. They use you the same way you use them; if they wanted you that badly, they could leverage Parley against you at any time, but they haven’t. What does that tell you? Now,” she said in a more normal volume since she’d gotten the result she wanted from her micro-seduction. She pulled away from him to fiddle with his tie and brush the palm of her hand down his chest, then back up again, straightening a button here, picking off imaginary lint there, as any wife would do when admiring her husband. “I’m going home. I have a lot of writing to do tonight.”
She brushed past him, which wasn’t difficult because he was too dumbfounded to stop her, then she turned. “And one more thing. Fen Hilliard is a bad man. He’s pure evil. At your core, in your soul, you’re a noble prosecutor and law professor who gets justice for people at all costs and defends naïve, idealistic, mousy little girls in the front row. That’s who you’ve always been and that’s who you’re always going to be. I wouldn’t love you if you weren’t.”
* * * * *
100: MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE
Justice lay in the dark, unable to sleep. She could hear and feel Knox’s slow, deep breathing beside her. Dog’s huge body lay under the covers between them, stretched his full length (paw to tail, probably four feet long), his fur warm and silky against her back with a subwoofer purr that vibrated the bed.
Her side of the bed was the one closest to the window, farthest from the door, and she lay looking out the beautiful beveled harlequin mullions at the fractured moonlight and thought about all the storms she was caught up in.
The storm at work never stopped, but it was the same storm all the time, never ending, never changing. She didn’t imagine it was any different in any other prosecutor’s office anywhere.
Eric spread the big cases out by lottery. She got what she got, like everyone else, even Knox. No trial case was rated by anything other than by case number, so some weeks Justice had a lot of work to do and other weeks, she sailed along. Just like everyone else.
Occasionally Knox would override Eric’s system and assign himself or someone else a particularly sensitive case, depending on any one attorney’s strengths. Knox took Sheriff Raines’s case and dispatched him to prison with great efficiency and much satisfaction.
Eric was actively interviewing and for the first time, she began to see women being interviewed. “Don’t get your hopes too high, Justice,” Eric told her when she remarked upon it. “I don’t plan to hire any women until your name is officially tattooed on his ass. I’m just interviewing to make him happy.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to spend my time kicking some chick’s ass who decides she needs to be Knox Hilliard’s next conquest, that’s why, and the last thing I need is for you to be perpetually pissed off. The minute you go by Hilliard, I’ll hire a woman, but not until.”
She grinned delightedly. “Aw, now I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”
He glared at her for being amused at him. “You’re welcome,” he snapped and stalked off.
Then there was Fen’s threatened publicity about her association with Knox (the one that he knew of, anyway). She had decided to start a back burn.
*
Where I Work
posted by Justice McKinley, 11/22/07, 9:38 p.m. CST
The Chouteau County, Missouri prosecutor’s office. Did you think I’d give up the chance to be trained by the Knox Hilliard when the opportunity presented itself? By the way, we have three residencies open. Everyone entering this courthouse must wear Nomex; a fire-breathing dragon lives on the second floor. [email protected]
*
“Thank you ever so much, Justice,” Eric snarled at her when she walked in Monday after she’d posted that.
“What?” she asked, alarmed, glancing at the clock. “What’d I do? I’m on time. Today.”
“Look at this,” he snapped, slapping his hand on a stack of papers three inches high. “Do you know what these are?”
“No.”
“CVs. Hundreds of them. My email box is full of resumes that I have to look through.”
Oh, was that all?
“Nomex?” Knox had asked as they sat on the basement floor watching TV, his back against the couch and his body wrapped around hers, both of them snuggled up in a blanket. “Nice touch.”
“I thought so.” She took a deep breath. “Knox, I want to be your wife.”
He started. “Uh, you are.”
“Publicly. As in, not just at Whittaker House.”
“No. I didn’t bust your head open about humiliating Fen—” He started to laugh again. “—twice—Priceless!—and I didn’t bust your head open for calling Fen’s bluff about attaching your name to Chouteau County, but don’t push it.”
She sighed.
The third storm, the OKH game, was in play. Justice was fully on board with everyone else, although her body hadn’t seen fit to cooperate with the baby part of that and she thought that was quite all right.
The pack had begun to meet regularly at Sebastian and Eilis’s house on the Plaza for Saturday dinner when the Hilliards were in town. It was the only house with a table big enough for all six of them to spread out and sit comfortably with food, drink, books, laptops, and other references to back up positions they took. (“No, Justice, you can’t cite yourself. That’s dirty pool.”)
They’d talk and debate long into the wee hours of the morning until Giselle and Bryce floated off to Giselle’s old bedroom, Sebastian and Eilis went downstairs to that hedonistic delight that had made Justice gape in awe the first time she saw it (“Knox, I want a Den of Iniquity, too.”), and she and Knox took the bedroom that used to be Sebastian’s until he’d moved downstairs permanently. No one got out of bed until early afternoon and then they ordered in Sunday brunch before going back to their lives Sunday evening.
One Saturday at dinner, during a lull in the conversation, she blithely said, “I got a call yesterday from the dean of the Brigham Young University law school.”
Dead silence when five people looked at her, agape.
“So it seems,” she went on, taking bites of her dinner, as if she hadn’t noticed their reaction, “he reads me. He recognized Knox’s name—not like anybody could forget it—and looked him up in their old records. He wanted to know my more in-depth opinion of the way he teaches, so I told him.” She took a drink and looked at Knox, whose reaction was complete and utter shock, then smiled sweetly. “He wants you to call him at your earliest convenience.”
So now she just had one last loose end to tie up, which had been simmering under the surface for a while. It was this loose end that had her sleepless that night and had for the last few nights and it was time to deal with it.
I. Own. You.
She’s the woman you love and gave everything up for.
She’d been bought and she wanted to know what “everything” was.
Justice turned the situation over in her head, looked at it, took it apart and put it back together again seventeen different ways. She came back to the same answer every time: Her father had never loved her. She had always been a farm hand to him.
Martin McKinley had used her from the moment her mother died, the mother who’d died of overwork: Backbreaking labor, guilt, recriminations, disrespect. No free time, no books, no study, no education. It had just been his dumb luck that he’d married a closet scholar who’d given birth to a not-so-closet scholar who had a grandfather who wanted to channel and exploit that.
Then she’d come back from Giselle’s and he had been intent on changing her purpose in his life. That still made her sick to her stomach.
Knox had paid her father to be able to have her without going to prison. Whether or not her father had sold her as a whore or a brood mare to Knox was irrelevant. Certainly a brood mare was treated better than her father had treated her. A whore, probably not so much. To him, she was a farm implement left out in the rain to rust wh
en not in use, her oil never changed, her tires worn down to the steel belts.
As she lay there in bed feeling the warmth and love of the two most important men in her life (albeit one of them neutered), she hatched her plan. It needed groundwork laid, so she’d begin that tomorrow. She knew that however long it took her to do that, she’d work herself up into a good enough mad for her to be able to carry it out to its end.
Just then, Knox shifted and rolled over, his hand landing in her hair. She didn’t think he’d awakened, but he caressed her curls anyway. Didn’t matter where he was or even if he was lucid, he found her hair. Always.
She turned over then and saw that he was on his back, still sound asleep, a luxury he could indulge himself in more and more. His face looked so young, so different without that hardness she’d come to appreciate for its own cold beauty. She rousted Dog out of his pocket between them and laid herself out along Knox’s side, her leg over his, her breast to his chest, her head on his shoulder, her arm across his body. She softly kissed his cheek, his ear, his jaw.
Justice felt his smile and she laid her hand alongside his scruffy face. She coaxed him to turn his head so she could kiss him because she loved kissing Knox.
* * * * *
101: LIGHT OF MY LIFE, FIRE OF MY LOINS
“Hey, Justice, wanna go get some lunch?”
“No thanks,” Justice returned absently as she wrote, trying to get the exact wording that would make her plan so tight it’d take an appeal to the Supreme Court to break it, and not even then. Maybe she’d ask Patrick for help. He was especially good at this stuff and she’d never cared a whit about contract law.
“Aw, c’mon, Justice. Just across the street.”
“Deputy, I’m busy,” she said, so absorbed in her task she didn’t bother to try to remember the man’s name.