by Moriah Jovan
Justice had to laugh at that, considering her earlier realization. “At least I’m not the only one with the in-laws from hell and a reason to avoid them.”
“Come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with a woman’s parents. I always ended up dealing with a woman’s teenage, early-twenties children, who weren’t exactly thrilled with me.”
Justice’s lip curled and he snickered at her.
“They didn’t like knowing cougar was gettin’ her groove back, much less how and with whom.”
“Apparently, you got over your vicarious Oedipal complex without counseling.”
“Ouch. Did you come up with that yourself?”
“I took psychology like everyone else. Even an econ major like me could figure that out.”
“Okay, okay. Got it.”
“This has been pointed out to you before, I hope?”
“Giselle says it was a power thing,” he replied with alacrity. “So, truce?”
“As long as you remember who’s holding whose leash, Humbert.”
His warm chuckles filled the car. “Yes, Lolita, my sin, my soul.”
They drove back to the farm, Knox’s fingers laced through hers, which made her smile. She looked out the window as they sped along, silent, watching the familiar-but-not landscape go by. When they drove back into the bumpy yard, the new car was gone, surprisesurprise, but that was okay. She’d get somebody out here soon enough to repossess it; she may not be able to throw him in jail, but she could make his life miserable.
“He went to the bar in town,” she said as they got out and entered the house. “He won’t be back for hours.”
She tucked her small hand in his big one and led him up the stairs to her old bedroom, which was completely untouched except for a layer of dust. Pink, delicate flowered wallpaper, frilly pink curtains. Child-sized desk and chair. Round table and rickety kitchen chair that were little bigger than the desk. Tiny closet that could barely fit the three 1983 Sunday school dresses she hadn’t bothered to take with her. Maybe she’d give them to Giselle for burning. Chipboard dresser propped and repaired various ways so it wouldn’t fall down. She and Knox could barely fit into the room together.
An ancient white wrought iron full-size bed that was still neatly made from the day she’d left for work and had unexpectedly had to get married was on the only wall it could be on.
“That,” she said, pointing to the table, “is where I found my voice and made my name. It’s also where I sat and looked at the wall and fantasized about a law professor I once had.”
She felt Knox start, then relax behind her, his hand plowing through her hair. “Oh?”
“Yes,” she said briskly as she took her gun out of her waistband and laid it on the desk. Then she grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled it over her head. She heard his quick intake of breath as she threw it in the corner. She turned and sat on the bed, lifting her feet one at a time for him to pull off her boots. He obliged and tossed them over his shoulder where they landed out in the hallway.
“I fantasized about him coming to my room in the middle of the night. Sometimes he’d sneak in the front door or the back door and magically miss all the stairs that squeaked. Sometimes he’d climb in my window. But he always found me in bed and would slip in with me.”
Justice pulled her jeans down and she slid a look between her legs at Knox to see that he’d kicked off his moccasins and taken off his own sweater. Gun on the dresser. He unbuttoned his fly, and she tried not to smile.
“And it was a secret affair, you see, because, while he had to have me, he was protecting me and my good name. My father couldn’t know because this man had a baaaad reputation, but I knew better.” Knox chuckled.
Justice shimmied out of the barely-there lingerie Knox did appreciate oh, so much, and went to the bed, turning it down. She gasped a teensy gasp when she felt Knox’s naked body against her naked back, his arousal hard against her, and his mouth on her neck and shoulders, one big hand splayed out over her belly to hold her to him and one cupping her breast. But she pulled away from him and climbed into the bed, slipped down under the covers, and pretended to be asleep.
“And I would wake up,” she whispered, “with him beside me, kissing me awake. He would say, ‘I love you, Justice’ over and over again while he kissed me.”
Justice smiled when the bed depressed and creaked under his weight and the covers floated down over both of them. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tight, their naked bodies entwining. “I love you, Iustitia.” He kissed her softly, slowly, deeply until her eyes fluttered open. “I love you, Iustitia.”
“I love you, Knox.”
“Okay, and then what?”
She snickered. “And then what I don’t know. He took over from there.”
Knox laughed outright, then stilled. She watched him as he studied her reverently. Finally, he murmured, “Miss McKinley, you haven’t been a very good student this semester.”
“I’m so sorry, Professor Hilliard,” Justice breathed. “What can I do to make it up?”
“Come to my office for a conference after class. I may be able to find a way for you to earn some extra credit.”
* * * * *
102: HOLLY GOLIGHTLY
“Iustitia.”
Who was this person attempting to roust her out of the cozy warm depths of sleep?
“Iustitia.”
“Goway,” she mumbled into her pillow.
“Iustitia.”
“What?”
“Santa brought you a present.”
“What time is it?”
“Noon.”
“Knox,” she groaned, turning over, presenting her back to him. “I get to sleep in today without my boss yelling at me. Just because you don’t like to sleep doesn’t mean I don’t like to.”
“Iustitia Jane Hilliard, you get out of that bed right now and come see what Santa brought you. How come you’re not bounding out of bed and all happy? It’s Christmas morning.”
She sighed and opened her eyes to look at the wall. “Knox, I told you. Holidays mean nothing to me. I don’t care; I never cared after my mother died. And besides which, you know how I feel about that whole Jesus thing.”
Knox grunted and the bed shifted, then she screamed when cold air hit her like a blast the instant Knox ripped the covers off of her. He picked her up and grinned smugly when she glared at him. “You need an attitude adjustment.”
“Fine!” she snapped and Knox laughed. “Okay, okay. Put me down and I’ll throw on some clothes so I don’t freeze my ass off.”
He did, and trotted off to the basement.
Justice sighed and looked outside. It was dark, for noon. The snow fell thick and fast, which was unusual. It very rarely snowed before January and almost never on Christmas.
Well, whatever fetish Knox had about Christmas, Giselle and Sebastian shared it. Her companions in Christmas Bad Attitude were Bryce and Eilis. That didn’t surprise her much.
On Thanksgiving, they’d gathered at the Plaza house to have dinner, along with Knox’s aunts Lilly and Dianne, who had started to become regular fixtures at their get-togethers since Knox wasn’t welcome with the tribe and Justice had to remain a secret. She wasn’t sure how much the aunts knew about Fen, but Knox had assured her that they dutifully swallowed whatever lie the pack told them and kept their own counsel. “The individual families have their own Thanksgiving dinners, then the tribe has a dozen parties all weekend. Giselle and Bryce and Sebastian and Eilis will show up at one or two of those. Christmas is pretty much the same way.”
Justice, Eilis, Sebastian, and Lilly cooked; everyone else cleaned up. She felt that was a fair trade. Sebastian made mulled wine for himself, Eilis, and Justice, and mulled cider for everyone else. They all went up to the third floor sitting room he’d created solely to watch the Plaza lighting ceremony on Thanksgiving night.
No one had noticed her lack of delight except Bryce, who sat beside her and
seemed very, very far away, then said, “We seem to be the odd ones out.” It hadn’t been long until Eilis joined them.
“Look at them,” Justice said, pointing to Giselle, Sebastian, and Knox, who were practically bouncing off the walls. The aunts weren’t much better behaved. “You’d think, in forty years, none of them had ever had a Christmas.”
“They,” Bryce said softly, “still have their family. I can’t get through Christmas without thinking about my kids.”
Justice and Eilis nodded. “I like to dress my house,” Eilis admitted. “Sebastian made that special for me, but otherwise . . . ”
Justice harrumphed.
So Justice pulled on a pair of Knox’s gray boxers and buttoned up one of his Oxford shirts, then rolled up the sleeves. She found a pair of his socks and pulled them up to her knees, but they were big and they just slid down and gathered at her ankles.
She sighed, dragged herself into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, dragged herself down the hall and then opened the basement door. Christmas music floated up the stairs, being the golden pipes of Nat King Cole. It was dark down there, with an odd glow that didn’t come from the TV. Warily, she walked down the stairs and as the room came into sight, she drew in a breath.
It was a Christmas wonderland and the glow was from the incredible number of Christmas lights on a Christmas tree as tall as the ceiling, as well as from a fire in the fireplace that Knox had never used.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put her hand on her mouth, looking at everything. There was a porcelain Victorian village in fake snow and surrounded by a tiny picket fence. There was a fake-snow bank that had the snowman and the Santa and Rudolph from the only thing she liked about Christmas, which was the Rankin and Bass TV special. There, around the tree, she could now see two tall piles of presents wrapped gaily and waiting for . . . who?
“Knox?” she whispered. “Where are you?”
She squealed when he caught her up in his arms, tackling her from the side and spinning her around while the lights came up a bit, enough to see but not enough to dim the mood.
Her whole family was there, watching her, waiting for her reaction to what they had created for her overnight. Her family, the one she’d come back to when she’d come back to Knox. In St. Louis, all the time she had wrestled with what to do next, it had never occurred to her that she might get more than Knox if she returned. All she’d wanted was the man she was in love with and the hope that he might possibly someday come to love her, and the opportunity to become courageous and, also maybe, powerful.
What she got was a group of people to love, who loved her and doted on her. These six other people besides Knox, these people who made up her family were kind and generous, as lavish with their affection as Knox was. “Merry Christmas, Iustitia,” Knox whispered and kissed her the way she loved most. Then he planted himself on the couch and plopped her down on the floor between his legs.
And then another surprise. Eilis, who had participated in this scheme and had been up all night decorating with the rest, was pulled down on the floor next to her, Sebastian on the couch next to Knox, surrounding her. Giselle sat on the floor by the bookcases between Lilly and Dianne, all laughing and chatting, while Bryce enjoyed every minute of being the elf.
And the presents flowed. She and Eilis were plied with gifts, mostly duplicates, from the silly (Silly Putty, Slinky, Etch A Sketch, crayons and coloring books) to the fun (handheld video games, jigsaw puzzles, and whole sets of Nancy Drew and Laura Ingalls Wilder) to the sensual (lotions and oils for Eilis that Sebastian had selected, new lingerie for Justice that Knox had picked out: “Yeah, I’m tired of not having any shirts or shorts”), but absolutely nothing cerebral (“Everybody here thinks for a living”).
“The point of all this,” said Bryce, who still desperately missed shopping for his children, who had had the idea, and who had done most of the shopping, “was to give you the Christmases you should have had as children. You’re lucky you didn’t get pink Barbie bicycles with training wheels.”
Justice and Eilis were both laughing-crying and hugging each other by the time the presents were finished, especially Eilis because she’d known about all this except for the part that she would be getting the same treatment Justice got. Knox had left a few minutes before Justice opened her last present, and then he came back to sit down beside her on the floor.
“Iustitia,” he breathed as he snuggled close, “this is from me.” He handed her two pale blue boxes, stacked and tied together with a white bow, Tiffany & Co. stamped on the lids.
Justice caught her breath and untied the bow slowly, not believing that a farm girl like her could have ever won the love of a man like Knox or that such a man would ever give her jewelry from Tiffany.
The smaller box held a pair of earrings, diamond and platinum flowers from which pearls dropped, and then her eyes welled with tears and she sniffled. The second box held a matching platinum necklace, studded with diamonds and pearls every quarter inch, all the way around.
She began to sob in earnest and reached for Knox so he could hold her and she cried into his shoulder. He shifted so that she was in his lap, and she cried for what seemed hours until she hiccuped and then stilled. The rest of the family had deserted the basement, but she could hear them upstairs in the kitchen and she could smell the food.
“Thank you, Knox,” she whispered.
“I would give you the world if I could, Iustitia,” he murmured, his chest vibrating deep with his words.
“I don’t have anything for you.”
“You came back to me and you stayed with me. You believe in me and you love me. That’s all I need.”
“But—”
He silenced her with fingertips pressed softly against her lips. “Trust me when I tell you I can never repay you for what you’ve done for me.”
* * * * *
103: BUSTED
JANUARY 2008
Justice drove to work in ten inches of fresh snow and was glad for the combination of front wheel drive and manual transmission. But she had to go back into the house and change into thick socks and hiking boots, then throw her dress shoes in her briefcase.
So she was late. And seriously annoyed. She walked into the courthouse to hear—
“MCKINLEY!”
—bellowed all the way from upstairs. Only new county employees bothered to make note of the time. Everybody else went about their business although occasionally someone thought about it enough to snicker.
He bellowed her name again when she was three-quarters of the way up the stairs, which climb seemed remarkably difficult for some reason, and her mouth tightened because she was married to the man and couldn’t say boo about it.
She was irate by the time she walked into the office only to see Knox waiting for her, a hand on his hip, a glare on his face.
“What?!” she demanded.
“You’re late.”
“I’m always late, Hilliard. Fire me.” The amused silence amongst her colleagues was palpable.
Knox looked at her strangely. “Get in my office. NOW!”
She went and he followed, slamming the door behind him. “What’s up your ass?” he grumbled, brushing behind her toward his desk.
“I could ask the same of you,” she shot back. “I’m tired of you hollering my name as soon as I walk in the door—nobody cares and it’s a waste of breath—and furthermore, it hasn’t been my name for the last eight months.”
That set him back on his heels.
“That’s right,” she continued, warming up to the subject. “I’m tired of sneaking around, feeling like I’m just fucking my boss.”
“You are fucking your boss.”
“Yeah, except there’s that little matter of the marriage certificate nobody knows about.”
“Nobody knows you’re fucking your boss, either. No harm, no foul.”
Justice stared at him, her mind completely fuzzed. “Are you blind, deaf, and dumb?” she barked. His mout
h dropped open and she went on. “Almost every last person in this courthouse, including the sheriff’s department, knows we’re sleeping together, not to mention every trooper from St. Joe to Grain Valley and the entire KC North Patrol, which means it’s probably filtered its way to the Clay and Jackson County patrols. And do you know how they found out? Because the Chouteau County prosecutor put an APB out on his redheaded assistant prosecutor at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning starting from a location suspiciously close to his house. I knew the minute Hadley opened his mouth you’d blown it wide open.”
“Oh, shit.” He turned and wiped his hand down his face.
“I will say,” she added wryly, “everyone’s very grateful to me for keeping you happy, so they’re not about to make an issue of it. But who knows what kind of damage it’s done to my credibility as a prosecutor? It might make you look like the Supreme God of Studliness and Instant Nice Guy, but it just makes me look like I’m not competent enough to get or keep this job without fucking you for it.”
He gulped. “Iustitia, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”
“Then you need to pay more attention to what’s going on around you. Whatever you hoped to gain by keeping our marriage a secret is long gone and now I’m tired of fucking my boss.” She could see his distress, but she didn’t care. “You make this right by me by the end of today or I’ll blog it tonight and I’ll rip your cover as hamlet to shreds. No, better! I’ll call a pack meeting and invite Fen. Maybe both.”
His eyes widened and he sucked in a breath.
She went to the door and opened it wide. She said loudly enough so everyone in the courthouse could hear, “And another thing! Until I have a ring on my finger and a nameplate that says Justice Hilliard, you can forget about getting laid!” Then she left, slamming the door behind her. Gales of laughter rang out all over the building.
She stalked to her desk and stewed about that for most of the morning, getting angrier and angrier as she worked. The loud and shameless mirth around the courthouse didn’t help, though it did serve her purpose. More deputies, troopers, KC cops, and attorneys than usual strolled in and out all morning, every one of them in an overly jovial mood. Dirk sauntered in to talk to Eric, but cast Justice a smirk that made her want to slap it right off his face.