The Proviso

by Moriah Jovan

  A baby made in love with a brilliant woman, well educated, related by blood to two equally brilliant men he respected and loved as brothers. Four, really, if he included Morgan Ashworth, one of the country’s foremost economists, and Étienne LaMontagne, genius, scientist, inventor. With few exceptions, her entire tribe fell into the pattern of excellence and courage bred by the Dunham sisters and manifested in Knox, Taight, LaMontagne, and Ashworth. She came from good stock.

  Though he’d dismissed the possibility of her infidelity nearly immediately and most particularly any infidelity with Knox, he’d been angry that Giselle was pregnant at all. Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps, just by wanting a child so badly, she had magically conjured one up. He knew that couldn’t be so and felt humiliation wash over him.

  Giselle had every right to accuse him of all those things, but she was smart and had given him an out. Not only had he not taken it, he’d slapped her in the face with both what she’d told him not to say and compared her unfavorably to Michelle in every other way.

  He’d called her a slut.

  Again.

  No excuse. The pain of having been utterly betrayed was clearly written in her expressive face and hit him in his gut. He knew that this might be unrecoverable and he’d lose the wife he adored and his fifth child.

  With no one to blame but himself this time.

  He didn’t need his swimmers counted. What he needed was time to figure out how to make her understand that he hadn’t meant a word of it, that he had lashed out because of pain he’d thought he’d buried deeply enough and guilt he’d thought he’d left far behind.

  The sun was setting and he gulped. He’d be alone in his house when dark fell and he’d go to bed alone. He’d wake up alone tomorrow morning. He’d come home from work tomorrow evening to an empty house. With one intentionally devastating remark, his home had turned back into a house.

  Giselle knew. She always made sure to get home before he did, even if that meant she had to drag her entire desk home from work, to be there for him because he hated the dark silence so much. In all that time, she’d spent one night away from home, the night she had taken Eilis to Ford then stayed with her, and it had nearly killed him then.

  He knew where she’d go, where she always went when she was in trouble. She had a home to go back to—hell, any one of twenty-plus homes, really—and with that one comment that had hurt her so deeply, he’d sent her straight back to the two men who loved her and had always, without fail, picked her up and brushed her off.

  He dropped his head in his hands, wracked with guilt, tortured by the irony and the depth of his hypocrisy.

  Sebastian Taight and Knox Hilliard would clean up the mess Bryce had made with his woman.

  * * * * *

  105: WHAT NOT TO EXPECT

  Giselle’s anger sustained her and she sustained it so that she didn’t completely fall off the edge of the cliff. How dare he! He knew very good and well that this child was his; she’d known the second he’d accepted that fact in his heart. Still he’d called her out—and with something worse than she could have ever imagined.

  She hadn’t had any of what she thought were the usual signs of pregnancy. Because she had believed it to be an impossibility, she had put it away forever.

  She’d not suspected that, beyond lack of self-control, there was a reason that she couldn’t stand the smell of cooking beef and had been irresistibly drawn to chewy pumpernickel bagels with vegetable cream cheese.

  She’d thought that her more-easy-than-normal tears were due to some softening of her personality, safe in Bryce’s love—emotional growth, perhaps.

  She hadn’t paid attention to the timing of her periods since she’d begun having the damned things because . . . why? and so she hadn’t noticed. Any month without a period was a good month, in her estimation.

  She always gagged up her morning vitamins on an empty stomach.

  And of course she was tired all the time. Throughout the last year, she’d grown to love the courtroom the way she’d loved Decadence. She’d put in long hours preparing and trying cases. She spent equally long hours making love to, having sex with, and fucking Bryce, her appetite for him more insatiable now than ever.

  Until Eilis and Justice had handed her a pregnancy test and ordered her to use it, the possibility had never occurred to her. Giselle had rolled her eyes and done it just to prove they didn’t have a good grasp of the odds. She didn’t relish hearing the smug “We told you so,” but once they finished teasing her, she would be able to count on their guidance. What Giselle knew about pregnancy wouldn’t fill a thimble.

  “Uh, Giz, you’ve been here three days without saying a word. Wanna share?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she muttered, and she could see the confusion on Sebastian’s face.

  “I thought you said he was fixed,” he said slowly.

  “That’s what he thought, too, so you can imagine what conclusion he jumped to when I told him.”

  Sebastian’s eyes widened. “Did he think . . . ?”

  “He didn’t name names, but in his mind, there would be only one other possibility.”

  “Oh,” he breathed. “Knox will be livid.”

  “Don’t you dare tell him that,” Giselle snarled. “I shouldn’t even be talking about it to you—” She choked suddenly, then swallowed.

  “Giz, I’m sorry. But . . . aren’t you happy you get a baby now?”

  “He doesn’t want any more children at all. How can I be happy about being pregnant with a child he absolutely does not want? A child he doesn’t want to believe is his?” She took a deep breath. “You know, I could deal with a broken heart on my own, but with a baby to raise . . . ?”

  Sebastian gathered her up in his arms and stroked her hair. She started to cry at his unexpected and uncharacteristic softness. “Give him a chance, Giselle,” he murmured. Giselle. Not Giz. No suck it up, princess. She cried harder. “Knox thinks he’s got some serious PTSD from his fire and probably from Michelle, too. That’s not something you get over just because you wake up one day and decide to leave everything you believe behind.”

  Giselle said nothing for a moment, then, “He has nightmares about his fire, but he refuses to talk about it.”

  “Knox says his father beat him over the head with the Rule Book. He thinks that might be at the root of it all.”

  She blinked and suddenly, it all fell into place. The “Rule Book,” their Grandpa Dunham’s disparaging moniker for a book he hated. He’d preached against it to the tribe, and had made sure every one of his children and grandchildren knew it wasn’t what the Lord nor the church was really about.

  “I should’ve known,” Giselle murmured, heartbroken on another level because that had never occurred to her. It wouldn’t have; the Rule Book wasn’t part of her family’s paradigm. “He thinks the fire, his children dying, was the Lord punishing him for not being perfect.”

  Sebastian wiped his hands down his face with a sigh. “He probably doesn’t even know how to begin sorting it all out. I wish my dad were here; he’d know what to do, what to say.”

  She sniffled.

  “I know you’re hurt, Giz, but he’s going to need you to help him through this.”

  “But how? What do I do? He won’t let me!”

  “Wait him out. He knows where to find you and he’ll show up. The man adores you. Don’t throw that away unless or until you determine he’s never going to work it out.”

  So she waited for Bryce to show up at her office or at Sebastian’s house and apologize. And she waited. And waited—

  —until by the time he did show up a week later, she was livid. And in court.

  Bryce walked in and sat in the back. She happened to see him out of the corner of her eye when she stood to give her closing argument. Her heart raced when she saw him, her libido went into overdrive, and she bit her lip. She had never given a better closing argument. She could feel her soul fill with passion, infusing her voice with something even she
had never heard before.

  What it was, where it had come from, how to do it again, she didn’t have a clue.

  Once court had adjourned, she waited until the room cleared, which proved difficult because her boss waylaid Bryce. He finally interrupted Hale’s cheerful ramblings. “Geoff, listen, I really need to talk to Giselle. Catch you later.”

  Bryce approached her with some hesitance. “You won your case,” he murmured.

  “How do you know?” she snapped, feeling the tears already start, too hurt and hormonal at the moment to care about his issues.

  “That was probably one of the most brilliant closings I’ve ever heard. I— I actually didn’t know you had such a way with words. It was almost—poetic.” She swallowed to try to stem the tide of tears, but they began to overflow anyway.

  “I read eighteenth century literature for fun. I must have absorbed some of it,” she muttered. He moved toward her, but she looked away.

  “I’m sorry, Giselle.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this here.”

  He inclined his head, looking at her things spread out all over the table and gestured toward them. “I’ll help you clean up,” he murmured. “Then would you come with me? Please? I need to show you something.”

  Neither spoke as they worked to collect her papers and files, then he carried her box to their SUV. They were out of the parking garage and had turned east on Truman Road before he broke the lengthening silence between them.

  “When you told me you were pregnant, all my anger with Michelle came back and—” He stopped, wiped his hand down his face.

  Her teeth ground. “And you compared me to that cunt.”

  “I’m sorry, Giselle. You’re not in any way like her.”

  “Oh, I see. Michelle was giving other people what you wanted, so that left you high and dry, but oh, so righteous and pure in your indignation. I give you what you want and I like it, so that makes me more sinful than you think you are because I don’t have any shame for what we did, what we do.”

  “No!” She started at the intensity of his tone. “I do not think that. I envy the spiritual freedom you have, that your family has, but that doesn’t make you sinful.”

  Giselle threw up a hand. “Dammit, Bryce, make up your mind. Either it is or it isn’t. What we do together can’t be sinful for you and not sinful for me at the same time. I swear, I don’t know how you can be so fucking brilliant in a courtroom but so fucking dense when it comes to your idea of morality or lack thereof. You’re a forty-two-year-old trial attorney. Did it not, at some point, occur to you that The Miracle of Forgiveness was Victorian bullshit?”

  He flinched.

  “That’s not what the church is about, Bryce. It’s not what the Lord’s about. There are two rules,” she snapped, reaching across the car to put two fingers in front of his face. “Love the Lord. Love your neighbor. That’s it.”

  He pushed her hand away. “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is that simple and I guarantee you that if you went to our bishop and asked him that, he’d tell you the same thing. That’s one of the very few things he and I agree on.” Her mouth tightened, her tears having dried with her anger. “My grandfather would have knocked your father’s head off for teaching you out of that book and he was higher up on the church food chain than your dad was.”

  He cast her a quick, startled glance.

  “And now we have a child to think about because your vasectomy failed,” she said low. “I’m sure you just couldn’t resist going to the doctor to verify that.”

  He shook his head as if in a daze. “I don’t have to,” he said. “You’re the most honorable person I know. I know the baby’s mine because I know you.”

  That surprised her, but it didn’t let him off the hook. “Ten days,” she muttered. “You let me go ten days without a word.”

  “Giselle,” he said. She could hear the pleading, the uncertainty, in his voice. “I needed time to get used to the idea and I didn’t know how to tell you that I’m really not happy about this.”

  “Oh, believe me, you made your opinion perfectly clear. How can I live with you knowing that? How can I bring a baby into the house knowing you resent it?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. All I know is I love you and I’ll do whatever I have to do to make you happy. Resent isn’t the right word. Fear is the right word. You don’t know what it’s like to watch your daughter burn to death right in front of you. You don’t know what it’s like to carry three of your children through fire, being on fire, knowing they’re on fire. You don’t know what it’s like to be told those three children died anyway and nowhere in that mess did the Lord show up to help you. You don’t know what it’s like to lie in a bed for a year where everyone around you is dedicated to saving your life, except for you, and you’re wishing—no, hoping—to die, too.”

  Giselle’s anger vanished. There just wasn’t much she could say to that. She looked out the window as they drove for quite a long while, through her old neighborhood, into Independence, a route she knew so well she could close her eyes and name every cross street in the three-and-a-half-mile stretch from I-70 to I-435. They were a mile from their destination before she understood his intention. She gasped.

  He looked at her sharply. “I’m sorry I’ve never shared this with you, Giselle. I— I didn’t want to mix my old life with my new one.”

  “I wanted to ask you at Christmas,” she said softly, “because you were so . . . in pain, but I didn’t know how.”

  “I wouldn’t have brought you here then,” he returned, just as softly. “That’s the hardest time of the year for me, although not nearly as hard now with you and the pack, the tribe.”

  He didn’t speak again until they stood at the massive headstone that bore the names and birth dates of his four children—and one death date, July 14, 2001.Almost a dozen bouquets of daisies in varying stages of decay lay strewn on the ground in front of the stone.

  “I loved my children,” he said. “I adored them utterly and completely and they died,” he said, clearing his throat and attempting to be matter-of-fact, “in the most horrifying way imaginable. I didn’t even get to bury them and say goodbye because I was in my coma and I had no one to take care of business for me. The irony is that I know Knox would’ve taken care of me if I hadn’t been such an asshole to him, too.” He paused. “They aren’t here. I put this stone here because I needed some way to hold onto them.”

  Giselle bowed her head then, her soul absorbing his pain and grief like a sponge, internalizing it, making it hers. She reached for and found his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and squeezed just a bit. He squeezed back.

  “I come here often. I’ve been here every day since you told me you were pregnant, wondering what to do, how I’m going to relive the joy and pain that children bring. I know that as soon as our baby’s born, I’ll fall in love again, but—”

  “You think the Lord’s going to punish you and take him away from you.”

  He said nothing for a moment, then whispered, “Yes.”

  She looked up at him then to find him watching her. His cheeks glistened with moisture. “Please stick with me, Giselle,” he whispered. “I love you and I’m a selfish bastard, I know, but I need you. I needed you from the first moment I saw you.”

  Giselle nodded. How could she do otherwise? She loved him and she’d promised.

  “Why did you think you had to shoulder this alone?” she whispered. “At the beginning of us, you asked me what I wanted from you and I asked you to let me help you carry it. You promised.”

  “Giselle, you assume the pain of everyone you love, everyone you protect. I watch you do it every day. You did it with Eilis and it devastated you. You did it with Justice and you worried for weeks—hell, years. You do it with the tribe. You do it with the burn victims we tend to, with random people who just need a helping hand. I see what happens to you when we come home at night. You—” He wiped his hand down his face.
“You feel it in your soul and then you ache. Did you think I’d lay mine on you, too? I promised you that before I saw what you do and there was no way I was going to add to that.”

  She swallowed. “Bryce, of all the people in the world who might need my help, you are the only one who deserves it. You’re the only one I’ve promised it to, the only one who’s entitled to it. I’d ignore the whole world if you’d let me help you with your pain.” She paused, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  He started. “For what?”

  “For—” She huffed, sniffled. “I don’t know. I’m sorry I made you think everyone else’s pain meant more to me than yours. I’m sorry I made you think you were less deserving.”

  His jaw dropped. “Giselle! You didn’t. I swear, you didn’t. I just— I’ve been carrying it alone so long I didn’t know how to offload some of it.”

  “But I want to do something to help you and you won’t let me.”

  “You don’t have to do anything. Your presence, your love, has helped more than anything I could’ve ever imagined. Your family— Giselle, I don’t know how I survived all these years alone without you, without the pack. Hell, without the whole tribe. I have a real family now. I belong somewhere that I’m not a black sheep. You’ve given me that.” He pulled his hand out of hers then to pull something out of his suit coat pocket: A long, narrow red velvet box. She bit her lip. “I had this made for you. This was why it took me so long to come to you.”

  Giselle took it slowly, carefully. She opened it and her brow wrinkled in confusion that quickly blossomed into awe when she picked it up and studied it.

  A platinum charm bracelet embellished with an emerald at the clasp, it had only two charms: The keys from Rape of a Virgin, one an exact replica of the phallus and one an exact replica of the baby pacifier. An oversized platinum heart hung from the clasp.