The Proviso (98 page)

“I wouldn’t have hired you if I thought you were
stupid.”

“You hired me because I saw you shoot a man in the
head—and that was a bogus reason anyway. My intellect or lack of it
had nothing to do with it.”

He pursed his lips and nodded. “Well, that’s
true.”

And that hurt. More than anything he’d ever said to
her. “Oh, go away,” she muttered.

“What did you say to me?”

There was that hardness, that chilling tone in his
voice, but because she didn’t fall for that anymore, she glared up
at him and spoke through her gritted teeth and clenched jaw. “I.
Said. Go. Away.”

His jaw worked in silence, his eyes a glittering sky
blue. Justice simply watched as he braced his hands on the arms of
her chair and kissed her. Hard.

Without a thought, Justice returned it, as much to
shove his attitude back in his face as to suck every smidgen of
pleasure out of his kiss. He hadn’t kissed her since she’d come
back—and oh, how she missed feeling his lips on hers, his tongue in
her mouth.

“You’re asking for it,” Knox muttered when he jerked
away from her suddenly.

“Then why don’t you give it to me?” Justice shot
back.

“Is that an invitation?” he growled.

“What do you think?” she snapped.

They stared at one another for what seemed like
hours, neither breaking eye contact. Justice felt no insecurity, no
embarrassment; she just wanted to have an excuse to look at that
beautiful face.

Finally, Knox raised a hand to run his fingers
through her hair. “You have a lot of guts, Iustitia Hilliard,” he
murmured. “I like that.”

Noises sounded in the hallway and he backed away.
Cleared his throat. “Lunch is almost over and you’ve got work to
do.” She watched him as he turned and sauntered back to his office.
She took a deep breath and began to smile. Well. She supposed she
knew what she’d be doing all night tonight, and it thrilled her
beyond reason.

Fifteen minutes later she was buried in paperwork.
Conversation swirled around her and she easily pulled out comments
and questions from the general hubbub that were aimed at her.
Justice attempted to keep herself focused on work, which was really
a losing battle. Thinking about being naked with Knox in bed,
making lo—

“Good God!”

The gasp was somehow able to pierce the thick
conversation, and the entire population of the office stared at
Richard, whose face had lightened a few shades of brown. He held a
manila envelope in his hands and looked down in the gaping
space.

“What’s wrong, Connelly?” Patrick asked on a forced
laugh in order to maintain some sense of joviality in the face of
their coworker’s astonishment. They all wondered how bad the news
was. “You look like that thing’s going to take a hunk out of your
nose.”

He looked up, then. “Okay, who did this?” he asked
as he pulled out a thick stack of worn one-hundred-dollar bills and
looked around.

One of the residents snorted. “Yeah, like we’d cut
you in if we didn’t have to.” Justice rolled her eyes. Hicks caught
her look, then grinned and winked at her. She returned his grin and
chuckled to herself.

Richard looked around and realized no one was lying.
They all got along well, but their altruism only extended to the
sharing of office supplies and trading food. They communicated by
yelling and cussing at each other. No one remembered birthdays, no
one asked after another’s family, and no one bought someone else
lunch.

Except Justice, who had done all three for Richard.
It was to her he turned.

“Justice?”

And Justice could see the tears of gratitude that
shimmered in his eyes and threatened to fall. Now he knew. His
initial reaction had been habit and he only needed her validation
that taking it was not dishonorable. She shrugged.

He put the money carefully back in the envelope and
gulped. “How much?” asked Hicks.

“Twelve thousand dollars,” he whispered, because his
voice was creaky with tears.

Justice shook her head. She looked up through her
eyelashes at Knox, who was engaged in deep conversation with a
detective, oblivious to what was going on around him. She smiled to
herself and then sucked in a soft breath when he slid her a glance
and a sly smile.

* * * * *

90:
OCCAM’S RAZOR

He was nowhere to be found when she got home and she
screeched in utter frustration. She didn’t want to crack her laptop
open. She didn’t want to cook. She didn’t even want to go out to
the barn to see how much progress Sebastian had made on his
painting—he was probably still mad at her anyway, since he hadn’t
seen fit to speak to her yet.

So she went downstairs and flopped on the couch,
flipping through channels. Nothing. Naturally, when she wanted to
watch TV, there was nothing on in two hundred and fifty
channels.

What she wanted was for Knox to come home and take
her to bed. Unless and until that happened, she was going to be
restless.

She got up and walked around the library again,
looking more closely at the spines. In the section that was
dedicated to her favorite subject, the Constitution, there was a
box she’d missed before. A battered shoe box was buried in the
midst of the mess of books and booklets, pamphlets and stray
papers.

Justice pulled it out, opened it, and nearly dropped
it in shock. There were copies of the
National Review
that
she had written for, copies of the two issues of the
UMKC Law
Review
that contained her articles, and printouts from her blog
posts. Each magazine was opened back to the articles with her
byline. Each law journal article was marked with stickies. They
were all dog-eared.

Every word she’d published—print and online—was
here, yellow highlighted, written on, circled, redlined, beat to
death. The only magazine issues in the box were the ones with her
articles; there were no others.

Her hand to her mouth, she half cried-half laughed.
She took the box to the couch and sank to the floor, her back to
it. She began to sift through them to see what he’d written in his
distinctive hand: elegantly stylized block letters, the way an
architect would write.

Comments were sparse and seemed to run fifty-fifty
on whether he agreed or not, whether he found a logical fallacy or
not, whether he thought something was irrelevant or could have been
emphasized more.

Then she flipped through the printouts of her blog
posts and comments, also marked. What most interested her, however,
were the printouts of hamlet’s comments. On seeing his moniker, she
felt that pain behind her sternum again.

*

JMcKinley writes:

hamlet, name that quote: In the United States
there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is
successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a
successful person is a sinner.

*

Underneath that printout he’d written the answer to
the question: Umberto Eco.

Justice sucked in a long, shocked breath, held it.
Then she giggled and threw her head back to look at the ceiling to
squeal, kicking her legs up in the air, feeling her face flush.
Grinning, she looked for and found a comment she’d made very early
in her official blogging career:
You remind me of a professor I
had my first week in law school
.

He’d highlighted that comment in yellow and drawn a
smiley face.

Was this why her?

Suddenly the couch behind her shifted and she
gasped, looking up to see Knox lifting one leg over her head so
that he could sit on the couch with her between his knees.

She didn’t know what to say to him, so she didn’t
say anything. He leaned forward against her, wrapping his arms
around her to read over her shoulder. Her insides went all
tingly.

“I wondered how long it’d take you to find that,” he
murmured.

Justice’s eyes welled with tears that tracked down
her cheeks and splattered on the printouts, smearing the ink.

“Why did you leave me?” she whispered. “I needed you
so much.”

He said nothing for a minute. “I’ve watched
Sebastian compete with Ford for years—and lose—and the last thing I
wanted to do was catch myself in that net, but somehow . . . ” He
sighed. “It wasn’t easy to stay away from you. I knew you felt
abandoned and I’m sorry.”

“Did you get my email?” she asked, hearing the
pathetic plea in her own voice.

“Yes,” he breathed. “I still have it. Sometimes I
hit reply but I don’t know what to say.”

“Why me?” she whispered, needing him to spell it out
in words because conclusions about such things as these were just
too risky.

“Oh, Iustitia. All I wanted was to see you before
Eric sent you on your way east, wait until after my birthday and
come find you. I never wanted you to see me in my world, who the
Chouteau County prosecutor really is. But then I shot Jones and I
saw the look on your face, watched your heart break. I couldn’t let
you go knowing I’d never,
ever
have a chance with you after
that. Your being my wife had nothing at all to do with the
proviso.”

Justice’s soul began to fill with light. “Why did
you let me go, then?”

“I had become Lucifer.”

She thought about that a moment, then nodded in
understanding. “And the baby?”

“I
don’t want
to fulfill the proviso.
Sebastian and Bryce have that under control and it’s not dependent
on me.” He paused for a moment. “Iustitia, I fell in love with you
that day in class, the second I touched you. Every day I bantered
with you online I fell more in love with you. Every day you were in
my office was torture for me. I let you go because I love you and I
couldn’t stand what I’d done to you. I’d like to have children with
you and I’ll take any children you want to give me—or not—just so
long as I have you.”

She could barely breathe. This was everything she’d
ever wanted from him. He nibbled on her neck; her eyes closed and
she tilted her head so that he had easier access.

“Never,” he murmured, “in a million years did I
think you’d come back to me. Why?
Why
did you come back to
me?”

“I wanted to be your lover. I hoped maybe you might
come to love me someday.”

“I do. I always have. Come to bed with me,” he
whispered in her ear, warm butterscotch. “Come make love with me.
Please.”

* * * * *

91:
HEY NINETEEN

By the time Knox’s mouth made its slow and agonizing
journey down Justice’s belly and between her thighs, she writhed in
pleasure. She gasped when his big hands caressed her hips and
grasped them, tilting her up so he could dip his tongue up inside
her, lapping at her most sensitive spots. She marveled at the
scandalous deliciousness of it all, her legs wide, her fingers
clutching his coarse blond hair to bring him into her even
closer.

She bloomed and popped with a cry and her back
arched. Her hips shot up out of Knox’s hands, then fell back to the
bed. She sighed when Knox rose above her, then sank into her,
slowly, carefully. She wrapped her arms around his ribs, then ran
her hands down his back until she clasped his buttocks to pull him
deeper inside her.

He shuddered and groaned when she did that, which
made her body fall apart, turn to liquid—and the feel of him
sliding inside her so tight, so slick, so . . . perfect . . .

Justice started to wonder why it hadn’t been that
way before because she’d been just as wet then as now—

“Stop thinking,” he whispered in her ear. “I can
tell when you start thinking.”

“Mmmm, talk to me,” she said, holding his face
between her hands and kissing him, tasting herself on his tongue
and his lips and growing even more aroused.

So he talked to her. He spoke in time with every
thrust, told her what to do and how to do it and why. He told her
what he wanted her to do to him and when and why. He said naughty
things to her, words she never liked because they weren’t
dignified, but in that instant, she fell in love with each and
every one of them as he spoke them, how he used them.

All night, he made her come and come again, turning
her over and rolling her on top and doing things she’d never
imagined a human could do. She knew what animals did, which she had
always assumed people did, more or less, after adjusting for
differences in anatomy.

Then her horizons had been widened from the merely
mechanical, the ordinary and pedestrian, to the extremes of human
sexuality with no stops in between. In one night with Knox, she’d
hit her stride and had become rather proficient at a couple of
things that, with no more information than she’d had before Anne
Rice, she would never have thought to try.

“Professor Hilliard,” she murmured as he settled
himself beside her, half on top of her, his big hand sweeping her
body from breast to thigh and back again.

He raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Miss McKinley?”

“You’re a
very
good teacher.” She cupped his
scrotum in her hand to feel the velvet, the delicate skin there,
the stones that lay hidden inside. He closed his eyes and sighed,
shifting so she had better access. She stroked his semi-hard length
and liked that he was sticky from sex with her, that he wore her
scent as she wore his.

“You’re a much more willing student than I gave you
credit for. My apologies, Miss McKinley.”

“I think I could be downright perverted if I had
enough practice.”

“You
need
more practice, Miss McKinley.
You’re eager enough, but you’re a rank amateur.” Justice shoved at
him and he laughed. “You give head like a veteran, though. Are you
sure
you’ve never done that before?”