The Proviso (24 page)

“Duncan.”

“You’re a Scot through and through, aren’t you?”

“Not quite. There’s some Apache floating around in
there somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know where.”

“Ah, that explains the tan,” she said and he
laughed.

Gradually, the conversation turned silly. “I,” she
said between bites, pointing her fork at him imperiously, “saw
Mötley Crüe in concert on their Dr. Feelgood tour. That’s how much
of an eighties hair band relic I am.”

He laughed yet again, another in a long series of
laughs, chuckles, and grins. “Yes, but I,” he said, mimicking her
fork gesture, “caught Metallica when nobody had heard of them
yet.”

“Impressive!”

“But I felt guilty about it,” he muttered wryly and
she laughed.

“I lift weights to Rob Zombie, but I run to
Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.” And they went on with their game of
one-upmanship of esoteric and closeted musical tastes.

“Are you from here?”

“No,” he said. “I’m from San Diego and met Knox at
UCLA after my mission; we were roommates in the freshman dorm.”

“Did you room with him the whole four years?”

“Yeah, he and I got along fairly well—wasn’t hard
since he spent most of his free time surfing and I spent mine
dating—so no point in changing anything. I got married right after
I graduated, then we both went to BYU for law school. I got a good
job offer here straight out of law school, liked it, and stayed.
I’ve lived here since ninety-three and I have no plans to go back
to California.”

“Surely you had job offers elsewhere?”

“None where I had friends who could introduce me to
the city.”

“Ah. What was your major?”

“Finance. When were you at BYU?”

“Eighty-eight. Knox and I overlapped two years and I
practically lived at his house. I’m surprised I didn’t meet you
then.”

He looked at her strangely for a moment, then
blinked and shook his head. “I was married then.” Ah, yes. That
might have been awkward, all things considered. He paused for a
long time, studying his plate, then, “I’m glad I didn’t. I was a
different person then and you’d have scared the shit out of
me.”

Giselle laughed. “And now you’re not quite as scared
of me as I’d like.”

“Ah, you noticed.”

“Anyway,” she said in a rush, redirecting the
conversation and he chuckled at her. “I graduated and came home for
my master’s.”

That quelled his laughter and his brow wrinkled.
“Master’s?”

With a sardonic grin, she said, “I’m way too old not
to have been around the graduate school block a time or two. I have
a PhD in English lit.”

“Really! So . . . law school—?”

“I owned a bookstore for seven years,” she said
matter-of-factly. “I shared space with a patisserie on one side of
me and a confectionary on the other. Maisy and Coco weren’t my
business partners, exactly; we just figured if we knocked down our
walls and unified our décor, we’d all make more money and it
worked.

“But it burned—Knox probably told you some of that.
It bankrupted all of us because we’d taken on new debt to expand
and our insurance policies didn’t cover that. We all had to start
over again because we couldn’t rebuild. There’s not much else out
there for an English degree that I actually wanted to do—and
certainly nothing that makes any money. I don’t want to get caught
up in university politics, either; I’d rather teach than publish
and that’s a no-no. After I’d spent about six months curled up in
bed, Knox and Sebastian kicked my ass to do something and I decided
to be a bit more practical in my education than I had before.”

“An indie bookstore’s risky, with the discounters
and big boys; I’m impressed you kept it open that long.”

Her brow wrinkled a bit. “Bryce, Decadence wasn’t a
bookstore with food. It was a
destination
. I stocked romance
novels of all kinds. Couple that with Maisy’s gourmet chocolates
and wine, and Coco’s pastries, the events we put on every weekend .
. . I was doing very well; we all were. I was never going to be
independently wealthy, but I made a lot of money doing something I
loved.”

“Decadence?” he murmured.

She could feel herself flush a bit, but ignored his
invitation to banter; she wanted, no,
needed
to explain. “We
were going to open locations down in Olathe and up in Chouteau
County, and we gambled everything we had to get the loans we
needed.”

His expression changed from sensuous to pitying in a
heartbeat, which she felt deep in her soul. Sometimes it was nice
to be pitied as long as it didn’t last too long; her family would
not be so indulgent of her. “So . . . do you
want
to be a
lawyer?”

Her mouth tightened a bit as she looked down. “It
wasn’t my first career choice, no, but Knox had always thought I’d
be good at it, and I was intrigued enough that it was a distant
second. I didn’t have the luxury of doing what I
wanted
to
do after we were burned out.” When he opened his mouth to ask the
next of about a dozen logical questions, she stiffened and he
stopped, understanding that that topic of conversation was closed
for now. She’d explained. The loss of her bookstore was not
something she wanted to revisit any further.

He had his own off-limit topics of conversation,
which happened to be his wife, his children, and his own fire.
Other than telling her that his wife and children had died in that
fire and trading the odd fact that their respective fires had
happened the same night, he closed himself off about that.

“What about your family?”

He waved a fork. “I’m the youngest child of three in
a family with not too many people in it to begin with. My sister,
the sibling right before me, is fifteen years older than I am. My
brother is almost twenty years older than I am. Most of my nieces
and nephews are older than I am. My mother had cancer and died
about four years ago and my father died soon after that. I was in
the hospital then and didn’t know for a while.”

“Oh, that’s horrible.”

He shrugged. “My mother was forty-five, my dad
fifty-five, when I was born—and I wasn’t a welcome surprise. They
thought they were finished. My dad had climbed pretty high up in
the church hierarchy and he was not prepared for another child. I
didn’t see him much because he was always at church meetings, so I
didn’t get to know him as well as I’d have liked. And I always knew
they wouldn’t be around as long as other people’s parents.”

After an interval during which their plates were
cleared, coffee and dessert declined, Bryce relaxed back in his
chair and studied her. While somewhat uncomfortable with that,
Giselle was all too willing to have the excuse to study him right
back.

Finally, he said, low and way too casually for her
comfort, “Wasn’t your bookstore fire meant to kill you?”

Giselle blinked and her gut began to churn. “Yes,”
she said, wary. “How much has Knox told you, exactly?”

His emerald gaze bored into her, his face
inscrutable. “One gun in each hand,” he murmured, his jaw clenched.
Her eyes widened and she sucked in a long breath of air. One of his
eyebrows rose. “Two bullet wounds. Threatened Fen at gunpoint. You
were armed at Leah’s funeral and at the gallery.”

Giselle didn’t understand where this had come from
or what it meant to him. Well. She supposed she’d rather they’d
parted company at the garden than have to account for herself to
him here, now, after a nice dinner and several hours into
intellectually orgasmic conversation. She didn’t want him to know
how much she craved his regard, his approval, but she’d be damned
if she’d apologize or feel shame for who she was or how she lived
her life.

She took a deep breath and notched her chin up a
bit. “How did you know I was armed at Christmas?”

But she caught her breath when a slow, predatory
smile began to spread across his face. She could smell his sensual
cologne and his eyes were unblinking.

“Did you think I wouldn’t be able to feel it?” he
purred. “Are you armed? Right now?”

Biting on the inside of her lower lip, she watched
him carefully. “Do you want me to be?”

“Yes.”

Giselle’s heart began to race at his tone and she
felt the lava between her legs. The focus had turned; he was
seducing her now and she wanted to be seduced. She sat up and
leaned as far across the table as she could without actually
standing. “I’m
always
armed,” she said on a husky whisper,
startled when she found him immediately nose to nose with her.

“I like that,” he whispered back, never dropping her
gaze. “I like it a lot.”

Bryce reached a hand up to her face and softly
cupped her chin in his hand, his thumb drawing lightly across her
bottom lip. Her body responded to the caress, as light as a
feather, as devastating as his kiss that night in the parking lot.
Without thinking, she touched her tongue to his thumb and it was
his turn to draw a sharp breath.

“Who slapped you?” he asked in that same whisper,
still touching her mouth.

“Fen,” she breathed, unable to do anything but
follow wherever he led.

“You said he looked worse.”

“I broke his nose.”

Bryce burst out laughing then and all the people at
the tables around them looked up to see what was so funny. He sat
back and gave her a lopsided grin. Bemused for a moment, her mind
cleared and she smiled as she relaxed back into her chair. He
liked
that, and her heart lifted.

Want me. Need me. Love me. Beg me.

A Cheap Trick song suddenly played in her head, and
she knew she’d fallen in love—but not tonight. Long ago, that night
in the parking lot, when he took her kiss away from her and turned
it on her.

“You went to see Fen today?”

“Yes.”

“What was with the leathers?”

Giselle laughed then, startled out of the intensity
of her thoughts. “That’s my kickin’-ass-and-takin’-names outfit.
Fen hates it, so I wore it to annoy him.”

“I thought you were mad at him?”

“Oh, yes. He accused me of sulking for the past
three years.”

“Not that you have no reason to,” he muttered
sarcastically, but switched gears before she could reply. “Where
do
you live, by the way?” he asked conversationally, as if
he hadn’t just shattered her world, as if he hadn’t just snatched
her soul and wrung it out. Made her like it.

But she kept her cool and her mouth twitched. “Seven
blocks from here. With Sebastian.” She couldn’t help but laugh at
the look of shock on his face.

“How did that happen?”

“I moved in with him after my fire. He came and got
me that night and pretty much took care of me and I just never
moved out.”

“What about your parents? They seem absent in all
this.”

“My father died when I was three. My mother’s had a
hard life, being a young widow with nothing, and now she’s enjoying
retirement with my Aunt Dianne—Sebastian’s mother. Sebastian and
Knox, my mom, Aunt Dianne, they’re my
immediate
family. My
Uncle Charlie, Sebastian’s father, was my father figure, but he
died about ten years ago.”

“And what does your mother think?”

“My mom keeps her opinions and speculations to
herself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s figured some of it
out. My Aunt Dianne’s a genius with money and she would’ve been
following Sebastian’s takeover of OKH. We told them my bookstore
fire was ruled an accident and that I got caught in a drive-by
shooting. I’m not sure they believed us and between them, they
probably have a couple of close theories.”

“Why don’t you just tell them?”

“I have a very large tribe and we all get together
constantly. They’re smart; I’m sure a few of them suspect Fen
murdered Leah, but most wouldn’t believe it and they certainly
wouldn’t believe what else he’s done. Fen’s charming and generous;
he spreads the love and money around—and he’s not insincere about
it. Most of my family don’t see him any differently than the rest
of the city does. If they do, they aren’t about to say so. It’s one
thing for people to have their private suspicions, but another to
split the tribe down the middle.”

Bryce’s face cleared in understanding. “Fen Hilliard
to the rescue,” he muttered.

“Exactly.”

“I watched Knox dance to his tune when we were in
college. I never trusted him, even though I’d never met him. Knox
said you find him amusing.”

She shrugged. “I have a twisted sense of humor, but
for us, it’s not personal. It’s business. I get that.”

“Why do you live with Sebastian and not your
mom?”

“It’s convenient to all the places I really need to
be. I can walk to school and work if I want or need to, not to
mention the Nelson. She lives north of the river pretty close to
Knox, and my car can’t take the punishment of that commute. She’d
rather I live with her because she thinks Sebastian’s a bad
influence on me and that I’m just way too brazen to be allowed out
in public.”

“Is he? A bad influence on you?”

“He’d corrupted me by the time I was six.” She
grinned at the confused look on his face. “We grew up together, in
the ghetto. My mom and I lived across the alley and up three doors
from Sebastian and his parents. There were a lot of . . . older
single white men that lived along our route to school.” His face
cleared in understanding.

“And Sebastian was a pretty boy.”

“Very. It only took him one
very
close call
to figure out he was going to have to find some way to deal with it
himself, so he had a gun by the time he was eleven. He’s lucky he
didn’t kill himself—or me—trying to learn how to use it.”

“Did he ever have to?”

She tried not to smirk and her eyebrow rose a
little, then he laughed. “I’ve been Sebastian’s sidekick since
before I could walk. Once he started making serious money, he
needed someone at his back he could trust. Knox was too busy
squiring debutantes on Trudy’s command and being her perfect
country club trophy son to be available when Sebastian needed him
to be. That left . . . me.”