The Proviso (39 page)

“What if I’m putting on an act?”

He laughed then. “You are the
worst
actress
in the world. Your face is very expressive and I can read you like
a book. I’ve been chasing you for almost a year because you didn’t
want to be caught. You could’ve asked Hale who I was and he
would’ve arranged something; you knew that, but you wouldn’t do it.
You
knew
Knox would’ve helped you get to me, but you didn’t
ask him to. A woman who’s after money doesn’t do those things.”

She sighed. “The money thing is going to take me
some time to get used to.”

“You live with Sebastian Taight. What’s there to get
used to?”

“I don’t have access to his money. It’s his. What I
have is what I earn. And you’ve seen our house—it’s a little too
middle class for a billionaire, don’t you think? He doesn’t like
living in his money and so it doesn’t remind me of what he has that
I don’t. We’re just poor kids from the ghetto and in a lot of ways,
we still live like that. Hell, he still drives the old beat-up
pickup truck he bought when he was sixteen.”

“And a Ferrari,” Bryce added dryly.

“So he does, but I don’t live with King Midas. I
live with my brother.”

Bryce grunted. “Well. Okay. Any more issues you’d
like to discuss?”

She smiled. “No.”

“So
now
will you marry me?”

“Yes,” she breathed and pulled herself up his body
so that she could kiss him, long and deep. Lazy like a hot summer
breeze and sweet like fresh mown grass. She sighed when she felt
his palms cup either side of her face.

“I want to give you a nice wedding,” he whispered
against her mouth as the kiss lightened. She opened her eyes to see
him watching her. “But I have no idea how people outside the church
plan them.”

“Not interested.”

He blinked. “That’s the last thing I’d’ve expected
Miss Fashionista to say.”

“Normally, if we were getting married in the temple
and had a huge reception afterward, yes. But we aren’t—” He opened
his mouth to speak and again she closed it with her fingertips.
“—and I’ve accepted it. This? Between you and me? This is about us
becoming lovers before getting married. It’s private. I don’t want
a bishop to marry us, much less any other flavor of clergy. A judge
will do. All I want is to be with you. I don’t want to spend a year
being only your fiancée just to plan a bash nobody’s going to care
about in six months.”

“What about your family?”

“I do what pleases me, not my family. Of course, I
want my mom there. Sebastian and Knox. My Aunt Dianne. That’s all.
The rest of my tribe wouldn’t fit in a judge’s chambers.”

“Is your mother going to resent me?”

Her brow wrinkled. “For what?”

“Because I seduced you.”

Her mouth tightened. “Please don’t take it all on
yourself like I had no choice in the matter. I could’ve said no and
you gave me plenty of opportunity to do so. My decision was as
deliberate as yours.” He inclined his head in acknowledgment of
that. “What makes you think my mother would resent you?”

He stared at her for a long moment, then said,
“Because that’s how my siblings will feel about you.”

She swallowed, hurt to her core. “Oh.”

“They would think you must have seduced me and
made
me break my covenants. They wouldn’t believe otherwise
even if I gave them a play-by-play. But don’t take it personally;
they aren’t too happy with me, either.”

“You don’t like your family much, do you?”

He shrugged. “It’s not that so much as I don’t fit
in. I was always the black sheep and I don’t even look like my
siblings.”

“Maybe you were adopted.”

A chuckle rippled through his chest. “I asked my
mother that once and she looked at me funny and said, ‘Bryce, I was
there
. For thirty-six hours. Trust me, you aren’t
adopted.’”

Giselle laughed and thought she might have liked
Bryce’s mother.

“Do you know how I made my money after the
fire?”

She nodded. “You sued everybody who had a hint of a
whiff of anything to do with the construction of your house, plus
the city for having crooked codes officers.”

“Right. Filthy lucre.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Mark and Serena—my siblings—think I’m immoral for
having done that.”

That blew Giselle’s mind. “Why? Your children
died.”

“Well, you know, the meek inherit the earth. Turn
the other cheek. I don’t deal with life that way and except for my
family and Michelle, the church, I never did. If I showed the
proper amount of shame for my work, my money, how I got it, they’d
be okay with it, but I refuse to apologize, so . . . ” He
shrugged.

“Oh, Bryce,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. It doesn’t bother me and they’re
thousands of miles away. We don’t talk. I might as well not have
any family for how much we interact.”

Giselle had to take him at his word because his
voice, which could tell her so much of his feelings, betrayed
nothing but statements of fact.

“Well, don’t think I won’t get my head handed to me
on a platter when my mother gets over being thoroughly delighted,”
she said dryly after a moment.

“Delighted?”

“With you. My mother will
love
you. Once my
tribe finds out
the
Bryce Kenard is about to be assimilated,
you’ll be welcomed like a conquering hero. That filthy lucre thing?
We’re all about filthy lucre.”

He laughed then. “Knox used to say your family was
just a hundred-plus people using any excuse to have a party.”

“That’ll never change.”

“He’d talk about it and it was just something I
couldn’t imagine. Still can’t.”

“Oh, you’ll get plenty of opportunities to see it in
action. Every weekend there’s something going on, weddings,
graduations, funerals, birthdays, baby and bridal showers. Stuff
like that. Plus all the major holidays and at least half the minor
ones. I don’t think we celebrate President’s Day. Yet.”

Bryce ran a finger across the line of her jaw.
Giselle watched. Waited. Finally, he murmured,

“Considering what you said about your jewelry,
perfume, and men, I’ll assume you want to choose your own wedding
ring?”

Giselle blushed and gave him a shy smile then, a
warm joy bursting in her soul and filling her. “Yes, please.”

“Now,” he murmured as he began to nibble at her
bottom lip, “we can make love or we can fuck. Pick one.”

* * * * *

37: A
LITTLE ZEN HEADED YOUR WAY

They laughed and teased each other as Bryce made
Giselle brunch. Kind of. Broiled salmon with parsley and butter,
hollandaise sauce, and eggs. The salmon was left over, he
apologized, as was the hollandaise sauce, which had broken. She
threw it out and made a fresh batch, which amazed him. He did
actually cook her eggs to her specifications, which she found
incredibly sweet.

“I don’t really cook,” he admitted finally. “My
housekeeper does that for me.”

Giselle had begun to set their places at the island
when she saw it. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped at what it
must mean. There, at the front of the house stood a glossy black
concert grand piano that had yellowing, well-worn music scattered
all over it and on the floor surrounding it.
Oh!

“I want to ask you something,” Bryce said,
interrupting her wonder. “Why have you stuck with Knox all these
years after you broke up?”

“History. Loyalty.”

“There’s more to it than that, I think.”

She thought about it while they gathered their food
and sat to eat. After a deep breath, she began, “The proviso is all
my fault.” At his questioning look, she explained and when she
finished, he said,

“So you feel responsible for something you did when
you were fourteen and here you are, twenty-something years later,
still carrying it.”

She shrugged. “You have to take responsibility for
what you do.”

He snorted. “And you don’t think you’re honorable.
So let’s try this again. Define honor.
Your
definition. What
are you comparing yourself to?”

She looked at him while she attempted to shake that
answer out for herself. “A karate teacher I had at BYU,” she
finally said. “I know he thought I had a crush on him, but I
didn’t. I couldn’t. He was too out of my league. I was in awe of
him. I was so in awe of him, I couldn’t
presume
to have a
crush on him. He was twenty-two and I was eighteen. I knew the
minute I met him I wanted to be just like him. He had
power
.
Real power, like the kind where men ten, twenty years older than he
paid him deference. He was a true leader. He was a
warrior
.
I think of him kind of like Alexander the Great.”

Bryce’s eyebrow rose. “Twenty-two?”

Giselle nodded, but he released a frustrated whoosh.
“What?”

“Aw, Giselle. It took me years to get to that point
and then to hear about some punk twenty-two-year-old who had it . .
. ” He shrugged.

Giselle could empathize with that. “He’s the one
whose example of honor I’ve been trying to emulate since. That’s
why I couldn’t define it for you. To me, honor is not a ‘what.’
It’s a ‘who.’”

“And I’m looking at her,” he returned sharply, and
she looked up to see his gaze boring into her. “I don’t know where
you got this idea that you’re not honorable, but get rid of it.
Whether you learned it or it was forced upon you or you already had
it and just honed it to a science, I don’t know. Most people don’t
earn real respect and admiration when they’re children, which, from
what little I know, you seem to have earned from Fen. However or
whoever you define honor, some nebulous thing you think you can’t
reach—you did. You’re it.”

Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and
tickled her cheeks as they tracked their way down to her chin. He
smiled at her and reached over to wipe her face with a napkin. “I’m
sorry,” she murmured, feeling a blush creep up her cheeks. “I cry a
lot.”

“Takes the edge off the Glocks.”

She laughed through her tears. “Yeah, that’s not a
good thing. Warrior queens aren’t supposed to cry.”

“They probably don’t wear Badgley Mischka and Manolo
Blahnik, either.”

“How did you know that?”

He laughed then. “Went through your very, ah,
sparse
closet. Reconnaissance.”

“Nosy, more like.”

“Semantics. So in this whole proviso mess, why
didn’t you and Knox just get married? It would’ve been very
efficient.”

“I was waiting for you. Metaphorically speaking, of
course.”

A pleased grin grew on his face.

“Something happened my junior year at BYU and it
clarified what I wanted, one of those random slice-of-life things
that makes you take a good look at what you want.”

“Which was?”

“It’s stupid. I saw a dude. A glance. That’s all. He
looked at me like he wanted to shove me up against a wall and fuck
me. But then I saw he had a wedding band on, so it didn’t go beyond
that. I mean, we’re at BYU so I’m going to assume he’s LDS, which
doesn’t necessarily follow, but the odds are good, right? He’s
married and he’s looking at me like
that
? That’s some
powerful mojo right there. It was like Hank Rearden incarnate. And
I wanted that.”

“So you waited for it.”

“Yep.”

Bryce’s mouth twitched. “Which explains the
vibrators and the erotica.”

She gasped and her mouth dropped open. “You
know
about that?”

A roar of laughter exploded from him and she huffed.
“Knox told me,” he finally said once his humor had wound down a bit
and he had wiped the tears from his face.

“That
bastard
!”

“You hid it very well. It took me a while to find
your toy box.”

The heat rose in her face and she ducked her head.
She felt his fingers on her chin then found herself nose to nose
with him. “And I’m telling you right now. You’re gonna read for me,
and then you’re going to use those toys while I watch.”

Giselle bit her lip, aroused and amused despite her
chagrin.

Smirking, he released her and went back to his
salmon. “So are there any other reasons you and Knox didn’t . . .
?”

She looked at him speculatively for a moment. “Are
you feeling threatened? Still?”

His smile dimmed and he hesitated. “Yeah, a little
bit, I’ll admit.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Indulge me.”

She supposed she could respect that. After all, she
had to deal with Michelle’s ghost and she’d welcome any information
that would help her do that.

“Well, I don’t know how to describe it. Knox
builds
his women and he couldn’t do that with me.”

“That makes no sense.”

Giselle took a deep breath. “He knows precisely what
he’s looking for in a woman, which is a little teeny spark of fire
hidden deep in her soul. Knox only ever falls in love with a
woman’s soul. Once that happens, he overwhelms her, manipulates
her, makes her vulnerable, breaks her down to expose her spark so
she can take over when she’s ready to progress on her own terms, to
fulfill the potential she already had.”

“Leah,” Bryce breathed as comprehension grew in his
expression.

“Leah. She was sad and lonely and had never known
passion in her life and she didn’t even know it. Knox saw her as a
passionate woman, vivacious, and charming. He knew it the first
time he saw her and that’s what he turned her into.”

“And you were already built, so it was a
non-starter.”

“Between understanding what I really wanted and
that, yes.”

“So what happens to his women once he’s built them?
He gets bored and moves on?”

“Oh, no.
They
move on to accomplish great
things because he taught them how. His gift is his curse. He loves
them, but none of them love him enough to stay with him. Leah never
loved him the way she loved her late husband, but she loved how he
made her feel. And that was okay with him as long as she stayed
with him.”