The Proviso (7 page)

“What do you want.” Clipped, hostile. Not a
question.

“I wanted to tell you how foolish it is to sleep in
an empty Plaza parking garage in the middle of the night with your
windows rolled down, but I see it’s occurred to you.”

“Indeed,” she said, tight-lipped. “Anything
else?”

Neither her expression nor her tone held any hint of
desire or anything remotely complimentary—just anger with a great
deal of contempt thrown in for good measure. He shouldn’t be
surprised. He’d burned that particular bridge behind him.

And rightly so!
Another man’s lover, even.
Although . . . from looking at the car, it didn’t seem as though
Knox took care of her very well and certainly not as well as he’d
taken care of Leah.

“I wanted to know if you’d like a late dinner,” he
said, shocking himself.

She blinked. “’Scuse me?”

He’d boxed himself in well. “Dinner. Or breakfast.
Whatever.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she sneered. She shoved her
car key into the ignition and turned the engine over.

“I saved your job.” Lame. True, but lame.

“Lame,” she snapped. “Whatever you assumed about me?
Dead wrong, so keep your derision to yourself. I don’t know who you
are or who you think you are, but I assure you: You have never met
a woman like me, and you never will again.”

So saying, she reached over and grabbed the knot of
his necktie to pull him to her. Surprised, he didn’t fight, but
when her lips touched his and her tongue swept his mouth, he
returned it with the same fire.

Then he wrapped his hand around the back of her
head, crushed her to him, and took the kiss away from her.

Directed it.

Deepened it.

Lengthened it.

He opened his eyes to watch her. Her face was a
study in desire, her eyes closed, her breath ragged, her tongue
matching his stroke for stroke, shift for shift. She sighed into
his mouth and released his tie to caress his neck, the scars there,
her thumb stroking his jaw line while their tongues mated.

Suddenly she sucked in a deep breath and her eyes
popped open, staring at him as if she’d lost herself somewhere
inside him. She had. He’d surprised her, taken the power position
away from her and she didn’t know how to take it back.

He knew this as surely as he knew his own name.

She jerked away from him, her breathing heavy and
her eyes wide. “You—” She stopped. Swallowed. “I—” Bit her lip.
Fumbled for the gear shift.

Bryce stood, then wrapped his hand tightly around
her chin. He tilted her head up until she looked up at him, an odd
mixture of panic and passion in her expression.

“Be careful what you wish for, Miss Cox,” he purred.
“You might get it.” Then he turned and strode toward his own car
without looking back, wondering what she’d make of
that
.

* * * * *

6:
ENERGIZER RABBIT

AUGUST 2005

“Ah, Sunday again,” Sebastian intoned from the sofa
where he watched a movie and drank a bottle of wine. “I don’t even
know why you bother going to church. You’re not the most sterling
example of Mormon womanhood ever.”

Giselle went into the kitchen to mix up her
sugar-free pink lemonade electrolyte booster, then cut ham and
cheese into cubes to snack on before going to church.
“
Technically
, I am.”

“With your mouth? And your penchant for killing
hitmen?”

She went into the living room to eat and Sebastian
put the movie on pause. So. He wanted to actually . . . talk? And
he’d downed nearly a whole bottle of wine; he must have as much on
his mind as she had on hers.

“You know as well as I do that cursing and killing
in self-defense wouldn’t keep me from being able to go to the
temple if I wanted to.”

“I’m pretty sure threatening to kill a man in cold
blood would get you that excommunication you’ve been bucking for
for the last couple of years.”

“Threatening and doing—two different things.”

“That’s rich, coming from a woman who’s never made a
threat she hasn’t carried out.”

“Okay, look. Say I go to the bishop and say, ‘Ready
to go to the temple now’ and he whips out the list of questions. I
can answer every single one honestly. I pay my tithing. I don’t
drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs. I’m honest, I believe in
Christ, I don’t batter my spouse—”

Sebastian laughed.

“—I support the prophet. I’m still a virgin and I’m
thirty-five. I’d say that’s a pretty decent track record and oh,
guess what? Instant temple recommend. And there I go, off to St.
Louis or Nauvoo or wherever and make my covenants with the Lord. My
mom would be so proud.”

“You forgot that general and all-encompassing
unresolved issues question.”

“I have no unresolved issues. Just because I’m not
exactly, you know, leadership material doesn’t mean I don’t qualify
as a Good Girl. And what do you mean, bucking for an
excommunication?”

“You know exactly what I mean. Your opinions’ll get
you in trouble faster than murdering Fen will.”

True. Giselle had always been different; she knew
it, everybody at church knew it. She garnered respect and
friendships across various social strata in the ward, but everyone
knew she’d eventually say or do something scandalous because she
managed to do it with amazing regularity—usually without meaning
to.

“I don’t spout false doctrine.”

Sebastian grunted. “No, I know you don’t. Your
problem is you’re as attracted to the profane as you are the
sacred. You can’t bring yourself to pick one and stick with it, so
you straddle the fence between them.” She fidgeted at his usual
perception. “As far as I can see, there’s no reward in sticking
with the sacred. So tell me something: Would you tell your bishop
why all the double-A batteries in this house disappear so
fast?”

Heat rose in her cheeks. “Digital camera,
asshole.”

Sebastian smirked. “So
technically
, you
aren’t. He’d laugh you out of his office with a ‘Stop doing that
and come back to see me again in six months.’ Speaking of that, buy
your own batteries or do it the old fashioned way ’cause I’m not
supporting your habit anymore. And oh, let’s not forget your
pièce de résistance
. Would you tell him about
that
?”

Something had changed inside Giselle once she’d
turned that corner into territory that few people would understand.
She had killed—and she felt absolutely no remorse.

“No,” she admitted. “’Specially after what happened
to Knox.”

“Well. That’s apples and oranges, but I see your
point. And do you actually plan on going to the temple?”

“I would never go alone,” she murmured, looking down
into her glass at the pink concoction she drank by the quart. “If I
happened to find a dude I liked who could marry me in the temple,
I’d go then.”

Sebastian snorted. “You aren’t going to find Hank
Rearden at church.” Hank Rearden, the fictional narrator of a
political fable by a fringe political philosopher.
Patheticpatheticpathetic.

“I’m not holding out any hope, no. But I’m not
cluttering up my life with a string of almosts and maybes and
potentials, and I’m not interested in random fucking. If I can’t
have exactly what I want, I’ll go without.” She paused when she
caught his upraised eyebrow and slid down into the upholstery.
“Mostly,” she grumbled.

“If your collection of erotica is anything to go by,
you don’t know what the hell you want. Some of that shit’s not so
fun when you try it and the rest of it’s just not worth the
trouble. Ask me how I know.”

She was too old and too honest with herself to say
that she was still
technically
a virgin because it was what
she’d been taught all her life: No sex before marriage. Don’t put
oneself in temptation’s way. Avoid the appearance of evil. Marriage
to a worthy member of the priesthood—

—in the temple, where the words “’til death do you
part” were not part of the ceremony; marriage was for
eternity
.

Giselle had always wanted that, a good LDS man with
a sexually adventurous streak.

Yeah, but how would you know? People lie.

She’d prepared, been obedient, but her childbearing
years were fading fast, even as her libido ramped up on her way
from thirty-five to forty, and all the while, the pool of desirable
Mormon men dwindled to nothing. She personally knew ten other
never-married women in the same boat and unless she ran into some
smart, educated divorced man or widower (probably looking for a
mother for his kids) who might not be thoroughly disgusted by what
she’d ask for in bed, she was shit out of luck.

“Quite frankly, Giz, you’re not going to find
Rearden
outside
the church, either. Quit waiting for—” He
waved a hand. “—fantasy man and let me fix you up with somebody. I
know half a dozen CEOs who’d fall in love with you, respect you,
treat you well. So they aren’t members of the church, but they’re
good men. If you want to get married and have kids before your eggs
dry up, you’re going to have to figure out what you’ll give up for
it. Forget the temple marriage and settle for walking down the
aisle like normal people.” He chuckled. “Or marry Knox. That’d
solve his problem, my problem,
and
yours.”

Giselle’s lip curled, but she had begun to consider
it lately as she got another year older—and a lot more tired.

Tired of going to church and hearing about how to be
a better wife and mother, being asked to take on extra tasks
because she didn’t have a family to take up her time, feeling the
outsider
not
because she had unorthodox opinions, but
because she was a single woman in a church that was all about
family.

“Celibacy’s not natural at our age, Giz. We’ve had
this conversation before.”

Tired of not having a warm, breathing, naked man in
bed with her every night, a man who would understand her and love
her in spite of the sharp edges she didn’t want dulled, a man who
would make all these years of celibacy worth the wait.

Giselle closed her eyes and took a deep, soft breath
now that she had a face and a body to go with her yearning—that
beautiful man with the burn scars and the magnificent green eyes
who exuded sex and power, who had disapproved of her for reasons
she didn’t know. She remembered his face and wondered how she could
be so stupid as to allow herself—
again
—to fantasize about a
man who was unavailable to her.

“Okay, out with it. Who is he?”

Damn Sebastian, his eye for detail, his unerring gut
instincts. “I— I don’t know,” she admitted.

“What did he do to you?”

He took my breath away.

She looked down at her scarlet linen skirt and
picked at a piece of nonexistent lint. “He was contemptuous of me,”
she murmured. “I don’t know why. It made me mad and then we had an
argument and then I— We . . . kissed.”

“That’s—uh, different,” he said finally, surprise
heavy in his voice. “You let a strange man in your personal space
long enough for him to kiss you?”

She could feel the flush creep back up her face and
deepen at the memory of that kiss. She cleared her throat. “Um,
well, I— I, uh . . . Actually, I kissed him.” Sebastian stared at
her as she haltingly told him what happened, his astonishment
growing with each word.

“When did this happen?”

“In April. At work. Hale’s client.”

“So that’s why you’ve been moping around for the
past four months like a kicked puppy.” She said nothing. “He was
contemptuous of you but he wants to fuck you.”

“I think so, yes. I don’t understand.”

“So find out who he is from your boss and ask
him.”

Her head snapped up, her eyes wide in horror. “Oh, I
don’t think so. The man dresses more expensively than you do.”

Sebastian said nothing to that. She knew he would
empathize with any man of wealth beset by women whose interest in
him was driven solely by his net worth.

“I can’t— There’s just no way I could work that out
without looking like a whore.”
Especially
with that face,
which must make it exponentially more difficult for him. “Besides,
he made it clear what he thought of me.”

“What makes you think he’s a Rearden?” Sebastian
asked slowly.

“He’s a warrior. You can tell. He’s bigger than you.
He’s— The way he looked at me?” She sucked in another deep breath
and released it slowly.

Sebastian pursed his lips. “You better be careful
with that, Giz. Not many men could throw a woman on the bed, fuck
her until she can’t walk, make her do exactly what he wants her to
do—and then
not
carry that outside the bedroom. Bigger than
me, huh? I can pick you up and toss you over my shoulder.”

“Yeah, a lot of guys could do that. No one’s ever
had the balls to try. That’s my point.”

“No, no
LDS
man has ever had the balls to
try. You haven’t given anyone else half a chance.”

She said nothing else for a moment. There was that
other thing—

“He, um . . . he called me Lilith.”

“So he knows his art well enough to catch the
resemblance.”

“That’s not the way he meant it, Sebastian. It
wasn’t a compliment.”

He gave a Gallic shrug. “That only means he
definitely
wants to fuck you.”

“And that he’s pissed about it,” she said, trying to
be matter-of-fact, to recover her nerves. “It doesn’t make any
difference. I’m not going to throw myself at a rich man, much less
one who doesn’t like me.”

“Would you fuck him if you got the chance?”

She looked at Sebastian without seeing him, her
tongue running over her teeth in thought. Finally, she drew in a
deep breath and whispered, “In a heartbeat.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened and he pulled away from
her, blinking. “Giz,” he murmured, “that’s— Uh— Wow. You’re about
at the end of your rope, aren’t you?”