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THE PROVISO
Book 1 in the Tales of Dunham
©2008 Moriah Jovan
Trade Paperback: ~700 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-9817696-1-5
ISBN-10: 0-9817696-1-6
Digital Formats: ~300,000 words
ISBN-13: 978-0-9817696-0-8
ISBN-10: 0-9817696-0-8
$8.99 per format or
$15.99 for the zip file bundle
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Knox Hilliard’s uncle murdered his father to marry his mother and take control of the family company. Now, he and his cousins Sebastian and Giselle are on a quest for justice and to restore Knox’s inheritance to him. None of them expect to find love along the way.
CAUTION: This title contains the jarring and bizarre juxtaposition of explicit sex and overt religion. As an added bonus, there’s quite a bit of libertarian/objectivist philosophy, politics, money, and cursing—the really bad kind. I also threw in a smattering of violence, nude art, the criminal use of mint chocolate chip ice cream, rampant armchair psychoanalysis, a slew of shoulda-coulda- wouldas, and a cat named Dog. Kitchen sinks…not so much.
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EXCERPT
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AUGUST 2004
“Check out the way he walks. I wonder if he fucks as good as he looks?”
Miss Justice McKinley looked down at the textbooks on the desktop in front of her and felt violated by the predatory purr coming from the woman in the row behind her. Really, she’d thought she’d left all this junior high queen bee business when she graduated from college, but apparently, some girls just never grew up.
She was very beautiful, Sherry was, glossy black hair, very thin, very well dressed—and she knew it. She stood out in the lecture hall full of students who watched and listened to Chouteau County prosecutor Knox Hilliard’s bons mots in between student introductions.
Sherry’s worker bees laughed and slid comments back and forth about Sherry’s skill with men, most of which, in Justice’s opinion, were unprintable. Justice even flinched at one particularly nasty remark that she couldn’t avoid hearing.
The back of Justice’s chair was kicked and she tossed a glance over her shoulder in irritation at the frequency with which that occurred.
“Sherry,” Worker Bee Number One whispered, “stop it. She’s gonna get mad.”
“What’s she going to do, read me Bible stories? Look at her! She’s drooling all over her pretty little dress. She wouldn’t know what to do with him if she had him.”
Justice swallowed at the cruelty in the girl’s voice, the nanny-nanny-boo-boo singsong in her ear, close, and she cringed at the whisper. “I bet she wants to fuck Knox Hilliard as much as I do. Pay attention, little girl.”
It was a good thing Justice was in front of Sherry and her courtiers because her face flooded with color. She averted her gaze from Professor Hilliard and tried to cool the hot rage and mortification that welled up inside her. It wouldn’t have bothered her so much if Sherry hadn’t actually hit the nail on the head.
Then it was the Queen Bee’s turn to introduce herself. She kicked Justice’s chair again and Justice blinked away stinging tears before looking up at the handsome attorney.
“Miss Quails,” the prosecutor said, his deep voice resonating from the front row of the lecture hall all the way to the most remote corners of the back. “Your turn.”
“Corporate,” she said shortly. “But what I really want to talk about is what you’re doing this weekend? All weekend?”
The room held its collective breath at her brazenness and the prosecutor stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Then a smile, quick and blinding, flashed across his face. Justice stared at him in awe, as she had for the entire two hours she’d been in this class. If Justice had ever needed to see an example of male beauty and masculine grace, Knox Hilliard was it. Too bad he was only subbing for the real professor.
He began to chuckle as he came closer to Sherry, therefore, closer to Justice. “See me after class and I’ll see what I can arrange,” he murmured, his predatory tone matching Sherry’s perfectly.
“Certainly…Knox.”
He still chuckled as he continued with the next person down the row. Justice averted her eyes.
“…about you, Miss McKinley?”
Justice started, and looked up at him; he watched her expectantly. She could feel her face burn and she cleared her throat. Her nerve endings tingled and she felt slightly nauseated. “I—I want to be a prosecutor,” she said and then, to her horror, she added, “Like you.”
Sherry and her clique snickered openly.
Surprise flickered in the man’s ice blue eyes and his carved lips smiled in kind bemusement. “Why?”
Justice swallowed again. She felt as if she were on trial, as if her answer would determine her whole future. In three years, half the people in that classroom would be competing for the coveted coup of being hired and trained by Knox Hilliard. Yes, her answer today would determine her whole future.
“I—I want to help people,” she began, caught up in the suddenly changing colors of his eyes and for a moment, just a moment, forgot all about Sherry. “I think that criminals, that they have too many rights. It’s too easy to hurt others for fun and profit.” She went on, gaining confidence in her opinion and strength in her voice as she always did when she spoke on something she believed in.
“There’s no sense of right and wrong anymore; uhm, personal property rights—meaning oneself and one’s belongings—were meant to be held sacred. That’s what the Founding Fathers wanted. Life and valuables are cheap now, partly, mmm, because of the eroding family base and partly because the legal system doesn’t punish criminals well enough. I want to help make the law a deterrent again—to, oh, legally avenge those whose lives are violated by someone else.”
Silence reigned throughout the lecture hall, and Justice could not quite meet the probing gaze of the prosecutor. She fastened it upon her books and tried to hold back tears of frustration and embarrassment.
Then Sherry laughed. Her friends laughed. The room exploded in laughter—raucous, jeering guffaws aimed at Justice, who was only now aware that she had displayed an appalling naïveté for her entire class to see.
This was going to be a long three years.
“ENOUGH!”
The roar was violent, livid, and thoroughly effective as it echoed off the walls of the abruptly silent room. Justice’s head snapped up to see Professor Hilliard leisurely stroll across the dais away from her, his hands in the pockets of his fine gray suit. His face was hard as he glared up at the rows and rows of open-mouthed students.
“How dare you,” he murmured, his tone dangerous. His lazy syntax and country twang were gone. He spoke with precision, his diction flawless. His easygoing manner had disintegrated to hard cynicism in the blink of an eye and Justice stared at him, confused—his outrage had been so immediate, so effortless.
“How dare you denigrate the career goals of a fellow student. I daresay none of you have thought that deeply about what you want and why you want it. None of you have displayed that kind of passion or expressed yourselves so eloquently that the room was enthralled with what you said. None of you were courageous enough to say what you really thought. How dare you sit on your pretentiously cynical asses and laugh at idealism. Idealism is what created this country; it’s what drives it; it’s what allows you to be here on daddy’s money.”’
He pointed to different sections of the room in turn. “You. You. You.” He began the trek back across the platform toward Justice. She caught the faintest whiff of an elegant cologne as he leaned alongside her toward Sherry. “And you, Miss Quails,” he purred, and it was not a nice purr.
Justice gulped, glad she was not on the receiving end of the latent violence in his voice. “You can go fuck yourself, because I certainly won’t.”
The collective gasp was palpable. Sherry stammered in confused outrage, even as Professor Hilliard’s regard softened and settled upon Justice who, with tears of mixed gratitude and mortification in her eyes, looked away from his large harshness and golden darkness. Fingertips under her chin gently forced her face around and up. She blinked to get rid of her tears before his clever ice—no, now dark—blue eyes saw them.
“Do you believe in vigilante justice, Justice?”
She gulped. “No,” she whispered.
“What about theft versus crimes against the body?”
“Property is to be held as sacred as the body and vice versa,” she responded in a voice made stronger after clearing her throat.
“Revenge?”
“No excuse.”
“Biblical and all that.”
“Yes.”
“Black and white?”
“No. Right and wrong.”
Justice followed his line of reasoning without effort because she knew these things, believed these things, believed in the brilliance and genius of the Founding Fathers.
They had touched, somehow, this experienced attorney somewhere in his mid-thirties and Justice, a twenty-two-year-old (today) law student who’d been in classes for a whole five days.
His thumb drifted across her cheekbone as he stood looking down at her; Justice was only minimally aware of the lecture hall full of spellbound students. His mind connected with hers even as his fingertips connected with her skin.
“Very good, Justice,” he murmured.
She stared up into Knox Hilliard’s sapphire eyes and fell in love.
* * * * *
Giselle Cox reached out and brushed the girl’s shoulder. She started, turned, nearly cowering with fear over whatever cutting remark she assumed Giselle would make, her hazel, almost amber, eyes wide.
“You were very good in there,” Giselle said quietly, aware of the wary glances cast their way because she got attention wherever she went, whether she wanted it or not. Today, she wanted it; no one who knew any better would bother this girl now that Giselle had marked her just by talking to her.
Giselle inspected Justice closely. Her appearance needed some serious help. She was taller than Giselle by at least three or four inches. An early ’80s-type shirtwaist dress made of printed chintz with a wide white collar hid a body type Giselle could only guess at, but if the legs were anything to go by, she had a lot of potential.
Her hair was a mess. It was a dull dark red mahogany color, frizzy, and braided in a French braid that went to her waist, which did nothing to contain the out-of-control frizz.
Her face was odd. That was the only way Giselle could describe it. She had a strange color of foundation on as if she were trying to hide acne, but the skim coat of makeup was smooth, so it wasn’t acne under there. Freckles? That’d go with the hair. Giselle was also pretty sure she had some good bone structure under all that pancake, but who knew? She was tempted to take the girl for a makeover just because she’d been so fabulous in class, but cracking open her chrysalis and letting her inner butterfly loose would have some serious and long-lasting complications. No, better she look like this for as long as possible.
Heaven only knew, Professor Hilliard didn’t need any more complications at the moment, especially considering what had happened in class. For a variety of reasons, no one would believe for a moment his response to Sherry’s proposition had been anything other than an attempt to let her save face, but he’d be lucky not to get fired or sued—or both—over how he had spoken to her after that and then actually touched a student.
Giselle snorted. Professor Knox Shit-for-Brains.
Justice continued to look down and she mumbled something Giselle couldn’t hear. Giselle’s eye was caught just over Justice’s shoulder. Knox stared at her from a staircase across the hall. He slid a cold glance over to Sherry and her brood who huddled together, their outrage palpable. Giselle looked at them, looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. He nodded once and left.
Justice was still mumbling. Dammit, she wished she didn’t have to talk to the top of the girl’s frizzy red head.
“Justice,” Giselle murmured, dipping her body down so she looked up into her face. She smiled gently as Justice raised her head. “You just go about your business. Believe in yourself and your opinions. Have faith. I don’t know you, but I’m very proud of you.”
Another encouraging smile, then she left the building.
To lie in wait.
“Sherry!” Giselle said brightly as the bitch came around a corner. “Can I, uh, talk to you a minute?”
“Sure, Giselle!”
Giselle’s lip almost curled at the girl’s delight at having caught her attention. There were only two reasons Sherry would know her name after one week in class and Giselle knew exactly what those were. She was about to use one of them to her advantage.
Ten years older than most of the other students, Giselle was a third year on the five-year plan. It wasn’t the most prestigious position to be in, that was for sure, but given her age, the fact that she already had a PhD, and, oh, the fact that she and Professor Hilliard clashed loudly, publicly, and often, she garnered a certain deference—even from other professors. It also made her a target for crushes of both genders.
Leaving her giggling friends under a tree, Sherry followed Giselle eagerly to an out-of-the-way spot in a thick stand of trees. Giselle turned only to find the girl backed up to a big tree, preening for her. She smiled seductively and approached her slowly with a swing in her hips. Sherry sucked in an anticipatory breath. Giselle reached out a hand when she was close enough to touch, and Sherry closed her eyes, waiting for Giselle’s kiss.
Sherry couldn’t even screech when her head was snapped back against the tree, Giselle’s hand clamped around Sherry’s throat and squeezing just enough.
“I’m going to tell you this once and I want you to make sure it gets spread around,” she whispered in Sherry’s ear. “Leave. Justice. McKinley. Alone. If I hear even a suggestion of a rumor that you, your skank patrol, or anyone else even not associated with you are giving her a hard time, you’ll regret it. I think the last place you want to be for the next three years is on my shit list.” Sherry’s eyes widened and she tried to swallow, but couldn’t. “You’re so not his type,” Giselle muttered flatly and with one last look of sheer disgust, she let her go.
She turned to run, but Giselle grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked her back, whispering in her ear. “You make sure now, to remind people that they are to be nice to her. How’d you like to be on his shit list, too?”
“No, no. I’m sorry. Please let me go,” she whimpered. “Please.”
And Giselle did. She ran crying back to her friends, but no one approached Giselle with accusations of what had happened in the glade.
Sherry left two weeks later, but Giselle continued to watch over Justice long after her impassioned speech was forgotten by all but three people.
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1: THE FIRST WIFE
SEPTEMBER 2004
The Kansas City crime scene unit had had to dredge Leah Wincott’s body from a pond, so the casket remained closed. There was only one reason any bride of Knox Hilliard—especially one who had a child already—would turn up dead.
Bryce knew he should probably stop sneaking glances at one particular mourner while the remains of his friend and client lay at the front of the chapel garnering her due respects. Leah’s death had too many implications to allow distraction, but he’d taken one look across the room and he could think of nothing but the woman who’d caught his attention.
She sat in a darkened back corner alone, her arms folded across her delectable chest. In one hand, she held a Dixie cup filched from one of the funeral home’s restrooms. She took a sip, then stared down into it. She looked good in black. No, she looked like a queen in black.
Anger, not sorrow. He didn’t know what kind of a relationship she had had with Leah, but he could feel the rage radiating from her in waves. By the time a funeral rolled around, most people had passed the anger stage of grief, or at least they hid it for the rest of the mourners. Not this woman; she seethed and her modest dress didn’t do a thing to mitigate her mood.
He studied her from where he stood in the midst of a cluster of people who had shown up at Leah’s visitation to witness the debacle of the most awaited and debated wedding on Wall Street.
The OKH Bride, the woman who, with two tiny words would enable one man to inherit the majority shares of a Fortune 100 company, had been snatched from her dressing room and murdered just before she could say, “I do.”
Still the woman he watched sat slumped in her chair, her expensively shod feet resting on the fold-out chair in front of her. In the dim light, her hair seemed a dull blonde. It was not bound in any way and large corkscrews fell to her shoulders. She had already plowed her fingers back through her curls several times in a futile effort to keep them from falling into her eyes. Finally, she huffed and set her Dixie cup down on the chair next to her, reached up, and began to braid her hair back.
Bryce sighed. He wished she hadn’t done that. On the other hand…
The black velvet of her short bodice shimmered subtle gold and stretched over her breasts. His nostrils flared, just a bit, at the thought of stroking gently over one of them, pausing to flick at her nipple with a thumb.
Her knee-length silk-and-chiffon skirt rose until the hem caught on something indiscernible about her thigh, but distinctly out of place. It took him out of the moment of sexual fantasy and into the realm of sheer curiosity at what would require one to wear a heavy black strap around one’s thigh. He couldn’t think of a reason at the moment, but it didn’t matter.
She’d finished braiding and she returned to her previous attitude: slouched, her arms folded, scowling at the floor.
An older woman in black passed behind her, pulled her fingertips lightly across her back in what seemed to Bryce a loving caress, and said something to her when she looked up.
Now he could see her face in its entirety and he sucked in a breath. He’d seen her before, in a Pre-Raphaelite painting he remembered studying in freshman humanities more than twenty years before. Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who demanded equality with Adam and left Eden in a snit when he refused.
Bryce had never forgotten that tale, nor the painting. The idea that Adam had had a wife before Eve had shocked him to his core at the time. Further, the particular point of Lilith’s complaint against Adam had aroused Bryce painfully. As he watched the warm, breathing Lilith across the room from him, he didn’t have to wonder if she’d demand to be on top.
He wondered how she’d go about demanding it.
The older woman had stopped speaking and waited for Lilith’s response. Her mouth tightened and she looked away, off into nothing, thinking. Finally, she glanced back up at the woman and nodded once. He could read her lips.
Okay, Mom.
The mother walked away with a pat on Lilith’s shoulder. As she arose, her full skirt caught again, on the chair this time and he sucked in a sharp breath. More to the point, what would require a woman to wear a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol strapped to her thigh at a visitation, under a cocktail dress, with no other trappings of law enforcement? The black lace of the top of her stocking only added to the arousing effect of the odd juxtaposition of delicate lace and lethal steel.
This Lilith had him harder than Collier’s painting.
Dammit, she mouthed as she swept her hand down her body to straighten her dress and cover the gun. The black-and-gold silk and chiffon flared and shimmered when she turned from him. Her ridiculously high heels forced the muscles of her legs into sharp relief and his eyes widened at the latent power he saw there when she strutted away into the dark recesses of the funeral home until she disappeared.
He hung back, loathe to follow her. He raised his left hand to feel his face, the burn scars that disfigured him, mocked him, kept him from approaching women because he hated the flinching, the fake politeness.
Monster.
He’d overheard that frightened whisper long ago when the scars were still relatively fresh, and though it didn’t make him angry anymore, it did serve to remind him of his sin, the punishment for his sin.
Unbidden, the image of that woman, Lilith, dangerous, muscular, on her knees in front of him, his hand clutched in her hair, her mouth around him, flashed through his mind. He thought he’d never catch a breath.
His feet took it upon themselves to trace her path, following a hint of a perfume he knew would belong to a Lilith: spice and flowers with a hint of sex. Far away from the chapel, toward a small, dimly lit room, he rounded a corner and heard a delicate female voice, filled with anger.
He stopped, ducked back a bit, listened.
“Say it, Knox.”
A sudden whoosh. “You were right,” came a man’s voice. Knox Hilliard’s—the fiancé of the woman in the casket. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Giselle, you don’t know how sorry I am.”
Giselle, not Lilith. His disappointment was deep and sharp, but she made it disappear with the unexpected sorrow in her whisper.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Knox. I shouldn’t have said that.”
There was a pause, then the sound of a hand on fabric. Bryce risked a peek around the corner and saw her engulfed in Hilliard’s arms, his face in the crook of her neck, her arms wound around his shoulders and her fingers curled into his hair.
“Come home with me tonight,” he murmured, one hand undoing her braid and the other splayed across her buttocks, crushing her to him. “Please. I need you.”
Bryce’s heart thundering in his chest, he pulled himself away from the tableau in front of him and dropped back against the wall. His mind churned through the implications of that even as the silence lengthened, only to be pierced with the soft sounds of kissing.
He didn’t wait to hear her response. Nauseated, he pushed away from the wall and stalked out of the funeral home.
That Leah Wincott, Bryce’s friend and client, had died for the sake of a man who had a mistress—it angered him.
That Bryce wanted a woman he didn’t know, who wouldn’t be interested in him anyway, the mistress of Leah’s groom—it enraged him. Lilith, succubus.
That the man between Lilith and Leah was Knox Hilliard, well… Bryce felt thoroughly, inexplicably, betrayed.
Again.
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2: ROMEO & JULIET
“One night,” Knox whispered into her mouth as their kiss softened.
In the aftermath of Leah’s death, with all the attendant guilt and grief, Giselle understood that he needed her. She couldn’t say she didn’t need him that way, too, but…
“You know what I’m going to say,” she murmured, pulling away from him. She placed her palms on either side of his tanned, ruggedly handsome face and looked into his ice blue eyes. She studied him and for the first time noticed how he had aged under the weight of constant stress. Thirty-five going on forty-five. “If we ever have sex, it can’t happen because of something like this. We’re not teenagers anymore and it’s about fifteen years too late for us. All you want right now is comfort sex and I won’t do that. I deserve more, especially from you.”
He sighed.
“Besides, what about last month?”
He pulled away from her and stared at her warily. “What about last month?”
Her mouth pursed. “You know what about last month. I was there, remember? You took one look at that girl and you were a goner. I don’t know how you planned to work that out with marrying Leah considering your excruciating monogamy, but you weren’t subtle about it. What are you going to do with her now?”
“I hate having you in my classes.”
“Yeah, I hate having you as a professor, too, so we’re even.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he admitted and turned away from her to pace. He wiped a hand down his face. “My fiancée was just murdered because of me—”
“No, because of me. She was marrying you to save my ass, not yours. And she died for it. You think I don’t have guilt of my own?”
He stopped pacing and pointed at her. “But it was her decision to get married. I tried to talk her out of it and—Remember!—she was the one who didn’t want a bodyguard.”
“So now you’re stuck with the added guilt of falling in love with a woman you weren’t getting married to and can’t have anyway, and you want me to kiss your wittow owwie and make it all better.”
“Yes, I do,” he shot back. She found herself pulled into his arms again, his big hand wrapping around the back of her thigh, pressing her into his arousal, her skirt gathering over his wrist as he stroked upward. They kissed with the confidence and familiarity of thirty years of history.
Knox didn’t exactly overwhelm her with desire, but she had her doubts as to the existence of overwhelming desire anyway. Thirty-four and at the breaking point of her quest for celibacy, finally giving in and making love with the man who’d spent half his life being her boyfriend would be…convenient, an incredibly elegant solution to every issue that surrounded them.
Temptation rose within her, if only on an intellectual level, and it didn’t much matter that his arousal for her was conditioned reflex. Why should she expect him to give her what she couldn’t give him?
“Now, see, that’s the answer to the problem right there.”
The kiss ended abruptly with that smug pronouncement from the doorway and Giselle groaned as she turned and walked away from Knox and the man who had sought them out.
“Fuck you, Sebastian,” Knox snapped.
“No, fuck her,” Sebastian drawled. “Marry her. Knock her up. I don’t care in which order that happens. Start adoption proceedings. Something.”
Knox sighed. “Dude, I don’t need this right now. I’m burying my fiancée.”
“Yeah, and we’re going to be burying you next since Giselle won’t actually die when she’s torched and shot.”
That prediction held quite a bit of truth, so Giselle said nothing. Knox, too, remained silent.
She looked at her cousin out of the corner of her eye as he stared between her and Knox. Sebastian, at thirty-eight, was six-foot-two of classic black Irish. Despite his fair complexion and ice blue eyes, his trademark scowl exuded darkness and danger. Lanky yet muscular and cut underneath his custom tailoring, he had hair so black it gleamed navy and his heart-stoppingly handsome face did nothing to mitigate his sinister air. He was just…black.
“We’d kill each other before a year was out,” Knox muttered after a long moment.
Giselle couldn’t disagree with that and said so.
“You two have been together on and off since before you knew what tongues were for. Lots of people get married with less than what you have. Fen’s never going to believe you won’t end up together, so the only way to keep Giselle safe is for you to marry her. If she’s married to you, he won’t be able to go after her again without getting the entire KCPD up his ass. You hide behind the FBI, so let her hide behind you. Everybody’s safe and happy until the turnover of OKH to you.”
Giselle’s throat clogged and she wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly chilled to her soul. “Sebastian,” she murmured over her shoulder. “Just for one moment, think about the child we’d have to have to fulfill the proviso, will you? Leah came with a daughter, so that was the perfect solution. Marriage I could live with just to win the game because nothing would keep us from getting divorced as soon as possible. But a child? No. Whether we had one or adopted one would make no difference. It would bind us together for the rest of our lives. I love Knox dearly, but not that much and not that way anymore.”
“That about sums it up for me, too.”
“Oh, that explains the groping.”
“Let me put it this way: I refuse to have or adopt a child on such mercenary terms. It’s immoral and it would make both of us whores, so there really is no point to getting married at all.”
Sebastian said nothing for a moment, then, “Well. Now that you put it that way.”
“You know what?” Knox said. “Forget OKH. I don’t want it.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want it?”
“I have no interest in it and it’s not worth the price.”
Giselle turned to gape at him.
“Uh, Knox,” Sebastian said after a moment of stunned silence. “You’ve spent your entire life preparing to take over that company when you turn forty. When, exactly, did you have this change of heart?”
“The minute I became the Chouteau County prosecutor,” he snapped. “I can’t manage shit. I put people in jail and I teach. That’s all I’m good at.”
“That was eight years ago. Could you not have told us this sooner?”
He groaned. “I didn’t know how much I dreaded it until I was waiting for the wedding to start. I never got cold feet about getting married. I had cold feet about having to take a job I’m not suited for and don’t know how to do. Now, I have to take it because Fen’s killed two people to get it and keep it.”
Giselle raised her hand. “Uh, hello?”
“Quit whining. You’re still alive.”
Sebastian’s mouth tightened. “There are exactly two immediate solutions to the problem, neither of which you—or Giselle—are willing to carry out. So, of course it’s up to me to bail your ass out.”
“Nobody asked you to, so don’t act like you’re the martyr of the piece.”
“Well, I’ll be damned if I sit back and let him continue to walk all over you and Giselle like he did Oliver and Leah without consequence.”
“Sebastian,” Giselle said, impatient. “None of this is Knox’s fault. I don’t understand why you’re taking it out on him. And he did try.”
Sebastian grunted. “Well, that’s true. Knox, I’m sorry this is happening to you. However, since it is happening to you, you now have two options: Cut and run or stay and fight. Staying and doing nothing isn’t an option because he will not trust that you don’t want OKH anymore. How you fight is up to you, but what you’re doing hasn’t worked, so think of something else.” Giselle leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “Either kill the bastard or let Giselle do it. She’s earned the right to it at this point.”
She’d fantasized about it often enough.
“Whatever gets done to him, I have to do it,” Knox muttered.
“But you’re not doing anything,” Sebastian returned. “That’s my point.”
Neither Knox nor Sebastian said anything for the longest time, which was uncharacteristic. Giselle opened her eyes and looked from one stubbornly set face to the other. Knox finally opened his mouth but when nothing came out, he closed it with a snap. Giselle watched him speculatively, wondering if he would tell Sebastian he’d fallen in love with another woman not three weeks before.
Knox caught her look and glared at her in warning. Sebastian witnessed the exchange and awaited an explanation, but neither she nor Knox felt like enlightening him. Yet.
Giselle huffed. “You,” she said, pointing at Knox, “go back to your crooked little outfit up there in Chouteau County and act like the corrupt bastard that you are. Whether you want your inheritance or not, the only way you’re going to get out of it is by being dead. You,” she said, pointing at Sebastian, “business as usual. Any which way this turns out, you win so I don’t understand why you’re bitching and moaning over a smattering of extra paperwork that Jack’s taking care of anyway. You would’ve done this a long time ago if Knox had come to his epiphany earlier.”
“Congress.”
“Don’t use that as an excuse. There’s not enough brawn back there to string you up, much less brains. I daresay if you do get called up, you’ll find the whole thing a lark.” She pushed herself off the wall. “I’m going home. I’m tired.” Giselle strode toward the door, expecting that Sebastian would move out of her way. He did, but he raised an eyebrow in a futile attempt to intimidate her.
“And what are you going to do, my lovely?”
“You don’t need to know.”
* * * * *
“Don’t move.”
The distinguished silver-haired gentleman halted at the cold round pressure at the back of his head. He stiffened when Giselle wrapped her delicate hand around his throat, thumb and middle finger pressed just deeply enough into his carotids to keep him still.
She leaned forward so that her mouth brushed his ear.
“You are alive by the grace of Knox Hilliard, who has requested in good faith that I not kill you,” she whispered conversationally. “If you try to have me killed again, if you attempt to kill Knox at all, if you pull any more stunts like killing any future brides, I’ll consider that a breach of good faith on your part. I should kill you just for murdering Leah.
“Consider: I didn’t die in the fire your goons set. I didn’t die when your goons shot me. I’m alive and both of your goons are dead and barbecued—and the DA was happy I did him the favor of cleaning up after him. So instead of being in the ground, I’m here. With you. Your security hasn’t a clue and the only thing keeping me from putting a bullet in your head right now is Knox. Have you learned nothing about me over the last thirty years? Do you really think you can take me on and win?”
She felt his gulp against her fingertips.
“I didn’t think so. Good day to you, Fen. Oh, I almost forgot. Mom said to tell you Thanksgiving dinner’ll be at her house this year, two o’clock sharp, as usual.”
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3: READY-MIXED CONCRETE COMPANY, 1935
“Bryce, are you okay?”
Bryce sat in his leather chair looking out over the city. High up in One KC Place, corner office, all glass, he could see for miles. He pursed his lips as he held his fingers steepled under his chin.
“I’m fine,” he muttered, answering his assistant’s question without turning. He didn’t mind Arlene’s nosiness. It was nice to have a woman care about him, fuss over him, even if he did pay her to do it. His housekeeper did that, too. Her daily harangues about his need for a wife always made him smile and shake his head. This morning, however, he found no amusement in it whatsoever.
Lilith.
He’d spent the last two nights Googling that damned painting, studying it, re-reading its history and provenance and myth, comparing it to the woman who’d made him fantasize about things he hadn’t bothered to fantasize about in five years. It was part of the permanent collection in a gallery in England; he knew he had no hope of buying it, but he’d sent an email of inquiry anyway. Any price—he’d pay it. No one had responded.
Giselle.
Arlene snorted. “Fine, my ass.” Normally that would’ve pulled a grin out of him. Today… No.
Knox Hilliard’s mistress.
“Here’s your Wall Street Journal. Leah’s all over it.”
Bryce spun around and snatched it out of her hand, then snapped it open.
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OKHE bride murdered, groom suspected
Fen Hilliard, current CEO of OKH Enterprises, was questioned in the matter of Ms. Wincott’s death, but released after several hours. No evidence has been found to connect either F Hilliard or Knox Hilliard to her murder, but investigations of both continue in light of K Hilliard’s questionable reputation in his community and F Hilliard’s apparent motive.
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“I think Knox did it,” Arlene offered.
Bryce grunted. “He had no reason to,” he murmured. “But Fen sure as hell did.”
“Fen Hilliard would never do something like that,” Arlene said, low, her voice so full of anger it shocked Bryce. He looked up at her, puzzled. She went on. “Fen Hilliard signs the paychecks of half my family. He rescued OKH when we thought it was going to go under and he saved us. He’s a good man, a generous man.”
Ah, yes. Kansas City’s knight in shining armor. Fen had taken the rattletrap company his brother Oliver, Knox’s father, had built, saved it from failure, and turned it into a billion-dollar success. He’d also married Knox’s mother after a not-so-respectable mourning period, which always made Bryce’s eyebrow rise. This town saw Fen Hilliard as a kind and caring man and adored him for his generosity to his employees and the community.
Bryce tended to forget that his opinion of the CEO of OKH Enterprises differed greatly from everyone else’s. Then again, Arlene would hear nothing against Boss Tom Pendergast, either, considering that the man had made sure Prohibition never touched Kansas City and that his monopoly on government concrete contracts pulled Kansas City through the Depression relatively unscathed. Bryce shouldn’t have been surprised she would hold Fen in high regard.
“And,” she continued, “I would think you of all people would know better than assume someone’s guilty just because everything points in his direction.”
His eyebrow rose at that, just enough to let Arlene know she’d gone too far. Her mouth tightened and she turned to walk out of his office. He would’ve fired anyone else for saying that, true or not.
He went back to his paper.
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According to the terms of the proviso K Hilliard’s father had secretly approved and slipped into the corporate charter just days before his death, K Hilliard’s inheritance of OKH Enterprises is guaranteed so long as he is married and has a child by his 40th birthday.
When WSJ asked F Hilliard what these terms meant for his leadership, he said, “It’s my great pleasure to safeguard my nephew’s inheritance for him. I’m looking forward to the handoff so I can pursue other opportunities and maybe go fishing.”
There is some concern that F Hilliard’s decision to take the company public some years ago has actually made an end run around the proviso, but legal experts who have studied the clause have come to the consensus that K Hilliard will be entitled to the majority shares the company holds for itself and will be its de facto CEO at that point, and that his claim would hold up in court if challenged.
However, if K Hilliard does not fulfill the terms of the proviso, F Hilliard will remain at its helm indefinitely.
To complicate matters, K Hilliard’s cousin, financier Sebastian Taight, suddenly began to acquire OKHE stock at a steady pace two years ago. Taight is known across the country for his “Fix-or-Raid” protocol with regard to troubled companies that hire his consulting services. What he plans to do with OKHE whether K Hilliard inherits or not is unknown and Taight has refused to comment.
To date, K Hilliard’s wedding and announcement of a birth is the most anticipated social event on Wall Street and financial quarters across the country, especially as the deadline, K Hilliard’s 40th birthday, looms. If he fulfills the terms of the proviso, his net worth could increase by as much as a half billion dollars.
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Bryce didn’t think Fen should’ve been released so easily from questioning since he had so much to gain from Leah’s death. Lucky bastard. Bryce’s lip curled with cynical resentment. Bryce had spent days in interrogation for the murders of his wife and four children because he’d had so much to gain from his wife’s death. He’d been charged and his criminal trial docketed before the fire investigator had come back with the evidence that cleared him.
No, Knox hadn’t killed Leah; he had everything to lose, but it wouldn’t matter. Every lawyer in town joked that the FBI had been back and forth to the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office so many times, the Missouri Department of Transportation had to repave that section of highway every six months.
The successor to an already corrupt prosecutor’s office and blatantly continuing the tradition, Knox lived under the FBI’s microscope. Despite that, he had a reputation as the best prosecutor in the ten major counties that made up the Kansas City metro area. His true talent, though, lay in turning baby lawyers into courtroom lions; his name on an attorney’s CV guaranteed a stellar career path. Under Knox’s leadership, the Chouteau County prosecutor’s office had evolved into a residency program for litigators whose tales of corruption and dirty money had yet to be substantiated by the feds.
Knox Hilliard: Suspect Number One for his bride’s death on the basis of his reputation alone, which preceded him all the way to Washington.
In a sidebar:
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Yesterday, OKHE stock price plummeted in the wake of another of Sebastian Taight’s mass buys. The SEC is expected to disallow any more buys by Taight if he does not account for his voting record as a majority shareholder. In addition, there are some murmurings on Capitol Hill about the legitimacy and legality of Taight’s raids.
Senator Roger Oth (R-Penn.), Taight’s most vocal opponent, said today, “He and businessmen like him need to be brought to heel by someone with some power. As far as I can see, Congress is the only entity with that kind of power.” Before being elected to office, Senator Oth was the CEO of Jep Industries, a company Taight dismantled after having been hired to restructure and streamline its operations. Taight would give no reason for his decision to break Jep Industries.
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And Sebastian Taight was the monkey wrench in the power play between OKH’s current CEO and its heir. Venture capitalist Taight had his fingers in so many pies, nobody could keep track of them all; he even speculated heavily in art. Wall Street had given up trying to figure him out years ago. Though scrupulously honest, he had a reputation for taking any leverage where he could get it, being completely ruthless about it, and remaining silent to the press. The drumbeats on Capitol Hill calling for Taight’s head got a little louder every time he thumbed his nose at the SEC, every time he refused to explain his Fix-or-Raid policy. His aggressive takeover of OKH had sharply increased the Senate’s interest in hauling him before a panel hearing.
Taight had the power to crush both Fen and Knox Hilliard and to all appearances, he had begun the process. Until the night of Leah’s visitation, Bryce, along with the rest of the financial industry, had assumed Taight to be on the warpath with both Hilliards, but now…
Before Lilith—Giselle—had caught his eye, Bryce had observed Taight shouldering up with Knox, giving him support, not leaving him to face the cream of society (Bryce couldn’t really call them mourners) alone. The men were cousins, but they acted more like brothers. No, Taight wasn’t at war with Knox, which only left the question of why he wanted OKH so badly he was willing to destroy it to get it away from both Fen and Knox—and why Knox treated him like a brother anyway.
Fen Hilliard, Sebastian Taight, and Knox Hilliard, three of the most brilliant men in the midwest, were a family very publicly at war. Whatever else had gone wrong in that family, their collective genius couldn’t be dismissed.
Bryce’s email dinged and he glanced at it to see if it required immediate attention. The art gallery that had Lilith. His eyes widened and he clicked on the subject line.
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Re: Lilith
Dear Mr. Kenard,
Thank you for your inquiry regarding Lilith by the Hon. John Collier. We regret to inform you that the painting is not for sale. Please let us know if there is anything else we may be able to help you with.
Curator
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Though Bryce knew he wouldn’t have been able to have it at any price, disappointment still struck him behind his breastbone. He went to a website he’d bookmarked and pulled up Lilith. As he stared at it, he wondered what it would take to possess the real one, the one in the little black dress who answered to the name of Giselle.