The Proviso Read Free

it clear enough all week.”
    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 not even
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. You’re so not his type,” she muttered,
and with one last look of sheer disgust, she let Sherry 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.
     
     
     
     
     
    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 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 last event in the debacle of the most awaited and debated
wedding on Wall Street.
    Two weeks earlier, 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 folding chair in front of
her. Dull blonde corkscrews cascaded just beyond her shoulders. She
had already plowed her fingers through them several times in a
futile effort to keep them out of her eyes. Finally, she huffed,
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 had risen
until the hem caught on something indiscernible about her thigh
that was distinctly out of place. It