The Proviso Read Free Page A

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,
nodded once, and spoke. 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 fabrics 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, loath 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.
    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, flared in his mind. He thought he’d
never catch his 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 at the other end of the building, 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 of air. “Okay, okay,” came a man’s
voice. Knox Hilliard’s—the fiancé of the woman in the casket. “You
were right. 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, too, Knox. I shouldn’t have said
that.”
    There was a pause, then the sound of rustling
fabric. Bryce risked a peek around the corner and saw her engulfed
in Hilliard’s arms, his