Read Online The Proviso by Moriah Jovan - Free Book Online

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