Magdalene (17 page)

“And you’re dating
my
mother?” she
squeaked. “Do you
know
—”

“Yes,” he said, an edge to his voice. “I
do.”

“So you have a thing for whores?” she
sneered.

“Your mother is an extraordinary woman, but
you
are a spoiled br— Don’t you
dare
shut that door
on me,” he snarled.

Oh. My. God.

He was livid and I was wet.

There
was
an angry man under all that
sanguinity, with passion to burn—and I was lame enough to chuckle
at my own joke.

“Okay,” I said, breezing out of the kitchen
and snagging my coat along the way. Mitch’s big hand was splayed
out on the door, holding it open against Clarissa’s attempt to slam
it. “Sorry about that. Had to finish paying a couple of bills and
the site wouldn’t load.”

Mitch didn’t break his rock-hard stare at
Clarissa, who stared back, wide-eyed. Hypnotized. “Good evening,
Cassandra.”

“Mitch. Thank you, Clarissa. I’ve got
it.”

I could barely contain my snickers as I
stepped out and closed the door behind me, Clarissa having fled
immediately.

“Why do you put up with that?” he asked
tightly.

“Oh, don’t start,” I said. “I get it enough
from Nigel.”

“Tracey puts up with it? The
same
Nigel Tracey who took down two banks single-handedly because their
CEOs offended him?”

“He doesn’t have much of a choice. It would
hurt Gordon’s feelings. Besides, those banks were already on the
edge, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I could’ve done it on a
Friday afternoon if I’d felt like going to the effort.”

Mitch grunted as he opened the door of my
car, and handed me in. “Maybe Gordon’s feelings need to be hurt,”
he muttered once he’d slid in beside me and given Sheldon an
address I didn’t recognize.

“The girls need somewhere to run when
Mommy’s being a big bad bitch,” I said.

“Oh, I get it. Fun parent, mean parent, and
the stepdad won’t do anything.”

“Precisely.”

“And the guy Mom’s dating gets to be her
enforcer.”

“Only because he’s so
good
at
it.”

“Would you be dating anybody who
wasn’t?”

“Absolutely not. ‘Spoiled brat.’ True, but
clichéd.” He sighed and I chuckled. “I
do
have reservations
made.”

“Cancel ’em,” he said shortly. “You had no
intention of paying anyway.”

I did as he instructed and smirked when he
realized I would have had to call in a few favors to get that
particular reservation. He bit back a smile and shook his head.
“Now,” I said when I turned my phone off. “I do have something
planned for after dinner that’s non-negotiable.”

He grunted. “Good thing or I would’ve taken
you to the concert in spite of your inexplicable dislike of ZZ
Top.”

“No,
loathing
. Is that a
dealbreaker?”

“Very well could be.”

The ride was a short one, almost a straight
shot across Central Park to the Upper West Side. We pulled up in
front of a beautifully maintained brownstone on a quiet,
tucked-away street. The address was as chichi as mine.

He said nothing as he handed me out—

“Seven-thirty,” I murmured to Sheldon, who
nodded.

—and escorted me down the stairs to the
servants’ entrance. He rapped on the door in what sounded like
code.

“Mitchell!” cried the old woman who’d opened
the door. The smells of borscht and lamb teased my nose. That
explained the accent. “Oh, you darling boy! You have been gone from
me so long!”

“Mrs. Andronnikov,” he murmured, picked up
her hand and kissed the back of it. “I dream of you every
night.”

Mrs. Andronnikov looked past him at me and
beamed. “Oh, and your lovely new lady friend, hello! Come in, come
in!”

Mitch ushered me in with a gentle hand on my
back, and I looked around. It was a restaurant—with exactly five
tables-for-two tucked into semi-private corners, all but one of
them occupied. It was dark, all the better to disguise some of the
gaudy Russian décor.

Mrs. Andronnikov, a large woman clad in what
looked like a cotton house dress under a stained apron—she had
house slippers on her feet—led us to our table, upon which sat an
enormous crystal vase full of orange roses.

“These are the right ones,
nyet
?”

“Perfect, Mrs. Andronnikov, thank you. This
is Cassandra. Cassandra, a dear friend of mine, Polina Andronnikov.
Her husband was my first foreman at Bethlehem Steel, and she babied
me terribly. Still does.”

I liked this look into Mitch’s past, the
kinds of connections he’d made in his life, and I smiled. I
couldn’t not. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Andronnikov.”

“Please! Call me Polina. Mitchell is not
allowed, you see.
He
must show respect, but for you, I am
Polina.”

“Thank you. I’m Cassie.”

I sniffed the roses before Mitch seated me,
before he handed the vase off to a wraith of a busboy I hadn’t seen
and gave him my address. So many questions, and the orange roses
weren’t at the top of the list. I didn’t even know where to
start.

“How long has this place been here?” I
asked.

“Mmmm, ten years? I think.”

I ran through my mental contact list to
figure out who would know about this restaurant and how— And why
didn’t
I
know about it?

A Russian matron whose retired husband was
Mitch’s first foreman back in the mid ’80s and had babied a teenage
steel worker— In a brownstone on the Upper West Side, with exactly
five tables—

“My God. You funded this place.”

He grinned and took a sip of the water
already on the table.

“Does it have a name?”

He shrugged. “If it does, I don’t know what
it is.”

“No menu?”

He shook his head. “You get whatever she
feels like cooking for you.”

“This is...wonderful,” I breathed, the
scents making my mouth water, and the rich ambiance putting me in
the mood for something I knew I wouldn’t get—
How
had I
missed this place? “
Thank
you.”

“I’m trying to impress a pretty girl.”

I might have laughed, but his sincerity had
the hint of a question, of insecurity. It was too important to
laugh off. “You’re succeeding.” I paused, then blurted, “You’re
very complex.”

He slid me a look. “Most people are.” I said
nothing. “Take Clarissa, for example.”

“You don’t know Clarissa.”

“I know enough to know that if she didn’t
need you for some reason, she wouldn’t be living with you.”

“What?”

“Tell me something. If she wanted to go live
with Gordon and Tracey, would she be welcome?”

“Oh, yes. Gordon adores the girls and they
adore him. Nigel treats them all like kittens.”

“And would she be allowed to live her life
the same way she does now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. So why does she live with you?”

I blanked.

“You said Helene sleeps at the hospital
because she doesn’t want to be around you, but she’s a resident.
She’d sleep there most of the time anyway, so she has no reason to
move. Paige also has a job that requires her to work on Friday
nights. I’m going to guess Olivia’s either working, out, or getting
ready to go out. But Clarissa... She wasn’t dressed to go anywhere.
She’s pretty, single, in college, has a driver and money. It’s
Friday night. Shouldn’t she be out on a date?”

“Uh...usually, Friday night is— Uh, she and
I— We usually spend it together. Watch movies. Eat pizza and ice
cream. Drink beer.”

His eyes narrowed. “No wonder she’s upset.”
Why
had I told him that? “Does she hang around the house a
lot when you’re home?”

“Well,” I mused. “I suppose so. She and I...
We have a strange relationship.”

“So she’s getting something from you that
she needs other than a weekly movie-night bonding session with her
mommy, or she wouldn’t stay.”

That was too much of a stretch. “How did you
get that from the entire twenty words you’ve exchanged with
her?”

“Thirteen years of counseling and
interviewing people who are sometimes pretty desperate to keep
themselves from me.”

Shit.

“Would it bother you if I have wine?” I
asked abruptly, needing to talk about something else.

“No. Why?”

“Because I really need a drink.”

He laughed then, and, like magic, a wine
bucket appeared at my elbow and a sommelier I recognized—late of
Per Se—had the bottle open and a glass poured for me before I could
say a word.

“How—” Oh, fuck it. If this old Russian frau
could afford to woo the head sommelier of a glam restaurant, I
wasn’t going to second-guess the wine. I took a sip, closed my eyes
and let the flavor devour me.

“I think she likes it,” Mitch said dryly,
and I felt the sommelier’s presence fade.

“This is...” I couldn’t speak above a
whisper. “...the best wine I have ever had.”

“You can thank Mrs. Andronnikov for that,”
he murmured. “Between my ignorance of wine and my ignorance of your
tastes, I wasn’t sure how you’d like it.”

“And where—!” I jumped. There was Polina at
our table again, this time sliding a small service of caviar
between us. She straightened and glared down at Mitch. “Where is
that good-for-nothing brother of yours?”

Mitch’s brow wrinkled. “He said he was here
last month.”

“
Da
,” she breathed, “and with his
lovely
wife. He does not deserve her, you know.”

Another ghost of a waiter slipped between
Polina and me to add a service of pickled herring surrounded by
fresh pumpernickel, and a dish of crisp crackers.

“But!” she was saying. “A month is too long!
He is to paint my dining room and let me feed his children.”

“I’ll give him a nudge.”

She turned in a huff and disappeared around
a dark corner I hadn’t seen.

“Your brother?”

“Sebastian,” Mitch said, as he took a
cracker and spooned a bit of caviar on it. I followed his lead, and
my experience with caviar told me this was some of the best. “Mrs.
Andronnikov can lead him around by his nose with her food. He’s
painted murals over every inch of this house—more than once. In a
style he hates. If he doesn’t, she won’t feed him.”

I looked at the wall on my right and, though
it was really too dark to see, I felt a little dizzy knowing I was
sitting next to what, in the art world at the moment, amounted to a
fortune.

I was completely, thoroughly charmed. “Oh,
Mitch.” They were the only words I had. “This place...the
wine...”

“It was worth it,” he murmured, staring at
me, heavy-lidded. He slid down in his seat a little, relaxed,
stretched his long legs out under the table, just brushing mine.
“The look on your face, I mean.”

I swallowed. Was that an
innuendo
Bishop Hollander had just thrown at me?

“And,” he said low, slow, never blinking,
“you haven’t really started eating. I can’t
wait
to see how
you react to that.”

My God, the man was seducing me, and very
effectively at that.

“Mitch,” I said abruptly. “I need to know—
Why doesn’t it bother you I’ve been a whore?”

“Because it’s an honest exchange,” he
answered immediately, sitting up straight again. The spell was
broken. “No long fake courtship. No fake marriage. No living with a
person you despise. No deceiving the other person, who may actually
be in love. In my opinion, that’s a far worse sort of
prostitution.”

Our second course came. Borscht. But not
just any borscht— I looked down at my spoon full of red liquid,
startled by a lovely flavor I couldn’t identify.

Mitch went on once the waiter disappeared.
“I don’t
like
it, because prostitution comes with a big bag
of its own problems, especially for people who are desperate—and
you weren’t. But I also wouldn’t be here if I were interested in
condemning you.” He paused as he took a bit of pickled herring, a
dab of what I assumed to be mayonnaise, and laid them on a piece of
pumpernickel. “I’ll admit I’m completely mystified as to
why
you did it, because you could’ve made your fortune back in a dozen
other ways, but I’ll figure it out.”

“You could
ask
me.”

“I did. You lied to me.”

“I did not!”

“You said you were bored. Bzzt. Wrong
answer.” I glared at him over the rim of my wine glass. “Are you
going to pout now?”

“Yes.”

“Mmmm, okay.”

“You like bad girls. That’s what it is.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, so what?”

“Was Mina a bad girl?”

“Other than eloping with a guy her father
hates? No.”

“Did she
want
to be?”

That drew him up short. “She liked to play
at it here and there,” he admitted gruffly. Looked at his plate and
smiled. “Things she thought were risqué.” Chuckled a little. “She
never made it to bad. Just cute.”

“I don’t get you,” I said flatly. “When was
the last time you had sex?”

He pursed his lips in thought. “Let’s see...
Trevor’s seventeen, so...eighteen years.”

“And your sex life wasn’t anything to write
home about.”

“How would I know? I don’t have anything
else to compare it to. I did get three kids out of the deal, no
divine intervention necessary.”

“But you—a celibate Mormon bishop—are dating
a woman who made her money on her back and now goes around the
country browbeating CEOs.”

Heaving an exasperated sigh, he said, “Jesus
didn’t hang out with the Pharisees, Cassandra. The people he hung
out with were considered the fringes of society, the sick, the
poor, the working class, the Romans, the tax collectors, the
prostitutes.” He raised an eyebrow. “And he loved them all.”

“You’re not Jesus.”

“Not even close. Like tonight. I should
never have popped off at Clarissa like that.”