Magdalene (26 page)

The music that poured out of the speakers
was some innocuous bubble gum pop, and the three of us requested
skates without need for payment. I looked around. Concession was
open and the non-skaters were already lined up for hot chocolate
and snacks, with no money changing hands. I cast a glance at Mitch,
who just shrugged.

“Allergies?” he asked wryly as he touched
his gloved thumb to my face.

“Yes, and I forgot my Benadryl.”

“Benadryl,” he muttered, shaking his
head.

We all sat to put on our skates, then set
out slowly around the outside of the rink. I listened as the two
men chatted about their callings. I might have felt left out were
it not for Mitch keeping me close to his side, holding my hand,
always making sure I knew he had not forgotten me.

“Now, you know,” Father Farraday drawled,
“half the congregation wants to skate with you.”

I felt Mitch chuckle. “They’ll have to ask
Cassandra. She’s got first dibs.”

And again the priest glanced at me
that
way
.

“Ah, Mitch, can I talk to you a minute? I’ve
got a parish problem I could sure use some advice on.”

“Not now, Rory,” Mitch said. Almost anyone
would have missed the slight edge in his voice, including Father
Farraday, but not I; I’d heard it before. The Mormon bishop was
receding in favor of the CEO of Hollander Steelworks—and the CEO of
Hollander Steelworks could be a mean son of a bitch when he was
crossed. If pushed, he would not play well with others.

“Mitch—”

“Not. Now.”

Father Farraday froze and stared at Mitch.
Mitch stared back, daring him to say another word about it. What
had I thought when I first met him? That he was the ordinary man
amongst the other, more extraordinary men in his milieu?

No.

Mitch fit right in with that pack of wolves
he considered his family, as capable of the same ruthlessness as
the rest of them.

Father Farraday smiled again and clapped
Mitch on the back and skated smoothly away to see to his
congregation’s fun.

Mitch looked at me then, his expression one
of mixed regret and humor.

“His colleague is in my little black book,”
I muttered wryly, not surprised when Mitch flashed me a grin. “I
guess the archbishop decided it’d be a good idea for Father
Farraday to stake him out and find out where and with whom the good
reverend was sinning. Nip that bad PR in the bud.”

“You’re pricey, so how...?”

“No idea, but I didn’t care. I will say
this: He was terribly pedestrian. Easiest money I ever made.”

Mitch threw back his head and laughed, a
warm, rich sound that seemed to fill me up with gladness.

“I don’t know why they bothered,” I
continued. “I’m a woman and an adult, so relatively speaking, I
wouldn’t be any kind of a scandal at all.”

“Money.”

“I don’t think so. What he spent on me— Not
even close to what all those lawsuits cost.” I paused. “You know,”
I mused. “All he really needed was an intelligent woman’s company.
To talk, laugh.”

Mitch made a vague noise of sympathy. “So
you have a thing for clergy.”

“I had a client who
happened
to be
clergy; I’ve only ever had a
thing
for one man of God—and in
eight weeks I haven’t gotten so much as a kiss from
him
.”

“Gripe, gripe, gripe,” he murmured, coming
to a slow stop in one corner of the rink, my hand in his. He gave
me that heavy-lidded look, took my glove off and raised my hand to
press his mouth softly into my palm. I bit my lip when his tongue
just touched my skin, daring me to ask for more.

I couldn’t, not when he had just made one
otherwise innocent little gesture the equivalent of an evening of
foreplay. My pulse thundered in my ears and I couldn’t breathe.

“Stop,” I whispered, wanting the exact
opposite. I was panicking. I knew that. How easily he could arouse
me—with
nothing
!

I hadn’t felt this powerless in years, and
certainly had never found powerlessness to feel so
delicious
.

He smirked and slowly drew away, but
apparently only to lace his warm, calloused fingers in mine—when
had he taken his glove off?—then wrapped his other arm around my
waist, pulled me up against him and we began to sway to the stupid
muzak as if we hadn’t spent all night dancing to real music, full
of fire and passion. His mouth brushed my temple and then down to
my ear.

“Patience.”

I gulped. “Mitch, I—” I what? He already
knew. Had known from the moment he first asked me to dinner. “What
are you doing to me?”

“Just playin’ the game you wanted to play,
Cassandra,” he murmured as he touched my neck with his lips,
barely, light, butterfly. “Notice you’re not winning.”

God, no, and I had never been so happy to be
on the losing end of anything in my life. I swallowed. “Is this the
Mormon version of Tantric sex?”

He stilled, and I could feel his wide grin
against the underside of my jaw. “I guess you could say that.”

* * * * *

Every Member
a Missionary

February 13, 2011

Quite frankly, I didn’t know how Mitch would
react when he saw me on his turf uninvited. After the research I
had done, I was confused about why he hadn’t simply invited me,
though I could think of about three or four plausible explanations.
Asking him to bring me would have muddied the waters in a
different, though no less turbulent, direction; thus, I took the
decision out of his hands.

It had taken me a bit of maneuvering around
his church’s website to find out where he’d be on Sunday and at
what time, but I needed more information. Thus I had, with
surprising nervousness, called Morgan Ashworth. I was unwilling to
expose that much of myself to Sebastian, whose first loyalty was to
Mitch.

“Why, it’s Cassandra St. James, as I live
and breathe. What can I do for you to
day
?”

“What do you think? You know how much I love
fucking gay men.”

His booming laugh set me at ease, as it had
every time I had spoken with him. “And you are the only woman who’s
ever tempted me.”

“I do seem to have that effect on you
all.”

“So, m’dear...” he drawled slyly, and I
heard the creak of an office chair being relaxed into. “I’ve been
hearing some very interesting tidbits and piecing together a sweet
little story about your current love life or lack thereof,
depending on your definition.”

I should’ve known. “You’re the only one,
apparently. I had to spell it out for Nigel.”

“Ah, but my network is diverse, complex, and
intersects in the most interesting ways, which is to say, almost
never.”

“Okay, well, don’t ask me to explain it
because I can’t. What I want you to do is get me to the church on
time.” Shocked silence. “That was a joke. Tell me all the gory
details of your super secret rituals so I don’t make an ass of
myself.”

More silence. Then, “Freud would adore
you.”

“Bite me. Just give me the information I
need, since it appears I have to have a decoder ring to figure out
what the Romans do.”

He grunted and his chair creaked again. I
heard papers shuffling in the background, books being tossed on a
desk. “You have the whens and the wheres?”

“Yes. Bishop Mitchell Grant Hollander,
Bethlehem Second Ward, Nazareth Stake. Nine a.m.”

“Okay then. Protocol. Do you want the short
course or the long explanation?”

“Whatever I need.”

“All right. First, Sunday is a twelve-hour
day for a bishop. He won’t have much time, if any, to spend with
you. He’ll be swamped with meetings and paperwork and fires to put
out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t even see you at all
unless you let him know you’re there and he won’t be able to see
you after church. Sit back and observe, soak up the atmosphere. The
more you understand about our culture, the better you’ll understand
Mitch.”

Sounded reasonable to me.

“Are you
sure
you want to do this
without him to help you?”

“I can see it’d be problematic for him, but
I don’t really understand why.”

“Fair enough.” Damn. I’d hoped he’d take the
hint and tell me. “The meeting is three hours long—”

“Three hours!” I barked and he laughed.

“I forgot how abnormal that is. Here’s the
basics. A little over an hour is the main service, called sacrament
meeting. Another hour is for your regulation Protestant Sunday
school. The other hour you’ll spend in a class with the women of
the ward. It’s called Relief Society. The order in which those
three things happen is up for grabs.”

Segregation by gender? Interesting. “What do
the men do that one hour?”

“They have the same lesson the women do,
talk about ward business, who in the ward needs what service
performed for them.”

“Tell me something. Why wouldn’t Mitch have
invited me to go? I thought you all were about conversion.”

“How long have you been seeing him?”

“Eight weeks.” Very long ones.

“Has he said much about it?”

“Bare bones. I’ve had to research most of
what I know myself.”

Ashworth said nothing for a long moment. “I
don’t know Mitch that well,” he finally said. “Or at least, not as
well as Sebastian does. He does a lot of things I don’t understand
when he does them, but then are perfectly rational in hindsight, so
I wouldn’t second-guess him, either as a businessman or a
bishop.”

And that was, in a nutshell, what intrigued
me about the man.

“I—” I drew a deep breath. “Should I say I’m
with him if it comes up?”

“That’s up to you.”

“They won’t think I’m... Um...”
Shit
.
I hardly ever stumbled for words. “I don’t want to embarrass him or
discredit him in front of his parishioners.”

“It won’t occur to anybody to think you’re
sleeping with him. The default assumption will be that you’re
engaged in a chaste courtship.”

I blinked. “That’s the
default
?”

He paused. “Has he given you any reason to
think it wouldn’t be?”

Well, no, he hadn’t.

But Greg Sitkaris sure had.

“Okay. He’s an ecclesiastical leader. But
all
of them?”

“Cassie,” he said with some irritation,
“this is the way we live our lives. I understand that it’s foreign
to you and most everyone else, but in our world, chastity for
unmarried people is the expectation. It’s
normal
. It’s not
easy, but it is normal.

“Now, you know how much I love you, but I’m
serious about this. If all you’re trying to do is get a celibate
Mormon bishop into bed, don’t delude yourself into thinking you can
do it with Mitch. If you want to get him in bed, you’ll have to
marry him to do it—and he can out-wait Lucifer himself.”

Stung, I blurted, “That’s not all—” I bit my
tongue.

“However,” he said right over the top of my
unfortunate slip, “if I get a hint of a whiff that you’re going to
try to wear him down, I’ll make you regret it.”

Though Ashworth was the only man in the
world who could make me back down, it wasn’t his threat that bugged
me.

But he continued to deliver rapid-fire
instructions, a map to help a non-Mormon navigate her first visit
to a Mormon church alone. I relaxed.

No, this wasn’t a man attempting to save
John Lennon from Yoko Ono.

Yet.

“You won’t be able to pass for a member of
the Church, so don’t bother to lie and say you’re visiting from
somewhere else. If you don’t tell them who you’re with, they’ll
assume you’re there as an investigator. They’ll wonder why you
don’t have missionaries with you and then you’ll get assigned a
pair; I don’t know if that interests you, so you’ll have to deal
with that as you see fit. If you’re not interested but you still
don’t want to use Mitch to dodge the missionaries, tell them you
just walked in or you’re from out of town and wanted to go to a
church and it was the most convenient. Something.

“If you do say you’re with Mitch, try to
make yourself known to him first thing so he doesn’t get ambushed.
I don’t know the politics of his ward, but every ward has
some.”

...politically delicate.

“It’d be like...walking into a small town
diner where everybody knows your business before you do. People
won’t assume you’re sleeping with him, no, but they
will
assume that he’s vetted you as appropriate bishop’s wife
material—”

Bishop’s wife.
God.

“—and that, because you have shown up, a
wedding is imminent.”

I gulped.

“That’ll make things iffy for one or both of
you. You’re dating a bishop. That
never
happens because
there is no such thing as a single Mormon bishop. The real
complication is you’re not a member. They should’ve released him
when Mina required round-the-clock care, especially considering how
long he’d been bishop. But now he’s got an almost-empty nest, time,
and money, so I can see why they haven’t.”

“What’s money got to do with it?”

“It means he has the luxury of spending work
hours conducting ward business.”

“He told me he spends thirty hours a
week.”

Morgan said nothing for a second or two.
“Well, I’m only a second counselor and I spend fifteen or twenty by
myself, but, you know, I’m single and I have money, too. I take a
lot of the burden off my bishop’s shoulders so he can spend some
time with his family.”

I paused because I wanted to ask, but it was
terribly gauche. My curiosity won out. “Um, I was wondering about
that... You’re in a leadership position, but you’re gay? How does
that work?”

“Doesn’t matter as long as I’m celibate. If
I had sex with a man, I’d receive the same disciplinary action as
if I had sex with a woman out of wedlock.”