Magdalene (32 page)

Had my children ever been that delighted to
see me? If so, I didn’t remember.

Mitch was still asleep on the sofa in the
waiting room and while I was hesitant to wake him up, I needed to
get him home, bathed, and tucked in bed as if he were one of those
children.

To take care of my soon-to-be husband.

* * * * *

An Innocent
Man

February 14, 2011

Mitch opened his eyes at the soft hand on
his shoulder and looked up at the most beautiful woman he’d ever
seen.

Her sudden proposal had shocked him, but now
that she’d opened the door, he wasn’t going to let her close it
again.

He reached up to her and pulled her to him
to kiss her as he had last night; whatever morals he still had
left, he resented at this moment. He could think of nothing he
wanted more than to take her home and make love to her.

Yet...

Somewhere in the back recesses of his mind,
he dreaded her reaction to his relative inexperience—relative to
any other man his age, that was. He knew enough to know he wasn’t
going to be a good lover to Cassandra without her help, her
instruction. He hoped she would be patient with him long enough to
learn what would please her.

Kissing, though, that he did well, he knew.
He hadn’t kissed a woman since before Mina had slipped into the
last stage of her disease, but he’d had lots of practice at it
before then. Kissing was all he’d been allowed before marriage to
any woman and he’d taken advantage of it with abandon.

And Mina... While she hadn’t cared for
actual intercourse, she’d adored kissing him, making out with
him—preferably in the back of the car.

“I could fuck you right now, Mitch
Hollander,” Cassandra breathed into his mouth, and he laughed,
delighted to the depths of his wannabe-bad-boy soul that a woman
felt comfortable enough with him to say something so vulgar.

“Cassandra,” he said as he sat up and pulled
her down to sit beside him. He wrapped his fingers up with hers and
took a breath. “I don’t know much about this.”

“I know.” Her mouth twitched with humor she
didn’t want to show. “It’s cute.”

“Puppy dog cute or little boy cute?”

She pursed her lips. “More like randy
adolescent kid with the keys to the car on prom night with his
pretty girlfriend cute.” She took a deep breath. “I was serious
when I said I was bored.”

That took him out of the moment and annoyed
him. “Okay, look. I know you’re lying. You know you’re lying. But
I’m not going to wade through that right now. I’m tired and I
stink.”

“Yeah, you do.”

He laughed. “You don’t cut anybody any
slack, do you?”

“I don’t lie so someone can save face, no.
Now,” she said in that same commanding tone she’d used to take such
capable charge of Johnny’s children. “Get your ass up and into my
car. I’ll let you shower and then put you to bed. I should take
advantage of your weakened state and do what I want to do to you.
Including,” she said, her voice dropping half an octave and taking
on a decidedly husky tone, “sucking your cock.”

He pulled in a sharp breath as that
particular body part made itself known and eager for her. It didn’t
help that he had to think about whether or not to take her up on
it, but then he sighed and arose. He dropped his arm around her
shoulder and pulled her close. She felt good there. Right. She’d
feel better if they were both naked.

“I’m not that tired. In for a penny, in for
a pound.”

“Damn, you’re stubborn.”

“I’m infamous for my patience. A third of
the former CEOs in America despise me for it.”

“Hence, ‘former.’”

“Precisely.” He leaned against her all the
way out to her rental, then asked, “Have you ever thought about
being a school teacher?”

He felt her stiffen against him. As she
stuffed him in the passenger side, she said, “That was a foolish
thing to say. I hate children and you should know me well enough by
now to know that.”

“Remind me to let Trevor know the master
liar has competition,” he returned when she dropped into the
driver’s seat.

“Why don’t you ever act like I think you
should?”

“How do you think I should act?”

“Like a Mormon bishop, that’s what, all
judgmental and stuff.”

“How would you know what a Mormon bishop’s
supposed to act like? I’m the only one you’ve ever met. I daresay
I’m the only real
Mormon
you’ve ever met, since most of my
makeshift family isn’t exactly sterling.”

She huffed and he grinned as he relaxed back
against the seat and watched her. She refused to return his look,
which he found vastly amusing.

“Brother Johnston, Brittany’s father,” he
said deliberately, to see how far he could push her before she
blurted something he could work with. Her mouth tightened and she
swallowed. “He’s been out of work for almost a year. Their house
was scheduled to be foreclosed on in a couple of months. Your
cufflinks will get them out from under a mountain of debt. But you
didn’t know that, so why’d you give them to her?”

A glimmer appeared in her eye, then a tear
ran down her cheek. He expected the words
allergies
and
Benadryl
to pop out at any moment. “I don’t know. Does it
matter? The girl liked them, so I gave them to her. I just— I
didn’t mean to hurt her mother’s pride.”

“You didn’t. She was distressed that you
might not know what you’d given her. She knew their value and she
thought you’d made a mistake. She didn’t want to take them under
false pretenses.”

Cassandra’s pretty eyes widened and she shot
him a look filled with hope. “Oh?” she asked, keeping her tone
carefully neutral. Either she was well practiced with the mixed
signals or she didn’t have a clue how easily he could read her.
Mitch was betting heavily on the latter.

“Yes,
oh
. I told her you knew exactly
what they were worth, that you had plenty more where that came
from, and to consider it a gift from the Lord.”

She kept driving, her eyes determinedly on
the road and her knuckles white. “Why are you telling me this?
Isn’t that confidential?”

“Their financial situation is no secret.
They just don’t know
I
paid their mortgage. They—and
everybody else—think the Church paid it. So keep it to
yourself.”

That got her to look at him again. “But you
said—”

“I said it was scheduled to be foreclosed on
and I said your cufflinks would get them out from under a mountain
of debt. I didn’t say you paid their mortgage arrears.”

Cassandra put her hand to her mouth. It
trembled and Mitch thought how much he could love this woman if
she’d let him.

Mina was the love of his youth, their union
a rough, uncertain lump of carbon, formed slowly and flawlessly
into a sparkling diamond under the pressures of life.

But Cassandra—

Oh, she was the most perfect of alloys, the
purest of metals in the most precise combination fired by the most
extremes of heat—to steel her against the trauma that was her
marriage and divorce, the one thoroughly documented in the court
system.

She would be the love of his life.

If
she would let him get close enough
long enough to crack open her shell.

When Sabrina had caught him to ask him to
give Cassandra’s diamonds back, he’d told Sabrina with full
confidence that Cassandra knew their value.

But nobody just gives thousands of dollars
of jewels away, Bishop! Especially to people they don’t know!

Yes, sometimes they do. Heavenly Father
answered your prayers, Sabrina. That’s how He works—through other
people—and trust me, she won’t miss them. Go home tonight and say a
prayer of gratitude, then take a little vacation up to Manhattan so
you can go to the diamond district. Sell them and buy Brittany
rhinestone replacements she can play with.

But—

Don’t. If you didn’t need them, it’d be
different. Go on now.

It had taken his investigators some more
digging, but he’d finally figured out why she’d gone into
prostitution.

She very definitely knew why.

Now he needed to know why she’d kept it to
herself all these years, lied about it to the detriment of her
relationship with her daughters.

Daughters she loved dearly and had no idea
how to handle.

Mitch needed to dig it out of her, make her
explain it, hear it in her words, but at this point, he didn’t care
whether it was before or after he got her in bed—and he wasn’t
above exploiting his reputation for sneakiness to do it.

He knew what Sebastian would say, could hear
it in his head right now: “Dammit, Elder, don’t
marry
her.
If all you want is to get laid, just fuck her and be done with it.
None of that messy divorce shit afterward when you figure out it
wasn’t the smartest thing you’ve ever done.” And he’d be right.
Intellectually, Mitch knew this. It was the circumnavigation to get
to his goal that Sebastian—and, by extension, Trevor—would find
ludicrous and Mitch no less so, really.

Mitch knew what Cassandra
said
she
wanted and she probably believed that. She knew she wouldn’t get
him in bed any other way, but there was something more, something
he couldn’t put his finger on. Marriage to her would give him the
opportunity to suss it out, to be skin-to-skin with her so he could
do that more efficiently.

Mina had always been more willing to tell
him her secret fears, hopes and dreams after making love than she
was any other time, deep in the night when she was vulnerable,
lying in his arms naked after having had the bond of his body in
hers.

He didn’t know if that happened with
everyone and he shouldn’t assume it would work with Cassandra,
considering what she’d done for a living. She would have had to
learn how to put any need for such intimacy aside to do the
job.

But he’d taken this gamble before and won,
and he had no reason to think he would lose this time.

Sebastian might think him nuts, but Bryce
would understand completely. He’d taken the same chance himself
with a woman he’d known less than a day and seduced immediately.
He’d married her two weeks after that. Four years and one child
later, after his and Giselle’s excommunications, through his
ongoing treatment for PTSD, Giselle was still pulling him out of
the hell he’d lived through before he’d met her, still loving him
and taking care of him.

Bryce would approve of this route, and he
was no fool.

Cassandra’s phone rang from her open purse
between Mitch’s feet. He grabbed it before she could, answering her
half-hearted glare with the smirk that never failed to fluster her.
He looked at the caller ID.

“What,” he barked.

Stunned silence. “I’m looking for Cassie St.
James,” Jack Blackwood said carefully.

“Yeah, but you
got
Mitch Hollander.”
Jack choked and Mitch couldn’t help his wicked chuckle. Cassandra
sighed. “She’s indisposed. I need her for a while, so don’t expect
her until you see her. Have her assistant cancel her appointments
for the week.” He terminated the call, dropped the phone in her
purse, and leaned back against the passenger door, silently daring
her to say a word.

But her mouth twitched and she began to
snicker, then chuckle, then laugh.

“He’d have fired me if any of his other
clients had done that.”

“He has his uses. Entertainment is one of
them.”

Her mouth dropped open in delighted
amazement, her eyes suddenly sparkling with humor. “You do that on
purpose.”

He flashed her a grin. “I do. It’s fun to
watch him dance around me.” He pointed out the window. “Turn left
here.”

As she turned onto Mitch’s estate, he looked
at it with new eyes. Winter made it bleak, but the house—well, he
hadn’t
seen
the house in years, and it surprised him now
that he lived in something so grand. Almost alone. Trevor would be
gone in a year and then what? Knocking around in a mansion all by
himself? Dribbling a ball alone down the empty soccer field in the
back yard because he’d have no one to play with?

An image of Cassandra standing on the front
portico to greet him when he came home from work flashed across his
mind, but he instantly banished it.

That wasn’t her style, and at this point in
his life, it wasn’t something he wanted, anyway.

“Is this a place you think you could live?”
he asked quietly when she parked in the driveway and turned the car
off. “
Would
you live with me?”

She looked at him then, her hair rumpled and
her clothes bearing the evidence of having taken care of three
small children all night—spots of mustard and ketchup, other
mysterious stains. The whites of her eyes were webbed in red and
there were dark circles under her eyes. “Well,” she muttered,
“that’s what married people do, right? Live together? Honestly,
though, it’s really too French provincial for my taste.”

He shrugged. “I’ll build you something else
if you want.”

She watched him for a long time without
saying anything. Then, “What did you mean when you told Jack you
needed me?”

Mitch let that sink in, knowing there was
something significant about the question, but too tired to figure
it out right then. “I want to make love with you, Cassandra, but I
need
you in my life.”

“You don’t love me.”

Mitch stared at her, wondering if the fault
was his because his cultural plane was that different from hers, or
her fault for being deliberately obtuse. Finally he spoke.

Slowly.

“I don’t know why you think I’ve shown up on
your doorstep every weekend for the last few weeks, but I assure
you, it wasn’t because I was trying to figure out whether I do or
not.”

Her bloodshot eyes narrowed and her chest
began to heave. “All you want is sex. You want it with me and I
want it with you. I’ll marry you because I’m not going to get to
fuck you any other way, but don’t mistake it for something deeper
than that because I’ll leave you the minute I’ve had my fill.”