Magdalene (33 page)

Mitch snorted. “You’re already in deeper
than that or you would have tried a little harder to seduce me.
You’ve respected my boundaries, you’ve continued to go out with me,
you came to church yesterday without my asking you to. Cassandra,
we’ve been dating for weeks and last night was our first kiss.
How
is it not deeper than that? If it weren’t, you’d have
left me at Babbo. You aren’t
ever
going to get your fill of
me.”

Obviously shocked, she opened the door and
got out, heading for the house. He scrambled out his side and stood
with the door open, looking at her over the top of the car. She had
stopped about twenty feet away from him and she stood with her back
to him, her arms wrapped around herself.

“When was the last time you had sex?” Mitch
called. Her back stiffened and she sucked in a breath he could hear
from that far away. “I’ll bet it’s been years for you, too. What,
since you retired?”

She looked at him over her shoulder with a
glare that could melt pig iron. “That’s none of your business.”

“You’re a beautiful woman, you’re powerful,
you like sex. You could have any man—or woman—you want, but you’ve
been with me for weeks getting nothing. Why? I’m not that
fascinating, Cassandra. I’m just a guy who works in a steel mill on
the weekends and spends the rest of the week on the Lord’s Payroll,
which is more trouble than it’s worth most days.”

Her mouth tightened. “You’re a novelty to
me.”

“A novelty who needs you.”

Her nostrils flared. “For
sex
,” she
spat. “Because you’re a forty-four-year-old man who doesn’t know
shit about it and you love bad girls and you’re curious and you
want me to teach you what I know. You want to know what it’s like
to really fuck a strong, healthy woman who loves sex and knows what
she’s doing—and fuck her hard without all that procreation and
morality bullshit getting in the way.”

“So what if I do?” he returned. “What’s
wrong with that?”

“Nothing, but that’s
all
you want and
you’re too fucking naïve not to
fall in love
to give
yourself permission to take it.”

“Give me one year, Cassandra. I want to
prove to you it’s more than sex, and if I haven’t done that in a
year, we can part company, no strings attached.”

“What would your parishioners think?” she
sneered.

“I don’t care what they think!” he bellowed.
“This is
my
life, not theirs. I only care what the Lord
thinks.”

“And oh, the Lord’s okay with you marrying
me just to have sex with me? That’s just a new spin on the old
fornication racket.”

“Don’t you put that on me. I am not the one
marrying
just
to have sex. Yeah, I gotta get married to have
sex, but if that’s all I wanted, I wouldn’t have asked you to
dinner to begin with.”

“Then what else could you possibly
need
me for?”

Her screech resonated within him, but only
served to confuse him further. “Cassandra, I
like
you. I can
talk to you. I have fun with you. I’m a loner by nature and I’ve
never really been
lonely
. I haven’t felt truly lonely since
before Mina was bedridden. But I count the days until we’re
together, and I call you every day just to hear your voice because
if I don’t— You taught me what lonely feels like.”

She blinked, as if that were a foreign
concept.

“It’s not like I couldn’t have beautiful
women stacked from here to Manhattan if I wanted them and every one
of them willing to marry me for various and sundry reasons, none of
which would include love and very few of which would include sex.
And don’t think that I’m excluding members of the Church, either.
There are plenty of women who’ve tried to get my attention. They
have no idea I have a life outside of church, what kind of women I
have to choose from and how many, and they would
never
think
I’d remarry outside the Church.”

She stared at him, then bowed her head and
pressed her fist to her nose. He couldn’t see any tears from where
he stood, but that didn’t mean anything. He forged on.

“I have plenty of opportunity, Cassandra,
and I have ever since I rebuilt the mill, even when Mina was alive.
None of them interested me. You do. Why do I
need
you other
than sexually? I can’t articulate it, but when I think of you, sex
isn’t what comes to mind first and since we’re not having any, it
should
be the first thing that comes to mind. I said it
before and I’ll say it again. I want you in bed. I
need
you
in my life. I don’t know how else to say it; I don’t know what
words you want me to use.”

Still looking at the ground, she flung her
fist through the air in resignation. “Fine,” she muttered, just
loud enough so he could hear. “Lie to yourself like you lie to
everybody else. I don’t give a shit. Go take a shower and get in
bed before you collapse.”

He hid his smile. “Will you be here when I
wake up?”

“Well, I can’t go back to work
now
,”
she said with a sullen sniffle. “Jack would want to know why my
indefinite service to you had been so short and definite, and I’d
hate to have to tell him you have a premature ejaculation
problem—which I’m sure you do.”

Mitch burst out laughing and went around the
car to approach her, but she put up a hand. “Don’t. I can smell you
from here. And while you’re sleeping, I’ll make wedding plans
that’ll bankrupt you.”

He ignored her command and dropped an arm
around her shoulder to guide her into the house. She still wouldn’t
look at him. “Actually,” he began benignly as he pulled her through
the front door, “what you
should
do is take a shower because
you
smell like rancid cheeseburgers and baby pee.”

* * * * *

The Last
Temptation

Trevor was shocked to see me in the kitchen
when he came in the house late that afternoon. I didn’t know if
he’d gone to school today, but I didn’t suppose he would have.

“Is that bread I smell?” he asked, sniffing
the air.

“Yes.”

“You make bread?” I nodded hesitantly and he
cocked his head at me. “No shit? That’s
awe
some!”

Surely, the boy had lost his mind. My girls
thought it terribly plebeian of me, but I never cared what they
thought about it; I hadn’t stopped baking each day’s bread until it
was no longer necessary. I didn’t know why I’d done it today,
except the ingredients were there and I was bored. “Why?”

He plunked himself down at the granite bar
top of the massive kitchen island and took the fresh-baked bread I
gave him with great anticipation. I handed him the butter, too, and
he proceeded to inhale nearly a whole loaf with a pound of butter
without bothering to answer me.

I watched his face as he ate and I thought
if a teenage boy could orgasm over food, Trevor would have done so
quite a few times through that loaf. I couldn’t help my smile,
though I tried. Such a simple thing, to make bread, and such a
disproportionate reaction to it— I felt a...something...trickle
through me that both pleased and frightened me. I didn’t know what
it was and I had no experience dealing with children who didn’t
demand the utmost in sophistication every moment of every day.

He licked his fingers with his eyes closed
and sighed, “Cassie, marry me. Forget the sex. I’d sell my soul for
this.”

I had to laugh at that; this family’s
priorities were like nothing I had ever encountered before.

“Spoken for,” I said after a moment. He
opened his eyes. “I need to get my girls out here to meet you.”

“Uh, does that mean...”

“Yeah,” I said wryly. “Couldn’t help myself,
especially after your pointed little lecture.”

“
You
asked
him
?” I shrugged,
and he laughed. “Shit, that’s awesome. You’ll have to meet my
sisters.” Oh. Them. The good girls. Some of my sudden good cheer
left as fast as it had come on. “They’ll love you,” Trevor went on,
apparently oblivious to my distress. “Bread. What else do you
do?”

Nothing that wouldn’t have embarrassed
Gordon and my kids to death if someone figured out
why
I was
doing it.

“Um, well,” I ventured slowly, not knowing,
not understanding—again—a culture that would breed a
seventeen-year-old boy to think homemade bread was “awesome,” and I
was unwilling to face even the smallest amount of ridicule for my
more domestic interests. “I did it all,” I finally admitted. “I
could’ve taught Martha Stewart a thing or two.”

“I guess my mom did all that before she got
so tired.”

“Do you miss her?”

“I miss not knowing the one my sisters knew.
I miss having a mother, if that counts. My friends at church—their
moms are really cool. I like going to their houses. It’s always so
noisy and... I don’t know. Like a home.”

I sighed and a dull throbbing behind my
sternum started up. I cleared my throat. “How are Johnny and
Kathy’s kids?”

He broke off another piece of bread, spread
it with butter, and chewed while he talked. “Don’t know. Kathy came
home with the little kids right after I got the oldest ones off to
school, but they wouldn’t go to sleep, all screaming and crying for
their mama. Kathy wanted me to stay, but I said no way and she got
pissed at me. I had to get out of there.”

I actually agreed with Kathy’s position and
my expression must have betrayed that, because he shrugged.

“Look, Cassie, I’m seventeen, I’m a dude,
I’ve just spent the night in a house full of kids, the oldest of
which is a fifteen-year-old girl who decides to run around the
house in her Daisy Dukes to see if I want to play. Then when that
doesn’t work—I told her to go put some clothes on and go to bed—she
decides she’s going to tell everybody about all these horrible
rotten things I did to her and get me in trouble if I don’t have
sex with her.

“And so when
that
doesn’t work, she
starts crying and begging forgiveness and asks me if I’ll just take
her to school so she can show me off to her friends— And I’m gonna
let myself get snookered right into jail for being a perv and then
get my name slotted onto the sex offender registry? I think not. I
called Decker and made him send someone else—someone
female
,
’cause I sure as hell wasn’t going to ruin my life for doing what
my foreman told me to do to help someone out during their family
crisis.”

That made perfect sense and I hastily
revised my disapproval of him for leaving Kathy alone. It struck me
then: I had thought nothing of it when Mitch had told me Trevor had
spent the night with those children.

“So you did go to school today?”

“Had to, ’cause Peggy—the fifteen-year-old—”
I nodded “—was already starting to run her mouth about what I
touched where and with what, which I knew she’d do.
Passive-aggressive little bitch. I went to the principal first
thing and let him know what happened and why so I didn’t have cops
all over me by third hour. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from
my dad, it’s how to cover my ass.”

And if that didn’t work, I was sure I could
bribe Olivia to don her kickboxing gear and drop in on the girl to
deliver a scolding she’d never forget.

“And your girlfriend?”

He waved a hand. “Eh, she’s twenty, junior
at Lehigh Univer—” His eyes narrowed at me. “Oh. I bet you know
about that.”

I bit my lip to keep from cracking a
smile.

“Har. Har. Har.”

“I’d think Peggy would be more concerned
about her dad than her Daisy Dukes.”

He sighed. “They don’t know yet. They think
he’s in the hospital for observation.”

“Oh.”

“And I sure as shit wasn’t going to tell
them.”

“I hear excessive cursing leads to
premarital sex.”

Trevor stared at me for a split second
before he began to laugh, then choked on his bread.

“I told him that,” drawled the deeper
version of Trevor’s voice from the door of the kitchen. I turned
and saw Mitch in a green bathrobe, leaning against the threshold of
the kitchen with his arms folded across his chest. I wondered what
he’d do if I went to him and untied it, pushed it off his
shoulders, and put my mouth to his throat. Got on my knees in front
of him. My heart thumped hard behind my breast. “But he didn’t buy
it. His idol trained him too well.”

That pulled me from my salacious thoughts
and made me chuckle. The idea of Sebastian Taight and Mitch
Hollander being best friends had never been more oxymoronic to me
than now, now that I knew Mitch, had watched him tend his flock and
his employees.

“Hey, Dad.”

“You going out tonight, Son?”

“Damn straight. It’s my day off, it’s
Valentine’s Day, and I have a hot date with a hot twenty-year-old.
Don’t wait up or anything.” Mitch growled in response as Trevor
stood and brushed the crumbs off his hands.

“I feel obliged to ask,” I said. “You are
using condoms, no?”

Trevor gaped at me, thoroughly offended.
“Uh,
yeah
.”

“I gave him the lecture,” Mitch grumbled so
disconsolately I had to laugh. “The last thing he needs at this age
is a child. Or a disease.”

“Oh, hell no,” Trevor agreed. “Okay, I’m
going to bed. Night, Dad.”

“Night. Love you, Kid.”

“Love you, too, Dad. Thanks for the bread,
Cassie,” he called as he strode out of the room.

“You’re welcome,” I said, but he’d gone by
then, his long legs eating up the floor between the kitchen and the
massive foyer, then to the staircase. The sound of his footsteps
receded and I looked Mitch square in the eye and said, “I suggest
you go put some other clothes on before I forget you’re a nice boy
and test the limits of your self-control. And since we are both
clean and I’m spayed,
we
don’t need condoms.”