Magdalene (43 page)

God, she was brilliant, with a fund of
knowledge I imagined could only belong to a trained theologian. I
didn’t care a whit about these people’s beliefs, but I could listen
to Prissy teach for hours.

It was in Relief Society that Sally finally
worked up the courage to nail me. “Why didn’t you tell anyone you
and Mitch were getting married?”

“It was between me and him, Sally,” I said
as gently as I could because she was about to cry. I was
unaccountably proud when she sucked it up. And then...

“
Sis
ter Hollander!” Louise said from
the front of the room. Her smile could’ve lit Lady Liberty’s torch.
“Congratulations! You have
no
idea how happy we are.”

I almost groaned at Louise’s timing, but she
moved on.

“Sally,” she said with concern, “is it true
you and Dan are moving?”

Sally was pale, but her voice didn’t tremble
when she said, “Yes. He got a job in Seattle.”

“Excellent. Well, not that you’ll be leaving
us, of course. When’s the big day?”

“Some time after Easter.”

“We’ll miss you.”

Sally only nodded, her mouth tight, and I
wondered how much Mitch had to do with that, but she held on as the
class proceeded. About fifteen minutes in, she said, “When, uh—”
She cleared her throat. Wouldn’t look me in the face. Directed her
conversation somewhere in the direction of my shoulder. “When are
you getting baptized?”

“I don’t know yet,” I murmured.

“But you’re planning to?”

“Yes.”

On my left, Prissy started. “Really?”

“Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

Her mouth pursed. “You and I are going to
have a little chat later, darling.”

“Okay, Mother,” I said somewhat snidely. “Am
I in trouble?”

“Yes.”

Odd. First Sebastian, now Prissy. That
wasn’t even counting the fact that Mitch had never so much as
invited me to attend. For a church bent on converting the world,
there wasn’t a whole lot of encouragement coming my way. Why would
I care one way or another? I hadn’t stepped foot in a church in
twenty years, since the twins’ baptisms, not even to do my Easter
and Christmas duty.

Relief Society ended and Prissy dragged me
out as fast as she could to find a private corner somewhere in the
labyrinthine hallways. “Unless you have a thorough understanding of
this doctrine and buy into it, you should not get baptized.”

“Why?”

“We—okay,
I
—take it seriously. This
is
not
fire insurance.”

I stared at her.

“Fire insurance. You know, where people go
to different churches and join a bunch of them to reduce their
chances of going to hell.”

I burst out laughing.

“Look, I can appreciate that you want to
support Mitch because you love him, but you can’t just—”

“Oh, wait a minute. Let’s clear something up
right now.” Well, hell, why not tell her? She wouldn’t approve, but
she’d get it. “I married Mitch for one reason and one reason only,
and it doesn’t have anything to do with
love
or
money
.”

It was her turn to stare at me for a few
seconds, completely confused. And then
she
burst out
laughing. “Yeah. O
kay
. Sure.” She turned to leave me there.
“Ask Mitch his opinion before you tell anybody about your
miraculous conversion.”

“Prissy!”

“Gotta git. See you Sunday.”

She strode down the hallway, and I could
hear laughing all the way.

Bitch.

* * * * *

Jacob’s Well

March 28, 2011

Mitch hadn’t been wrong in predicting that
Jack would let me do what I wanted as long as I didn’t leave
Blackwood Securities. Considering my agreement with Mitch only ran
a year, Jack was perfectly willing to put up with the inconvenience
of...no change at all.

It would be like I was out on permanent
assignment, half my staff here in Bethlehem dealing with the
division, which would take another couple of months, and half my
staff in New York. I’d go into the office once a week or so, and
nothing would change.

Monday morning, I sat in the kitchen at the
island bar eating breakfast and perusing the morning’s financials
on my laptop. I looked up and watched Mitch come in from the mill,
greasy, exhausted, still in his orange coveralls. He gave me a warm
smile and a quick kiss, then headed to bed. He’d warned me that he
didn’t intend to give up his graveyard shift in the foundry on
Sunday nights, and I’d said, “Okay, no problem” because it hadn’t
been.

Then.

I’d come home from church alone the day
before and slept alone for the first time in a little over a
week—and I resented the hell out of it.

Strange, considering I had only
slept
with one other man in the fifteen years since Nigel had deemed me
suitably trained.

“Mornin’, Cassie,” Trevor mumbled as he
dragged himself into the house from the garage.

I looked at the clock. Almost seven. “Why
didn’t you just pack a bag, take a shower there, and go to
school?”

He growled. “I’m not supposed to be there at
all and Scarlett’s RA is a bitch. I fell asleep and barely made it
out without getting caught.”

“Go take a shower. You stink. I have lox and
bagels if you want any, because I will not live without my Zabar’s
salmon.”

“Yum. I could get used to this. You gonna
make bread today? Maybe?”

I saw the genuinely hopeful look on his face
and didn’t have the heart to refuse. “Sure.”

“Yes!”

I finished with my breakfast and news
gathering, then headed upstairs to get ready for work—at the mill,
where I would commandeer an office in which to establish Blackwood
Securities’s satellite.

I stopped in the threshold of the beautiful
bedroom, all Mitch. Dark walls, not quite navy. Silver carpet and
linens. Cherry furniture, including the bold headboard on the bed
he’d bought for me. Heavy silver drapes were drawn, casting the
room in near pitch dark. Ah, yes, to allow him to sleep in the
daytime if he needed.

And there he lay on his back, almost
spread-eagled, the bedclothes kicked off and his body nude.

His big, beautiful body, muscular from years
of hard labor and regular soccer matches with his son and weekends
filled with Latin dancing, dusted with golden hair. The hair on his
head was still wet from a shower. His beard was a darker blond
touched with white, and I wondered what he’d look like if it grew
out. If he turned over, I’d be able to see that strong back and
tight ass, the one that still had four tiny half-moon marks on each
hip. Not two nights ago, I’d dug my fingernails into him as he
pounded into me, fucked me the way he’d always really wanted to,
rough and dirty, but still holding something back—

—and always tempted to apologize after the
fact.

He hadn’t. Yet. But eventually he’d break
and push past whatever barrier he still had, and
then
he
would apologize. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine what he could be
keeping back unless...

Don’t you
dare
shut that door on
me.

Anger.

I hadn’t seen that in a while, but the
stress that was causing it was still there, bubbling underneath his
happiness, the happiness he ascribed to me.

He shifted a bit, and I continued my perusal
of his person. I’d seen dozens of men naked, but none that stirred
me as he did, and I didn’t know why.

And because I am a selfish bitch, I locked
the door, dropped my heavy bathrobe, climbed onto the bed between
his spread legs, and licked the head of his cock. I knew from a
week of experience it would take him a while to wake up this way,
but I loved giving head to this man.

He was so appreciative of it. He treated it
as the most precious of gifts.

I’d never known a man who thought of it as
anything other than an entitlement.

He began to harden in my hand, my mouth, and
he shifted again, sighed heavily. “Cassandra,” he whispered, but I
knew he wasn’t awake yet. He whispered my name often in his
sleep.

That unsettled me for some reason.

Oh, but he tasted so good, this man who said
he loved me.

“Cassandra,” he whispered again, his fingers
in my hair, holding me close. I looked up the solid plane of his
body to see him staring back at me, his face intense, his jaw
clenched. “Don’t make me come alone. Come with me.”

Ah, yes. That was important to him, after
the disaster of our first attempt. He was still embarrassed about
that, but more than that, he didn’t want to cheat me, wouldn’t
allow me to pleasure him without expectation of reciprocity.

I shook my head, and lightly scraped his
cock with my teeth to make my point. He hissed, though whether in
pleasure or pain—or both—I didn’t know. I had awakened him after
he’d been up for twenty-four hours serving others, and I would make
it worth his while, to serve him in the only way I knew how.

I reached up and placed my hand on his
chest, pressed gently down until he understood I wouldn’t obey, and
relaxed back into the bed.

Mitch’s fingers wove into my hair and I
sucked, licked, pumped him with my hand, remembering my birthday
when I had lain in his lap and he had played with my hair. I closed
my eyes as every minute of the time we had spent together—was it
really only three months?—hit me in rapid sequence, each more
precious than the last.

His hips came up off the bed, and he groaned
as he came. One, two, three...four...jerks and he sank into the
sheets.

I swallowed, something Nigel had told me
never
to do. And I never had.

Until Mitch.

“Cassandra, let me—”

“No,” I murmured as I tasted my lover, all
sweet and salty. “Relax. Go back to sleep.”

“Come with me,” he muttered, even as his
eyelids drifted shut.

I could do nothing less.

* * * * *

Everything
But Yul Brynner

Mitch and I sat at dinner together that
night alone in our kitchen, talking, laughing. Even though it was
Trevor’s night off from the mill, he was out with Scarlett and
wouldn’t be home until midnight—if he bothered to come home at
all.

It was late, as Louise had dropped in
earlier to get Mitch’s signature on an “emergency food order.”

“We take care of our own,” Louise had
explained as she waited for Mitch to get home from work. “I go to
the family’s home, find out what they need, then fill the order
from the bishop’s storehouse.”

“Mitch has a storehouse?”

She laughed. “Not
Mitch
. Any bishop.
No family in a ward will go hungry as long as the bishop or the
Relief Society president knows their circumstances. The hard part
is getting people to cough up the information.”

“Who is it? I can help.”

“Ah, I can’t tell you. That’s for Mitch and
me and the family to know, and nobody else.”

“Mitch told me all the people in the ward
boundary are his responsibility. You do this for nonmembers,
too?”

“If I know about it, I’ll get it done. As
for monetary needs, Mitch usually covers that himself. Not many
wards are lucky enough to have a bishop of his means and
generosity, and the Church will pay for things like medical bills
or counseling or rent or...anything that can’t be pulled from the
storehouse.”

Mortgage arrears to keep a family from
foreclosure.

“Is he expected to cover these things
himself because he can?”

“Heavens, no. He just does.”

It was apparently a complex situation
because he’d closeted himself with Louise in the library for almost
an hour, during which time I baked the bread I’d promised Trevor.
It was odd to think all I had to do to earn my stepson’s approval
was bake a loaf of bread now and again. If that.

Once Louise left with a sheaf of papers and
a few blank checks, Mitch and I got to the spaghetti with the
marinara I’d made from scratch. I was hungry for food, but hungrier
for the conversation. I liked this time with him, the two of us,
high-level professionals relaxing, boasting about the day’s
accomplishments with someone who would understand and cheer
appropriately without feeling threatened.

Mitch told me about the goofy new chemist he
had hired, straight out of school, a genius who hid it behind fart
jokes and harmless pranks.

“Larry Karabas sent him to me,” he said,
chuckling. “We’ll have to invite him and his wife to dinner
sometime.”

My appetite vanished. “Larry Karabas?” I
asked carefully.

“Yeah,” he said around his bite. “Friend of
mine. You know him?”

I barely kept my meal from coming back
up.

“You could say that,” I muttered, looking
down at my plate. Shit. How had I been so willfully naïve as to
think I could be Mitch’s wife and blithely float in the same social
circles Mitch did without running into the very people who could
afford me?

“What, you don’t like him?”

Like him? I barely knew him out of bed.

“Question,” I said briskly, still not
looking at my husband. “How many of these people do you know
personally?” Whereupon I rattled off the names of about ten
businessmen, politicians, celebrities, and continued to fight my
nausea as he answered affirmatively to each one.

I stopped, unable to go any further, because
his every “yes” came slower and his voice got more hoarse.

We sat in silence for long moments.

“I’ll go get the list,” I said quietly.
“Tomorrow. I won’t let you go around doing business in the dark
like that.”

“It didn’t occur to you until now?” he asked
tightly.

“It didn’t occur to
you
?” I gasped,
shocked at his tone. “Why wouldn’t you think that if
you
can
afford me, all your friends and acquaintances and business contacts
could too?”