Magdalene (8 page)

I blinked. Interesting. “How old were
you?”

“Twenty.”

I’d been pregnant with Clarissa when I was
twenty.

“And then you just got dragged into his
family.”

“Dragged? No.” He chuckled. “I didn’t have
to be dragged. Sebastian’s family is large and tight. It doesn’t
take much to want to be part of them.”

“I can see that.” After having been with
them all morning, I could.

He stopped to take another bite and we ate
in silence for a moment before he said, “Do you have kids?”

I raised an eyebrow at him, surprised. “You
didn’t ask if I was married.”

“You work for Blackwood.”

Obviously. I shook my head at my inability
to think straight within ten feet of this man. “I have four
daughters. Helene, Clarissa, Olivia, and Paige. Olivia and Paige
are twins. They’re twenty.”

“They all live at home?”

“Yes.”

“What do they do?”

“Helene is a resident at Bellevue. Clarissa
is a senior at NYU preparing for law school. Olivia is a personal
trainer with an affluent clientele and Paige is a principal dancer
with Alvin Ailey.”

“Ailey’s tough. I’m very impressed.”

His response startled a grin out of me.
“I’ll tell her you said so. She’ll be very pleased.” Invariably,
the kudos went to the doctor, not the dancer, no matter how
prestigious her company.

“I’ve been meaning to—”

Mitch’s abrupt silence startled me. He was
watching the maître d’s station with an unreadable expression, and
I turned.

There, what looked like a husband and
wife—both almost too beautiful to gaze upon—being escorted to their
table. The man glanced our way, then stopped short to stare at
us.

He was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen,
with strong, slightly tanned features, and chocolate-colored hair
shot with silver at the temples. He was shorter than Mitch, but
lean and wiry, lending him the appearance of height. In short, he
was far more physically attractive than Mitch and in another time,
another life, I would have approached him, but now...

Mitch glanced at the man’s blonde companion,
then back at the man, his eyebrow raised. I looked back at the
man—God, it had turned into a tennis match—whose expression slowly
turned into a smirk.

He handed his companion off to the maître
d’, then headed our way. He came to a graceful halt close to my
left, his elbow nearly touching my ear.

I have never been one to shy away from a
handsome man’s touch.

“Mitch,” he purred.

“Greg,” Mitch said tightly. “How’s
Amelia?”

“Oh, don’t be coy,
Bishop
,” he said,
pronouncing the “p” sound with a contemptuous little pop. “You
don’t have any illusions about me. Your first problem is that you
have no proof. Of anything. Your second problem is that even if you
did, nobody would believe you. For all anyone knows, she’s a new
client of mine.”

Mitch grunted and took a bite.

“I see I’m not the only one out with a
beautiful woman who isn’t my wife,” this Greg person said. “And
who
are you?” he asked me with the kind of suavity with
which I was intimately acquainted. He cupped my shoulder with his
perfect hand and caressed me, almost to the point of kneading.

And he did it exactly right.

While stripping me visually with enough
skill so as to escape all traces of sleaze.

“Cassandra St. James,” Mitch murmured as he
tapped his mouth with his napkin, then took a drink of his water. I
expected him to follow up with an explanation of
who
I was,
but he didn’t. “Greg Sitkaris.”

“So very pleased to meet you, Ms. St.
James,” Greg said, and took his hand off me to dig in his coat
pocket. He handed me his business card. “If
there’s...
anything
...I can do for you, please don’t hesitate
to call me.”

I took the card with alacrity, knowing that
Mitch was taking in every detail of this by-play, knowing in which
direction his thoughts were going.

“Thank you,” I murmured up at Greg, flashing
him a brilliant smile.

“No, thank
you
,” he murmured, sliding
his big hand across my back, leaning into me. He looked at Mitch.
“We look good together, don’t we?”

Mitch’s expression betrayed nothing but a
slight boredom I suspected was well practiced. That dig must have
been an old and familiar one, but it was true and we all knew it:
In looks, Mitch couldn’t begin to compete with Greg.

Neither could any other man I’d ever
met.

“Must get back to my lovely companion for
the evening,” he continued, as if his comment had gotten the
reaction he wanted. He gestured to the wine bucket. “Don’t drink
too much, Mitch. Wouldn’t want to wreck that glorified Beetle of
yours, now would we? Good night, Ms. St. James. I hope to see
you
again very soon.”

He sauntered away, secure in his beauty and
power. It didn’t take much for me to sketch a rough picture of the
situation.

“One of your parishioners?” I asked blithely
after a sip of wine.

“Yes.” Mitch had withdrawn from me, from our
connection, but I’d expected that.

I glanced at Greg across the restaurant,
holding his dinner companion’s hand and listening intently to
whatever she was saying with such animation. “He’s a
sociopath.”

Mitch started.

Ah, good. I’d managed to shock him, and I
bestowed upon him my most wry smile.

“How—?”

I shrugged. “I’ve run into my share of
people like him. It’s not hard to spot if you know the tells. Let
me just say that in my previous life, I wouldn’t have taken him as
a client.”

The corner of his mouth reluctantly twitched
upward, and I knew I had him back. Stronger now.

“There are problems there, I take it? I
mean, other than the fact that he’s committing adultery?”

He sighed. “It’s...complicated. And I can’t
talk about it in any case.”

I pursed my mouth and looked at my plate.
“Hypothetically speaking,” I drawled and played with my fork, “if I
were one of your parishioners and I came to you and confessed my
adultery, what would you do?”

“I would walk you through a repentance
process,” he replied. “It would take a while, depending on how
repentant you were. It could take as little as a year, but usually
longer. It’s possible you’d just drift away if you weren’t
interested in completing the process.”

“And that would be?”

“Excommunication is the beginning of the
process. Rebaptism to finish. Start over with a clean slate, like
it didn’t happen.”

“Ah. And...if I didn’t confess, but
you...witnessed me in the act?”

He took a deep breath. Held it. Released it
with a whoosh. “
Normally
,” he murmured, still willing to
play along, “I would start the process anyway, without expectation
of repentance. Hypothetically speaking.”

“You can do that? Just kick someone
out?”

He nodded. “I call a bishop’s court. The
stake president—my immediate superior—and eleven other men get
together and have kind of a tribunal, I guess, to decide the
matter. But I get the ball rolling.”

“And
some
situations aren’t
normal.”

“
Some
situations are...politically
delicate.”

If his tone of voice was anything to go by,
he’d told me all he would tell me, but I tried again anyway.
Without knowing more about him, about the way his church worked,
and his congregation’s internal politics, I couldn’t deduce details
any other way.

“How do you see yourself as a bishop?”

“When I was new at this job,” he said wryly,
letting me know he understood I hadn’t given up, “it bugged me that
people got upset with me because I couldn’t or wouldn’t give them
what they wanted, or they thought I was too harsh or...any number
of strange reasons. My dad said, ‘Son, if a third of the ward isn’t
mad at you, you’re not doing your job. Any less than that, you’re a
pushover. Any more than that, you’re on a power trip and you need
to get off it.’”

I laughed. “I take it you’re right at about
a third?”

He grinned. “Depends on who I offended that
week.”

I let it go with a smile, and the rest of
the evening passed in casual, very careful conversation, both of us
aware of Greg and his extramarital date, and he of us. He caught my
eye across the restaurant and lifted his wine glass in a toast.

I didn’t press Mitch for any more details of
the feud brewing between him and his parishioner, despite my acute
curiosity, and he didn’t seem put off by the blunt deconstruction
of my résumé. It was entirely possible he had simply made a mental
shift from potential lover to friend or all the way back to
colleague. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

Yet he insisted on walking me up to my hotel
room, strolling really, my hand in the crook of his elbow, his free
hand covering mine. Neither of us said anything and by the time we
reached my hotel room, my body was languid, ready, willing. I
hesitated to ask him in because I wasn’t at all sure I could
control the situation; by the same token, I didn’t want to hear him
hem and haw about saying “no.”

But he trapped me between his body and my
hotel room door, his arms bracketing my shoulders, both hands
planted flat against the door behind me. He leaned toward me, his
mouth barely brushing my cheek. He touched me nowhere else, but I
trembled and closed my eyes.

“Thank you for a wonderful evening,
Cassandra,” he breathed, his words sifting softly across my skin
and seeping into my brain. I sighed as if he had made love to me. I
awaited The Kiss, but he pulled away from me. I opened my eyes when
he tugged the keycard from my hand and slipped it into the
door.

He opened the door, gave the keycard back to
me, flashed me a smirk, then turned to stride down the corridor,
one hand in his pocket. Even through my pique at having been so
thoroughly seduced without having been touched, I had to smile as I
watched him walk away from me.

So.

He
did
have a swagger.

* * * * *

Quench My Thirst
With Gasoline

Mitch
never
lost control.

Most days, his legendary cool was the only
thing that kept him from destroying his house with his bare hands.
Sebastian rarely got angry to begin with, so he had no cool to
lose; Knox popped off the minute something hit him wrong then
promptly forgot about it; Morgan laughed at everything; Bryce had
the good fortune of a wife who could manage his temper.

Mitch, though... Mitch didn’t have the
luxury of anger. He was a bishop and bishops had no emotion but
loving concern, however detached.

He could vent to the one person who knew him
best, but while Sebastian would take everything Mitch had to throw
at him, then offer a “Feel better now, Elder?” he didn’t have the
empathy necessary to help Mitch put it in perspective. Bryce had
empathy to spare, but he had enough on his emotional plate without
Mitch adding to it. It didn’t matter anyway; they were a thousand
miles away. Time and distance tempered any satisfaction he could
derive from unloading on either of them.

There was only one public place he allowed
himself an outlet: In his high-performance sports car with ZZ Top
blaring from the speakers, on the road with his foot shoving the
gas pedal to the floor. He raced his demons home after having left
Cassandra at her hotel room door.

Without kissing her.

Undressing her.

Making love to her.

At those speeds, in the dark, on narrow,
twisting country roads, knowing there were patches of ice here and
there, he had to concentrate, but once he got home...

He didn’t even glance at a clock as he took
the sweeping staircase two steps at a time to his
seventeen-year-old son’s room. He burst in to find the kid sloppily
arrayed on his bed like a pig in a blanket, asleep. He only knew
that because of the snores that came from somewhere inside that
roll.

“Get up,” he nearly snarled as he gripped
the boy’s exposed ankle and yanked. Hard. “Outside.”

A miserable groan issued forth from that
mass. “Dad...”

“Now!” he barked and left the room, slamming
the door behind him.

It was another fifteen minutes before he met
his son on the back lawn of the estate, which he had long ago
transformed into a full-length soccer field, floodlights blinding
in their intensity and more ZZ Top coming from speakers attached
just below the floodlights.

He said nothing and fired a soccer ball at
Trevor, who promptly lost the last vestiges of sleepiness to head
the ball back at him and the game was on.

Neither spoke as they ran and maneuvered the
ball over the snow-and-ice-littered field, no holds barred, their
breath blowing white in the cold.

After a while, Mitch felt his tension wane.
“Loser!” he called as he kicked the ball straight at Trevor’s
head.

“Go look in a mirror, old man!” Trevor
yelled back as he dribbled the ball down the field, dodging all
Mitch’s aggressive attempts to get it back. “You know what young
lions do to the old ones. You want me to break your arm again?”
Trevor lunged right to knock Mitch on his butt.

Mitch laughed as he hopped up, and the game
grew a little lazier. They traded insults as fast as they traded
the ball—

—then the floodlights and music shut down,
leaving them in the pitch black.

They stopped and Mitch bent over, his hands
on his knees, panting. His eyes burned with afterimage and his ears
rang. He’d set the timer for two hours, never expecting that they’d
play that long, much less have another hour of play left in
them.

“Dude, you musta had a shitty day at work,”
Trevor drawled as he bounced the ball off Mitch’s back, caught it,
and headed into the house.