by Moriah Jovan
“I was a prostitute.”
Not a twitch of a facial muscle to betray his thoughts. “I’m assuming we’re not here on that basis.”
“No. I retired from that years ago.”
“And you got into it how?”
“I was bored.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
Oh, God, no. I couldn’t talk about this. What had I been thinking? “Do you hear confessions from your parishioners?” I asked abruptly, needing to get off this track, sorry I’d gotten on it. “Is that part of your job, like a priest?”
“Yes.”
“So I don’t want to confess.”
“Were you confessing?”
“No.”
“Forgive me. It’s not an industry I have much knowledge of and I was curious.”
No, dammit! He had me in curlicues. He still didn’t look shocked nor did he seem as if he wanted to cut the evening short.
Our food came and I caught myself breathing a prayer of thanks to a god I wasn’t sure existed. Our conversation veered to safer territory: His board of directors, to whom he referred as his family.
“Sebastian Taight,” he said after I asked him how he’d come into that circle of players, “was a companion I had on my mission.”
The image of two young men in black suits with black name tags, pushing bicycles, carrying backpacks flashed across my mind. My dinner companion had been one, once upon a time? So bizarre. More bizarre: King Midas having been one.
“You were a missionary?”
He nodded. “In Paris.”
“With Sebastian Taight.” I simply couldn’t process that.
His mouth quirked. “I know how it sounds, but yes. The same Sebastian Taight. He...” He paused a moment, as if he were thinking. “The mission was very difficult for both of us. Sebastian made it bearable. He had ideas and plans. Philosophies. He shared them with me and he was so passionate about them... I learned more from him in the four months he was my companion than I’d learned in the nineteen years before that. If it hadn’t been for him, it would never have occurred to me to do what I did with my life.”
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.
“Not exactly,” Mitch replied, straightening to follow his son, ignoring the profanity. He heard it all day, every day, especially when he went into the foundry and, moreover, Trevor did too. Besides, this wasn’t the bishop’s house; it was the house of a single father
with a teenage son. Without a female around, the males were bound to go feral at some point.
There were moments Mitch could barely keep himself from dropping an f-bomb or two. It was only a point of pride that kept him from swearing at all, ever; if he did, his public persona might crack and that he couldn’t allow to happen.
He entered the warm house behind Trevor and took off his filthy winter clothes in the mudroom.
“You need to get laid,” Trevor yelled from the kitchen.
Mitch barked a surprised laugh, and shook his head as he threw his cleats in the laundry room, then entered the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade out of the refrigerator. Trevor leaned against the counter nursing his own bottle. “That,” Mitch said after a long drink, “is true.”
The boy stared at Mitch, shocked. “Serious?”
“I met a woman today.”
“Shit.”
“We had dinner.”
“Is she hot?”
He shrugged. “Not like you mean it, no.”
“I don’t even know what ‘hot’ is anymore, anyway,” Trevor muttered, looking at the floor, an unhappy expression on his face.
“What does that mean?” Mitch asked, genuinely curious.
It took a long time for him to answer, which was normal. Trevor usually chose his words with care. “Okay, like Hayleigh Sitkaris.”
Mitch said nothing.
“She’s really cute. Actually, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, but she’s so...needy.”
“Neediness comes in a lot of different varieties,” Mitch found himself saying. “It’s not always a bad thing.” All Hayleigh needed was a rabblerouser of a boyfriend who’d stand up to her father—
“Yeah, but that’s not hot. Am I missing something? At church, at school, there are a lot of guys who want to go out with her, but she’s all about me.”
—which she apparently knew, since she kept attempting to confide in Trevor in hopes he would take the hint—and the job.
“Okay, so say she wasn’t needy. Would you like her then?”
Trevor pursed his lips in thought. “I’d ask her out.”
