by Moriah Jovan
No, not competing.
Making love.
We left the club at three a.m., breathless, sweaty, laughing, hanging onto each other. We had cleared the floor a couple of times, finished off kids half our age, decimated two platters of tapas, amused the bartenders and waitstaff.
I had never felt such joy in my life.
“So do all Mormons dance as well as you?” I teased when he handed me into a cab.
He laughed. “If they don’t, it’s not for lack of opportunity or encouragement. You surprised me. It was nice.”
I smiled and bit my lip, somewhat shy to be so happy right in front of the man who made me feel that way. “Where did you learn to dance like that?”
“Ah...” He laughed wryly and looked down at the knot our entwined hands made. “The first woman I ever asked to marry me.”
“What? And she refused? Crazy.”
“No. Backed into a corner. Like you. Like Mina.”
“What was her name?”
“Inez. She was five years older than me. She was a competition dancer, lost her partner, grabbed me at a church dance and gave me a crash course.”
“You were how old?”
“Fourteen.”
“Awww, you caught a little crush.”
He grinned. “Not a little one.”
“Is this who you were thinking of at Ailey?”
“Yes. I competed with her for a couple of years until she met her husband. That broke my heart. Nineteen, went on my mission. Twenty, came back. She was divorced with two kids she couldn’t support by herself, and her ex wasn’t paying child support.”
“What a loser.”
“Yeah, well... That was when Bethlehem and Allentown were dying. There wasn’t much work to be had. She never told me what happened with her husband, but I wanted to marry her and take care of her and her kids.”
“And...you didn’t have any more prospects than anybody else.”
He shook his head. “I’d worked in the steel mills since I was sixteen and didn’t know anything more than anybody else did. Steel was your ticket to retirement. Then it wasn’t. Our whole way of life was disintegrating around our ears. I was watching it happen and had no idea what to do.”
“And so how’d she get out of her corner?”
“She, um...” Mitch’s mouth tightened and he looked down at the floor. “She’d taken a lover. Much older. Married. Rich. I couldn’t compete with that.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach and my mind went blank.
“Anyway,” he continued. “She left. Mina caught my eye. You know the rest.”
“Have you ever tried to get in touch with her?” Say no say no say no.
“No. I have no desire to.”
“Did you...” I did not want to know the answer, but I asked the question anyway. “Did you carry her into your marriage?”
He looked at me sharply, sober. “Yes. And I regret that. Mina deserved so much better than that. Better than me.”
My mouth dropped open. “Mitch!”
“That was another reason I needed to get out of Pennsylvania, besides getting Mina away. I needed to get away from memories of Inez. Start fresh with a girl who thought I was worth something, enough to defy her family over, who believed in me. I wanted to do my best to live up to her opinion of me, but I couldn’t do it in that pressure cooker.” He paused. “I would’ve died young putting food on the table for Inez. Mina made me who I am.”
“And Mina?” I murmured. “Now?” Why did I care? I wanted to fuck the man, not marry him, and any past women he might bring to bed with us shouldn’t make any difference to me.
“She was pretty much comatose the last couple of years before she died, so... We said goodbye three, four years ago. The last thing she said to me before she slipped away was that she loved me and she wanted me to find someone who could match me.”
My heart caught in my throat.
“Aw, Cassandra,” he murmured, shaking out a handkerchief. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
I batted his hand away. “Stop it. I’m not crying. I never cry.”
“Okay.”
The rest of the ride was silent, me in the crook of his arm, half lying against him, my ear just over his steadily beating heart. Once the cab dropped us off in front of my townhouse, we strolled across the sidewalk and up the stairs.
As we climbed, I pressed myself into his body and he seemed to press back. I felt his attention and returned it, but once in the shadow of my front stoop, I pushed him into the corner.
His chest rumbled with a chuckle and his large hand wrapped around my waist to hold me close to him. I attempted to kiss him because I so wanted to feel his mouth on mine, his tongue in my mouth, but he turned his head slightly. My lips met his cheek.
Frustrated, aroused, thoroughly bewildered—he pulled me to him but refused my kiss?—I closed my eyes and simply, softly pressed my mouth to his skin, breathing in the bittersweet musk of good cologne, clean sweat, and male. One soft kiss, then another.
I opened my mouth and touched my tongue to his skin...
...and smiled when I realized his breathing was rough and his heart raced.
“Stay with me tonight,” I whispered when I pulled away from him only enough to hand him my key.
His sly humor was back and he tossed a grin at me as he unlocked the door and swung it open. “I think not.”
“Afraid of losing?”
His grin faded a little and he said, with a serious tone I had never heard him use, “I would lose much more than this game, Cassandra. You have no idea how much I have at stake.”
I swallowed and looked away. It seemed like a reproof and I felt ashamed for something I didn’t understand at all. Then I felt his big hand gently cupping my chin and tilting my face up to look at him.
“When I kiss you,” he murmured, the pad of his thumb caressing my cheekbone, “it’ll be on my terms, not yours.”
Shit, there he was, the CEO, laying down the law, giving no quarter.
“I’m used to that,” I snapped, hoping to slice open a wound somewhere, anywhere, in retaliation, my anger and...something else...bubbling up to swallow my happiness.
He drew back, surprised, wary. “Oh? How so?”
“I do what men want me to do; it’s always on their terms.”
“But you chose your clients and you set the prices accordingly,” he shot back. “You didn’t do business with anybody you didn’t want to and you made sure they could and would comply with your terms. Who was in the power position again?”
I pressed my mouth together, furious that he refused to be shocked, that he had no compunction about referring to my prostitution as the business that it was. If he’d been judgmental in the least, I would have had a weapon to use or at least an excuse to dump him, but he wasn’t so I didn’t.
“I’m not Gordon, Cassandra,” he went on, and I felt—loved—the anger in his voice, the passion. “I’m not one of your clients. You can’t intimidate me and you can’t manipulate me. You figured that out half an hour into our first date, but you’re still trying.”
“Oh, that’s rich. You’re the one who called it a game.”
His mouth tightened then and his eyes flashed with the same anger that had cowed a girl never known to have been cowed. But I was not Clarissa and I liked it. It made him magnificently human in a way that the hot swivel of his talented hips on a dance floor did not.
“Then if you want to keep playing this game,” he nearly growled, “I suggest you concede this round and go in now. Alone.”
“Is that a threat?” I breathed, shocked, unable to believe the turn of the conversation. “Because if it is, you can take it and shove it up your ass.”
I had the good fortune of a door that would slam satisfactorily.
In his face.
* * * * *
Your Holy Man
Mitch clipped down the front steps of Cassandra’s townhouse and stalked the two blocks to his hotel. He stoppe
d at the front desk to request his car, then stalked off the elevator and down the hall to his room.
He never had to bring much, but the fact that he had clothes for three days that he wouldn’t be spending with Cassandra ratcheted his temper up a notch. Once in his car, he squealed out of Manhattan, ZZ Top as loud as he could stand it, and, once he was on the New Jersey Turnpike, he floored it.
So angry.
Ninety, hundred, hundred and thirty before he could think about it—
So aroused.
—needing the speed and concentration to take the edge off.
He couldn’t remember being so angry with someone he cared about and certainly never with Mina. Mina would have withered under the force of Mitch’s temper if he’d shown it. His kids had never given him much reason to get that angry, though they’d had their moments, particularly once Lisette and Geneviève started dating.
Trevor— Well, Mitch had no right to complain. Whatever Trevor did now that Mitch didn’t approve of, Mitch could only blame himself for not putting his son ahead of his other responsibilities.
Cassandra, though...
She was like no one he had ever met and he wanted to make love to her with a passion he didn’t know he had. Only now did he understand why Kenard hadn’t hesitated to seduce a woman he’d known less than a day.
In that instant, Mitch’s surface sympathy sunk to soul-deep empathy.
What Cassandra didn’t know, what Mitch couldn’t afford to let her know, was that she didn’t have to do much of anything to wage an effective seduction. Tonight she had pushed him almost further than he could bear—and she had no idea how close she was to her goal.
Which made him angry.
Angry and painfully aroused—not a combination he had ever had to suffer before he’d met Cassandra St. James.
He made the ninety-mile trip in fifty minutes, a record for him, but it hadn’t helped at all. He hit the stairs at a run and burst into Trevor’s room.
Where he slept.
Naked.
With a girl.
Who screamed.
“Dad, shit!” Trevor croaked, startled out of a sound slumber and shooting to his knees, snatching his bedclothes. The girl started to cry as she scrambled around Trevor. She bolted into the bathroom and slammed the door.
“You brought a girl into my house?” Mitch growled.
“That’s a surprise?” He was tangled in the sheet and he struggled to get his feet on the floor without falling on his face.
“You couldn’t even have the decency to get a hotel room?”
“Sleazy!” he yelled. “You were supposed to be in New York! Until Monday!”
Mitch ignored that. “Outside.”
Trevor halted in his efforts, stared at Mitch, his mouth hanging open. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I am not. Get dressed and get outside.”
Trevor’s face darkened. “No, Dad. I’m done. You dragged me out of bed three times last week, and twice the week before. I’m tired, Dad. Get it? I’m sleeping in class and Decker’s pissed as hell at me because I can’t do my job and as we all know, not doing your job in a steel mill gets you killed.”
The boy gritted his teeth. Held his ground. Somewhere in the back of Mitch’s lust-drugged mind he could respect that.
Now Mitch could add jealousy to the poisonous stew roiling within him. His son felt free to— But Mitch couldn’t—
“What am I supposed to say? Oh, I’m sorry. My dad wants to sleep with his girlfriend, but he won’t, so he gets me up to play soccer in the middle of the night to run it off? Fuck that. I’m done. Find another way to deal with it because this is your problem and I’m not going to let you make it my problem. Oh, hey, here’s an idea—jack off like the rest of us weak mortals.”
Trevor finally got untangled and out of bed, his sheet wrapped around his waist, and stumbled toward the bathroom. “Scarlett!” He pounded on the door. “Baby, lemme in. Please?”
Mitch stood watching this, his fists clenching, seeing only the deep hurt on Cassandra’s face, the door she had slammed in his face.
He didn’t know what to do.
Too much.
Out of control.
He knew he was, and he had no idea how to get back in control.
He was too old for this.
Trevor cast him an angry glance over his shoulder. “Okay! You can go now! And turn off the light and close the door on your way out.”
As angry as Mitch was, he couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but what his son had said, so he turned on his heel and walked out. It was petty, he knew it was, but he didn’t turn off the light or close the door, and felt even worse when he heard the curse and the slam of the door behind him.
Mitch stalked down the hallway to his bedroom, locked his door, then threw himself on the bed and ripped his fly open.
* * * * *
Baby I Love U!
January 18, 2011
I didn’t have any problem Tuesday morning acting as if nothing were different in my life, because it wasn’t. All was well in the world.
As usual.
Except...
There was a dullness to my day, and that irritated me.
Hollander had it coming and I didn’t regret it, even though it meant the end to our budding little romance. It would take another two months to finish separating the old J.I. operation from Hollander Steelworks, and I could do it through my minions. I would never have to see or speak to him again.
Ah, well. I’d had more intriguing men than he. There were plenty more.
“Cassie, you okay? You seem a little— I don’t know. Down in the mouth.”
I flashed a bright smile at Susan, who smiled back and went about her business. An hour later I got a phone call that took me to California, where I waged war on a board of directors who wanted to block the brash reorganization plan their new CEO had begun. The CEO—all of twenty-eight—was an arrogant shit, especially for someone so young, but he wasn’t so arrogant that he wouldn’t call for help when he needed it.
It took me almost three days to beat the old bastards into submission, with a level of rudeness and cruelty surpassing any I had ever displayed, and probably would never need to again once details of this meeting worked its way across the country.
At the end of business Thursday, once I had finished my work and cleared the conference room of its collection of aging socialites, I busied myself packing my laptop and wondered what kind of wine one served at a pity party.
“Cassie.”
I looked up at the CEO. Tall, lean. Powerful. He was gorgeous, from his closely shaved afro, to the sharp planes of his dark face cut sharper by a meticulously trimmed goatee, to his intense brown eyes. And almost twenty years younger than I.
Oh, he fit my idea of the perfect lover to a T. Four months ago, I would have taken him back to my hotel room immediately and fucked him with no time-wasting niceties.
Now... I read his faintly predatory expression and felt absolutely nothing but a slight annoyance.
“Would you care to have dinner with me tonight?”
As an invitation, it was non-threatening and sincere. Underneath all that pretty and arrogance and genius, he was a good man, but he wasn’t Hol—
And he was most definitely eager to have some quality time with me between the sheets. God knew I could use a weekend of lithe young brainiac stud.
“I don’t think so,” I murmured after a second, wondering why I didn’t take him up on it and angry with myself for not doing so. “I’m, uh...not on the market right now.”
“For men or...?” he questioned carefully. It was a fair question and I shook my head.
“I’m— Um, for anybody.”
“Oh,” he said, as if that were a foreign concept and perhaps it was. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that I might dissemble; he had been witness to a protracted demonstration of my nasty reputation. I didn’t realize I’d spent so much time with Hollander that my concept of what “most
single people” did had expanded so far as to include adults who remained celibate by choice because they believed that God requested it as a token of obedience.
More than a token. Downright martyrdom.
Idiots.
“All right.” He held out his hand for me to shake and I took it. “Let me show you to your limousine at least.”
By the time I got to my hotel room only a few minutes later, it dawned on me what would not happen the next day.
No flowers.
No phone call.
No date.
I was back to Friday nights with chick flicks and Chunky Monkey and Clarissa. If she didn’t have another boyfriend yet. Maybe Nigel and Gordon would take me to a movie.
That made me wince.
I decided to have my pilot change his flight plan, as I had the sudden urge to make myself unavailable to everyone and perhaps go down to San Diego—hang out in TJ for a few hours—then turn up Monday morning well rested and relaxed.
I stripped down to my expensive lingerie and redressed in ordinary clothes that would allow me to blend in here where beautiful young women teemed and I was considered plain. Old.
There was great freedom in that.
I walked aimlessly, not caring where I went. Eventually, I found myself in front of a bookstore, then inside it, then in front of the romance section. An hour later, I walked out with a bag full of books and went in search of alcohol and ice cream.
Two Harlequins, a quart of Phish Food, and half a bottle of Mount Gay later, I had accomplished some vague goal of passing out completely shit-faced so I could awaken in the afternoon, having slept through the absence of—
But shit, my stupid ringtone, the one I’d whimsically, ironically, assigned to Mitch, taunted me even in the dreams of my drunken stupor... It quit, but then J.Lo’s tinny voice started up again and I groaned, wondering what in the hell had possessed me to choose that song. I covered my head with a pillow and rolled over to go back to sleep.
“Fuck,” I croaked when I heard my assistant’s ringtone (“I Heard a Rumour”) some time later and struggled to reach the phone. “What?” I rubbed my eyes and yawned.
