by Moriah Jovan
I knew what he wanted. I knew how badly he wanted it. And I knew he would refuse to take any more than he already had.
But that wasn’t what I offered him now.
“Marry me, Mitch.”
I hadn’t really said that, had I?
He opened his eyes and stared at me, incredulous. I could feel warmth flooding my face. Of course he wouldn’t want to marry me, whore that I was and am.
“I’m sorry,” I said and cleared my throat. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot.” I shifted to leave his lap, but he held me tight.
“Yes,” he said, hoarse.
I stiffened and looked at him. “Trevor said you’re a master liar. Are you sure?”
He laughed a laugh completely without humor and ran his hand down his face. “Am I sure? I’ve wanted it since New Year’s, but I didn’t expect to get it so fast or without a fight.”
“I don’t love you.”
“I know what you want. I’m okay with that. For now.”
“And on your terms.”
He inclined his head. “On my terms.”
“Mr. Hollander!” The voice was female, panicked, and not quite as loud as the incessant crying of three children under the age of five. “What happened? Where’s Johnny?”
Suddenly, Mitch disappeared and CEO Hollander took his place. Somehow I understood and I slipped off his lap as discreetly as I could to let him work his magic on this woman whose husband had had his leg cut off.
There would be legal consequences; it went without saying. But Hollander Steelworks was nothing if not cash-rich and well managed by a man who wanted to serve people. He and his insurance company would do right by this man.
I corralled the children—it seemed my day had been overrun with the little things—plopped one on each knee and handed the third the Sprite. “What’s your name?”
He gulped at my boardroom voice, but he answered anyway. “Wally.”
I gestured to the sofa beside me with my head. “Sit. Drink. There are burgers in the bag there if you’re hungry.”
It was a long night.
I didn’t awaken until eight, when my cell phone rang. I couldn’t get to it because I half sat, half lay on the sofa, a sleeping child curled up in each arm and the third sleeping on the other end of the sofa, his legs wrapped around and over mine.
Didn’t matter, though. I knew who it was by the ringtone: “Money’s Too Tight to Mention.” I sighed.
“You want me to get that?”
I looked up at Mitch, still filthy, haggard. I’d lay heavy odds he hadn’t slept at all. “It’s Jack, wanting to know why I haven’t shown up for work yet.”
Mitch’s lip curled. “I’ll deal with him,” he said curtly.
“He doesn’t know about you and me.”
He grunted and sat down on a chair across from the sofa, a coffee table between us. “He annoys me,” Mitch said, as if he had nothing better to say.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. I like him in small doses, but a little bit of Blackwood goes a long way.”
I could respect that, particularly since it was true. “Sebastian seems to be the only one who can really handle him.”
“Sebastian understands him. I don’t. It’s as simple as that.”
“I can’t imagine you not understanding anyone,” I said.
A corner of his mouth quirked. “You have no idea how much I don’t understand.”
“Like?”
“Like why you persist with that stupid reason for going into prostitution.”
I felt as if he had slapped me. “Are you on that again?” I snapped. “I’m a bulldozer, not a sneak. If I say I was bored, that’s what I mean.”
“You’re a bad liar,” he returned. “Does anybody believe that?”
I was fuming. “I thought you said this family had nine kids in it. Where are the other six?”
Suddenly, he grinned and I knew I had betrayed something significant, but I didn’t know what. What I did know was that he wasn’t going to leave this alone until he had pulled out of me whatever it was he wanted me to say.
“Decker sent Trevor out to their house to take care of them so Kathy could come here. These three,” he said, gesturing to the ones that slept on top of me, “wouldn’t leave their mother.”
“How’s Johnny?”
“Well, he could be better, but he’s alive, his leg’s back on with all the nerves attached, and he’s on good drugs.”
That would have pulled a smile out of me except for the creeping wetness I noticed against my leg. “Oh, shit,” I breathed as I looked down. “The girl peed on me.”
Mitch had the gall to laugh. “Is she still in diapers?”
I glared at him as I plucked the waistband away from the two-year-old to check. “Yes.”
He stood then, but listed to his right. “I’ll get the biggest size they have,” he rasped, his humor gone and exhaustion etching his face—and he didn’t think twice about pushing himself beyond his limits to keep the situation under control.
“You will not,” I snapped. He looked at me uncertainly, so I used my boardroom voice. “Mitch. Sit. Now.”
He sat. Slowly, watching me warily.
“I’ll clean her up and beg diapers from the nurses.”
I pointed to the coffee table with the carcasses of cheeseburgers and French fries. “Eat. There’s nothing wrong with it except it’s cold and has cooties.”
“Bossy,” he muttered, but did as I said while I roused the children.
After descending upon the nurse’s station to demand the diapers and the other accoutrements I needed, then herding the children into a large family restroom, they were at least clean, dry, and presentable. I had shucked my own jeans and cleaned the pee spot as well as I could, but it would take a while to dry; I had to resign myself to the fact that everyone who saw me would think I peed my own pants. The two-year-old twirled in her makeshift skirt of a receiving blanket held together with safety pins as if she were a princess. The cafeteria people acted suitably impressed with her outfit.
I sat all three of them down at a table to eat. They chattered like magpies and I was hard pressed to keep up with all the “Oh really?”s and “Uh huh”s and “Wow”s the conversation required, not to mention the “Don’t you dare do that again”s and the necessity for leveling the evil eye. My evil eye had worked on more adults than I could count and worked quite well on children I had not borne. “Miss Cassie?” said the oldest. “Where’s my mom?”
There was a beat of silence before the clamoring and crying started, which only grew in intensity. It was as if they’d forgotten her for a short period of time during their little adventure, though why they found me comforting I didn’t know. It took some doing before I’d hunted the mother down, sleeping in a chair beside her husband’s bed. He was awake and his face lit up when he saw his children, who squealed with delight and rushed to him.
My head hurt.
I left once I was assured the father was okay and the mother was in a position to be able to take over, but I couldn’t forget the way the children had run to him.
Had my children ever been that delighted to see me? If so, I didn’t remember.
Mitch was still asleep on the sofa in the waiting room and while I was hesitant to wake him up, I needed to get him home, bathed, and tucked in bed as if he were one of those children.
To take care of my soon-to-be husband.
* * * * *
An Innocent Man
February 14, 2011
Mitch opened his eyes at the soft hand on his shoulder and looked up at the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
Her sudden proposal had shocked him, but now that she’d opened the door, he wasn’t going to let her close it again.
He reached up to her and pulled her to him to kiss her as he had last night; whatever morals he still had left, he resented at this moment. He could think of nothing he wanted more than to take her home and make love to her.
>
Yet...
Somewhere in the back recesses of his mind, he dreaded her reaction to his relative inexperience—relative to any other man his age, that was. He knew enough to know he wasn’t going to be a good lover to Cassandra without her help, her instruction. He hoped she would be patient with him long enough to learn what would please her.
Kissing, though, that he did well, he knew. He hadn’t kissed a woman since before Mina had slipped into the last stage of her disease, but he’d had lots of practice at it before then. Kissing was all he’d been allowed before marriage to any woman and he’d taken advantage of it with abandon.
And Mina... While she hadn’t cared for actual intercourse, she’d adored kissing him, making out with him—preferably in the back of the car.
“I could fuck you right now, Mitch Hollander,” Cassandra breathed into his mouth, and he laughed, delighted to the depths of his wannabe-bad-boy soul that a woman felt comfortable enough with him to say something so vulgar.
“Cassandra,” he said as he sat up and pulled her down to sit beside him. He wrapped his fingers up with hers and took a breath. “I don’t know much about this.”
“I know.” Her mouth twitched with humor she didn’t want to show. “It’s cute.”
“Puppy dog cute or little boy cute?”
She pursed her lips. “More like randy adolescent kid with the keys to the car on prom night with his pretty girlfriend cute.” She took a deep breath. “I was serious when I said I was bored.”
That took him out of the moment and annoyed him. “Okay, look. I know you’re lying. You know you’re lying. But I’m not going to wade through that right now. I’m tired and I stink.”
“Yeah, you do.”
He laughed. “You don’t cut anybody any slack, do you?”
“I don’t lie so someone can save face, no. Now,” she said in that same commanding tone she’d used to take such capable charge of Johnny’s children. “Get your ass up and into my car. I’ll let you shower and then put you to bed. I should take advantage of your weakened state and do what I want to do to you. Including,” she said, her voice dropping half an octave and taking on a decidedly husky tone, “sucking your cock.”
He pulled in a sharp breath as that particular body part made itself known and eager for her. It didn’t help that he had to think about whether or not to take her up on it, but then he sighed and arose. He dropped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. She felt good there. Right. She’d feel better if they were both naked.
“I’m not that tired. In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“Damn, you’re stubborn.”
“I’m infamous for my patience. A third of the former CEOs in America despise me for it.”
“Hence, ‘former.’”
“Precisely.” He leaned against her all the way out to her rental, then asked, “Have you ever thought about being a school teacher?”
He felt her stiffen against him. As she stuffed him in the passenger side, she said, “That was a foolish thing to say. I hate children and you should know me well enough by now to know that.”
“Remind me to let Trevor know the master liar has competition,” he returned when she dropped into the driver’s seat.
“Why don’t you ever act like I think you should?”
“How do you think I should act?”
“Like a Mormon bishop, that’s what, all judgmental and stuff.”
“How would you know what a Mormon bishop’s supposed to act like? I’m the only one you’ve ever met. I daresay I’m the only real Mormon you’ve ever met, since most of my makeshift family isn’t exactly sterling.”
She huffed and he grinned as he relaxed back against the seat and watched her. She refused to return his look, which he found vastly amusing.
“Brother Johnston, Brittany’s father,” he said deliberately, to see how far he could push her before she blurted something he could work with. Her mouth tightened and she swallowed. “He’s been out of work for almost a year. Their house was scheduled to be foreclosed on in a couple of months. Your cufflinks will get them out from under a mountain of debt. But you didn’t know that, so why’d you give them to her?”
A glimmer appeared in her eye, then a tear ran down her cheek. He expected the words allergies and Benadryl to pop out at any moment. “I don’t know. Does it matter? The girl liked them, so I gave them to her. I just— I didn’t mean to hurt her mother’s pride.”
“You didn’t. She was distressed that you might not know what you’d given her. She knew their value and she thought you’d made a mistake. She didn’t want to take them under false pretenses.”
Cassandra’s pretty eyes widened and she shot him a look filled with hope. “Oh?” she asked, keeping her tone carefully neutral. Either she was well practiced with the mixed signals or she didn’t have a clue how easily he could read her. Mitch was betting heavily on the latter.
“Yes, oh. I told her you knew exactly what they were worth, that you had plenty more where that came from, and to consider it a gift from the Lord.”
She kept driving, her eyes determinedly on the road and her knuckles white. “Why are you telling me this? Isn’t that confidential?”
“Their financial situation is no secret. They just don’t know I paid their mortgage. They—and everybody else—think the Church paid it. So keep it to yourself.”
That got her to look at him again. “But you said—”
“I said it was scheduled to be foreclosed on and I said your cufflinks would get them out from under a mountain of debt. I didn’t say you paid their mortgage arrears.”
Cassandra put her hand to her mouth. It trembled and Mitch thought how much he could love this woman if she’d let him.
Mina was the love of his youth, their union a rough, uncertain lump of carbon, formed slowly and flawlessly into a sparkling diamond under the pressures of life.
But Cassandra—
Oh, she was the most perfect of alloys, the purest of metals in the most precise combination fired by the most extremes of heat—to steel her against the trauma that was her marriage and divorce, the one thoroughly documented in the court system.
She would be the love of his life.
If she would let him get close enough long enough to crack open her shell.
When Sabrina had caught him to ask him to give Cassandra’s diamonds back, he’d told Sabrina with full confidence that Cassandra knew their value.
But nobody just gives thousands of dollars of jewels away, Bishop! Especially to people they don’t know!
Yes, sometimes they do. Heavenly Father answered your prayers, Sabrina. That’s how He works—through other people—and trust me, she won’t miss them. Go home tonight and say a prayer of gratitude, then take a little vacation up to Manhattan so you can go to the diamond district. Sell them and buy Brittany rhinestone replacements she can play with.
But—
Don’t. If you didn’t need them, it’d be different. Go on now.
It had taken his investigators some more digging, but he’d finally figured out why she’d gone into prostitution.
She very definitely knew why.
Now he needed to know why she’d kept it to herself all these years, lied about it to the detriment of her relationship with her daughters.
Daughters she loved dearly and had no idea how to handle.
Mitch needed to dig it out of her, make her explain it, hear it in her words, but at this point, he didn’t care whether it was before or after he got her in bed—and he wasn’t above exploiting his reputation for sneakiness to do it.
He knew what Sebastian would say, could hear it in his head right now: “Dammit, Elder, don’t marry her. If all you want is to get laid, just fuck her and be done with it. None of that messy divorce shit afterward when you figure out it wasn’t the smartest thing you’ve ever done.” And he’d be right. Intellectually, Mitch knew this. It was the circumnavigation to get to his goal that Sebastian—and, by extension, Trev
or—would find ludicrous and Mitch no less so, really.
Mitch knew what Cassandra said she wanted and she probably believed that. She knew she wouldn’t get him in bed any other way, but there was something more, something he couldn’t put his finger on. Marriage to her would give him the opportunity to suss it out, to be skin-to-skin with her so he could do that more efficiently.
Mina had always been more willing to tell him her secret fears, hopes and dreams after making love than she was any other time, deep in the night when she was vulnerable, lying in his arms naked after having had the bond of his body in hers.
He didn’t know if that happened with everyone and he shouldn’t assume it would work with Cassandra, considering what she’d done for a living. She would have had to learn how to put any need for such intimacy aside to do the job.
But he’d taken this gamble before and won, and he had no reason to think he would lose this time.
Sebastian might think him nuts, but Bryce would understand completely. He’d taken the same chance himself with a woman he’d known less than a day and seduced immediately. He’d married her two weeks after that. Four years and one child later, after his and Giselle’s excommunications, through his ongoing treatment for PTSD, Giselle was still pulling him out of the hell he’d lived through before he’d met her, still loving him and taking care of him.
Bryce would approve of this route, and he was no fool.
Cassandra’s phone rang from her open purse between Mitch’s feet. He grabbed it before she could, answering her half-hearted glare with the smirk that never failed to fluster her. He looked at the caller ID.
“What,” he barked.
Stunned silence. “I’m looking for Cassie St. James,” Jack Blackwood said carefully.
“Yeah, but you got Mitch Hollander.” Jack choked and Mitch couldn’t help his wicked chuckle. Cassandra sighed. “She’s indisposed. I need her for a while, so don’t expect her until you see her. Have her assistant cancel her appointments for the week.” He terminated the call, dropped the phone in her purse, and leaned back against the passenger door, silently daring her to say a word.
