Magdalene is book 3 of 5 in the Dunham series.
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A Mormon bishop.
An ex-prostitute.
A man with a vendetta.
Let the games begin.
MAY 2007
I didn’t go into prostitution because I was desperate; I did it because I was bored: Bored with my hausfrau existence, bored with my husband both in bed and out, bored with my ingrate daughters who don’t (yet) understand what it means to be the sacrificial lamb in the nuclear family setup and that being a wife and mother can be its own category of prostitution. They will. And I’ll laugh.
I was never the stereotypical whore with a heart of gold, which seems to be used as point and counterpoint: If you’re pure in heart, being a whore is tolerable, forgivable even; if you’re just a mercenary bitch who likes sex and, moreover, getting paid for it, it’s the unforgivable sin. Ultimately, however, I had to choose my clients on their ability to pay my exorbitant prices and leave the good sex to my carefully selected lovers.
I didn’t quit prostitution for some sort of wish fulfillment of born-again virginity; I quit because I was bored. Fucking for money involves a certain amount of acting ability and while I’m a very good actress (thus, a very good whore), it takes some amount of concentration that is not usually conducive to having a real orgasm.
With a healthy bank account, one ex-husband whose current partner sports genitalia similar to his, four grown daughters, my forty-third birthday on the horizon, and with professional ennui setting in, I had to find something else to do.
Never an Honest Word
November 9, 2010
It was Tuesday night at church, and Mitch could tell: The sound of twenty teenagers’ laughter echoed from the gym. Toddler squeals came from the nursery and carried across the building. Murmurs and chuckles drifted from the kitchen where women gathered to learn the art of creating decent meals out of food storage.
They weren’t doing so well.
He headed out of the room to escape the cooks who knew the food was bad but were determined to brazen it out.
“That’s right! Leave us to our misery!”
Mitch tossed a grin over his shoulder at the woman who’d spoken. “Self-induced, Prissy,” he called back. “You get no sympathy from me.”
Chuckling, he looked down at his BlackBerry and nearly barreled into another woman. He stifled a groan and stepped back immediately. “Excuse me, Sister Bevan,” Mitch murmured, refusing to use her first name.
“Bishop, can I talk to you?”
He didn’t want to.
But he would.
Because he had to.
“Certainly,” he said politely, and gestured toward the hall that led to the bishop’s office. She preceded him and once inside, he closed the door behind her and checked a second door to an adjoining room to make sure his clerk was present and puttering about with church records. Mitch left that one open an inch.
Meanwhile, Sally had made herself comfortable in the chair across from Mitch’s desk. As usual, she had dressed in her best, something approaching a cocktail dress, but not quite making the look work for her. She should probably not wear red.
He dropped into his chair, leaned back, and intertwined his fingers behind his head. “What can I do for you?”
What can I do for you?
His life’s refrain.
Of course, he didn’t have to be told what he could do for her. She’d made herself abundantly clear in the last year, and hadn’t been too subtle before that.
She launched into her usual litany of complaints against her husband, Dan, most of which involved his inability to find or keep a job. But jobs at Dan’s level were scarce and the man was overeducated and overqualified for anything he could get in Allentown or Bethlehem. Apparently, he hadn’t told Sally he was looking for jobs in Manhattan, Chicago, and Atlanta&8212;and not just because there were better opportunities.
Dan wanted to get Sally away from Mitch, and Mitch was perfectly happy to assist him in that endeavor. They’d never talked about it, but the knowledge lay heavy between them.
Mitch wasn’t listening to her. He’d heard it before and didn’t believe a word of it, so he stared at a spot just to the left of the woman’s ear and said “uh huh” and “no” and “yes” in all the appropriate places.
A knock sounded on the door, and with far too much gratitude, he said, “Come in.”
It opened and a seventeen-year-old girl stuck her head in his office. “Hi, Bishop.”
“Hi, Hayleigh.”
“Is Trevor here tonight?”
“He’s at the mill.” Which she knew. It was code for I really need to talk to you now, Bishop.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that the bishop’s son doesn’t come to the youth activities?”
That stung, but she didn’t know. Mitch didn’t need another reminder that Trevor hated Church—everything about it, from doctrine to culture—and would rather clean rest-stop toilets with his own toothbrush than come to church.
But he did attend on Sundays and, to the kid’s credit, he did everything he was asked with a smile and without complaint.
Mitch might have been happier about that were it not for the stab of guilt he felt because he’d farmed the kid out to someone else to raise during his most impressionable years. Now it was too late.
Sally rose abruptly, obviously offended that he had allowed her to be interrupted. “Thank you, Bishop,” she said tightly.
“You’re welcome, Sister Bevan.”
Hayleigh Sitkaris opened the door fully and moved out of Sally’s path. She waited until the older woman had disappeared, then slipped into the office and plopped herself on a chair. “Bishop—”
He waited, but she looked down at the floor. Twisted her diamond bracelet around with her finger. Swallowed. Maybe tonight would be the night she’d confide in him the way a few of the other kids did, the ones who didn’t trust the charismatic youth leader—
—Hayleigh’s father.
“I— Uh, I need—”
“You better tell me quick, because your dad’s going to be here any minute.”
She paled.
“Hayleigh,” he said abruptly, no-nonsense. Her head snapped up. “Whatever it is, I can help you. You have to trust me.”
“Nobody believes me,” she whispered, casting a glance at the cracked clerk’s door. Mitch leaned over and gave it a gentle push until the latch clicked.
“Except Trevor?” It was a stab in the dark.
She paused. “He…doesn’t get it.”
Well, Mitch hadn’t understood it himself until recently, either, and the girl had no faith that he ever would.
A sharp series of raps on the door made the girl stiffen. “Just a moment,” he called. “Hayleigh,” he said softly, leaning over his desk to offer her the ever-present tissue box. “Mop up.”
She obeyed. Mitch waited and watched as she struggled to pull herself together. Finally, she took a deep breath and nodded.
“Come in.”
Enter Hayleigh’s father. He stilled when he saw the girl, and said smoothly enough, “Hayleigh, dear, your mother’s looking for you.”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said brightly, popping out of her chair and acting for all the world that she was happy to see him. But she never met his eyes, and cast a glance at Mitch. “Thanks, Bishop.”
“No problem.”
She squeezed past her father, who watched her, then closed the door and looked at Mitch. “Appropriating something else of mine, Mitch?” he said low. “Raising two daughters of your own wasn’t enough that you feel the need to raise mine, too, or are you into teenage girls?”
“Siddown.”
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
Of course he would. But those tactics didn’t bother Mitch in the least, and he simply relaxed back into his chair again. The hostility was ever-present and had been for the last twenty-five years, but now there were no illusions—or at least, there weren’t any now that Mitch had something approaching proof, though not of the right type.
“Whaddaya want, Mitch? The kids are waiting for me, and you know I don’t like being at your beck and call.”
“I can help you with that,” Mitch drawled, making a point to look straight into Greg’s soulless gray eyes. “I’m releasing you from the Young Men’s presidency.”
“You what?” Greg asked, shocked. It was the first time Mitch had seen him show a genuine emotion in years.
“Young Men’s president. You’re out.”
Greg’s face contorted with the anger of perpetual frustration. “Why?” he ground out.
“Does the name Rohm mean anything to you?” Mitch asked.
Greg’s rage didn’t abate nor did he fall to justifying, explaining, reasoning. “So what if it does?” he snarled. “You can’t prove anything.”
Mitch shrugged. “Does it matter? I don’t have to have proof. Maybe I just want somebody else to have a crack at such a…prestigious…calling.”
“Nobody in this ward can do that job better than I can.”
That, in fact, was true, but Greg had an ulterior motive: In this neck of the woods, Young Men’s president was seen as the stepping stone to the bishopric and above all else, Greg wanted to be a bishop.
“Still waiting to sit in this chair, eh?” Mitch said, just to twist the knife a little. It wasn’t very Christlike of him, but he couldn’t resist.
“Dave’s going to hear about this.”
“I’m sure he will, bright and early tomorrow morning at tee time. Does Shane know you’re a thief?”
Greg barked a humorless laugh. “Ah, your father-in-law. He’s always been a tool.”
Mitch totally agreed, but there was no satisfaction in knowing that Shane was as blind to Greg as everyone else.
Almost everyone else. There was a minority of people who either understood or had instincts enough to steer clear:
A couple of the kids.
The Relief Society president and her husband.
Mitch’s first counselor and his wife.
His second counselor, who had had a few run-ins with Greg when they worked together at Jep Industries years before.
Somehow Mitch had managed to surround himself with the few people in the ward who understood what Greg was about—and he had never noticed.
“So tell me something,” Mitch said abruptly. “How does it feel, knowing you were the flunky at J.I.? What’d they promise you? A million? Two?”
Greg’s face flushed and he balled his fists. Mitch knew Greg wouldn’t dare punch him, because Mitch was bigger, stronger, and he had authority over Greg. Getting arrested for assault would take the shine off Greg’s façade.
Oh, how Mitch wished he had enough proof to take to the D.A., but since he didn’t, he had to settle for punishing Greg ecclesiastically—and even there his options were limited.
“And leaving the country without you, after you’d done their dirty work? Nice touch.”
Mitch couldn’t bar Greg from going to the temple. The stake president—Mitch’s superior—would have to okay the decision, which would oblige Mitch to explain. Without proof, explaining to a man that his best friend had been the linchpin in a large-scale embezzlement scheme would be…awkward. At best. And explaining it to most of the people in Mitch’s ward—even if he could—would cause no end of trouble for Mitch.
Better to release Greg quietly and not call him to anything else. Caught between the most popular man in the ward and the stake president, it was the only thing Mitch could do—and he’d get hammered for it from every side.
Ah, well. Perhaps then President Petersen would release Mitch from the bishopric so he could go on with his life and do something…different.
“Considering our history, I don’t know what possessed me to call you in the first place.”
“It’s because you’re such a damned fool, Mitch.”
“I’m sure Senator Oth would believe me.”
Greg planted his hands on Mitch’s desk and leaned over it. “Go right ahead and tell him. He’s as stupid as your father-in-law is.”
“I can’t disagree with that,” Mitch said blithely. “But Roger has the power to make your life miserable whether I can prove it or not.”
Greg’s mouth twitched as he slowly straightened to his full height. “You would never go to Oth,” he murmured. “You and your wolf pack aren’t exactly his favorite people, and to him, I’m a nobody. He wouldn’t understand it if you carved it in his skin.”
That was true, too.
“You have no conscience, do you?”
Greg answered Mitch’s question with a smirk, his temper evening out into a vague humor. Fake, all fake. Except the rage. The rage would manifest as “slips” of the tongue and gentle, slyly penitent tidbits of gossip, little seeds of contention planted in the minds of three quarters of the people in the ward and stake.
Why was Mitch only seeing this now?
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” Greg said, “but I don’t keep company with women who pose for nude portraits. Or modern-day Gordon Gekkos. Or murderers.”
“Jesus did.”
Greg’s rage resurfaced and he reached for the doorknob. “You’re going to regret this, Mitch,” he snarled. “You just can’t be happy unless you’ve taken everything that belongs to me, can you?”
“I never took anything away from you. Mina didn’t belong to you. Neither does my car, my house, my kids, my company, my bank account, my friends, my calling. Never did.”
“I’ll find a way to destroy you, Mitch. When I’m done with you, you won’t be able to walk into a church building anywhere in the world. You think anybody will believe you over me? You could have mountains of proof, and nobody would believe I’m capable of anything less than perfection, and you’d get crucified for daring to suggest that I am—starting with your father-in-law and the stake president.”
“Aaannd while you’re trying to figure out how to do that, I’ll be turning your life inside out and upside down, finding all your little schemes, starting with Jep Industries. Let’s see who finishes first.”
“Don’t play chicken with me, Mitch,” he growled. “You’ll lose, just like the Rohms. Just like Senator Oth.”
Mitch smirked. “Do your worst.”
Greg turned in a fury, but his demeanor changed the instant he opened Mitch’s office door and stepped out in the hall to find a cadre of teenagers awaiting him. “All right, guys,” he boomed, as jovial as always, “Now we can get back to the fun.”
The excited chatter dimmed with the close of the door, and Mitch picked up his phone. “Sebastian,” he said without preamble. “I know you’re up to your eyeballs in problems right now, but we need to go over those Jep Industries documents again. ASAP.”
“Uh,” said the man on the other end of the phone after a long pause. “Why? It’s been six years. We’ve gone through those a million times.”
“I have something to look for now. Guy in my ward, one of the HR execs we didn’t rehire. He was in on it. I just can’t prove it.”
Sebastian put him on speakerphone. “Name?”
“Greg Sitkaris.”
Keyboard clicks. Mouse clicks. “Okay, I see him, but nothing pops out at me. What are you thinking?”
“I want to get together. Lay it all out with the new information, re-map it. And the sooner the better.”
“So what did he do? Why now?”
Mitch hesitated, wondering how much he could say. Being a bishop held the same responsibility of confidentiality that every other ecclesiastical position did. But in this case…
“One of the foundry’s foremen— He’s a bishop of another ward. Two weeks ago he tells me about a family in his ward whose financial situation isn’t adding up, and Greg’s name kept popping up. I took the liberty of having my people check into this family’s situation, and all roads point to some annuities Greg sold them—”
“But that’s not illegal,” Sebastian said with some impatience, and Mitch could tell his attention was beginning to wander. “And annuities are notoriously bad instruments to begin with. Caveat emptor.”
“Sebastian!” he snapped. “Stay with me. This is important.”
Pause. “Sorry.”
“Once the new information is added in to what we already have, it turns into a different picture. I just don’t have a clear idea of that picture. I want us all there so we can brainstorm.”
Silence, except for the sound of a fingertip tapping on wood. Finally, Sebastian said, “Okay. We can do that, but not in the next couple of weeks. I’m trying to hold Knox together while the media drags him through the mud over Vanessa.”
Mitch felt a thud deep in the pit of his stomach. The stake president would demand to know why Mitch had released Greg from such a key position in the ward, and Mitch had hoped to have figured it out before that happened.
“You’re going to Whittaker House for Thanksgiving, right?”
“Of course.” Mitch only wished Mina had been well enough long enough for him to have taken her to Whittaker House Inn, in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks. It was only a hundred miles southwest of Rolla, the town where he and Mina had truly, finally fallen in love and spent eight years, where they’d built their life and family.
Mina would have adored it.
Under normal circumstances, Mitch would have never gone to one of Vanessa Whittaker’s holiday masquerades, with Mina or without. Those parties were way too decadent for his comfort zone, but this time, his attendance was necessary. Vanessa was mired in media mud and nursing a broken heart, to boot. She needed all the support she could get, and he owed her for the sweetly quiet way she’d taken care of him this past year.
“We can do it then,” Sebastian was saying. “Bring what you have. See if you can gather more. We can spend the weekend going over it all. That okay?”
No. Possibly too little. Definitely too late.
Mitch couldn’t even enjoy the thought of finally solving this riddle and putting Greg in jail because of the dread settling over him. He’d bested Greg for almost twenty-five years, time after time, and his winning streak had to end somehow.
Mitch knew this would be it, and it wouldn’t be pretty.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel.
“Oh, bullshit,” Sebastian drawled after a split second. “There’s something else going on.”
Not for the first time Mitch wished he could lie to his best friend as well as he could lie to the rest of the world. “I just released him from the Young Men’s presidency.”
“And?”
“He wants to be bishop. Always has. And…compared to him, I have a bit of a credibility problem.”
Sebastian grunted. “Because of us.”
“That and Greg is…charismatic. In the charlatan televangelist way. Whole ward loves him, especially the kids. He plays golf with the stake president and softball with three quarters of the stake high council. My father-in-law’s still in love with him, and you know how Shane feels about me.
“But he’s also got his daughter wrapped up in knots, his wife is a little too Stepford for my comfort, and the few people who understand what he is stay far, far away from him. It’s been explained to me, but I never got it until lately. I started really watching him, tracking his behavior through the way other people act and treat each other. He can stir up trouble without seeming to and make it seem like everybody else’s fault.”
“Oh, I get it. Like my Aunt Trudy. She could’ve gaslighted a frog.”
“Yes, exactly. Gaslight. That’s it. I couldn’t think of the word.”
“So what naïf called him to be Young Men’s president?”
“Uh…that would be me,” Mitch muttered. “He’s useful. Does everything he’s asked and does it well. He’s heavy into Scouting, does all the high adventures in grand style. I wasn’t going to let that go to waste just because he and I have history.”
“And you can’t stand him.”
“It’s not that… It’s—” Mitch sighed. “I never knew him. Never thought about him enough to care. I’ve never looked past his act because it doesn’t affect me one way or another, and I was too busy with my life. Mina tried to explain it to me for years, but apparently I wasn’t listening.”
More guilt.
“And you’re worried about what he could do to you.”
Mitch paused. “Not…professionally, no.”
Sebastian laughed then, a booming laugh that made Mitch crack a reluctant grin. “Aw, c’mon, Elder. Have a little faith. This isn’t Paris, and we’re not twenty, getting dressed down by a mission president with the IQ of a crêpe. This guy has no power, no connections, and nowhere near the money you have. What’s the worst he can do?”
Lady Marmalade
November 30, 2010
My email dinged and the sender’s name shocked me.
TO: cjsj@blackwoodsecurities.com
FROM: SA Taight
REPLY-TO: kingmidas@taight.com
SUBJECT: [no subject]
DATE: 11/30/10 2:11 PM EST
Cassie,
Even though you neither called me to rescue you from your cockeyed theories about my Fix-or-Raid Protocol nor presented yourself for my anointing as my ideological successor, I want you to reorganize the Hollander Steelworks/Jep Industries operation. Need it fast and I hear you specialize in fast. Please give me date and time we can get this done. Pref next week. Pref Mon. Pref 10am. Pref @ Hollander’s office.
SbnT
kingmidas@taight.com
What an ego that man possessed. But I laughed, delighted that he had come to me, albeit with the infamous arrogance that he could snap his fingers and the financial world would jump.
I hit REPLY.
TO: kingmidas@taight.com
CC: jack@blackwoodsecurities.com
FROM: Cassandra J. St. James
SUBJECT: How high? Re: [no subject]
I would prefer Monday next, 10 a.m., Hollander’s office. Please make the appropriate arrangements.
St. James
It took me the rest of the day to clear my calendar, and it took my assistant that long to get the file storage service to promise a rush delivery. When they had stacked at least a dozen banker’s boxes in my corner office suite the next morning, Susan and I looked at each other in dismay.
“Uh…” The head of the corporate bond department stood in the door of my office staring at the carnage.
“New project,” I said when I realized Melinda had arrived to whisk Susan away so they could watch their favorite cooking show—Vittles: Gourmet Roadkill and Weeds—together. “I need her right now, so DVR it.”
“What project?”
“It appears that Hollander Steelworks can no longer support the old Jep Industries operation by itself and needs to be cut loose.”
“Oh,” Melinda said, blinking. “That’s…interesting.”
“Want to help?”
“No,” she said flatly. “I have about as much interest in restructuring as you have in bonds. Plus, I have plans for the weekend and they do not include—” She waved a hand. “That.”
“Okay, then,” I said pointedly. “Bye.”
Melinda left in a huff, and Susan and I set to work sorting and sifting, finding all the documents I needed.
I’d been through most of them in the last four years, but my assistant hadn’t, and she needed to know the whole story so she could help me. Finally, we had the boxes organized enough that we could plant ourselves on the floor and start digging. Susan settled in as if I were going to spin a magical financial yarn for her pleasure.
“Once upon a time,” I said, flashing her a smile. She grinned back at me in appreciation. I wondered what it would be like for one of my daughters to happily listen to a story I wanted to tell while we worked on a project together.
“You know who Senator Roger Oth is, right?” I said.
She nodded. “He’s an imbecile.”
“Exactly. He was the owner and CEO of Jep Industries about, oh, seven years ago. He inherited it and really didn’t have a clue what he was doing. One of those silver-spoon types. Like me, only stupid.” Susan laughed. “Anyway, J.I. ended up in a hole Roger couldn’t pull it out of and he had to call Sebastian Taight to fix it.”
“And Mr. Taight raided it instead.”
“Well, kind of.”
It wasn’t King Midas’s usual modus operandi, and had taken everyone by surprise. Usually when Taight was called to restructure a company, it took a while; no one understood why he did what he did or why it took him so long to do it, but his method worked. When he finished with a company, he left it lean and strong, and—more importantly—it stayed that way. It would take a year or more for Wall Street to find out if he would initiate a hostile takeover, which happened often enough that the betting pools opened as soon as he stepped foot on a property.
“The first thing that tipped everybody off that this wasn’t his normal process,” I said absently as I thumbed through the files, “was that he called his family in immediately.”
“His family?”
“Morgan Ashworth. Knox—”
“Morgan Ashworth, the writer? He’s related to King Midas?”
“He’s not a writer. He had a few good ideas and hired a team of ghostwriters and marketers. He’s an economist who’s been politically disenfranchised for the last few years. He basically—” I laughed and reached for another folder. “He shrugged.”
Susan groaned at my bad joke, then said, “I’ve seen him. Well, his picture. On the back of his books. He’s hot.”
“And gay.”
She sighed and I chuckled, unable to blame her.
“Then,” I said, and threw a file in a box, “there’s Knox Hilliard.”
“The OKH Enterprises heir? The one who had to fulfill all those crazy conditions to inherit the company?”
“Yes. The one who had to get married and have a living child before he was forty, which nobody thought he’d do after his uncle—Fen Hilliard—killed Knox’s fiancée and tried to kill the woman Knox would’ve married as a last resort.”
“I can’t imagine a company being important enough to kill people over.”
“Ah, well. Fen had built a billion-dollar empire from a ghetto one-guy shop and he loved it. I can understand how he felt about losing it to somebody who didn’t want it but felt obliged to take it.”
“Enough to kill for it, though? Really?”
I pursed my lips. “Of course not. But by the time Fen decided to kill Knox, he’d already lost the company. If Fen couldn’t have it, neither could Knox. Fen just wanted to make sure he took Knox with him to hell—and he almost succeeded. Knox had no pulse for a couple of hours after he was shot. In fact, he was still in the morgue when his mother committed suicide.”
“Oh, that’s so sad.”
“It really is.”
“Does that have anything to do with Jep Industries and Hollander Steelworks?”
“Only marginally.” Then I really started to warm up to the tale. It was a sexy story and I wanted to tell it. “Ashworth and Hilliard—Knox, not Fen—are Sebastian’s cousins. Hilliard’s a specialist in prosecuting white-collar crimes and he’s a magician with numbers. Sebastian only calls him in when he suspects theft. He calls on Ashworth when he needs an assessment of the greater economic impact of a company failing completely.”
“Which meant there was a chance that could happen.”
“Right. The fact that he called them in immediately meant the situation was about to blow up and devastate a huge portion of the economy.” Indeed, a Jep Industries failure would have rocked the core of American industry. J.I. bought at least half of Hollander Steelworks’s annual output of steel to manufacture thousands of metal parts from the mundane (nuts and washers) to the magnificent (tuned mass dampers). Jep Industries was the BASF of metal-parts manufacturing: J.I. didn’t build anything; they made the products used to build everything.
I would have continued to talk, but my mouth was getting dry. “Want anything?” I asked as I stood to get something to drink.
“Cassie,” Susan pleaded, hopping to her feet. “Let me do it.”
“Water, then,” I said, and let her go. It embarrassed her when I got her a drink or brought her lunch, but I knew what she liked and if I wanted to go out… I saw no reason to cater to her sense of corporate propriety over my sense of efficiency.
I stretched. Checked email. Made a phone call.
Wondered if I had yet come to a place in my life where I could contemplate having an affair.
Even though you neither called me to rescue you from your cockeyed theories about my Fix-or-Raid Protocol…
Oh my, and had I ever needed rescuing from my advisor—an asshole professor who didn’t think a rich Upper East Side divorced stay-at-home mom had any business cluttering up his MBA program.
I hadn’t called King Midas to pull me out of business school with a diploma because he was beautiful and I couldn’t afford the distraction of attempting to break my long fast—especially with a man who’d ostensibly taken himself off the market a few years before.
He probably would’ve brought his gorgeous wife and then I’d have had two people in my immediate vicinity reminding me how long it’d been since I’d had good sex from a man or woman—or both—and taking my attention away from getting my reworked thesis approved.
Taight had managed to rescue me in absentia, however, by alerting the CEO of Blackwood Securities as to my plight. Jack Blackwood had offered me a job after one evening with a thick dossier his investigators had compiled, my thesis, and my résumé. That, in turn, forced my advisor to reconsider his opinion of rich Upper East Side divorced stay-at-home moms.
Or at least, one of them.
Susan returned with water and we returned to our sorting.
“Where was I?”
“The part where you say you were kidding that Morgan Ashworth’s gay.”
I laughed. “Ah, sorry, no can do.”
“Rats. Okay, so… J.I. was bleeding money and…?”
“Right. Roger Oth’s executives were stealing from him and they’d laid a crumb trail that would point to him as being—oh, the wing man, I guess—once they jumped ship and headed to Brazil. What nobody knew at the time was that Sebastian, Hilliard, and Ashworth were working around the clock to find out how and where that money was going and to stop it. The best they could do—because all the executives left the country the minute Hilliard found the crumb trail—was shut down Jep Industries.”
“I thought that was what they were trying to avoid.”
“They were, but the employees’ 401(k) accounts had been scheduled to drain to a Swiss bank account, and the accounts were locked with a dead man’s switch.”
At Susan’s blank look, I had to backtrack.
“If the accounts were accessed in bulk with one login by anyone other than the thieves, they would instantly transfer. It was possible to access one account at a time, which would allow any one employee to receive their funds should they leave before the scheme was set in motion.”
“To keep anybody from suspecting.”
“Right. Hilliard figured this out, so as soon as he had all the paperwork in place, Sebastian laid off all the workers. Before any employee was allowed to leave the building, they were directed to a computer, instructed to access their account, and roll it over into a different account. That left the thieves without most of the funds they were counting on.”
“Clever.”
Indeed.
“All hail King Midas. Again.”
“Oh, no,” I corrected, then took a long drink. I hadn’t talked to anyone for this long in…oh, forever. “Not this time. Everyone was stunned. The employees. Wall Street. Congress. One day J.I. lived and breathed, secure under King Midas’s guidance for at least another year or two, and the next day it was gone. Poof. Left a hole in the manufacturing sector and killed twelve hundred jobs. He made a lot of enemies.”
“Why didn’t he just hold a press conference and explain it?”
That was a good question. The rest of the world assumed it was because Taight never talked at all, which would have been an entirely reasonable thing for them to assume. King Midas’s mystique rested on his refusal to explain how he decided whether to fix or raid a company.
But I’d spent two years studying Taight and his methods, and I knew why he hadn’t said a word about Jep Industries: He wanted to catch the bastards. He had never gone into a company with an embezzlement problem and not come out without getting a few people jailed. To the rest of Corporate America, Jep Industries looked like a triumph. For all I had never met nor conversed with Sebastian Taight, I knew he considered Jep Industries a personal failure.
He’d never failed before or since. It had to grate.
Finally, I said, “He’d rather just keep his reputation for being a ruthless bastard.” Susan nodded. Yes, she would understand because, while I might be King Midas’s heir apparent, I certainly didn’t give companies years to figure out their issues and learn how to be better at their jobs. I had gained a reputation for doing it fast because I was rude.
Possibly cruel.
“That happened in the summer of 2004. I started grad school in 2007, which was about the time everybody began to figure out that none of the companies that needed Jep’s products had closed. At first, everyone assumed they were still working on leftover inventory, so no one thought much about it. Eventually, they’d have to start buying from Jep’s nearest competitors.”
“I thought Jep had no competition.”
“In effect. It’s hard to compete when nobody wants your products because they’re crap.”
“Oh, I see.”
I took another long drink.
“It took a while for people to notice that none of Jep’s customers had gone out of business and they weren’t buying the inferior products. Nobody could figure out who was manufacturing J.I.’s products. It became a brand new situation to analyze, and I walked right into it.”
Indeed, that puzzle had caught my imagination nearly immediately, and I watched and listened, picking up clues here and there long after the furor had died down. The three years between the closing of J.I. and my entry into the MBA program had been ones of silent upheaval in the manufacturing sector and thus, the economy. Only a handful of people had been witness to it.
I was one of them, albeit in retrospect.
I became an amateur historian, funneling through all those old records, finding Sebastian Taight and his family, digging back to his ties with Mitch Hollander, which seemed to originate in the Mormon church.
That piqued my curiosity to no end, this tendency I began to see in Mormons to be able to spin gold out of straw, especially Taight, his mother, and his cousins. Taight fascinated me simply because he was an enigma to the rest of the country. There was something there, something in him that I could hold onto. I knew it was there, and I would find it.
And then I did.
It was like finding a snag on a cardigan, the one thread that, if tugged, will unravel the entire garment in a single pull.
I’d been with Blackwood Securities barely six months when Taight’s five-year-long war with Fen Hilliard came to its shocking head. Jack, Melinda, and I, along with the rest of the officers and executives of Blackwood Securities had held our collective breath for a month while we waited for Knox Hilliard to live or die.
“And how does OKH Enterprises fit into it?”
“Well, once Hollander had completely absorbed J.I., he wouldn’t sell his products to OKH out of loyalty to Sebastian. Now, Fen was clever and he could make do with the other vendors’ inferior products—better than anybody else could—but it cost him more in the long run in time and lost productivity.”
Susan said nothing for several seconds. “That’s just so…junior high.”
I laughed. “It is, isn’t it? The stakes are just a lot higher. And so now I’ve told you the story—”
“They didn’t all live happily ever after?”
I snorted. Cheeky girl. “Yes, but now Sebastian wants me to go reorganize Hollander Steelworks. What I’m going to do is detach Jep completely and give it a new corporate identity. It needs to have something other than ‘The Old Jep Industries’ as its brand, since Jep Industries went out of business in 2004.”
“Why doesn’t Mr. Taight do it himself? I mean, that’s what he does, right?”
That was an excellent question.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but I have a theory. Now. What we’re looking for are the original documents pertaining to when Hollander Steelworks absorbed Jep. Then I’ll need you to contact Hollander’s assistant and get the organization’s charts and— Well, you know what I want. After I have all that, I can figure out the most efficient way to get it done.” I looked at her as she sifted furiously through boxes, all business now that she knew what to look for. “We have a long weekend ahead of us.”
Cabiria
December 6, 2010
“Cassie, whatever you do, don’t use your schtick on Mitch Hollander. It won’t work and it’ll annoy him.”
I didn’t bother to look up from my desk, where I had assembled everything I needed to get this project done. My boss stood in the threshold of my office, nervous, showing it, but that didn’t affect me.
“Cass?”
“I heard you, Jack,” I murmured, too engrossed in preparing for the task ahead to indulge his insecurities. “You should know me better than that.”
He grunted. “I know you well enough to know you pull out the sex kitten when it suits you.”
“As I recall, that’s why you hired me.”
“I hired you for your little black book and your tendency to use it as a weapon.”
Which made me one of the most powerful people in America. I smirked.
“So let me make this perfectly clear to you: The man’s a Mormon bishop. It would be like seducing a priest.”
“Did that. Two years, until the archbishop busted him.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes, but not badly. Boringly. I don’t remember if he got excommunicated or just sent to Siberia.”
“Cassie. Please?”
I sighed and looked across the room at him, all five feet and ten inches of barely leashed—usually cheerful—energy. “Why are you so afraid of Mitch Hollander?”
He waved a hand. “I’m not afraid of him. I like him. I respect him. He doesn’t like me.”
“Okay, then. Why do you need his approval?”
“Why do you need Clarissa’s?”
Ouch.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said, getting back to packing my laptop and associated displays. Jack made fun of me for using paper, but digital presentations kept people at a distance, and I got in my clients’ faces. Paper suited my style. “I promise I won’t disgrace you by throwing myself at Hollander.”
“Thank you,” he breathed, and I shook my head. Jack’s concern for Hollander’s opinion was so out of character I had no frame of reference for it.
At a word to my assistant, my things were taken down to my car while I ate the last of my breakfast.
“And, oh, keep your mitts off the rest of the pack, too.”
“Why?” I asked around my lox.
“Just— No playtime or side arrangements amongst my Mormon clientele, okay? It kind of creeps me out.”
“Their morality is their problem,” I said. “And as to that—except for Hollander, who nobody can figure out anyway—none of that pack is a shining example of morality. I mean, look at Hilliard.”
“That’s a rumor.”
“But he’s never denied it.”
I felt a deep affinity for Knox Hilliard, a man who’d cracked and gone rogue the minute the justice system failed to deliver justice. Fortunately or unfortunately (I’d never known which) I hadn’t had Hilliard’s courage and had settled for dispatching my enemies in less permanent ways.
Even then, while my daughter could overlook a charismatic law professor’s alleged misdeeds (so much she was willing to follow him to his no-name midwestern college to get a law degree), she could not forgive me mine.
The ones she knew of, anyway.
Vengeance was far uglier up close and personal, and did not sit as attractively on my shoulders as it did on Dr. Hilliard’s, whom she worshipped on a semi-regular basis whenever he lectured on white-collar crimes at NYU’s criminal justice program.
“And Taight.”
Jack shrugged. “He’ll tell you he’s still a cultural Mormon.”
“Doesn’t keep him from fucking half the world’s women.”
“He’s settled down.”
“Doubt it. A tomcat like that doesn’t just stay home with the kittens when one particular pussy catches his fancy.” Jack cleared his throat and I rolled my eyes. “Okay, okay,” I said, conceding once I remembered Jack’s history, sexual and otherwise. “I get the point. Unless you’re fucking around on your wife.”
“Would you fuck around on my wife?”
“It would depend on her libido and how good she is in bed.”
“She’s a raving lunatic. Eat your heart out.”
That made me laugh. If Eilis Logan had done for King Midas what Lydia Blackwood had done for Jack, I’d have to kill my assumptions about his chronic promiscuity.
I looked at my watch and stood to clean up.
“Cassie, please, let me do that,” Susan said as she zipped through my office door, past Jack.
“Susan…”
“It’s my job,” she said and glared at me, her fist propped on her hip. Really, she was too young to be that bossy, but I acquiesced.
I swept out of my office, Jack’s last-minute admonitions following me down the hall to the elevator bank. Once down on Wall Street, I slipped into my waiting car. My driver closed the door, walked around the car, slid behind the wheel, and said, “Good morning, Ms. St. James.”
“Good morning, Sheldon. Any news?”
He gave me a few details on my neighbors, my colleagues, my children—tidbits he’d picked up here and there at Zabar’s or the dry cleaner’s or wherever he went while waiting for a call from me or my children. Every day he had at least one small thing that I could use. Somehow.
“Thank you,” I murmured when he ran out of on dits.
“And,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “My wife finally got a job. Really good one, where she can do what she likes and go up the ladder. Benefits, too. The works. Ms. St. James,” he said earnestly, “I really want to than—”
“Excellent,” I said, and checked my phone for messages.
We said nothing else to each other on the drive to Bethlehem, home of Hollander Steelworks, mostly because I needed to call the one person guaranteed not to want to talk to me.
“Cassie!” she hissed, then lowered her voice. “I’m in class.”
I knew that.
“Question,” I said, disregarding her irritation. “When do you graduate?”
“In May. Which you know. My graduation application is posted on the refrigerator.”
“It’s dated two years ago, Clarissa.”
“What do you want?”
“Are you serious about going where Knox Hilliard teaches?”
“Dammit, Mother. Of course I am. An urban commuter school—a state one at that—in some hick town in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t have skiing or a beach?”
Her willingness to sacrifice so much for her educational goals was admirable.
“I mean, for real? As in, you’re going to work, not simply drool over Professor Hottie and wait for him to notice you and fall in love with you?”
“I’m going to ignore that and point you to my 4.0 in a double major. Which is criminal justice and Spanish. Not humanities, also known as underwater basket weaving. Unlike some people I could name. Mother.”
She had me there. The snob. “I am on my way to a meeting at which he will be present. Would you like me to finesse your name into the conversation? Plant a few seeds?”
I would have thought the call had been dropped but for the background lecture going on and the rustlings of students. “What kind of meeting, exactly?”
“Not that.”
I could hear her breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank God.”
“Although I might change my mind…”
“Mother! Don’t you think you’ve poached enough men? You have to move in on my territory, too?”
“A crush on a man old enough to be your father does not ‘territory’ make.”
“God, you’re a bitch.”
“Isn’t he married? To that gorgeous redheaded right-wing nut?” Stony silence. “Oh, I remember. We don’t like to talk about that.”
“Bite me. This conversation is over.”
And it was, because she’d hung up on me.
I attempted to annoy my other three daughters, but none of them were available. I doubted they were avoiding me, but I couldn’t rule it out.
My phone rang then— “I’ve Never Been to Me,” my best friend’s ringtone.
He hates that.
“Where are you?” Nigel demanded.
“About halfway to Lehigh Valley. Why?”
“Word got out that you’re detaching Jep Industries from Hollander Steelworks, rebranding it, and installing a COO. Hollander’s bigger customers are biting their fingernails.”
“Shit, already?” I had hoped that word wouldn’t get out so soon, but it was inevitable when the CEO of OKH Enterprises—J.I.’s biggest customer now that Fen Hilliard was dead—was married to Hollander’s best friend. King Midas probably didn’t want to piss off his wife by doing the reorganization himself.
“You’re the wild card in this scenario.”
I would have pinched the bridge of my nose, but I didn’t want to disturb my makeup. “Keep mum until I can work Logan around to my point of view.”
Indeed, Sebastian Taight’s wife could be a right bitch when she was unhappy, and as the CEO of the biggest metals fabrication plant in the country, her opinions were critical. The health of OKH’s equipment depended on Jep’s products, and any change in its leadership could negatively affect her production lines—which would affect a lot of other companies. Thus, the manufacturing sector took its cues from her: If Eilis Logan wasn’t happy, nobody was happy.
Naturally, I’d planned for that.
“I’m not sure how long it will take me to beat Hollander and his cronies into doing it my way, especially if she fights me. And God knows how Taight will figure into it. Even if he likes my plan, he’ll stand with his wife.”
“That’s a helluva conflict.”
“Has that ever stopped the Dunham family before?”
“Good point,” he said. “Gotta go. Bring all their balls home in a jar.”
Right.
I looked at my watch. “Damn. Sheldon, could you drive around Bethlehem and Allentown? I want to see a few things.”
“Pardon my saying so, Ms. St. James, but won’t that make you late?”
“Yes, Sheldon. Yes, it will. Perhaps…twenty minutes or so?”
“Yes, Ms. St. James.”
Mid-Life Crisis
“Mitch, you okay? The pack’s here.”
He knew that.
From the vantage point of his office three stories up, through floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows, Mitch had watched his board of directors, his friends-cum-family, drive onto the grounds in two vehicles, then disappear into the parking garage.
It wouldn’t take them long to get to his office once they parked.
Still Mitch stood with his arm pressed against the glass, up over his head, his forehead against his arm. He watched sparks fly out of the massive doors of the foundry half a mile away and regretted the weak winter sun; it was pretty in daylight, but it was spectacular at night. He liked going out and contributing to the creation of those sparks.
In the eternal battle of man against steel, Mitch conquered.
Every minute of every hour of every day, and Hollander Steelworks was a living testament to that.
“I’m fine, Darlene, thanks,” he said without turning. His poor assistant, so worried about him.
But here it was, early December, the ground around the office building covered in white or glittering ice melt. The only grief he could muster today, his wedding anniversary, was that he didn’t remember much about the time before Mina’s disease had really started to drain the life out of her; didn’t remember much about his wife, the woman he’d loved and married twenty-three years before. She had loved him, believed in him, supported him, borne his children. He remembered what she had done, but not who she was.
He only remembered the longsuffering invalid he had nursed so long.
Mitch heard the booming voices and boisterous laughter of four men and three women drawing closer to his office suite.
Still he didn’t move, even when he saw their reflections in the glass.
The big hand of Mitch’s best friend came down hard on his left shoulder and shook him lightly. “Sorry, Elder,” Sebastian murmured. “I didn’t think about the date when I scheduled this. You should have said something.”
Mitch shook his head. “If it bothered me that much, I would’ve.”
Another man approached on his right and halted at the glass, his arms crossed over his chest. “You okay, Mitch?” he rasped.
Second time in five minutes someone had asked him that, but Mitch knew Bryce would understand completely, and he couldn’t lie to Sebastian when it was important.
“Wondering if I did everything I could,” he finally replied.
“You got her seen and gave her the best care money could buy,” Sebastian said.
Palliative, not curative.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Bryce offered, “her first obstetrician should’ve suspected something was wrong and checked her over.”
The second one missed it, too. The third—
Mr. Hollander, I want to admit her so I can run some tests. Something’s wrong, and we need to find out what.
—had called in a neurologist who finally uncovered it: early-onset multiple sclerosis, progressive, undiagnosed for over ten years.
I’m sorry, Mrs. Hollander. There is no cure. No drugs. And this is…serious. I don’t know how much longer you’ll live, to be quite honest.
Sixteen years, eight of them spent lying in bed in a deteriorating state of consciousness.
“What are you not saying?” Sebastian was nothing if not persistent.
Mitch continued to say nothing.
“Oh, don’t start piling on the guilt. You got nothin’ to feel guilty about.”
Oh, yes he did. He felt guilty for not remembering her, for not missing her. Shouldn’t a widower grieve longer?
Or at all?
“Mitch,” Sebastian said with some impatience. “Her body died last year. Her essence left years ago. You’ve done years of grieving.”
Mitch was not shocked that Sebastian had read his mind. It was to be expected; they were brothers, after all, their bond forged in the blast furnace of adversity. It was also to be expected that Sebastian would spout facts to negate emotion he didn’t understand.
“Elder,” Mitch murmured finally, an edge in his voice, “you don’t know from guilt.”
“Mitch—”
“Shut up, Taight,” Bryce rumbled. “You have no idea.”
So the three of them stood there a moment longer in silent companionship. Trust Sebastian to bear Mitch’s temper with equanimity whether he deserved it or not.
Ah, well. That was what brothers were for. Mitch had no one else to vent on, that was for sure.
Mitch pushed away from the glass, turned with a well-practiced hearty cheer he rarely felt, and rubbed his hands together. “All right. Let’s get this party started.” He looked at his board of directors.
Sebastian Taight.
Bryce and Giselle Kenard.
Knox Hilliard and Justice McKinley.
Morgan Ashworth.
All here to implement the reorganization of Hollander Steelworks, which had begun to stumble under the weight of its own success.
Then there was Eilis Logan, Sebastian’s wife, Mitch’s biggest customer for J.I.’s products, who had come to look after the health of her own company. Mitch had no doubt Wall Street and the rest of manufacturing were waiting for news of this meeting.
Ah, but it had to be done. This reorganization would rejuvenate his company while taking a lot of weight off Mitch’s shoulders.
Never mind the idea to reorganize had taken root while getting quite a bit closer to proving that Greg Sitkaris was a thief.
Never mind it had come up while Mitch stood in the midst of a hundred or more beautiful, scantily clad women—knowing he could have any one of them (or more) if he so much as crooked his finger…
“We’re missing somebody,” Mitch said, needing to shake that off. Another layer of his guilt, wanting to move on.
Not knowing how.
Or with whom.
“Cassie St. James,” Sebastian said as he seated Eilis at the foot of the conference table. He proceeded to position himself as close to her as he could without pulling her onto his lap. “Traffic must be heavy.”
“Who is she?” Mitch asked as he sat at the head of the table, and the others, who seemed to be waiting to see if Mitch were truly okay, followed his lead.
“Me,” Sebastian said, “version 2.0. Cassie wrote her MBA thesis on my rationale for deciding whether to fix or raid any given company.” Mitch raised his eyebrow and Sebastian nodded. “She got roundly pummeled and ridiculed for daring to suggest that my decision was predicated on the teachability of a company’s leaders.”
Mitch, along with almost everyone else, stared at Sebastian in shock. “She figured it out?”
“She sent me her thesis before she turned it in; had it down to the last detail, examples, anecdotes, quotes, patterns, data analyses, and footnotes wherever she could see a deviance from my norm. She speculated that could indicate Knox’s involvement into any particularly complex project I was working on. That really got trashed.”
“You told me about that,” Knox said. “Did you go back her up?”
“I would’ve if she’d asked, but she didn’t. She refused to budge in her defense, though, and ended up nearly getting herself drummed out of her program. I told Jack about it, so he hired her. He’s been wanting a clone of me on his staff for years.”
“Have you ever met her?” Mitch asked.
“I have not and furthermore, I’ve only communicated with her by email once—to get her to do this.”
His brow wrinkled. “You’re handing the whole thing over to her?”
“Yup. I didn’t want to end up sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future.”
Eilis chuckled.
“How long has this woman been with Jack?”
“About a year, I think. He hired her just before she was scheduled to defend her thesis.”
Mitch let every suspicious thought he had show on his face and, predictably, Sebastian read him correctly. “Mitch, I’ve been watching this woman work and I’ll go so far as to say she’s better at being me than I am.”
“She’s certainly faster at it,” Eilis said, staring at Sebastian speculatively, “but she’s rough on the ego. She doesn’t do the same soft-shoe routine Sebastian does.”
“So, what, she cuts about a year off your process?”
Sebastian nodded. “’Bout that, maybe a little more. I figure it’s probably what I should have done all along, but…”
“It’s your inner nurturer, Midas,” Eilis teased with a nudge that garnered her a pleased grin.
“She’s, what, twenty-four, twenty-five?” Bryce asked. “And she’s the phoenix rising out of the ashes of Sebastian Taight’s sudden career change from corporate raider to full-time artist and stay-at-home dad?”
“Not that young, but otherwise, yes.”
Knox glanced at his watch. “Late. Dammit, I hate late.”
Mitch glared at Sebastian. “Me too. Why hasn’t she called? Why hasn’t Jack called?”
“He’s afraid of offending you,” Sebastian shot back. “He can’t tell when you’re being funny.”
Knox laughed then. “Shit, nobody else can, either.”
“Jack annoys me,” Mitch groused.
“Jack annoys everyone,” Eilis offered. “Even his wife.”
The eight of them settled in to wait, and Mitch relaxed as they began to indulge their favorite pastime while together: Poking fun at each other.
“So, Bishop Hollander,” Ashworth boomed. Morgan Ashworth never said anything. “How’s the wife hunt going?”
“I could ask the same of you,” Mitch shot back with a smirk, not in the least offended, and the snickers and laughter around the table rose, Morgan’s guffaw outstripping the rest. “You have anything to confess yet, Elder Ashworth?”
He held up his hands in truce. “Not me, Bishop. I’m pure as the wind-driven snow.”
“My ass,” Giselle Kenard returned. “I saw the way you checked out that carpenter as we came in.”
“Looking is not the same as doing, dear Cuz. Tell her, Mitch.”
“True. But did you lust after him in your heart, Elder?”
Morgan snorted. “I’m not confessing to anything.” He pointed at Giselle. “And you have no room to talk, O Freshly Excommunicated One.”
“Pffftt. Shall I tell our bishop about your Playgirl stash?”
“You mean the one that doesn’t exist?”
“Ha! I caught you.”
“Twenty years ago, at which time you decided you wanted to share in the eye candy. All afternoon. I was not amused.”
The table erupted in laughter. “I can’t believe you’re still mad about that,” she grumbled underneath the noise.
“I might not be if you hadn’t stolen them.”
She sank down into her chair and bit her lip. “I still have them if you want them back. They’re kind of, um…dog-eared, shall I say.” Bryce stopped laughing and looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “Well,” she said defensively when she caught her husband’s look. “It’s not like I need them anymore. You know, ’cause you— Believe me, I don’t need— You, you’re—”
“Giselle,” Bryce growled, though Knox and Justice, Sebastian and Eilis, were all coughing and choking on their laughter.
“They’re at Mom’s, okay? In storage. And they have been for years. I moved on from pictures to words and—” She shot up in her chair and stuck her finger in Bryce’s face. “—You don’t seem to mind my library. You’ve practically got Tropic of Cancer memorized and you’ve done—”
Bryce clapped a hand over her mouth. “Okay. Got the point.” He looked at Morgan. “You want those back?”
“No.” Morgan glared at Giselle. “I should’ve drowned you when you were a kitten.” Then he took a deep breath and looked back at Mitch, who simply rolled his eyes at the family’s ribaldry. “Speaking of bishops,” he said smoothly once the hilarity had died down. “Why haven’t they fired you yet?”
“I wish they would,” Mitch said. “You try going into year seven running a ward the size of mine and knowing you’re on the short list for stake president.”
He caught Bryce’s shudder out of the corner of his eye and chuckled.
“Now, see, this is what I like about my situation,” Morgan said. “I don’t have to worry about being called as bishop or anything higher than what I am. And I don’t get stuck teaching rugrats. It’s all I can do to grin and bear all the little bastards at family gatherings. I have my brush with greatness being second counselor and that’s more than enough for me.”
Mitch stared at him. “Second counselor? I didn’t know that.”
He shrugged. “Lucky that way. I figure the Lord gives me little consolations to make up for the big one I don’t get.”
“I empathize,” Mitch murmured as he stared down at the table, no longer quite as amused as he had been. Fifteen years of celibacy. At least. One did not beg a dying woman for sex, no matter how badly one needed it.
He had.
Still did. Spending the past week at Whittaker House and having to endure its three-day bacchanalian masquerade—in complete misery—had made that perfectly clear.
Kenard clapped him on the back and squeezed his shoulder with a big, comforting hand. Yes, of all the people at that table, even Morgan, Bryce understood the most. They’d talked about it privately, the two of them; had compared notes, had given and received solace as only people with similar experiences can do. Had he been the bishop to hear Bryce’s confession—
Some days he wondered if Bryce would ever come back from his excommunication and Mitch shook his head at the senseless waste of a believer—two, if he counted Giselle.
If nothing else, Mitch’s long experience as a bishop had taught him a large measure of compassion. He was just tired of spending every free moment at church.
He needed a vacation.
But where would he go? With whom? His daughters had their own families now and his son had his own life. So what would he do there, alone? When Mina was well enough, he had no money and no time. When he’d amassed enough cash and time to take his family somewhere nice, Mina was too weak and he’d had too many worries to be able to relax. He’d lived his entire life without having gone somewhere specifically to relax and have fun. Now that he had the cash, time, and fewer worries, he had no one to go with.
He waved a hand and looked up at his motley collection of friends who looked back at him with varying degrees of concern they tried to hide. His mouth twitched as he studied the men. “All four of you born and bred in the Church, only one of you eligible to hold the priesthood—and he’s gay. Nobody would believe it.”
The laughter, rich and sincere, broke out again and Mitch was glad. These people, his adopted family, knew him better than anyone, let him be himself—not dad, not CEO, not bishop, not scientist. Just Mitch. And he did not want to be maudlin around them.
“Mitch?” The double doors to his office suite opened and his assistant poked her head around. “Ms. St. James is here.”
He nodded and all eight of them stood to welcome the newcomer. He regretted it, really. An unknown would put paid to the impromptu party; the in-jokes would have to cease.
It was only his years of training as both a businessman and a bishop that kept his expression impassive when Ms. St. James walked in. It was only the fact of his suit coat’s length that kept everyone in that room from knowing how sex-starved he must really be to react that fast to the sight of her. In her late thirties—not mid-twenties as had been assumed—she was, at first glance, fairly ordinary-looking.
But not at all ordinary.
She smiled with a calculated reserve, noting, he was sure, that this was a table of people familiar with each other and she was the outsider, though not the enemy. Mitch could see that she knew they’d expected someone much younger and that she had intended to catch them all off guard.
With age came credibility and she had just turned the balance of power upside down.
She would need that edge to get past Eilis’s objections.
Morgan, ever the extrovert, immediately glad-handed her, then began to introduce her around. Mitch took the opportunity to study her while she chatted with each member of his family.
She looked Parisian, tall, slim, with skin the color of café au lait, heavy on the lait. Her black hair was sleek, pulled into a tight twist at the back of her head. A hint of a mole just above the left corner of her full mouth gave her an air of mystique. She stood about five-eleven in modestly high-heeled black shoes. She had dressed conservatively, in a pencil-slim, mid-calf-length black skirt and a severe white button-down blouse underneath a black blazer. Ruby cufflinks in French cuffs folded back over her blazer sleeves and a simple Tiffany watch were her only jewelry.
Expensive simplicity.
“And this,” boomed Ashworth, “is the man himself, Mitchell Hollander, founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks.”
“Mr. Hollander,” she said, her voice husky as she offered her hand and met his look, her light brown eyes clear and without guile.
“Ms. St. James,” he replied and took her hand. He shook it in his most bishoply way, the grip just firm enough and his other hand over hers. The handshake that said As one of the Lord’s representatives, I care about you and I’ll do what I can to help you. The handshake he now used as a defense mechanism because his immediate interest in her bore absolutely no resemblance to anything spiritual.
“Please, call me Cassie.”
He released her hand carefully, all the right signals sent, none of the wrong ones, and inclined his head. “Call me Mitch.” He gestured to the empty chair at his right, between him and Bryce. “Make yourself comfortable. If you’ll let Darlene know what you’d like to drink, we can get started.”
Rough Boy
I walked into the CEO’s executive suite, saw them all in their natural habitat, and was immediately caught off guard.
Me!
I couldn’t say why. I knew what they all looked like, save Hollander. And it wasn’t as if I had never seen half a dozen beautiful people in a room together before.
Perhaps it was the attitude that filled the room, of camaraderie, of…friendship…that made me uncomfortable with them. A room full of testosterone with no posturing, no competition— It felt almost like…love?
Couldn’t be.
Still, as much as they had surprised me, I had surprised them, exactly as I had intended.
Most of them would not have expected a woman their age; after all, Jack Blackwood specialized in training up very young Big Swinging Dicks. The young had the energy and drive to do the job to his satisfaction and they didn’t have the family commitments that would keep them from the 24/7 availability he demanded. Jack enjoyed spawning ruthless little business bastards as if they had his genes, and the younger the better.
When people succeed early, they can retire early.
As Morgan introduced me around, I assessed each of them intellectually and sexually. Yes, Jack had told me to keep my hands off, but a pretty lover with a high IQ would assuage my burgeoning restlessness, and I was looking at a room full of people who filled the bill.
Ashworth himself. He was no exception, and I’d been attracted to him from the moment we met. Large, animated, utterly masculine, with rich mahogany hair and piercing ice blue eyes, Morgan wouldn’t trip anybody’s gaydar, but then, neither would Nigel.
Knox Hilliard. Blond and tan, with the same color eyes as his cousin Morgan, Knox was not much younger than I, but he looked older; in my experience, blond men don’t age well. I didn’t find him particularly attractive, but he had a quick, warm smile and the charisma of an entertainer or prophet. I could see why Clarissa was so smitten, and I wished I had thought to bring her if only to meet…
Justice McKinley. She was the May to Hilliard’s December. Only a year older than my eldest daughter, she seemed like such a sweet girl in person, with her freckles and short, bouncy auburn curls, fashionable glasses perched on her pixie nose, all trumped by a perfect hourglass figure dressed to utmost advantage. But her utterly telegenic beauty hid a cutting wit she used to slice and dice—on national TV—politicians who displeased her. I would relay this meeting to Clarissa tonight in excruciating detail and enjoy watching her writhe in envy.
Giselle Kenard. Her muscular little body hung nude in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On canvas, she was gorgeous, with long flaming curls accentuating her agony. In person, though, she radiated humor and I could not guess her age. Her ice blue eyes betrayed her blood ties to both Hilliard and Ashworth, and her rather dull honey-colored curls—caught up in a yellow-ribboned ponytail—made her cute. Barely. My taste in women does not run to barely cute.
Her husband, Bryce Kenard. Now, he shocked me. The burn scars that matted half his face gave him an animal sexuality that cloaked him like an aura. He had the most beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen in a man. I couldn’t imagine what a man like that saw in a woman as mousy as Giselle, and I wondered if he could be lured away from her.
Eilis Logan, whom I’d also only seen as a nude on canvas. Taller than I, zaftig, with shoulder-length blonde hair, one green eye and one blue eye— It was too bad that she would be my natural enemy in this little project.
And finally, her husband, King Midas, Sebastian Taight, the object of my curricular fascination and my predecessor in unconventional corporate-restructuring methods. He was perfect in a carefully unstudied GQ way, black Irish from his white-tinged black hair to the same ice blue eyes.
He had noticed my scrutiny of his wife, and glanced between us, then smirked.
“I think not,” Eilis murmured dryly.
“No?” Sebastian drawled low enough so only the two of us could hear. “Eilis sandwich?”
She raked me from head to toe. “Tempting. But…no. I don’t share.”
“Damn,” Sebastian and I said at the same time. And all three of us laughed at a joke everyone else was straining to hear.
“Too bad it took an imperial order to get to meet you, Cassie,” he said, holding his hand out. “Another month or two and I would’ve stormed your office.”
And with one handshake, I knew I’d earned the respect of a man who respected very little. “I find it’s not always good to know too much about one’s idols.”
“That’s true. Your dad was one of mine.” I stiffened. “I was…disillusioned.”
Ah, yes. If he had followed my father, he would have known what happened to him. It had never occurred to me that King Midas and I might have learned from the same master; thus, my affinity for Taight’s style had nothing to do with serendipity and everything to do with familiarity.
“Relax,” he murmured with a warm smile. “I didn’t summon your father. I summoned you.”
I nodded and took a deep breath.
Intriguing, yes, this clan of entrepreneurs, philosophers, artists, and lawyers with some strange fraternity I couldn’t pin down—
Then Ashworth introduced me to Mitch Hollander.
Ordinary. An ordinary man in his mid-forties who felt comfortable in his own skin, comfortable with who he was, and comfortable with his ordinariness amongst the cadre of extraordinary people in the room. He was athletic, with a broad chest and shoulders, and stood an inch or two over six feet. He had short, thick sandy hair that curled slightly. His eyes were an unremarkable blue.
I couldn’t stop staring at him, and the rest of the people in the room faded.
He shook my hand in an odd way, with his left hand covering our clasped right hands, but it had no hint of sexual intent and, in fact, he seemed to be above such base human needs. A Mormon bishop, akin to a Catholic priest. Ah, yes, the Man-of-God Handshake. Thoroughly non-threatening while at the same time being loving and caring—and sincere in it, too. I remembered my boring priest and suddenly wondered what Hollander would be like in bed.
Then I got a little obsessed by the idea. My very curiosity about him intrigued me; of all the overtly sexual people in this band, none of them had caught my fascination more than the one ordinary man—
—who happened to have built a steel empire, so I shook off those errant thoughts and got down to business.
Honestly, fucking these people’s minds had to be at least as pleasurable as fucking their bodies, but once I immersed myself in the business at hand, that ceased to be of any importance at all.
By the end of the meeting, I had wrestled with Eilis—and, somewhat surprisingly, Knox—over my plan to split the former Jep Industries back to its own entity. Knox’s opinion was negligible, his objections clearly rooted in the fact that he’d worked so hard to get Hollander Steelworks and Jep Industries consolidated that he didn’t want to see his work undone. But Eilis had real concerns and was a worthy opponent, flinging questions at me as fast as I could catch them.
Kenard and Ashworth grilled me on details, and took copious notes to help them ascertain some of the more complex legal and long-term economic aspects inherent in such a move. They asked every question I knew they would ask, and got answers that satisfied them.
Sebastian, obviously bored, had pulled out a sketchbook and pencil. He seemed to pay no attention to the proceedings at all, but I knew better.
Both Justice and Giselle had disengaged themselves from the meeting soon after it began. They tapped away at their laptops, serious expressions on their faces. Curious, I actually stopped the meeting and asked what they were doing.
“Uh…bookkeeping?” Giselle said warily after a minute hesitation, as if she thought I were reprimanding her.
Justice looked at me over the top of her glasses and, with a straight face, announced, “I’m having cybersex.” Knox nearly fell off his seat laughing, most everyone else chuckled, and I couldn’t help but smile, conceding the point that it was none of my business. Then she grinned and went back to it. Whatever “it” was.
Throughout the presentation, Hollander made no comment whatsoever, nor had he laughed at Justice’s joke. He had simply leaned back, relaxed, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and took it all in with an expression I couldn’t read. He had watched my relatively loud scuffle with Eilis and Knox like someone watching a tennis match, back and forth, back and forth. For someone who had to make the decisions—difficult ones—he didn’t seem terribly stressed about it.
Finally I had finished detailing my plan, answered Kenard’s and Ashworth’s questions to their satisfaction, earned Sebastian’s approval with a faint nod, and thoroughly quelled the objections of both Eilis and Knox. I turned to Hollander, wondering if he even understood what had happened since he stared right through me and hadn’t seemed at all engaged.
“Mitch?” I said, and watched his eyes focus on me fully.
“Do it.”
Both Eilis and Knox piped up again, a token protest, really, but he held up a hand. They snapped their mouths shut.
Well. That was easy.
My minions would put the plan in motion and what would have normally taken me eight hours today and another six weeks in a flurry of emails and phone calls had taken me all of three hours with no bloodshed.
I gave Hollander a little smile as I began to pack up my displays and my laptop, careful not to look too long lest he believe me to be interested in him personally, which would not be an incorrect assumption.
Morgan and Giselle amused themselves with an obviously familiar game of swapping increasingly clever insults across the table.
Knox sat quietly, playing with Justice’s curls and reading over her shoulder while she worked with great concentration. Then he pointed at the screen and said, “You might want to reword point four. Wilson hates that trick.” She looked at him incredulously. “I’ve done it before. He’s never said anything to me about it.” Knox held up his hands. “Just sayin’.”
Sebastian had his phone plastered to his ear and Eilis leaned against him to hear the other side of the conversation. “What do you mean, they don’t miss us? … No, we’re not going to stay another three or four nights. Elliott’s sick and— … He was running a fever when we left, remember? … Oh, he was, too. Mom, are you trying to kill my kids?” Eilis plucked the phone out of his hand. “Dianne,” she said into it, “I’ll keep Mr. Mom away as long as I can… No, thank you.” Sebastian growled at her when she terminated the call and calmly handed his phone back to him.
Bryce leaned into Giselle and whispered something in her ear, interrupting her and Ashworth’s game. She stared down at the table while she listened. She flushed and her hand curled into a fist. “Yes,” she whispered hotly when he finished, staring into his face with a mixture of adoration and lust. “I would love to.” No, that was not a man who could be lured away from his wife. Ah, well.
I felt unfamiliar stirrings of sentimentality. Who were these people that watching and listening to them could make me want to sigh as if they were a Hallmark Christmas special come to life?
Then there was Hollander, standing with his back to me, staring out a bank of windows that looked toward the business end of his mill, his hands in his pockets, his suit coat gathered over his wrists. It was a stance I’d seen thousands of men take thousands of times, but there was just something about him…
He turned then and caught me staring at him, though I hoped it was simply a stare of speculation and didn’t betray my now driving need to know what it would be like to fuck a squeaky-clean Mormon bishop. He returned my look without blinking. His lids lowered. His mouth twitched.
Ah, he and I understood each other perfectly then.
“Dinner?” he said underneath the familial conversation and laughter behind me.
“Delighted. Seven?”
“I’ll pick you up.”
I turned with a smile, then left to arrange for a hotel room and find a killer outfit.
• NOT the end •
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