MAGDALENE

Mitch, the widowed bishop of a Mormon congregation, falls in love with Cassie, the woman hired to restructure his steel mill. Meanwhile, a man in Mitch’s congregation plots to take over the position of bishop using Cassie’s past profession as a prostitute as his weapon.

A Mormon bishop.
An ex-prostitute.
A man with a vendetta.
Let the games begin …

---

But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.
—I Corinthians 7:9 (KJV)

∞ 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 own, 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 phone 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—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.

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.

Within minutes, Jack Blackwood, my boss, stormed my office with his usual frenetic energy. I was clearing my calendar. Susan, my assistant, was on the phone with the document storage company to get a rush delivery.

I held up a hand. “Don’t start.”

“Do not piss off Mitch Hollander,” he growled.

That caught me off guard. “Pissing people off is your raison d’être. Why does Hollander deserve coddling?”

“Not coddling,” he said testily. “Respect.”

“The only person you respect is your wife.”

“Hollander’s pretty damned close. Do not make his life any harder than it has to be.”

That was oddly specific, but Jack had vanished and I probably would never get an explanation.

The banker’s boxes started arriving within a half hour. They were still arriving at close of business. When Susan and I got to work the next morning, we had to practically squeeze into my spacious office suite.

“Uh … ” The head of Blackwood Securities’s corporate bond department stood in the doorway staring at Mt. Boxmore.

“New project,” I said when I realized Melinda had come 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?”

“I suspect 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 moving and slinging boxes so we could start finding all the documents I needed.

“Why aren’t these digitized?” I grumbled.

“Be right ba—” Susan sneezed, then zipped out of the office and sneezed again. “Okay,” she said when she came back an hour later. “Twenty temps, new scanners, new computers, new printers, and space on the fourth floor dialed up for Monday. Let’s get to it.”

I love that girl.

I’d been through most of these documents 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. “The too-long-didn’t-read is, a few years ago, Hollander Steelworks absorbed a company called Jep Industries, which manufactured specialty parts for outdated, highly specialized, and experimental machinery, massive nuts and bolts in odd gauges, and anything niche that anybody wanted and could pay a premium for. They made run-of-the-mill stuff too, but they made everything better than anyone else. To do that, they bought at least half of Hollander Steelworks’s annual output of steel, so when Jep had some problems, it made sense for Hollander to absorb it. However, it’s now grown to a point it needs to be its own entity. We are going to detach that division from Hollander Steelworks, rebrand it, and install a COO.”

“Why does King Midas want you to do it?”

“Well, first, I did my master’s thesis on Taight’s Fix-or-Raid protocol and Jack hired me on that basis, so I suspect he trusts me to do the job right, whether it’s how he would do it or not. Second, his wife is the CEO of Hollander’s biggest customer, OKH Enterprises, and he probably doesn’t want to piss her off if he does something that’s going to hurt her company.”

Susan snickered.

“It’s not too off the wall, really. Between Hollander’s steel and the J.I. products, his market share is massive. If we do anything that will harm OKH, even if it’s to Hollander’s benefit, it’ll affect a lot of other companies down the line. Even without OKH in the mix, what we do will have long-reaching consequences around the world, so this is going to be a very delicate operation. You’ve heard of Senator Roger Oth?”

She nodded. “He’s an imbecile.”

“Exactly. He inherited Jep Industries, but 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 King Midas to fix it.”

“And Mr. Taight gave it to Hollander instead.”

“Yes, but how and why he did is the important part, and why we’re looking for documents pertaining to it.”

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 takeover, which happened often enough that the betting pools opened as soon as he stepped foot on a property.”

I went on as I flipped through a folder. “Shutting J.I. down was the last thing anyone thought would happen. J.I. was too important. However, once Taight got there, things went sideways almost immediately. The first thing that tipped everybody off was that he called his family in.”

“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.

“Ashworth is Taight’s cousin. Taight only calls him when he needs an assessment of the greater economic impact of a company failing completely. It
wasn’t just J.I. and its employees on the line. It was all the patents, trademarks, royalty deals, licenses J.I. held. Those couldn’t contractually be transferred to anyone else, so while there were other factories in the country that were capable of stepping in for J.I., they wouldn’t be able to do it because of licensing agreements. If factories don’t have the parts to maintain their equipment …

“Then,” I said, and threw a file in a box, “there’s Knox Hilliard, another of Taight’s cousins. He prosecutes white-collar crime and he’s a bloodhound.” In more ways than one. “He’ll comb through the books and find any theft, how it’s done, how to get around any safeguards the embezzler put in place. Taight called both, then he called Jack, so the Street got very, very nervous.

“It turned out that Roger Oth’s HR and payroll execs were stealing from him and they’d laid a crumb trail that would leave him holding the bag once they jumped ship and headed to Brazil. They didn’t expect Roger to call Taight, and they skipped town immediately. Taight, Ashworth, and Hilliard worked around the clock to find out how and where that money was going and to stop it. They did, but while they had already stolen several million dollars, they weren’t done. The ultimate goal of the embezzlement scheme was to make all the employees’ 401(k) accounts drain into an offshore account on a specific date, which had already been set up. They set it up so that if the accounts were accessed in bulk with one login by anyone other than the thieves, the funds would instantly transfer. They left it possible to access one account at a time, which would allow any one employee to receive his funds should he leave before they pulled the trigger.”

“To keep anybody from suspecting.”

“Right. Hilliard also had no way to kill the pending transaction without triggering the transfer.”

“So have the employees roll over their 401(k)s before then.”

“That would have worked if the 401(k) plans’ rules hadn’t been quietly changed so that the funds couldn’t be rolled over while any individual was still employed.”

“Oh. So they would have to lay everyone off to get around the new distribution rules, and then the accounts could be rolled over individually.”

“Yes.”

Her brow wrinkled. “How long between when they figured it out and when the funds were set to transfer?”

“Maybe … ten days? A couple of weeks at most.”

“How many employees?”

“Twelve hundred.”

“There is no way they had enough people and equipment to get twelve hundred individual accounts accessed and rolled over in ten days.”

My girl was quick on the uptake.

“Correct. Hilliard cooked up a way to salvage the pension plans, the jobs, and the licensing issues all at the same time, but it required an established heavy manufacturing business with large cash reserves and the ability to take it on immediately. OKH was one. Hollander Steelworks was the other. However, the then-CEO of OKH was known for being deliberate in his decision-making—”

“Slow,” Susan corrected.

“Crude, but yes. OKH is also in Kansas City, Missouri. Hollander’s bank account wasn’t quite up to snuff, in that he would be company-rich but cash-poor after the acquisition, but he has a reputation for taking risks and making good snap decisions. He happened to be in a position to jump on it. He had the space, the equipment, and the wherewithal. And the mill was less than five miles away from Jep Industries. Now, here’s where it gets tricky. The CEO of OKH was Hilliard’s and Taight’s uncle, and they were at war with him over something completely unrelated, which is its own soap opera. Taight and Hollander, on the other hand, have been besties since the eighties. They all had a personal stake in this, none of which they were prepared for going in.

“Everyone was scrambling. Jack had to set up new accounts, and new software had to be purpose-built from the ground up, which Jack’s son and his team managed to do in about thirty-six hours. Lawyers had to be brought in to work a little black magic over the licensing agreements. Roger pretty much had to be shown in crayon what was going on so he’d sign the paperwork.

“While all that was going on, Ashworth was working with Hollander to get the J.I. employees under his roof, employed, and back on the production lines with their 401(k)s intact as soon as possible, but they needed to be able to work without the distraction of running a business at the same time. They shut the company down and furloughed the employees.”

“I thought that was what they were trying to avoid.”

“They were, so everyone was stunned. The employees. Wall Street. Congress. To everyone on the outside, one day J.I. lived and breathed, secure under Taight’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.”

“Why didn’t Mr. Taight just hold a press conference and explain it?”

“He couldn’t do that until it was all sorted out. By this time, they had four days left before the pensions disappeared. They were all set to bring the computers in and lay off the employees when the CEO of OKH sued for an immediate injunction on the shutdown because he wanted J.I. He was arguably better for it than Hollander, but he wanted time to think about it. He didn’t know about the embezzlement scheme or the time crunch they were working under, and he couldn’t possibly have done it even with help.

“Taight and Hilliard were able to pull the unions’ lawyers in. At this point, they had a little over seventy-two hours before the 401(k)s transferred. Taight left Hilliard in court and went back to J.I. The day before the funds were set to transfer, he laid everybody off. But, before the employees were allowed to leave the building, they were directed to a computer, instructed to access their account, and roll it over. They were very quietly told why, to pretty please keep their mouths shut, to come back to work in two weeks, and that they’d be paid retroactively. For the most part, it worked. Hollander reimbursed those employees who couldn’t get their funds rolled over in time.”

“Whew!”

I almost laughed at Susan’s reaction. She said it as if it were her money on the line. 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 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 the employees got their money, went back work, they all got paid by Hollander Steelworks, and everyone lived happily ever after. 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. Very few people knew what was going on and it looked like J.I. had closed for good. Taight and Hilliard were still wrapped up in court, nobody knew Hollander was involved, so his new J.I. operation was flying under the radar. The Department of Justice came riding in on a white charger and won the case for Taight.

“That happened in the summer of 2004. I started grad school in 2007, which was about the time somebody in the financial press posited that Jep had to be operating somehow. J.I.’s products were still available long after inventory should have dried up. The obvious conclusion was that somebody else was making them on the downlow, or J.I. was still in business. J.I.’s website redirected to one that still worked but it was very primitive, little branding—just a half-assed J.I.-like logo you couldn’t really read, but might have said ‘J.I.,’ no indication who was running the place, no address, phone number, email address, but a simple contact form. Salesmen were still on the phone, techs were still servicing the equipment, customer service was getting done, bills were paid, checks were cut, business was as usual. Eventually, the dependent businesses didn’t really care as long as their production lines weren’t affected.”

“But how?” Susan breathed.

“Hilliard had a laid a paper trail so convoluted it took the FBI’s best forensic team months to figure it out and concede that it was airtight and legal. He’d run everything through a shell company under Ashworth’s name and called it Jepp—with two Ps—Indirect.”

Susan’s cackle made me smile.

“Taight, Ashworth, Hollander, and Hilliard came out of that smelling like roses because the unions were happy their people were still working, and that they had done everything possible to keep people employed with their pensions intact. However, DC didn’t look kindly on Ashworth for his part in it, and his career crashed and burned. So he went home with his tail between his legs.

“But then Hollander pulled a fast one. Out of loyalty to Taight and the war he had going with Fen Hilliard—the CEO of OKH—he refused to sell his steel or J.I.’s parts to OKH.”

Susan gasped.

“Fen might have been slow, but he was clever and he had ways around that. However, it came at a high cost and so back to court they went. The DoJ was pissed. Now they had an antitrust claim against Hollander on their hands, but precedent had already been set and they had helped set it. That didn’t pan out, so Fen decided to run for Congress, which made absolutely no difference to Hollander, but it threw a monkey wrench in Taight’s life for a while, which landed him, Hilliard, and a couple of other people on the hot seat in front of a Senate panel.”

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—”

“Did Mr. Taight ever explain what happened or anything about it?”

“God, no. He’s like Mary Poppins. He never explains anything.”

King Midas’s mystique rested on his refusal to explain how he decided whether to fix or raid a company—or why he did anything, really.

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 ended up looking 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 probably wants to 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.

“But I got a master’s thesis out of it,” I concluded with a sigh. “At the time, it was a puzzle everybody was dying to solve, 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.

“If Hollander won’t sell his steel or products to OKH, why are they a factor now?”

I didn’t bother to tell her about what happened to the guy Hollander wouldn’t do business with. It was an epic on its own and just as sexy, but that would have to wait for another day.

“Fen died in 2007. The current CEO is his daughter, Hilliard’s half-sister, and Taight’s wife, so Hollander’s been selling to her since she took over. It’s a very long story, but lawyers, guns, and money were involved.”

“They didn’t all live happily ever after.”

I snorted. Cheeky girl. “Almost. First, we have to get this job done. So, 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, twitchy as usual, but I never let that affect me.

“Cass?”

“I heard you, Jack,” I murmured, too engrossed in preparing for the task ahead to indulge him. “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 energy. “Why are you so afraid of Mitch Hollander?”

“I’m not afraid of him,” he said testily. “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.

“The guy’s superhuman. He’s had a hard life and I know all too well what it’s like to run a high-intensity business when your personal life’s even more intense. All I had to do was run an investment bank and rehab two very damaged children without help for a year with no time for my derivatives hobby until my wife stepped up. Hollander had the mill, the Jep Industries takeover, a terminally ill wife, three kids, and carries enormous responsibility in his church—all alone—with no time for his life’s work. For almost twenty years. I wouldn’t be able to withstand the pressure he’s been under for that long.”

That was saying something, indeed. Jack didn’t feel pressure, or at least, not like most people, but he hated the grind of relationships, so Hollander’s vast network of relationship-based responsibilities would be impressive to someone like Jack.

“What’s his life’s work?”

“Alloys.”

I rolled my eyes at myself. Of course. He was Chief Metallurgical Officer. “Thanks for the insight,” 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.”

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. “Okay, okay. 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 thank—”

“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. Hollander’s bigger customers are biting their fingernails.”

“Shit, already?”

“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 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.

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 Chopard 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 aloof 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.

---

ROXANNE

I DRESSED CAREFULLY, Jack’s instructions ringing in my head.

Still, I wanted to see if Mitch could be distracted, rattled. I wore a white blouse with a low cowl that showed a touch of cleavage—what I could muster up with a push-up bra, that was. A simple red skirt that went to my knees wasn’t sexy by itself, but combined with red suede peep-toe heels, it should do. Understated, but very, very clear in intent.

I know how to finesse men. It had taken some trial and error to learn this as Nigel trained me to be the sophisticated whore I’d set out to become. He had taught me how to lead the conversation exactly where I wanted it to go and never, ever allow it to get off track. I could anticipate any man’s conversational rabbit trails and steer accordingly, without letting him know that I had an ounce of brains.

Mitch Hollander could not be steered, and I realized that the minute he handed me into his navy-and-silver Bugatti. Moreover, he knew exactly what I was about and with a droll expression, dared me to continue to try. That fascinated me as much as it puzzled me.

We sat in a French restaurant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and comfortably conversed about absolutely nothing, as we had since he’d picked me up. (How he knew where I was staying, I had no idea, but I was getting the distinct impression he could flex his power without seeming to stir so much as a finger.)

Tonight at least, Hollander was a master at negotiating meaningless conversation with utmost aplomb, as if he did so on a regular basis. He spoke, gestured, and held himself with some strange mixture of confidence, strength, and humility I had never encountered in a man before.

No arrogance, no swagger.

His cohorts, Taight and Hilliard, Kenard and Ashworth, had arrogant alpha-male swagger down to a science. Though I couldn’t tell who was the alpha in that barrel of testosterone, I understood and appreciated men like that. The women, as powerful as their men, had their own swagger. As do I.

Hollander I did not understand. He knew that and used it like a weapon.

I had my first shock when the wine steward came around and Hollander did not wave him away. “I’m not versed,” he murmured in a voice as rich and warm as a stream of the darkest Belgian chocolate, “so I’ll have water, but feel free to serve the lady.”

Just to be perverse, I chose the most expensive wine on the menu. Mitch relaxed back in his chair, his elbows on the arms and his fingers steepled under his chin, and simply watched the sommelier and I. At long last it was done and I sat back in my seat to watch him watch me, and I raised my wine glass in a small, somewhat mocking, salute.

His eyelids lowered almost imperceptibly and the corner of his mouth curled up.

For a man of God, I decided, he might know a whole lot more about how to seduce women than I’d given him credit for. The thought disturbed me.

I decided to quit the bullshit and be completely transparent. He would see it as a tactic, and it was, but at this point, I had no other tricks up my sleeve. I waited until after we had ordered our entrées.

“What,” I asked slowly, never taking my eyes off him, “does a Mormon bishop do, precisely?”

He smiled slowly as his eyelids lowered, and I crossed my right leg over my left knee. He didn’t miss that and his eyebrow rose. I nearly laughed because this man was so out of the realm of my experience.

“A Mormon bishop,” he replied with some care, “is a low-level executive, ah, a project manager, I guess, of a ward—a congregation. He has two counselors who help and a cadre of management types and assistants to delegate responsibilities to. My nearest female counterpart in that hierarchy is the president of the women’s auxiliary. Relief Society. She reports to me directly, but has the same structure.”

“Who’s the CEO?”

“The president of the Church, also known as the prophet.”

“I suppose any large organization like that would have to have a fairly rigid structure.”

“Yes.”

“How much time do you put into it?”

He thought a moment. “Twenty-five, thirty hours a week maybe.” I nearly dropped my glass. “I only have one child at home now, and he has his own timetable so it’s easy to lose myself in it. Most bishops have wives and children at home and they sacrifice just as much as the bishop does.”

Oh, hell, I wasn’t even going to bother with etiquette. “And you don’t get paid.”

He shook his head. “No. We don’t have paid clergy.”

“And you’re the low man on the totem pole?”

“Yes.”

“Like a Catholic parish, right? So you have a diocese?”

“A stake. The stake president is my, ah, boss.” He broke out into a grin and I had to smile. The Hollander of Hollander Steelworks was the low man and had a boss.

“How do you get that job?”

“If you’re smart,” he said wryly, “not voluntarily.”

I laughed.

“You get called. The stake president asks you if you’d be willing to accept the calling. You accept. Or don’t. By the time you get to that stage, you probably have a reputation for accepting other jobs and doing them as well as you can.”

“Is this a lifetime position?”

“No, but there are days it feels like it.” He relaxed back into his chair. Stared at his plate. Played with his utensils. Suddenly, I felt like I was witnessing a man in the throes of an unpleasant epiphany. “A bishop is usually called for five, seven years at the outset,” he said slowly, still not looking at me, still lost in whatever had jerked his attention from our flirtation. “Usually only once. It’s a very stressful job.” He paused. “Sometimes, you serve out your term and then move up the ladder. Mostly you just go back to being a regular member of the ward.”

Ambition! There was his chink. “Ah, you want to move up?”

He looked up at me then. “No. This is my second term.”

Was that fatigue I saw? I didn’t know; he covered it too quickly.

“How many years do you have in this one?”

“A little over seven.”

I blinked. “That means you’ve been at this … ?”

“Thirteen years, with about a year between terms, give or take.”

“So … ” I said carefully. “This isn’t supposed to be your life’s work. Not like a Catholic priest.”

“Correct.”

“And you don’t want to advance.”

Whatever emotional well he’d dropped into, he suddenly came out of with a smile. “The pay is lousy.”

I had to laugh then. “So why don’t you just turn in your resignation?”

He waved a hand. “Oh, it’s not that simple. Someone has to be found to replace me and if I’m released—if I quit or get fired—I could always be asked to fill some other equally stressful position.”

“Can’t you just say no?”

“I could,” he said slowly, as if he’d never thought of it before, but I knew better. “Yes, I could, but I wouldn’t. I would do whatever I was asked to do.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s part of what the faithful do; they serve. They sacrifice. They give their time and their talent and their money to keep everything running.”

“Your church is rich; why don’t they pay you?”

“Sacrifice. Emotional investment. Obedience. Love. I don’t know. Pick a reason, any reason.”

I couldn’t pick a reason. I didn’t have reasons like that. I didn’t know people who thought in such terms as sacrifice and love and emotional investment. Obedience. Good God.

“So. Ms St. James—”

“Cassie, please.”

“That doesn’t suit you.”

Interesting. No one had ever been so bold as to say so, if they’d even thought about it at all. “I don’t much care for it myself, no,” I finally admitted.

“Cassandra.”

I smoothly pulled my right leg farther up my left. “Did I detect a bit of a French accent when you ordered?”

“Yes.”

“You speak French?”

“Yes.”

Damn. I wanted to undress him already and our entrées hadn’t even arrived. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so aroused by so little so fast. It made no sense. I knew men who spoke French and Japanese and Greek and some all three. One man, one relatively ordinary-looking man who spent the equivalent of a three-quarter-time job working for his church for free in the name of faith, love, obedience, and sacrifice—

Inconceivable.

“Tell me, Cassandra,” he murmured, that heavy-lidded look doing more to me than I wanted it to. He had me pinned like a butterfly. “What did you do before grad school and Blackwood Securities?”

The fact that he asked meant he really didn’t know, that Sebastian hadn’t seen fit to tell him (which was interesting in its own right), and the answer was the only thing that would free me from the hold he had on me.

“I was a prostitute.”

Not a twitch of a facial muscle to betray his thoughts. “I’m assuming we’re not here on that basis.”

“No. I retired from that years ago.”

“And you got into it how?”

“I was bored.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

Oh, God, no. I couldn’t talk about this. What had I been thinking? “Do you hear confessions from your parishioners?” I asked abruptly, needing to get off this track, sorry I’d gotten on it. “Is that part of your job, like a priest?”

“Yes.”

“So I don’t want to confess.”

“Were you confessing?”

“No.”

“Forgive me. It’s not an industry I have much knowledge of and I was curious.”

No, dammit! He had me in curlicues. He still didn’t look shocked nor did he seem as if he wanted to cut the evening short.

Our food came and I caught myself breathing a prayer of thanks to a god I wasn’t sure existed. Our conversation veered to safer territory: His board of directors, to whom he referred as his family.

“Sebastian Taight,” he said after I asked him how he’d come into that circle of players, “was a companion I had on my mission.”

The image of two young men in black suits with black name tags, pushing bicycles, carrying backpacks flashed across my mind. My dinner companion had been one, once upon a time? So bizarre. More bizarre: King Midas having been one.

“You were a missionary?”

He nodded. “In Paris.”

“With Sebastian Taight.” I simply couldn’t process that.

His mouth quirked. “I know how it sounds, but yes. The same Sebastian Taight. He … ” He paused a moment, as if he were thinking. “The mission was very difficult for both of us. Sebastian made it bearable. He had ideas and plans. Philosophies. He shared them with me and he was so passionate about them … I learned more from him in the four months he was my companion than I’d learned in the nineteen years before that. If it hadn’t been for him, it would never have occurred to me to do what I did with my life.”

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

“Twenty.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You work for Blackwood.”

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

“They all live at home?”

“Yes.”

“What do they do?”

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

“Ailey’s tough. I’m very impressed.”

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

“I’ve been meaning to—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mitch,” he purred.

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

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

Mitch grunted and took a bite.

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

And he did it exactly right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither could any other man I’d ever met.

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

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

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

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

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

Mitch started.

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

“How—?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that would be?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And some situations aren’t normal.”

“Some situations are … politically delicate.”

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

“How do you see yourself as a bishop?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So.

He did have a swagger.

---

QUENCH MY THIRST WITH GASOLINE

MITCH NEVER lost control.

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

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

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

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

Without kissing her.

Undressing her.

Making love to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not exactly,” Mitch replied, straightening to follow his son, ignoring the profanity. He heard it all day, every day, especially when he went into the foundry and, moreover, Trevor did too. Besides, this wasn’t the bishop’s house; it was the house of a single father with a teenage son. Without a female around, the males were bound to go feral at some point.

There were moments Mitch could barely keep himself from dropping an f-bomb or two. It was only a point of pride that kept him from swearing at all, ever; if he did, his public persona might crack and that he couldn’t allow to happen.

He entered the warm house behind Trevor and took off his filthy winter clothes in the mudroom.

“You need to get laid,” Trevor yelled from the kitchen.

Mitch barked a surprised laugh, and shook his head as he threw his cleats in the laundry room, then entered the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade out of the refrigerator. Trevor leaned against the counter nursing his own bottle. “That,” Mitch said after a long drink, “is true.”

The boy stared at Mitch, shocked. “Serious?”

“I met a woman today.”

“Shit.”

“We had dinner.”

“Is she hot?”

He shrugged. “Not like you mean it, no.”

“I don’t even know what ‘hot’ is anymore, anyway,” Trevor muttered, looking at the floor, an unhappy expression on his face.

“What does that mean?” Mitch asked, genuinely curious.

It took a long time for him to answer, which was normal. Trevor usually chose his words with care. “Okay, like Hayleigh Sitkaris.”

Mitch said nothing.

“She’s really cute. Actually, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, but she’s so … needy.”

“Neediness comes in a lot of different varieties,” Mitch found himself saying. “It’s not always a bad thing.” All Hayleigh needed was a rabblerouser of a boyfriend who’d stand up to her father—

“Yeah, but that’s not hot. Am I missing something? At church, at school, there are a lot of guys who want to go out with her, but she’s all about me.”

—which she apparently knew, since she kept attempting to confide in Trevor in hopes he would take the hint—and the job.

“Okay, so say she wasn’t needy. Would you like her then?”

Trevor pursed his lips in thought. “I’d ask her out.”

“Why do you think she’s needy?”

He glanced at Mitch warily. “You’ll think I’m crazy.” Mitch shook his head, and Trevor took a deep breath. “Her dad. He’s so awesome, right? He’s fun. He’s cool. He’s not all about the rules all the time.” He stopped. “But there’s something about him that’s not right. The way Hayleigh acts around him, it’s totally different from the way she is, like, when she’s hanging around me and Josh and Cordelia.”

Josh and Cordelia. The other two kids who didn’t buy into Greg’s charm. Four teenagers out of thirty-eight. They didn’t know why, either.

“Crazy, huh?”

“Not at all. But think back. Does she come on to you? Does she act like she’s angling for anything other than somebody to listen to her who won’t think she’s crazy?”

Trevor stared at the floor, silent for a couple of seconds. “Well, yes and no,” he murmured. “It’s weird. When Josh is around, it’s almost like she would rather be with him than me, but— It’s like, she wants me to do something for her, but won’t come out and say it.”

“Like … something only you can do that Josh can’t, and if Josh could do it she wouldn’t be all about you?”

“Yeah, exactly. Weird.”

Not weird. Smart.

Josh didn’t have a trust fund he could use to whisk Hayleigh away from her father, much less a full-time union-wage job and his own investment portfolio to support her on. Josh also didn’t have a father who could protect her from Greg. Hayleigh wasn’t mercenary—she was confused and desperate to either untangle her confusion or find an efficient, palatable way to get away from its source.

Trevor had cash and Mitch had power.

It was more than Mitch had had when faced with the same situation.

“You know what’s going on with her, don’t you?” Trevor asked.

Mitch shrugged. “I have my suspicions. Nothing concrete. It’d help if you paid attention to whatever she’s trying to tell you. Then maybe you could pass it along to me if you feel comfortable doing that.”

Trevor studied him a moment. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I can do that.” He remained silent for a while, and Mitch began to dread whatever would come out of his mouth. A long silence like that meant Trevor was trying to decide how best to deliver bad news.

“Dad, I don’t want to go to BYU.”

Mitch released a long whoosh of air. Was that all? “Okay.” Easy enough. “I didn’t go to BYU and I never expected you to. Where do you want to go?”

“NYU.”

Mitch would rather he go farther away from home so he could feel truly independent, but it was Trevor’s money, Trevor’s decision.

“And I don’t want to go on a mission.”

Mitch had expected that a year ago. “Why not?” he asked, but he already knew. Trevor had spent a lot of time with Sebastian over the last few years. Even though Mitch had known the consequences of letting an impressionable teenager loose with a libertine like Sebastian, Mitch had needed help desperately.

Sebastian was willing to step in where Mina’s parents wouldn’t, Mitch’s parents couldn’t, and this—

“I don’t think I believe any of it, much less enough to preach it for two years.”

—was the result.

Mitch had gambled his son’s religious training and lost.

“Déjà vu all over again,” he said under his breath, remembering the late nights, the arguments, the anguish of watching his best friend lose his faith, hurt, angry, bewildered, and, ultimately, alone in a mire of doubt. Mitch certainly wasn’t going down the “pray about it and you’ll know it’s true” route again. That rarely worked anyway.

“What? No objections?”

“What am I supposed to say to that, Trevor? You’ve always been expected to be a man, and you’ve grown into a fine one, so I trust you’re capable of making your own decisions.”

“I don’t want to embarrass you in front of the ward.”

Mitch laughed. “I haven’t been embarrassed about anything since I came home from my mission early.”

“Aw, c’mon, Dad. You were sick.”

That was the story, anyway.

I’ve been hearing things about you, Elder Taight, Elder Hollander. The stock exchange? The Louvre? You’re not here for the sightseeing, Elders. You’re here to work.

Have you seen our baptism numbers, President?

Yes, Elder Hollander, I have. Impressive, certainly, but I simply can’t ignore you two breaking the rules. I know you two spent your last P-day in La Rive Gauche.

It was a P-day, President. Preparation day. That was part of our preparation.

Don’t get smart alecky with me, Elder Taight. I always knew you were trouble. And where are you getting all the money I know you’ve been spending? You can’t afford half the food that’s in your apartment.

No, Elders Hollander and Taight weren’t blameless.

Sebastian had indeed dragged Mitch to the stock exchange and museums on the sly, taught him about money and art and philosophy, encouraged Mitch’s taste for subversive books at the tiny bookselling stalls they found on their explorations of Paris. Mitch ate well on Sebastian’s dime and didn’t beat his feet to death walking everywhere because Sebastian made sure they had the money to use the subway and, if they were desperate enough to risk being found out, a taxi. Sebastian had taught him what it felt like not to pinch every penny because he had to, and Mitch was only too eager to take the mental and emotional respite his renegade companion offered.

But they also worked hard and had the numbers to prove it. It should have been enough.

You two need to figure out if you’re here to work or if you’re here to mess around.

But President, we’re the second-highest baptizing companionship in the mission.

I heard you the first time, Elder Hollander, but you’re not listening to me. It doesn’t excuse either of you. You and Elder Taight here, birds of a feather, shirking your duty. I’m sure your parents are very proud, but then … the Church is paying for your missions, right? Because your parents can’t? So they don’t have any real investment in how you do here. Weak, both of you.

The mission president’s insults had stunned Mitch into silence, but not his companion.

Oh, fuck you, President. You wouldn’t know weak if it crawled up your ass and died.

Elder Taight! Your language!

Maybe you should worry less about my language and my food and my going to the stock exchange, and more about your two lily-white rich zone leaders out fucking every pretty girl they can find. That’s against mission rules too, right? I never hear about them getting called on the carpet. Put our stats up against any other companionship in the mission and you’ll see who’s fucking around and who’s not. C’mon, Elder. Let’s go back to tracting, like we’re supposed to. Like we were doing when we got hauled in here. Totally bogus.

Mitch had walked out of the mission president’s office nauseated, ashamed of whatever weakness that had made him sit there and take it. His transfer orders had arrived the next day, as had Sebastian’s. No, the mission president couldn’t let a companionship like Elders Taight and Hollander exist; their hard work made everybody else look bad.

Just like working for the government. I’m blowing this popsicle stand and going to Spain. Come with me and we can see Europe like it’s supposed to be seen.

No, I have to do this. I want to make my parents proud.

Proud? Of what? Bending over? This is shooting fish in a barrel, and we’re the fish.

My brother didn’t have these problems. Your cousins aren’t having these problems. It’s just this mission.

So what? It doesn’t change our situation.

My dad says when you’re going through heck, keep going.

Yeah, Mitch, you know what? There’s this thing called strategic retreat. Why are you letting a prick like that judge us worthy or not? He’s the one with the problem, not you. Not me. We’re doing what we came here to do, what we said we’d do. That’s all the Lord cares about. You can’t tell me you believe the Lord depends on that asshole to tell him whether we’re worthy or not.

I don’t. I can deal with it.

Mitch had been assigned to Elder Snow, and he didn’t think it was a coincidence that Elder Snow was considered the “cleaner” of the mission. An extraordinarily high number of missionaries who were assigned with Elder Snow went home early.

Mitch’s weary disappointment that a quarter of the mission’s elders were partying grew to anger, then rage, under Elder Snow’s abuse.

The guy never slept. He kept the lights on and made noise so Mitch couldn’t sleep, taunted him relentlessly, ate all the food, and stole what little money Mitch had.

Turn the other cheek. Turn the other cheek turn theothercheekturntheotherche—

Elder Hollander, did you hear me? Oh, no wonder you’re such a retard. Just a steel worker, like your old man. Do you even know how to read?

What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do what wouldjesusdowhatwo—

It was true that after two months with Elder Snow, Mitch had grown ulcers so severe he should’ve been in the hospital, but that wouldn’t have gotten him sent home.

Always keep your cool, Son. Honorable men let it roll off their backs.

It was the day Mitch had managed to slip his jailer and find a street vendor a few blocks away where he’d spent the last of his stipend on a crêpe filled with cheese and sausage that sealed his fate. Mitch had watched in horror as Elder Snow snatched the crêpe out of his hands and tossed it in the Seine with a victorious smirk.

Mitch had thrown the first punch.

And the second.

And the third, fourth, and fifth until Elder Snow was curled up on the concrete, protecting his head, sobbing and pleading for mercy.

The mission president hadn’t been any happier with Elder Snow (for having botched the job) than he was with Elder Hollander (for not groveling for mercy from Elder Snow). But Mitch had a weapon: his journal, loaded with every detail of the mission and his tenure with Elder Snow. He would not bend over one more time.

President, you send me home with a dishonorable release, and I’ll make sure the General Authorities hear about this mission.

You can’t threaten me.

Try me.

Mitch knew that if he hadn’t been so ill, so emaciated and clearly exhausted, President Bates would’ve called his bluff—but all Mitch had to do was drop his journal in the mail to Salt Lake and head to the hospital. Mitch had backed the man into a corner until he’d agreed to a medical release.

It was easy for people to buy that. Mitch’s father had taken one look at him and driven him straight from the airport to the hospital, where Mitch had spent a couple of weeks.

Yo, Elder. Did you hear about President Bates?

Sebastian, you’re calling me from Europe?

Yeah. They reorganized the mission just after you left, and sent Bates home. Apparently, you and I weren’t the only ones kicking some ass and getting kicked back. It’s a big scandal.

That had twisted the knife even deeper.

Not even Sebastian knew the real reason why Mitch had come home early. Sebastian would have crowed and praised him, but Mitch didn’t want praise. He was ashamed. Ashamed for letting Elder Snow get under his skin, for cracking, for losing control. And if Mitch had had a little more faith—in himself, in the Lord—if he’d waited it out …

Mitch toyed with the idea of telling Trevor about Elder Snow, but instead of being a successful object lesson, it would only reinforce the contrary opinions Sebastian had already pounded into the boy’s head.

“Doesn’t matter why you come back early, Trev,” he finally said. “If you say it’s medical, you’re either lying, crazy, or weak. If you say nothing, you must have been sent packing because of a girl. The worst is always assumed.”

“Maybe if I did go, Grandpa Monroe would—”

Acknowledge my existence.

Trevor couldn’t even finish the sentence, and Mitch felt the boy’s pain as he’d felt Mina’s, as he’d felt his daughters’. Mina’s parents, who had moved to Philadelphia upon the Hollander family’s return to Bethlehem, had never acknowledged their grandchildren’s existence. Once Mina had had the temerity to run off and marry a lowly steel worker, Shane Monroe had stricken Mina’s name from the family tree. As far as Shane was concerned, the Hollander family simply didn’t exist.

“He’s never going to, Trev,” Mitch said simply. “Don’t do things with the idea that you can earn his approval or love. Your sisters already tried that and it didn’t work.”

Lisette and Geneviève lived picture-perfect good-Mormon-girl lives: graduating from BYU with honors, serving missions, marrying in the temple. Shane knew of it—they’d both insisted on sending him invitations to their graduations, pre-mission send-offs, post-mission open houses, weddings—but had still never spoken to them.

They’d both cried for hours, inconsolable, and Mina had cried with them. Mitch could only stand by and watch, mop up the tears, listen to their heartbreak.

“’Cause you were a steel worker,” Trevor muttered into his Gatorade bottle, half angry, half hurt. “That’s messed up.”

A steel worker who’d deprived Shane of the son-in-law he’d wanted.

Trevor was angry, hurt. He wouldn’t cry, but his back molars might suffer some damage from the grinding of his jaw. Either he was trying to control his normally even temper or he was planning some scheme to get his grandfather’s attention. If it were the latter, Mitch wished him the best of luck and prepared for the emotional fallout.

“I’m not going to try to talk you into going on a mission,” Mitch finally said, more to change the subject than make his next point, “but think about this. If you don’t go and you decide you do believe and you want to find a good LDS girl, your options will be cut about in half. That probably doesn’t make any difference to you now, but it will if you change your mind later.”

“But Mom didn’t care.”

“Your mother was very young. All she wanted was to get married and have children.” And escape an arranged marriage. “I caught her attention and she caught mine, so it worked out. But she had all these romantic notions of living on love, and part of the romance is hardship and struggle. When you marry a guy who didn’t finish out his mission and works in a dying industry, you get an extra helping of hardship and struggle.”

“And you struggled.”

“I don’t regret a second of it, either.”

“Dad,” Trevor said slowly, “why did you and Mom elope?”

“Ah, well … ” He took a deep breath, wary of where this could go. “Her father wanted her to marry someone else and she didn’t want to marry that man.”

Trevor shrugged. “All she had to do was say no.”

“She did. She said it the only way she could make it stick.”

“Huh?”

“She married me instead.”

“Oh, Grandpa Monroe wouldn’t have forced—” He stopped short when he saw Mitch’s raised eyebrow. “No,” he breathed.

“The wedding was planned. The rings and dress were bought. She already had her temple recommend in preparation. The flights to Salt Lake were booked. Honeymoon was paid for. She was a good girl. She would’ve done what she was told.”

“Running away was your idea?”

“Yes.”

But once Mitch had presented the idea, Mina had been only too willing to let him rescue her. It wasn’t the best way to start a marriage: two kids who weren’t as in love as they should’ve been, getting married under duress, both of them with questionable motives. He and Mina might have been young and desperate, but they’d had a common culture and common goals, and had worked hard to make their marriage a success.

So what if Mina’s crush on Mitch hadn’t completely matured— So what if Mitch’s simple compassion for Mina’s circumstance hadn’t completely matured— So what if they hadn’t been completely in love on their wedding day—

They were by the time Lisette was born a year later.

“And so now you’ve met somebody else?”

“Yes. Not sure where it’s going yet. Or if it is. Would it bother you if it did?”

Trevor shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t … remember Mom very well. I guess it would depend on the woman.”

Ah, well, then, Mitch might as well get his most pressing issue out in the open. “She’s from Blackwood Securities, doing the reorganization.”

“I thought that’s what Sebastian does.”

“He doesn’t do as much of that anymore. He likes the design work he’s doing for me, wants to dig into the metal, learn the machining, see what he can get it to do. And he likes being a stay-at-home dad.”

Trevor shuddered and Mitch laughed. “Okay, so then the problem is she’s not a member of the Church?”

“Well, not that so much as her previous profession.” He paused. “She was a prostitute. A very high-dollar one.”

“No shit,” Trevor breathed, straightening up, all interest now. “She told you that? Just out of the blue?”

“She wanted to shock me, to see what I’d do, how I’d react.”

“Maybe she was lying.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

Trevor laughed. “Well, hell, at least she was smart enough to get paid instead of giving it away.”

Mitch grinned. “There’s a certain honor in that, eh?”

“Yeah. So … ?”

… in my previous life, I wouldn’t have taken him as a client.

“Doesn’t bother me.”

“What if she just wants your money?”

“Doubt it. She has her own and if all she wanted was a meal ticket, she wouldn’t have stopped being a prostitute. That’s a lot more honest than a woman who marries for money.” He paused. “What I think she wants is to see if she can get a Mormon bishop in bed. She sees me as a challenge. It’s a game for her.”

“And?”

He slid a glance toward his son. “You know me better than that.”

Trevor threw up a hand. “Of course. It’s why you drag me out of bed at one o’clock in the morning to play killer soccer whenever you’re horny, which, by the way, is seriously fucked up.”

Mitch couldn’t disagree with that—

“When’d you figure that out?”

—but he wasn’t about to admit to the rare occasion he was desperate enough to take care of it the usual way.

“A while back. Dunno when.”

Mitch let that hang for a while, reluctant to ask, not really wanting to know. “Trev? You, uh—?” He held up his hand. “Not dad, not bishop. Just men talking.”

The boy said nothing for a moment, then— “I don’t know how to answer that. If I say no, it’d make me feel pathetic. If I say yes, you’d be disappointed.”

Mitch remained silent because Trevor had a better handle on it than he’d thought.

Finally Trevor sighed. “No. I haven’t met a girl I wanted that much. I mean, I think about sex all the time.”

“Yeah. You’re seventeen.”

“But I look at what I’ve got to choose from at school and it’s just not … Something’s not clicking for me. I mean, I don’t like dudes, either, so that’s not it. In a way, that’d be easier because at least I’d know why I’m not digging the girls. And at church, well, the girls I like aren’t giving anything up, and the only one who does isn’t interesting enough to make up for all her bullshit.”

That was the most sensible thing Mitch had ever heard out of a seventeen-year-old boy’s mouth, and he said so.

“No, it’s not sensible. It’s a fact.”

Mitch snorted a laugh. After a couple of seconds, he said, “So … if you did meet a girl … ?”

“Yeah. I would.”

Mitch sighed. “Well, be careful. Watch out for the girls with dollar signs in their eyes. Use condoms. I’m sure Sebastian’s already given you the lecture. And if you do, you better act accordingly at church. No public prayer, no blessing the sacrament, no choir practice, no splits with the missionaries.”

Trevor nodded and took another swig of his Gatorade. “So speaking of church. You gonna bring this woman?”

“Nope.”

“Heh. You can be embarrassed.”

“Nope. This isn’t a missionary moment, Trevor. She’s a woman who has her own life and I find her interesting, so why would I want to try to change her? If she comes to church with me, fine, but it has to be at her instigation.” He paused. “I know I don’t talk about myself this way much because it makes me uncomfortable, but, Trev, I’m a powerful man and I didn’t get that way without knowing exactly what I want and having a great deal of cunning and patience to get it.”

“And you want her?”

“I’m intrigued. But with who she is now, not because I want to change her into something she’s not. I might go ahead and play the game with her, but I’ll win.” He leaned over then and got in Trevor’s face. “Because I always win.”

---

STEEL IN VASE

December 27, 2010

THREE WEEKS.

Well, that settled that, I supposed, but I didn’t know why it bothered me so much. I should never have told him something so outrageous, full disclosure be damned. I might have been able to keep my prostitution from him for however long our little flirtation would have lasted, but now it wasn’t possible.

Maybe I should’ve immediately repudiated the little prick who’d intruded upon our evening, instead of falling into my act, conditioned by years of fucking people I wasn’t attracted to—and some I didn’t like.

Qué será será. I sighed and rubbed away a strange stinging in my nose.

I swung around in my chair when my assistant knocked on the door and my breath caught in my chest as the biggest bouquet of the most perfect roses I’d ever seen preceded her into my office—in vibrant orange. What the hell, orange? She put the vase on my desk, her face a study in excitement. She bounced on the balls of her feet and said, in a rather conspiratorial whisper, “Three dozen.”

Three weeks.

Three dozen.

I might as well have been told point blank. I reached for the card and opened it. I recognized the handwriting.

Babbo – tonight 7:30

“Who’s it from?”

Nobody knew of my evening with Mitch. Never mind Jack would blow his top; I simply wanted to keep it to myself. It was so … different from anything I’d experienced.

“The man’s a romantic,” I breathed in wonder. I felt something warm and soft blossom in my chest and that strange stinging feeling in my nose started again. Was this what “to woo” meant? “To court”? Was I being courted, wooed?

I had never been that.

Gordon Rivington—a teenage crush cum marriage cum property swap.

Nigel Tracey—my introduction to and instruction in exquisite sex.

Lovers, miscellaneous—affection, fun, and a few mutually beneficial extras.

Clients, by referral only—business deals.

Mitch had come to Manhattan, but whether it was solely to see me or not, I didn’t know. I doubted it highly.

“I looked it up,” my assistant said, and I started because I’d forgotten she was there. “Orange roses mean desire and passion.”

Really.

“But orange means other things, too, so maybe it’s not just that or not that at all.”

“What other stuff?”

“Enthusiasm.”

“That’s fairly generic.”

“And fascination and um, like, ‘I’m proud of you’ kind of stuff.”

“I have a hard time believing a man would indulge in rose language.”

Susan bent to take another whiff, but stopped and said, “Oh? What’s this?”

From the center of the bouquet she plucked a bright orange iPod Nano, its earbud cord tied in a bow. I stared at it, my mind blank.

“Cassie?” Susan had been speaking and I’d completely spaced. “I said, it must have something on it. If he just meant to give you the iPod, he would’ve left it in the box. And it’s not like you couldn’t buy your own.”

Oh.

I pulled the cord loose, plugged it into the device, put the buds in my ears, then turned it on. In a second or two, the smooth voice of Harry Connick, Jr. flowed into my brain and straight down to the pit of my belly.

What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

“Cassie! Sit down before you fall down. What’s wrong?”

I sat, relaxed back into my chair, and closed my eyes, listening to Harry repeat the question while envisioning Mitch. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew Susan was tiptoeing out of my office, and I even heard the soft swish of the door closing behind her.

Expensive gifts from clients were de rigueur; it was ritual, simply part of the payment protocol for a mistress. Jewelry. Collectible wines. Art. Favors I could call in, occasionally worth many thousands of dollars, but mostly priceless. Things neither I nor my client would have to account for on a tax return. Occasionally the smaller gifts might arrive in or with flowers, but they meant nothing.

No, I had never had this.

A bouquet and a song, to plead for a date on a special night of the year.

My face heated up and I wondered if I were getting sick, so I felt my forehead, but no. It was nice and cool. I put my hand to my cheek, then had to find a tissue because my skin was all wet.

---

UPTOWN GIRL

SHE HAD WORN ORANGE.

The minute she stepped into the restaurant, she took Mitch’s breath away. He had felt every minute of the last three weeks, debating whether to pursue her, how she would mesh at church, if she would be willing to mesh at church, whether church really mattered in this equation or not, beyond keeping his covenants.

He couldn’t figure out what it was about her that had him feeling as nervous as a kid asking a girl out for the first time, but he had to see her again.

Three weeks. It had taken him that long to determine that his fascination with her wasn’t going to go away. He knew what conclusion she would draw from his leaving such a long space of time between then and now, given her bald pronouncement. It’d been a test—and he’d passed it.

Because she was here.

In orange.

“Cassandra.”

She started and turned, a sweet smile on her face that he wanted to see more of. Her face, piquant, with those clear brown eyes, was the most beautiful face he had ever seen—

—and that included the face of his wife, the mother of his children, whom he had loved and married in the temple for eternity, whom he had cared for so many years before she died.

He didn’t remember this fire in his gut, this need for Mina that he had for Cassandra. Perhaps it was the fact that she was, unlike Mina, vibrant and sensual. Perhaps it was the fact that he wasn’t twenty-one and destitute, stretched to his limit and depending on his fragile eighteen-year-old wife to keep them out of the red every month. He was forty-four, healthy, and had everything to offer a woman, even one who had as much money and power as he did.

But here Cassandra stood in front of him, beautiful in a way Mina had never been.

Guilt stabbed him. The guilt of disloyalty. The guilt of an adulterer, the way it had been described to him in countless interviews over the years. He was a widower and he had been faithful to his wife and his covenants, so he didn’t understand why his spirit was vulnerable to guilt when his mind wasn’t.

“Mitch,” she returned in that husky purr he wasn’t sure was deliberate. He thought he was an expert at spotting women who affected husky purrs, so if she was faking it, she was better than all the women who had tried before.

She held her hand out for him to shake, but he turned it and brought it to his lips for a light kiss. Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly as he held her gaze. He could tell her breath caught and he wondered if she was as smitten as he was. He doubted it.

Still, she was here and she had worn orange.

He tucked her hand into the crook of his left arm and nodded at the maître d’ for their table.

The conversation began easily enough, though Mitch wasn’t paying attention to what she said so much as how she said it. He noticed she did not order wine. That intrigued him, since, in Bethlehem, she had chosen what Sebastian later informed him was what anyone with exquisite taste and money to burn would order. Sebastian wanted to know who had ordered it and why it had piqued Mitch’s curiosity enough to ask. Mitch had declined to explain.

Now, Mitch simply watched her, listened to her voice. It evened out after a while and he wondered if the purr had been nervousness, but he doubted that, too. He didn’t make women like her nervous.

“How was your Christmas?” he asked during a small lull just as they had been served.

“Decent,” she murmured. “Gordon, my ex-husband, and his husband, Nigel, took the twins to a performance of Wicked. Helene had a double shift at the hospital. Clarissa and I indulged in a chick-flick marathon and binged ourselves sick on Ben & Jerry’s. Yours?”

“My wife died on Christmas Day last year,” he said, wondering why he’d even brought it up, except, well, it was two days after Christmas. Why wouldn’t one ask? “My son and I went to Vail. My daughter hosted Christmas this year and filled up her house with her in-laws. Fun people. Did a little skiing. So it was good.”

Relatively speaking.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“My fault,” he said briskly and sat up a little straighter. “I figured yours had to be better than mine.”

She chuckled then. “And it wasn’t.”

“Didn’t sound that way, no.”

“So what brings you up to Manhattan?” she asked finally. He’d expected it immediately, but perhaps she was hesitant to know.

“You.”

She bit her lip and he didn’t know how she’d survived as a call girl without getting completely fleeced. If she was acting, he couldn’t tell and—well, that pretty much meant she wasn’t.

“As it happens,” she said, suddenly paying a lot more attention to her meal. “I am, uh, free Friday.”

His heart thumped in his chest.

What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

“I find that … odd.”

She looked up at him, her expression shuttered. “Then why did you ask me out if you thought I had something else to do?” she asked brusquely.

“I couldn’t not.”

She swallowed. “Oh.”

“Cassandra,” he began slowly, not even sure what he wanted to say. “I would like—”

The phone in his suit coat chirped the ringtone that let him know he had a problem at church. Cassandra stiffened and the moment shattered. “I’m sorry,” he said, immediately frustrated, but hiding it as well as he usually did. “I have to take this call.”

“Go ahead,” she said flatly with a dismissive wave.

He arose and stalked through the restaurant and out the front door. “What,” he said tightly, without looking at the caller ID.

“Uh … ” Then Mitch looked. His first counselor. “Did I interrupt something?”

“As a matter of fact, Steve, yes. What’s wrong?”

“Sister Bevan is trying to get hold of you.”

Mitch ground his teeth. “I’m in Manhattan.”

There was a long pause. “She’s demanding to talk to you, wants your cell number.”

“What’s the problem this time?”

“She says Dan hit her.”

Mitch had every reason to doubt that, but wouldn’t take the chance. “Steve, please do me a favor and take care of it. There’s a list of shelters in my desk drawer—”

“Been there, done that, Mitch. Louise is over at her house trying to talk her into going to the hospital and filing a police report, which she’s refusing to do.”

Of course.

“Where’s Dan?”

“Gone … who knows where.”

Probably the library, where he’d always gone when he wanted to escape his life. He’d done it since they were kids, and right then, Mitch wanted to throttle him for it.

“Have you seen her? Do you know what kind of condition she’s in?”

“No.”

Another call was coming in. “Hey, Steve, lemme call you back.” He switched over, already knowing who it was, wanting to strangle whoever gave her his number.

“Bishop!”

“Sister Bevan,” he said politely, holding onto his patience with every last ounce of will he possessed. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m done. I cannot take this anymore. Dan’s just … out of control. Help me!”

“Listen to me and do what I tell you to do, okay? Sister Kelly is with you, right?”

“Yes, but she isn’t you. She can’t make Dan go away.”

He ignored that. “Let Louise take care of you, get you to a shelter at least.”

Sally launched into a list of reasons why he had to be the one to help her and why she couldn’t go to the emergency room or call the police.

“Sister Bevan, I am going to help you, but you have to let me talk to Sister Kelly, okay?”

“Yes, Mitch,” she said, then sniffled. “Thank you.”

“Louise,” he said without preamble when she answered. “Are you free to talk?”

“No.”

“All right.” This was an old exercise. Louise’s job as Relief Society president gave her unlimited access to Mitch’s ear, and they’d collaborated on the disposition of too many such situations. “Any bruises or blood?”

“None.”

“Do you believe her?”

“No.”

“Call the police and have her make a report. If she’s not lying, we can get this dealt with properly. If she is, maybe it’ll scare her enough to quit … ”

“Greg’s here.”

Mitch’s throat clogged. Louise’s terseness told him everything he needed to know about how helpful Greg would be, sweetly feeding Sally’s obsession with Mitch.

“Can you get him to leave?”

“No.”

No one but Mitch and Brother Kelly knew how much she despised Greg Sitkaris. Her hatred had grown slowly over the last five years as she’d gone about tending the women in the ward, seeing the way Greg charmed them. Then, once they were thoroughly captivated by him, he would slowly, subtly chip away at their confidence and self-esteem with backhanded compliments dispensed in tones flavored with disdain—for his own amusement.

Even Mitch had thought Louise’s descriptions of his behavior unbelievable and she, like Mina, had given up trying to explain it to him.

But now Mitch understood.

“All right. Insert yourself between them. Don’t let him talk to her or get close to her.”

She paused. “Uh … ”

“I get it now.”

“Finally!” Little whispers of fabric let Mitch know she was moving. “You need to do something,” she hissed.

Louise certainly wasn’t shy about stating her opinion. He knew exactly what she wanted him to do.

“I’m … working on that,” he admitted gruffly.

“Right now?” she asked, shocked.

“Yes, right now! And I’m having a good time and I want to get back to it.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “That’s great! Okay, I’ll call my husband and we’ll get it done. Consider your evening free.”

Mitch had just turned his phone off when a flash of orange at the door of Babbo caught his eye.

“Cassandra!” he called, panicked, and trotted toward her.

She stopped. Gave him a cool glance. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry. That was a church call. I had to take it.”

“Had to?” she asked smoothly.

Mitch opened his mouth to protest, but no, he hadn’t had to. That was why he had two counselors and a female counterpart with her own counselors, and an entire hierarchy of people who could have dealt with it without involving him. “I’m sorry. It’s … complicated. I’ve— My ward—parish—they’ve gotten used to my availability—” He needed to shut up.

“You’re a brilliant man, Mr. Hollander,” she murmured. “You know how to make yourself unavailable, and I don’t take second place to anyone. By the way,” she said as she turned and walked away from him, “I am busy Friday.”

His nostrils flared. “Cassandra—”

“I didn’t pay the tab, so you’d best see to it.”

“Cassandra—”

“Good night, Mr. Hollander.”

Mitch wanted to howl, but didn’t. As usual. “Happy early birthday, then.”

She stopped cold and stood motionless for long seconds. Her head bowed. He watched, his heart pounding in his ears, wondering if …

“You had me investigated,” she said quietly over her silver-mink-clad shoulder, her breath white in the cold air.

“Of course I did,” he said, exasperated. “I’d be an idiot not to.”

“So you know everything.”

“Not everything I wanted to know, no.”

“My ex-husband? My ex-father-in-law? My divorce?”

“Yes, yes, and yes.”

“Police reports? Criminal trial transcripts? Financial records?”

“Those too.”

“My client list?”

“You didn’t sell it. Did you destroy it?”

“I’m not that stupid.”

“That’s a relief.”

“The people on it don’t share your opinion.”

“I wouldn’t think so. Couldn’t get your medical records, either.”

She waved a hand. “Well, I don’t have any cooties, if that’s what you’re wondering. I’m a professional.”

“Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.”

“Fine. I’ll get tested again and send you the results.”

“Much appreciated.”

“So knowing what you do know, why did you ask me out?”

“You’re a brilliant woman, Ms St. James,” he said, hope seeping back into his soul. “You know what that means.”

“It could mean anything. Like … pity.”

“I don’t drive two hundred miles round trip to have intimate dinners at chic restaurants with people I pity.”

“Slumming, then.”

“No. You’re slumming. I’m the one from the wrong side of the tracks.” He saw the corner of her mouth twitch. “And what did your people find out about me?”

She released a resigned sigh. “That you have a PhD in metallurgical engineering from Missouri S&T. That your wife had a rare and devastating form of multiple sclerosis. That your daughters were missionaries for your church in Moscow and Hong Kong, respectively, although I can’t remember which went where. That you have one child—a boy—still at home. That I’m the first woman you’ve been interested in since your wife died last year and that she was the only woman you’ve ever had sex with. That you have lived a very boring life and that you seem perfectly happy to wallow in your boringness.”

He laughed, feeling lighter than he had in weeks. Months. “And yet, you accepted my invitation. Why?”

She turned almost fully then and looked at him, a smile creeping up on her. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Cassandra. Could we please go back in and finish our meals? I’m still hungry.”

“Turn your phone off.”

“I did.”

“Did you get your crisis taken care of?”

“Would it make any difference?”

“No. I come first. Always.”

Mina never would have made such a demand, and Cassandra’s arrogance had Mitch aching.

He offered her his arm and said, “Likewise.”

She sniffed. “I made a very good living knowing how to treat men.”

Mitch chuckled. “Nice to know I’ll be in good hands then.”

“You have no idea how good. Yet.”

---

HEY, BIG SPENDER

December 31, 2010

“CASSIE, WHAT IS your problem?”

Hell if I knew. I’d been pacing around the house all morning, too restless to find any one thing and do it, too wound up to watch TV, too distracted to catch up on household business.

“Go to work or something,” Clarissa snapped before stuffing popcorn in her mouth.

I stood in the kitchen and stared at Clarissa, Olivia, and their boyfriends in the living room splashed out in front of the TV for a New Year’s Eve Woody Allen marathon.

Something was wrong with this picture, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what.

They’d finish the movies, nap—have sex—all afternoon and evening, then go clubbing all night long.

My oldest and youngest were busy, too: Helene would be at the hospital for the next thirty-six hours. Paige had three performances today and two tomorrow.

I didn’t want to go to work.

But I didn’t want to be here, either.

I could go to my room, but that felt too much like I’d been sent there by my disapproving offspring.

The phone rang and I snatched at it just because it was something to do.

“Were you planning to come in any time today?” Susan asked.

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning and I am not there. What do you think?” I do my best work early in the morning.

“You need to come in today.”

That didn’t sound good, but I didn’t want to hear some chopped-up explanation for whatever had gone wrong. “All right. Get Sheldon here.”

I didn’t bother to change out of my sweats, the “NYU” stamped across my tits and ass brittle, cracked, half chipped off. I barely brushed my hair and went without makeup. Battered running shoes, no socks, old gloves and stocking cap, and I was out the door.

“Ms St. James,” Sheldon murmured as he handed me into the car.

“Good morning, Sheldon.”

“Happy birthday,” he said when he finally slipped into the driver’s seat.

I stared at him. My driver was the first person today to tell me that? “Uh, thank you, Sheldon,” I said, but shook it off as he pulled away from the curb and into traffic. “Any news?”

“All quiet.”

“I suspect Olivia’s being followed.”

“She was. I took care of it.”

I met Sheldon’s significant look in the rearview mirror. “Permane—? Never mind.” He said nothing. “Did Susan tell you why she called me in?”

At that, he smirked.

My curiosity as to what had happened at the office deepened. I was a specialist, my department created for me and all my support staff handpicked by me. Neither I nor my employees got involved in the bank’s day-to-day business, and I had given my staff the day off.

I knew why Susan had gone in. She had her eye on some kid in payroll, and would use the opportunity to fiddle around a little bit, play whatever computer game she was obsessed with, then head on down to the human resources department for her lunchtime stalking ritual.

“So,” I said briskly as I came off the elevator, pulling off my gloves and hat. To my surprise she and Melinda were smashed up together right in front of Susan’s computer, rapt. I didn’t have to be told what they were watching. “What’s the crisis?”

Susan paused their cooking show, looked around Melinda at me, up and down, and said, “Geez, is it possible for you not to look gorgeous?”

“Huh?”

“You come in dressed like a bag lady and you’re still hot.”

I laughed, unaccountably pleased, but Melinda snorted. “I hate you.”

“Vittles?” I asked dryly, stepping behind the two Vanessa Whittaker fangirls.

“I missed her when she was here, cooking at Chez Fricassee,” Melinda said, looking up at me. “Did you?”

“No, I ate there. Several times. She’s a brilliant chef, but she only got her break because she was Ford’s mistress and model. It would’ve taken her years to break out like that otherwise.”

Melinda grunted. “Doesn’t mean she’s not good at what she does.” She gave me the once-over. “Q.E.D.”

“Touché.”

“We all need help,” Melinda continued, looking at Susan now, lecturing. She did that a lot when she was in a reflective mood. “Don’t let anybody tell you all you need is brains and hard work, because that’s bullshit. We get help along the way, lucky breaks, countless people who help in small ways and a few who help in big ways. That chef—” Melinda pointed to the computer. “—got a big break because of who she was sleeping with. That’s true. Being beautiful doesn’t hurt. But it didn’t give her her talent or her drive or her business sense. She had to work for what she built and now she has to work twice as hard to keep it and grow it.

“The trick,” she went on, “is to always be giving back. To help people along their way. Sometimes that comes back to you in strange and wonderful ways. Occasionally you get it back from the person you gave it to, but mostly not. So those lucky breaks people get? No such thing as luck. That’s the groundwork you laid when you helped somebody else.”

I nodded toward the monitor. “Makes me wonder what she did to come into Sebastian’s orbit, because you know how antisocial he is.”

They both stared up at me then. “You don’t know?” Susan asked.

“Know what?”

Melinda waved a hand. “Her boyfriend, the politician.”

“Cipriani? The hotshot who just got Senator Afton hounded out of Washington?”

“Him. She pretty much saved his life when she was a little girl. It involved Hilliard, so that was how she got access to Taight. She gave a big press conference at her Thanksgiving masquerade. I was there and it was powerful. She had me in tears. Go watch it on YouTube.”

“I will. I need to hit one of those masquerades. I hear they’re decadent.”

Melinda smiled wickedly and stretched, her beautifully toned arms glistening dark chocolate. “It was … lovely,” she purred after a second or two.

“Are either one of you going to cough up the reason you have summoned me?”

“It’s in your office,” Melinda said dismissively and gestured to Susan to restart their program.

I obeyed as if I were a flunky—

—and stopped short. There, on my desk, a gift basket but clearly not some perfect corporate parfait of meaningless motivational bullshit. I approached it slowly, as if it were a wild animal that would pounce on me at any moment if it noticed me.

It was a pathetic little thing, really. I’d mastered my share of crafts early in my marriage when I was a Martha Stewart acolyte, trying my best to be what I’d been brought up to be: A high-society June Cleaver, perfectly accomplished in the home arts, perfectly dressed and coifed while practicing those arts, my pretty mint shirtwaist covered by a complementary apron I had hand-embroidered. I could’ve done a better gift basket in my sleep, even after all these years.

I untied the pink tulle. A “bouquet” of cookies on sticks, probably a couple dozen. Sugar cookies, from the looks of them, unartfully iced and decorated, with two sticking prominently up in the center, each with one word: “Happy” and “birthday.”

Oh, my. I cleared my throat and plucked a cookie out of its fastening.

“Shit,” I breathed after I’d taken a tentative bite. Chewy, with a delicate balance of lemon and vanilla. They might not be able to decorate, but damn, they could bake.

Whoever “they” were.

The cookie sticks were in a small vase. I pulled that out and set it aside to see— There, in the bottom of the basket were two paperbacks. I held one in each hand and looked between them. No, not two books. One. One in French and one in English. The one in French was old, yellowed and battered. The one in English was fresh and bright.

Angélique, Marquise des Anges or, in English, Angélique, the Marquise of the Angels.

I knew this story: A teenage girl obliged to marry an unattractive eccentric over a decade her senior, with whom she gradually fell in love as she learned who and how truly wonderful he was.

I’d been required to view the movie during one of my interminable humanities classes in my interminable undergraduate years, and had written my paper on the contrast between the heroine in the story to my own history. I’d earned a C because, “No matter how well written, treacly fiction has no place in film critique. You’re lucky I didn’t fail you.”

Why had Mitch chosen this particular story? He was a sly devil, and I couldn’t discount the possibility that, now he knew my history, he was making the same comparison I’d made. Yet …

The French version was well loved, and a quick glance at the copyright page told me it was from an early printing, 1958, and it was old before we were born—ancient by the time Mitch had gotten his hands on it. He had written in the margins, tiny, in French. Inside the back cover, in a different hand, in English, was written, “You should be reading your scriptures, Elder!”

That made me smile, this microscopic look into the lives of two twenty-year-old boys in a foreign country, out of their depth, and struggling to make sense of their situation.

I put the books down, then looked back into the basket. Ah, yes, a note. I broke the seal and took out the plain white card.

Happy birthday Cassandra.
I’ll pick you up at 8:00
(jeans – bundle up)

I fell into my chair. Dammit, where was that box of tissues?

Once I’d mopped up my face and taken a Benadryl for my allergies, I made sure the cookies were within reach, opened the English version of the book, tilted my chair back, propped my feet on my desk, and settled in.

---

WHEN DID YOU FALL

I OPENED MY DOOR at two minutes to eight to see him standing there relaxed, his hands in his jeans pockets, a long wool overcoat swept back behind his strong arms. His sandy hair glinted a slight red in the glow from the street lamp and his eyes seemed lighter in the reflection off the snow. He had a sly smile on his face and I wondered if he would kiss me at the stroke of midnight.

Was it only a month ago I’d thought him ordinary?

“Come in for a minute,” I said with an unintentional huskiness to my voice. I stepped aside, but his smile change from sly to amused and he said,

“Thank you, but no. Not coming in.”

It took me a second or two to figure that out, then said, “You think I’m going to seduce you.”

“Attempt to.”

I smirked.

“Appearance of impropriety and all that.”

“Ah, okay.”

Chuckling, I went to find my coat, then shoved it into his hands when I stepped out onto the stoop and locked my door. He assisted me into it as I had expected him to.

“Did you get my test results?” I asked as he handed me into the car he’d hired for the night. I slid over a proper distance so that he wouldn’t be too tempted.

“Yes, I did, thank you,” he said with a chuckle. “And I turned off my phone.” Once he was comfortable and we were on our way, he looked at my lap, grasped one of my hands, and wrapped my fingers up with his. “Did you have a good birthday?”

“Only because of you.”

Oh, my God. I hadn’t really said that, had I? I had. His frown told me I had. “What does that mean?” he rumbled.

“Uh … ”

“Are you telling me that your family didn’t do anything for you?”

“Uh … ”

“And your daughters all live at home, right?”

I looked past him out the window, seeing nothing. “New Year’s Eve is … New Year’s Eve. It’s special to them. It’s always been difficult.”

“Even when you were a kid?”

“Um … ” I cleared my throat. “No. My parents— They made sure to put me first. Then … ”

“Then … ?”

“Then I got married,” I said flatly, hoping he would back off. He knew what had happened—at least, what was in the public record as having happened.

His jaw clenched then and he looked away as if to hide it. His hand closed a little tighter on mine, and I wondered— “Do you ever get angry? Really angry?”

He looked at me sharply and his expression melted into a smile immediately. “Not much, no,” he said. “I’m pretty easygoing.”

Liar.

I didn’t say it, though. He’d deny it and I really didn’t want to spend my evening trying to get him to admit something probably very few people knew about him.

“That book you sent me,” I said. “I like it so far. Thank you.”

“How far in did you get?”

“Angélique’s marriage.” I launched into the oddity of his having chosen that particular book to send me and why, and, because I couldn’t keep my fucking mouth shut, I said, “Did you send that to me because of my marriage?”

He started. “No. I— It’s my favorite book. It … helped me get through a rough time in my life. I didn’t see any connection in it. I wanted to— Um … ”

I closed my other hand over the knot that his and mine already made. “It’s okay,” I murmured. “It wouldn’t have bothered me if you had. I was curious, is all. Big coincidence.”

He stared at me for a second, his expression somber. “Tell me about it.”

I took a deep breath and sighed, then shifted to make myself more comfortable. I knew what he was asking and I didn’t pretend otherwise. “Gordon was twenty-five. I was fifteen and madly in love with this dashing older man. He saw me as a well-behaved little girl … a pretty life-sized doll who could walk and talk. He didn’t object when his father and my father set up the deal. I sure as hell wasn’t going to object.” I stopped, thought back. It was humiliating, thinking how I’d doodled Gordon’s name on my notebooks, being so very … fifteen about it. But fifteen was fifteen and not forty-six, and was to be expected. I was far more forgiving of, say, my twenty-four-year-old assistant’s crush on the kid in payroll than I was of my fifteen-year-old self.

“We had three years of an entirely chaste and fairy princess courtship. I thought Gordon refused to kiss me because I was underage, which only proved to me that he was honorable. We got married a week after I turned eighteen. My father didn’t figure out until my wedding day why Gordon’s father was so eager to get us married off.” I laughed. “Hell, Gordon didn’t even know.”

“When’d he come out?”

The warmth of Mitch’s big hand seeped into my cold ones. “When he got out of prison. Before he went into treatment.”

“And your father put you in that position, even though he knew.”

“He didn’t know,” I said. “He suspected. Didn’t know what to do because if he were wrong, it would’ve blown back on all of us very badly … I try to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“I see. You were the one hit with all the aftershocks.”

I shrugged. “I was a good girl. I did what I was told.”

“Until you couldn’t anymore,” Mitch muttered, his head bowed and his voice far away. I leaned forward a little to look up into his face.

“Mitch?”

He glanced up at me, then chuckled wryly. “You and Mina. Good girls backed into a corner, then came out fighting.”

“Your wife?” I asked, not in the least bit jealous. I’d be suspicious of any man who didn’t want to talk about the woman he had loved so long, the mother of his children. After years of studying men, fucking a good many of them, and acting as overpaid therapist to more than a few, I had come to the conclusion that ones who’d lost beloved wives after long marriages made excellent relationship material, and I wasn’t threatened by a ghost.

“She was seventeen when we met,” he said slowly. “Very shy, soft-spoken, eager to please. Physically delicate. She was sick even then, but nobody knew it. She had never rebelled, not even so much as smarting off. I was … without prospects, so her father— He was—is—a CPA with his own successful firm, very upper middle class. He disapproved of me.”

“Putting it lightly?” I asked, hearing the edge in his voice.

A corner of his mouth turned up. “I think you read me too well.”

“I think you let me.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment of that.

“And?”

“And I … stole her.”

“Stole her? From whom?”

“Her father. The man he wanted her to marry. They had it all arranged for her to marry him the week after she graduated from high school.”

“So you eloped? How’d that work out with her family?”

“Disowned her. Never spoke to her again. I got into S&T, so after she graduated from high school, we moved to Missouri and stayed there for eight years. It was easier for her that way, anyway. She could use distance to excuse them.”

Well. Mina Monroe and Cassie St. James, two sides of the same coin.

“Now?”

Mitch waved a hand. “Her mother died before she did. Her father never had anything to do with me or the kids.”

“Still?”

“Still. My son is having a hard time with it right now, same way my daughters did. Do.”

I sighed.

“And … what’s your ex-father-in-law doing these days?”

That startled a delighted laugh out of me, as he had surely intended. “My ex-father-in-law is working at a convenience store somewhere on the Tex-Mex border.”

“How much of a hand did you have in that?”

“Both hands, both feet. And I make sure to keep my stiletto heel in his jugular at all times. Revenge is best served in a Slurpee cup, you see.”

He and I laughed, and we were still laughing when our car pulled up to Bryant Park. “Mitch,” I drawled, not in the least surprised. “Ice skating? What a chick-flick cliché.”

“Well,” he said as he got out and pulled me out after him, “it’s free and I didn’t have much money left after that ridiculously expensive basket I sent you.”

“Don’t tell anybody I’m such a cheap date. Did you make those cookies?”

“Uh, no. The young ladies in my ward—parish—”

“I’ve got the lingo now, Mitch. Ward, not parish.”

He grinned. “—were making them as a service project, so I asked my Relief Society president—my female counterpart in the ward—to swipe a few, write the words, and wrap it up.”

“Service project?”

“Yeah. It’s where somebody in the ward is identified as being in need of having something done. Sometimes it’s a job the teenagers can handle with little or no supervision. They get together and work on it, get it done. Project. Service. Service project.”

“I’m not in your ward-slash-parish.”

“No, but I am. And I was in great need, let me tell you.”

We laughed.

And continued to all evening as we attempted to skate, neither of us very good, leaning against each other, propping each other up, occasionally pulling the other one down. We may have spent more time upright than on our asses, but I wouldn’t have bet on it.

Breathless, we retired to a bench a couple of hours later to watch others who were far better than we were. Mitch draped his arm around my shoulder and I snuggled in for warmth. He curled his free hand around mine, and I felt his strength even through several layers of wool.

“Where are you staying?” I asked. “Did you drive?”

“I drove. Staying at The Mark.”

I glanced up at him, surprised. “Just around the corner from me!”

He simply smiled, which carved concentric laugh lines into his cheeks.

“You’re ornery.”

“That I am,” he murmured.

“What would God say about that?”

“God made mosquitoes.”

I burst out laughing then. “Point taken. Then I will assume you have something planned?”

“My only plan was to spend the day with you, if you were free.”

I was supposed to go shopping with Clarissa, during which she would attempt—and fail—to wheedle a five-thousand-dollar dress out of me. Boy, would she be pissed when I canceled. “I’d like that,” I said, more softly than I’d intended to. “But not in my house?”

“Not alone, no.”

I tried to be angry, but I couldn’t. It was simply too funny.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Ha ha ha.”

“Oh, don’t be mad. I haven’t laughed this much with a ma—” Well. He didn’t need to know that.

“I think,” he said slowly, looking off into the distance, “that it’s time for hot chocolate and brownies. Jacques Torres.”

“What are you talking about? They close at nine on Friday and maybe earlier today.”

“You sure about that?”

My breath caught. “You evil man.”

“The epitome.”

WE HAD THE CHOCOLATERIE to ourselves, and we were seated with much ado—New Year’s Eve, almost three hours past their closing time and coming up on midnight. People were knocking on the door to get in, but were ignored.

Midnight.

I was getting jittery, wondering how Mitch kissed, unable to wait for the new year when I would feel his mouth on mine.

Happy birthday to you …

I gasped and turned in my seat when the singing began.

A cake.

With sparkler candles.

Fuckers wouldn’t go out when I blew at them, either. There were only four, but they kept sparking and sparkling. I kept blowing and blowing.

“Dammit!” I plucked them out of the cake and dunked them in my water glass.

Mitch roared with laughter. I tried not to, but failed.

“That was a nasty little trick,” I grumbled. He opened his mouth, but I held up a hand. “I know, I know. God made mosquitoes.”

The cake was cut and we each had a piece. There were chocolates and hot chocolate and ice cream and fruit and by the time we left at two, we were buzzed on sugar. We bounced nonsense off each other, in hysterics over things that, in daylight, would be simple stupidity, not even worthy of eyerolling.

The hour, the laughter, the sugar, the dark, the cold kept at bay in the back of a warm car with a warm and attractive man— It made me say and do things I knew I would find humiliating in the morning because they were so very … fifteen.

“I didn’t get my midnight kiss,” I whined, but it had taken me almost the entire distance home to cut through our silliness enough to remember it.

“You were otherwise occupied blowing out candles, and now it’s too late.”

“It’s never too late for a kiss.”

He cocked one eyebrow at me. “You think?” He shifted and leaned toward me and, with a sigh, I closed my eyes.

And he kissed me.

My eyes popped open. “What the hell was that?” I demanded.

He spread his arms, all wide-eyed innocence, and said, “I kissed you.”

“On the tip of my nose! I barely felt it!”

I was squeaking. Oh, God, I was fucking squeaking!

“You weren’t very specific.”

I screeched. He laughed. I screeched louder, but it turned into a fit of giggles. I fell over and lay across the car seat with my head in his lap, simply looking up at him. He smiled and smoothed my hair, picked up a strand only to let it slip through his fingers.

“I’m drunk,” I said.

“I know. You’re worse than a toddler. Can’t hold your sugar worth a darn.”

I blinked. “Darn?”

“That’s right.”

I sat up. “You don’t swear?”

He shook his head slowly. “Never.”

“You better write me a list of things you can’t do.”

“Tomorrow. It’s a long list.”

“And then I will attempt to get you to do them.”

“I would expect nothing less.”

I sobered a bit. “Mitch, I— I wanted to tell you. Tonight was … ” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed my face. Benadryl. I needed Benadryl. “This was the best birthday I’ve had in a long time,” I murmured. “Maybe ever.”

He looked at me, no longer amused, and said, “I’m sorry.”

---

LONG NIGHTS, IMPOSSIBLE ODDS

MITCH UNLOCKED HIS hotel room door wearily, closed it, and sagged back against it.

“What am I doing?” he whispered to no one.

That was a stupid question. He knew exactly what he was doing and he wanted to continue doing it.

Mitch, you have a taste for bad girls. You always have.

Now, there was a voice from the past. Inez, his first crush, a sultry Latina five years his senior. She had been in desperate search of a dance partner so she could enter a competition, and had conscripted him. At fourteen, the only things he had to offer her were his size, strength, and malleability.

He wasn’t going to lie to himself and deny that Cassandra’s history was part of his attraction to her, but there was so much more to her, other things that were just as attractive.

But …

Inez again.

We don’t usually make such good wives, or at least, not the kind of wife the Church expects us to be …

That had been relevant when, at twenty and fresh home from his aborted mission, he’d attempted to persuade Inez to marry him—two misfits banding together against the world—but it was irrelevant now.

Look, figuring out how to get what you want is the easy part. Figuring out what you want is the hard part.

It was one of Sebastian’s first lectures to him as they sat in the cool, dark peace of the Notre Dame cathedral to hide, rest from their labors, and talk about theology and philosophy. Once Mitch and Mina had settled in together, he’d figured out what he wanted easily enough and gotten it. He’d never had a need to revisit the issue until, just before Mina slipped away from him completely, she used the last of her strength to give him a speech that sounded rehearsed.

Mitch, you rescued me from a fate worse than death, then turned around and gave me everything I ever wanted. You made my dreams come true. Promise me— When I leave here … Find someone. Someone who can match you the way I never could, someone who’ll take care of you the way you deserve.

Mina …

No, Mitch. Trevor will be gone soon to make his own life. It’s your time now. Take it. Enjoy it. You haven’t had a minute to yourself in twenty years.

He turned on his phone and checked for messages: five, all from his counselors and various ward members. He slowly undressed and got in a hot shower, hoping it would help him remember the right question, so he could try to answer it.

What do you really want?

Mitch knew that voice, still and small, but deep like his father’s. It seeped through his brain whenever he needed more guidance than his common sense and life experience could supply, asking the question he hadn’t had the courage to ask himself.

“Cassandra St. James,” he murmured.

His evening with her had only pulled something within his reach he’d been trying to grasp—and missing—for months.

“I want a life.”

A life that wasn’t so filled with everyone else’s problems that he had no room for any of his own.

Now you can figure out how to get it.

Mitch hadn’t had so much fun since he’d taught Mina how to drive on their first date, then when they were first married and without children, when he’d taken her on cheap adventures and taught her to be silly with him. Once he’d gotten her away from Shane, given her the freedom of his name and validated her fun-loving soul, he’d watched her blossom about as much as she could.

But she’d never opened up that far. She hadn’t had the strength to pop open the way he’d hoped she would, especially after Lisette was born. Mina had been happiest spending her energy with the children, nesting in their apartment, pinching pennies until they screamed, keeping hearth and home while Mitch went to school and worked at menial jobs and tended to church callings that had demanded everything he’d had.

And, well, Mina loved babies, toddlers, children, but she hadn’t been altogether thrilled with how one went about making them. He knew that, although he hadn’t known why until she was pregnant with Trevor. But because he always had other things on his mind, because he was always at work or at church, sex—or lack thereof—had never been an issue.

Tonight, having stood on Cassandra’s stoop, captivated by her cool, dark beauty, knowing none of her children were home, knowing she wanted him, knowing she had no barriers to keep her from sex whenever, however she wanted it, that she enjoyed it and could teach him anything and everything …

It had immediately become an issue.

Don’t lie to me, boy.

Okay, okay. Not just tonight.

Eight months ago he’d stepped out of his life for a while and indulged himself on a dance floor, his favorite teenage pastime, long dormant, one Mina was not physically capable of sharing with him, one from which he could walk away when he got too uncomfortable.

Then last month he’d spent a week at Whittaker House, in the midst of beautiful women, any one of whom would’ve—

Unable to walk away from the temptation because his presence was needed and he’d needed his family’s help and that was the fastest way to get it.

He’d spent the last year dealing with this, being single, suddenly without most of the obligations that had taken up his time, able to take a second to look around at what the world had to offer, wanting … something—and not knowing where to start.

Lisette and Geneviève were married and lived far away in opposite directions.

Mina was gone.

Trevor would fly the nest soon.

The foundry’s profitability had risen markedly once Eilis had taken Fen’s place, settling the last of Mitch’s worries. It had been his own choice not to do business with Fen, but because OKH was the foundry’s biggest customer, the cost had been great. With Eilis at the helm, Mitch had no reason to withhold his products from OKH.

When Cassandra finished detaching Jep Industries from the Steelworks—critical now that the foundry’s growth had exploded with the new business—the entire operation would be permanently settled. Mitch’s officers could run it should he decide to take a sabbatical or bury himself in his lab with his alloys, or both.

And surely, surely he’d be released from the bishopric sometime soon …

Wouldn’t he?

Right?!

Soon. Patience. You have a mess to clean up first.

Two or three, more like.

No, just one.

A world of attractive, available women, and—

Look, if all you want is companionship, you got a church full of single women our age. Half of ’em are virgins and half of those have PhDs.

Bryce’s advice.

Look, if all you want is sex, I know a dozen powerful women who’ll blow your mind without blowing your bank account. Break free, Elder. Break free!

Sebastian’s.

Mitch had money, power, time, and an almost-empty nest.

And had spent the last year dazed and confused.

Until Cassandra St. James had walked into his office, austere, aggressive, accomplished.

And beautiful. Even—no, especially—in faded, hole-ridden jeans through which he could see thermal underwear, three sweaters (mismatched), and her beautiful black hair, sleek and shiny, swinging freely around her shoulders when she moved. She’d guessed his planned evening activity and layered accordingly.

He got out of the shower, dried, dressed for bed, crawled in it, checked the clock.

Three-thirty in the morning.

“Thank you,” he sighed, his eyelids drifting closed, too tired to pray properly.

You’re welcome.

★