Magdalene (6 page)

If nothing else, Mitch’s long experience as
a bishop had taught him a large measure of compassion. He was just
tired of spending every free moment at church.

He needed a vacation.

But where would he go? With whom? His
daughters had their own families now and his son had his own life.
So what would he do there, alone? When Mina was well enough, he had
no money and no time. When he’d amassed enough cash and time to
take his family somewhere nice, Mina was too weak and he’d had too
many worries to be able to relax. He’d lived his entire life
without having gone somewhere specifically to relax and have fun.
Now that he had the cash, time, and fewer worries, he had no one to
go with.

He waved a hand and looked up at his motley
collection of friends who looked back at him with varying degrees
of concern they tried to hide. His mouth twitched as he studied the
men. “All four of you born and bred in the Church, only one of you
eligible to hold the priesthood—and he’s gay. Nobody would believe
it.”

The laughter, rich and sincere, broke out
again and Mitch was glad. These people, his adopted family, knew
him better than anyone, let him be himself—not dad, not CEO, not
bishop, not scientist. Just Mitch. And he did not want to be
maudlin around them.

“Mitch?” The double doors to his office
suite opened and his assistant poked her head around. “Ms. St.
James is here.”

He nodded and all eight of them stood to
welcome the newcomer. He regretted it, really. An unknown would put
paid to the impromptu party; the in-jokes would have to cease.

It was only his years of training as both a
businessman and a bishop that kept his expression impassive when
Ms. St. James walked in. It was only the fact of his suit coat’s
length that kept everyone in that room from knowing how sex-starved
he must really be to react that fast to the sight of her. In her
late thirties—not mid-twenties as had been assumed—she was, at
first glance, fairly ordinary-looking.

But not
at all
ordinary.

She smiled with a calculated reserve,
noting, he was sure, that this was a table of people familiar with
each other and she was the outsider, though not the enemy. Mitch
could see that she knew they’d expected someone much younger and
that she had intended to catch them all off guard.

With age came credibility and she had just
turned the balance of power upside down.

She would need that edge to get past Eilis’s
objections.

Morgan, ever the extrovert, immediately
glad-handed her, then began to introduce her around. Mitch took the
opportunity to study her while she chatted with each member of his
family.

She looked Parisian, tall, slim, with skin
the color of café au lait, heavy on the lait. Her black hair was
sleek, pulled into a tight twist at the back of her head. A hint of
a mole just above the left corner of her full mouth gave her an air
of mystique. She stood about five-eleven in modestly high-heeled
black shoes. She had dressed conservatively, in a pencil-slim,
mid-calf-length black skirt and a severe white button-down blouse
underneath a black blazer. Ruby cufflinks in French cuffs folded
back over her blazer sleeves and a simple Tiffany watch were her
only jewelry.

Expensive simplicity.

“And this,” boomed Ashworth, “is the man
himself, Mitchell Hollander, founder and CEO of Hollander
Steelworks.”

“Mr. Hollander,” she said, her voice husky
as she offered her hand and met his look, her light brown eyes
clear and without guile.

“Ms. St. James,” he replied and took her
hand. He shook it in his most bishoply way, the grip just firm
enough and his other hand over hers. The handshake that said
As
one of the Lord’s representatives, I care about you and I’ll do
what I can to help you
. The handshake he now used as a defense
mechanism because his immediate interest in her bore absolutely no
resemblance to anything spiritual.

“Please, call me Cassie.”

He released her hand carefully, all the
right signals sent, none of the wrong ones, and inclined his head.
“Call me Mitch.” He gestured to the empty chair at his right,
between him and Bryce. “Make yourself comfortable. If you’ll let
Darlene know what you’d like to drink, we can get started.”

* * * * *

Rough Boy

I walked into the CEO’s executive suite, saw
them all in their natural habitat, and was immediately caught off
guard.

Me!

I couldn’t say why. I knew what they all
looked like, save Hollander. And it wasn’t as if I had never seen
half a dozen beautiful people in a room together before.

Perhaps it was the attitude that filled the
room, of camaraderie, of...friendship...that made me uncomfortable
with them. A room full of testosterone with no posturing, no
competition— It felt almost like...love?

Couldn’t be.

Still, as much as they had surprised me,
I
had surprised
them
, exactly as I had intended.

Most of them would not have expected a woman
their age; after all, Jack Blackwood specialized in training up
very young Big Swinging Dicks. The young had the energy and drive
to do the job to his satisfaction and they didn’t have the family
commitments that would keep them from the 24/7 availability he
demanded. Jack enjoyed spawning ruthless little business bastards
as if they had his genes, and the younger the better.

When people succeed early, they can retire
early.

As Morgan introduced me around, I assessed
each of them intellectually and sexually. Yes, Jack had told me to
keep my hands off, but a pretty lover with a high IQ would assuage
my burgeoning restlessness, and I was looking at a room full of
people who filled the bill.

Ashworth himself. He was no exception, and
I’d been attracted to him from the moment we met. Large, animated,
utterly masculine, with rich mahogany hair and piercing ice blue
eyes, Morgan wouldn’t trip anybody’s gaydar, but then, neither
would Nigel.

Knox Hilliard. Blond and tan, with the same
color eyes as his cousin Morgan, Knox was not much younger than I,
but he looked older; in my experience, blond men don’t age well. I
didn’t find him particularly attractive, but he had a quick, warm
smile and the charisma of an entertainer or prophet. I could see
why Clarissa was so smitten, and I wished I had thought to bring
her if only to meet...

Justice McKinley. She was the May to
Hilliard’s December. Only a year older than my eldest daughter, she
seemed like such a sweet girl in person, with her freckles and
short, bouncy auburn curls, fashionable glasses perched on her
pixie nose, all trumped by a perfect hourglass figure dressed to
utmost advantage. But her utterly telegenic beauty hid a cutting
wit she used to slice and dice—on national TV—politicians who
displeased her. I would relay this meeting to Clarissa tonight in
excruciating detail and enjoy watching her writhe in envy.

Giselle Kenard. Her muscular little body
hung nude in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On canvas, she was
gorgeous, with long flaming curls accentuating her agony. In
person, though, she radiated humor and I could not guess her age.
Her ice blue eyes betrayed her blood ties to both Hilliard and
Ashworth, and her rather dull honey-colored curls—caught up in a
yellow-ribboned ponytail—made her cute. Barely. My taste in women
does not run to barely cute.

Her husband, Bryce Kenard. Now,
he
shocked me. The burn scars that matted half his face gave him an
animal sexuality that cloaked him like an aura. He had the most
beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen in a man. I couldn’t imagine
what a man like that saw in a woman as mousy as Giselle, and I
wondered if he could be lured away from her.

Eilis Logan, whom I’d also only seen as a
nude on canvas. Taller than I, zaftig, with shoulder-length blonde
hair, one green eye and one blue eye— It was too bad that she would
be my natural enemy in this little project.

And finally, her husband, King Midas,
Sebastian Taight, the object of my curricular fascination and my
predecessor in unconventional corporate-restructuring methods. He
was perfect in a carefully unstudied
GQ
way, black Irish
from his white-tinged black hair to
the same
ice blue
eyes.

He had noticed my scrutiny of his wife, and
glanced between us, then smirked.

“I think not,” Eilis murmured dryly.

“No?” Sebastian drawled low enough so only
the two of us could hear. “Eilis sandwich?”

She raked me from head to toe. “Tempting.
But...no. I don’t share.”

“Damn,” Sebastian and I said at the same
time. And all three of us laughed at a joke everyone else was
straining to hear.

“Too bad it took an imperial order to get to
meet you, Cassie,” he said, holding his hand out. “Another month or
two and I would’ve stormed your office.”

And with one handshake, I knew I’d earned
the respect of a man who respected very little. “I find it’s not
always good to know too much about one’s idols.”

“That’s true. Your dad was one of mine.” I
stiffened. “I was...disillusioned.”

Ah, yes. If he had followed my father, he
would have known what happened to him. It had never occurred to me
that King Midas and I might have learned from the same master;
thus, my affinity for Taight’s style had nothing to do with
serendipity and everything to do with familiarity.

“Relax,” he murmured with a warm smile. “I
didn’t summon your father. I summoned you.”

I nodded and took a deep breath.

Intriguing, yes, this clan of entrepreneurs,
philosophers, artists, and lawyers with some strange fraternity I
couldn’t pin down—

Then Ashworth introduced me to Mitch
Hollander.

Ordinary. An ordinary man in his mid-forties
who felt comfortable in his own skin, comfortable with who he was,
and comfortable with his ordinariness amongst the cadre of
extra
ordinary 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.