Dree borrowed a phone and called Sister Mariam so she could spend the night at the convent instead of the rectory. Just because she and Augustine—no, Maxence—had come to some sort of détente didn’t mean that she wanted to be sleeping in close proximity to him before it became absolutely necessary.
At the convent, she and Sister Mariam sat on threadbare, goose-down cushions on living room couches in the convent and sipped cinnamon-scented milky tea.
Other sisters sat around them, chatting.
Sister Mariam asked, “Did he tell you more about the project?”
“I guess we will be spending most of our time in Jumla province, which he said is west of here?”
Sister Mariam’s eyes widened, but her eyebrows went down. “Jumla province?”
Other sisters around them, all of them wearing soft gray saris, turned and looked at Mariam and Dree.
“Yeah, that’s what he said. Is that a problem?”
Mariam addressed her sisters. “Andrea Catherine is a nurse practitioner. What can we give to her to take with them?”
With that, the nuns were up and moving. Several of them were dispatched to local hospitals and clinics to confer with other working sisters.
Dree was swept along in the crowd to several storage rooms in the back of the convent. After much discussion, several large cardboard boxes were stuffed full of medical supplies like sutures, courses of antibiotics, gauze and ointment, wound care supplies, a thermometer, stethoscope, ophthalmoscope, a sphygmomanometer for taking blood pressure, and vitamins, so many vitamins, single vitamins and multi-formulations, as powders, pills, tablets, and drops.
The other sisters returned, bearing more boxes. Some were taken to the kitchen to be refrigerated for the night.
Mother Superior Maria Devna told Dree, “Before you leave Sunday morning, you will wake us. We will pack the tetanus and other vaccines that have to be refrigerated. They should not freeze and should not get too warm, but you know this because you are a nurse.”
Dree pulled Sister Mariam aside and asked, “Am I going to need all these things? Are there hospitals where we’re going?”
Mariam shook her head sadly. “Jumla province is very poor. The cities are, of course, like cities everywhere, smaller versions of Kathmandu. There is an excellent training school for doctors and nurses near Chandannath, the Karnali Academy of Health Sciences. However, once you get out into the countryside, it is very bad. Some people do not see doctors for years, and many people die of things that they should not. You will take the supplies?”
“Of course, I will. I’m a nurse. I took an oath to treat people and save their lives.”
Mariam patted Dree’s hand. “It is much like the vows that we take. Indeed, a great number of nurses are also sisters because this desire to help someone is very close to God. I know you will be with Deacon Father Maxence, but he may not be with you every moment of the day.”
That was uncomfortably close to what Maxence had said. Dree suddenly had a little more trepidation about going out into the wilds of Nepal, even though she had grown up near the Mexican border in southwestern New Mexico.
Sister Mariam continued, “I can give you a veil to wear, so people will think you are a religious sister, and they will leave you alone. They will also respect you more. Do you have a cross?”
“Um, no. I’m sorry. It was stolen. I wasn’t wearing it when I went to work on the last day when I was in the United States. None of us nurses wear jewelry. You never know when you’re to be standing next to an MRI scanner and have your earrings ripped out of your ears. Anyway, everything I owned got stolen while I was at work.”
Mariam frowned. “May I ask what happened?”
Dree swallowed hard, trying to clear her embarrassment out of her throat and her voice. “One day while I was working a fifteen-hour shift, my fiancé stole all my money and every single possession that I owned, and he sold everything for whatever he could get for it because he owed a lot of money to some criminals. When I got home, I had nothing. Everything was gone. After I fled the country and freaked out for a few days, I called the principal of the Catholic high school where I’d gone to school, and she hooked me up with people to get me here, where my ex or some other people who are looking for him won’t be able to find me.”
Sister Mariam’s eyes had gone wide, showing white all around her very dark brown irises. “I just wanted to get away from home and leave Kerala.”
Dree laughed. “It’s a stupid thing that happened to me. I still can’t quite believe it.”
Mariam shook herself and blinked a few times. “Nevertheless, we are very happy that you are here, and we honor and respect you for doing a mission for Catholic Charities. If you ever want to become a sister in our order, we would happily accept you. Wouldn’t we, Mother Superior?”
Mother Superior Maria Devna nodded. “Although we would appreciate it if you would gossip less and not lead Sister Mariam into temptation.”
Sister Mariam blinked, and Dree got the distinct impression that she was working very hard not to roll her eyes or glare at her mother superior. She said, “Come with me, Andrea Catherine. We will find a veil for you.”
Before they could go, the mother superior asked Dree, “Did Father Maxence mention if he was saying Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help on Sunday?”
“He didn’t mention Sunday, and I think we’re leaving too early that morning,” Dree told her. “But he said he would be assisting and preaching the homily there tomorrow morning, Saturday.”
A shiver ran through the group of sisters, and they all glanced at one another.
Mother Superior Maria Devna said, “I will reserve the school bus for tomorrow morning.”
Dree stuck her tongue between her molars to keep from cracking up. She certainly understood why they were all excited, though.
She’d been on her knees in front of Maxence, and it was spectacular.
After giggling with Sister Mariam half the night because she really did know all the gossip about every religious person in Kathmandu, Dree sat in a pew the next morning at Our Lady of Perpetual Help with the rest of the sisters, all of whom wore perfectly pleated dove gray saris and shining faces.
Thank goodness Dree had made her confession to Father Moses just a few days before, so she didn’t have to ask Sister Mariam to find her a confessor because she’d been having relations first with her boyfriend Francis for months and then with the almost-priest-guy for four glorious days.
Oops. Impure thoughts. She didn’t need any of those on her conscience, especially while she was actually sitting in church and could finally take communion again.
It felt good to be able to receive communion and have a clear conscience. Francis had always made fun of her for being upset and not wanting to go to church because she was too embarrassed to admit she’d slept with him and upset because they weren’t going to stop, and then there was the whole birth control issue.
But she and Maxence had agreed not to indulge ever again, and so they wouldn’t.
With an open and honest heart, she’d told Father Moses in Paris that she had no intention of sinning anymore.
Heck, at the time, she’d believed she was never going to see Augustine again.
And now the spectacularly gorgeous Augustine—Maxence!
Dang it, she had to remember that guy’s name was Maxence, though she had told him to lie to her about his name.
She hadn’t told him to lie about being a priest, however.
Anyway, the spectacularly handsome Maxence, with his full lips and dark eyes and black, softly curling hair, was standing in deacon’s robes at the altar, assisting a priest at the Mass.
Yesterday, even though he’d been wearing a Roman-collared shirt, a part of Dree hadn’t truly believed that Maxence was a deacon and planning to become a priest. His black suit had been fashionable and not altogether dissimilar to the clothes he’d been wearing in Paris. His shirt had been black, but he might have been a mafia hitman, which was
more plausible than that energetic, enticing, tantalizing, intensely sexual man with a streak of kink wanting to be a priest.
He’d edged her for two days, denying her an orgasm.
He wanted to be edged and denied forever.
Now, that was pretty dang kinky.
Impure thoughts.
No impure thoughts in church.
Dree glanced at Sister Mariam sitting beside her in the pew, but Mariam didn’t seem to have sensed Dree’s immoral musings.
She made a concerted effort and controlled the tempestuous thoughts rising in her mind until the gospel reading, when Deacon Father Maxence ascended the pulpit on the left side of the sanctuary.
Every eye in the church turned toward him, including Dree’s.
Morning sunlight streamed through the crazy-quilt stained glass windows, showering the sanctuary and the nave with trembling light.
Maxence was bathed in a sunlit glow that glistened on his dalmatic robe, purple for Advent, and was surrounded by gold glimmering in the air like angelic fire. He touched the page of the Bible in front of him and whispered a prayer before he began to read that day’s prescribed Scripture reading.
His rich baritone voice filled the church, which had gone unusually silent without even the common crinkling, sighing, and fidgeting of so many people sitting on wooden pews. Even the ladies wearing rustling silk saris didn’t move and barely breathed.
Dree listened to him read the passage, barely aware of the church around her or anything beyond the otherworldly radiance of the beautiful man standing before her, the music of his voice in her ears, and the taste of his words like honey in her mouth.
At the end of his reading, Maxence intoned, “The Gospel of the Lord.”
The congregation roused, and everyone replied with voices as shaky as if they had fallen into the depths of their very souls, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.”
Dree realized that she was clutching the back of the pew in front of her with her hands. Her knuckles were white and ached.
Every minute that Maxence had spoken, his voice had found her and filled her mind and spirit as if he had only been speaking to her.
From the rapt expression on Sister Mariam’s face, she had felt the same way.
And the rest of the sisters, too.
Dree twisted and looked around the church. Everyone seemed to be coming to terms with the experience they had just had, blinking and swallowing, while some had their eyes closed and head bowed as they pulled themselves together.
That was not hypnosis, that thing that Maxence had done. Dree’s parents had taken her to a hypnotist when she was eight to get her to stop biting her fingernails. Hypnotism was a very specific, knife-like form of meditation where the hypnotist invaded Dree’s thoughts and supplanted them with her commands. It hadn’t worked. Dree finally stopped peeling her nails down to the quick with her teeth in high school.
No, what Maxence had done was not hypnotism.
He hadn’t done something.
Maxence had become something.
His reading reminded Dree of a rock concert, one of the best ones, where even though you’d only been able to afford tickets up in the nosebleed sections and you were jammed in with thousands of other lost souls in the thin skim of smoke near the ceiling, the bass and drums pounded in your veins, and the music flowed through your body, and the lead singer’s dark eyes bored into yours as he sang directly to you about love and loss and connection, and you screamed your adoration back at him with the multitudes.
When you remembered it afterward, it seemed like—
Air puffed through Dree’s lips.
It seemed like a religious experience.
In that wooden church in Kathmandu, God or something divine had poured through Maxence. It wasn’t a trick or technique, but something innate inside him had focused the light of heaven and allowed them to experience it, together and with him.
When he looked up, radiance shone in his face.
Dree’s legs were shaking, and she lowered herself to sit on the pew without letting go of the one ahead of her.
Other people were doing the same thing.
It wasn’t that Maxence wanted to become a priest.
She saw why he had to be a priest.
Chapter Three
Mission Team
Maxence
The initial team meeting for the rural NICU micro-clinic project was held Saturday afternoon in the rectory’s living room.
Deacon Father Maxence leaned on the fireplace and rested his elbow on the mantle.
Dree sat on the far end of the couch near the windows, which seemed to be as far away from him as she could get and still be in the room.
Maxence was aware of his effect on people when he read the Scripture section or the homily at Masses or even when he channeled his soul into what he was saying. He’d been able to do it to some extent all his life, though he hadn’t understood what he was doing as a child. When you can convince your nanny that you should have candy, ice cream, or some other kid’s toy anytime you wanted it, your parents ship you off to boarding school when you’re five.
That was how he explained it to himself for years until he realized that they’d also shipped his older brother off to the same boarding school when he was the same age, and Pierre wasn’t nearly as persuasive as Max.
Not that boarding school had stopped his eloquence or even slowed him down.
Dree huddled in her chair over by the windows, looking over the front garden. Winter afternoon sunlight showered her with golden light.
After they’d shaken hands when she’d arrived, she hadn’t looked at him since.
At Mass this morning was the first time Dree had seen Maxence open his heart and his voice, except for that very quick, light moment at the charity ball at the Palace of Versailles in Paris.
And now she was sitting across the room from him, and she couldn’t even look at him.
Maxence considered her to be smart from the moment she’d sobered up. This confirmed it. Being around Maxence was flying very close to a flame.
They should discuss this before it became a problem.
But just then, Max had a roomful of people and an orientation to run.
Rather than stand at the fireplace and lecture them the whole time, Maxence suggested they go around the room and introduce themselves.
The first person to talk was a tall, white guy who was at the end of the couch nearest Max. Alfonso’s hair was dark blond, and when he looked up at Maxence, his eyes were a clear shade of green. He sat with his feet placed evenly on the floor together, his knees tight, and his back ramrod straight with his fingers laced in his lap.
Alfonso had always been uptight.
He said, carefully pronouncing the Spanish words precisely, “I am Alfonso de Borbón y Grecia. Maxence and I met at Le Rosey boarding school when we were five years old, and he’s been dragging me along on these charity missions ever since.”
Alfonso sounded like he was making a joke, but his voice was a bit flat like he wasn’t sure he could pull it off. He stole glances at Dree while he spoke like he wasn’t paying attention to his own words.
Unease swirled in Maxence. He’d never considered Alfonso to be untrustworthy before, but the way he was looking at Dree seemed predatory.
Alfonso continued, “I have a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I live in my native Spain. I have been on several trips with Maxence with Catholic Charities over the past decade. We traveled together on charity trips on holiday breaks from school, too. I am pleased to be of service again. I have two nieces, Princesa de Asturias Leonor and Infanta Sofia.”
Maxence rubbed his eyebrow and temple. Alfonso had managed to speak volumes about who he was without actually saying it, which always amused Max. Anyone who didn’t know what they were listening to would probably wonder why parents would name one of their daughters something so long and unwieldy and give the other the first name
of “Infanta,” not realizing those parts weren’t names at all.
When Max had the choice, he chose to say nothing at all about who he was.
As Dree had discovered to her chagrin, he mused.
It could have been worse.
There was more.
Alfonso continued to watch Dree out of the corner of his eye, and his hands tightened on his legs.
Yes, Dree could distract anyone who liked beautiful women, and Alfonso did. He was just grossly inept at talking to them, no matter how much Max and his other buddies tutored him in the fine arts of flirting and tried to play wingman for him.
The next guy across the room, Isaak, was another exceedingly tall man. He was leaning back in his chair, and his long legs stretched toward the middle of the room, at ease to the point of being too casual. His pale blond hair was rumpled, and his ice-blue eyes missed nothing.
Every time Dree so much as twitched, his glance found her.
Like he was hunting her.
Maxence repressed an inclination to stand between Isaak and Dree.
Isaak said in a deep voice with inflections of French and Russian, “I am another of Maxence’s boarding school classmates, but my degree is in electrical engineering. I have a concentration in medical devices. I am from Nice, France, and I am Isaak Yahontov.”
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