by Moriah Jovan
After the final curtain call, Mitch sat silent, staring at the stage, oblivious to the people around us streaming out of the theater, and I wondered if he had some rare medical condition that had caused him to go catatonic.
“Mitch?”
He started. “Oh. Um, sorry. I was...”
“Somewhere else.”
“Yes.”
“Mind telling me where?”
He pursed his lips. “Long time ago,” he murmured. “A girl I knew once. She would’ve loved this.”
“Not your wife?”
He shook his head. “No. Mina was a soccer player.”
“Soccer? I thought she had early-onset multiple sclerosis? How’d she manage that?”
“High school. She was the star forward, but her coach would yank her out about halfway through the game—sometimes he’d let her go a little longer—because she didn’t have the stamina to finish the game, and she’d be in pain. She racked up the points before she got benched. I don’t have a clue how she endured practice.”
“Then why’d she do it?”
He paused. Looked somewhere over my shoulder. “Her father made her. He pushed her too hard, wouldn’t hear her when she complained, wouldn’t get her seen. Always raising the bar, expecting her to conform in things that he thought were appropriate for girls, discouraging things he thought weren’t.”
“Like?”
“Well, the soccer. That was the hip sport for teenage girls at the time, and he expected her to be the best. But then there was math. Calculus. Chemistry. He finally just forbid her any math classes at all. Said she didn’t need it because she was going to marry a man who could support her. Her job was to be a good wife and mother, stay in shape and be pretty. Soccer was the staying-in-shape part.”
I swallowed. No matter what had possessed my father marry me off to Gordon in spite of his eleventh-hour doubts, I never doubted his love, and my mother was never without a smile or a word of support. I couldn’t imagine little Mina Monroe’s life.
But...well, yes, I could. Gordon had had that life with his father. Then Rivington had tried to cast me in that mold as well and failed miserably.
The theater was empty, but here we sat, Mitch churning through whatever unpleasantness with which he’d arrived on my doorstep. I wanted him to meet Paige, but I know when a man needs a sympathetic ear and has no one else, so I stayed still and silent.
“He called me today,” he said abruptly. “My father-in-law, I mean. He’s only spoken to me once in my life. Twenty-five years ago. To warn me off Mina.”
My spine tingled.
“Demanded I meet him in Philly—why, I don’t know. Told him to make an appointment with my clerk, make him come to me as a bishop.”
“Well, so you won that little pissing match.”
“Yeah, you know... Problem is winning all the battles and losing the war.”
“War?” This was far too cryptic, but I wondered— “Does this have anything to do with Greg Sitkaris and the...delicate politics?”
He slid me a look. “You’ve been checking into him, I take it?” I smiled, and he chuckled suddenly. “What’ve you found out?”
“So far nothing important or interesting. He’s just your run-of-the-mill penny-ante sleazeball.” I paused. “And works for your father-in-law. Right-hand man?”
Mitch gave me a small salute. “Greg was the man Shane had arranged for Mina to marry.”
Oh, my God. I couldn’t imagine what a man like that would’ve done to such a fragile girl.
We stayed in our seats in the still of an almost-empty theater.
“I,” Mitch said abruptly after a moment, “would like to meet your daughter, if I might?”
Topic closed, but that was all right with me. The parallels, both literal and metaphorical, between Mina’s life and mine were getting a little too close for comfort.
We went backstage and I found Paige in her dressing gown, cavorting with her boyfriend, a veritable Adonis with gleaming mahogany skin, in the midst of dancers streaming in and out and around.
“He’s here?” she squealed when she saw me, hopping off André’s lap and blowing through the dressing room, out the door. I stopped for a small chat with André, whom I really quite liked, as he treated Paige well and seemed to be inclined toward building a life and family with her—if she ever caught on or he worked up the nerve to tell her.
I entered the hallway some minutes later to find her in Mitch’s arms, her cheek on his shoulder, tears streaming down her face and soaking into his suit coat. He cast me a helpless smile over her head.
Something warm trickled down my cheek and I wondered if I had any Benadryl.
•
“What’d you say to her?” I asked Mitch the next day as we awaited Sheldon’s arrival. “First she was bawling and this morning she was practically giddy. Wouldn’t tolerate Clarissa’s opinions on the subject of Mom’s new friend.”
He shrugged as if he dealt with weepy young women on a regular basis. “I told her I appreciated her artistry and skill. Then I asked for her autograph and that’s when she started to cry.”
My throat constricted. “My kids might be spoiled brats, but they— Excellence is the expectation. Praise is...hard to come by. Add to that a big sister who’s a doctor and...”
“I understand,” he said quietly, and I knew that he did. “So what do you all do in the winter around here?” he asked with a robustness that sounded forced.
“Hang out at each other’s apartments, drink a lot of wine, and fuck. I’m game if you are.”
He laughed as Sheldon pulled up smoothly in front of us, and I felt I had done my part to lighten what was left of an emotionally draining weekend.
“You and I,” I said once he’d handed me into the back of my car, “are going bowling.”
He looked at me strangely.
“A client taught me.” I waved a hand. “Good ol’ boy from Texas, widower. Self-made gazillionaire who missed his wife and wanted someone to talk to and play with. I was willing to trade a perfect manicure and some time in a seedy bowling alley drinking cheap beer for installing Rivington in front of a Slurpee machine in a border town.”
Mitch began to laugh, as I knew he would. “Herod?”
“The same. In this case, Salome learned how to bowl and do it well because Herod wouldn’t tolerate anything less than perfection.”
“Outstanding,” he said.
And he was, but not outstanding enough to beat me—though he tried.
“Thank you for a wonderful weekend, Cassandra,” he whispered in my ear that night once he’d wrapped me in his arms. “May I see you Friday?”
I closed my eyes and sighed, unable to remember a time I didn’t know this man, unable to imagine what it would be like not to see him.
“Yes.”
Please.
* * * * *
Yentl
January 13, 2011
“Good morning, Cassandra.”
I smiled at the deep voice on the other end of the line. “Good morning to you, too,” I replied, my voice rusty from several hours of disuse. “What’s the occasion?”
“Just thought I’d give you a Thursday-morning wake-up call. To be a mosquito.”
“I’ll play mosquito with you. Want to know what I’m wearing?”
Long pause. “No.”
That made me laugh until I choked.
“Are you almost finished?” he asked wryly when I’d begun to wind down.
“Had to think about that, didn’t you?”
“Er, yeah. So what’s on your agenda today?”
Snickering, I said, “Oh, you know, take down a CEO or two, install a dictator in a banana republic, assassinate some other tyrant somewhere else.”
“All before lunch.”
“Then I have to consult with the President.” Mitch chuckled and I closed my eyes. “So what are you doing today?”
“I have a meeting with one of Eilis’s competitors. He wants a price break for quantity.” That
made me chuckle. “Really,” he said dryly. “Eilis doesn’t get one, so this guy sure as heck won’t.”
“And you’re making him come to you for a refusal just to amuse yourself.”
“Exactly. Cassandra,” he said low, that husky bass sending my libido into overdrive. “You have a good day.”
“You too,” I whispered, suddenly shy and unbearably aroused at once.
I hung up and lay stroking myself, imagining what it must be like to writhe with Mitch Hollander in bed, nude, skin to skin. Under him, on top of him.
I knew his suits weren’t padded, his chest and arms muscular. His trousers lay exquisitely over his ass, but unfortunately, I had never been able to get a good idea of that part of his anatomy my body really wanted.
Craved.
I came thinking of Mitch. I’d really had no need for that since I took my red light down, but since the night he’d seduced me with a softly whispered “good night” in my ear, then sent me roses, I couldn’t stop.
Mitch confounded me on too many levels to sort out. Spiritual and celibate. Quietly ruthless and ornery.
God made mosquitoes.
Just thinking about him made me smile, no matter what occupied me at the moment. It had struck me earlier in the week during a business meeting; in the middle of a negotiation, one of the players said something that reminded me of Mitch and I had smiled to myself.
That smile had sealed that deal.
I showered and dressed, went down to get in my car. No one had ever made me feel so special, in bed or out. With anyone else, I would have been cynical, but Mitch had no ulterior sexual motives. He’d fight me every step of the way to his inevitable seduction, so his offerings of flowers, inexpensive gifts, interesting dates, came without expectation of anything, much less sex, which made them poignant and...innocent.
Knowingly so.
Frustratingly, excruciatingly, wonderfully so.
Jack, irritated that I now had a distraction of the personal type, wanted to know who sent the flowers, who made me smile over nothing, but I wouldn’t tell him.
I didn’t care if he blew his top.
I just wanted to keep it all to myself, this sweet little thing we had.
“What do we have?”
“What’s that, Ms. St. James?”
Sheldon glanced from the road to the mirror and back again.
“Nothing, Sheldon, thanks. Just talking to myself.”
What we had was a seduction, a slower one than I was used to, granted, but I knew what I wanted from Mitch: a night or a week or a month in the sack. That would cure me. He was a novelty, intriguing because I couldn’t have him the only real way I wanted him.
Yet.
I knew his game. He did it with industry leaders across the spectrum, coy, subtle, leaving them wanting, then dropping them when it amused him while they never got what they wanted at all but came crawling back to beg, unaware they’d been played.
So why was I playing it? Why had I succumbed to his spell like everyone else?
He’d never been bested, and I was probably one of the only people in the country who could do it because I had clear and significant advantage no one else had.
The question was why he played such games.
I didn’t know, but I intended to find out.
I walked into my silent office, which would be abuzz in about an hour, and flipped on the light to see the barely-hanging-on orange roses (I still didn’t know what the fuck was up with the orange) and the pathetic little basket on the ledge in front of my window. The white bouquet in the cobalt vase still graced my desk in a prominent place.
A tulip was soft as velvet under my fingertips.
“Who is he? Or she?”
I looked to the door to see Jack leaning against the jamb, his arms folded over his chest. He couldn’t decide whether to be irritated or amused at me. I knew how it must look to him: A forty-six-year-old woman smiling over flowers.
“That’s my business.”
“Is it business?”
I studied him, knowing which answer would appease him, but it really didn’t matter. “No.”
“I’d rather it be.”
Of course he would. No attachments.
“Is this going somewhere? Seriously, Cassie. I need to know if you’re gonna hang around for a while.”
“Jack,” I drawled, “there is no reason I can’t do this job from wherever I am. I’m not here half the time anyway.”
“I want my officers here,” he said. “That’s part of the deal.”
“Fire me,” I snapped, planting my fist on my hip. “If I’m not allowed to have a life at all, or if you’re going to wait up for me to sneak in past my curfew, then I’ll just clear out my office right now and go across the Street to set up shop with Nigel. I’m not one of Jack Blackwood’s twenty-two-year-old Baby Swinging Dicks.”
And that would be the end of that. I set my own terms at Blackwood Securities because there was no one else quite like me, and as Sebastian Taight’s acknowledged successor with a history of success, I lent Jack inestimable cachet.
He said nothing as he turned and walked out of my office, leaving me alone with my chaotic thoughts.
Was it going somewhere? Really?
Or did I just think I could get it where I wanted it to go?
Shit, he hadn’t even kissed me yet.
Something had to happen that would jar Mitch enough to push this relationship somewhere other than this...sexual stalemate. I knew what it was: I simply hadn’t tried hard enough to seduce him.
I was enjoying the novelty of the foreplay too much.
Tomorrow night.
Thus far, I had been rather circumspect in my dress with him, to respect his beliefs, his unwillingness to be caught out in sin. Tomorrow, no.
Something had to give.
* * * * *
Let Us Make Man in Our Image
Mitch was perched on a high stool, bent over a microscope, measuring the tensile strength of his alloy after the last tweak of his formula. His lab assistant entered the measurements into the computer as Mitch called them out, but he already knew what the computer would spit back out at him.
He began to smile.
Perfect.
Or about as perfect as a man-made alloy could get.
Lighter than aluminum and stronger than the strongest titanium alloy. At least, this variation of it.
“What are you gonna call it?”
Cassandra.
“Perfection,” Mitch muttered at his head chemist, who had sidled up to check Mitch’s data. “I don’t know yet.”
“Kinda makes you feel like God, doesn’t it?”
“Yup.” And it had from the first moment he’d stepped into a lab.
And in the lab, he was just another scientist pursuing a nebulous dream of perfection: one metal, all applications.
It couldn’t happen, of course, so they simply worked at strengthening existing alloys for existing and future applications.
Except this one, a formula Mitch had been working on since grad school. Being head of a company had gotten in his way.
“Oh, before I forget. Darlene’s looking for you.”
There went his day playing scientist at a word from his executive assistant, who pretty much ran his work life. He sighed.
“Hey, that’s what you get for being a hotshot CEO. It’s your own damn fault.”
Mitch chuckled, landed a light punch on his chemist’s arm, left the lab, and headed up the elevator—
—only to stop short in the reception area of his office suite when he saw who awaited him.
“Dave.”
David Petersen, the stake president, impeccably attired in a brown suit, turned with a smile that seemed to Mitch to be a bit...strained.
“Hey, Mitch.”
“I...thought we got all our business taken care of at last night’s meeting.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah,” he said. “Just wanted to chat a bit.”
“Dave,�
�� Mitch said bluntly. “It’s Thursday. I’m at work.” He gestured to his jeans and tee shirt. “You pulled me out of my lab for a chat? That’s what email is for.”
“Mitch.”
Out of respect, he said nothing more and swept open his office door in invitation. “Anything to drink?”
“No thanks.”
Mitch gestured for Dave to have a seat in one of the club chairs in the sitting area away from Mitch’s desk, while he went to his wet bar, fully stocked with nothing alcoholic and pulled out a Coke from the mini fridge. He headed across the room and dropped onto the sofa, then propped his feet up on the coffee table.
“What’s up?”
Dave scratched his jaw and said, “Mitch, you know I don’t like to meddle in the way my bishops run their wards. I mean—” He gestured around Mitch’s massive office, expensively and tastefully decorated and furnished. “I figure you know what you’re doing.”
“Yup.” He took a drink and waited.
“But I gotta ask you: Why in the world did you release Greg from the Young Men’s presidency? He did a great job.”
Of course, Mitch had prepared for the question and gave the standard answer: “Inspiration, Dave. I prayed about it and there you go.”
President Petersen’s mouth tightened as if he didn’t believe the answer. It wasn’t a lie, but the entire truth wouldn’t go over well.
And there wasn’t much Petersen could say to counter that. “Well, um... Do you have any idea why?”
Oh, boy. Mitch still hadn’t figured out how to worm his way out of that question and had hoped it wouldn’t be asked at all. “I got the impression Greg needed a break and somebody else needed the challenge of the position.” That, too, was true.
Petersen thought on that a minute, then took a deep breath. “Is there some bad blood between you and Greg? It feels like a vendetta on your part, but for what I don’t know, and I’ve never known you to be vindictive.”
Mitch played dumb. “That’s weird, since I did call him to that position in the first place and he’s been there four years. That’s a long time. Why is this even an issue?”
Dave pursed his lips, and nodded slowly as the sense of it sank in. “Yeah, you know, you’re right.” Mitch almost breathed a sigh of relief. “I think Greg’s just feeling a bit useless right now. Unsettled. Have you thought of something else he could do?”