by Moriah Jovan
I stopped in the threshold of the beautiful bedroom, all Mitch. Dark walls, not quite navy. Silver carpet and linens. Cherry furniture, including the bold headboard on the bed he’d bought for me. Heavy silver drapes were drawn, casting the room in near pitch dark. Ah, yes, to allow him to sleep in the daytime if he needed.
And there he lay on his back, almost spread-eagled, the bedclothes kicked off and his body nude.
His big, beautiful body, muscular from years of hard labor and regular soccer matches with his son and weekends filled with Latin dancing, dusted with golden hair. The hair on his head was still wet from a shower. His beard was a darker blond touched with white, and I wondered what he’d look like if it grew out. If he turned over, I’d be able to see that strong back and tight ass, the one that still had four tiny half-moon marks on each hip. Not two nights ago, I’d dug my fingernails into him as he pounded into me, fucked me the way he’d always really wanted to, rough and dirty, but still holding something back—
—and always tempted to apologize after the fact.
He hadn’t. Yet. But eventually he’d break and push past whatever barrier he still had, and then he would apologize. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine what he could be keeping back unless...
Don’t you dare shut that door on me.
Anger.
I hadn’t seen that in a while, but the stress that was causing it was still there, bubbling underneath his happiness, the happiness he ascribed to me.
He shifted a bit, and I continued my perusal of his person. I’d seen dozens of men naked, but none that stirred me as he did, and I didn’t know why.
And because I am a selfish bitch, I locked the door, dropped my heavy bathrobe, climbed onto the bed between his spread legs, and licked the head of his cock. I knew from a week of experience it would take him a while to wake up this way, but I loved giving head to this man.
He was so appreciative of it. He treated it as the most precious of gifts.
I’d never known a man who thought of it as anything other than an entitlement.
He began to harden in my hand, my mouth, and he shifted again, sighed heavily. “Cassandra,” he whispered, but I knew he wasn’t awake yet. He whispered my name often in his sleep.
That unsettled me for some reason.
Oh, but he tasted so good, this man who said he loved me.
“Cassandra,” he whispered again, his fingers in my hair, holding me close. I looked up the solid plane of his body to see him staring back at me, his face intense, his jaw clenched. “Don’t make me come alone. Come with me.”
Ah, yes. That was important to him, after the disaster of our first attempt. He was still embarrassed about that, but more than that, he didn’t want to cheat me, wouldn’t allow me to pleasure him without expectation of reciprocity.
I shook my head, and lightly scraped his cock with my teeth to make my point. He hissed, though whether in pleasure or pain—or both—I didn’t know. I had awakened him after he’d been up for twenty-four hours serving others, and I would make it worth his while, to serve him in the only way I knew how.
I reached up and placed my hand on his chest, pressed gently down until he understood I wouldn’t obey, and relaxed back into the bed.
Mitch’s fingers wove into my hair and I sucked, licked, pumped him with my hand, remembering my birthday when I had lain in his lap and he had played with my hair. I closed my eyes as every minute of the time we had spent together—was it really only three months?—hit me in rapid sequence, each more precious than the last.
His hips came up off the bed, and he groaned as he came. One, two, three...four...jerks and he sank into the sheets.
I swallowed, something Nigel had told me never to do. And I never had.
Until Mitch.
“Cassandra, let me—”
“No,” I murmured as I tasted my lover, all sweet and salty. “Relax. Go back to sleep.”
“Come with me,” he muttered, even as his eyelids drifted shut.
I could do nothing less.
* * * * *
Everything But Yul Brynner
Mitch and I sat at dinner together that night alone in our kitchen, talking, laughing. Even though it was Trevor’s night off from the mill, he was out with Scarlett and wouldn’t be home until midnight—if he bothered to come home at all.
It was late, as Louise had dropped in earlier to get Mitch’s signature on an “emergency food order.”
“We take care of our own,” Louise had explained as she waited for Mitch to get home from work. “I go to the family’s home, find out what they need, then fill the order from the bishop’s storehouse.”
“Mitch has a storehouse?”
She laughed. “Not Mitch. Any bishop. No family in a ward will go hungry as long as the bishop or the Relief Society president knows their circumstances. The hard part is getting people to cough up the information.”
“Who is it? I can help.”
“Ah, I can’t tell you. That’s for Mitch and me and the family to know, and nobody else.”
“Mitch told me all the people in the ward boundary are his responsibility. You do this for nonmembers, too?”
“If I know about it, I’ll get it done. As for monetary needs, Mitch usually covers that himself. Not many wards are lucky enough to have a bishop of his means and generosity, and the Church will pay for things like medical bills or counseling or rent or...anything that can’t be pulled from the storehouse.”
Mortgage arrears to keep a family from foreclosure.
“Is he expected to cover these things himself because he can?”
“Heavens, no. He just does.”
It was apparently a complex situation because he’d closeted himself with Louise in the library for almost an hour, during which time I baked the bread I’d promised Trevor. It was odd to think all I had to do to earn my stepson’s approval was bake a loaf of bread now and again. If that.
Once Louise left with a sheaf of papers and a few blank checks, Mitch and I got to the spaghetti with the marinara I’d made from scratch. I was hungry for food, but hungrier for the conversation. I liked this time with him, the two of us, high-level professionals relaxing, boasting about the day’s accomplishments with someone who would understand and cheer appropriately without feeling threatened.
Mitch told me about the goofy new chemist he had hired, straight out of school, a genius who hid it behind fart jokes and harmless pranks.
“Larry Karabas sent him to me,” he said, chuckling. “We’ll have to invite him and his wife to dinner sometime.”
My appetite vanished. “Larry Karabas?” I asked carefully.
“Yeah,” he said around his bite. “Friend of mine. You know him?”
I barely kept my meal from coming back up.
“You could say that,” I muttered, looking down at my plate. Shit. How had I been so willfully naïve as to think I could be Mitch’s wife and blithely float in the same social circles Mitch did without running into the very people who could afford me?
“What, you don’t like him?”
Like him? I barely knew him out of bed.
“Question,” I said briskly, still not looking at my husband. “How many of these people do you know personally?” Whereupon I rattled off the names of about ten businessmen, politicians, celebrities, and continued to fight my nausea as he answered affirmatively to each one.
I stopped, unable to go any further, because his every “yes” came slower and his voice got more hoarse.
We sat in silence for long moments.
“I’ll go get the list,” I said quietly. “Tomorrow. I won’t let you go around doing business in the dark like that.”
“It didn’t occur to you until now?” he asked tightly.
“It didn’t occur to you?” I gasped, shocked at his tone. “Why wouldn’t you think that if you can afford me, all your friends and acquaintances and business contacts could too?”
He charged out of the chair and away from me, out of th
e kitchen, stalked down the hall to the foyer, wiping his hands down his face, then stalked back. Back and forth, back and forth, pacing. Muttering names and “that makes sense,” and “that one, too.”
“Oh, I see,” I called out. “It was all an intellectual exercise for you, or maybe a spiritual one. All theory, no reality.”
He stopped and glared at me. Pointed at me. “You should’ve thought of this.”
“You’re an adult!” I snarled, rising. “You could’ve asked. You just didn’t want to know.”
“How many?” he growled.
“Men or women?”
His nostrils flared. “Total.”
“A hundred and sixty-four. Congratulations! Now servicing number one hundred and sixty-five!”
“Cassandra—”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare make this an issue now, Hollander. I have asked you, every step of the way, if you’re okay with it, why you’re okay with it, and you gave me all these high-minded Jesus answers and I took you at your word!” I was screaming. “Why would I think you were lying?”
“I wasn’t lying!” he roared. “I— It was—”
“What, I wasn’t in your face enough? I waited for a whole forty-five minutes into our first date to tell you? Should I have walked into your conference room and said, ‘Hi. I’m Cassie St. James. In case you didn’t know, I used to fuck people for money. Let’s get started with this reorganization!’? Everybody else knew, including your best friend who hired me for the job. Why didn’t you know? Why didn’t he tell you? And are your people so incompetent they couldn’t have rebuilt a good portion of my client list on their own? My people got your sexual history!”
“You could’ve given it to me!”
“You never asked!”
“Yes, I di—” He stopped, his chest heaving, bowed his head to stare at the floor and rifle through his memory.
“You asked for test results and I sent them,” I said low, furious. “If you had also asked me for my client list, I would have given it to you.”
His head popped up to look at me as if to catch me out in a lie. “On our second date? Why?”
“So this,” I screamed, stabbing the point of my steak knife into the table, “wouldn’t happen! I trusted you not to do this. I tried to make sure you understood exactly what my being a prostitute actually meant. You. Did. Not. Want. To. Know. And I was too fucking blind to see what you were doing or I would’ve shoved it in your face at the very beginning.”
“Would you have given it to any other man who’d asked?”
“Of course not!”
“I didn’t think so. So why would I ask? Why would I assume I was special, considering you were angry enough to walk out on me?”
“Why wouldn’t you try? You didn’t get where you are by playing it safe!” I stormed toward him then brushed past him. “Screw the list. Call your lawyer. I’m calling mine. Yay us. We made it a whole ten days.”
“NO!”
I turned and walked backward. “Why not? I fucked you. You fucked me. There. I got what I wanted, you got what you wanted, and you can walk away with your conscience clear because you married me to do it. Solemnized—sanctified—fornication.” I got to the library, stepped over the threshold, slammed the d—
“Don’t you dare shut that door on me,” Mitch snarled, his big hand splayed out over the wood, keeping it from moving an inch, much less slamming. I stood there and stared at him, captivated. Anger and lust were bound up in the tension in his big body, and God help me, I wanted him to fuck me right then, but this was too important.
“You like bad girls,” I murmured. “But not too bad. Just bad enough for your comfort zone. Forgivable ones. Redeemable ones. It was okay as long as it was all rhetoric and you could hide behind Bishop Hollander, acting as my confessor—”
“I AM NOT YOUR CONFESSOR!”
“No,” I shot back. “The man standing in front of me, pissed off, yelling at me, jealous as hell— He isn’t. That guy, you, brilliant and powerful CEO of Hollander Steelworks, savior of the US steel industry— You. You are my lover. Bishop Hollander is my confessor, the easygoing guy I was dating who couldn’t be shocked, but never asked for the list because he didn’t want to know details, just that I was repentant or...something. And he thought I deserved forgiveness or absolution or whatever you people call it. Did he never understand that I AM NOT REPENTANT?!”
He opened his mouth, but I pointed at him. “Don’t you say one more fucking word until I’m done.”
He shut it.
“Let me tell you something, Hollander. You married a really bad girl. I have done things you can’t imagine, things you don’t even know exist, things I like that I will never ask you to do—and some things you can’t do because you’re not a woman. And I’ve done them with people you know.
“But you, the King of Steel— You want the same things they did. You want me to take you there and Bishop Hollander—God’s low-level project manager—hates that. You can’t decide who you are. Are you virtuous or are you depraved? Does our marriage cover everything as long it stays between us, or are some things still taboo? How far can you go and still be virtuous? Are you a god or are you a man?
“I don’t want a god in bed with me, Hollander. I don’t want God there, either. I want the King of Steel in bed next to me, in me, and I’ll be damned if I stick around to watch you turn back into Bishop Hollander when you come in the front door.”
His jaw ground. “I want that list, Cassandra.”
“You may have a divorce instead.”
“Absolutely not.”
That stopped me. He was enraged over the reality now that he had names and faces to go with this nebulous idea of “high-dollar call girl,” but wouldn’t let me go?
“You’re not going anywhere except wherever you have your black book stashed.”
“Fuck you. I don’t jump on your command.”
“I’ll sue you if you leave me.”
My mouth dropped open and my pussy contracted with lust. “Sue me?” I laughed. “What the hell for?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you doubt me?”
I stared right back at him. “And I will countersue. You want Cold War II? I’ll give it to you. Mutually assured financial destruction. The entire money sector will buy tickets and popcorn to watch you and me slug it out until we’re both broke.” I approached him then, but he stood firm when I punched my finger into his sternum. “And then,” I whispered as I pressed my body against him, pressed my mouth to his chin, “we’ll come home to our little shack and laugh at them while we make love.”
He took the bait, but still he held something back from me in the night, even as angry as he was.
He lazed in bed the next morning watching me dress in old jeans and one of his rugby shirts. God, how could I be so sore? I was no virgin. To anything.
“May I come with you?”
I’d expected that. “No. I’m not going to let you know where I keep it. Not even Nigel knows. You’re just going to have to trust me to bring you back a complete and unabridged copy.”
“I do.”
I looked at him sharply. “Who’s speaking? King or bishop?”
“Both,” he muttered.
“Who did I have sex with all night?”
His mouth tightened and he looked up at the ceiling. “King.”
“So I was right. His majesty wants to keep his mistress, but the bishop wants to redeem the bad girl.”
His jaw clenched.
“Who are you, Mitch?”
He said nothing for a second or two. Then sighed. “I’m a blue-collar union steel worker and a failed missionary.”
I looked at him then. Really looked, because I knew he was thinking far beyond our pissing match.
“Everything’s a fight for you, isn’t it?”
He snorted and gestured at me. “Go read your own history, lady.”
That made me laugh, and I lay back down in bed to snuggle up to him. “I like fighting with yo
u.”
“I...like it, too.” I knew that. “You understand. You can— You catch it and throw it back at me. Distilled.” He paused. “I’ve never had that.” I knew that too.
“And that lets you decompress.”
“Yeah.” He paused. Kissed my forehead. “Thank you,” he whispered.
“Any time. I won’t be back until tomorrow evening.”
“Okay.”
“You still don’t want to know, do you?”
He gulped. “No. But I have to. I’ll have to change how I do business with these people. I can’t do that without knowing who they are. I’m— I should’ve asked you for it up front. You were right. I didn’t want to see it.”
“Because you knew you would know these people.”
He nodded.
“And his majesty the King of Steel wanted me and he wasn’t about to let Bishop Hollander talk him out of going after what he wanted.”
“Yes.”
Before I left, I felt the need to inform him that his golf partner, whom he was to meet in an hour to discuss the home décor and jewelry line of products, was on my list.
Mitch groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “But,” I said as I sat on the bed to pull on my old running shoes. “He’s not territorial or the jealous type. He’s totally live and let live. He had three other mistresses besides me and his wife, and all five of us are different races and sizes. His problem is he’s insatiable and needs lots of variety. His wife is very understanding, but of course, he wore her out, so ‘grateful’ would be a better word.”
“Good to know,” Mitch mumbled.
“You’d be surprised how many men are like that.”
“You’d be surprised that I do know how many men are like that.”
“Ah.”
“And women. Thirteen years. I’ve heard it all.” I looked at him speculatively, and he held up a hand. “I’m not your confessor. I don’t want to be. If you tell me, it has to be because you trust me or you’re teaching me or both.”
“You keep Bishop Hollander out of this bed completely, then. Preferably out of the house.”
He sighed. “I’ll try.”