Magdalene by Moriah Jovan Page B

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 entrees 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