“It’s not. Andrea is a male name.”
“Well, I assure you I’m not a male.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“I should say you are. Speaking of which, why are you wearing a Roman Catholic priest’s shirt and people are calling you father? Are you impersonating a priest? That has to be a crime or something. This is weird.”
He flipped his hand in the air toward the door. “As Sister Mariam said, I’ve been ordained as a deacon, not a priest, so I am called Deacon Father Maxence. I have a vocation to be a priest but have not been ordained as one yet.”
After being a nurse in an inner-city hospital for years, Dree had a finely tuned bullshit detector. “Deacons are supposed to be either married or celibate.”
He shrugged. “Not yet.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you are waiting for God to grant you the ability to keep your pants on? It doesn’t work like that.”
He bit his lip, his white, even teeth pressing his full lower lip in a way that Dree had done just two days before.
And wanted to do again.
No. He was a priest.
Or close enough.
And she was detecting some mighty large bullshit.
She said, “Don’t you have to go to confession and enumerate your sins and say penance like the rest of us do, or do deacons get a free pass?”
“Deacons do not get a free pass. I’ve had to do the rite of reconciliation twice for our time together in Paris.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you did.” Something rather stupid in her felt pride at that. “You should’ve told me you were a deacon and supposed to be celibate.”
One side of Maxence’s mouth rose, and the depths of his dark eyes sparkled with mischief. “I’m rather glad I didn’t.” He sighed. “And now I’d better go to confession for that, too.”
Dree snorted at him. “Having some impure thoughts?”
“You have no idea how impure my thoughts are right now.”
“You’ve got to stop doing that, Augustine. Speaking of which, what is your real name? Is it that Maxence thing or something else?”
“I was baptized Maxence Charles Honoré Grimaldi. Because I have been ordained as a deacon, you can call me Deacon Father Maxence or Father Maxence.”
Her tone sharpened. “‘Yeah, it’d be too suspicious if I called you daddy.”
He winced like she’d slapped him, as he damn well should.
She hadn’t meant to be quite so sarcastic, but dang, this was not some minor thing he’d forgotten to mention. She didn’t like that he’d put her in the position of helping him break his vows, either.
She said, “Auggie, you don’t even look like a Maxence. A guy named ‘Maxence’ should be effete, skinny, and blond.” Not shredded with muscle and with thick, dark, curling hair and a face like a movie star. “And I don’t know how I’m ever going to get used to calling you that.”
He glanced at his reflection in the ornate mirror above the fireplace mantle, and so two gorgeous men were looking at each other. “I don’t think I look like an ‘Auggie.’”
Dree said, “So, that whole story about you being a prince was to cover up the fact that you’re a priest, or you’re going to be one, or you want to be one. Bravo, Father Deacon Maxence, bravo.” She slow-clapped, and for some stupid reason, her heart felt like it was cleaving over and over into a million slices and fluttering as it fell around her.
“It doesn’t matter what we call ourselves, and it doesn’t matter how we got here. The most important thing now is to figure out what we’re going to do about it.”
“I think that’s obvious. I’m a nurse practitioner, and I’m going on a Catholic charity mission to help save the lives of newborn preemie babies by building tiny little NICU clinics all over the Nepali countryside. I don’t know what you’re going to do.”
He frowned and shook his head. “I’ve done many of these charity missions all over the world for eight years, from Rwanda and The Congo to Argentina and Nicaragua to West Virginia and the Appalachians. The problem is that we usually slate all-male groups of volunteers for these missions, and I had planned for this group to be the same.”
“So, you’re saying, what? You don’t think there’s going to be any women’s bathrooms where you’re going?”
“There aren’t going to be any bathrooms where we’re going. We were planning to stay in rectories with other priests when we can, but there is camping gear that has been rented, and we will be roughing it in the extreme out in Jumla province. A woman would not be comfortable in those conditions.”
“Augustine, I mean Maxence, you are a city boy who lives in gussied-up Europe. I am a country girl who was born and raised on a sheep ranch in southern New Mexico. I can guarantee that any ‘roughing it’ that you think you have done is what my people would call an ordinary weekend. Do not tell me that I don’t know how to rough it.”
He frowned at her. “I’ve been on charity missions in some of the most destitute parts of the world, where I lived with families while I built their wells or schools or whatever else it was that they needed. Nobody was slaughtering the fatted calf for me on those trips.”
Dree crossed her arms across her chest and looked away from him. “Still, I am a hardened country girl, and I can tell you are nothing but a greenhorn, city-boy dude.” When she used the word dude, it did not have the friendly connotations that surfers have when they say it. “You would get bucked off of a broken-down, hoof-draggin’ nag in five seconds flat.”
He said, “I can ride a horse.”
“Maybe one of those docile, Saddlebred geldings they keep at dude ranches.”
“This is unproductive. We need to contact Father Thomas Aquinas and tell him to send a different medical professional for this trip.”
“I am not quitting. I cannot go back to Phoenix. If one of us can’t go, you quit.”
“I will not back out of this mission. You should quit.”
“I’m not going to quit. You quit!”
Maxence clenched his fists and looked away from her. “I must go on this mission. Besides the fact that I have a great deal of experience in leading complicated projects such as this one, these kinds of missions are why I am a deacon and want to be a priest.”
Dree gasped and pointed at him. “You do want to be a priest!”
“Yes! I would’ve taken Holy Orders years ago if they’d let me. I have chosen this life because I want to do good work in the world, because I’m recognized for this because I do good work, and I thrive here. When I am out on one of these missions, a sense of purpose fills me like no other time in my life. This is what I was meant to do.”
She pointed in the general direction of France. “Then, in Paris, why did you—”
“I don’t know!”
Dree sucked in a deep breath like when an ER noob resident got hot under the collar at nurses who had far more experience than they did. “Okay. We just need to figure this out. So, okay. So, this work means a lot to you, but I need to go on this mission.”
“If it’s just that it’s not safe for you in Phoenix, I can send you back to Paris. I will pay for you to stay at the Four Seasons or a rented house in the French countryside or whatever you want for two months, the same amount of time that you would have spent on this mission. I’ll put money in an account for you to spend. You’ll be safe there. You just can’t be here.”