His eyebrows rose, shock striking him before his face settled into that same well-orchestrated calm he reserved for his parishioners. “You can bet I’m a prisoner, but not for the reasons you think.”
His admission caught me off guard, but not more than the next moment did.
His palms captured my face, thumbs trailing down the warmth of my throat before he smashed our lips together.
His kiss defiled as much as it gave life.
He desecrated me to the depths of my soul without ever removing a strip of my clothing.
“But that’s where my beliefs diverge from the church.” His lips teased at the corners of my mouth before his tongue darted out, tasting the bow of my top lip.
Oh sweet fucking heaven.
“I happen to believe it isn’t living if you’re not breaking a rule every now and again.”
He caught the soft whimper on my lips with his, swallowing it instantly before his tongue pushed past the barrier and he was sheathed in me again.
His taste, far deadlier than I’d remembered.
His cock, sliding against the outside of my clothes, quickening my pulse and soaking my panties with forbidden arousal.
“Despite what my church may believe…” Bastien’s thumbs hooked in my shirt, the warm pads of his fingertips sliding against my skin and cutting through my nerves like hot butter. “I can’t renounce you.”
His palm slid up my naked torso, divesting me of my shirt, while one hand cupped a shiny chalice, drops of wine already making their way between my breasts. Staining the satin bra I wore, pooling in my navel, soaking a rebel river of red along the elastic of my panties in unholy consecration.
“I know the taste of sin, sweet Tressa. I’ve tasted it every night in my dreams. Craving you is a new and deadlier form of hell than the last I’d overcome.” He dropped to his knees, the empty cup slipping to the floor and soaking his white robes in scarlet before his tongue met my flesh in slow swipes, eyes glinting to mine as he held me flush to his mouth.
Soft mewls formed on my lips as my body fell apart in his arms, limbs loose as he worked his way up my body, tongue tasting every inch of the blessed wine from my skin as he went.
“I am very surely a prisoner to you, my dove.”
Finally, his hands reached the cups of my bra, fingers splaying over the round flesh as he breathed against my ribs. “I’m caged to the dream of anointing you from head to toe. My desire to christen the throne you deserve to sit on.” His fingers hooked into the fabric of my bra and pulled, revealing my breasts to him. His irises warming with fire, he shot his tongue out and tangled with my nipple while the fingers of his other hand worked against my breast, kneading gently at first, before the pressure grew harder, more desperate.
“The thought of being good enough for you, to own the very heart of your soul, that’s what keeps me up at night.” His hands worked both of my breasts now, tongue darting out to pay the other attention before he stood to my height, hands cupping my neck and forcing me to look nowhere but him. “You’re not my dark night of the soul, Tressa, you’re my light at the end of the tunnel. When I talk of rebels, I talk of people like you and me. Soul mates, both of us driven to leave the world brighter than we found it. That’s the thing I love the very most about you, always willing to do all the wrong things for all the right reasons. I love your rebel heart.”
I swallowed, emotion ravaging the remaining nerves of my throat before wild tears burst the levees of my eyelids. “If I’m a rebel heart, wouldn’t that make you a rebel saint? My holy man, saving the world one soul at a time.”
His chuckle sent sparks down my spine.
“S’pose it would.” His grin quirked, eyes twinkling. “But rebel hearts change history.”
EIGHTEEN
Tressa
“Scripture points to the moment Adam took the apple from Eve as the exact sliver in time that humankind took its first bite of consciousness. In that moment, men and women became shrouded in selfish ego. Feelings like shame and guilt and lust and greed flooded the brain for the first time in history. So nothing about this—” the tip of his index finger traced the brown edge of my nipple as he rhymed his own brand of scripture “—is inherently sinful.”
He ducked his head, sucking a peak into his mouth, eliciting moans of rapture.
“We are love. And loving shouldn’t be done with shame or guilt. We are God’s expression of physical love on earth. Two souls uniting.”
His words struck all the lonely chords of my heart.
I hated him for that.
The selfish side of me wondered if he knew I yearned to hear his words like an addict searching for the next high.
“You’ve pledged your love to God.”
He flicked his eyes up before he turned back to loop a golden rope between his hands, gaze fading back to my peaked nipples. Soft, emotion-filled eyes observed me, his actions slow as he began to wrap the braided rope around my wrists, winding the shiny fibers up my forearms before leaving the loose ends hanging.
He drifted his eyes up and down my body once before searing my gaze, then ducking to loop my tied arms over his head.
“Looks like I’m pledged to you for at least the next time being.”
“Someone could open those doors at any moment, Bastien. This isn’t funny.” Trembles of fear soaked my desire cold. “Undo the ropes.”
Bastien cinched them tighter, drawing one fingertip down the line of my arm and sending shivers over my skin.
“Didn’t they teach you in seminary that bad company corrupts good morals?”
Bastien’s smile twisted up, both his hands working softly at the flesh just under the waistband of my pants.
“And you, just as the bee, having gathered heaven’s dew and earth’s sweetest juices from amid the flowers—”
I slammed my eyes closed, ears locked to his well-worded weapons. “A lying mouth deals death to the soul, and that sounds like lies of the first order.”
Damn biology, tangling with my logical thought, his assault on me becoming too much. The emotion, the pressure, the pain and pleasure.
With ragged desperation and tears itching my eyes, I recited, “Fly from bad companions as from the bite of a poisonous snake, or you will be in danger of losing your soul.”
“Tressa.” Bastien’s voice broadened, his hands sinking into the flesh of my waist, hovering just out of reach of the elastic of my waistband.
I gulped, dampening all of that pent-up desire for him before I breathed the words that’d been floating just out of reach for days now.
“I’m leaving.” I paused. “Soon.” I pressed my lips together, looking anywhere but at his face. “Consider this my notice or whatever.”
The words cut my throat like they carried miniature knives.
My heartbeats stretched long and slow, all four chambers echoing thunderously in the tiny shell of a holy room.
It was laughable.
All of it.
We were laughable.
A thousand angry secrets sped up in my throat. I wanted to scream and cry and run my way out of this moment. But instead, the bastard had me here, facing my worst fear, my fucking self.
“I just think it’s time for me to move on—” The words were weak even to my own ears.
“The hell it is.” Bastien made quick work of the knot at the back of his robe and had it pooled on the floor in an instant. His hands checked the bindings at my wrists, ensuring they were tight, while his eyes traveled up my torso, gaze sizzling up every soft inch, before his thumbs hooked at my waistband and pushed.
His jaw clenched, eyes equal parts ravaged and desperate, the press of his hands into my flesh left all the marks his words couldn’t.
Eyes holding mine, he slid his fingers inside the elastic of my panties, pushing them down my thighs before our lips came together in a fevered rush. A kiss that stole all of my breath and my soul along with it.
That kiss wasn’t the light at the end of the tunnel; it was
the bomb in the darkness, lighting up the dark depths of our souls just enough for us to catch a glimpse before the lights burned out again.
A simple kiss, the beginning of the end.
Bastien wrapped his hands around my waist, pulling my ass to land on the wooden-topped chest as his other deft hand stripped me of my underwear. With one large palm pressed at the base of my back, he snuck under the cage of my arms again before catching my lips with his just as his cock nudged at the edge of my entrance.
His hips moved in a slow rhythm, a torturous tango my head grew dizzy trying to anticipate, my body succumbing to the drugging force of his lips pressed against mine, tongue working in tandem to sever every lock I held tight, burn every wall I’d kept purposely high.
With the blood of Christ on his lips, Bastien entered me fully, filling me so tightly his invasion burned and itched. The burn of a man inside me for the first time too much to bear. My teeth sank into the flesh at his neck, tight ropes of muscle strung with sinew tighter than the ones that bound my wrists.
Finally, sweet agony filled my muscles, relaxing around him until the stretch of his girth felt less like an invasion and more a pleasurable assault.
His hands covering my body, paying attention to all the places he’d been promising to, his fingertips and lips owning every piece, I gave him my last moments of innocence.
Encircling me in both his arms, he held me against him in a hug that caged, coaxing out all my love for him against my will. A love the sheer size of which I still couldn’t fathom.
Bastien slipped a hand around his neck, working the red ropes from my wrists and letting them fall to the floor in a heap. I dug my nails into his skin instantly, muscled shoulder blades flexing beneath my palms as I clung to him, begging for more.
With every inhale, we sealed both of our coffins.
NINETEEN
Tressa
I woke the next morning, soft strains of salsa music piping up the stairwell.
I stretched, the scent of man greeting my nose.
Bastien.
The last twelve hours throbbed between my legs. I pushed out of bed, eyes finding my pile of clothing rumpled on the floor next to the tiny twin bed. A woolen blanket discarded at the foot. Tears pushed out of my eyelids and down my cheeks.
Salsa music played on.
I slid my fingers into my hair, every ounce of me hating every bit of myself in that moment. In a countless array of bad decisions, this one took the cake.
Fucking the priest now, eh, Tressa? Way to make ’em proud.
I bent over, gathering my socks into a fist when the padding of footsteps on the stairs landed in my ears.
“Morning.” Bastien walked into the room, naked as the day he was born into this world, every one of my twenty-four years feeling painfully inadequate.
I pushed my socks across my face to erase the tears before I stood, tucking the sheet around my torso a little tighter. “Hi.”
Bastien registered my awkward arrangement before his hips swayed toward me, the thick curve of his dick half hard and growing as he drew closer. My mouth watered, the desire to give up a real life and be his sex slave strong.
“Me enamoré de ti,” he mouthed the words of the song playing from the kitchen downstairs.
My stomach churned.
His eyes hung suspended, glinting with the afterglow of last night’s pleasure.
“Dance with me,” he ordered in Spanish, the memory of my grandmother’s own richly accented words making my heart swell impossibly bigger and slightly more ravaged at the thought of leaving the man who made me feel this way.
He pulled me closer, fingers on one hand lacing with mine as the other settled at my back. He tugged at the sheet separating us, the cool fabric falling to our feet as he whispered along to the lyrics, his honeyed baritone curling around his mother tongue and cementing the sentiments in my soul.
He knew I had at least a mediocre understanding. But somehow, when he sang it in another language, it felt less real and yet more real as if, in our little bubble, we spoke in our own love language, a dialect only he and I had the dictionary for.
“And I fell in love with you,” he breathed the lyrics gently, fingertips whispering across my skin as we danced in the dim room, polished wood infused with the holy scent of incense.
I clutched at his bare shoulders, the muscles taut and unforgiving under all that creamy copper skin. It would break my heart to end this, but end it, I would. Before something out of our control could.
“You’re my first dance, sweet dove.”
I peered up into his puppy-dog eyes, shame filling my heart that I’d soon be breaking his. “Your first dance ever?”
Tomorrow.
I would go home, collect myself, have one good night’s rest, then gather all of my things and march over here in the morning.
There would be no next Mass for me.
The deeper we both sank into this cesspool of a love, the better the chance we’d drown in it.
A double love suicide.
“First dance ever,” he confirmed, patting my backside once as the song ended, something faster taking over the airways. Bastien spun me into and out of his arms once, eliciting a giggle from my otherwise sad lips. I was plotting to leave him while he wooed me every step of the way. I was his villain. Born to break his heart, shred his soul, and teach him every life lesson he never knew he needed to learn.
I was that girl.
Heartbreak girl.
The armor around my heart grew a little thicker; already it’d been blinded and bound with bad defense mechanisms after Dr. Grady’s office.
Dr. Grady.
I hated that his memory kept attaching itself to these moments. Tainting the time Bastien and I had. We were holy, for lack of a better comparison, and what I had with the professor was muddied with innuendo and blind groping behind locked doors.
I couldn’t stand the pain of staying any longer, and Bastien would, without a doubt, suffer the longer I stayed in his life. His comment about first dances only solidified my resolve to end the pain for both of us.
“I…” The words choked my throat. “My mom sent me to college with a sleeping bag and a birth control implant in my arm.” I rubbed the small scar from its insertion out of habit. “Her way of not repeating bad cycles, I guess.” I caught his eyes. “I just thought you should know you don’t have to worry about me getting…” The word was lodged, an immovable feast in my throat.
Pregnant.
Shame twisted my intestines painfully.
“Tressssa.” He hissed my name like a quiet mantra, hands cupping my face and whispering words to me in Spanish. “I never thought…” He trailed off, dark irises rich with emotion. “I need you to know you deserved more than that.” He pressed his forehead to mine so intimately, I had half a mind to run. “And that nothing could happen, not a single thing, that could cause me to regret what we found right here. Together.”
His lips grazed mine, his words, thick with pity, surged like fire through my heart.
“Lately I’ve been thinking I wish life had a rewind button.” His fingers interlocked with mine, bringing each of my hands to his lips and dotting my knuckles with chaste kisses.
Breaking my heart with every one.
“I’ve got to meet with the veterans club this morning, but I should be back by lunch. I’ll bring you and Luce something? Maybe the nursery kids too. How many kids do we usually have today?”
I clenched my jaw fiercely, unwilling to let him see my emotions. With a shake of my head and a fake smile, I managed to dismiss him, hiding my face behind my hair as I bent to pick up last night’s clothes.
Always the other woman. Why did I have a habit of getting involved with men who didn’t belong to me?
“I’ve got a bit before I have to leave. What do you say about a shower?” Bastien encircled me with his arms, pulling the clothing from my hands and locking me to him with his lips.
I almost ran out right then.
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But instead, I stayed.
I let his lips linger on mine a few minutes longer.
I let his fingers slide between my thighs and work me to another orgasm.
And then I let him carry me into the shower where he fucked me with his mouth against the tile wall, my hands clutching his shoulder blades, begging for mercy with every breath.
And if I’d left a second sooner, maybe I could have stopped what came next.
Or maybe I would have made it worse.
The police reassured me we could never know.
But still, when a bomb goes off that causes the entire world to shift, it leaves a lot of people wondering.
Bastien’s cock was slipping from my body, our skin hot with sexual release, when the tiles of the shower trembled behind my back.
The torrent of emotions he’d coaxed out of me these last months rained down on me in a downpour of tremors mixed with sobbing tears.
Walking away from the beauty he brought to my life felt like cutting off the very nose to spite my face. Could I really willingly excise the happiness from my life like a bad cancer, knowing I was my very best with him?
“Tressa,” he breathed against my neck, peppering kisses across the hollows of my throat. “Talk to me.”
“I can’t live without you, and that scares me,” I blurted before thinking. A habit that happened all too often in this man’s presence.
His eyebrows rose, sympathy soaking his irises. “You’ve got such a huge heart, sweet dove.” The pad of his thumb followed the tip of my chin, lifting it softly to catch his gaze. “I would wake every morning in your bed if I could. Whisper a thousand ‘I love yous’ over a hundred lifetimes, and still, loving you would never get old.”
His words acted like barbed wire, clawing their way into the fragmented cracks of my heart. How could he be so very perfect and so very imperfect at the same time? My savior and my tormentor.
“But, Tressa…” His eyes turned up to the fine cracks of the old plaster ceiling. “I’ve spent most of my life on my knees asking God for his guidance to make sense of the senseless. Faith is what’s sustained me, Tressa.” Watery irises found mine again. “Turning away from that now, that would be counterintuitive to every fiber of my being.”
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