Father Bastien played a starring role in my dreams last night, like every night, his dark gaze and cocky grin sending spirals of lust unfurling like a snake through my insides. Keeping him off my mind had become a near impossibility, my only choice to power through planning church activities for fear of losing my mind to lust.
My eyes fluttered closed, the ancient quiet of the church walls around me, hundreds of years of faded incense ghosting at my nose, my mind on the only thing that’d come to matter over the last few months.
The man who lit me on fire.
The man who would never be mine.
Two heavy palms spanned my thighs, squeezing softly before pressing my legs apart, allowing him entry into my space.
I sucked in a quick breath, heart firing into a gallop when a thumb covered my lips.
I recognized his scent instantly.
I kept my eyes shuttered, flirting with the dangerous fantasy of this moment, praying it into life, knowing what I felt—his body against mine—couldn’t be real.
Bastien’s fingers nestled into the hair at my neck, drawing me closer to his body, a soft growl rumbling from somewhere in his barrel chest.
Tears pressed at my eyelids as I felt all of him, the sensations bursting like fireworks inside of me.
This was terrifying. This was unforgettable. This was our love.
“I’ve missed that smile.”
A fissure formed down the axis of my heart. His thumb still pressed at my lips, I did the only thing I could think of doing and the very last thing I should have done and darted my tongue across my lips, tasting him on my skin.
Every nerve in my body came alive. Before I could recover, my tongue still tingling from the memory of that bare touch, he pressed the tip of his thumb into my mouth.
My lips closed around his intrusion on instinct, like my body remembered his touch from past lifetimes, a sort of muscle memory—our souls familiar even though our minds strangers.
“Open your eyes.” His voice was raw, raspy in a way I’d never heard.
His fingers untangled from my hair and dusted across my eyelids, over my temple and whispered along my hairline.
A shudder tore through me, my body fracturing with sensations he’d probably never made a woman feel before.
“Show me your eyes, Tressa.” His lips grazed the shell of my ear, and the muscles in my body nearly seized with pleasure. “Don’t hide from me.”
I nodded once, eyes opening to find his gaze stuck to mine like a magnet.
His head angled, he lifted one rakish eyebrow and slipped his thumb out of my mouth and snaked it deliciously down the center of my body before slipping it under the waistband of my pants, hot, greedy skin against hot, greedy skin. “I want to own you.”
“Bastien…you already do,” I breathed before he covered my mouth with his lips, tongue dancing with mine, slowly at first before pushing harder, strokes deep and sweeping as one hand cupped my neck, the other sliding across the outside of my panties. His kisses were feverish, needy, like if he didn’t get his fill now he may never get the chance again. That was the thing about forbidden love: it lasted forever, suspended in moments of bliss and steeped in an impossible reality. Our time together was so limited, but no less bloodless.
One of my arms circled his neck while my other fingertips stroked against the stubble of his jaw. Our bodies aligned, warmth blazing between us before the ridge of his thumb caught the hard nub of my sensitive button.
Violent spasms rocketed my entire world as he swiped the tingly spot again, arousal soaking my slit and seeping out of my skin, his lips growing feverish as he worked against me. My body arched into him, needing a release only he could give.
Desperate for more of him, desperate for him to need me like I did him at this moment.
Maybe we could have just this.
Bastien and me.
Together.
Forget the rest.
I loved him so much, and I hated myself for it. The more we kept our secret from the world, the more my heart withered and died.
A soft moan simpered past my lips when the edge of his thumb worked under the elastic of my panties. Tentatively, his finger swept at the moisture between my legs, before his thumb and his tongue pressed farther, probed deeper, elicited quiet moans and mewls from my mouth. My thighs began quaking as he rubbed me until stars burst behind my eyelids.
His tender fingers swept at my core, sliding out of my panties lovingly as he pecked tiny kisses across the bow of my lips, cheeks, and temples. Doting on me sweetly, eyes filled with warm honesty.
A slow breath overtook me when both of his hands cupped my cheeks, the evidence of my pleasure glistening on the pad of his thumb.
Tears pricked at my eyelids when I realized we would never have this again.
This would be it.
Tonight, I would go back to my tiny cottage and submit more applications. And then, hopefully, tomorrow I could work up the courage to tell him I was leaving.
But for now, we had our own forbidden brand of perfection.
“I’ve been dreaming of that look on your face—the soft blush that says you just came beneath my fingertips.” His thumb traced my cheeks. “Sweet, rosy halos of wicked rapture.”
My forehead pressed at his shoulder, thighs still quivering from the aftershocks of my orgasm.
The orgasm Father Bastien had graced me with.
A sigh, equal parts contentment and guilt, settled over me.
I did my best to push back the old dogmatic cycle of shame and guilt. But still, its presence in my life was real and alive and to be reckoned with at every unfortunate opportunity.
Like this one.
With Bastien’s lips against my neck.
“I want to do it again.” His fingers tangled with mine as he pulled me from my place on the wooden chair, energy coursing through his taut muscles. “Only a fool would think a sip could chase you out of the system.” He pulled me against the hard wall of his body. “The joke’s always been on me.” His lips worked against mine, tongue sweeping at my insides and sending waves of pleasure through me. “Because one taste and I’m addicted to you, sweet dove.” His fingers looped with mine, and sliding through the shadows of St. Michael’s, Bastien walked me down the long hallway and past the nursery where Lucy was already finished picking up, lights dim and door closed.
“She’s a hard worker. You should hire her full time.”
“But I have you.” The rasp in his tone chugged like honey through my veins.
“Not forever.”
He opened the door of the rectory and flipped on the kitchen light. “Not if I can help it.”
Brightly lit white walls reflected like a spotlight on our locked hands, hearts hammering in unison as the pleasure he’d just given me raged within me.
Bastien paused in the middle of the kitchen, faded linoleum under his polished leather shoes.
I gulped when his fingers unlaced from my mine, and we stepped back into reality.
We hadn’t been gone long.
“I’ll get a jacket and walk you home.” His voice was firm with staccatoed structure, quiet reservation.
Like a gunshot wound to my heart, his words blasted apart in my chest as we faded back into our normal rhythm without missing a beat.
“Sure.”
Tears welled in my eyes when he slid his tweed and wool jacket over my shoulders.
“After you.”
I nodded, feeling the cool, casual tone and tight smile down to the tips of my frozen toes.
Bastien and I walked side by side down the short walkway to the cottages that dotted the perimeter of St. Michael’s. Shadows hung heavy on our shoulders, amber glow reflecting from the streetlights on our shoes as we walked a path we’d walked at least ninety of the last hundred days.
But this walk was different.
Our footsteps slower.
Our fingers brushing softly, flitting like fireflies over my skin and making me uncomfortable and h
ot everywhere.
I gulped when I rose the three steps to the porch of my cottage, light already burning softly from the kitchen.
“Thank you,” I murmured. Glad, at least, that Lucy hadn’t flipped on the porch light when she got home and we were shrouded in some small sense of shadow.
Bastien’s eyes hung heavy on mine, lips inches away and pressing closer as his chest grazed, layers of puffy warmth doing little to douse that fire that ignited between us. “I’ll be reliving this night with you more times than I’ll ever admit.” A half smile cracked my face, and that cocky grin he reserved only for me twisted his mouth. “Thank you.”
Bastien’s thumb, the thumb he’d used to bring me to my knees, swept the seam of my lips.
I shuddered, recognizing the taste of me clinging to his flesh. I shifted my thighs with the memory of his deft fingers.
“Don’t do that,” he husked, tortured eyes darkening.
“Do what?” I could hardly croak.
“Those eyes beg me to forsake all that’s holy and succumb to everything sweet that is you.” He traced the pad of his thumb over my eyebrow with a wry smile. “I want to bring you home and take care of you. Maybe in another life, we could have, but in this one, my job is clear. In my worst moments, I wish it weren’t so. But in my best, I know my greatest good is spent—” He nodded to the small neighborhood of homes that surrounded us.
“They need you.” I knew it was true with all of my heart.
They needed Bastien’s love much more than I did.
And that was why I was leaving.
“They need me.” Bastien’s gaze surrounded me, eyes drifting to the hollow of my throat and then up to the heavens. “I’m good for them.”
You’re good for me, I screamed, but instead I let silence fill the room.
THIRTEEN
Tressa
“Do you think you’ll ever leave Brooklyn?” I slipped the point of the scissors against the edge of the paper and made my first slice the following afternoon. “Maybe move to Philly—Bastien talks about you all of the time.”
“Uncle Bash is cool, but I don’t think I could leave my girlfriend Rose—she talks about California sometimes, but Brooklyn is my only home—even if it hasn’t exactly treated my mom well—it’s better than where she came from, it seems like it anyway.” Cruz arranged the plastic silverware and plates in disposable cups as we prepared for the church’s winter festival.
“I thought Rose was supposed to come this weekend—I’m so anxious to meet her.”
“She was,” Cruz frowned, darkness shading his irises whenever he talked about his girlfriend. “I guess that’s why I came this weekend even after she said she had a music gig in the city and couldn’t come—I wanted to get Uncle Bash’s opinion on,” his eyes finally caught mine briefly, “some things.”
“Uncle Bash,” I smiled, “it’s weird to think of him as anything but Father Bastien.”
“My mom always calls him Bash, I think it’s a nickname from when they were kids.”
“I can’t even imagine him as a little boy, before the church got to him.”
Cruz laughed. “The church was in his blood young, according to my mom. He was only seventeen when they left Cuba, and already he’d spent time in the Jesuit school then. I always thought it was weird that he just picked up and left one night with her, but whenever I ask she shuts down and refuses to say more. I know she thinks highly of her brother, she calls him her knight in armor in Spanish and does a sign of the cross, I don’t know what happened to them before they left Cuba, but it was hard on them, whatever it was.”
I sank into Cruz’s words, this rare glimpse into Bastien’s family a priceless one, although it didn’t reveal any answers, only caused more burning questions.
“I’m sure if you asked Bastien he’d tell you.” I offered as I cut crisp white angel garland to hand at the festival tomorrow.
“We haven’t spent much time together, and I’ve been so wrapped up between school and Rose, well, I haven’t had the time, but I get the sense that they’d both like to keep the past in the past.”
“People gonna people,” I teased, bumping him in the shoulder. Cruz’s shy chuckle turned to a loud laugh when I sliced the head clean off a handful of paper angels by mistake. He sounded so much like his uncle it was uncanny.
“Sounds like the holidays in here,” Bastien entered the sacristy then, cool air engulfing him before the door shut with a thud. “It’s rare I walk into my home to the sound of laughter,” he patted Cruz warmly on the shoulder, “I’d hate to get used to it.”
“You should spend a Christmas in the city with mom, and Rose, and I. Bring Tressa too,” Cruz’s eyes swung from his uncle’s to mine, sparkling with naive hope. “Rose and Tressa and mom would have the best time.”
Bastien’s eyes hung heavy, his nod slow before a smile that looked more like a frown turned his lips. “Maybe, son.”
Realization dawned in Cruz’s eyes—there would never be a good time for Bastien and I to go anywhere together, that was just the plain truth of it. Getting him out of the clutches of the church, with their ability to deny him even time off—a holiday away seemed an unlikely event.
“I wanted to ask you while I’m here,” Cruz started and I felt dread settle in my chest, “I’ve been trying to locate my real father—“
“I don’t think now is the appropriate time,” Bastien cut him off and turned his back.
I narrowed my eyes, wondering how Bastien could have such a cold reaction to his nephew. “But—”
“This is a talk for your mother, Cruz.” I felt the stern warning in his words.
“She won’t even talk to me about the night you left Cuba, I just want some answers and I figured you’d give them to me because you take that vow of honesty or whatever priests do.”
“Vows are easily broken, Cruz, stop being naive.”
“But—”
“The truth is, your mother swore me to secrecy about all of the events surrounding that time, I’d be breaking a vow if I told you anything.” His eyes hung heavy on Cruz’s, tension filling up the small space as the two men—one young and one regal like a king—faced off.
“Just tell me, was it bad? What happened that night?”
Sympathy softened Bastien’s eyes before he covered his mouth for a moment, pain hollowing his cheeks before he uttered, “I won’t say anything more out of respect for her, but be tender with her, son, your mother suffered a tragedy I wouldn’t wish on God’s worst enemy.”
* * *
“See?” I yelled over the chugging of the volunteer fire truck early the next morning, Cruz at my shoulder as a loud spray of water covered the wide, skating-rink-sized layer of snow in the side yard of St. Michael’s. “They are loving you so hard for this already!”
Bastien shook his head back at us, crooked grin on his face. He stood, arms crossed, looking all lush and warm and inviting as we watched the first stages of my winter festival game plan unfold.
Step one—convince someone with an extremely large hose and an endless water source to share a little for our community ice rink. An announcement had run in last week’s church newsletter requesting donations of old or no longer used skates and hockey equipment, and the drop-offs had come in droves. Cruz was headed back to the city on the train tonight, but just in the short time I’d known him, we’d become fast friends. He’d done wonders at helping me with this festival, and his presence at St. Mike’s would be missed by more than just me. He’d been charming the little old ladies socks off—he was a mini-Bastien the way he listened so attentively and nailed you with those warm brown eyes. Whatever nurturing blood ran in their veins was very much genetic, and just working with him side by side the last few hours was enough for me to feel like he was family.
I would be sad to see him go later this afternoon, but he gushed nearly non-step about his new girlfriend Rose and how her and I would get along so perfectly. He promised they’d come for a weekend—and I promis
ed I’d do my best to get Bastien into the city as soon as he had time off. Bastien had only shaken his head when I’d said that last part: without a second seminarian to lead Mass morning and afternoon, time off was a luxury that couldn’t be afforded.
And when a giant fire truck rolled up outside the local parish this morning, the people came out.
I laughed as kids clapped and waved, Cruz darting off to build a snow fort with a few older boys as one firefighter pointed out the control system on the hose to the smaller group of kids, another group of older ladies pointing to the two firemen operating the hose at the business end.
I nearly made a joke to Bastien about the dirty little old ladies but thought better of it, before he caught my gaze and split into a laugh of his own that rumbled so deep, I swear it hit places he hadn’t touched since…ever.
Just a look from this guy was about enough to send me over the edge, the chaste white collar at this throat a taunt, begging me to tackle him and loosen it with my teeth. I expected to burn in hell for these thoughts one day. I’d already made peace with it.
“We’re a good team,” Bastien said.
“We?” I bumped his shoulder. “I think it was me on the phone begging the fire commissioner to loan me that giant hose he’s got.”
“Loan, huh? Dare I ask what you promised in return, Tressa?”
“It’s better you not.” I winked, waving at the fire chief across the yard.
Bastien lifted an eyebrow.
“Turns out he hasn’t had good arroz con pollo since his grandma passed last summer. I promised I’d make him a batch, with enough for the rest of the guys, a few times a month through all of winter. It didn’t take him long to agree.”
Bastien laughed. “I concede. You never cease to amaze me.”
“Well, for the record, I may have done the legwork, but it wasn’t without your inspiration.” I shrugged. “So, we are a good team.”
He nodded, eyes taking in the busy scene, St. Michael’s looking alive for the first time in a long time outside of weekly Mass.
“Things were pretty quiet without your particular brand of—”
REBEL PRIEST Page 9