“I see the innocent little demons that dance in your eyes, sweet dove. You can’t hide your secrets from me.” My lips sucked at the sweaty skin of her neck. “You never could.”
I spread my palm over her breasts, sandwiching the tiny cross between her skin and mine like a brand. “You play so recklessly with the matches around your heart—” I nipped at her earlobe “—and the sparks enthrall me.”
Her ass wiggled against my hips, that raw, primal caveman thing I’d thought was long buried since our last night together shaking at the cages. My shame at embracing both my filthy and pious sides evaporating in an instant.
I needed this woman.
“Tell me what you want. You want me to take it from you?”
Her eyes caught mine, blinking once. My cock flexed.
“You want me to desecrate and defile every sweet inch of you?”
A soft hiss of pleasure as she rocked against me.
“We’re bound together, Tressa. I won’t let you forget that anytime soon.”
Rubbing the roundness of her backside with my palm, I pulled myself from her body and teased at her entrance, enjoying the way her hips sought a release only I could give.
Tressa, desperate and needy for me, a notion so satisfying and sweet I could roll around in it for a lifetime. Breaking every vow was worth it to be with her, as was committing every sin my soul’s newfound purpose. Anything to own her, take her, make her mine.
“Patience isn’t your strongest attribute. You may want to think about working on that next Lenten season.” I landed three slaps on her rounded backside.
She jumped, unable to rub at the quickly growing pink handprint on her bottom. I stroked my new mark on her perfect skin, enjoying playing her body like an instrument, attuned to her every movement and need.
“And maybe you can give up celibacy next Lent.” The sarcasm in her saccharine words brought a grin to my face.
“So wet and filthy. I’ve got just the thing to keep that mouth busy.” I spanked her twice more on the other ass cheek as punishment. Pushing a hand up the arch of her throat, I slipped my finger past her lips.
She gulped down another moan, a series of pleas falling from her lips that had me slamming so hard and so deep, I thought I might break her myself.
She’d already broken me.
For so long, I’d tended my flock obediently, never a misstep, hardly a stray thought. But with her, I was the wolf. She needed protecting from me. I wanted to claim her, cage her, force her on her hands and knees, and fuck her seven ways from Sunday. With her, I was nothing but a beast. A man under her thrall, willing to confess at the heart of her altar.
“I thought about using my belt, but I like feeling you, knowing how to hit you with just enough pressure, knowing I can only hurt you as much as I can hurt myself.” I slipped my palms up the undersides of her arms, enjoying the way a trail of goose bumps popped up in my wake.
I released her bindings then, needing to feel her hands on me, to know she was right here with me, of her own will. Our demons played best flesh-on-flesh, scorching sin against damp skin.
I pulled her up to my chest, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and rode my hips. Her soft cries and the tensing of her thighs around my body told me she was crashing over the edge, her hot body sucking me farther in, coaxing my own release from the base of my spine down to the tips of my toes. With tremors of pleasure rippling through us, I emptied into my very own holy grail, tasting life and touching God from the inside out.
I watched her come undone, every carefully held morsel slipping away like drops of holy water, leaving behind a pure and primal shuddering creature of need. The rebirth of two broken souls uniting as one. Kissing her reverently, lips and hands and limbs entwined, I whispered the words I’d buried down deep.
“I kept my days busy when I was without you.” The loneliness of all those moments haunted me even still. “So I only missed you when the sun went down. When I ran out of things to distract myself, I always found you. I can’t begin to express what you gave to me. That time of my life plays in my memory like a sweet dream.”
She hung her hands around my neck, eyes locked and shimmering with warmth and tenderness in the dim light.
“Oh, Bastien.” She ran two soft fingertips over my cheekbone.
Dropping my forehead to hers, lips grazing, I murmured, “You and I were always poetry, captivating, sweet, and over far too soon.”
And then I buried myself inside of her again, needing the physical reminder that she was real, she was here, and she was finally with me. Just like we were meant to be.
TWENTY-FIVE
Bastien
“I can’t tell you how long it took me to work up the balls to come here.” She sat propped against my simple headboard later, sheets tucked under her arms. I lay at her side, unable to help the rogue grin, one arm thrown over her belly as my scent clung to her skin.
“How did you find me? I’m sure the cardinal had the file sealed for all eternity.”
She huffed. “He was useless.”
I laughed at her bold statement of one of the holiest positions in the Roman Catholic Church.
“I tried to ask where you’d gone once Luce and I returned from the hospital, but he was as smug and tight-lipped as ever. So I started searching the name of every priest under his order. I didn’t get anywhere for months, and I wasn’t even sure I should be trying at all. I didn’t know what I’d do with the information even if I had it.” She stopped, eyes animated with her retelling. “But then, finally, a few months ago, a newspaper in Havana uploaded some of their older archives online, and a Father Martin popped up. I didn’t know if it was the one I knew, but it mentioned the cathedral in Pinar del Rio, and without even knowing what the hell I was thinking, I started searching for flights to Cuba.”
“Even more courage than I remembered.”
Her fingertips ran circles around the curve of my bicep as she continued on. “I’m so glad I was there with Luce when she had Luca. He’s the sweetest thing. I was there the first time he walked. His first word was doggy.” Tears steeped in her love-filled eyes. “Luce even got her own direct sales business off the ground so she can stay at home with him all day. And she’s the best mom, Bastien. I wish…” She paused, looking unsure of whether she should say the next part. “I wish you could see him.”
I wrapped my fingers around her knee, squeezing. “I hope someday.” I shook my head as I reflected back. “I hated leaving so abruptly. I spent so much time thinking about all of the people I’d grown so close to. The cardinal and bishop were at St. Mike’s within an hour of your going to the hospital with Lucy. I remember thinking once I got things settled down at the church, I’d go to the hospital to see how you both were. But once the two of them arrived, it seemed the steps to transition me out and a new priest in were already in place. The following morning, the cardinal informed me of my transfer and somehow implied I’d made St. Mike’s a target.” I shook my head at the memory. “It was emotional torture not knowing what had become of you and her and the baby and that kid…”
She swallowed, hands seeking mine, fingers twining together. “They tried to bring him to trial, but he just kept acting insane, saying illogical things. I was convinced it was an act, but Lucy wasn’t so sure. She really worried about him.” Her fingers worked back and forth at my knuckles. “Until he sent the letter months after he was institutionalized.”
“A letter?”
She sucked her lips between her teeth, nodding. “It was hardly coherent. It took us a few tries to read it, and even now, there are parts we can’t understand. But he kept bringing up evil and wolves hiding in holy clothing and, Bastien…” She paused. “He had her key, that means he must have snuck into our cottage. Maybe he even saw you and me…doing something. He said deceit and sin still run unchecked in the pews of St. Mike’s and that he’d even called the diocese to report a crime, but they didn’t care. He said over and over, they didn’t care.”
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br /> I swallowed, understanding snapping into place. I had no words to deal with what she’d just unloaded.
The idea that I’d held this secret close to my heart a foolish one. Of course, we were caught. We’d lapsed too much, been too risky; it would be unlikely someone hadn’t seen us.
My heart thudded heavily in my chest, a horrible feeling settling that I’d left her there to confront all of this alone.
“Luce and I worked it over a hundred different ways. The only thing I kept wondering…” She frowned, peeling out from under me and tightening the sheet around her body as she stood from the bed and walked to the tiny window looking out on the smoky mountains.
“What?” I sat on the edge of the bed, one hand in my hair, unsure if I was ready for any more of her realizations. She’d had a lot more time to critically think her away around this situation. I was coming in blind to most of it.
“Remember those receipts? The ones you found in the church attic?”
“Yeah.” My mind fought to remember the tiny handwritten slips.
“Do you remember who they were made out to?”
“Eve somebody.”
“Well after Casey sent the letter, he took his own life. The orderlies checked on him one morning, and apparently, he’d been stashing his pills and doing favors to collect a few from other patients, and he overdosed.”
My eyebrows rose at her admission.
“When we went to his funeral, Lucy brought Luca to the church day care for an hour, and we went to the service. Well, we didn’t stay. There was so much media, and when they recognized both of us…then it wasn’t peaceful at all. I snagged a program, and it just so happened that on that program it said he was survived by his mother, Eve Maniscalco.”
“Maniscalco…” I tilted my head, vaguely remembering the name. “That’s the name from the receipts?”
“Yup. Don’t you remember?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, lucky for you, I’ve been bringing Ms. Watson dinner a few Sundays a month since you left, and that woman is a St. Mike’s fangirl of the first degree.”
“A fangirl?”
“Of you, for starters.” Her eyes twinkled as they met mine. “But who isn’t?”
I slapped her ass through the thin sheet.
“But she’s also been going to St. Mike’s since she was a girl, and I bet you didn’t know she’s kept every single weekly parish newsletter since she started attending with her first husband in 1965?”
I couldn’t contain my laugh. “You don’t say?”
“She’s a charmer, that one, and loves to talk. Even remembers when Casey was a little boy going to St. Mike’s with his mom, Eve.”
“Well, how about that.”
“And she has the series of weekly missals showing Casey’s name as an altar boy under Father Martin.”
My throat cracked.
Heart hammering, I planted both of my hands on the stone alongside Tressa’s head, requiring it and her to support me.
“Fuck, I never should have left.”
“Bastien, no, that’s not why I told you this.”
“Never. I was such a coward. I left so much open-ended.” I’d walked away from what was my true calling at that moment, blind to its very existence.
Regret ravaged me like a hungry demon, sending bile into my throat and adrenaline into my muscles.
“So many secrets.” I shook my head. “And the cardinal knew everything. He left me in the dark, transferred me out of his life, sweeping me under the damn rug just as he must have done all those years ago with Father Martin.”
“But that’s the thing. We don’t even know what happened with Father Martin. And the main person who could is gone and, really, wasn’t very trustworthy to begin with.” Tressa breathed, fingers at the muscles of my neck, working me down from the cliff.
I allowed her calm to seep into me, urging me back to the bed. “There isn’t anything we can do about any of it. I had to tell myself the one thing that mattered was that Luce and the baby were safe.”
“And you.” I cradled her head in my hands, sighing deeply as I considered all that’d come to pass between us.
“You know what it took for me to come here? To come to you?” She settled beside me, tucking herself into the crook of my arm. “It took me realizing that my life was of my own making. That even when I was in college and working for the head of the department and he was locking the door and pressing himself against me and threatening to take away my scholarship if I didn’t let him jerk off in front of me…” Her eyes sparked with fresh anger.
“I never understood why shitty things kept happening to me. One asshole I dated even told me girls with daddy issues fuck better. So that was it, I was just destined to attract the losers. And I let that professor play his mind games for months, thinking deep down, I must deserve it. That I wasn’t worth anything in my own right. I was surrounded by people reinforcing to me that my worst was my very best, so it was better to give up any dreams now.” She wiped a tear across her cheek.
“Sometimes the person you’d take the bullet for is the person behind the trigger, ya know? But then one day, it just clicked. I was a victim because I hadn’t set that horrible monster straight yet. Because I thought I deserved what he was doing. And finally, the night I stood up to him and leveled that first edition of The Alchemist at his head, that was the moment I decided no longer to see myself from the perspective of a victim, but a badass. I found my backbone. I came to terms with the slow unraveling of my life when I wasn’t looking. I’d been a passive participant, letting life happen to me for so long instead of making it mine. I’ll never do that again. It took me a minute, but I finally found myself. Now, I’ve made authenticity my rebellion.”
“You know, I went to seminary to find God. It took that experience for me to realize that God isn’t a voice so much as a feeling. So many people forget, or worse, don’t allow themselves to feel Him working in their lives already.”
An amused tone tickled her voice when she said, “Bastien. My wise saint. With—or without—the white collar.”
“My sweet dove, still a beautiful rebel.” I hummed into her hair. “You should get some rest, I’ve got plenty planned for you.”
I tucked Tressa into my arms, smiling as she drifted into a peaceful sleep, moonlight playing on her cheeks and lighting up my heart.
TWENTY-SIX
Bastien
“What was your first thought when you found out you were going back to Cuba?” She cradled the delicate bloom of a bougainvillea flower, nestling her nose in the fuchsia petals the following morning. I’d always loved the colorful vines that crept around this island paradise, but seeing her enjoy a piece of my homeland for the first time was enchanting, to say the least.
I’d grown accustomed to a life of holy consecrated solitude, but the breath of fresh air she constantly provided was more than invigorating.
“My feelings on my home are complicated. When I was young, I couldn’t wait to escape the suffocating smallness of it, but with time away…” I plucked one of the larger flowers on the vine and tucked it behind her ear, the color shocking against her almost-black hair. “I think the timing was finally right.”
I meant that sentiment on so many levels.
We continued down the road that edged the tobacco field, giant leaves growing a little more every day and encroaching on the narrow, red-dirt path.
“The true blessing has been getting to know the families who live here. Island life isn’t for everyone, but most find a way to make it work anyway. Some of the rural communities, well…the thinking may be a little more…antiquated.”
She bumped against my shoulder playfully. “Is this a veiled warning? What exactly are we about to walk into?”
“Well…Ms. Carmelita Martinez and family are a treat, her littlest Santiago is a riot, but the more I’ve gotten to know them, well, the more I’ve gotten to know Padre Juan.”
“Padre Juan?”
“He’s a retired priest from Santa Maria’s, and he’s probably the most unholy former holy man I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.”
“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow with interest just as a warm breeze caught her dress, swirling the loose linen fabric around her thighs and teasing a glimpse of my promised land. “The good Padre sounds interesting.”
“Interesting doesn’t quite cover it. Unfiltered is just the beginning.”
“Oh, one of those stodgy old guys? Trust, I’ve gotten really good at deflecting bullshit. You don’t have to worry about me.”
I laughed loudly. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
“Wait, shouldn’t you be concerned about protecting my honor?”
I caught her hand with mine, not even thinking twice because it felt so natural to be with her. “I have a feeling you’ve gotten good at protecting yourself.”
She winked, only acting bashful.
“I think he’s one of those guys who respects it when you can dish it out too, so feel free to aim high with that one. It’s probably worth mentioning, though.” I paused as the roofline of Carmelita’s house came into view over the rows of tobacco leaves. “Carmelita and Padre Juan are very close, and I get the sense it’s been that way for a while.” I whisked my thumb along the underside of her wrist, not sure how to explain this next part. “In fact, it would be my guess that Padre Juan is little Santiago’s father.” My revelation hung in silence. “Not just spiritually speaking, but biologically too.”
Tressa’s eyes widened with instant realization. “Oh?”
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