For the first time, I was making a concerted effort to put myself in the driver’s seat of my life. And maybe I’d needed a few months of Father Bastien’s good sense and motivated work ethic to get my life back on the course I envisioned for it, but that was all my time here was—temporary.
I spent another hour printing applications for what few jobs in the health industry I was qualified for, filling out each of them longhand before writing down the physical addresses in my planner and then picking out the most professional secondhand outfit my budget could buy.
I wasn’t sure if white was allowed in winter or if navy shoes went with a black belt after all, but it would have to do. One thing Mom had taught me was that a warm and friendly smile went further than a dollar ever could. I didn’t know if she was right about that, but it was all I had to work with, so I was rolling with it.
My plan was to go in guns blazing tomorrow, thousand-watt smile on my face.
I needed out of St. Michael’s.
Away from Bastien.
Closer to me.
What listening to Bastien had helped me learn was that those bad decisions I’d made weren’t bad so much as mini learning detours. That I should be grateful for their existence to keep me on the right path. Bumper cars in the game of life.
All of it sounded like a bad Pinterest vision board, but just the same, I found if I took that perspective to heart and tried to live by that reframing every day, life felt…better.
Now, I had the energy to think about event organizing and ways St. Michael’s could help improve the neighborhood. Now, I could give back.
In fact, I might have been freezing cold and looked a mess the first night Bastien saw me, but really, in a wild, roundabout way, I had Dr. Grady to thank for my meeting Bastien at all.
That night could have turned out so very differently.
I’d called the number on that card that night.
After losing my scholarship, the checks from the grants no longer depositing into my account meant I couldn’t even feed myself. The funding for my student housing terminated.
My life. In ruins.
I’d called the number that night because I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.
I told myself I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I think, really, I did.
I knew by the flirtatious grin and cocky tilt of his eyebrow that he was trouble.
I should have hung up when he forced me to beg him for the meeting.
He complained that he was too busy for college dropouts.
I was a dime a dozen now.
I assured him I wasn’t.
Begged him to give me a chance, desperation cracking my voice.
A chance at what? I wasn’t sure, but the naïve part of me hoped for a secretarial job or maybe personal assisting. But within minutes of climbing into his black Suburban, I recognized the error in my judgment. His hand was crawling up my thigh, fingertips tickling the nape of my neck, and he was telling me he required a taste of all the goods before he hired anyone to work for him.
Flames of fury lit in my stomach, and I’d done the very first thing I could think to do.
Balled up my fist and nailed him in the balls with all the rage I could muster.
He probably could have pressed charges against me.
He barked at the driver to pull over and kicked me square on my ass on the curb.
It was all fortunate, really, because Father Bastien had been clearing the steps of St. Michael’s when I’d, almost literally, landed at his feet.
My in the flesh, real-deal, cassock-wearing saint.
He was my guardian angel that night, gathering me up in his arms, my body rattled and life broken, and walking me into his church. Hustling me into his private home, he settled me on his small, threadbare couch and wrapped me in wool blankets, tending the scrape and forming bruise on my thigh.
We sat shoulder to shoulder that night, slurping soup and watching reruns of Jersey Shore.
My selection, not his.
But it’d been the entertainment of a lifetime introducing him to those kids for the first time.
The last time I had been under the roof of St. Michael’s, I was eight and innocently blabbing the reality of my existence to Father Martin. The idea that the pious man I sat next to on the couch I would someday fall for…that still felt like utter nonsense.
And that’s because it was.
Whatever else Bastien and I were, at the heart, we would always be nonsense.
TWELVE
Tressa
Some mornings, I woke up justifying our secret brand of sin.
To whom, I wasn’t even sure.
Myself?
God?
The fantasy Bastien who lived every night in my head? The one who said everything just right and touched me with rough, dominant hands, his dark irises saturated with shame and guilt?
But the mornings I woke up telling myself that love breathed between Bastien and me, real and true and right in the eyes of man and God?
Those mornings were the worst.
The days my footsteps were filled with hope ended with nights that inevitably left me raw, my heart a little bloodier for even considering a love for him. Living alongside Bastien without being with him had, itself, become a form of suffering. My mind grew a little more determined to find a way out.
I’d considered every possible option. Staying with my mom was off the table, her life since I’d left for college worse off than when I’d been with her. Countless medical issues after a lifetime of abusing her body were finally taking their toll.
I hadn’t seen her since I’d left anyway, and usually, the only time she called was when she needed money. I was okay with that, and on the rare occasion I could help her out, I did. But more often than not, I was forced to tell her no out of pure necessity. There were plenty of nights I had no choice but to eat noodles out of a cup just to buy textbooks for class, and still, those days seemed simpler than now.
I swallowed down the ache that always gripped my throat when I thought about things from my past lives. My eyes drifted to the file on my computer that held the application for low-income housing in a newer development across town. I’d found the article about the new apartments on the newspaper’s website, so the likelihood I would be picked wasn’t great, mostly because I didn’t have a salary to support much of a monthly rent payment.
I’d been thinking, if Bastien was willing to train Lucy, maybe she could take over some of his office work, and coupled with the nursery and the event organizing I was trying to implement, perhaps a full-time position at St. Michael’s was possible for her. At least enough to get her through the pregnancy with a roof over her head and a small community to look out for her.
The sense that it was time for me to move on was growing greater by the day. I felt it deep in my bones every time I locked eyes with him across the church pews during Mass.
And maybe down even deeper than that, I was running from a familiar rut.
A rut my mother had been stuck in all too often during my childhood. A rut where staying and loving a man who didn’t love her back was easier than leaving.
Well, maybe our circumstances weren’t quite the same, but at the core, as I saw it, they were.
I refused to stay the course when the course finished in a dead end.
Maybe even with a few epic crash and burns along the way.
That was not the life I intended to live.
Not the one I’d wished on stars for.
I wouldn’t stay and love a man who couldn’t love me back.
Bastien was married to the man upstairs, and I was his mistress.
Bile nearly choked me.
The idea that I could get certified as a nurse’s assistant suddenly sounded like a better fix than staying here for any longer than I had to.
Watching him. Feeling him in every part of me when he entered a room. Being so close, yet mountains apart. The rules in his world and the rules in mine were different. And his forb
ade his love for me.
I shifted in the hard wooden chair. Tucked as I was in a corner of the sacristy, ancient holy relics and silence permeated the room.
I stood out in this place.
Gold- and silver-plated items decorated the shelves, memories of evenings after Mass, watching Bastien clean and straighten the precious metals with such care and precision would leave a lasting ache in my heart forever. The way his hands had cradled the items, the bronze of his skin sending lightning strikes of pleasure careening between my thighs.
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 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 for the first time.
Every nerve in my body came alive as my mind imprinted the taste of him on every synapse.
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.
I wanted to slap the cocky grin off his face and beg him to carry me to his bed in the very same instant.
It was infuriating.
And so thrilling.
And as if Bastien had the ability to read my mind, he 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.
“Bastien,” 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.
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.
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 this.
THIRTEEN
Tressa
“I’ve been dreaming of that look on your face,” Bastien breathed in my ear. “That soft blush that says you just came beneath my fingertips.” His thumb traced my cheeks. “Rosy little halos of devilish 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 hot 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.”
REBEL SAINT Page 7
