“Ready for you to fuck me. Please fuck me, Bastien.” My fingernails dug into his back.
“Agh,” his rigid cock stroked my nerves, “so hot and sweet and mine.” He attacked my mouth as he thrust into me in one gentle motion. My body quickly adjusted to him and he began to ease in and out. He kissed and nibbled along my neck while his hands stroked my breasts down to my hips. Then he leaned back and took my calf in his hand and held it up high over his shoulder as he began to slam into me. I cried out in pleasure at this new angle, hitting a new and delicious spot.
“You feel so incredible—so perfect, there aren’t even words to explain what you do to me.” Bastien thrust in and out and I put my hands above my head to brace myself against the headboard. Bastien placed another hand on my breast and squeezed, kneading my sensitive flesh with tender strokes. He had fully filled me and I couldn’t imagine anything could ever feel better. Just then Bastien’s hand trailed down from my breast to my clit and began to press and massage in circles.
“Come for me, let me hear how good you feel, dove.” Bastien continued to rock in and out, locking eyed with me as my orgasm ripped through me, sending tingles to my toes and a wash of pleasure to my head. Bastien groaned, his jaw tightened, and I felt his body pulse. His strokes slowed and he collapsed on top of me panting. My fingers intertwined in his hair and my heart felt like it would burst from my chest as Bastien’s head lay on top of it. His breathing slowed and he rolled to the side and curled around my body, locking me in his embrace as I heard his breathing deepen. My own lids grew heavy and I fell asleep almost instantly.
I didn’t know what tomorrow might bring for us—but I knew nothing in my life would ever top this moment, right here in bed with him. My rebel saint and savior.
SEVENTEEN
Tressa
I stretched my arms back like a cat and sighed deeply before realization dawned that I wasn’t in my own bed. And that my girly parts were sore.
We’d committed the ultimate sin last night, and here I was, the morning after, inhaling the musky scent of our lovemaking on his sheets. Images of him between my legs flashed through my mind.
I opened my eyes slowly and rolled over to find myself alone in his bed. The wrinkled white sheet was draped over my naked body and suddenly I felt only shame. Bastien had crept out on me; did he regret last night? Should I get dressed and sneak out the door and sneak back to my cottage? I wasn’t sure of the protocol in this situation. And yet, where shame regularly would have bloomed, a sense of peace permeated all of me. Especially in the places where I could still feel his touch, the soft sting of his bruises on my thighs the most primal reminder of where he’d been.
I bit my lip and looked around the room for my clothes, realizing Bastien had peeled me out of them as he’d carried me to his room.
My eyes darted around the room for something to cover myself with. What a walk of shame this would be. Bastien’s undershirt lay across the chair by the door and I swiped it as I made my way to his small en suite bathroom. I stepped in front of the mirror to access the damage, running my fingers quickly through my hair to get out the tangles then splashing my face with water in an attempt to look fresher. I pulled Bastien’s shirt over my head and stretched it to cover my bottom as much as possible. I didn’t know what I would face when I walked out of the bedroom door, but I had to make at least an attempt at dignity as I gathered last night’s clothes.
The last twelve hours throbbed between my legs as salsa music played on downstairs. 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. He pulled me into his arms, sprinkling kisses across my lips as he held my cheeks in his protective palms. “I brought your clothes up, but don’t be rushed.”
“Hi.”
Bastien registered my awkward arrangement before his hips swayed toward me, the thick curve of his member 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, the way he made me feel so warm and loved was addictive.
“Dance with me,” he ordered in Spanish, his eyes hung suspended, glinting with the afterglow of last night’s pleasure. He pulled me closer, fingers on one hand lacing with mine as the other settled at my back 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. “To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring upon ourselves.” His forehead dipped catching my lips with his and kissing me tenderly. “I think things that I shouldn’t, want things unavailable to me, dream things that I force me into confession: all because of you.” 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 forced innuendo and blind groping behind locked doors. I’d pushed him away a thousand times, but still, for the sake of my scholarship, I’d continued to find myself in close quarters with him.
“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 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.
If I’d left his room 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 weeks 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.”
His hands dropped from me, the loss of contact subtle yet still devastating.
“I’ve been called to do the most good on earth. And this place, right here, is where I can do the most good.”
Reserved anger twisted my emotions. Beats of silence deafened my ears. Tension thickened the air between us. I swallowed, no reply left to be given.
Bastien’s lips burned against mine, we were a broken promise existing only on borrowed time. “I just don’t know how to be without you anymore.”
An invisible fist clutched at my heart with his last words. It’s terrifying to love something so much that exists outside of your own body—terrifying to feel something so profound and so forbidden that just speaking it out loud could destroy so many lives.
A series of booms rattled the floor under our feet then, subtle like an earthquake, before everything fell silent again.
Water rained over our heads, and Bastien’s eyelids, heavy with water droplets, turned from mine for the last time.
I swallowed, anxiety running white-hot through my veins before he nodded once. His full lips turned up slowly before he slipped behind the shower door, running a towel across his biceps and over his head quickly before tossing the spent towel on the floor at his feet.
The stretch of his broad body walking away from me, his last kiss goodbye.
EIGHTEEN
Tressa
As I came down the narrow steps of Bastien’s stairway ten minutes later, still dripping wet from the shower when Ronnie John—one of the kids from Bastien’s catechism class—sped around the corner, climbing the stairs two at a time with fear painting his features.
My heart pummeled my throat as I realized how bad this looked.
So very bad.
There was no sensible reason I should be sneaking down Father Bastien’s private stairwell so early in the morning. This kid would definitely run off and tell everyone he knew, and then where would that leave us? And Bastien’s job? The parishioners would revolt, the cardinal would come, Bastien would be ripped from St. Mike’s.
Our very worst fears were materializing on the face of this boy.
“I can explain.” I choked on the statement, because I couldn’t.
I couldn’t explain.
“Run.” He clutched my elbow.
“What?” I shook my head, confused.
“Run, Ms. Tressa,” Ronnie John urged, begging me to follow him a beat before seemingly giving up and scrambling up the stairs as quickly as possible. He landed at the top of the staircase and launched himself down the hallway just as a series of booms echoed through the tiny chambers of the house.
“What the fuck is going on?” I breathed, fear causing my palms to prickle with sweat as the smell of gunpowder circled my nostrils. “Ronnie!” I screamed up the stairs, eyes darting from the door he’d slammed closed behind him to the long, dark hallway down which he’d come. The one that led deep into the bowels of St. Mike’s.
I gulped, fear pulsing through me as realization dawned that danger lay ahead, in exactly the direction Bastien had gone.
“Oh God.”
I’d been so wrapped up in our sin, I hadn’t even realized the boom from earlier was something far more serious than I could have imagined. Indecision iced my veins before I launched forward, pushing myself down the long hall and bursting into the sacristy.
Horrifying, deafening silence.
I crossed the room, conscious of every footstep on the aged wooden floor.
My hand quaked as I turned the doorknob that led from the sacristy and into the nave of the church. Rustling against the other side of the door shook me before I sucked in a shallow breath and opened it a crack.
Centuries-old incense laced with the scent of blood pulsed in the air as Lucy clutched Ms. Watson against her body, blood leaking between her fingers, spread across her face, seeping beneath her folded legs and soaking the smooth wooden floor.
“Oh God.” I covered my mouth, holding back vomit and my wildest scream. Tears pierced my eyes and stung my cheeks. “No.”
I yanked the door wider, pulling Lucy and Ms. Watson into the tiny room with me, scanning quickly behind them for the cause of all this blood.
“Bastien’s out there,” Lucy choked out, eyes wide with fear as our gazes met for the first time.
“I don’t see him.” A sinking feeling ate up my stomach.
“He’s in the vestibule.” Her hands began to shake as fresh blood soaked between her fingers. It looked like it was coming from Ms. Watson’s chest, but it was so hard to tell.
I’d never seen so much blood.
Bile rose in my throat as a crimson river traveled down the cracks of the wooden floor I’d just crossed, unaware of the massacre happening just on the
other side of the door.
“Are you hurt? The baby?” Fuck. Where was my phone? Both of them needed an ambulance.
And then the door from behind us swung open, Cruz—Bastien’s nephew—shooting in with a wild look in his eyes. “Cruz? What’s going on? Why are you here? Are you okay?”
He shook his head, terror lacing his young irises. “I wanted to surprise Uncle Bash at Mass this morning but when the cab pulled up outside I saw—”
“What? What did you see?” I shot up, terror icing my veins as I imagined Bastien hurt, or worse.
“I—
“Tressa!” Lucy’s breath rattled with pain or fear, or a mix of both. “Bastien’s out there with him.”
“With him?” I glanced back through the crack in the door, eyes scanning for any signs of more bodies. Alive or otherwise. “Who’s him? It looks clear from here. I don’t even hear anything.”
Lucy shook her head, tears splashing down her cheeks as she tried to quell the surge of blood soaking her sweater and Ms. Watson’s jacket. “Tressa, you don’t understand. Close the door and lock it. The father of this baby is out there.” Fresh tears coated her cheeks as she rubbed at her tiny belly. “I think he’s got a gun.”
“What?” The shrill tone of my reply hurt my own ears and made me painfully aware a second too late that I’d just given away our hiding place.
“I saw it, I saw something, the cab pulled away before I could tell him to call the police, but we need the police, Tressa. There’s a very bad man out there.”
“Oh my God.” I tried to calculate how many minutes it’d been since he’d left me.
Too long.
That was how long.
Fear and courage swam in my veins, steeling my muscles for the bravery I knew I needed to save the man I loved.
“I’m going.”
“Not unless you have a death wish.” Cruz warned.
“I have to.” I choked.
“Then I’m going too,” Cruz pushed between me and the door. The sounds of a scuffle were slight but present as soon as soon as he eased open the door into the church.
REBEL PRIEST Page 13
