Sin With Me (With Me Series Book 2)

by Lacey Silks

  “That bad, eh?” he asked.

  “No, I’m sorry. It’s just all so… tight.” I scanned him over, appreciating every single limitation of my clothing so much more. That was when I realized that he wasn’t wearing any underwear and every enticing curve below his belt was outlined to perfection.

  “No, you look fine.”

  Very fine.

  I would burn in hell for this.

  “Besides, there aren’t too many people in church on a Saturday, right?”

  “Right.”

  He stood there, holding his dripping clothes in front of him. It wasn’t until he cleared his throat that I realized I’d been staring without shame. I quickly moved past him, brushing against his arm, heading straight for the drawer with the plastic bags.

  “You should put these in here or you’ll drip all over the church floor.”

  “Thank you. I’ll order a new valve for your sink.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. I can do it.”

  “Do you know what kind?”

  “No.”

  He laughed before opening the front door. “I’ll get it, Kate.”

  “I’m going to have to find a way to thank you for all your help.”

  Before he turned, I thought I heard a low growl. It sounded more like an invitation than a warning.

  “I’ll pay for it, at least,” I said.

  “No, this is church property. You’re a tenant here. A tenant who’s been wronged when her kitchen sink became possessed.”

  Was he trying to make a joke? I chuckled nonetheless. It was… cute.

  “Thank you for your help.”

  “You’re welcome. Feel free to use the kitchen in the rectory in the meantime.”

  “Thank you. Did you need anything from me?”

  “I just wanted to ask you to keep a closer eye on Father John. Not that you wouldn’t, but he’s been feeling quite ill lately.”

  “For a man in his sixties, he sure looks like he’s carrying the world on his shoulders.”

  “I don’t want to alarm you, but I have a feeling he’s reaching the end of his days. The diocese will be forced to find a new rector for the parish soon.”

  “But he’s so young. And we have you.”

  He looked a little confused before replying, “I won’t always be here, Kate. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do, but you could take over the mass and everything. We don’t really need another rector.”

  “You will need another one.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not up to me. I can’t do Father John’s job.”

  I couldn’t imagine the parish without Father Cameron. Over the past two months he had acclimated to Pace so well that it felt like he’d always been here.

  “You’re doing a wonderful job, though. You’re always polite and non-judgmental.”

  Would he mention my confessions? He’d listened to them a couple of times, but never judged me, not even when I told him that I’d masturbated.

  “Once you’ve heard one sin, you’ve heard them all.” He turned around and I followed him to the front door.

  “But you’re supposed to listen to them individually.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t.”

  I felt my cheeks heat. If he did hear them, then he was truly a wonderful priest because he’d never made me feel inadequate.

  “Kate, everyone sins. Including me.”

  “I bet you don’t sin as much as I do.”

  Oh, that did not come out the way it was supposed to and I didn’t mean to use such a sultry voice either. What was wrong with me?

  He thought for a moment before saying, “I’m not going to bet on our sins, but you’d be surprised what goes on in my head.”

  Now each time I saw him, I’d be wondering about his thoughts and I’d pretend that they were all naughty. Father Cameron became more enticing with each passing day. There was unspoken danger about him, but when he wore that collar around his neck I felt safe.

  “Right, well, I’ll pray that Father John gets better, then.”

  “Of course. And even if he doesn’t, I’m sure your prayers are heard. Don’t ever think otherwise.”

  “Thank you, Father Cameron.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Father Cameron?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is there anything else you needed?”

  He searched through his memory for a moment. “I was wondering if you know where Father John stores parishioner information.”

  “Oh, there are cabinets in the third room past the office.”

  “No, I’ve gone through those. I’m talking about older documents, ones that go back to the early nineteen hundreds.”

  “I didn’t think our church was that old.”

  “It is. The settlement in these areas was mainly Christians from the south.”

  “Are you looking for someone in particular?” I asked. “Because I’m pretty sure there are old records in the tower.”

  “The tower?”

  “The church tower. Father John has the keys. I can get them for you.”

  “That would be great. I should change before Mrs. Windsor comes for her afternoon prayer. She may go into labor if she sees me dressed like this.”

  I could only imagine that as one orgasmic birth. She was one of the other five pregnant woman in Pace who could barely keep her belly upright and was past due. I closed the door behind Father John and went back to the kitchen. Looking at that broken faucet, which moments ago was still leaking water, and swept floors, I realized I’d forgotten how nice it was to have a man around the house. Since Mom’s heart diagnosis, I hadn’t found much time to date, and after the third jerk who didn’t understand what family meant, I gave up. Father Cameron was a family man, both figuratively and literally. Though he spoke little about his, when he did, it was from the heart. The entire parish looked up to him as if to a father figure. I bet he didn’t even know how much he meant to these people.

  I quickly put the kettle on and made honey lemon tea. I grabbed my phone, stuffed it into my jeans pocket, and went to seek out Father John. When I knocked on his door with a fresh cup of tea, he was hawking up another lungful.

  “Father John? I brought you some tea.”

  The room was dark. Curtains had been pulled to cover the bright sun coming in from the outside. I wasn’t sure how Father John was planning on leading this evening’s mass, but he always managed, and he never let Father Cameron take the lead. Come to think of it, I’d never heard Father Cameron lead mass, not even once, and I attended every Sunday.

  “Thank you, dear. You know, you remind me so much of Joanna. She used to bring me tea just like this.”

  “I don’t know any Joanna in town.”

  “She used to work here and live in the parish house. Then one day, she left and I never saw her again.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  “Pace used to be what a priest would call a living hell. Violent criminals, murders, and death.”

  “This small town?”

  He nodded. “Drugs, prostitution, money smuggling, tormenting our citizens…” He sighed.

  I still couldn’t picture the image he was painting. It was impossible to think of Pace as anything close to violent. But then again, Father John was old, and his memory became more like Swiss cheese every week. I didn’t like the way he looked. I didn’t like seeing him this weak. “Father John, tell me what happened.”

  “One day, they just left.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, there might have been a chess game involved,” he chuckled. “And a lot of God’s grace.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But he waved his hand in dismissal. As Father John squeezed a few more coughs into a tissue, I looked around his room. He liked to keep photographs of him and his parishioners in his office, but I hadn’t realized that he had them in his room as well. I was about to leave when my gaze caught a specific photograph. I picked it
up and off the mantle and brought it closer to my face.

  Is that my mother?

  The image was old, in predominantly sepia colors, but the resemblance was uncanny. She stood in front of what appeared to be a chapel. I didn’t have any family artifacts left over from my mother’s younger years. In fact, my mother had never kept anything from her childhood. Even if she had, I wouldn’t have known; after the house fire, we’d lost everything.

  I picked up the photograph and turned it over on the other side. I held my breath as I read the meticulous handwriting that was identical to my mother’s.

  Learn from yesterday, live for today, and hope for tomorrow.

  “Father John, where did you get this picture?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s my Joanna I told you about.”

  If I had any doubts about why my mother had sent me here before, they all disappeared. She had a reason. His name was Jack, and I had to find him no matter what.

  Chapter 9

  Cameron

  I climbed the oval staircase, turning left and up. The ominous echo of old brick underneath my soles made the hairs on my nape stand tall. The lightbulb on the next level flickered, and I focused on the shifting shadow of the steps ahead of me. I wasn’t one to get scared easily, but even I was having trouble keeping my cool. I wondered how many people had passed this way before me. I touched the railing at the side and felt old dust transfer to my palms.

  When I finally reached the top, I felt like I was in another world, and behind the wooden door I’d find Sleeping Beauty. I twisted the metal key in its lock and pushed the door open. The smell of age-old wood and paper, moss and musk overpowered the room. Across the attic, daylight shone through a single window, casting its perfect hologram in the disturbed dust.

  I didn’t have to venture far to realize the task ahead of me. As I stared at the lines of cabinets, stacks of boxes, and stray papers everywhere, I was afraid that I’d need more than two lifetimes to find this… grain of sand in the middle of the universe.

  The sound of footsteps shook the living ghost out of me, and for a moment I thought I was seeing a ghost, but then the shadow of a familiarly beautiful silhouette pushed up into the attic. It looked like my sleeping beauty was coming upstairs.

  “Father Cameron?” Her voice stirred something inside of me, and my mind immediately flew to this morning when I’d seen her standing in that kitchen, completely soaked.

  “Up here,” I called out, and then blew a breath of air over my face. The heat in this attic was squeezing the sweat out of my back.

  A moment later, she stepped through the door. Dressed in tight jeans and a similar white t-shirt to the one she’d lent me, Kate took my breath away.

  “You didn’t bring a flashlight?” I asked.

  “No, but it looks like I should have. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I’m just about to start, but I’m not really sure where the hell to start.”

  She gasped.

  “I’m sorry. It’s a joke. I didn’t mean real hell.” By the time I realized my choice of words, it was already too late. Kate was looking at me like she didn’t recognize me. She was looking at me as if I were a man, not a priest – and that was dangerous.

  “Oh, I’m not that good at church jokes,” she said.

  “Unless you have a tequila, right?”

  “Now that one was funny.” She laughed and then crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing them. “I wish I could say I was here with no ulterior motive, but that would be a lie.”

  Ulterior motive? That sounded more like a temptation.

  “There’s a lot of dust here. You’re going to get dirty,” I said. “What’s the ulterior motive?”

  “I’ve never been afraid of a little dirt.” She pulled her hand across her cheek, drawing a long smudge as she did so. Kate must have touched the dusty railing on her way up. She couldn’t have realized how cute she looked at the moment. I put my hands on my hips and once more scanned the long rows of cupboards.

  “I just found out that my mother used to live in Pace,” she said, surprising me by the comment.

  “And you didn’t know this before?”

  “My mother never talked about her past. She never talked about my childhood, either, and there’s no record of her in the office files.”

  “Wait – so you’re not originally from Pace?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Where are you from, then?” I already knew the answer from my brother, but I wanted to hear it from her. “And if you didn’t know this was your mother’s home town, why are you here? Sorry. That sounded rude.”

  “It’s all right. When my mother fell ill she also lost 99.999 percent of her speech capabilities. The only thing she said was ‘Jack Pace.’ You wouldn’t happen to know a Jack in this town, would you? Because I’ve looked everywhere.”

  I shook my head. In a matter of five minutes, Kate had managed to derail my mission to find a clue about where the Cortez family could have moved to.

  “I just want to make her happy, you know. It must be important if she keeps repeating his name. Well, at first I thought it was a man by the name of Jack Pace, but I’ve pretty much covered all of the country searching for him, and I couldn’t find him. Thinking that maybe she was talking about a man by the name of Jack, from the town of Pace, that’s how I got here.”

  “That’s a pretty long shot.” I knew exactly what searching for someone felt like, but even I had a bigger lead on the woman we needed to find than Kate had on someone by the name of Jack.

  “Oh, yeah? Then why does Father John have my mother’s picture in his bedroom? My mother was from Pace. There’s no question about it.” She bugged her eyes out at me.

  “Really? That’s a coincidence.”

  “No. That’s not a coincidence. Why wouldn’t she have told me about this place before? I feel stupid that it took me so long to figure it out.”

  I could find a very good reason someone would want to forget about this town, and his name was Cortez.

  “So where did you move from?” I asked again. “Brook mentioned you’re from the East Coast.”

  “Originally Montana. I moved to Long Island for work, and now I’m on a personal leave, four months into looking for Jack Pace. I’m not doing that great, by the way, because I haven’t found any trace of him yet.”

  I could stand there and listen to her talk all evening. It was… captivating.

  “Well, given how Father John has her picture, do you think your mother could have meant John from Pace?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’m sure she said Jack.”

  “What are you going to do when you find Jack?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. I’m assuming he’ll know my mother, so maybe he’ll give me the answers I’m looking for.”

  “Well, let’s dig in, then.” I moved over to the first file cabinet and pulled it open. Disturbed dust swirled in the air, forcing a few coughs out of me. I didn’t notice when Kate stepped up behind me until I caught her alarmingly arousing scent.

  “Wait. I know what I’m looking for; but what are you looking for? You mentioned older records?”

  When I turned around and saw her standing in a ribbon of light, I lost my thoughts. She looked stunning. “I want to acquaint myself with the town’s history and organize these records.”

  Did Kate just shiver? Her skin was peppered with goosebumps. She stepped sideways and pulled out another drawer. “I’ll start with this one, then.”

  Dust floated around her and she looked more beautiful than ever. I reached inside the top drawer of the cabinet in front of me and skimmed my fingers over the files. “It doesn’t look like it’s organized by year.” I pulled my fingers across the second row. “And not by last name either.”

  “Well, two pairs of eyes are better than one, right?” She smiled. “How about you let me know when you find the W’s? What letter are you looking for?”

  “C
’s. That sounds like a good plan, detective.”

  “What?”

  “I said, sounds like a plan, detective.”

  “I heard what you said, but why would you say that?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just a figure of speech.” I leaned my head to the side, scanning her shocked face. “Kate, were you a detective on Long Island? Because your search for Jack Pace would make a lot of sense then.”

  She sidestepped nervously as if contemplating whether she should answer me.

  “Yeah, I am. Or I was. I’m not sure if I want to go back. I know I’m not ready now and… it’s just that… there’s just a lot to think about before I make the decision.”

  “And you chose to spend your time in a dark attic with a priest, searching through thousands of files.”

  “Can’t think of a better place to be. You know, I’m glad you’re doing this.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, I always tell everyone that this parish looks out for them. I mean, Father John is always telling the kids stories of good winning over evil and small people taking down armies. He never loses hope. That’s part of the reason I became a detective. We can’t ever lose hope.”

  “I never want to lose hope either. What else does he say?” Maybe I should have had a longer chat with him? Maybe he was my key to finding Cortez. Thankfully Kate was feeling quite talkative today.

  “He mentioned the mafia, drugs, violence, and sex trafficking. Right here in Pace. Can you believe that?”

  When I caught her gaze, her mouth opened by a fraction, like she was trying to solve a mystery. Again, the level of her cuteness had no limits.

  “Where have they all gone?”

  “That’s what I would like to know,” I answered honestly.

  “Is there a specific last name I should be looking for?” she asked.

  The name was popular in the southern states; I couldn’t see any harm in allowing Kate to help me.

  “Cortez.”

  She stilled.

  “You know a Cortez?” I asked.

  “I used to go to school with a girl…” Her gaze shifted from left to right, then back left again. If I were a betting man, I’d say that she was lying.

  “What was her name?”