“You have to discuss her some time, honey.”
Scrubbing a hand over his face he asked miserably, “Do I?”
“I’m surprised you don’t walk around looking like some ninety-year-old, all stooped over like.”
Tristan smiled in spite of himself. “Let me guess… Because of the heavy burden I’m carrying.”
His grandmother grinned. “You said it, not me.”
“Nana, please,” he implored hoarsely. “I know you mean well. But can you please just drop it? I don’t want to get into this right now.”
“Don’t or won’t?”
“Either or.”
“Something is weighing on you.”
In lieu of a reply Tristan picked up his untouched milk. Downing the entire sixteen ounces in one continuous, impressively fast guzzle, he plunked the empty glass down on the table, canted toward his grandmother until they were nose-to-nose, and looked her straight in the eye.
Slowly and quietly he told her, “Whatever lead coffin you think I’ve been schlepping around for the past decade, Nan… I’m not.”
As usual his grandmother was having none of it. Thin, penciled eyebrows drew together in a frown. “Let me tell you something, boy. I’ve known you since you were nothing more than a randy sparkle in your daddy’s eye, so do not, not for a single second believe you can bullshit me. Sure as sugar you have things needing unloading and I want to know what and I want to know now.”
Blowing out a breath of exasperation, Tristan collapsed back in his seat. “Why aren’t you listening to me?”
Charlotte Cleary narrowed her blue eyes and briefly regarded her beloved but bullheaded grandson before pushing herself away from the table. Taking off her apron, she walked to the back door, turned to face him with arms folded across her matronly chest, and stood in front of it like a bouncer at a bar.
Doing her best Clint Eastwood she rasped, “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear.” Punk. “One, you’re going to tell me what’s going on. Two, you’re going to tell me what’s going on. And three…you’re not leaving here until you do. Not unless it’s through me. Literally.”
For a stunned moment Tristan just stared at her. When he realized the diminutive woman was dead serious, he threw back his head and brayed with laughter. “Oh Nan. Nana.”
“You think I’m playing here, boy?”
“You’re priceless,” he chortled, wiping away a tear. “Fucking priceless.”
Before she could think of a retort, Tristan was striding toward her. The next thing Charlotte Cleary knew, she was being lifted off her feet by burly arms locked around her in a bear hug.
“God I love you,” he declared with exalted affection.
He swung his grandmother around like she was a child, and with her face smothered against his chest her litany of muffled protests went unheard, and unheeded.
When she finally managed to twist her head sideways she gasped, “Put me down you big brute, I can’t breath.”
Still chuckling, Tristan did as she demanded.
The unintentionally comic reprieve may have broken the tension and lightened his mood but it had no effect on changing his mind. As he escorted the fiesty old woman back to the table he reaffirmed, “I’m still not discussing her. Nice try, though.”
“Tristan…”
“Nana… You know how I hate to—”
“—fucking repeat myself,” grandmother and grandson finished simultaneously.
Tristan’s face formed a frown. “Yeah, well, glad we go that straight,” he muttered.
Resuming their places at the table, they sat side by side in stilted silence—grandson chipping away at a piece of uneaten crust with his fork, grandmother fastidiously sweeping up microscopic crumbs with her hands.
“Her,” Nan murmured, as a thought took root. “It’s curious how it’s always her you don’t want to talk about. Not Kady. Not Kadence. You can’t say the girl’s name out loud, can you, honey?” She ignored Tristan’s don’t-go-there glare. “Then tell me, when was the last time her name left your lips?”
He didn’t need to scour his memory bank to come up with an answer. It was just the other night at Mo O’Malley’s when he found Kady practically passed out in the utility closet.
Open your eyes, Kadence.
Well he couldn’t very well have called her, “hey you.” But Nan was right. He’d said Kady’s name a thousand times in his head but never aloud. Speaking her name meant giving credence to her existence, and to him she was smoke and mirrors, not flesh and blood. Revenant instead of real. To see Kadence Janacek as anything else was to keep her alive in his heart, instead of where she belonged, in his hate.
“Christ, Nana,” he swore on a sigh. The fork he’d been toying with clattered to his plate as his hand abandoned it for his hair. “You just couldn’t leave it alone.” His fingers plowed through the thick sandy strands.
In order to keep on living, Kady had to be dead to him. How could he make his grandmother understand that without coming across as batshit crazy? God, to think he was going to give up the priesthood for that woman. Was willing to give up everything for her.
For her worth is far above rubies.
Proverbs 31:10, describing a woman of virtue. A passage he’d ascribed to her. But that was before. Before the lying little tramp cheated on him, proving herself to be about as far from virtuous as a woman could get. The way she looked yesterday laying there on her bed, nightgown in disarray, hair wild, face flushed… Like a wanton, a harlot, a woman who’d just been soundly fucked. Like a woman asking to be soundly fucked.
God save him but he wanted to. Wanted to rut between her legs like an animal. Wanted to hear her moan and pant and gasp in mindless rapture while he pistoned in and out of her slick hot pussy. Wanted to hear her cry out his name and feel her cunt clench his cock as she came. Hard. The way he liked it. But more than anything, Tristan had wanted to gather Kady up in his arms and simply hold her. Hold her like he used to. The way he had when he once loved her.
“So what did she want to see you about, honey?”
“Apparently she had something to confess.” He gave a scornful sniff. “Something so important it took her eleven years to get around to it.” “Did you know she actually snuck into the box?”
“I heard.”
“Right. Of course you did.”
“Go on. What was it is Kady needed to get off her chest?”
“Hell if I know. At the time I wasn’t exactly receptive to having a little tête-à-tête with her. She caught me completely by surprise. Christ, just when I thought there wasn’t anything more that girl could do to shock me… The way she just showed up like that.”
“Maybe she didn’t give you a heads up because she was afraid you’d refuse to see her.”
“She had every right to be afraid.”
“Well clearly she knows you.”
“Like all the women in my life, apparently.” He’d meant it sardonically but realized how it sounded. Kady a woman in his life? She wasn’t an anything in his life.
“So what happened?”
“Nothing. Shit. I admit I didn’t handle the situation as well as I maybe could have. She’d probably tell you I was acting like a consummate prick. I, uh…” He began fidgeting with the fork again. “I may have said something… along the lines of… if I didn’t see her face for a hundred years it wouldn’t be long enough. That was the G-rated version, anyway. I essentially let her know her I wasn’t interested in a damn thing she had to say.”
“Which was a lie.”
“It’s the truth, Nan. I don’t want to hear any more of her excuses. That’s all she’s ever given me. Excuses for not being able to tell me anything. To talk to me. Confide in me. I was her fiancé, for chrissake. The man she’d planned on spending the rest of her life with. The supposed love of her life. The one person in the whole world she should’ve trusted with the truth but insisted she couldn’t.”
Taking a breath to replenish his oxygen supply, he lowered
his voice to a dull rasp. “You know what the most maddening part is? There was only one thing I wanted her tell me. Only one I ever needed to know. One.”
“And what’s that, honey?”
“Why. Just… why.”
“Why?”
“Why she did it. Why it happened.”
“You mean what happened.”
“What?”
“What happened.”
“Nan, I know what happened. The whole damn town knows what happened. She was screwing some guy behind my back… for who knows how long… got herself pregnant… ended up throw— Sorry, falling down a flight of stairs and… Well, you know the rest as well as anyone.”
“Bullshit,” Nan condemned. “All of it!”
“I was there with her at the hospital. Sitting at her bedside. Me. Not the SOB she was sleeping with. He was nowhere to be found. No, it was the idiot she was engaged to who was holding her hand when they told her she’d lost the baby. A baby, by the way, the aforementioned idiot didn’t even know about, and despite the rumors had zero chance of fathering.” Tristan’s breath stuttered. “I didn’t need Maury Povich to announce ‘you are not the father’ to know the kid couldn’t possibly have been mine. The two of us didn’t even— I mean we never—” He squeezed his eyes against the rising emotion. “I wanted to wait until we were married.” With an embarrassed shake of his head he muttered, “Stupid, I know.”
Placing a hand on his shoulder, Nan said, “It’s a rare man willing to wait, honey.”
He let out a derisive snort. “Turned out she was the one who wasn’t willing or able. So yeah, I pretty much know everything that happened.”
“You sure?”
His eyes went wide at his grandmother’s jaw-dropping insinuation. “What are you getting at? You’re not making any sense. Of course I’m sure!”
Tristan’s hand was wrapped around the empty milk glass, clenching it so tightly his knuckles looked like a row of white marbles. Fearing he might actually break it, Nan gently pried his fingers loose and sandwiched them between her palms.
“No arguing Kady was ten weeks pregnant. No disputing she suffered a miscarriage. But all that other stuff… the vicious speculation she tried aborting the baby on her own… that she didn’t even know who the father was… that you were but didn’t want it… Those were terrible, hurtful untruths and yet people willingly accepted the gossip as gospel. They were wrong about you, honey. Is it such a stretch then to consider you might be mistaken about Kady?”
His grandmother’s words settled on Tristan’s shoulders as heavy and uncomfortable as a wet wool blanket. He didn’t want to consider the possibility there may have been something more to Kady’s betrayal, that perhaps it wasn’t a betrayal at all. But ever since that horrible day in the hospital, he’d clung to the only reality he knew. She’d been carrying another man’s baby. What made it worse, she refused to say whose. To protect the guy was the obvious assumption. He was probably married.
“Not buying it, Nan. I know you were always fond of Kad—her, but you have to accept that she wasn’t who you thought or hoped she was. If there’s a victim in this narrative, it’s me. I’m the one deceived. I’m the one who pulled the knife out of his back. His heart.”
“Tris—”
“I can appreciate what you’re trying to do. Really. But painting her with another brush isn’t going to make me see her any differently. Facts are facts and trying to plant a seed of doubt in my mind can’t change what happened. Nothing can do that short of a time machine.”
“ ‘Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ ”
“Really, Nana? You’re quoting the Holy Book, to me? Next you’re going to tell me to love thy enemy and turn the other cheek.”
“I know it’s not easy to practice what you preach, but think about it. If you can’t forgive and you can’t forget then what’s left? You have to pick one or the other.”
“She doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.”
“Oh, honey…” In a gesture of pity as much as love, Charlotte Cleary cupped the side of her grandson’s face. “Don’t you see? Forgiveness isn’t what you do for someone else. It’s what you do for yourself.”
Tristan stared across the room, giving his grandmother the impression he was reflecting upon her words when in actuality he was counting Mississippi’s to keep his emotions from mushrooming like an atomic cloud.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said solemnly. “Forgiveness is me giving up my right to hurt her for hurting me. And that’s not anything I intend to do anytime soon.”
Then he stood up, planted a kiss on top of his Nana’s head, and before walking out the door thanked her for the cherry pie.
fourteen
Thick, white steam enshrouded the bathroom as he stood in the shower with his back to the sprayer, head hanging limply to his chest as hot water pelted his neck and shoulders. Tristan had been standing that way close to fifteen minutes and didn’t give a rat’s ass how wasteful he was being. Every muscle was tight as a nun’s cun—fist and the torrent of wet heat felt too damn good to move.
It wasn’t only his body that ached. His teeth did as well from all the goddamn gnashing they’d been doing over the past seventy-two hours. It wasn’t difficult to surmise the reason. Merely evoking her face was enough to put another crick in his neck.
He already looked like a giant pink prune and upping the hot water wasn’t doing his shriveled skin any favors, but thinking about Kady was causing his muscles to bind up again and he was afraid all the progress made to loosen them would be lost. He didn’t want to make room in his head for thoughts of a waif with moon-colored hair and cornflower-blue eyes. Fuck her haunting haunted eyes, and fuck her for the effect she still had on him.
Why couldn’t she just let him be? And why the hell couldn’t he keep her out of his goddamn thoughts. By telling Kady off at Saint Ben’s the other day his intent had been to get her to stay the hell away from him for good. His hope was to banish at least her physical presence from his life so someday he might find some damn peace.
The father scoffed at his own naiveté. Finding peace where that woman was concerned was as likely as finding a snowman sunbathing in the Sahara. He’d laugh if there was anything funny about it.
Having forgotten he’d washed himself already, Tristan reached for the shower gel and pumped out another generous palmful. As he lathered up his torso, his hand accidently grazed his pierced nipple, causing him to shudder.
Priest with a piercing? Yeah, he got that it was an aberration. Perhaps considered by some an abomination. Surprisingly, the barbell wasn’t put in until after he’d reaffirmed his vow of chastity, and definitely not for the intended purpose of heightening arousal. Strange as it sounded, he wore the damn thing as a daily reminder—that sex was fleeting, the soul eternal, and what he was missing by being celibate could never compare to what he’d be losing if he weren’t.
It was his version of the “elastic band technique”, snapping a rubber band on your wrist to stop negative thoughts (or in this case, prurient ones) and was successful ninety-percent of the time. Which unfortunately meant there was that remaining ten.
As his mind conjured Kady in that diaphanous nightgown, Tristan’s hands wandered lower, soaping his hips, his pelvis, his groin…. and tightly squeezing his eyes did nothing to shut out the vision of those impudent nipples poking through the gauzy cotton. Fuck, it wasn’t the damn nightie he couldn’t get out of his brain. The sight of her bare tit was burned into his retinas. That alabaster globe tipped with that hard pink nipple ringed by that perfect pink areola… Christ God, he could feel it even now.
The fullness, the heft, the fucking unbelievable squishy firmness… His fingers had closed over as much soft, warm flesh as would fit within the span of his hand. Like pretty much everything about him Tristan’s hands were big yet couldn’t contain all of her. Which he found hot as hell. It was all he could
do yesterday not to rip that goddamn gown off her. If he thought he was screwed before… After seeing her, touching her, he was fucked up the ass sideways.
Looking down, he watched the fingers of his right hand close one by one around his soap-slicked semi, tempting him to do something he hadn’t done in fucking forever. Something that would undo in five minutes what had taken him five years to become. Master of His Domain. With a single impulsive act he would bludgeon to death the command he’d held over himself since recommitting himself to Christ and Church.
Each of you will control his own body and live in holiness and honor, not in passionate lust.
Admittedly, during nights when sleep wasn’t forthcoming, when he’d lay wide-eyed in bed staring into the darkness, his mind would start to wander along with his hand. Memories and fantasies about women would follow—how they felt, smelled, tasted—inevitably leading to some shaft rubbing and nutsack fondling. Yet that’s as far as it ever went. He couldn’t even recall the last time he actually rubbed one out, coaxed cum from his cock on purpose.
As his tumescent member pulsed in Tristan’s hand like some live thing, he stared at it curiously seeming not to recognize his own dick in a fully aroused state. But if his brain didn’t know what to do with it anymore, it was a sure bet his body still did. With one hand bracing the wall in front of him, the other began the up and down, tip to root stroking motion ingrained in male DNA.
For a moment he watched transfixed as his fist took long, languorous pulls on the growing appendage. Oh yeah… Arching his neck back, he closed his eyes and allowed himself a moment to simply enjoy the sensation without guilt or self-censure. Oh fuck yeah… Just five more strokes, he told himself. Okay, maybe ten. Just ten more. Then he’d stop. It appeared he was going to stay true to his word until a picture of cherry-red, barely-there panties popped into his head. Oh fuck.
It wasn’t the panties themselves that started him pumping with all the hormone-fueled frenzy of a horny teenager but the sneak-peek he’d gotten of Kady’s pussy. Sweet baby Jesus, that glorious golden pussy. Just picturing it was enough to unleash the load building up in his balls.
FATHER: Men of the Cloth - Tristan (Forbidden Priest Romance 1) Page 12
