I lean my head against the wall and close my eyes. “There’s nothing for us to figure out.”
I hear Auden step closer.
“You’re right about that,” he vows.
I open my eyes to see him avid and beautiful in front of me. For a long moment, we just look at each other. I can’t call it a standoff, because I know there’s no way Auden will stay frozen for long.
And I’m right.
“This isn’t over,” he repeats silkily, and then he starts for the door.
“Auden,” I half warn, half beg.
He turns the full force of his gaze on me once again. “You’re still mine, St. Sebastian Martinez. And you’re still going to my fucking gala.”
And then he leaves.
Chapter Five
Proserpina
I sleep all day, and most of the night, only waking up when Auden slides into bed and silently tugs me into his chest. The sheer pleasure of being held by him, of rubbing my cheek against his bare chest, is enough to have me back asleep within mere moments, and I don’t wake up enough to ask why St. Sebastian isn’t in bed with us.
I wake up again as I feel Auden’s lips against my temple and then him gently disentangling himself from me. I blink against the faint morning light, fussing a little as Auden leaves the bed and takes all his nice-smelling warmth with him.
“Sleep, little bride,” he says, tucking the blankets in around me. I’m conscious enough to recognize that his voice is sad, but before I can ask him why, he kisses me. “Rebecca’s team will be here to start tearing apart the maze in earnest, so you may as well sleep while it’s still quiet.”
I want to sleep—I still feel wrung out from Beltane and vaguely queasy from the Levonelle—so I don’t protest. “Did Saint have to leave for work?” I ask on a yawn, my eyes already closing.
Auden’s voice is careful when he says, “He does have work today.”
“Okay,” I mumble, and then I’m unaware once more.
I dream of Estamond.
She and Randolph sit on a red blanket between the standing stones at the edge of Thornchapel’s property. A summer breeze toys with their clothes as they pick at the remains of a picnic.
A lone bee has found its way to the half-eaten strawberries; it buzzes indecisively around the plate, hovering at the edges like a nervous guest who won’t sit down.
They have their shoes and jackets off, and Randolph is stroking Estamond’s bare foot. His hand is trembling and his lips are parted. His stare is pinned to where his large male fingers touch the dainty curve of her ankle. He looks like a man who is being very, very brave; he looks like he can hardly believe his own daring.
There are no rings on either of their fingers. They’re not married yet.
“Tell me more about it,” he says to her, and I know they’ve been talking, continuing some conversation started several days ago.
“It’s better to act than to speak,” Estamond murmurs, putting her hand over his. She pushes his hand up to her knee. Without stockings, her skin is warm and supple, and his fingers twitch underneath hers. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Randolph can barely speak. He knows he should pull away, he knows he should angle his body so she can’t see the shameful response he’s having to touching her under her skirts.
“I like to learn. ” His voice is quiet, but gruffly so. A man’s shyness, not a boy’s.
Estamond parts her legs, savoring the small grunt that leaves his lips as he watches. “One question, then.”
“Only one?”
“How else will I lure you out for more picnics?” she teases, and he meets her eyes with a look so tender and helpless that Estamond’s chest hurts. He doesn’t need to say it; they both know.
He doesn’t need to be lured or fed. He’s hers and has been since he first saw her on the village green as Thorncombe’s May Queen.
“Proceed with your question,” Estamond says, reaching out to finger the small curl behind his ear. His hair is a light, pleasant brown—Wessex mixed with Dumnonia—but near his temples and behind his ears, there’re a few strands of silver. She knows he is embarrassed by it, embarrassed by his age—he thinks it unseemly for a man of nearly four decades to desire a girl of not even two—but she likes it. She likes how big he is, how powerful his hands are, how thick hair dusts his forearms and the tops of his feet. She likes how it feels to be soft and new against his hard muscles, she likes all that power and experience giving way under the gentlest of her touches and the smallest of her smiles.
Randolph’s hand stays near her knee, but she can feel the quivering in his touch—he wants to pull away, he wants to push higher. A thick column of arousal is pressing against the front of his trousers. His voice is distracted when he asks, “Who is John Barleycorn?”
I know—with sudden dream-certainty—that they’ve been talking about the old ways. About the thorn chapel.
I also know, with the same certainty, that Estamond hasn’t said that name to him. Intentionally so. I know that when he says it—the innocent John, the haunting Barleycorn—fear tickles through her belly like the dry awns of a barley spike.
“Why do you ask?” she says.
Randolph stretches a little, ursine and contented, although Estamond notes with some fondness that the hand on her knee stretches too. Her bear’s not fully contented just yet. “The villagers were talking about when to go up and start scything the bracken in the hills—which means the barley in the lowlands won’t be far behind. Then one of them mentioned the name—they’d pour out their ale for John Barleycorn before they started.”
Estamond hates the name in Randolph’s mouth. She hates thinking of what that name means while the sun is shining on her silver-templed bear, a bear still too shy to reach for the freely offered honey beneath her skirt. Suddenly, she’s had enough.
“John Barleycorn is a memory, that’s all,” she says abruptly. “He is nothing to us.” And to keep Randolph from asking anything more—or wondering at her sharp tone of voice—she takes his hand and leads it up her skirts until she hears another bearlike grunt, and then there’s no more talk of John Barleycorn.
By the time I force myself out of bed, it’s late morning and the hedge removal in the maze is well underway. I peer out the bedroom window to see digging machines and backhoes and a veritable swarm of people in bright vests tearing the maze apart bite by bite. Chewing through one hundred and fifty years of beauty like it had no right to be there in the first place.
Carrion birds, ripping the flesh from Thornchapel’s bones.
The memory of my mother’s bones flashes through my mind, and I close my eyes, thinking of the white arch of her eye socket, of the dark mud St. Sebastian had scraped away from it. I think of him desperately murmuring a prayer in my ear, I think of Becket’s confession about that Samhain and what he saw. It should feel cathartic, maybe, to see something so quintessentially Thornchapel torn up beneath those machines, to see the land punished for the crime of hiding my mother from me, but it’s not cathartic in the least. It’s miserable, and I wish Auden would have stayed its sentence and let it be for another hundred and fifty years. Undoing the maze won’t undo Ralph’s sins no more than it will bring my mother back to life.
I’m full of contradictory thoughts and feelings by the time I’m down in the library with a cup of coffee and Sir James curled by the scanning station in an easy position for the idle foot-pets I like to give him while I’m working.
How can I love this place when it’s the place that killed my mother?
How can I feel so protective of it when I’m basically a stranger to it, and its own golden scion seems intent on scrubbing it down to the bedrock?
Estamond was protective of it too, I remember, and then look at the stack of books I’m supposed to be working on. They’re “scientific” agricultural treatises from the late eighteenth century, and I decide I’ll get back to the ruminations on the best soil conditions for barley in Devonshire in a minute. I set my coffee
down, and much to the disgruntlement of the German shepherd already rolled onto his side for tummy rubs, I start hunting through the stacks, climbing up one of the steep wooden staircases to access a far upper corner of the second level that I know holds some Guest family history. I want to see if I can find more about Estamond, or even just the time period when the Guests moved in and took the land from the Kernstows.
The day is one of intermittent drizzle and clouds, and so I’m listening to the rain patter softly at the glass and to the slide of leather and cloth as I tug at books to look at the covers when I hear footsteps. Expecting a lost construction worker or maybe Delphine wandering in from wherever she’s been curled up with her phone, I step over to the wooden railing that rings the upper story of the library and then beam when I see it’s my favorite priest.
“Proserpina,” he calls up, and before I can come down the stairs, he’s climbing up them, taking the steep risers two at a time with his long legs until he’s up here with me, pulling me into his arms for a solid embrace. I catch the woody, spicy notes of incense; I breathe them in, reminded of that day in his church when he trapped me against a wall and fucked me with a hand shoved down my panties.
As if knowing where my thoughts have gone, Becket asks in a low voice, “Can I kiss you?”
“Yes,” I say eagerly—then remember Beltane night and the promises Auden, Saint, and I made to each other. I’m a claimed submissive now, and I belong to someone. “Wait—I should ask Auden,” I whisper into Becket’s shirt. “I’m his now.”
“Oh, I know,” Becket says, and I’m not sure if I’m correctly reading the tone of his voice, so I lift my face to look up at him. He’s smiling in that priestly way of his—like happiness is the serious business of God—but there was something in his voice that seemed more serious still. Before I can ask him about it, he’s pulled his phone from his pocket and is showing me the screen. “Which is why I’ve already asked him.”
I glance down, and then I laugh a little. Leave it to the boys who’ve grown up with Latin lessons and horses to turn something like this into a mannerly, gracious exchange.
May I kiss Poe?
You may do whatever you like with her, Auden had replied. Provided she agrees and she’s returned to me happy.
“Well, then,” I say, still laughing when Becket’s mouth captures mine. His phone clatters to the floor as he grabs for my waist to haul me close.
You may do whatever you like with her.
I shouldn’t be so turned on by that, right? But hell. Every stroke of Becket’s tongue, every squeeze of his warm hands—it’s at Auden’s pleasure, it’s at Auden’s will. Auden is letting this happen, and so even though it’s Becket’s mouth against mine and even though it’s Becket’s long body crowding me up against the bookshelves, it’s like Auden himself is kissing me. It’s like Auden himself is slowly lighting my body on fire.
“You like this,” Becket whispers between kisses. “You like him loaning you out.”
Even the word loan makes my toes curl, and I’m searching for something to rock my hips against until Becket pushes a hard thigh between my legs as graciously and calmly as he would offer his shoulder for a parishioner to cry on. The pressure is so good, it makes me wild, and I paw shamelessly at the hard shoulders underneath Becket’s tab-collar shirt. A loaned toy already whining for more.
My voice is breathless when I finally answer. “I do like it. So much.”
“Auden knows you very well.” Becket’s hands move to my hips, helping me move against his thigh, as he kisses me again. “Even after such a short time.”
It has been a short time—it’s been less than six months since I returned to Thornchapel. And yet, it feels like so much longer, and I’m not sure why. I’m not sure if it’s because we knew each other as children, or if doing sacred things together out in the woods means you know someone much more intimately than normal, but whatever it is, it makes me feel like I’ve been bound together with Auden and Saint for much longer than a few months.
I wish Auden were here right now, so much. And St. Sebastian too.
“You taste so sweet,” Becket says, bending down to kiss my neck. “You taste like everything good.”
My wandering fingers find the collar of Becket’s shirt and run along the edges. He’s taken his priest collar off, and so the notch in the shirt reveals the base of his throat: strong and warm and vulnerable. I trace circles there as he tastes my mouth. “Is this okay?” I ask him as we break apart for a breath. “Are you sure?”
His eyes glow down at me, a deep blue made even bluer by the pale light pouring in from the north-facing windows. He gives me another serious kind of smile. “I am more sure about you than I am about anything else apart from God himself,” he murmurs, and then he brushes his lips against my forehead—a kiss that could be priestly if not for the thigh pressing so perfectly against my cunt.
I don’t take my eyes from his face. He looks so wholesome and handsome and holy, and even though I’ve carved out my own lush and forgiving version of Catholicism, I know that’s not everyone’s Catholicism. I know that Becket will face internal and external consequences for what he’s done because of me and Thornchapel, and I’m torn between trusting him and wanting to take care of him.
“I don’t want you to regret this,” I say. “Just because we’ve done things before—just because we were together for Beltane—doesn’t mean we have to do it again.”
“Are you telling me,” Becket asks with a crooked smile, “that it’s never too late to repent?”
I don’t answer him because I don’t really know what I’m trying to tell him. I think it’s presumptuous for one person to try to be another’s conscience; I also think being a good friend means you feel concern for their future as well as their present. I keep searching those flame-blue eyes, and finally say, “I want to be good for you.”
His smile fades into a sigh, but it’s a tender sigh rather than an impatient one. “I don’t believe you could be anything else. Do you love me?”
“Of course.”
“Do you love me like you love Auden? Or St. Sebastian?” Before I can answer, he’s shaking his head, eyes closing as if he’s ashamed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
I chew on my lip. “Do you want me to?” I ask. “Love you like I love them?”
The priest drops his forehead to mine.
“Yes,” he admits, voice troubled. “I do.”
He sounds so miserable that I ache for him. I cradle his wonderful face in my hands and lift my lips to his, giving him all the love with my body that I can’t give with my heart. “Please don’t be in love with me,” I beg in between kisses. “Don’t hurt for me. Please.”
“It’s too late,” he whispers back. “But I’ll never ask you for what you can’t give. I just need you to know what these kisses are for me, because they’re not a sin. For me, they are a sacrament.”
And what can I say to that? What should I say to that? As much as I love knowing things, I wish I could unknow this, I wish I could unlearn that Father Becket Hess . . . loves me. Not in the way a friend loves a friend, not in the way an occasional paramour loves a lover, but love-loves. And I want to give him all the love he deserves, I want to love him back with every molecule of my being, but it won’t be what he wants from me, it won’t be the same.
He pulls up and studies my face. “I mean it, Proserpina,” he says gently, correctly interpreting my worry. “Just this—what it is, what you can give me—is something I cherish beyond measure. The last thing I want is for you to feel like I’m waiting for you to give me more or change how you feel.”
“Becket . . .”
“And I’m sorry I said anything at all,” he tells me, running a thumb along my lip and then trailing it down my jaw to my throat. “It’s ridiculous, wanting more when I already have so much. When I’ve already been so greedy . . . ”
His thumb moves farther down, his whole hand, and then he’s palming a breast as h
e gives me another sweet kiss.
I decide something then and there. “You can always say it,” I tell him, meaning it with everything I am. “You can always tell me and show me. You can always let me feel it.”
I find the hand not currently cupping my breast and guide it under my skirt. As per Auden’s earlier request, I’m wearing nothing underneath it, and so the moment I tilt away from his thigh, he encounters me bare and wet and hot.
“Proserpina,” he groans.
“Let me feel,” I tell him, letting go of his hand so that mine are free to slide through his hair. “Let me feel every bit of it.”
The next kiss he gives me is not so sweet. It’s ardent and harsh, and it feels like he’s unleashing weeks and months of longing into me. His lips mold over my own, his tongue strokes against mine. One hand squeezes at my breast as the hand under my skirt searches me relentlessly. From the firm bud at the top to the tightly pleated button in the back, Becket refuses to let any part of me go unexplored. Unprobed. And soon the same fingers I’m pressing against are charting the hidden well inside my folds, pushing inside and sending me to my toes.
“I was here,” Becket murmurs. “Just a couple nights ago, I was right here.”
I part my legs as much as I can while still standing, and he groans again, the hand on my breast now falling to his belt. It’s the work of seconds for him to have his belt undone and his pants opened, and then his hands are under my skirt again, shoving it up to my waist so that there’s nothing but cool library air brushing against me. But he doesn’t push his way inside me. Instead he kisses me again, gripping my thigh to hold it against his hip as he explores my mouth.
The emptiness against my cunt is excruciating.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 7
