Holy Ruin (Rosetti Club Miami #1)

Chapter 1

Iwear my collar everywhere.

Not out of devotion — though that's what I tell my parishioners, and they believe me, because people believe what a priest tells them.

I wear it because it's the most effective repellent known to man.

Better than a wedding ring. Better than a cold shoulder.

A white collar on a reasonably attractive man broadcasts one unmistakable message: don't bother.

After eight years of practice, my gaze slides off beautiful women like water off glass.

The redhead at the post office. The nurse who brings her mother to Sunday mass in a sundress that tests the structural limits of cotton.

The college girls who drive down from Miami on weekends to pick strawberries at the farms and wander into town smelling like sunscreen and youth.

I see them the way I see the weather — present, irrelevant, nothing to do with me.

It's harder when they approach. When Mrs. Herrera's niece visits from Havana and leans across the pew to tell me she loves my homilies, her blouse doing things that have nothing to do with God's word.

When the new teacher at the elementary school finds reasons to stop by the rectory with questions about the parish history that somehow always require standing very close.

The collar handles it. I smile. I redirect.

I become so thoroughly Father Gabriel that whatever they think they see in me dies on the vine.

It works. It has worked for three years in this small, quiet town where nothing happens and nothing is required of me except performance.

The rest of the machinery helps. Five-mile run at dawn, fast enough that my lungs burn and my legs stop sending any signals except pain.

Cold shower after, standing under the spray until my skin forgets it can feel anything at all.

On good mornings, that's enough. On bad mornings — the ones where I wake up hard and aching from dreams I won't let myself remember — I run seven.

Sometimes eight. I eat plain eggs at the kitchen counter, standing, because sitting down for a meal feels like a pleasure I haven't earned.

Black coffee. Dry toast. The body gets fuel. The body does not get comfort.

Alma's Diner is where the town eats. I come here twice a week for coffee because pastoral visibility is part of the job, and because Alma herself — sixty-three, five feet of Cuban authority — would show up at the rectory and drag me out by the ear if I didn't.

"Father Gabriel!" She sets a café con leche in front of me before I've sat down. "You look terrible. Eat something."

"I ate at the rectory."

"All alone." She crosses herself. "Your mother would cry."

She says this every time. My mother has been dead for nine years, but Alma knew her, back in Miami, back where the Delgado name opens doors I've spent years trying to close. I drink the coffee because refusing Alma is not an option available to mortal men.

The diner is half full. Farmers. A couple of truck drivers. Mrs. Alvarez, who waves and mouths God bless you across the room. I wave back. The collar does its work: I am visible and untouchable, a man set apart. I open the parish budget on my phone and try to focus.

The bell above the door jingles.

I don't look up. People come and go at Alma's all day. There's no reason to look up.

But something shifts. A change in the ambient noise — conversation dipping for a beat, then resuming slightly differently.

The way a room recalibrates when someone worth noticing walks in.

I've been reading rooms since I was twelve years old, sitting in on my father's meetings, learning to track the subtle currents of power and attention.

The skill never left. It just went dormant.

I look up.

She's at the counter, sliding onto a stool with the easy grace of a woman who's comfortable in her own body.

Dark hair — loose curls past her shoulders, the kind of hair that looks like she just ran her fingers through it and called it done.

Olive skin. A face that's striking rather than pretty: strong jaw, full mouth, eyes that tilt up slightly at the corners.

She's wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and she looks like she just walked off a highway, and every man in the diner is pretending not to stare at her.

Including me.

My gaze should slide off. This is the moment where my years of discipline kicks in and I become Father Gabriel and she becomes weather.

It doesn't happen. My eyes stay on her like they've been nailed there, and something in my chest — something I haven't felt since long before the collar — does a slow, rolling turn.

She orders in Spanish. Fluid, easy, with an accent I can't place — not Cuban, not quite Mexican. "Café con leche, por favor. And whatever pie that is." She points at the case. She has good hands. I should not be noticing her hands.

Alma serves her, studying her with the frank appraisal of a woman who considers the diner her territory. "You're not from around here."

"Passing through." She takes a bite of the pie and makes a sound — quiet, involuntary, a small hum of pleasure that she probably doesn't know she made — and my hands tighten around my coffee cup.

"Passing through to where?"

"Haven't decided yet." She smiles at Alma, and the smile transforms her face from striking to devastating. "Anywhere that isn't where I was."

Alma glances at me. The glance says: interesting. I pretend to be absorbed in parish budgets.

"Running from something or running to something?" Alma asks, because Alma has never met a boundary she respected.

The woman laughs. It's a real laugh — throaty, surprised, like she wasn't expecting to find anything funny today. "Ask me again when I figure it out."

I should leave. I should finish my coffee and walk out and let her be a stranger who passed through Homestead and kept going.

Instead, I'm sitting here cataloguing the curve of her throat and the way her fingers wrap around the coffee cup and the small scar on the inside of her forearm that she touches absently.

Alma, because she is either divinely inspired or diabolically inclined, says: "Father Gabriel, come meet our visitor. He knows everything about the area."

I could kill her. I could genuinely, sincerely kill her and just seek forgiveness afterward.

I stand. I walk to the counter. The collar is doing nothing — worse than nothing, because the woman looks at it, then at me, and something flickers in her eyes that isn't the usual deference. Not dismissal either. Something more like: oh, that's interesting.

"Father Gabriel." I extend my hand like a man reaching into a fire.

Her hand is warm. Her grip is firm and brief and absolutely devastating.

"Sera." Just the name. No last name, no context.

She holds my eyes for a beat longer than casual.

Up close, I can see the amber in her irises and the faint circles under her eyes that say she hasn't been sleeping well.

She smells like something warm — vanilla, maybe, or coconut — mixed with road dust and coffee.

"Welcome to Homestead." My voice sounds normal. This is a miracle.

"Is it always this quiet?"

"Always."

"Good." She says it like quiet is a commodity she's been shopping for. Then she looks at me — really looks, not at the collar but at the face above it — and adds: "You don't look like a small-town priest."

"What does a small-town priest look like?"

"Older. Softer." She tilts her head. "You look like you should be running something."

The observation lands closer to the truth than she could possibly know. I almost laugh — genuinely almost laugh, and it's been so long that the muscles feel unfamiliar. "I run a parish. It's enough."

"If you say so." She's smiling again, and it's the kind of smile that has a dare in it. Then she turns back to her pie, releasing me, and I stand there for a half-second too long before returning to my table.

My coffee is cold. My hands are unsteady. My heart rate is doing something that belongs in a cardiology textbook, not a diner in Homestead.

I put money on the table and leave. I don't say goodbye to her.

I don't look at her again. I walk back to the rectory in the October heat and I stand under a cold shower for the second time today and I tell myself that she said she's passing through.

She'll be gone by tomorrow. By tonight, maybe.

She'll finish her pie and get back in her car and drive to wherever isn't where she was, and I'll never see her again.

The relief I should feel doesn't come.

Instead, I'm standing under cold water thinking about the sound she made when she tasted that pie. The small hum. The involuntary pleasure.

God help me.

Marisol calls at two, as if God has decided that today is the day He tests every wall I've built.

"Gabriel." Her voice carries Miami in it — sunshine and salt air and the hum of a city that never sleeps. "Please tell me you're not busy next Saturday."

"What's next Saturday?"

"The Foundation gala. Dad's too sick to go, and I need family there. The donors, the board — they need to see I'm not alone in this."

The gala. The word alone is enough to crack open a door I keep bolted.

I can smell it — the scent of a Delgado event: champagne and orchids and old money and the expensive perfume of women in couture gowns.

I can hear it: a string quartet playing beneath a hundred conversations, every one of them loaded.

I can feel the weight of a custom suit on my shoulders, the way a room full of powerful people opens when you walk through it, the electric current of being someone who matters in a world where everything is beautiful and everything is dangerous.

I haven't felt that current in eight years. My body remembers it the way it remembers Sera’s hand on mine at the diner — instantly, involuntarily, with a hunger that makes a mockery of cold showers and five-mile runs.

"Mari, I can't—"