Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
LUCA
D ays go by, and Sloane and I fall into an easy routine. We tend to the animals we found out are on the property, find things to do during the day, and after dinner, we both find a book and curl up on the couch. It’s easy.
Too fucking easy, if you ask me.
It’s unnerving how much I don’t miss the church. It’s also bothersome how much I feel at ease in Sloane’s presence. The nagging attraction we have to one another is still there. I’ve found it especially hard in tight quarters not to brush against her by accident, but I’m finding it just as hard not to reach for her in moments of silence between us.
Like just now, she sighed as she turned the page on her book, and my hand instinctively splayed between us, palm up for her to take it.
Luckily, she hadn’t realized I’d moved, and I had time to put it back in my lap, but it was worrisome.
Sloane found the basement of torture this afternoon, and we spent a good ten minutes of uncomfortable silence down there looking over all the knives and devices hanging from the wall. It was hard not to notice all the sex toys amongst the knives and torture devices, too.
Ardesia hasn’t sent word about how things are going at home, and it’s bothersome, to say the fucking least. Mama has been prodding me via text messages to find out where I am and why I wasn’t at the church. She hasn’t stepped foot on the consecrated ground since Papa died, but I missed two dinners, and it was enough for her to overcome her differences with God to come looking for me.
Now John is up in arms and calls five times a day to check in, to which I reply with texts that I’m busy. I don’t know how much longer I can brush the two off when they’re working strategically together.
“I’m going to turn in,” Sloane says, pulling me from my head. I’ve been reading the same page for ten minutes, my eyes and mind unable to focus on whatever’s written.
“Okay. Goodnight,” I reply, pretending to re-read the mundane lines, even though I don’t have the patience for it.
I stretch out my legs before I realize she’s too close to them, and she trips over me with a scream, grasping for the table and couch to save her from the fall. I throw the book to grab her, catching her around the middle and hauling her to me so she doesn’t fall.
“Jesus, are you alright? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize how close you were passing my feet,” I say in a huff, my breathing speeding from the adrenaline.
Her face turns toward mine, and the fucking room goes as still as the woods when a predator is afoot.
“I’m alright,” she whispers, eyes growing heady.
Too close. Fuck, I’m too close.
Back up.
Set her back on her feet!
My mind shouts at me to do the right thing as we inch further into one another, losing our good sense as a pulsing attraction takes over.
“Thank you for catching me,” she says, and it’s laced with so much more meaning than me helping her keep off the floor just then.
Meaning that chokes me under its weight.
“I’ll always catch you, little dove,” I whisper back, losing my grasp on my good nature.
“Will you now, Father?” she teases, using my title like a double-edged sword to spear through me.
My cock hardens at the term, and I realize just how sick I am at its throbbing ache for attention. She’s twenty-one. I’m a man of the cloth. I shouldn’t feel this way about her. I’m supposed to be keeping her safe.
All of it flies out of my head when she eats up the distance between us and presses her soft lips to mine. The inner darkness I now know as desire takes hold of me.
I haul her on my lap, and she straddles over me.
My kiss gobbles up her moans, and I swallow them like the most decadent dessert I’ve ever tasted.
My tongue parts her lips, opening her mouth to me as it explores hers before pulling back. We’re doing a taunting dance, back and forth, moans building, and bodies heating.
She grinds on my erection, and my eyes nearly cross at the feel of her over me, commanding me.
She lets out a shuddering breath as I grasp her hips and rub her across my lap again, this time harder, slower.
“Luca,” she breathes, her hands slipping into my hair and tugging the strands taut in her hold.
“Sloane,” I answer, my tone soft.
My entire body feels like I’m standing too close to the sun, and she’s holding the reins. I can’t step back. My arms wrap around her, holding her snugly to me as she continues to writhe across my cock like a ruthless goddess who’s come to win a conquest.
I don’t feel like I’m sinning with her. I only feel fulfilled. Wanton. Hungry for more.
Her ruinous machinations don’t cease as she bites my lower lip and tugs my head back with her hold on my hair.
“We shouldn’t,” I tell her as she bombards me with her tongue once more, slipping it past my lips’ defenses to tease me.
“Who would know?” she asks.
Her question ambles through my brain, bouncing off synapses and neurons, trying to find a logical response. But there isn’t one.
Because she’s right.
Who would know?
“We would,” I finally reply, muttering it between heated kisses that I can’t stop giving her.
“Luca, please,” she begs, and my body surges with awareness that she needs something from me, and I’m denying her.
The way she grinds on me, kisses me, commands me, is bewitching. As if she’s Eve trying to tempt me to become humanity’s downfall beside her. Fuck if I’m not five seconds away from doing so, too.
The ruthless way she kisses me, mixed with the longing in each breath she draws between them, is electrifying my body to the point of madness. She’s the only cure for what ails me.
“Sloane, I can’t…” I plead, and she stops, a flush entering her cheeks deeper with embarrassment.
“I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. What am I doing?” She moves to get off my lap, and I hold her firm.
Her eyes brim with tears that I’ll never let her shed. “It was both of us,” I tell her.
She’s in silk night shorts, and I know she’s wet before I even slide my hand over the crotch of them.
“Luca,” she breathes, but it’s not a warning. It’s another alluring plead from her kiss-bruised lips as she grasps onto my shoulders.
“I know, my little dove. You ache, don’t you?” I taunt, finding my way beneath the shorts with my hand, my fingers finding her bare beneath them.
At this, my eyes roll back in my head in pure divinity. “Fuck, Sloane.”
A charming little gasp leaves her lips as my fingers slip through her wetness, swirling around her swollen bud a few times before sliding deeper toward her entrance.
“Let Father Russo make you feel better,” I tell her, losing my grip on sanity and leaning into the radiance of how it feels to be near her. To touch her.
“Please,” she begs, and it’s what presses me forward.
I sink two fingers inside her, and she bucks on them, moaning angelically.
She’s fucking exquisite.
The way she glides on my fingers, working her own body toward an orgasm that she so desperately needs.
“God, look at you,” I manage.
I look between us and watch where my fingers disappear in and out of her heat, and the walls of her ripple around me in waves I want to drown in.
Part of me wonders how I made it this long without touching a woman, without giving in to this unforgiving feeling. But I know how I made it this long.
Because I was waiting for her.
It’s sick, the thought.
I was waiting for her to say, ‘What age gap?’
I can’t dwell on the hatred growing in my belly, though.
Not when Sloane whispers, “Harder, Father. Fuck me harder.”
Words that’ll haunt me for the rest of my life, no matter where I go after this godforsaken cabin.
I do as she asks, gripping her shoulder and leaning forward to give her just what she needs. My fingers dive deeper inside her, and she captures my lips in a bruising kiss.
I didn’t think it was possible, but I grow harder beneath her, dick pressing painfully behind my boxers and throbbing for attention.
The kiss grows brutish, our teeth clashing, and I swallow her ardent moans of rapture. Her walls flutter around my fingers, and I know she’s getting closer, even before her nails dig into my shoulder.
“Don’t stop, Luca, God, don’t stop,” she begs, and my name from her lips uttered next to His has the dream I’d had days ago wafting back into my mind.
“You going to come for me soon, aren’t you, my little dove?” I tease, biting her lower lip playfully.
My dick is seeping pre-cum into my pants, and the sticky warmth of it brushes my arm as I angle my arm upward to add another finger inside her.
She gulps for air as I widen her further with my fingers.
“There we are, pretty girl; let your priest stretch your pretty cunt.”
I know I’m fucked the moment I give over to the carnal urges fluttering through my mind.
She’s sobbing with wails of pleasure, breaths shallow and quick as her eyes stay locked on mine as her mouth falls even further open, her eyes widening with an emotive expression.
“Don’t you dare close your eyes. Let me see you come for me,” I taunt, leaning into her and breathing in her pleasure with greed. It fills my soul with a pining ache so deep I know Lucifer is scrubbing his hands together as he expects one of God’s chosen to fall from grace.
Her avaricious cries denote her orgasm, and I watch as she fights to keep her eyes open as she shouts my name over and over as her walls convulse around my fingers.
“Good girl, little dove. Good girl,” I praise, not knowing who the fuck I’m becoming the longer I’m around her.
And it’s not her that’s doing the ruining. I’ve been this covetous, dark man all along, and the darkness was only waiting for the perfect time to surface.
She liquefies onto my lap as I remove my fingers from her center, licking them clean as she watches me with glazed-over eyes of bliss.
“That was…” I hear her audibly swallow.
I nod. I’m unable to form words or summarize what that was like in any semblance of a sentence.
“How will we ever quit this? How will we do what’s right?” she asks, and her question sinks to the bottom of my stomach like a message tied to a rock.
If I had to answer her, I know the words would go like this: I don’t know.
But that does neither one of us any good to have floating free in the universe, so I keep them to myself.
The anguish we’re inflicting on each other because we want to dive into this dangerous attraction together is astounding.
But we can’t.
At least, I can’t.
Which makes no sense, considering how I just behaved.
I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of a sword without shoes on, and careening over the edge would lead me to the safety of her arms. But in her arms, I wrap myself in sin so abominable that I’d land on the rung of hell beneath where the Devil himself dwells.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I mutter, looking up at the ceiling.
“Mmm,” Sloane agrees sleepily, and I stand to carry her to her bed.