Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SLOANE
I wake in a heavy haze. It’s bright, and the smell of sausage permeates the room. I stretch and groan as things pop from the action.
The night before comes flooding back as an ache between my thighs reminds me in a flash of what I let happen.
“Shit,” I mutter to myself.
My door is open, but I can’t see Luca from where I sit on the edge of the bed.
I make for the shower, stepping in and drowning out every devious memory with the spray of scalding hot water.
As if that’ll wash the sin off of you.
The thought makes my stomach flip, and it’s why I don’t hear that Luca has entered the bathroom.
I squeal when he knocks on the glass shower door.
“Sorry, I just wanted to know how you take your eggs.”
For someone who didn’t get off last night, he’s unhealthily perky this morning. Which he usually is. I, myself, am not a morning person. Becoming remotely human takes me a couple of hours and two coffees. I used to blame working at night for how cranky I was. Now that I’m here in the middle of nowhere, I know it’s just who I am.
“Over easy is fine with me,” I rush out, hoping the hot water covers the flushed sense of confusion swirling through my eyes.
“Alright. Breakfast is just about ready. Whenever you’re ready,” he tells me, moving off as if wholly unaffected by my state of undress.
And even though he made me come only hours ago, epically, I might add, my center reminds me just how attracted to him I am. With a sudden furious throb.
I look down, shaking my head at its audacity.
Not only is he my dead father’s friend. He’s a priest.
A fact that I continue to tell myself that my libido only takes as a challenge.
We’ve already gone too far, but it doesn’t matter. I want more.
And I know he does.
But convincing him that our time here can be between us will be a feat all its own. My life is in danger, and this is what my brain is choosing to latch onto. I’m fully aware that it’s demented and ruinous, but I want nothing more than to be ruined by him.
I growl at the argument going back and forth in my head for and against the idea of corrupting the poor priest who’s currently cooking me breakfast and ignore my body’s wanting throbs for attention as I hurry and wash and towel off.
Slipping into some comfortable clothes, I padded into the kitchen to find Luca shirtless and his abs on full display.
He turns. “Oh, sorry, I got grease on my shirt. Didn’t want it to set in, so I took it off and treated it.”
I bite my lip, looking toward the ceiling.
How am I going to survive this?
No answer comes, so I sigh as I sit at the table and wait for Luca to bring me the plate he’s piling food on. He snags a cup of coffee with steam wafting off the top, and I lick my lips at the succulent scents billowing off both the plate and the coffee as he sets them before me.
He straightens, giving me an eyeful of rigid muscles and dark chest hair. Not to mention the shadowy line of hair that leads somewhere that’s the sole reason for my sexual delirium currently. “Need anything else?”
That’s a loaded question, Father.
I swallow against the thought’s spine-tingling fingers that rake down my back and turn away from him.
“No, thank you,” I squeak.
He gives me a wicked little smirk and turns to make his plate. I can’t keep my eyes off him. Not when he sits down, not when he’s minding his own business eating his food. Not even when he looks like he’s in deep, transporting thought.
Last night changed something. The things he said. The way he made me come like I never have before.
There’s no going back for me, and if he treks the dismal road to desire I’m currently traveling, I’ll gladly hold his hand while we risk it all.
He has so much to lose, though.
I don’t want to be the reason he upends his entire life and starts over at thirty-eight.
I swallow down coffee and finally turn my gaze away from him.
My thighs press together, and my belly grows hungry with another craving, my mouth watering for something other than the food on my plate.
I stand abruptly, grabbing my plate and cup, heading for my room. “I’m going to eat in my room. Thank you for breakfast,” I announce, knowing I look foolish. But I can’t remain in that heavy force field that Luca Russo is creating.
It’s nearly fucking impossible to breathe when I’m around him.
“Alright?” I hear him say, confusion braiding into his tone at my hasty exit.
I pick at my food and let my coffee grow cold as I sit on the bed, head lolled back on the headboard as I contemplate the situation I’ve gotten myself into.
However, if I hadn’t snuck away from Luca, I’d still be back at the rectory in the same infuriating conundrum as here.
It baffles me I’ve never found someone who makes me feel like he does, and then, here he comes, with all his soft touches and concerning gazes.
He’s the problem.
My mind’s unsound reasoning doesn’t help matters. I roll my eyes and cross my arms over my chest in defense.
“Sloane?”
Great, here he comes again.
“I’m sorry, Luca. I’m just feeling off-balance today,” I snap, keeping my eyes averted in case he still has no shirt on.
“Do you need me to get you anything? I can have one of the guys find a medic?”
I sigh, exasperated with his kindness and willingness to take care of everything and anything for me, because it only draws me in further.
Just go away before I do something we both regret!
My mind isn’t wrong. Those are the words I should shout at him, I keep my lips shut.
“Not off-balance in that kind of way, Luca. I’ll be fine. Thank you for checking on me, though,” I say curtly, hoping he takes my answer and the hint and goes and makes himself busy with something else.
“Mm, I see,” he says in a deep, dour tone that makes my toes curl into the mattress. He sits on the edge of the bed, putting his arm over my waist and resting his weight against the mattress as he leans closer.
His other hand tucks my hair behind my ear, and I’m jubilant at the attention, but I quickly scold myself for letting my thirst for him grow.
He’s a priest, he’s a priest, he’s a priest.
The chanting doesn’t help when he leans his face closer. “You mean you’re off-balance because of what happened last night? How I made you come for me?”
I nearly fucking choke.
Who is this man, and what is the wilderness doing to him?
“Luca, please.” I shake my head at him. My eyes plead with him to walk out of my room and leave this alone.
“I’m growing weary, Sloane. Tired of fighting this savage wanting between us. It’s eating me alive.”
“You have to be strong,” I tell him.
Pot, kettle.
“Do I? Because after you went to bed last night, I wondered if you weren’t right.”
I swallow. What the hell had I said in my aroused stupor that he’s taking as wisdom?
He says, “About how no one has to know what happens while we’re here.”
He leans even closer, and my lids grow heavy under the weight of his teasing presence.
“Well, you shouldn’t listen to me. I was just greedy for you last night,” I admit, trying to keep my wits about me.
But his lips dust over mine, and a mewling whimper makes its way out of my throat, lighting up the space surrounding us with a shade of rouge that’ll likely alert hell to our activities.
“As you are now?” he asks.
I open my eyes to see his pure, voracious appetite dancing in his, and I know it will be hard to get him to rein it in because I don’t want him to.
I want him to splay me on this bed like the last fucking supper and watch as he devours me like a starved man who finally has food in his grasp.
“Well, little dove, are you wet right now? Are you ravenous?” he asks, and his tone has dipped into a tempestuous octave that I can’t fight.
I nod. “So wet. So hungry,” I whisper against his lips.
“This craving for you is insatiable. I fear if I give in, it will only grow,” he admits.
I nod in agreement. “We can’t… You can’t…” My words trail off as he works his hand down the front of my sweatpants.
There she goes. The logical little angel that lives in my brain and tells me what not to do. She’s gone. Left the fucking building at the first scrape of his touch.
However, the manic little bitch in the red leather, dangling her feet over a throne fit for a queen of hell, holding a pitchfork, she’s alive and well and egging me on.
“God, you’re soaked for me,” Luca whispers, slipping his fingers through my pussy lips and over my clit a few times, toying with me.
I can’t find words for how it feels to be touched by him.
To be near him.
This is madness.
I’ve died, and this is my hell.
“Please.” I’m back to begging. So soon, too.
“If I’m going to go to hell anyhow,” he says, removing his hand from my pants and fishing around his pocket for something.
He tugs out his rosary, and I watch as he shoves it down my pants.
The cold beads make me hiss, but then as he rubs them over my clit, back and forth, I arch into his touch, scooting forward, and leaning my weight on my hands as my head lolls back.
“Luca,” I whimper.
He stops moving his hand. “Father Russo, little dove.”
It feels wicked and wrong to call him that, but it also makes a thrill rush through my veins that he’s too weak to this lust between us to fight it any longer.
“Father Russo,” I correct, and he moves the beads again.
“Take these infernal things off,” he says, and I tug my pants and panties down, toeing them off the edge of the bed.
When I’m bare, I let them fall back open, and Luca gets between my legs and looks down at me, dangling the rosary over my spread-open pussy.
“So fucking beautiful. A cunt molded by God himself.”
His words cause a sweltering heat to build in my belly, and I lick my lips as I watch him plot his next move on my body like a man on a mission.
His cock is so hard behind his sweats, and I remember how it tasted to have him in my mouth in the confessional. How it felt to kneel at the feet of a man with so much power and command.
“Father, please,” I beg, and it seems to stir something feral in him.
He shoves the beads inside me, leaving the dangling cross in his hand to tug them back out.
“Do you know how you’ve tormented me since I saved you? How you’ve taken up every cavern in my goddamned brain?” His tone is distressed, and I’m worried about what he will do with the beads he stuffed me full of.
Half of me wonders if he’s planning a full-on exorcism of whatever dark demon is inhabiting my body and making me drag this godly man to hell with me.
Before I ponder the thought, he slowly tugs the beads out of me. They massage my insides as they move back into his hands.
“I dreamt I tied you to the cross on the apse,” he admits, and I nearly stop breathing at his admittance.
When the last of the beads is out of me, I sigh in relief, but my heart is racing.
It feels like the thin, punishing veil of a wall he’d erected to keep away from me has somehow shattered from last night to today, and even though I know I should be the air of reason, I don’t want to be.
And I won’t dwell on the guilt associated with that fact, either.
“Tell me about your dream,” I whisper, lifting to look at where he’s grinning fiendishly up at me from between my thighs.
“Oh, little dove, it was a doozy. You sure you can handle it?”