Chapter 31 - Gabriel
Ifind her in the main kitchen at La Sirena. Alone. Here.
Crossing the space in three strides, my hand closes around her wrist, and I turn her to face me.
"Don't," I say.
One word, low, stripped of everything except what's underneath.
"I wasn't—"
"You were mapping exits. I can see it on your face.
" My other hand comes up to her jaw, tilting her head so she has nowhere to look but at me.
"You've been mapping exits since the day I met you.
Every room, every conversation, every time someone gets too close.
" My thumb traces her cheekbone, and my voice drops. "That's over."
"Gabriel—"
"You're not disappearing. Not anywhere. Not to some place where you convince yourself that surviving alone is the same as living.
" I step closer, my body pressing hers against the counter's edge, and there's nothing controlled about it.
The prince, the priest, both gone. Just the man, raw and certain and done waiting.
"I killed for you yesterday. I am not standing in this kitchen watching you calculate the distance to the door. "
Her breath catches.
My fingers squeeze her jaw. "I love you, Seraphina, and women I love don't get to leave. Okay?"
"I wasn't going to leave," she whispers.
"Good." My forehead drops to hers, and the fierceness cracks just enough to show what's behind it — not possession, not Julian's kind of ownership, but the raw terror of a man who's lost everyone he's ever loved and just found the one he'd burn the world to keep.
"I need you to stop thinking about it. I need you to stop keeping one foot out the door and both hands on the exit strategy. I need you here. All the way here."
My mouth finds hers before she can answer, and it's not a careful kiss. This is the kiss I've been holding back, years of denial breaking open against her lips. My hands move to her hips, lifting her onto the counter, and she wraps around me like the answer she hasn't said out loud yet.
"I'm here," she says against my mouth. "I'm staying."
I've spent years listing the things my hands aren't allowed to touch.
Women's skin. My own cock on the nights when the discipline cracked.
Years of inventory management, of treating desire like contraband, and now Sera is on my kitchen counter with her legs wrapped around my waist and I can't remember a single reason I ever stopped wanting this.
"Say it again."
"I'm staying, Gabriel."
My hands tighten on her thighs. Hers grip my shirt. Dinner can wait.
Everything can wait except this.
She said it twice and I'm going to make her say it again. Not because I don't believe her but because the sound of it rewires something in my chest that's been broken since I was twenty years old.
I pull back just enough to see her face. Her lips are swollen from mine, her eyes dark, her pulse visible in her throat. That throat.
The contrast should horrify me. Yesterday I killed a man with these hands.
The steadiness of it, the precision — that should make me recoil from touching her.
But I'm done making penance out of pleasure.
I've spent years treating my desire like a weapon.
Tonight I'm finding out what it does when I let it be something else.
"Say it again," I tell her, and my voice comes out low and rough and nothing like a priest's.
Her hands grab the front of my shirt. "Make me, Father."
Christ. This woman.
I kiss her hard, one hand cradling the back of her skull, the other gripping her hip to pull her flush against me.
She gasps into my mouth when she feels how hard I am, and the sound does something primal to my brain.
Not the careful arousal of the sacristy or the desperate collision on the altar.
Something simpler. Something that says: mine, and I'm done pretending otherwise.
Her fingers find the hem of my shirt and pull it over my head. I let her, arms up, and when her hands land on my bare chest her palms are warm and sure and I shudder like she's the one with holy water.
"You're shaking," she says.
"I'm not."
"Gabriel." Her thumb traces the muscle above my hip, moving down. "You're shaking."
I am. Not from shock. Not from what happened in the hotel in New York.
From the sheer overwhelming volume of wanting her without any barrier left between us — no collar, no guilt, no ghost of Elena standing in the corner of every room where I touch a woman.
The barriers fell today, all of them at once, and underneath there's just this: hunger so sharp it's almost pain.
"You want these hands on you?"
She takes my right hand and puts it on her breast, over the silk of her blouse. Holds it there. "I want them everywhere."
The blouse has buttons. Small ones, pearl-coloured, and my fingers are too big and too impatient for them. I undo three before I give up and pull, and the buttons clatter across the kitchen floor.
"That was silk," Sera says.
"I'll buy you another one."
"With what money? You're about to quit your job."
I laugh against her collarbone, and the laugh surprises me. I can't remember the last time I laughed during sex. Maybe never. The encounters before Elena were urgent, competitive, the Delgado prince performing. Elena was intense and earnest. And after — years of nothing.
But Sera makes me laugh, and the laughter doesn't kill the want. It feeds it.
Her bra is simple. Black. The clasp is in the back and I get it on the first try, which feels like a minor miracle for a man who hasn't undressed anyone in nearly a decade. Her breasts spill free and I cup them both, running my thumbs over her nipples, watching them harden under my touch.
"God," I breathe, and it's not blasphemy. It's the closest thing to prayer I've said in weeks.
She arches into my hands, and I bend to take one nipple into my mouth.
The sound she makes when I suck, a broken little moan that she tries to swallow, goes straight to my cock.
I want to hear every sound she's been holding back.
Every moan she stifled in the sacristy, every gasp she swallowed on the altar because someone might hear.
Tonight, let them hear.
I work her nipple with my tongue, teasing it to a stiff peak, then switch to the other while my hand slides down her stomach to her waistband.
Her trousers have a button and a zip, and I'm better with these than the blouse — one hand, quick, efficient.
She lifts her hips off the counter and I pull the trousers and underwear down together, dropping them on the floor on top of the ruined blouse.
Sera naked on my kitchen counter. My mother’s club kitchen, and Sera's body.
I've served communion to hundreds of people. Placed the host on their tongues with reverence and care. I have never, in all my years behind the altar, felt anything as sacred as this woman bare in front of me with kitchen light on her skin.
I drop to my knees.
The position of prayer. The position of worship. We've done this before — on the altar, the symmetry of confessional and supplication. But this is different. No transgression fuelling it. No stolen hour in a church. Just a man on his knees because there is nowhere else he wants to be.
I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh and she jolts, fingers finding my hair. I kiss higher, taking my time, tasting the salt of her skin, feeling the muscles in her legs tense as I get closer. Her breathing has gone ragged. Her fingers tighten in my hair.
"Gabriel—"
"I've been kneeling in the wrong direction for eight years," I murmur against her skin. "Let me make up for it."
I put my mouth on her and she comes apart.
Not immediately — I'm not that arrogant.
But fast, faster than I expected, because she's already soaked, already swollen, and when my tongue finds her clit and presses flat she makes a sound that I will hear in my dreams for the rest of my life.
A raw, unguarded cry that bounces off the kitchen tiles and says finally, finally, finally.
I eat her like communion. Slow, reverent, thorough.
My tongue works in long strokes from her entrance to her clit, pausing to circle, to press, to suck.
Her thighs clamp around my head and I grip them, holding them open, keeping her spread for me because I need to see all of her, need to taste every part of her while she writhes on my counter.
"Oh god — right there — don't stop—"
I don't stop. I add a finger, sliding it inside her, curling it forward while my tongue keeps its rhythm on her clit. She's tight and hot and dripping, and when I add a second finger she clenches around them so hard my cock throbs in sympathy.
"Come for me," I say against her, and the vibration of my voice must do something because she dissolves.
Her back arches off the counter, knocking the wooden spoon to the floor with a clatter, her thighs shaking, her hands pulling my hair hard enough to hurt.
I work her through it, gentling my tongue as she comes down, feeling the aftershocks pulse around my fingers.
I stand, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, and Sera looks at me with glazed eyes and flushed cheeks and a smile that's wicked.
"Get your pants off," she says.
I obey. There's a sentence I never thought I'd think about a woman giving me an order, but when Sera tells me to strip, I strip.
Belt, trousers, boxer briefs — all of it hitting the floor in a pile that mingles with her ruined silk.
I'm so hard it almost hurts, my cock jutting thick and heavy between us.
Her eyes drop and her lips part. She reaches for me, wrapping her hand around my shaft, and my hips jerk forward involuntarily. Her grip is firm, confident, and she strokes once from base to tip, her thumb circling the head where I'm already leaking.
"Sera." Her name comes out strangled.
"I want you inside me."