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Adriana shifted her weight, grinding down against the hardness growing beneath my clothes. The contact was obscene, a hard line of heat that promised to split us open. I threw my head back, a guttural sound tearing from my throat.

“Damn you,” I whispered, but there was only hunger in my curse.

I reached between us, my fingers fumbling with the button of her pants. The metal button gave way with a sharp snap, followed quickly by the hiss of the zipper. The air between us was stifling now, humid and thick with the scent of arousal.

Adriana shimmied the pants down her hips along with her underwear. The cool air hit her wet skin, but it was instantly replaced by my hand. I cupped her, my palm hot and calloused, my fingers sliding through the slickness that had gathered there.

33

ADRIANA

“Are you going to save my soul, Father?”

I heard myself say the words, and knew there was no turning back.

“No, baby. I’m going to ruin it.”

One minute my legs were around his waist, and the next, my shoulders were pushed against the wall hard enough to knock the air out of me, his hand flat against my sternum like he was holding me down in case I decided to run. His mouth was at my throat, his grip firm, the air between us burning hot.

I knew this man. He had the same body, the same voice, the same careful hands that had saved me. And yet, I didn’t know him at all. The priest I knew had not been replaced; he had simply stopped holding the other side of him down.

“Last chance to back out,” he murmured against my skin.

“You promised to ruin my soul. I'm staying for the show.”

Something in him gave. I felt it go — a slackening in the arm braced beside my head, the last thread of whatever had been holding the line finally letting loose.

After that there was no in-between. No fumbling, no negotiation, no merciful pause where either of us might have come to our senses. Just his hands, and the sound of fabric giving up, and then the cold shock of air on my back and as we shed our clothes in a heap on the ground.

I should have taken the time to look at him. I'd wondered, in the shameful private way you wonder about a man who is supposed to be above wondering about, and now here he was and I couldn't spare the seconds. I got fragments. The flat of his stomach. A scar under his ribs. Dark hair at his chest, silvering at the temples, and his mouth already at my throat before I could catalogue any of it.

We weren't a man and a woman. That would have made this easy-it would have been an ordinary sin. We were a priest and the girl who stumbled bleeding into his church, and we were about to take something that could not be given back, and both of us knew it, though neither of us had the strength or courage to stop.

“Adriana.” My name, in his voice, was wrecked. “God forgive me.”

His mouth crashed to my lips.

The kiss was closer to a man drowning and finding something to hold onto. I felt my head knock back against the plaster and didn't care, opened for him and let him take. His teeth caught my lip. I felt it split. He didn't stop and I didn't want him to, and when I tasted copper between us he made a sound against my mouth like it hurt him — like the blood was the thing that finally proved this was real and it was happening.

His hand came up and closed around my jaw, though there was nothing gentle in the movement. He tilted my face where he wanted it, and there was something obscene in how practiced the gesture was, how a man who had spent the past decade of his life being careful with his hands could put them on me like that without a single moment of relearning.

I got a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back so he had to look at me.

Something broke across his face. It was the look of a man who has already jumped and is simply falling now, with the whole clean length of the drop ahead of him.

I dragged his mouth back down to mine until our tongues were dancing against each other. He was demanding, brutal, a man starved. His body pressed against mine, the long length of his cock digging against my stomach. His hands moved against my hips, firm and claiming, taking.

It was the opposite of what I thought it would be… gentle, soft, fumbling. Instead, the priest who’d relegated his collar to a drawer was like a beast unleased as he ravaged my mouth. I moaned against him, wanting more. Wanting so much more.

He grabbed my hips and lifted me against the wall, lining himself against my opening. He pressed against my opening, ever so slowly, his eyes fixed to mine, his bottom lip caught between his teeth. He moved a finger toward my clit, pressed there, firm and unyielding, before he started to move in lazy circles as he pressed further into me.

A pulse of electricity throbbed from the soles of my feet, straight up my thighs and into my back as I arched away from the wall.

“Fuck,” he hissed, as he breached my opening and slid inside me. “Fuck, Adriana. You’re so tight.”

My nails scraped against his back as he held me up, his muscles contracting beneath my fingers.

He lifted one leg higher, pressing further into me, a rod of fire as he seated himself deep inside my soul. He started to grind himself against me in a slow, agonizing roll of his hips, pushing further deep inside me. He pumped in and out, slow at first, then picking up speed. Rough, Fast. Deep.