Page 24 of Beneath His Robes

Elias sighed. “Yeah, I had a feeling this was coming…he’s not well.”

I frowned when my suspicions were confirmed. ‘Not well?’ Jerry was like my father, and the news hit hard in my gut. “What’s wrong with him?”

Elias shook his head, not willing to give up more information than that. The unsaid hung between us. ‘You aren’t family, so you don’t need to know.’

“Ma was excited to see you again. She’s been getting distracted easily, and Dad takes longer to hunt nowadays, and well, she…” he answered my unasked question.

“Oh,” I replied. That was such a lame answer, but I didn’t really know what else to say.

“I missed them, too.”

Elias ran his hand through his hair, leaning against the door frame. I tried to prevent myself from biting my lip at his profile.

“You don’t have proper clothes for hunting, Ronan.”

I blinked, my gaze breaking from his body.

“You need to take some of mine. It’s too cold outside for…” he trailed off, and his eyes scanned my body.

I felt my muscles ripple under his scrutiny. I wanted him to enjoy the man I had become. Elias walked through the door he stood at and started rifling through a closet. He threw a few sweatshirts at me and a pair of snow pants.

I stripped off my muscle shirt and grabbed the offered items mechanically. Elias turned around and froze.

“Oh shit, sorry,” I said. “I forget nakedness is a sin.”

Elias didn’t break his gaze from my body, and his blue eyes seemed to simmer.

“Nakedness isn’t a sin in itself,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper as he walked toward me.

I couldn’t move my feet. My hands were frozen with the damn shirt half on my wrists.

He was so close I could feel his heat on my exposed flesh. I hardened instantly, reacting as I always have with his presence.

“But that doesn’t mean…” he said, but he stopped himself.

His words were a soft whisper on my lips, but I didn’t dare move.

“Doesn’t mean what, Mon Pur?”

My dick was pressing into his body, but he didn’t pull away from me. His blue eyes were piercing, filled with rage, pain, desire, and something else lurking beneath the surface like a storm in the deep.

I held my breath, unwilling to let the magic of this moment slip away. He parted his perfect lips, and his next words left me breathless.

“That doesn’t mean the thoughts your bare form has awakened inside me aren’t sinful.”

ChapterTen

Elias

This was wrong.

My mind was screaming at me. Regardless of whether I wore my alb or a sweatshirt, I was a priest. I couldn’t have a man backed against a bed like this.

Not anymore.

Not Ronan.

How was this area not painful enough already that it wouldn’t block any and all lust from my mind? He had been kissing me here when we were sixteen, but he had been buried in my sister against the wall that was across from us now, too.

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