Page 14 of Priest (Priest 1)
No. It came out like a promise.
Her hazel eyes flashed up to mine, and she drew in a breath whe
n she saw my face.
Fuck, what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I keep any interaction with her normal and well away from implications of sex? “You were saying about the formulas?”
“Um, right.” Her eyes flicked back to the screen, and she swallowed. Her smooth throat moved with the motion, and I wanted that throat arched up in offering to me.
I wanted that whole body arched up in offering to me.
“Doesn’t the church have real book-keeping software?” she asked, stopping to fix a row of data that I’d accidentally cloned.
“Yes, our office manager does, but I don’t know how to use it.”
“So you can quote Seneca but you can’t use Quicken.”
“You knew that was Seneca?” I smiled despite myself. I didn’t meet very many people who even knew who Seneca was, much less who were able to recognize a quote from one of his letters.
“My parents paid a lot of money when I was a girl to make sure I knew all sorts of useless things.”
“You think it’s useless? Non scholae sed vitae. ‘We learn not for school, but for life.’”
“But si vis amari, ama? ‘If you wish to be loved, love?’ I tried that once. It didn’t work out so well.” Her voice was bitter.
I put my hand on her wrist. It was pure instinct, to comfort someone who was hurting, but I hadn’t counted on the heat rippling up from her hand, on the way that my touch would send goose bumps crawling up her arm. I hadn’t counted on how perfect her delicate wrist would feel with my fingers wrapped around it, as if God had made it for the sole purpose of me holding.
I should let go. I should apologize.
But I couldn’t. And I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Maybe you loved the wrong person.”
Because who wouldn’t love this gorgeous creature? This over-educated, over-sexed woman who oozed intelligence and sensuality? This woman of white skin and red lips and a brain built for running financial empires?
She met my gaze again. “Maybe you’re right,” she whispered.
We stayed like that a moment, our eyes locked, my hand gripping her wrist, and then—may I be forgiven—I slowly ran a thumb along the underside of her wrist, a motion that nobody could see, but that she definitely felt because she took in a shuddering breath.
Fuck, she was so smooth, her skin so silky. I wanted to kiss that part of her wrist, press my lips against her pulse point, right before I tied a rope around it. In fact, I got as far as lifting her wrist off the table before the hissing of the espresso machine brought me back to my senses.
What the fuck was I doing?
I let go of her hand and shut the laptop closed, standing abruptly. “Sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“You’re a spiritual advisor,” she said, peering up at me. “Isn’t everything your business?”
I was too busy pushing my stuff into my laptop bag to answer, desperate to leave, trying to convince myself that it was okay, it was fine, I had just comforted her, I had basically done nothing more than hold her hand, which I wouldn’t think twice about doing with any other parishioner.
It was fine.
But when I turned around, Poppy was standing next to me with her own bag all packed up. “Can I walk with you back to the church?” she asked. “My house is on the same block.”
Of course it was.
“Sure,” I said, hoping I sounded normal and not like a priest trying to fight an erection in public. “No problem.”
We stepped out into the heavy May heat, crossing the street. The silence between us felt odd, laden with whatever strange moment had just happened, and so I spoke, trying to stave off the fantasies that continued to crowd at the edge of my mind.
“How long have you lived here?”
