Page 36 of Sinner (Priest 2)
Cue impressed admiration.
Except when Zenny knocks on the door at seven o’clock, there’s nothing to be impressed about. I’m covered in flour, my vegetables refuse to brown up in the roasting tray like Alton Brown said they would, and I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve folded the puff pastry. I think it’s only two—Mary Berry says in her cookbook that I at least need three folds—but I drank a couple of the craft beers in nervous desperation before Zenny could get here, and now time and previous pastry-folding events are all fuzzy.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m worth twenty million dollars! I’ve snapped companies in half like kindling over my knee, and yet I can’t even be cool for one dinner? For long enough to make a fucking pot pie?
But when I open the door and Zenny catches sight of the flour dusting my Hugo Boss suit pants and the steaming wreckage that is my kitchen, she laughs so hard she has to slump against the doorframe, and that laugh makes it all worth it. Her laughter is light, happy, still the tiniest bit girlish, and her smile is like a shot of sunshine right to the heart.
I start laughing too.
“What happened?” she finally manages to ask, her eyes roving over me again. Except this time they linger not on the dusty smears of flour, but on the tapered lines of my waist. On the places where my sleeves are rolled into crisp, straight rolls, showing off the forearms I pay an ungodly trainer’s fee for.
Watching her drink in my body is headier than any eight-point-five percent beer, and I have to remind myself to focus.
Dinner. Pastry folds. Right.
“I’m cooking,” I say with dignity, closing the door behind her. “And it’s going very well.”
“I can see that,” she says, and when I turn, she lifts her eyes to my face very quickly as she blushes.
She was just checking out my ass.
The knowledge sends hot blood south, and my fingers are burning with the need to touch her, hold her, yank her into a kiss.
I walk toward the kitchen as quickly as I can…away from her and her sweetly roving eyes. “Would you like something to drink while I finish up?”
“A sparkling water would be nice.”
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She comes to sit at the large island in the middle of my kitchen, pulling up a tall chair and sitting across the work surface from me as I hand her a LaCroix and go back to rolling out my piecrust. I’m giving myself a silent pep talk, trying to run through all the decisions and phrases that I’ve decided on in the last twenty-four hours, when she breaks the quiet with one of her determined yet vulnerable questions.
“So are you going to do it?” she asks.
I pause the motions of the rolling pin, looking up at her. She’s in jeans and a worn St. Teresa’s Academy T-shirt; no headband or scarf today, just curls everywhere. She looks like a college student. She looks young. And the expression on her face—hopeful and nervous and filled with shy attraction—it’s not doing anything to help either my conscience or my stiffening cock.
“Do you mean, am I going to have sex with you, Zenny?” And once I say it, I hear it—the voice thing she mentioned in her message. My words have gone all husky and a little dangerous. “Am I going to fuck you like you asked me to?”
Her tongue peeps out to lick her lower lip, pink and wet, and she breathes hard. “Yes,” she whispers. “That’s what I mean.”
And here we come to it, the thing, the reason she’s here tonight and the reason I couldn’t sleep after Family Dinner and the reason I spent today punishing myself in the gym and later in the office.
I don’t know what a good man would do in my shoes.
I can only guess at what an unafraid one might do.
I walk around the island to her, taking the back of her chair and turning it so that she’s facing me. I brush the curls away from one side of her face so that I can cup her cheek and lean close. “Yes,” I breathe against her lips.
“Yes?” she repeats in a trembling voice, as if she doesn’t quite believe me. She pulls back the tiniest bit to search my eyes. “Really? Yes?”
“Yes. For the next month, my body is yours.”
“Oh, Sean,” she murmurs, throwing her arms around my neck. Her lips are against my cheek now, impossibly soft, impossibly tempting, and my cock surges against my pants, reminding me that I’m only a half-step away from being able to grind against her inner thigh. Against the place where the denim seams meet right in front of her precious pussy.
“Thank you,” she says, kissing my cheek. “Thank you, thank you.” And then she turns her head and finds my mouth with her own, and my world catches fire and burns into a shrinking nothing; her mouth is all that’s left, her yielding lips, her searching tongue, her sweet taste.
It’s so very, very cliché, but kissing Zenny makes me feel younger, reminds me of the incendiary kisses one gets as a teenager, when every touch, every lick and caress is so fucking charged with excitement. As an adult, kissing can fade into something perfunctory, the prologue, the necessary foreplay to get a woman wet and squirming for what I really want—but as a teenager, I lived to kiss. Lived to make out. Even came in my pants once making out in a movie theater with a girl named Giana Saviano.
I’d forgotten how fucking incredible just kissing is.
