“And yet you do not believe me when I say how beautiful you are. How special.”
“No, Father. It’s the opposite. I do believe you. Every word.”
“And that is a problem?”
“Maybe.” I edged closer to the screen. “The first time we met…what did you see in me?”
His words edged, hard and forced. “In you, I saw my damnation. It flashed like a prophesy in my mind…before it turned to fantasy.”
A shiver claimed me, but I didn’t fear it. It delighted me with a tickled warning.
Don’t let this happen.
“I should have imagined you with a halo, draped in golden light,” he said. “That’s what you’d prefer to hear. But I’ll always be honest with you…especially about this.”
The tension would tear me apart. I knew it. I had felt it. This wasn’t playful flirting.
This was something far more dangerous.
My whisper was too loud for the silence of the church. “Father, we can’t speak like this anymore. We can’t meet anymore. No matter how innocent we once thought it was…now we know the truth.”
“Which is?”
“I’ve wanted to be alone with you, too many times for all the wrong reasons.”
“You have not sinned.”
“I will not give it a chance.”
He sighed, speaking softly with his infinite patience. “Tell me why you are really here, Honor. What sins have you committed?”
I bowed my head. The confessional was too small, too claustrophobic, too near him. I edged to the screen, not knowing if I sought forgiveness or the chance to feel his heat, hear his breath…to imagine his touch.
Just a graze of his fingers.
A slide of his hand.
The gentle brush of his lips against mine.
My mouth dried, but I feared the soothing flick of my tongue over my lips.
“You are a priest, and it’s wrong to expose you to these feelings. You could lose the church. Your vocation.”
“My angel, those are not your sins. They are mine.”
“They’re shared.”
“It is not a transgression if we speak after Mass, or if you help me carry supplies for the youth group, or if we stay late to clean the nave. These are not sins—unless you have succumbed in another way…”
I swallowed.
I had surrendered to something worse. Something damning.
Something amazing.
“Bless me, Father. I have sinned.”
The confessional creaked. His voice warmed and chilled, lashed and comforted. He understood, and yet he demanded more from me.
I closed my eyes. “My thoughts and actions have not been…”
“Pure?”
No one’s thoughts could remain pure around Father Raphael. He was a man who’d convert an unbeliever with the confidence of his smile. The sincerity of his words could bless even the most pious. He feared nothing and no one, and even his confidence was shadowed in humility.
He was good. He was holy.
He was completely forbidden to me.
Why did I want him so badly?
“I’ve had impure thoughts.” I stared at the floor, the scuffed wood from too many formal shoes bowing before the window. I hadn’t knelt. I didn’t trust myself to fall to my knees before a man like him. “And…sating those thoughts hasn’t eased the desires.”
“Sating?” His words echoed in a hidden smile. “How have you attempted to sate these thoughts?”
He could imagine it.
And, at the time, I hoped he had.
Last night was the worst of my sins. My needs had become the most insistent. My hands had slipped within my panties before I cast them away. Every silken motion ripped through me.
I had never been touched by a man, and I tried to deny my own immorality, but nothing eased that haunting, demanding, desire.
I’d thought of him. I’d imagined him.
I’d wished I had stayed in the church a little longer, talked a little softer, stayed by his side just for a moment longer.
And it had been wrong.
“I prayed last night, Father. Alone and in my bed. The only name on my lips was yours.”
The silence crackled, a tumult of quiet and judgment. I counted the seconds, my breaths, the soul-destroying memories of the pleasure I gave myself in dark shame.
Father Raphael breathed deep, a ragged and masculine breath that might have rattled the sanctuary’s stained glass windows if it hadn’t vibrated through me first.
“Do you understand temptation, Honor?” he asked.
Now I did. More than most people.
He continued, his voice low. “It is a powerful force—more powerful than greed, envy, hatred.”
“And I failed, Father.”
“No, this is my failure. I haven’t prepared you. I am your priest. I am the man who should protect you from this lust.”