Still, I was a man who enjoyed some pain, but I wasn’t a fucking masochist.
So I avoided holy places, and until today, it had been fine.
But I’d made a mistake. I’d put my fears above Bea’s safety like a fucking fool. I was smarter than that, better than that. I was not a man ruled by his past, by pain or emotions as fucking useless as fear.
Fear was a cage people willingly locked themselves into. I knew that. Or I thought I had.
Then today.
Today, today, today.
When Bea almost died because I was afraid of some stone and mortar.
“Priest?” her soft voice called, cutting like a beam of light through my dark thoughts, dragging my consciousness into the present.
She was standing in the shadowed mouth of the corridor wearing nothing but pink. Sheer fabric patterned minimally with tiny hearts. I could see her nipples peaked in the bra, the texture of her downy hair beneath the transparent underwear.
The tension inside me coiled tighter, my teeth aching as they clenched, my hands fisted so tightly they ached. I wanted to slice open my palms to release the strain and feel the heat of my slick blood trail between my knuckles and drip, drip, drip to the floor like an incantation.
Instead, I stared.
I stared at the girl who was my heart displaced outside my chest. Only with her did I ever feel this agonizingly alive. Every beat of my heart, every molecule of blood in my veins, and breath in my lungs claimed and reanimated by her.
Little Bea Lafayette standing there in delicate pink scraps of fabric I could rend with a curl of one finger.
She was looking at me, tight-fisted, sternly scowling, cold as a column of ice chiselled into the form of man, as if I was something soft and precious. As if she could hold me in the palm of her hand and stroke me with her little fingers.
“I need you,” she murmured softly, holding out one hand, knuckles bruised from punching that badmouthing cunt at dinner. The evidence of her capacity for violence made me harder than her lingerie. I liked to think I’d planted that brutality in her along with my seed. That I’d infected her with some of my darkness just as she had with her obdurate light.
I didn’t move, focused on breathing instead of lunging forward to gnash my teeth at her throat, to open one of her veins just to see evidence of her blood, to know she was still alive despite my fuckup at the church.
The air between us seemed to whip and snap, crackling with dangerous tension.
Bea stepped closer, my brave fool.
“I want you,” she told me, curls tumbling over her small breasts in a shining sheet as she stepped into my orbit and up onto her toes. When she spoke next, she did it while grabbing one of my heavy, scarred hands and placing it on her chest, my fingers curling into the edge of each firm breast.
Fuck, but I could kill her with one hand, one push.
One mistake and she’d be dead under me. One rage, one nightmare, one moment taken too far and I could end the only reason I could think of to live. I was a weapon, the sharp edge of a blade and the blunt force of a fist, and Bea was a silk heart. It would have been simple to assume she would be safer in a different man’s hands, but who would protect her better than a weapon, than me? Truthfully, the tension that existed within me between her ruining her and cherishing her for the fuckin’ miracle she was made my heart pound loudly in my chest, my blood roarin’ through my veins straight to my cock. It made me feel so fucking alive.
“I see you,” she told me, her eyes dark in the yellow lamplight, wide, dark pools I wanted to fall into. “I see you, Priest, even when you don’t want to be seen. You cannot be invisible to me. Religion teaches you to covet the divine, to swallow it wholesale down your throat like communion. To seek it out for absolution. To me, you are divine, and my pursuit of you is anything but unholy.”
I stood still as she began to explore my clothed body with tender, tentative hands. They fluttered like doves at my chest, plucking the gun from my holster, unclipping the hunting knife from my belt. She knelt at my feet like a servant, eyes shining with worship as she lifted the edge of my denim pant leg to release the dagger at my ankle, then slid the boot knife out of the heel of my right shoe.
She was disarming me, in more ways than I could count.
I was sweating, vibrating with the effort to stay silent and calm while she had her way with me. I slept with those knives. I showered with them collected on my sink basin well within reach. Being parted from my knives felt like an amputation, but I sensed it was important to her to see me without them, to have me defenseless under her soft hands.