“Thank you,” I correct, and she smiles like I passed something that can’t be a test. We don’t have long enough together for tests.
I watch through the screen as she stands and steps out, for a moment creating an irrational panic in my bones.
She can’t leave. Not yet.
I haven’t gotten to tarnish the saint or knock the halo off her head.
But she’s not leaving. The door creaks open, and instead, she steps into my side of the confessional with a serious expression on her sweet face that sends the last remnants of blood in my body straight to my aching cock.
I shuffle on my knees to face her, looking up into her face. My hands begin to rise of their own accord and I pause, asking silent permission. With a barely-there inclination of her head,she gives it, and I close my hands over her hips beneath that monstrosity of a habit.
I can smell her…nerves and something deliciously sweet and floral and indisputable feminine musk. I think my comment about eating her pussy must have aroused her. My face is level with her abdomen, and I pull her in, nuzzling into the voluminous folds of the habit. Her breath hitches a little and her fingers curl into my hair.
“Get up,” she whispers.
I move, returning to sit on the bench, and we close the last inches the way we started—on her terms, one breath at a time. Sanctuary lives between our mouths like a switch only she gets to touch. Keeping one arm locked around her waist, I move one hand to her jaw, stroking it, putting her mouth where I need it.
“I’m going to kiss you, Kitty,” I tell her, low, because warnings are another way to ask. I wait a beat long enough for the word to stop this. It doesn’t.
I go in careful—the barest of grazes, a draft more than a press—so she has one last clean breath to say sanctuary. She doesn’t. The moment our mouths meet, the quiet hits like impact anyway. Heat, then a tremor, then the give of her lips parting on a sound I feel more than hear.
She tastes like wintergreen and candle smoke, like someone who brushed her teeth too hard trying to be good and still came. Her fingers catch in my lapel. The veil’s edge skims my knuckles; the rosary taps once against my wrist like a hallelujah.
I keep the kiss measured, contained, the kind of control you have to muscle for—because I know the shape of taking, and this isn’t that. This is heryescupped in my hands like a butterfly, and it’s better than anything I ever stole.
Because regardless of what she tells herself, and how she’s trying to act, Caterina is truly all innocence and light. I should walk away, but the damage to my soul was done too long ago.
I’ll take her, even for the night, and make sure that this angel always remembers the night she fell for a devil.
“You can touch me now,” she whispers when I let her come up for air. “I want you to touch me.”
Thank God.
I don’t waste another moment. One hand gently wraps around the back of her neck, anchoring her to me. The other, I skim down her body to the bottom of the habit and beneath, to finally get my hands on her skin.
In a matter of moments, every nerve ending in my body is on fire with the connection between us.
Caterina pushes herself into my grasp further, deepening the kiss while she struggles to figure out what to do with her hands and her body.
Pure innocence that I am too happy to corrupt. Reluctantly releasing her thigh after squeezing gently, I cover one of her hands with mine and guide her to my chest.
“You can touch me now, too.” I tell her. “But be warned, kitty…I’m not going to take it easy on you.”
She nods once, settles over my lap like she’s stepping onto thin ice and daring it to hold. The habit pooled around us makes a dark little tent; the screen on our left throws latticework over our faces. I can’t see the color in her eyes, only the widening when I breathe on her mouth.
“Kiss me,” she orders, quiet as a blasphemy.
I do, slow. She meets me like she’s memorizing a prayer she wants to mean something, mouth soft at first, then braver. She tests; I follow. She tastes like mint and nerves and something I shouldn’t put a name to because it’ll wreck me.
She trembles—decision, not fear—and breathes faster against my mouth. My sweet innocent kitten tries a deeper kiss, hesitates, and then tries again. The rhythm’s careful, counted,not sloppy. Not practiced. It throws me. She’s giving me saint and good girl like a weapon I asked for.
“You wanted a saint,” she murmurs, like she heard me thinking. “You’re getting a saint. Be good to your girl.”
Saint. Good girl.The words slide under my ribs and find the part of me that obeys orders because it learned the cost of ignoring them. Instead of the nausea that I expect with the memories every other time, the angel in my arms is bringing peace to the maelstrom of emotion.
When I skim my thumb higher along the inside of her thigh, she makes a sound that she tries to swallow and fails. Her hand flies to my chest, palm flat, feeling the thud that won’t calm down.
“Too much?” I ask.
