TWENTY-SEVEN
Bastien
“More! A healthy man like you must eat!” Carmelita rubbed at her round belly as she goaded me into a third helping of what she called her famouslechon asado con mojo.
I chuckled at her insistence, accepting another heaping pile of the marinated pork. She whispered she’d also be sending me home with a batch to eat the next week.
I thanked her profusely and took another bite of the succulent, slow-roasted meat. “You’re a master.”
Her cheeks warmed to a shade of pink before she sat at the chair opposite me, a warm bronzed hand covering mine. “You know…” Her eyes twinkled, and I immediately wondered what I’d gotten myself into when I’d accepted that third helping. “I taught my Margarita everything I know. She can keep a man very satisfied, if you know what I mean, Padre.”
My heart shrank in my chest.
“Oh!” Carmelita shot up from her chair. “Here is my eldest beauty now.”
She looped arms with the young girl, probably no more than eighteen or nineteen if I had to guess, and sat her down in the chair at my side.
“Beautiful like her mother.” I smiled awkwardly.
“No, no,mi Margaritahas the fresh young look of youth. Her skin is so soft.” Carmelita set one of Margarita’s hands atop my own.
Firecrackers and alarm bells shot off in my body, a woman’s touch for the first time in four years unlike anything I could have predicted.
Was it just anyone who could set me off like this?
Or was it the way her dark hair fell over one shoulder in just that certain way that I was used to?
The way she sucked on her bottom lip when she was nervous, or how her dark eyes clung to mine, naïve and willing?
“She won’t bite, Padre.” Carmelita tugged her daughter’s chair closer to mine. Our thighs almost touching, I chomped down on my teeth to quell the urge to what…I wasn’t even sure. “The Martinez family, we come from a long line of very devout Catholics, Padre. Please don’t mistake our love for something other than what it is.”
I let her words hang heavy, fearful she had in mind what I thought she did.
“For many, many centuries, it was not uncommon—not just in our village, not just in Cuba, but Rome, Brazil, Boston!—for even the most devout of holy men to…experience all the pleasures only a family can afford.”
Her chocolate-brown eyes hung on mine, the lechon asado con mojo settling like cement in my stomach. My head pounded and my chest ached. So many eyes trained on me at once made me feel like ants were marching their way beneath my skin, hell-bent on breaking free.
“I…” I searched for the right words.
But what the hell were the right words in a situation like this?
“I’m flattered.” My eyes bounced from Margarita’s wide innocent ones to her mother’s. “Margarita holds a beauty far greater than most.” I swallowed, fearing I might alienate what had quickly become like a family to me. “But I am a holy man—” I held a hand to my heart “—to the core.”
Carmelita tipped her chin up, running her eyes up and down my body before shrugging. “Maybe one day, you come around.”
She stood, tapping my face with her wide palm and then patting Margarita’s head before bustling down the back hallway and out of sight.
“I’m truly sorry. I mean no offense.” Margarita’s eyes widened farther, almost as if she didn’t quite understand.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t come around so much. I don’t mean to give the wrong impression about my time spent here.” The urge to stand was strong. Margarita’s brown eyes on mine felt more familiar than strange. The soft contour of her cheek, the way her top lip filled out her bottom with the perfect little Cupid’s bow center. I blinked, thinking she looked more like Tressa upon closer inspection than I’d first realized.
I had a flash of a moment where I imagined what it might be like to kiss Margarita. If she tasted like Tressa, winter and honeysuckle, coaxing me into a blissful calm.
Margarita sucked on her bottom lip, hand inching across the worn tabletop until her little finger crushed my own. “You’re a very handsome man, Padre.” She slipped her little finger under the knuckle of mine, forcing more contact than I could possibly stand. “It would be an honor to…” her eyes hung heavy-lidded with desire “…be yours.”
I gulped, thousands of years of programming sending my body into hyperawareness, muscles stiffening as that old primal response stirred to life.
I hated myself in that moment.
