Shame twisted my intestines painfully.
“Tressssa.” He hissed my name like a quiet mantra, hands cupping my face and whispering words to me in Spanish. “I never thought…” He trailed off, dark irises rich with emotion. “I need you to know you deserved more than that.” He pressed his forehead to mine so intimately, I had half a mind to run. “And that nothing could happen, not asingle thing,that could cause me to regret what we found right here.Together.”
His lips grazed mine, his words, thick with pity, surged like fire through my heart.
“Lately I’ve been thinking I wish life had a rewind button.” His fingers interlocked with mine, bringing each of my hands to his lips and dotting my knuckles with chaste kisses.
Breaking my heart with every one.
“I’ve got to meet with the veterans club this morning, but I should be back by lunch. I’ll bring you and Luce something? Maybe the nursery kids too. How many kids do we usually have today?”
I clenched my jaw fiercely, unwilling to let him see my emotions. With a shake of my head and a fake smile, I managed to dismiss him, hiding my face behind my hair as I bent to pick up last night’s clothes.
Always the other woman. Why did I have a habit of getting involved with men who didn’t belong to me?
“I’ve got a bit before I have to leave. What do you say about a shower?” Bastien encircled me with his arms, pulling the clothing from my hands and locking me to him with his lips.
I let his fingers slide between my thighs and work me to another orgasm.
And then I let him carry me into the shower where he fucked me with his mouth against the tile wall, my hands clutching his shoulder blades, begging for mercy with every breath.
If I’d left his room a second sooner, maybe I could have stopped what came next.
Or maybe I would have made it worse.
The police reassured me we could never know.
But still, when a bomb goes off that causes the entire world to shift, it leaves a lot of people wondering.
Bastien’s cock was slipping from my body, our skin hot with sexual release, when the tiles of the shower trembled behind my back.
The torrent of emotions he’d coaxed out of me these last weeks rained down on me in a downpour of tremors mixed with sobbing tears.
Walking away from the beauty he brought to my life felt like cutting off the very nose to spite my face. Could I really willingly excise the happiness from my life like a bad cancer, knowing I was my very best with him?
“Tressa,” he breathed against my neck, peppering kisses across the hollows of my throat. “Talk to me.”
“I can’t live without you, and that scares me,” I blurted before thinking. A habit that happened all too often in this man’s presence.
His eyebrows rose, sympathy soaking his irises. “You’ve got such a huge heart, sweet dove.” The pad of his thumb followed the tip of my chin, lifting it softly to catch his gaze. “I would wake every morning in your bed if I could. Whisper a thousand ‘I love yous’ over a hundred lifetimes, and still, loving you would never get old.”
His words acted like barbed wire, clawing their way into the fragmented cracks of my heart. How could he be so very perfect and so very imperfect at the same time? My savior and my tormentor.
“But, Tressa…” His eyes turned up to the fine cracks of the old plaster ceiling. “I’ve spent most of my life on my knees asking God for his guidance to make sense of the senseless. Faith is what’s sustained me, Tressa.” Watery irises found mine again. “Turning away from that now, that would be counterintuitive to every fiber of my being.”
His hands dropped from me, the loss of contact subtle yet still devastating.
“I’ve been called to do the most good on earth. And this place, right here, is where I can do the most good.”
Reserved anger twisted my emotions. Beats of silence deafened my ears. Tension thickened the air between us. I swallowed, no reply left to be given.
Bastien’s lips burned against mine, we were a broken promise existing only on borrowed time. “I just don’t know how to be without you anymore.”
An invisible fist clutched at my heart with his last words. It’s terrifying to love something so much that exists outside of your own body—terrifying to feel something so profound and so forbidden that just speaking it out loud could destroy so many lives.
A series of booms rattled the floor under our feet then, subtle like an earthquake, before everything fell silent again.
Water rained over our heads, and Bastien’s eyelids, heavy with water droplets, turned from mine for the last time.
