Mortal Sin (39 page)

Hot. Wet. Silk and steel
. He drove deep, shoved her up against the wall so hard she knew she’d have bruises tomorrow. “Is this what you wanted?” he rasped.

“Yes. God, yes.”

“More?”

“Oh, yes, sugar. I want it all.”

He plunged deeper, buried himself to the hilt. Her knees were clamped so tight around his ribs that she knew she must be hurting him, but she didn’t care. He was hard between her legs and the wall was hard against her back, and he was making edgy, raw animal sounds deep in his throat. This wasn’t lovemaking, this was pure jungle sex, and it felt so good, hot and sweaty and noisy. He fumbled with the strap to her dress, tried in vain to pull it down, finally gave up and yanked. Silk tore once, twice, and then he freed her breast and closed his mouth around it. She shuddered with pleasure, made a low, keening sound as his tongue tormented her swollen, aching nipple. Her last rational thought was to wonder if the music was loud enough to drown out their caterwauling, and then she forgot to wonder because his movements quickened and she heard him cry out, and the next instant her body splintered and there was nothing but him and a white-hot pleasure that threatened to swallow her alive.

They collapsed in a sweaty tangle against the wall, still connected, gasping like runners at the end of a race, too stunned to speak as aftershocks rumbled through both of them. She felt her muscles contract around him, felt his contractions inside her. His skin was sticky against hers, the smell of perspiration more aphrodisiacal than offensive.

Trying desperately to catch her breath, she said, “I do believe it was you… who said that this wasn’t… about sex. Or was I thinking of… somebody else?”

His face buried in her hair, he said, “There’s a distinct possibility… that I may have been… mistaken.”

“That’s what I thought. Time for a little… revisionist theory?”

He lifted his head, pulled a strand of her hair away from his face, reached down and attempted to pull shredded silk back up to cover her breast. “I ruined your dress.”

She looked down at the dress, hanging in tatters around her. “Yes,” she said. “I believe you did.”

“I’m so sorry. I don’t understand what happened.”

“It’s all right. I bought it on sale.”

“Still, there’s no excuse—”

“Clancy, darling… “

“—acting like some kind of animal… “

“Goddamn it, I paid fourteen dollars for it at Filene’s Basement! You need to lighten up and get a sense of humor. It’s a really good thing to have.”

His eyes met hers, uncertain, a little embarrassed. “You’re telling me there’s something humorous about this situation?”

She cupped his cheek and placed a gentle kiss on his lips. “There’s something humorous in just about every situation, sugar. You just have to look for it.”

“I must have missed it, then. I’m sure you were impressed by my behavior. First I rip your clothes off, then I self-destruct after forty-five seconds.”

She hid a smile. Toying with a strand of his hair, she said, “We were both in a big hurry this time around. It’s a wonder we managed to last that long.”

But he was still muttering, mumbling darkly, something about being a one-minute man. Judging by his tone, it wasn’t something he wanted to be.

Heaving a mighty sigh, he said, “Sarah… love.”

Her hands, stroking his face, stilled. “What?”

“I hate to have to tell you this, but I need to put you down. I can’t hold you up any longer. My legs are getting shaky.”

“Oh.”

“Is this what it means to be middle-aged? I can’t keep it up for more than sixty seconds, and to top it off, my legs aren’t strong enough to lift a hundred-pound woman. What’s next, diapers and a bib?”

She unlocked her legs from around his waist, disengaged, and slid down the wall to the floor. Her legs were spongy, weak and wobbly. “Speak for yourself,” she said, tugging uselessly at what was left of her dress. “I’m planning on another twenty years before I hit middle age. And I weigh considerably more than a hundred pounds.”

“Where?”

She glanced up. “Where what?”

He’d pulled his boxers back up and was busy adjusting his clothing into some semblance of order. “I want you to show me all these pounds you’re supposedly packing.”

“I’ll have you know, sugar, I weigh a hundred and twenty-eight pounds. I’m just built compactly.”

“Ah. That explains it. No wonder you almost did me in. I’m surprised that with our combined weight, we didn’t go right through the floor and into the cellar.”

“I forgot. You do have a sense of humor. It’s just slightly warped. Listen, do you think the next time around we could try for the bed?”

“So there’s going to be a next time around? You’re not tossing me out on my keister and singing
Hit the Road, Jack
?”

“Oh, you gorgeous, sexy, unenlightened man. We are just getting started.”

She fed him ice cream in bed.

It was silly, foolish, laughably juvenile. And incredibly, undeniably sexy. He was dead certain there was no more fetching sight than that of Ms. Sarah Connelly sitting cross-legged on the mattress, bed sheets tangled around those satin thighs and candlelight drawing golden highlights from her hair. Surely nothing could be more romantic than dining a deux by the light of a single candle, sharing plump swirls of heaven on a silver spoon, punctuated by velvet sighs and sweet, vanilla-seasoned kisses.

She licked the spoon delicately and said, “I was starving. I haven’t eaten a thing since lunch.”

He planted a kiss on the bare knee that peeked so tantalizingly from beneath the sheet, and began working his way, kiss by kiss, up her silken thigh. “If you were so hungry,” he said, “why didn’t you eat?” He ran a fingertip along the slightly rounded contour of her belly. It was softer than he’d imagined, less firm than the rest of her sleek, toned body.

She held out a spoonful of French vanilla, and he lifted his head and took the sweet, icy confection into his mouth. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I was so nervous, I was afraid that if I ate anything, I’d throw up all over you. If nothing else, it would’ve been a memorable evening.”

“Well,” he said. “I’ve had some interesting experiences in my time, but I don’t recall that I’ve ever made a woman throw up. Of course—” he studied with keen interest the row of tiny pearlescent stretch marks, harely noticeable to the eye, that crisscrossed her belly below her navel “—it’s been a long time since I’ve been on a date. My memory could be a little shaky. But if I were to be thrown up on,” he added thoughtfully, “trust me when I say that you’d be my first and only choice.”

“I do believe there’s a backhanded compliment in there someplace.” She abandoned the spoon, stuck her forefinger into the ice cream, and pulled it out. Without waiting for an invitation, he caught her hand and drew it to his mouth, sucked in her slender finger, and swirled the sweetness away with his tongue, flicking it over the fleshy pad of her fingertip before withdrawing.

She dipped her finger back into the ice cream and said casually, “So, are you ready to talk about her yet?”

Still mulling over the paradox he’d discovered, he said, “About who?”

“Meg.” She glanced up, and those blue eyes pinned him in place. “The woman whose name you have tattooed on your arm.”

For an instant, he stopped breathing. Every other thought fled his mind as he waited for the old, familiar dagger of pain to slice through his heart. When it didn’t, he exhaled and rolled away from her and onto his back. Staring into the shadows that danced on the ceiling, he said flatly, “Meg.”

She licked the ice cream off her finger. “I asked Josie about her. She said it wasn’t her place to tell me, that I needed to wait until you were ready to talk about it yourself.”

“It was a long time ago.”

She dug back into the ice cream. Without looking at him, she said, “So maybe it’s time now for you to let it go.”

He studied her open, trusting face, realized it wasn’t censure he saw there, but love, mixed with something else: acceptance. However much he chose to tell or to hold back, Sarah Connelly would never pass judgment on him. Her respect for him, her admiration for him, would remain steadfast.

The knowledge was liberating. Inside him, something let go. Some stricture that had kept him tightly bound for eleven years simply opened up, with no precedent, no warning. Suddenly, it was right to talk about Meg, astonishing to discover just how much he needed to talk about her, how much he needed to share the whole bloody story with someone he trusted, someone he loved, someone who loved him unconditionally.

He reached out and took the ice cream container from her hand. Turning, he set it on the nightstand, and then he rolled onto his hip and pulled her down beside him. As she trailed caressing fingers through his hair, down the nape of his neck, he said, “You asked me once why I became a priest.”

“I remember,” she said. “It was the day of little Frankie’s christening, when we were walking on the beach. You gave me some song and dance about how people turn to God because of unanswered questions. You danced all around the issue, but you never did give me a real answer.”

A single vein blazed a blue trail beneath the soft, milky flesh of her forearm. He traced it with his lips. “I gave you half an answer,” he said. “Meg was my unanswered question. Unanswered, unanswerable, and brutally painful.”

They remained that way, her fingers toying with his hair, his lips a whisper away from her wrist. “Meg was beautiful,” he said. “Not just on the outside, but on the inside, where it counts. She loved to laugh… ” He trailed off, lost, for just a moment, in the dusty past, before he found himself again. “That’s what I remember best about her, that wonderful laugh, the kind that made you want to laugh right along with her. It was intoxicating. She was intoxicating. She drew people the way nectar draws bees.”

Sarah’s fingers traced patterns against his scalp. “I fell in love with her when she was fourteen years old,” he said. “But I was twenty, far too old for a fourteen-year-old girl. I had to wait for her to grow up. I’ve never been a particularly patient man, but I knew Meg would be worth the wait. So I went to UMass for a year, squeezed in courses around my work schedule. Meg knew I had my eye on her. She couldn’t help but know. I tripped over my own feet and turned into a babbling idiot every time we crossed paths. While I worked and studied and suffered, Meg spent that year flirting with every fifteen-year-old boy north of Rhode Island. I think she did it just to torture me. At the end of the year, I was half crazy, she was still just a sweet teenage girl, and I was still six years older. I realized I needed to put some distance between us. What little patience I had was wearing thin, and I didn’t want to ruin everything by making my move too soon. So I dropped out of school and hitchhiked around Europe for a few months. Then I went to work on a merchant ship and ended up in the Far East.”

“Ah, yes. Where you learned to eat with chopsticks.”

“Among other things.” Some of which he would go to his grave without telling her about. “I stayed there for nearly three years. But always, in the back of my mind, I knew I was waiting for Meg.”

Softly, she said, “So what happened?”

He shifted position, planted a kiss on the smooth swell of her breast. “When I came home, she was eighteen, more beautiful than ever, and I waged an all-out campaign to win her affections. It didn’t take long. I suspect that all that time, she’d been waiting for me, too. Things turned serious pretty quickly. I wanted to get married right away, the summer after she graduated. I couldn’t see any reason to wait; I was twenty-four years old, I’d been around the globe, seen the world. I was ready to settle down. But Meg was eighteen, and I don’t think she’d ever been more than twenty miles outside of Boston. She kept putting me off. She wanted to finish college first. Four years. I couldn’t imagine waiting four whole years. I pushed. She resisted. After a while, I noticed she wasn’t laughing so much anymore. Then, one night in early August, she told me it wasn’t going to work out between us. It was over. She was going to college in a few weeks and moving on with her life.

“I didn’t take it well. I told her she was ruining her life, ruining
our
life. I told her that she’d be back, that what we had was too good to throw away. I ranted. I bellowed. I said terrible things to her.” The memory, even after all these years, filled him with shame. “You have to understand, I was twenty-four years old, absolutely desperate, and stunningly, maddeningly in love.”

Her fingers stilled against the nape of his neck. “What happened?”

He closed his eyes, moistened his lips. “Six days later, she was murdered.”