“You’re equivocating now,” I said raggedly, closing my eyes against the sight of her pumping my dick.

“Then how about another confession,” she said, dragging her fingernails from my pelvis to my navel, making my abs tighten. “After the first day I talked to you, I looked you up online. I couldn’t stop thinking about your voice, like I could still hear it in a way, echoing in my mind. And then I saw your picture on the website and you looked…well, you know how you look. That was the first time I got off thinking about you.”

“You’ve touched yourself thinking about me?” The last remaining shred of my self-control frayed, threatening to snap.

“More than once,” she admitted, still running her fingers over my abs underneath my shirt. “Because seeing your body that first time we met while running…and then your face the last time we talked. God, your face, it was so damn dark, like you wanted to gobble me up right there…I had to fuck myself three times before I could focus on anything else.”

There it went, any self-discipline that remained, and all that was left was a male—not Tyler, not Father Bell—but something more primal and more demanding.

“Show me,” I ordered.

“What?”

“Lie down on this floor, spread your legs and show me what it looks like when you fuck yourself thinking of me.”

Her mouth parted and her cheeks reddened and then she was laying on the carpet, her hand on her cunt. I stood over her, fisting my cock, giving in to it all, giving in to everything, as long as it ended in her covered in my climax.

“Why didn’t you wear underwear today?” I asked, watching her trace circles around her clitoris.

“The last time, when we talked, I got so hot talking to you. I thought if it happened again today, it would be easier if I didn’t wear panties. To…take care of it. And it was easier.”

I knelt down between her legs and then took her slender wrists in my hand. I stretched out over her, pinning her wrists to the floor above her head, my dick brushing against her pussy and her bunched-up skirt. “Are you telling me,” I asked, “that you were masturbating in the booth next to me?”

She nodded fearfully. “You make me so wet,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”

It took everything I had not to shove into her right there and then. Every time I rocked my hips, my dick slid against her folds, and they were so warm. So wet.

I dropped my head, burying my face in her neck. She smelled like clean skin and the barest hint of a lavender perfume—something that probably cost more than what I made in a month. For some reason, this excess, this possible decadence, fueled my need to tear her apart. I bit her neck, her collarbone, scored her shoulders with my teeth, all while I ground my cock against her clit and palmed her breast, driving her to a second orgasm as if I were punishing her with pleasure. Punishing her for showing up here and knocking my carefully constructed life over as if it were a house of cards.

She squirmed underneath me, panting and gasping, her hands flexing uselessly against the floor as I kept them pinned there with only one hand. She was so wet, it would be so easy, just a slight change in angle, and then I could thrust in.

I wanted to. I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to. I wanted to fuck this woman more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. And perversely, the fact that I couldn’t, that it would be wrong on every single level—moral, professional, personal—made it even hotter. It made the image, the imagined feeling of it, a single bright point of obsession, until I was mindlessly rutting against her, sucking and nibbling at her as if I could burn out this need by devouring every inch of her skin.

“Oh God,” she whispered. “I’m going to—oh, God—”

I would have flogged myself every day for the rest of my life if I could have been inside of her right then, felt her tightening on my dick, felt her shuddering convulsions from the inside out. But being on top of her was almost as good, because I felt every seizing, jerking breath, every wild buck of her hips, and when I met her eyes, they were fierce and penetrating, but also surprised, as if she’d been given an unexpected gift and wasn’t sure if she should be grateful or suspicious.

But before I could delve further into that look, she’d arched her back and unseated my balance, tipping me so that I rolled to my back and she was on top of me.

Without hesitation, she tugged my shirt up so she could see my stomach, and I didn’t miss the way her jaw clenched and her eyes flared. She scratched my stomach—hard—as if furious that it was firm and muscled, as if angry that it turned her on. (And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t turn me the fuck on.)

She sat on me, her slick cleft sliding against the underside of my dick, and then she started stroking me that way, as if she were jacking me off with her pussy. I raised up on my elbows so I could watch it, watch the way her flesh pressed against mine, the way her bare cunt allowed me to see her ripe clitoris peeking out. It was so goddamn wet, and with all the pressure, her full body weight pressing against my cock, it was such a close approximation to the real thing, maybe too close, but it still wasn’t technically sex, I lied to myself, maybe it wouldn’t count, maybe I wasn’t sinning.

But even if I was, holy fuck, I was not stopping.

It was so dirty, the way her skirt was still hitched up to her hips, the way my pants were yanked down just far enough to free my balls, the way the old carpet abraded my ass and lower back. The way she shamelessly angled herself so that my shaft would press on her in all the right places, the way it was just our arousal lubricating us and nothing else, and God, I wanted to marry this woman or collar her or cage her; I wanted to own her, make her, take her; I wanted us on this old carpet forever, with her hair coming undone and her nipples hard and her naughty pussy milking my dick for everything it was worth.

“Come,” she told me hoarsely. “I have to see you come. I need it.”

My jaw was too tight to answer, because it was close, something more intense than I’d felt in years gnawing at the base of my spine and rending its way through my pelvis.

“Don’t hold back,” she begged now, pressing down even more, and fuck, there it was. “Give it to me. Give me every drop.”

Shit, this woman was filthy. And perfect. And it was pure instinct that made me grab her hips and work her harder and faster over me, my mind filled with the sight of her straddling me and her pale pink clitoris, still plump and needy, and the memory of her taste and smell on my mouth and face, and then it flooded through me—no, it burned and chewed through me, and she let out a low moan at the sight of my come spurting onto my stomach. There was so much, and it felt like hours instead of seconds that I was suspended in pulsing, total-body release.

And at that moment—at the peak of my high, at the peak of her greedy triumph—our eyes locked and we surged past every barrier—stranger and stranger, priest and penitent, Tyler and Poppy. We were simply male and female, as God had made us, Adam and Eve, in the most elemental and fundamental form. We were biology, we were creation incarnate, and I saw the moment she felt it too—that we were fused somehow. Irrevocably and undeniably fused together into something singular and whole.

My climax abated, but I could barely breathe, barely process what the fuck I had just felt, and then Poppy bit her lip and dragged one finger across my stomach, coating it in my orgasm, and then brought it to her mouth. My cock jumped as I watched her suck it off her finger.

I rested my head back against the floor, overcome with the sinking realization that I would probably not ever be able to dig this woman out of my system. She was the kind of woman that could make me hard over and over again, the kind of woman I could spend a week fucking nonstop and then still want more, and that was bad news for my self-control, which was slowly resurrecting back into life, along with my defeated, gnashing conscience.