She obeyed without question and that simple act of obedience stirred up the old me, the me that was known on campus for a certain type of experience in the bedroom. I couldn’t help it, it felt so damn good to have a woman pliant to my demands, to see a woman as smart and independent as Poppy let me take care of her, trust me to direct her in exactly the right way. And then I felt like an idiot. I gripped the countertops, remembering my women’s studies classes in college, the feminist nun at the seminary who outlined every painful instance of misogyny in the Church’s history. I was being a pig, for more reasons than one. I needed to regain my control, go out there and tell her that after her drink, she needed to go. I would be honest about my struggle and hope that she would understand.

Even if she hated me for it.

Because I deserved her hatred.

But first, the drinks. While I enjoyed Scotch, I usually drank it alone or with my brothers, so I didn’t have the right glasses for it. In fact, I didn’t have any drinking glasses at all. So I brought the Scotch out in two chipped coffee mugs.

Be good be good be good, I told myself as I approached her. Don’t jump her bones. Don’t fantasize about fucking her tits. Be a good priest.

I offered her the Scotch. “Sorry about the mugs.”

She grinned. “But they’re so classy.”

I rolled my eyes and sat in the chair next to the fire, which was a bad idea because it meant that she was basically sitting at my feet and that was just reinforcing all the bad thoughts.

Now or never, Tyler, I told myself. You have to do this.

“Poppy—” I started but she interrupted.

“No, I’m the one who needs to apologize,” she said. “That’s what I came here to do, after all.” She tilted her head up to meet my eyes and the fire glowed through her hair, showing where it was drying into messy waves. “I feel terrible about this afternoon. I’m fucked up from what happened with Sterling, and for some reason, when you got all protective of me this afternoon, I panicked.”

You and me both.

“And I’ll be honest—since I am talking to a priest after all. It’s complicated by the fact that I can’t stop thinking about you all the goddamned time, and it’s killing me.”

Everything in me lit on fire, because these were both the first and last words I wanted to hear, and I flinched.

She cast her eyes down in a wounded way that knifed through my ribs. She thought I was rejecting her attraction, rejecting her. Shit, nothing was further from the truth, but there was no way to explain that without making things more tangled than they already were.

“Anyway,” she continued in a small voice, “I’m sorry for lashing out at you this afternoon. And I’m also sorry for what happened last Monday. I took advantage of you. I have all this shit in my life and I inflicted it upon you because you were here and you were kind.”

I leaned forward, trying to summon the strength to say what needed to be said. “I’m glad that you came here and that you’re sorry—not that you should be sorry, because the blame of what happened after your last confession rests squarely on my shoulders. But I’m glad because it means that you understand why it can’t happen again. I have a vow to uphold, to honor God by honoring his children, his lambs. You came to me for help and instead I—” I stopped, unable to utter the words. But the heat rushed to my groin anyway, as words from that one afternoon shot through my mind like bullets through ballistic gel. Cunt. Clit. Cock. Come. I didn’t need to look to know that my sweatpants were dangerously close to revealing these thoughts.

“—I took advantage of you,” I finished instead.

She pressed her lips together. “You did not take advantage of me. Yes, I’ve got some shit going on in my life right now, but I am my own person, capable of making my own choices. I’m not damaged, I didn’t grow up unloved. I’m not a blank slate for males to exert their agency on. I chose to sleep with Sterling. I chose to let you go down on me. I wanted those things, and you don’t get to tell me that I didn’t. You don’t get to tell me that I was nothing more than an unwilling bystander.”

She stood, the red in her cheeks not just from the fire. “Don’t worry. I won’t bother you with my body again. I’ll respect your vow and your outdated chivalry along with it.”

That stung. That stung like hell, actually, because I had just been trying to summon up all of my postmodern, feminist ally thoughts, trying to squash down the part of my brain that fantasized about making her crawl naked across my floor with a cup of single-malt balanced on her back.

And that’s why—I think—I grabbed her arm and tugged her between my legs. She gasped, but she didn’t pull away. I was at the perfect height to sit up and suck on her nipple through her shirt, which I did. Her hands laced through my hair as she moaned.

“I thought—you just said—” She writhed as I bit gently down and then resumed my sucking.

“You’re right,” I said, pulling back. “I shouldn’t do this.”

Her face fell ever so slightly, but she nodded, pulling away, and then I grabbed her hips and tugged her down so that she straddled my thigh, her pussy immediately starting to grind against me in an adorably needy way.

“I shouldn’t put you over my lap and spank your ass for being a brazen little slut and coming here without a bra,” I growled in her ear. “I shouldn’t twist ropes around your wrists and ankles until your cunt is exposed and then screw you until you can’t walk anymore. I shouldn’t flip you over and fuck your ass until your eyes water. I shouldn’t drive you down to the strip club and fuck you in the back room, so that you’ll forget all about Sterling and the only name you’ll remember to say is mine.” I lightly bit her nipple again. “Or God’s.”

I tucked two fingers into the waistband of her shorts and pulled down, the elastic stretching and giving me a peek at what I had already suspected. There was the smooth rise of her pubic bone, her clit visible as a tiny, soft bud of flesh, a bud just begging to be touched.

“Why did you come here tonight, Poppy?” I asked as I palmed her breast, quietly groaning at the feeling of its unsupported weight in my hand. I kept my other hand where it was, still staring at her bare cunt. “Did you really come to say sorry? Or did you come here, in the middle of the night, without a bra or panties, to tempt me? That’s a sin, you know. Willfully leading another person into wrongful action or thought. No, don’t pull away now.”

She had started to twist away, and I knew I was sending signals so mixed that they were beyond confusing, they were blended, incomprehensible, but then I murmured, “One more. Give me one more.”

One more what? I wondered even as I spoke. One more orgasm? For her? For me? One more chance? One more glimpse, one more taste, one more minute to pretend that there was nothing in the way of us being together?

And then I blanched. That was a stupid way to phrase it—being together—as if my attraction to Poppy Danforth was more than three years of celibacy encountering the sexiest woman I’d ever met. As if there was some secret part of me that wanted to do more than fuck her, it wanted to take her to dinner and make her breakfast and fall asleep with her in my arms.

She was staring at me the whole time I thought this, staring with hungry hazel eyes and a hungry mouth and those tits so perky and soft under her shirt.

“Tonight,” I told her. “We have this. Then no more.”

She nodded, then swallowed, as if her mouth were dry. I watched her throat move.

“Get on your knees,” I said hoarsely.

She scrambled to obey, kneeling in between my legs and peering up at me through the long, dark lashes that haunted my waking thoughts.

“Take your shirt off.”