Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 93482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93482 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 467(@200wpm)___ 374(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
“What’s the matter?” I taunted. “Don’t you trust the word of a man of God?”
CHAPTER 13
ROSE
How could something so beautiful be so intimidating, I wondered as I stared up at the black spires of the St. Thaddeus chapel. The way the sharp towers seemed to twist up and pierce the sky was terrifying, and still so breathtaking in their savagery.
I didn’t understand how a building that called people to worship could be so foreboding.
Then an image of Thomas standing above me, his cock in his hand as he guided it to my lips, flashed in my mind. He was just as intimidating and just as beautiful. I shook those thoughts out of my head and refocused on the reason that I had come to the chapel today.
Since I had found out that the stranger was a priest, I couldn’t get him out of my head. Then to find out that he was a Manwarring on top of that, making him practically my brother-in-law or at least uncomfortably close to it, was just too much.
This had to stop.
It was bad enough to be a woman in my class having premarital sex, although it happened. Usually, as long as it didn’t involve someone in the same social circle, the chances of it getting out were slim. It was a risk most young women took, and a few regretted.
Having an affair was one thing, but if anyone found out from a reputable source that I was involved in one, I’d be ruined. People would see me as damaged goods. It didn’t matter what kind of sex it was, or if people didn’t know how a partner touched me, or what they made me do to them. The second my reputation was in question, my future prospects were gone. Not that I wanted to marry whoever my mother deemed appropriate anyway, but to be unworthy was something else altogether.
And if the stuck-up society matrons who ruled over my world found out that the man I let touch me was a priest, then clearly I would be a sinner who would go to hell. Some ladies who thrived on scandal might not completely shun me. They might keep me around for the amusement and the shock value of my tale, but my social standing would be nonexistent.
Still, that wasn’t the worst of it. If people also found out that the priest I had let defile me was my sort of my brother-in-law, I’d be done. I’d be a social pariah. There would be no telling what would happen to me. I would probably be shipped off to some convent, or Mother would find some mental health spa that still believed in diagnosing hysteria. I wouldn’t put it past her to try to have me lobotomized.
Since I would have “brought it on myself,” no one would damn her for it. They would support her by saying that she did the best that she could with such a spiteful, horrible, immoral daughter.
I hated the confines that living in this class placed on me. I hated being in this gilded cage my entire life and having people tell me how privileged and entitled I was, but never understanding the price that I had to pay for it. But I knew outside of my cage the world was far colder and far crueler.
So no matter how much I ached for his touch, no matter how often I thought of him and how much I wanted to be his good girl, his angel, it just couldn’t happen.
I contemplated the church, reminding myself of the reasons why this couldn’t happen. I tried to work up the courage to actually walk in the door and face my demon head-on.
Was he my demon, or was I his? Had I somehow made a man of God stray? Had I welcomed or even courted this? He called me his angel, but was I his ruin? Was he mine?
He wouldn’t care about my reasoning, or about my social standing. All he had to do to avoid fall-out was get out of New York, assuming any of this touched him at all. Men were not treated the same way women were, and once he put on that collar, he became practically untouchable.
I, however, was very touchable by the rumors and the scandal.
Since there was no way he’d care, I had come up with other reasons for not becoming involved any further with him. Lesser reasons in my mind, but ones that maybe he could understand. When needing to get a point across, it was best to put it in terms beneficial to the person on the other side of the table. You didn’t tell them why you wanted it a certain way, you told them why they wanted it that way. Years of mind-numbing business classes had at least taught me that much.