Mortal Sin (34 page)

“Gonzales,” he said thoughtfully, remembering a pair of shiny black boots with pointed toes. “If we can find him, maybe he’ll lead us to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I wouldn’t mind seeing him go down right along with Rio.”

“Kit says she’s been to his house. It’s in a crummy neighborhood out near the airport.”

“East Boston. That should be easy enough. There can’t be more than a couple hundred Gonzales families in East Boston.”

“Not much to go on, is it?”

“It’s more than we had an hour ago.” He thought longingly of a hot shower to wash off the
eau de basketball
that clung to him, but came to the reluctant conclusion that at this particular moment, comfort was a higher priority than cleanliness. “Why don’t we go find that tea now?” he said.

She followed him to the rectory kitchen, a place where he spent very little time. His private quarters had a kitchenette that was more than sufficient for his needs, and it took him a few minutes of searching before he located the tea bags and a pair of cups. He set them on the marble countertop beside the gargantuan old commercial gas range, filled the teakettle and put it on a front burner, and turned the knob.

Nothing happened. Behind him, Sarah said, “I think you need to light the pilot.”

He swiveled around, puzzled. “The pilot?”

“You really don’t know much about cooking, do you. Father?”

He shrugged, unembarrassed. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Besides, I have other, much more significant qualities.”

“Uh-huh. Find me a match.” She knelt and opened the massive double oven doors. He stepped back, more than willing to let her take over. “My momma used to cook on one of these things,” she said from inside the oven, “until Daddy finally decided it was time to enter the twentieth century.” He handed her a wooden match from the box on the sideboard. She struck it, and he heard a poof. Retreating from the oven’s cavernous interior, she brushed her hands together and stood back up. “There,” she said. “Now you can run the stovetop.”

“Slick maneuver,” he said. “You’ll have to show it to me sometime.”

“I don’t know, sugar. You’re really good at that helpless little boy thing. I bet it goes over big with the ladies in your congregation.” She paused, took a deep breath, then said briskly, “So what do we do now?”

He lit the burner, adjusted the placement of the teakettle, killed a little time waiting for it to start heating. “Now,” he said, “I call Paoletti. Run Gonzales by him and see if he rings any bells.”

She moved away from him, crossed the room to the window, stood looking out while she absently ran a hand back and forth along the smooth marble countertop that Abby kept spic and span clean. “Gonzales told you not to go to the police,” she said.

Beside him, the kettle whistled. He busied himself pouring hot water over tea bags, then carried one of the cups across the room and handed it to her. “Careful,” he warned. “It’s hot.”

She took it from him without speaking, and went back to gazing out the window. He returned to the stove, where he swished his own tea bag around in the hot water. To the back of her head, he said, “I’m just going to do a little discreet checking. Gonzales won’t ever know.”

She turned away from the window. “I’m afraid,” she said. “Don’t you understand? Bone-deep afraid. For Kit, and for you.” Her voice broke. “They’ve come after you once. What’s to stop them from doing it again?”

The hand that held the teacup trembled, and it was that, more than anything, that got to him. She was a strong woman, and there was nothing so heartbreaking as watching a strong woman disintegrate. He crossed the room, took the teacup out of her hand, and set it on the counter.

And took her in his arms.

It was an idiotic thing to do, but then, he’d been acting like an idiot since the day they met. Heedless of his disheveled state, he held her hard against him, tuning out the instantaneous protest from his bruised ribs. Warm. She felt so warm. Warm and soft and pliable. He buried his face in her hair, inhaled the faintly floral scent of her shampoo, and felt the rapid, steady rhythm of her heart.

With a sigh, she settled into him. Was it a sigh of contentment, or one of resignation? He couldn’t tell. Breathing hard, he reminded himself that this was comfort. Nothing more, despite the rapacious urgings of his body. He lowered his head and brushed his cheek against hers. Her skin was like silk. He slid a hand up her smooth, slender neck, cupped it beneath the heavy fall of hair. With the pad of his thumb, he traced the line of her jaw, the distinct bow of her upper lip.

She raised her head. Those blue eyes met his, and all the breath left his body. He knew it was a cliche, but he could have sworn that for an instant, the earth stopped revolving. His stomach turned inside out, and his heart hammered erratically against his ribs. His gaze still locked with hers, he took a sharp, shallow breath and leaned imperceptibly closer—

And remembered, belatedly, who and where and what he was.

He froze, stricken by what he’d done, by what he’d nearly done, by what he wanted, more than anything, to do. Her eyes went suddenly soft and bruised, the eyes of a wounded doe. A pink tinge crept up her cheeks, and she pulled away.

He released her instantly, but the damage was already done. “I have to leave,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Kit might call again, and I have so much to do tonight, I’ll never get it all done. I’ll be up until midnight if I don’t get started. Thank you for the tea.”

“Sarah,” he said, “don’t.”

She turned on him, the pain he’d caused imbuing her words with a harshness she probably wasn’t even aware of. “Leave me alone, Clancy! This situation is embarrassing enough without you making it worse. I’d like to leave with some of my dignity still intact.”

Her words were like a slap to the face. He didn’t try to stop her. Instead, he stood clutching the cool, hard edge of the marble countertop, trying to ease the ache in his gut, trying to figure out how he’d managed to get himself into this mess. Wondering how he was supposed to cope now that he’d stepped over the invisible boundary they’d drawn in the sand between them. She was hurt. And furious. He’d seen the fury smoldering in her eyes, just beneath that outer layer of pain. He couldn’t blame her for being angry. He had no business holding her, no business leading her on. No business feeling as though he would expire without her touch. It would serve him right if she simply walked out of his life the same way she’d walked into it, a whirlwind of blue eyes and golden hair, soft Southern vowels and that sweet essence that was simply Sarah.

He wouldn’t blame her if she did. He just wasn’t sure he had the strength to bear it.

The rectory door thudded behind her, and he waited for the sound of her car engine, waited for her to drive away, out of his life, forever. But all he heard was the soft ticking of the kitchen clock. After what seemed an eternity, there was a brisk knock on the door. He took a deep breath, ran a shaky hand through his hair, and went to answer it.

She was standing on the steps, her spine ramrod straight, her chin high in the air. “May I use your phone?” she said, as though they were strangers, as though he hadn’t just held her in his arms and nearly handed his soul to the devil for her.

“Why?” he said. He glanced past her, at the Mustang, still sitting where she’d left it earlier. “Is there a problem?”

“It’s my car,” she said wearily. “The son of a dog won’t start.”

It took nearly two hours for the tow truck to arrive, two hours of pacing and stewing and avoiding him as much as was humanly possible. He tried to make amends, tried to be a gracious host. He offered her coffee, tea, hot cocoa. Scotch. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Takeout pizza. She refused them all, too angry and hurt and humiliated to accept anything from him, ever again. Eventually he gave up and left her to brood alone while he took a shower and dressed in clothes that didn’t smell like a stale locker room.

By the time the tow truck got there, it was seven-thirty, and it had started to rain. For the second time in a matter of weeks, she stood by the window and watched the Mustang being towed away. Tomorrow, she would call the repair shop and make them wish they’d never heard her name. In the meantime, she had a more immediate dilemma.

“May I use your phone again?” she said stiffly. “I need to call a taxi.”

“A taxi?” He raised those thick, dark eyebrows in disbelief. “Do you have any idea how much it would cost you to take a taxi from South Boston to Revere? Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll drive you home.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll just take the T. If you’d be so kind as to point me in the right direction?”

“Stop being an ass. I said I’d drive you home.”

Her mouth fell open. She tried to formulate a snotty retort, but the words wouldn’t come, probably because he was right. She was being an ass. “Fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

At some point during that endless, silent ride, her anger dissipated, leaving in its place an emptiness that was somehow worse than the anger. Sarah couldn’t look at him, couldn’t speak to him, for fear she’d dissolve into tears. She couldn’t understand why, for she wasn’t the kind of woman who wept and wailed and grieved for things that might have been. She was the straightforward, solid kind of woman, the kind who made her decisions and burned her bridges and lived with the consequences of her actions. She’d made a mistake getting involved with Clancy Donovan. Good-looking, charismatic men had always been her downfall. It was time to admit the truth, once again drag herself up by the bootstraps, and move on with her life. So why couldn’t she do it?

The tension between them was so thick, she could have sliced it with a knife. He pulled the car into her driveway and turned off the headlights. Rain pattered gently against the roof, and the windshield wipers slapped back and forth with a hypnotic rhythm while they sat, two statues frozen in time and place.

“The way I see it,” he said into the darkness, “we have two options. We can go on pretending this isn’t happening, or we can bring it out into the open and try to figure out what the hell we’re supposed to do about it.”

On the radio, Bob Seger’s raspy voice sang quietly of love and loss. “There isn’t anything we can do about it,” she said. “What we’re feeling for each other… what we’re thinking… it’s an absolute impossibility.”

Metal tinkled against metal as he toyed with the keys that dangled from the ignition. “There are things I’d like to say to you. But I’m not supposed to even think such things, let alone speak them out loud to a woman.”

She focused her attention on the sweep of the wipers for fear that she’d implode if she looked at him. “What things?” she said.

“If the situation were different… I’d tell you that I dream about you at night. Vivid, erotic dreams. That I wake up in a sweat with my fists clenched and the smell of you still in my head. I’d tell you I want to lie naked with you, flesh to flesh, and draw in the very essence of you through my pores. I’d tell you that the instant you walk into a room, I forget how to breathe. My chest tightens, my lungs contract, and I can’t for the life of me remember how to draw breath. If the situation were different, I’d tell you all these things. But the situation is what it is, so I can’t.”

Inside her heart, elation warred with despair. “How am I supposed to respond to that? What do you expect me to say?”

“That I should stay away from you? Never darken your door again?” His misery was palpable, a living, breathing entity. “I don’t know, Sarah. You tell me.”

She hovered at the edge of a dangerous precipice. One step in the wrong direction would produce devastating results. But which direction was the right one? It seemed that no matter which path she chose, heartache lay at its end.

She wet her lips and said, “Do you want to come in the house?”

He lifted his gaze to hers. Amber eyes locked with blue and held, while her heart hammered so loudly she could hear it inside her head.
Boom-boom. Boom-boom
. Without speaking, he turned off the car, reached for his seat belt, and released it.

It took her trembling hands three tries to get her key into the lock. The door opened, and she stumbled across the threshold in the darkness. Behind her, he quietly closed the door. She reached for the light switch, and his hand closed over her wrist to stop her.

“Sarah.” he whispered. Just her name, but that single word, the touch of his fingers, incited a riot inside her. For an endless instant, they stood frozen, his fingers locked around her wrist, her chest rising and falling with her heavy breathing. Then somebody took the first step—maybe him, maybe her, maybe both of them—and she moved into his arms in a motion as fluid and seamless and inevitable, as right and natural, as the sun coming up tomorrow morning.

So close they breathed in tandem, they gazed into each other’s eyes, her body thrumming with terror and anticipation and delight, all rolled into a single jagged entity that danced in her belly like a porcupine on speed. The thick night air spilling through the open living room window carried the moist, fresh scent of the rain. In the distance, sharp and quick as a knife, a siren tore the velvet fabric of the night. She lay the palm of her hand against his cheek, ran exploring fingertips up the bridge of his nose, traced his eyebrows, a little too thick, a little too shaggy, one after the other.

He caught her wrist in his hand, brought it to his mouth, kissed the spot where her pulse beat so rapidly. Her breasts were crushed against his chest, and his ribs—his poor, bruised ribs—rose and fell with his breathing. His heart thudded erratically. He plowed his fingers into her hair, took her face in his hands, and dragged her mouth up to his.

Dear God.

She’d waited so long for this.

How many men had she kissed over the years? He instantly erased them all, this exquisite, forbidden man who tasted of heaven and hell and everything in between. She forgot all the reasons why they weren’t supposed to be together like this, forgot everything but the magic of his mouth on hers in the velvety blackness of a warm May night ripe with the scent of honeysuckle and punctuated by the chirping of a cricket in the tall grass behind the garage. She locked her arms around his neck in desperation, in mortal danger of tumbling headlong into a place from which she’d never find her way back again.