Mortal Sin (37 page)

“Steady. Nothing Steve and I couldn’t handle.” Josie glanced up from her perch on the floor. “Hand me that stack of Asaros.”

Sarah picked up the pile of paperback novels and handed them to her assistant. “I’m sorry to keep deserting you like this.”

“Not a problem.” Josie cleared a space on the second shelf and tucked the books neatly into it. “You have things you need to do. Stevie and I can handle the store. Oh, I almost forgot—Clancy called.”

Heat flooded her body. It was absurd that she should have this kind of physical response to the mere sound of his name. She was a grown woman, thirty-three years old, with three ex-husbands and few remaining romantic illusions. It was insane that she should be this happy about a phone call from a man who was off-limits not just to her, but to every female on the planet. Ridiculous that she should feel like a giggly teenage girl with a major crush, like those girls she’d seen in East Boston, still wearing that fresh-faced look of hope in spite of the babies they pushed in strollers.

Trying to affect a cool casualness she didn’t feel, she said, “Really? I thought he wasn’t due back until tonight.”

“He isn’t. He called from the road.” Josie picked up another stack of paperbacks and tucked them into an empty space. “He wants you to call him.”

She strode nonchalantly to the front of the store, squeezed past Steve, who was talking books with a customer, and used the phone behind the counter. Clancy answered on the second ring. “Hey there, sugar,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Right now, I’m sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Route 3, headed back from the Cape. Are you free to talk?”

She stepped aside to allow Steve access to the cash register. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Then I’ll talk. You can listen. I’ve spent the last five days thinking about this little problem we’ve been having.”

Her breath strangled in her throat. “And?”

“And I’ve decided we’re going to resolve it tonight.”

Her mouth went as dry as a double vermouth martini. Suddenly, in spite of the air-conditioning, she was damp all over. Carefully, she said, “Would you care to clarify that statement?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

She must have made some kind of odd noise, for Steve glanced up, eyebrows raised. Sarah blew out a breath and turned away from him. Into the phone, she said quietly, desperately, “You have lost your mind.”

“Maybe I have. Or maybe I’ve found it. Sarah, I’ve looked into my heart, my soul, about as deep as a man can look into himself, and I haven’t found anything wrong, anything sinful, in the way I feel about you. I’m not a saint, I’m just a man, a man who’s been alone for too long. And I want you with every fiber of my being.”

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. At the other end of the phone, she heard the purr of his engine as he moved forward in the line of traffic and then stopped again.

“Any time you’d like to chime in with a response,” he said, “the floor’s open.”

“What are you expecting me to say?”

“Damn it, Sarah, don’t make this any harder on me than it has to be. I’m sitting here in the middle of the traffic jam from hell, breathing in diesel exhaust, with a box of Trojans in a bag on the passenger seat and my heart in my hand. Give me something. Anything.”

His words struck her like a hard blow to her stomach. In a strangled voice, she said to nobody in particular, “I have to take this call in my office.”

Cradling the cordless phone to her chest, she walked on unsteady legs to the back of the store and into her cluttered office. Heart thudding, she dropped into the swivel chair behind the desk. In disbelief, she said into the phone, “You bought condoms?”

“In a little drugstore in Provincetown. Hiding behind dark glasses, my hands shaking like a junkie in need of a fix. I’d have worn a paper bag over my head if I’d had one. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I kept expecting the heavens to open up and a bolt of lightning to plummet to earth and strike me dead. I’ve finally figured out why so many teenage girls wind up pregnant. It’s because teenage boys can’t face the terror of buying condoms.”

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him just yet that his purchase was totally unnecessary. Instead, she said in a tremulous voice, “You’re serious about this.”

“God in heaven, Sarah, would I joke about something like this?”

“You’re obviously not thinking clearly. You haven’t considered the ramifications.”

“I’m thinking more clearly than I have in months.”

“What about the Church?”

“Let me worry about the Church. It’s not your concern.”

“Of course it is. If we do this…if we take our relationship to the next level… if we become—” She clamped her mouth abruptly shut, unable to continue.

“Lovers. It’s all right to say the word out loud. God won’t strike you dead for saying it.”

“If we do this,” she said doggedly, “then everything that affects you affects me. All your concerns become mine.”

“It’s too late,” he said. “Everything that affects you already affects me.”

“Damn it, Clancy, I don’t want to hurt you! Don’t you understand? You have so much more to lose than I do!”

“And so very much to gain by loving you.”

She closed her eyes, bit her lip, blinked back the tears welling beneath her eyelids. “You’re going to break my heart, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. Let me check my to-do list. Let’s see… oil change, six-month dental checkup, pick up dry cleaning… yes, there it is. Break Sarah’s heart.”

In spite of her efforts to prevent it, the corners of her mouth turned up. “It may not be intentional, but you’ll do it anyway. It’s inevitable.” She took a hard, shuddering breath and swiped a tear from her cheek. “But there’s something I have to say first, Father. I know it’s a sin, but I can’t help it. I’m a prideful woman. I will not be your regret, or a mistake you made during a moment of weakness. I won’t be your midlife crisis, or—God help us both—your guilty pleasure.”

“Sarah, love, you’re none of the above. What you are is my obsession.”

All the breath left her body. Outside the open door of her office, Steve and Josie went about their business as though the earth weren’t buckling and trembling beneath their feet.

The phone crackled with static. “Sarah?” he said. “Are you still there?”

She wet her lips, found her voice. “Yes.”

“Just so you don’t misunderstand—I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Tonight. Nine o’clock. Be ready.”

She opened her mouth to respond, but he’d already hung up.

She left work early, stopped at the candle shop and selected three fat candles. Then she rushed home to start shoveling through the clutter. Even though he’d seen her house in its customary chaotic condition a dozen times, on this momentous occasion she wanted everything to be perfect. She washed dishes, ran the vacuum, dusted nooks and crannies she generally forgot. Tucked magazines into the magazine rack, folded newspapers and stuffed them into the trash can in the garage.

She cut a bouquet of white lilacs from the yard and placed them in the center of the dining room table, set two candles on the fireplace mantel, then spent twenty minutes choosing a diverse selection of romantic ballads and programming them into the CD player.

At seven-thirty, satisfied she’d done all she could with the house, she lit the candles, turned on the music, and went upstairs to get ready. She showered, shaved all the necessary body parts, and blow-dried her hair until it tumbled, soft and wavy, around her shoulders.

In the bedroom, she dropped her robe in front of the mirror and critically studied her thirty-three-year-old body. She was so damned ordinary, and she wondered what it would be like to be Faith Hill or Shania Twain, sleek and stunning and perfect. Leaning toward the mirror, she searched for any indication of aging—crow’s feet, sagging jowls, droopy boobs—but her skin was still as smooth and supple as it had been at twenty. She couldn’t find any wrinkles, and so far, nothing had started to head south. Her thighs were firm, if unremarkable, her belly flat, her waist neatly tucked. No man had ever waxed poetic over her breasts, but they were firm and high, a perfectly adequate 34C.

Oh, Lord. How was she going to survive this night without detonating like a scud missile gone awry?

She was meticulous with her makeup. He’d seen her without it, but tonight was different. Tonight was for larger-than-life romantic fantasies, and she was pulling out all the stops. While Celine Dion crooned downstairs, she applied mascara with hands that trembled so hard she had to set down the brush and force herself to take a series of slow, calming breaths. For all her worldly experience, tonight she felt like a fifteen-year-old on her first date. Except that no man, not even when she was fifteen, had ever made her tremble in anticipation.

This was it. The Big One. Everything that had come before tonight, all the frogs she’d kissed while she waited for her prince to arrive, were nothing more than rehearsal. It didn’t matter that her prince was a card-carrying member of the
Catholic clergy. It didn’t matter that the funeral pyre she was tossing herself onto was her own. Like a racehorse out of control, she was determined to barrel straight ahead and immolate herself in the flames. She was smart enough to recognize it, just not smart enough to figure out what she was supposed to do with the knowledge.

She managed somehow to finish with the mascara, then she painstakingly painted her lips a bloody crimson, layered them with clear lip gloss to make them shiny and wet and kissable. When she was done, she barely recognized the woman in the mirror, red lips parted in anticipation, eyes bright with a combination of excitement and terror. What she was about to do was irreversible, and terrifying on so many different levels that just thinking about it made her nauseous. Her stomach gurgled, empty and forlorn, but she didn’t dare to eat for fear of upchucking and ruining everything.

She spent ten minutes deliberating her choice of undergarments. Did she dare to go without? The man hadn’t seen a naked woman in eleven years, and she didn’t want to be the cause of his untimely demise. On the other hand, her bureau drawers were filled with utilitarian cotton underwear, hardly sexy by any standards.

This isn’t about sex
, he’d said.

Right. And pigs could fly.

She decided to forgo the underwear. If she was going to play the role of vamp, she might as well take no prisoners, and if he wasn’t man enough to survive it, he shouldn’t have set this catastrophe into motion in the first place.
Be ready
, he’d told her. Lord only knew, she was ready, so primed she was in danger of starting without him.

She’d already picked out a dress. Her closet was crammed with lovely clothes, most of them bought with Remy’s charge card. But tonight, she had no intention of wearing something paid for by another man. She’d bought the dress on sale at Filene’s back in January, then she’d tucked it away in her closet and forgotten it. It was black, a soft, shimmering silk that clung to her like a second skin. She wriggled into it, reveling in the whisper of silk against her naked flesh. With nervous hands, she smoothed the fabric, adjusted the tiny spaghetti straps that held it up, tugged at the hem and trusted that her backside was adequately covered.

She stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linens. Then she turned down the sheets and spritzed perfume, subtle and floral and sweet, between crisp layers of cotton. She spritzed herself at the pulse points in her wrists and her neck, at the crease of elbow and knee, in the shadowy hollow between her breasts. Heart thudding, she crossed the room and spritzed between the sheets again, just for good measure.

Night had settled outside her window while she dressed, and somewhere nearby, a cricket had begun to broadcast his nocturnal song. She walked to the window, closed the blinds, and stepped into the black high-heel shoes she’d set out earlier. There was a box of wooden matches in the top drawer; she opened it, removed a match and struck it. With a soft hiss, it sputtered into flame, and she lit the last candle and blew out the spent match.

Surveying herself critically in the mirror, she decided there was nothing more she could do. This was as good as it got. She opened a drawer and swept her cosmetics into it. She could sort them out later. Pausing, she scanned the room to make sure the pillows were plumped, that the chair beside the window was empty, that she hadn’t left any dirty undies peeking out from beneath the bed.

A flick of the lamp switch plunged her into flickering, shadowy candlelight. Through the window, she heard the purr of an automobile engine in her driveway, and her heart kicked into overdrive. With slow deliberation, she descended the stairs, afraid that if she didn’t hold herself back, she’d stumble in the heels and fall ass over teakettle to the bottom. There was no room for stumbling tonight. There was no room tonight for anything but magic, the kind of magic a man and a woman could make when everything was right and the feelings were fathomless and they’d finally stopped trying to keep their hands off each other.

His footsteps crossed the porch, and he knocked on the door. Sarah stepped into the foyer, took a single, hard breath, her hand trembling on the doorknob. Then she turned the knob and swung the door open.

He waited on the other side of the screen, dark hair haloed by the porch light. His hands were tucked casually into the pockets of his jeans, the tails of his black linen jacket hitched up, crumpled between elbow and wrist. Beneath the jacket, he wore a blue dress shirt, open at the throat, just enough to reveal a glimpse of crisp dark chest hair. The effect was devastating. Her heart rate accelerated as he considered her with that enigmatic amber gaze. Gone was the humble agent of God, morphed into an exotic emissary of the Dark Side.

May the Force be with you.

She took a deep breath and said, “This is it, Father. Last chance to bail.”

Those bottomless golden eyes studied her, head to toe. She waited, her chest aching with the effort to breathe. Finally, his gaze reached her face. “Five days,” he said. “Five days since I last saw you, and it feels like five years.”