Page 53 of Moonlit Temptation

I was in deep. So deep I already felt the chasm he was going to leave behind when we got on our respective flights.

My eyes stung, imagining it.

Quickly, I blinked them away.

No tears. No heartbreak.

But was my heart already breaking?

The kiss had long since ended and now Saint was helping the man back into the robe.

Before the fabric was completely around his shoulders, the group broke out into a chant. And this time, finally, I was able to hear the words:

Welcome home, Brother.

I couldn’t look away from Saint, couldn’t pry my gaze away with a crowbar. I was left suspended in a daze, questioning what I just witnessed.

Saint stood unperturbed as people moved to hug and shake the hand of the newcomer.

He was a deep-rooted tree in the middle of the storm, completely unaffected.

Instead of the sight of him filling me with warmth and need and want, I was left feeling cold.

With a deafening heart, I stared at a man I’d known my entire life, only to see a stranger standing in his place.

How many layers of a person had to be stripped away until you finally knew the real them?

I wasn’t naïve enough to believe I knew every part of Saint—that there weren’t pieces of him that were a stranger to my obsessive longing—but this felt like a pretty big deal to miss.

He was a book with hidden chapters, pages censored and undiscovered.

I made it back to the hotel in a daze, barely registering my belly flop onto the bed as I struggled to wrap my head around what I saw. What was that? Some satanic ritual? A sex cult?

Was Saint in a sex cult?

What was a sex cult, even? An in-house orgy? A place that preyed on young, unsuspecting people?

Oh, God. My stomach tightened. Was that why Saint slept with me?

I felt like I was going to throw up.

I almost didn’t want to see him. Didn’t know what version of him I would get.

The one that shared my bed or the one that commanded that room.

My body curled into a tight ball under the covers. The sun had started to sink below the River Thames, casting a shadow into the room. I refused to turn on a light. Refused to move a limb beyond the mattress.

It felt like I was hiding from reality. Maybe I was.

Part of me wished I hadn’t given in to my compulsion to follow him, that I was still kept in the dark.

The other part, a larger part, was glad I had. To know that the Saint I had worshiped for years wasn’t the man I was convinced I knew.

What was that cliched saying my father always spewed at me? Ignorance was always bliss.

Well, knowledge was a bitch.

I almost didn’t come back here. But when I ran from the property, I didn’t have a clue where else to go. It was better I came here, in the end. I needed to make sense of what I saw.

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