Page 47 of Audacity

‘That’s it.’ I place a palm on each perfect white cheek, spreading them so I can enjoy the sight of her well-prepped cunt, pink and glistening and inviting, and the darker, more forbidden hole above it.

If anything is forbidden when it comes to this woman.

I grab my cock for the first time since I entered this most excellent trap and allow myself to trace a line with the tip down through her folds.

The breath she lets out is shuddery. ‘Oh, God.’

‘Praying now, are we?’

I notch myself at her entrance and take her hips, and Christ is the feeling of wedging myself inside her is an earthly paradise so sublime it could have me forsaking any more illustrious versions of heaven. I grunt out the next lines of today’s psalm, the act of sullying these holy words only making my physical pleasure keener. Sharper.

‘Before I was afflicted, I went astray,

but now I keep your word.’

The irony. Fuck, I’ve bottomed out in her. I pause for a second to wallow in the sheer delight of it, Athena’s groan telling me we are both very much on the same page. I pull out and really let her have it, keeping one hand gripping her hip while I use the other to burrow under her arm and find one perfect breast.

I’m a man lost to everything but his basest needs and to this beautiful, writhing woman’s ability to speak to them. The white-hot ecstasy coursing through my veins feels like the most lethally addictive opioid, a drug so strong I know it will pull me under and fill my lungs with its glorious toxins.

We come together like this, with me rutting into her with every animalistic urge I have and grunting out the basest, most transgressive take on psalms penned by King David himself and meant for the glory of God as she swallows my prayers with her cries.

I’m quite certain I’ve desecrated the Office of Terce on this January morning, but fuck if it doesn’t feel like the kind of exaltation most sinners will never know.

CHAPTER 21

Athena

‘If you want me to stop, you really are going about it the right way,’ Gabriel murmurs against my clit.

I pant against the smooth white sheets of our discreet bedroom in Claridges, willing myself to stop wriggling. This is absolutely not the type of establishment to rent rooms out by the hour, but it turns out it absolutelyisopen to accommodating local businessmen who choose to make a permanent standing room reservation.

All the more convenient for said businessmen to get their assistants naked and begging in their lunch hour.

I send up a mental prayer of thanks to the efficient George even as I grit my teeth with frustration, my hands flexing uselessly in their silk ties. ‘I didn’t know former priests could also be sadists.’

A little laugh against the skin of my thigh. ‘Oh, they absolutely can. And they’redefinitelymasters of being masochists, which is why I’m not balls-deep inside you already, sweetheart.’ He uses two fingers to part the lips of my pussy so fully that even the warm whisper of his breath on my flesh risks sending me over the edge. ‘Now tell me just one of your favourite memories and I’ll let you come, and all this misery will be over.’

Ever since I ambushed him in his prayer room last week, something has flipped. It’s as though he’s let himself go willingly to the dark side with me. As though he’s yielded to that inexorable downward pull I represent towards a dark underworld that, in his previous life, represented mainly a threat to his parishioners.

What that has meant is that he’s started to take the lead more in our sexual relations. Whether it’s because he finally understands thatI’mgiving him permission or because he’s finally givenhimselfpermission, I’m unsure.

Neither am I complaining.

Except for now, when this orgasm is as alluring and as inaccessible as the mirage of an oasis in the desert.

He has me naked and trussed up, spread eagle style, on an oak four-poster in Claridges. Our new arrangement lessens the risk of us being caught at work and allows us to get far more adventurous (though I’d argue that sex on a woodenprie-dieuwas pretty enterprising of us both). He’s naked too, a beautifully wrought arrangement of tanned skin and hard muscle and dark hair crouching over me as he toys shamelessly, relentlessly with my body.

I need him to let me come, andthenI need him to lay all that delicious weight over me and crush me as he fucks my brains out. He, however, has other ideas. He’s the seasoned CIA operative to my detainee, only his favoured intelligence-harvesting technique is orgasm denial.

‘I’ve signed NDAs,’ I say weakly.

‘Don’t care. I don’t need names, just generalisations.’ He slides a single finger so slowly, so carefully, inside my body, and it’s nowhere fucking near enough, and I just want to howl. ‘I’m still plumbing the depths of you, Athena, and I feel like I haven’t even started.’

He’s not talking about the depths his finger is exploring in such a torturously leisured way. He’s talking about the depths ofmeand my sex drive and my tolerance for depravity. And I get it, because I know he feels on the back foot with me. I know he feels out ofhisdepth, like the sex we’ve had so far has been firmly in the shallows.

I won’t admit it to him, but a part of me feels conflicted. I was pretty open with him at that interview dinner, but I understand that I’ve operated in environments he can’t even dream of. He knows I’m dirty, but he has no idea, really, of the things I’ve done over these past few years while with Seraph. Of the kinds of men I’ve been with. And there’s some small, dark part of me that doesn’t want this former man of the cloth judging me for that.

It’s as though he can read my mind. ‘I want to go places with you, if that’s what you want. I want us to have some fun with this. I just—I’m still trying to map you.’

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