Page 6 of Priest

“You’re lying!”

“Am I? I’m sure that you can easily contact Carlos. Ask him if he wasn’t fucking your mother every time I left town. Call him!” he shouted, shoving his cell phone at me.

Spit flew from his mouth. My father was enraged, and I was terrified. I had never been afraid of him. He didn’t appear to be the same man who had given me everything, protected me, and loved me unconditionally.

Until an hour ago, my father had been my world. He was a knight in shining armor who always ran to my rescue. The man who loomed over me was someone I wanted to hide from.

“If you showed?—”

A loud boom toward the front of the house, followed by shouting, interrupted me. I looked at my father, and his eyes had grown round and large with fear.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Get upstairs, now.” He grumbled, heading for his bookshelf where he kept his gun safe.

“Who is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“The guards. Where are they?” I rushed behind his desk and tapped the keys on his computer. I pulled up the monitors and saw two dead bodies at the front gate, Jeremy and Vance, and another one at the front door, Elijah. I had no idea what happened to Morris, the guard who patrolled the grounds.

“Get upstairs,” Daddy whispered while he keyed his code into the keypad.

“Daddy,” I whispered.

“Your ass had better do what the fuck I tell you to do before it’s too late,” he hissed.

“It’s too late for that.”

“What?”

My daddy turned around and stared at the man who stared at me. A man whose dark umber skin looked as if he hadworked in the sun most of his life. Menacing, coal-black eyes raked carelessly and cruelly along my body over the rim of mirrored sunglasses as if he could see right through the cropped, sleeveless pink blouse that I wore and the skintight jeans that hugged my curves.

Deadly eyes slowly dragged down the zipper of my blouse as though he was tugging it down inch by inch with those large, veiny, tattooed hands. My hand instinctively flew to my zipper to make sure that it hadn’t come down by his sheer willpower. The muscles in his forearms flexed, and my gaze rose from his hands up to his biceps. He had full-sleeve tattoos on both arms. That shit was sexier than a muthafucka.

The upturn of thick, full lips surrounded by a thick, beautiful beard and mustache and the way his tongue flitted out to lick them before they turned up into a sneer had me throbbing at my core. And there was something about that big, curly afro that made me want to touch it despite the danger surrounding him.

“Priest.” My father and I whispered at the same time.

Shame filled me when I saw the disgust in my father’s eyes. He had seen the way Priest undressed me with his eyes. It was a good thing that he hadn’t seen the way I’d wet my panties over how Priest looked at me. If Phaedra thought I was wet before, she hadn’t seen shit yet.

Unfortunately, my father hadn’t gotten his safe unlocked yet.

“Step the fuck away from that safe, Morgan, or that’s your ass.”

“Priest, surely we can talk about this like civilized men.”

“Ain’t shit civilized ’bout you or me, nigga.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t talk like businessmen, Priest.”

“You fucked up, Morgan,” Priest stated, stalking further into the room.

“I understand that you’re upset,” my daddy replied.

Priest walked behind my father’s desk and took a seat in my father’s chair as though he owned it. He was merely inches away from me. His scuffed, dirty black boots touched the toes of my thirteen-hundred-dollar Manolo Blahniks. He still hadn’t looked at my father, but it didn’t matter because there were three other men crowded in the doorway who dared my father to make a move.

I could hear other feet walking around upstairs, and I knew there was a gang of them prowling through our home, touching our things, violating any sense of security we had. A shudder ran through me, and Priest leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.

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