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“There’s ways of tracking people down.” Some might say it’s bad luck to rough up a priest…but I could practically feel the crunch of cartilage dislocating, the crack of breaking teeth, as I hit, and hit, and hit again, hard and fast, with no room for mercy. “He’s gotta be somewhere close if he heard about your—” I caught myself before I said it.
But Shane heard the unspoken word loud and clear. So soft it was hardly a breath, he said, “About my what?”
I dropped my arms and looked away.
But Shane didn’t take the opportunity to back off. He stayed exactly where he was, placing a single hand, palm-down, over my heart. “Even though Father Dunn will keep on getting away with it—they’ll just keep covering things up and shuffling him to another parish—” He walked his fingers up my collarbone and stroked them along my jaw, coaxing me to look him right in his storm-colored eyes. “I can’t tell you how touched I am that someone finally believes me.”
He slid his hand around the nape of my neck to draw me into a kiss…and winced.
When he pulled back, his fingers came away sticky with clotted blood. But he was nowhere near as shocked by it as he’d been the first time it happened.
I said, “We’ll get to the hospital—”
“There is no hospital, Gino, and we both know it. There’s nothing but the black boat, the river…and you, and me.”
As Shane spoke, he chafed off the blood, leaving a streak of rust red across the leg of his perfectly pressed gray suit pants. Then he took me by the shoulders, and dragged me into a fierce liplock that tasted more like desperation than want.
“This is a bad idea,” I said, but it was already too late. Shane snaked a hand down the front of my pants, and my dick started doing my thinkingforme. My breath caught as he worked my hard-on, confident and sure, maybe the only way I’d ever seen him assert himself.
He nipped at my lower lip while he jacked me off, breathing hard and ragged—nothing at all like Gabriel and his self-assured, easy charm. Nothing like the rough and random guys I’d get off with out back of the gin mill, either. Shane was pure need. And after everything he’d just told me—everything that had beendoneto him—I hated that his neediness turned me on.
Though it didn’t stop me.
It couldn’t. My own need came over me hard and fast in response to the feel of his slender fingers gripping me just right, and the small, desperate sounds he was making against my mouth. Without missing a beat, I grabbed him up against me and hoisted him up, and he wrapped his legs around my hips like we’d planned the whole move together. I staggered toward the tree cluster without breaking our kiss. Whether or not I thought I’d actually make it, I had no idea. I just had to get away from that damn river.
We made it to the trees in a few reeling steps—the same trees that had taken us hours to reach before. I dumped Shane onto a tangled mat of gray weeds. It wasn’t much, but it was better than the crunching gravel or the riverbank muck. He drew me down against him, me holding a pushup between his spread knees, him with his arms looped over my shoulders, arching up to rub against me.
“Touch me.” Shane’s voice was husky.
In the midst of all the wrongness, everything about him felt so damn right. Even so, I couldn’t shake the thought I was putting my hands where some lecherous old man-of-the-cloth had already blazed a trail.
And he saw it in my eyes. His pale brow furrowed. “You think I’m broken.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. When he tried to turn his head away, I took him by the jaw and made him look up at me. “I think you’re perfect.”
Shane’s pupils flexed and his eyes darkened. “Then, for heaven’s sake, Gino…don’t make me beg.”
It was the wrong thing at the wrong time—and most definitely the wrong place—but how could I even think of saying no?
Our kiss was savage. Even violent. And just as I thought I’d taken it too far—that Shane was scrambling to pry himself out from under me—he surprised me by flipping us both over, straddling my thighs, and kissing me ’till I forgot how to breathe.
I grappled at him hard enough to bruise, groping his back, kneading his sweet ass. He slipped a hand between us to unhitch his belt, and as soon as the buckle was undone, I had his pants down. He was just as hard as I was, and when I made a fist around his shaft, he gave off a gasp that was nearly a sob.
“I need to see,” he said against my mouth, then levered himself up on trembling arms. “Your big, rough hands…. Fuck, yeah.” He watched, mesmerized, as I worked his cock. The flushed red tip appeared and disappeared inside the circle of my fist as I pumped it, and the slit glistened with arousal. “They’renothinglike his hands.”
It wasn’t the first time those huge mitts of mine made me feel like a man. But never had it been for this reason.
“You too,” Shane said. “I want you to get off, too. With me. Together.”
I shoved down my pants and my cock jutted up off my belly like it was straining to touch him. I took it in my other hand, side by side with Shane’s, and let him set the rhythm with his graceful hips. The act was as quick and dirty as any hookup behind a seedy bar with a stranger—but somehow it was so much more. Even through the clothes, I could sense Shane’s wiry strength, and the way we would fit together, just right, naked and drowsy, tangled in sweaty sheets and watching the sun come up…if we ever got the chance. Which I highly doubted.
This hasty grope session would have to be enough.
Shane lowered his mouth to mine. “I’m close,” he breathed against my lips, but I already knew, from the way his thighs had gone taut and the high flush on his cheeks. I jacked us both harder, faster, but it wasn’t the pressure of my callused hand that finally brought me off…it was the look of innocent wonder on Shane’s face as his eyelids fluttered shut and he found his release.
Afterward, I was worried he’d pull up his pants, make a smart remark, and start regretting what we’d done. But he didn’t. Instead, he rolled off me just enough to settle into the crook of my arm, then nestled his head on my shoulder and breathed a sigh of contentment.
“I’ve given it some thought,” he eventually said. “And I’ve realized this isn’t Egypt, after all.”
