Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(109)

“Have I ever, Miss Simon?” he asked, the eyebrow with the scar through it rising. “You’re not the only one who’s been keeping secrets.”

I was so surprised by this answer that I forgot to hold on to his wrist, giving him the momentary physical advantage. He took it by yanking my tank top over my head.

“Jesse!” I cried, shocked. His training in dealing with uncooperative patients was in high evidence. “What are you—”

He silenced me by lowering first his mouth over my lips, then his entire body over mine, pressing me back against the window-seat cushion.

My mind spun. The sensations I was experiencing were not at all unpleasant—the lean weight of his body; the quick, light touch of his tongue and hands; his clean, soapy man smell (no trace of the Monterey County Jail that I could tell)—but I couldn’t understand why they were happening here, now.

Then again, why was I wasting time thinking? How many nights had I lain in this very room, dreaming of this happening (though admittedly never on the window seat)?

And now it was happening, and I was questioning it instead of simply enjoying it, like the fact that he’d managed somehow to peel off my bra, and was tracing a hot trail with his mouth from my throat toward what the cups of the bra had revealed.

But what, I couldn’t help wondering, in the part of my brain that could still think and not feel, if those things about the curse were true?

Then his fingers were undoing the zipper to my jeans, and I remembered what I’d said to Jesse the night before. I wasn’t afraid of ghosts . . . especially this one.

I reached for the fly to his own jeans, and the sound of it popping open might have been the most satisfying thing I’d ever experienced in my life . . . at least until I felt, when he’d thrown his shirt aside, the sensation of the bare skin of his chest meeting mine. Then I decided no, that was the most amazing thing I’d ever experienced. He kissed me deeply, but after he peeled my jeans away from my hips, kissing wasn’t ever going to be enough. We’d both seen and felt—for the first time—all of each other’s secrets, and now nothing was going to stop us from fully exploring them, no matter what rules we ended up breaking.

A few heart-pounding, breathless seconds later, our clothes were in a tangled heap on the floor, and he was inside me. It was exactly how I had always imagined it would be, and yet unimaginably better. If evil was being unleashed, I couldn’t see it, or feel it, either. What I felt was the opposite. I was flooded with playful joy, as if the dark blue walls around us were sweeping us up and rolling us into the peaceful blue Pacific beyond my windows, full of warmth and light. It washed over us again and again, leaving us spent and happy and full of gratitude and love. How could there be evil in that?

There couldn’t. Only good.

Perhaps this was what Paul had somehow known and feared us discovering most of all.

Oh, well. Too late now.

I was so tired afterward I felt as if I could barely raise my head, but I did manage to notice something.

“Goddammit, Jesse. You didn’t even give me a chance to take off my boots.”

His head was resting on my shoulder as, with one finger, he drew lazy circles on my thigh. “I did try to remove them at one point, but you seemed more interested in my doing other things.” His tone was teasing. “I was only trying to appease your wishes.”

“Ha! If that were true, we’d have had sex a long time ago. What’s changed all of sudden?”

His dark eyes gleamed. “You still don’t know?”

“No, I still don’t know. I mean, besides proving that you didn’t turn into some kind of homicidal demon just from having sex with me, what happened to how we have to wait until we’re married out of respect for what you owe to me and my family and the church and all of mankind? All this time you and Father Dominic—”

Jesse stopped drawing circles on my thigh and lifted his head to give me a disapproving look. “I really wish you wouldn’t bring him up at this particular moment, Susannah.”

“Well, I don’t want to talk about him, either,” I said. “But you’re the one who dragged me to all those boring Pre-Cana classes. I’m certainly not complaining about how things have turned out, but what was the point of waiting if the entire time you were going to abandon all your religious scruples when—”

“I haven’t abandoned them. I merely decided there was reason to be more flexible about them.”

I grinned. “Would one of those reasons have to do with a certain person from our past who came roaring into town this week to declare his undying love for me, so you wanted to mark your territory?”

“It would not,” he said, “though I feel as if I should add ‘highly active imagination’ to the list of your many assets.”

“You can’t blame me for thinking it after what happened last night.”

“My reasons have more to do with what happened this morning. That’s why I spoke to Father Dominic.”

All feeling of postcoital lethargy left me. I sat up so abruptly I banged him in the head with my shoulder.

“You what?”

“Ow, Susannah. I’d ask if I hurt you earlier, but it’s clear that you’re feeling fine. If I were a less well-adjusted man, you might have wounded my dignity.”

“Oh, don’t worry about your dignity, I’ll be walking bowlegged for a week. We’re going to have to get a new cushion, as a matter of fact, or at least flip this one over. But why did you talk to Father Dominic? I get that he’s your confessor, but he’s my boss, too. I don’t need him knowing all my personal business. You didn’t tell him about this, did you?” I gestured to our clothes, which lay across the floor. “How could you confess something you didn’t know you were going to do? Unless . . .” I gasped. “Jesse! You scoundrel! Was this premeditated sex?”