Lessons in Sin by Pam Godwin

CHAPTER 18

MAGNUS

By the time we stepped outside, the storm had moved on, leaving a frigid chill in the air that would work well to clear my head.

Carrying the blankets, I led Tinsley to my car. An old base-model sedan. No options. The lowest of the low. Nothing like the luxury cars I’d owned in New York.

The tin box was perfect for me.

She didn’t spare it a glance as she slid into the front seat. The opossums absorbed her full attention.

During the drive, she petted and played with their ears and tails. I left her to it, knowing these were her final moments with them.

Twenty minutes later, I parked along the gravel path that led to the entrance of the state park.

“Ready?” I twisted in the dark to face her.

She stared down at the animals on her lap. Her chest lifted with a heavy inhale, but she didn’t cry. Instead, she nodded, and a tiny smile twitched at the corner of her mouth.

Wrapped in blankets and escorted by the moonlight, we stepped onto the path in our soggy shoes and icy clothes. My breath formed puffs of white vapor, and my fingers were so cold they’d gone numb. But I was at ease. Unburdened. Peaceful.

This deep, genuine sense of happiness was new to me. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so content.

It had everything to do with her.

In the space of six weeks, she’d become a coveted presence. I eagerly awaited every word from her mouth. Looked forward to seeing the ferocity in her eyes. Counted down the seconds until she punched back with another witty retort.

As she lowered the opossums to the ground and coaxed them into the woods, I realized this was the side of her I cherished the most.

With her guard down and her soft underbelly exposed, she was an angel beyond her astral form. Her power came from her inner grace and compassion. When she wasn’t trying to raise hell in my classroom, she was innately, wholly, profoundly pure of heart.

Where I was a cold and empty house of bones, she was a vast meadow aglow with lemon-scented blooms and honeybees.

She was everything I wasn’t.

I’d never been so taken with a woman, and it unnerved the hell out of me. She was smart and strong and willful enough to pierce my exterior. Hell, she was the only woman who might understand me and accept me for who I was.

I feared that for her.

I meant what I’d told her. I wouldn’t be able to stop this. But to protect her from me, I was going to damn well fucking try.

As the opossums set off into the darkness, she stood beside me, watching them fade away. She blew a kiss, a little wave, and tilting her face to the night sky, she released a joyous laugh.

A much better send-off than a shoebox and burial mound.

I gave her the time she needed, standing silently at her side and absorbing her beauty in my periphery. We hugged the blankets around our shoulders, our arms brushing, hers shaking with the cold. Without thought, I pulled her against me, chest to chest, enveloping her in fleece and body heat.

She rested her cheek against me and sighed. My body hardened. Our hips pulled together. Her soft, pearl-colored hair tickled my throat. I wasn’t wearing my collar.

This was a bad idea.

She snaked her arms under the blankets and wound them around my back. “Confession time.”

“We already did that today.”

“This isn’t a sin. It’s more of an admission.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Too bad. I know who left the carnage in my room, and when you punish her…” She made a groaning sound. “This is hard for me to say.”

I bit back a smile, knowing what would come out of her mouth.

“I don’t want you to whip her.” She stared up at me through her lashes. “Or spank her or look under her skirt or—”

“Tinsley—”

“—touch her in any way. Mostly, I don’t want you to be with her the way you were with me today.” She propped her chin on my chest, her gaze never leaving mine. “I have no right to ask this of you, and hearing it out loud sounds so petty and inappropriately jealous. I swear, Magnus, I’m not going to make any more moves on you. Except for maybe hugs.” She tightened her arms around me. “This is nice. But I’m not going to come to class without underwear or try to sleep with you or anything like that again.”

I waited for the relief to hit, but it didn’t come. “Does this mean you’ll behave in my classroom? No more backtalk or disrespect?”

“What?” She reared her head back, snorting. “Let’s not go crazy here. I’m still going to make your life a living hell.”

Impossible. Every second with her was unexpected and challenging and pure bliss.

“I won’t give up on my one great passion.” She shifted her weight, inadvertently rubbing against the fly of my jeans. “But while I’m removing you as part of my plot against my mother, I don’t want…” Her lips parted as she searched my face. “Damn, why do you have to be so exasperatingly gorgeous?”

I had that very thought about her every second of every day.

“What I’m trying to say…” She blinked and sucked in a breath, abdomen tight. “Nevada has a massive hard-on for you, and I don’t want you to reward what she did to me tonight by lifting her skirt and—”

“Shut up,” I murmured, watching her plump lips roll in and push out, wrestling with her silence. “I’ve only ever taken a strap to three students, and in all three cases, I felt nothing. No anger, no frustration, no interest outside of a professional capacity.”

Her eyes flickered as she absorbed my words. “You felt anger with me.”

“I feel everything with you.”

Dear God, I couldn’t suppress this fixation, couldn’t pretend my attraction to her didn’t weaken my promise to God when, at soul level, I wanted this heavenly creature with every filthy breath in my body.

The moonlight lit up her hair in unearthly hues of glimmering white. Her beauty was elegantly delicate and airy in a way that seemed too perfect for this world.

But it was her perceptive, intelligent gaze that reached into my carefully constructed existence and shredded my control. I couldn’t remember my name when she looked at me like this. Like she saw me—the man, the sinner, the murderer—and accepted what she saw.

My lips separated on all the words that wouldn’t come.

We can’t.

You’re my student.

I’m twice your age.

You’re a Constantine.

I’m a priest.

I’ll hurt you.

I’ll kill you.

All the reasons, all the logic and truth and sanity, slipped through my fingers as she lifted on her toes and stared at my mouth. There was nothing but the rapid thud of my heart, the timorous tumble of her breaths, and the temptation of her forbidden lips.

My hand went to her neck, fingers curling, restraining. I dipped my head, weightless, gasping for air and finding none. Until her sweet exhalation misted over my lips, teasing me with the taste of sin.

The scrape of my shoes kicked up gravel. My heart hammered. The blanket fell from my shoulders, and there, in the cloak of night, I stole a forbidden kiss from an angel.

I didn’t just kiss her. I consumed her, possessed her—or she possessed me, this tiny elven goddess, meeting the lashes of my tongue, lick for lick, in a frantic, voracious rhythm that made my balls draw up tight and perspiration bead across my skin.

Nine years.

I hadn’t touched a woman, smelled, tasted, or kissed a woman in nine years. The heat from her lips was staggering, the honeyed flavor of her tongue more sinful than I could’ve ever fathomed.

The sweetest heaven.

My heaven, my salvation—neither of which I deserved.

The lemony scent of her sank into my lungs as I took and took, and she had no choice but to be taken. She was my charge after all. Mine to instruct. Mine to discipline.

Mine.

I kissed her with all the pent-up hunger of the last six weeks. She echoed my intensity, stroking my lips and tongue with eager, impish caresses as though my mouth held what she most needed to exist. I wanted to give it to her, and I did. With a palm on one of her bottom cheeks, I squeezed the firm curve of it, punishing her sensitized welts.

Her moan shuddered through the night. Her kiss shuddered through me, and my brain stopped functioning. We could’ve been the last humans in the world, for all I felt was her.

Just her, the woman who made me so painfully hard, and the cocoon of darkness that was our freedom from the outside world.

I ground my cock against her, telling her with my body what I should never again demand with words. I wanted her innocence, her pleasure, her pain. I wanted her completely, no matter how wrong.

“Magnus.” My name was a plea, her voice pitched with lust and longing.

It only heightened the ache. I ached with the pressure of hard heat. Ached with the knowledge that I only needed to lower my zipper and thrust beneath her skirt.

The thought made me frantic, and I kissed her harder, deeper, needing more, more, more.

I tore my mouth away and spun her around. The blankets tripped up her legs, and she stumbled. I didn’t help her. I shoved her. To her knees, onto her chest, I followed her down to the tangled pile of fleece.

I couldn’t stop my hands from sliding up the backs of her thighs. Couldn’t stop my fingers from pinching and twisting the welts on her hot little ass.

A scream rippled out of her, spurring me to fall upon her and ride her, grinding, dry humping as my fingers fumbled with my zipper. Mindless, feral, I wanted inside her with every drop of my blood. And hers. I wanted to make her bleed.

Her neck turned, bringing her gaze over her shoulder, her eyes bright with female awareness. Her hair dragged through the mud, her face and hands coated with it.

Everything inside me stilled.

This was wrong.

She shouldn’t be held down like this. Not in the mud. Not in the cold. And never ever with me.

“No,” I whispered. Then louder. “No.”

I shoved away from her, driving myself back across the wet earth while battling every desire to claim her.

“What are you doing?” She pushed up, wincing as she rolled to her butt. “Why did you stop?”

“I’m hurting you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I will.”

“You won’t.” Breath burst from her lungs on a loud guffaw. “I won’t allow it.”

I sprung to my feet, roaring, “I was seconds from taking your virginity in the mud like a fucking animal!”

“Because I was giving it to you!” She stood, too, her knuckles whitening around fists at her sides. “If you want it, it’s yours. I’d much rather get rid of it with you than with Tucker Kensington or some other fumbling boy.”

“I’m not fucking you. Not now. Not ever.” Pounded by fury, I paced, circled a tree, returned to her side, and exploded. “So help me God, if you so much as give Tucker your mouth, I’ll bloody your damn hide so completely you won’t be able to sit for a month. Do I make myself clear?”

“Oh, Miss girl. Is that supposed to be a threat?”

Miss girl?Did she think I was joking around? That this was a laughing matter?

“No one touches you!” My voice thundered with my rage, scaring off whatever was in the trees.

She stumbled back.

I stayed with her, shoving my face in hers. “Do I make myself clear?”

Her eyes squeezed shut. Then she spun away without another word.

Only once she was in the car did I release the breath in my lungs. My head fell back on my shoulders, and I let my arms sink to my sides. I didn’t move until my heart slowed, until my blood cooled, until I couldn’t feel my face or hands in the cold.

Then I gathered the blankets and drove her back to the school.

When the campus came into view on the horizon, she broke the silence. “You scare me, Magnus.”

“Smartest thing you’ve said all night.”

“You don’t scare me in a serial-killer way.”

“That’s a relief,” I said dryly.

“It’s a thrilling kind of fear. Like the way those fake haunted houses ramp up my pulse, dump adrenaline into my system, and make me feel alive. I know the things that jump out at me aren’t going to kill me. But man, do they crank up my heart rate. Just like you.” She looked out the window and mumbled, “I like that pushing, pulling, jumpy, scary feeling. I want it in a relationship. It keeps the blood pumping.”

“You’re too young to know what you want.”

“Don’t do that.” Her glare cut to me. “Did you know what you wanted when you were eighteen?”

“Yes.” I knew and pursued and took in every way possible.

“Then don’t be a dick about my age.”

I pulled up in front of the campus gate and stepped out of the car. She joined me as I removed my phone and typed a text to Miriam. I didn’t want Tinsley dealing with any questioning tonight. It was nearing midnight, and she needed sleep.

When I unlocked the gate, she stepped to the other side and shut it. Her fingers curled around the bars, and her fathomless blue eyes peered through the space between her hands.

“You can make me go to church, but I’ll never share in the mystery of your faith,” she said quietly. “You can order me not to kiss Tucker, but I’m going to have sex, whether you like it or not. And you can tell me I should be afraid of you, but I’m not. Not in the way you want.” She released the bars and walked backward. “I won’t kiss you again. I don’t want to be that person, the one you resent. If you break your vows, you should do it for yourself, not for anyone else.” She inclined her head. “Goodnight, Magnus.”

With a gentle smile, she turned and headed to the residence hall.

I watched her until she vanished inside the building, aching for her.

She was unlike anyone I’d ever known. As if her breathtaking, otherworldly allure wasn’t enough, she was mature beyond her years and more intelligent than all the women I’d been with combined.

I should’ve never tasted her lips, but I couldn’t bring myself to regret it.

That divine, unparalleled, life-changing kiss was the only one I would ever have.