SANGUINE

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SIERRA SIMONE

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CONTENTS

Sanguine
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

Saint Sneak Peek

Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

Also by Sierra Simone:

About the Author

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SANGUINE

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CHAPTER 1

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BASTIEN
I GENERALLY LIKE PRIESTS, even when they’re trying to kill me.
But I’m really not in the fucking mood this morning.
I can feel the warm kiss of the sunlight through the open folding doors,
and I can hear the gentle churn of the Coral Sea outside—it’s time to sleep,
not deal with holy men scratching at my gates, and anyway, the whole
reason I rented this place on Hamilton Island was so I could have a few
months of peace, which I think I’ve earned, and I’ve especially earned the
right not to be vexed by a self-righteous butcher, and all I want to do is
sleep curled up in this sunbeam like a cat, and is that so much to ask?
After the buzzer rings the third time, I reach for my phone and open the
security app to answer it. “Fuck off. And if you’re here to kill me, extra
fuck off.”
“I’m not here to kill you.” The voice on the other end of the line is
impatient, as if I’m the problem here, even though he’s the one rudely
waking me up to murder me.
“I don’t believe you,” I say crisply. “Now please go away.”
“We both know,” the voice says, “that I can be inside the house in the
next five minutes anyway. Unlike you, I don’t need an invitation to enter, so
you may as well let me in.”
I think about this for a moment. The house is surrounded with stone
walls and gates, but they’re more to limit the gaze of tourists (and their
smartphones) and paparazzi (and their cameras) than to stop serious
intruders. Or priests on a mission.
“I can call security,” I say.
“You can,” the voice agrees.
It’s Australian, that voice, although not broadly so. Just some pleasantly
relaxed vowels and a slight lilt to the end of his sentences.
Damn that friendly accent, I can’t tell whether he’s telling the truth or
not.
“Ugh,” I say—not into my phone, just into the warm, sea-scented air.
I came to the Whitsundays to relax! To splash around in the water! To
drink some nice Australian wine! And yes, fine, to bite the suntanned necks
of happy tourists, but that’s really immaterial to the point. Don’t I deserve a
vacation? Don’t I deserve an infinity pool with ocean views?
“Fine,” I say irritably—to the priest this time, not just my room. “You
can come in. But maybe I’ll kill you, have you ever thought of that?”
“I’m not here to kill you,” the priest repeats, mostly without inflection,
although I still hear the thread of impatience in his voice. Like he’s already
late for an appointment and taking the time to kill me is making him even
later.
Ugh, fuck this guy. I have stuff I’d rather be doing too! Like sleeping!
I mutter a pissy noise into the phone—not strictly necessary, but I want
him to know how annoyed I am—and I press the gate button. As it opens, I
pull up the camera view to get an idea of his size. Not that I’ve ever had a
problem fighting off priests—a tribe of paper-skinned elders and their
scrawny, still-pimpled pupils—but it’s good to know one’s enemy and all
that.
But I’m too late with the camera view. I just get a glimpse of silver-
white hair as the priest moves past the gate and onto the narrow path
crowded by exuberant tropical plants. An old man.
Please go away, I think as I push myself out of bed and tug on some
linen pants. As grumbly and tired as I am, I still don’t want to kill anyone.
I’ve never liked killing, even when it was necessary, and I certainly don’t
like killing priests. Or old men.
Maybe I can scare him enough that he won’t come back. Although if I
know priests, I know that he will come back, and that’s—sigh—a thing. A
real thing that would be close to a problem, and I’m so very tired of
problems.
Don’t make me kill you, old man.
I pad to the door and open it before he can knock—and then freeze.
Because I am not looking at an old man.
There’re a few lines around his eyes, but that’s not surprising for
someone with fair skin as sun-kissed as his. The hair—the hair is near-
white, but up close, I can see it’s a very particular shade of blond, and it
hangs to his shoulders in a sort of careless tousle that I like very much.
And his face … it’s the face of a man past true youth and into his prime
—but not by very much. Stubble shadows a square jaw, a shallow cleft
winks from his chin, and bright amber eyes stare at me from beneath heavy
brows. He can’t be much more than thirty-two or thirty-three, but those eyes
look at me with the weary acceptance of someone three times his age.
Although as he takes me in—my face, my exposed chest and stomach,
my bare feet—the expression in those haunting eyes changes somewhat.
Heats into something less weary that could be lust or could be loathing, it’s
hard to say. I often inspire both in people.
The Australian priest is big, massive, a rock wall of a man—six and a
half feet, shoulders filling the doorway—and I find myself appreciating the
brutal, holy hulk of him as I take a step backward onto the balls of my feet.
I’m very strong—I was before I changed, being not too much shorter than
the Viking in front of me, and now I’m an apex predator anyway—but even
I might have trouble with this one.
He sees my movement, and his amber eyes flash from my feet back up
to my face. “I told you I wasn’t here to kill you.”
“I’ve heard it before, priest,” I say, a tad crankily. (But I really have
heard it before. Usually before the stake and mallet come out.)
For the first time since I opened the door, he looks surprised. “I’m not a
priest.”
I don’t even have enough scoffs to scoff properly at that. “Please. I
could sense you all the way from the gate.”
His lips part. They are wonderful lips, as firm and sculpted as the rest of
him, with two well-defined peaks and the shallowest possible curve to the
bottom lip. All grim geometry, this priest’s face. It’s very hard not to want
to lick it.
“You could … sense me?” he asks, sounding unnerved.
I decide he’s probably not going to kill me immediately, and also that a
holy man in my house at this bright hour calls for something to drink, so I
turn on my heel and stride into the kitchen. “You know what I am, and yet
you’re asking me this question?”
He follows me to the kitchen—first closing the front door, which I find
a rather touching commitment to manners, all things considered—and then
stands across the glistening expanse of kitchen island from me as I start
chopping fruit for a nice sangria. He looks around before answering me,
and while his face stays unreadable, there’s no disguising the quick,
saccadic movements of his eyes as they log every detail of this paradisiacal
nest.
The house is a lovely, open-plan type thing, with one central kitchen-
cum-dining-room-cum-living-room, and it spills out onto a shaded terrace,
which then extends out to the infinity pool. As I have since I first came
here, I have all the windows and folding glass doors open, letting in the
breeze and ceaseless spill of the ocean outside. Dent Island is rucked up
around the horizon, like a dark green quilt kicked to the bottom of a bed,
and cottony clouds waft above like overfluffed pillows. The pool is a
rippling, Impressionist painting of it all, a painting set right into the lush,
emerald-green lawn.
Everything inside the house is gleaming wood and generous furniture;
it’s tailor-made for a billionaire and their paramour, or maybe a celebrity
and their entourage, but of course I’m knocking about in it alone, wasteful
rake that I am. And the priest doesn’t hide the moment this registers with
him. “You’re by yourself,” he says.
“And you never answered my question.” I finish chopping the lemons
and oranges and move to the apples. “You know I’m a vampire, and yet you
don’t know we can sense priests? How have you survived this long?”
I’m genuinely curious. He’s not surprised to see me moving through
sunlight or popping the occasional apple chunk into my mouth, which
means he knows more about vampires than most people. He knows we’re
mammals, not magic, and that our eyes are better suited to hunting at night,
so while we skew nocturnal, the sunlight doesn’t hurt us any more than it
hurts a cat or an owl. He knows the combination of electrolytes, glucose,
lipids and iron in human blood is the only complete meal for us—but we
still eat and drink other things too.
“I’m not a priest,” the man repeats. And then pauses. “Anymore.”
“Aha!” I say through a bite of apple, pointing my knife at him.
“J’accuse!”
Those eyes flash again. A thrill runs right down my spine, as if a lion
had just locked stares with me. I’m not the only predator in this room, and
I’d put my not inconsiderable money on him having been a vampire hunter
in his time. Some self-destructive part of me idly wonders what it would be
like to see those eyes flashing up at me as I pinned him to my bed … or as
he crawled over me, so big he blocked out all the light except whatever was
reflected from his gaze…
“That chapter of my life is closed,” the man says. “It was a long time
ago.”
“I bet it won’t seem like a long time to me, and also, I don’t care what
Rome thinks, you’re still a priest.”
A growl rumbles in his chest as he takes a step forward. I think I feel
that growl from the nape of my neck to the lazily stirring length in my
drawstring pants.
“I’m. Not.”
I set the knife down and find a glass pitcher. “Do you know how
vampires suspect a priest is near?” I grab an opened bottle of red wine and
pour it in. An obnoxious glug glug glug noise fills the kitchen. “We have
superior senses in almost every way. Truly superhuman. I can smell fear, for
example, and I can hear lust—and in your case, I can perceive in every
single possible way your clarity, your faith, and your devotion. It brightens
the air around you, and it makes the space near you hum. I can taste your
faith, and it tastes like”—I close my eyes and savor him on my tongue for a
moment—“ironically, it tastes like communion. The wafers, I mean. It’s the
serotonin in your body. The dopamine too. It’s so close to being sweet, but
the moment you apprehend the sweetness, it dissolves. Beckoning you
back, urging you to take more. Begging to be chased. Much like God
Himself, if I may say so.”
I open my eyes and get back to the sangria, adding the orange juice.
The man stares at me, lips parted again.
“None of that has gone away,” I tell him, adding the fruit to the wine
and then hunting for some brandy. “Maybe you no longer wear a collar, but
inside, you’re still a man of God. I’m not sure why you left the Church—or
why you were kicked out—but lack of faith wasn’t the reason.” I find a
cinnamon stick, swirl it in the pitcher with some flair. “Ta-da! Do you want
some? Of course you do, you’re Catholic and there’re only golf buggies on
this island, so who cares about drinking—here’s a glass now, stop being so
shy.”
The ex-priest sniffs at the glass, then raises those wonderful eyes to
mine. “It’s only wine? Nothing … else?”
I roll my eyes. “This isn’t Gilded Age Paris, mon ami; I’m not stocking
my cellar with casks of human blood in between visits to the opera. It’s just
wine.”
“Hmm.”
“You have to admit a priest who’s worried about blood in his wine is
deeply ironic.”
“Hmm.”
“Also can I just point out the Latin root of ‘sangria’? From ‘sanguis,’
meaning blood. So in a linguistic sense, we are drinking blood, am I right?”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as serious as the man in front of me,
even after being exposed to the full force of my linguistic wit.
But he does take a tentative sip, then licks his lips after, which sends my
already interested cock into very obviously interested territory.
And then when he takes a real drink, and I watch the swallow work its
way down his throat, I nearly have a heart attack. If I had my lips on that
neck, if I had my teeth there …
I have to move around the corner of the island so he doesn’t see the
needy erection currently pressing against my pants. They’re loose enough
pants but they’re also thin, and also—this isn’t to brag, it’s honestly just
true—it’s a very noticeable cock when it’s in the mood.
The man sets the glass carefully on the counter, as if one drink of wine
will be quite enough, thank you very much. “You’re not how I thought you
would be,” he says after a minute.
I’m trying not to think about his throat. Or the way a drop of wine
lingers on his lower lip, begging to be sucked off. “And how did you think I
was going to be?”
He shrugs. “I’ve met some vampires before. They weren’t as…blithe…
as you are.”
“Blithe?” I echo, a smile growing across my face. “Blithe? That’s the
word you picked?”
The man grunts, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s color coming up on his
cheeks. “It’s a real word,” he mutters defensively. “I’ve read it before.”
“First of all, can we just acknowledge that not using ‘sanguine’ was a
real missed opportunity for you, given our discussion five seconds ago
about Latin root words?”
“I like blithe,” he says. Stubbornly.
I’m shaking my head and laughing. This silver-haired giant looks like
he could crush rocks with his bare hands—and then out he comes with
blithe. “Got any other thesaurus words for me? Jocund, maybe? Mirthful?
Merry? Gladsome? Gay?”
The word gay makes his cheeks go even pinker. Interesting.
“Let me ask you this, Mr. Ex-Priest: were you a hunter? Because if the
only vampires you met were vampires you killed, then that probably
explains why they weren’t so blithe when they met you. When we’re not
fighting for our lives, we do tend to be a fairly sunny bunch. Get it? Sunny?
You’re not laughing. You’re one of those austere Latin Mass priests, aren’t
you?”
“I was a hunter,” he says, ignoring my last question. “But I left because
I didn’t want to hunt anymore.”
“So you’re not hunting me now?” I ask.
He shakes his head. The ends of his silvery-blond hair brush
distractingly over his shoulders. They’re big shoulders, big and hard, and I
wish I could squeeze them. From behind.
While I pressed slow and slick into his muscular body.
“I didn’t come to hurt you,” he says, and when he looks at me this time,
there’s a sort of earnestness underneath the grim sphinx thing he has going
on. Like he wants me to believe him. “I came because I saw you last night,
and I—” He clears his throat, pauses, clears his throat again. He looks very
uncomfortable, and I’m already guessing why.
“You saw me hunt,” I say. Flatly. “And even though it’s not your job to
stop me anymore, you feel like you need to—what? Chastise me for it?
Threaten me away? Chase me off?”
“No,” he says, more quickly than he’s spoken all day. “Nothing like
that. You didn’t kill him—and you took so much less than you needed.”
“I never kill, not if I can help it,” I inform him, my blithe mood gone.
(I’m a little sensitive about this, if you can’t tell). “I haven’t killed since—
well, okay, it was Gilded Age Paris actually—but that was provoked and
everyone I’ve told the story to agrees with me, if you must know. I just
want to drink and then let my victims go, no worse off than if they’d
donated blood. Which, I mean, really is what it amounts to if you think
about it.”
The pink is back in his cheeks. I blink at him, wondering why seeing me
hunt last night would be embarrassing for him—oh. Ohhhhhhhh.
Oh yeah. This priest is getting very interesting indeed.
I give him my wickedest, most louche grin. “You saw more than the
drinking, didn’t you? You saw the kissing.”
“Do you—” He clears his throat again. “Do you always kiss them? Your
victims?”
“When they want me to.” I fold my arms across my chest, suddenly
back to enjoying this morning very much. All this delicate blushing on such
a big, bleak man—it’s a combination of delights, enticing and carnal. I
wonder if I could bite that blush sometime, just a little nip, just a sharp,
little kiss. “Why do you ask, my sullen priest? Are you in the market to be
kissed? Or bitten?”
He shifts, and although his body ripples with unconscious grace, I can
also sense his uneasiness. A light lace of adrenaline and cortisol in his
blood, making the air around him taste faintly acrid—smoky and earthy,
like a good Islay scotch. It’s not unpleasant, but it does have wariness
tickling at the nape of my neck again. I still don’t know why he’s here.
“Why are you asking me about kissing and biting? Why were you
watching me? More importantly, why are you here?”
“I was working up to that!” the ex-priest grumps, shifting on his feet
again, and I realize that I’ve completely misread him from the start. He’s
not impatient at all.
He’s nervous.
I slowly uncross my arms and watch as he takes a step forward, and
then a step back, and then turns to face the ocean, and then turns back to
me. And then finally he says, “I came to see if—maybe—if you’re not busy
or anything—and only if you’d like to—I mean, only if you felt like it—if
you’d like to get dinner. With me. Sometime.” The last words he grates out
like they’re physically painful to speak, and that proud face dips down to
the floor as if he’s considering curling up into a miserable ball after this
display of vulnerability.
Everything I was feeling—the petulance, the suspicion, the amusement
—everything is replaced by a drowsy, dulcet bloom of tenderness in my
chest.
Well, okay, not everything. There’s still a heady cocktail of sangria-
fueled lust coursing through my veins, but it’s not at odds with the
tenderness at all. Instead the two feed each other, making my heart thump
for this shy, nervous man as I throb elsewhere.
I take a step toward him, deciding that if he wants to get dinner, he’s
probably not going to be bothered by the state of my erection. “So you saw
me kissing and biting someone last night, and instead of killing me like a
good vampire hunter, you want to take me out on a date?” I say it lightly,
but the words are blunt. I need to be sure.
He looks at me through eyelashes the color of angry rain. “I’m not a
hunter anymore,” he says simply.
“But you were watching me last night. That wasn’t hunting?”
“I have a new job this week, private security on the island. Midnight
patrol.”
He is such a big guy that I’m not actually all that surprised. His size,
plus the way he carries himself—like a man who’s taken lives—would be
enough of a deterrent for most touristy troublemakers, I’d imagine. Still
though. “Priest to private security—not exactly adjacent vocations, my
friend.”
His shoulder moves the slightest bit—the world’s smallest shrug.
“Finding work after the Church has been hard. The … nighttime … has
stayed with me. The peering into shadows, the walking silently under the
stars. It’s a habit I can’t break. So patrolling someplace in the dark seemed
like a natural fit. I honestly wasn’t looking for vampires. Just drunks or
buggy thieves.”
“But you found me anyway.”
He blinks as if remembering. “I found you anyway. You were—you are
—beautiful.” He flushes again, looks away.
Beautiful. I’ve been called many flattering things before (because
there’s lots of flattering things about me, that’s just facts) but it’s been a
long, long time since I’ve been called beautiful.
I study him as he looks out the window, the strong lines of his jaw and
nose, the impossible color of his hair. The shy press of his full lips. I don’t
know this man’s name, I don’t know his secrets or his hopes or where he’s
from or where he sleeps at night or what he thinks about when he’s alone. I
only know that he’s a bashful, grunting hulk of a man; I only know he used
to kill my kind … but for some reason, has chosen not to anymore.
I only know that he saw me kissing and biting someone last night, and
instead of hunting me down out of a lingering sense of duty to humankind,
he’s here awkwardly asking me out on a date. Telling me he thinks I’m
beautiful while I fuss at him over sangria.
The tenderness I’m feeling toward him is practically an undertow now.
I’m being sucked into the deep.
“What’s your name, former priest? And do you know mine?”
His expression is careful when he looks at me. Guarded. “You go by
Bastien.”
Bastien is, in fact, my real name, and only someone who knows how to
burrow into layers of paperwork would have found it on my lease here.
“You were a hunter indeed,” I murmur.
He nods, but he doesn’t apologize, which I respect. And maybe even
like? I have to admit, after centuries of prowling after people, it’s rather
nice to be prowled after myself.
“And I’m …” The man hesitates, and I realize it’s because he’s unused
to saying his first name. It makes me wonder how recently he’s left the
Church. “My name is Aaron.”
I’ve wandered close enough to him that I could touch him now, if I
wanted. I don’t touch him, but I do enjoy the way his eyes rake down my
taut stomach to where my pants hang low around my hips. He yanks his
gaze back up as if embarrassed to be caught looking, but I don’t miss how
he angles his body ever so slightly away as if he doesn’t want to frighten
me with his body’s response to mine.
I have never met a priest or hunter like him. A quiet brute who just
wants dinner and maybe kissing. Maybe more …
Maybe waking up this morning was a good idea after all.
“Okay, Aaron,” I say softly. “I’ll go to dinner with you.”

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CHAPTER 2

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AARON
WHEN I WAS a young priest learning how to hunt vampires, our teachers
warned us how beautiful vampires were, how beguiling, how they could
bewitch the senses and thwart good sense just with a smile.
Well, here I am on a date with a vampire, utterly bewitched. Good sense
thwarted past reckoning.
“More wine?” Bastien asks, tipping the bottle to my glass and topping it
off before I can refuse. The fading sunlight limns him in red and pink and
gold, and I’m trying not to stare, but it’s impossible. His face is almost too
lovely to be real—a Pre-Raphaelite composition of full lips and long
eyelashes, large eyes and a Greek nose. His jaw is finely carved and his
cheeks and forehead are aristocratically high, and he is all contrasts—
sculpted features with soft, inviting lips, ivory-pale skin with dark eyes and
hair.
He looks like a painting. Like he would have been in a painting when he
was mortal.
“We’re quite a sight, aren’t we?” Bastien observes, setting the bottle
down and picking up his own glass by the stem. His vowels curve with an
accent I can’t quite place—nearly French, nearly British, a fleeting glimpse
into lifetimes he’s spent on other shores. “A vampire and a priest, breaking
bread.”
Old habits have me glancing around, although we’re in the far corner of
the covered restaurant patio and well out of earshot of any other diners.
When I look back to Bastien, his mouth is curled up at the edges.
“Worried the villagers will come knocking with torches and crosses
later?” he asks, amused.
I make an affirmative grunt, and then I look down at my wineglass. “I
didn’t need any more wine.”
“Yes, you did,” Bastien says, the smile still toying at his lips. “How else
will I get to know your deepest, darkest secrets?”
He’s got a point. We’ve made it through the walk up to the restaurant
and ordering our meal with me barely speaking at all. Because of one very
embarrassing fact that I decide is best to confess to him now. “I don’t have
secrets. Or things to talk about. I’m not—I’m not interesting. Like you.” I
look down at the sunset-colored ocean below us as I say this, so I don’t
have to see the moment he decides this is a terrible, boring date and he’s
going to leave.
But he doesn’t leave. And when he finally speaks, his richly musical
voice is pitched very low and very soft, in a way that sends heat licking in
my belly. “A former priest—a former vampire hunter—who saw a vampire
being wicked and decided to get closer to wickedness instead of further
away … that sounds very interesting to me.”
Closer to wickedness … I almost shudder with the accuracy of his
words. When I saw him kissing that man last night, when I saw the pleasure
on the man’s face as Bastien held him close and buried his mouth in the
man’s neck, I felt longing like I’d never felt it before. I felt the first real
jolts of arousal since I’d left the priesthood.
I wanted it. I wanted kisses and biting. I wanted this vampire to do to
me what I’d vowed I’d never let any vampire to do me, and drink my blood.
In fact, I’d even worn a long-sleeved sweater—very, very thin, mind you,
because even with the constant breeze, Hamilton Island is warm—because
it has a low rounded collar that completely exposes my throat. I don’t have
the words or eloquence to tell Bastien what I want, but maybe he’ll know it
without me having to tell him. Maybe he’ll take it without asking. Maybe
he’ll pin me in some dark corner somewhere and make me moan with
pleasure the way he did to the man last night.
I dare to look back at Bastien. The smile is still there, but it’s no longer
a signal of amusement. It’s a signal of something else …
An invitation, maybe?
Or maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see. Maybe it’s pity. Maybe
I’m pitiable and pathetic, a clumsy, eager fool who wanted to get closer to
something dangerous and beautiful and who’s now made himself ridiculous.
I suddenly wish I’d worn a collared shirt. I look like a vampire’s version
of a tart.
Bastien sees I’m lost in my own mind, and he reaches for my hand. It
takes me a minute to understand—it’s been so long since I’ve been touched
in kindness—and then even longer to accept. Bastien sees my hesitation but
attributes it to something else. “We’re safe here,” he says softly. “I won’t let
anything happen to you.”
His meaning is clear; this bright, touristy place does feel very safe, but
safety is always conditional on whose hand you’re holding, and where I
grew up, this could still be dangerous. It’s a particular kind of fear I didn’t
have to feel as a priest, but now it’s here, as real as my desire for Bastien. I
didn’t realize I was afraid until he offered to help hold the fear with me.
I look down at our hands as he speaks, and then I have to look away.
The sight of our fingers and palms—big and square and obviously male—
touching is the most wonderful and the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.
And his words …
“Thank you,” I manage to get out. The warmth and pressure of someone
holding my hand, promising to keep me safe, is making my throat ache, and
the words come out rough. “I’m not used to someone thinking they need to
protect me. Because I’m so big,” I add in order to explain, and Bastien
laughs.
“I can see that. You are very big.”
The words are flirtatious enough that I feel myself blushing. He laughs
some more.
“You’re very easy to tease, you know,” he points out. “I’ve made you
blush like a virgin all day, and it’s starting to make me wonder how long it’s
been since you’ve been on a date.”
“I’ve never done this before,” I admit in a mumble.
He grins, eyes sparkling. “A date with a vampire? I imagine not.”
“No, Bastien. This.” I look down at our hands and then to the wine and
the table and the view.
A small line appears between his brows. “Aaron. Please tell me I’m not
your first date.”
I can’t tell him that, so I don’t say anything at all.
Bastien’s grin fades, but his eyes remain intense. “Are you a virgin?”
I make a noise that could mean anything, but Bastien doesn’t let me
wriggle out of answering.
“I know it’s an invasive question, but I’m a vampire, so humor me. How
untouched is my laconic priest?”
The possessive my in my laconic priest makes my pulse thud a little
harder, and Bastien’s eyes rove over my exposed neck as I reply honestly.
“Very, um, untouched,” I admit.
He lifts his eyes back to mine and tugs his hand free. “Well then.”
I stare down at my now-empty hand, feeling stupid, and I slowly pull it
back into my lap. Maybe he doesn’t like virgins. Maybe he doesn’t like the
reminder that I was a priest. Maybe—
“What do you say we skip dinner?” Bastien asks, interrupting my
panicked self-recriminations. “I’ll feed you at my house.”
I blink at him. “What?”
He leans forward, a lock of hair tumbling over his forehead and his dark
eyes flashing with some strong emotion I can’t identify. “Aaron, I’m sitting
across from a strapping ex-priest who’s been flaunting his naked throat at
me all evening, and now he tells me he’s a virgin. The reins of my control
are understandably snapping.” He digs out some cash for the wine and
tosses it on the table, and before I can say anything, he’s taking my hand
and hauling me easily to my feet and tugging me out the door.
Confused but also flattered and also hoping this means what I think it
does, I follow Bastien, trying not to look like I’m getting dragged off to
slake a vampire’s obscene needs. My dick gives a heavy twitch at the
thought, stirring and lengthening until I’m swollen enough that I have to
adjust myself so I don’t look like a walking teen-movie gag.
“When did you leave the priesthood?” Bastien asks once we’re on the
footpath back to his house. He’s in a white button-down shirt, and the
setting sun outlines all those flat, dense muscles underneath the fabric. He’s
built lithe and lean and graceful, and I have the sudden image of him
crawling over me like a huge cat, eyes hot with hunger.
I’m too distracted to answer him. “I—what?”
Bastien sighs. “Look, I know learning you’re virginal in the extreme
should make me more careful with you, and probably we should have, like,
five more dinner dates and some long talks about intimacy before I even
think about touching you, but I’m a vampire, okay? I’m sorry, but I’m one
of your sexy grunts away from taking your virginity in between some
shrubs while the wallabies watch, and it’s been a century or two since I’ve
needed to fuck like this, and I’m barely hanging on, so what I need to
happen right now is I need you to help distract me until we get back to my
house and I can at least give you some privacy before I put my mouth all
over you. Got it? Good. Now talk to me. When did you leave the
priesthood?”
Too many feelings for me to process are crowding my chest and
stomach. Lust and shyness and gratitude and fear and more fear.
So I just try not to think about all that and give him what he wants
instead. It’s easy, in a thrilling kind of way, to surrender to his bossiness. “I
was officially dismissed from the clerical state four months ago. The
Church was … reluctant, I guess. There are not so many of us left now that
they can easily let even one go.”
“Not so many priests?” Bastien asks.
“Not so many priests who are trained as I was,” I clarify.
“Ah, in the Order of Saint Marcellus, you mean,” Bastien says, and I’m
surprised.
“You’re not supposed to know that name,” I tell him.
Bastien makes a scoffing noise. “Vampires aren’t supposed to know the
name of the ancient order sworn to hunt them down?”
“It’s supposed to be secret; we’re forbidden to whisper it to anyone
outside the order, even in the throes of death. Who did you learn it from?” I
frown, thinking of all the reasons a priest of the Order might break his vow.
“Did he tell you under duress?”
“You mean, did I torture it out of someone?” Bastien asks dryly. “No. I
earned that knowledge honestly. How long were you a priest?”
“Ten years. What do you mean you earned it honestly?”
A wallaby hops across the road, stopping to look blankly at us and then
moving along after a moment. Bastien watches it, his face growing distant.
“It was a long time ago,” he says finally, which doesn’t really answer my
question. “When I was mortal. Why did you become a priest?”
There it is again, that urge to do as he says. I answer him without
worrying that I sound grunty or stupid or overeager, even though this is the
most I’ve spoken aloud at one time in the last four months, and it feels
strange. “I grew up in a small town an hour outside of Toowoomba.
There’re as many churches as there are houses, or so it felt like. Praying
was in my blood, but so was fighting, and it felt like there was nowhere
good a big, hot-blooded boy like me would end up, but my childhood priest
wanted to help. He sent me to his mentor in Brisbane, and they promised if
I went to seminary and was ordained, they’d find the right place for me.
And that’s how I ended up in Rome, inducted into the Order.”
“Hmm,” Bastien says. A warm breeze ruffles up the road, and when I
look over, his shirt is clinging to every contour of his torso and chest. And
his trousers are clinging too, and I see the distinct outline of a large erection
—the same one I did my best not to gawk at this morning. Bastien wasn’t
lying about wanting me. And I want this vampire to want me. I want him to
touch me and make me bleed and make me come. I want it so much my
body hurts trying to hold all the wanting—and the terror of who I want—
inside it.
“I think,” Bastien says, “you’ve just explained the how. And not the
why. Don’t forget I can taste your belief, Aaron. You became a priest
because you wanted to, not because it was the only choice you had, and I
want to know why.”
I grunt a little, not sure how to answer this. Somehow I know he won’t
settle for the short and easy answers I gave when I was in the process of
ordination—the I feel called and I want to serve God as much as I can, the
kinds of answers that are as expected as they are reductive. And I can’t
make a fool out of myself more than I already have.
I decide to give him the truth, as intimate and ephemeral as it is.
“I always knew I loved God,” I explain, “because I always knew He
loved me. When I was a boy, I would go out to my family’s fields and
watch the sky at night. We were way out in the bush, and there weren’t any
lights, and the sky was dripping with stars. So many stars that it felt like I
could hold out my hand and they’d fall into my palm like rain. Like all I
had to do was ask and God would fill my heart with stars like He filled the
cisterns and wells and lakes with water, and who wouldn’t want to serve a
God like that?”
“Who indeed,” Bastien murmurs, something tender curling into his
words. “Do you still believe that? That God will fill your heart with stars if
you ask?”
“Yes.”
“So the boy on the farm became a priest because he grew up with stars
raining light on him night after night, and it felt like God Himself was
covering him in a net of pure love.” Bastien’s voice is still tender, but it’s
tight too, as if he’s upset. “There are many worse, and cheaper, reasons to
become a priest, Aaron. My hat is off to you.”
We turn onto the narrow road that leads to the expensive houses
celebrities like to rent—a road I’ve patrolled a few times since starting my
job here. Bastien doesn’t say anything as we approach the discreet gates of
his home, and I’m starting to feel like I’ve said something wrong.
“Bastien,” I say, feeling clumsy with my words, as usual, “did I make
you angry with me? By talking about God?”
Bastien lets out an indignant huff, and I almost smile. He’s so funny, this
bloodthirsty painting of a man, he’s so open. It only took ten years of
vampires and death to become a silent gargoyle, but that he’s managed to
live lifetimes and still be funny and honest and adorable—it’s astonishing,
really.
He punches in the code to his gate as he huffs some more, and then as
he impatiently ushers me through, he says, “I’m not angry, Aaron.”
“You’re not?”
A self-deprecating puff of air. “I’m a little ashamed is all.”
“Ashamed?”
“It’s one thing to scent your earnestness,” he says as we walk down the
path to the door. Cockatoos ruffle and bitch as we walk by, but they sense in
their animal way that Bastien is a predator, and so they give us a wide berth,
fluttering from a distance. “But to hear it—to know it—Aaron, I don’t think
you appreciate how good you are. And if I weren’t already going to hell on
account of being an immortal cannibal, then I’d be going to hell for the
mere fact that your goodness incites me to badness. It makes me want to do
very depraved things with you. To you, actually, very much to you.”
I don’t think I can breathe. I want those depraved things so badly, but
when I open my mouth to tell him so, all that comes out is a low noise of
acknowledgment.
Luckily, Bastien doesn’t seem to mind my taciturnity. He keeps going as
he opens his front door. “I want to fuck your goodness. Do you understand
how odd that is? I want to bite it. I want to drink these wonderful, earnest
secrets of yours down as you shudder for me. I want to make you feel every
dirty thing you’ve earned by being so good; I think you’re too pure to be
truly debased, but my God, I want to try.”
The door swings open, and we step inside, and before I can react—
which means it happens too fast for any human to react—I’m shoved
against the wall and Bastien’s mouth is on mine.
He pins me there with a forearm against my throat, his free hand
roaming shamelessly around my body, sliding over my stomach and hips
and then delving right past my waistband, sending my back arching far off
the wall.
“Whoa, there,” he says like I’m a stallion he’s trying to break, and fuck
if that doesn’t get me hotter. All my life, my size has been something to be
afraid of, something to be contained, but Bastien seems … delighted by my
bigness. Pleased by it. Aroused by it. Like it’s thrilling for him to have a
massive, wild male grunting and snarling at his touch. And for some reason,
that makes it thrilling for me. He isn’t scared of me, and he’s just as strong,
if not stronger. I don’t have to worry about hurting him or scaring him, no
matter how much I thrash or no matter how many snarls I make.
And I am snarling now as his clever fingers find my erection and
squeeze before pushing lower to cup my testicles. His mouth on mine is
firm and persuasive, coaxing me to open in between my growls, his kiss
turning possessive as he strokes along my tongue and licks at the inside of
my lips.
“What can’t I do to you?” he whispers against me. His hand in my pants
is wicked, and I’ve never felt anything like it, not even the times I’ve done
this to myself. “Tell me, mon prêtre. What can’t I do to you?”
I know he’s honestly asking, and so I give him an honest answer.
“Nothing.”
“That’s a dangerous thing to tell such a one as me.”
“I watched you take care of a total stranger last night. You only took a
little, and when you were done, he was conscious and smiling and safe. And
you have every reason to hate me because of what I used to do, and yet
you’re still asking me permission now. I trust you, Bastien.”
He goes still against me, and after a second, he pulls back enough that
he can meet my stare, pulling his hand free from my pants too, which has
me arching again. His eyes are so dark, so unreadable. His breath is warm
against my kiss-damp mouth. “You truly trust me?”
“I do.”
He closes his eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Jesus!” His eyes fly open. “Of course not, Aaron! What the fuck.”
“Then I trust you,” I say, shrugging against the wall. He lowers his
forearm and takes a deep breath, running a hand down his face.
“Okay. Okay. I’m going to fuck you and I’m going to bite you and I’m
going to play with your cock and maybe suck it too—not all in that order,
obviously, I’m having a hard time thinking right now. It will feel good when
I bite you and I won’t take too much, but I need you to tell me if it’s still too
much or if it hurts. I mean, hurts in a bad way. You know what I mean.”
Seeing this noble vampire all flushed and flustered—because of me—is
gratifying beyond measure. “I trust you,” I repeat simply. “As long as you
don’t mind that I—I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bastien mutters to himself, running another hand down
his face. “Do I mind that this giant farm-boy-slash-priest is a virgin and
trembles whenever I so much as hold his hand. Jesus.”
He presses back against me, one hand deftly unbuttoning my pants and
freeing my erect organ. I hiss the moment it hits the cool air, and he hisses
along with me as he looks down and sees I’m already wet at the tip.
“Am I the first person to touch this cock?” he asks me, his voice low
and sounding more French than ever. “I think I must be. You’re about to go
off in my hand, and I haven’t done anything yet. Fuck, that’s sexy. Jesus,
are you about to come right now? You really are. Fuck fuck fuck fuck—”
Bastien’s husky wonder is the soundtrack to my first orgasm with
someone else; all it takes is looking down and seeing him wrap those
elegant fingers around my length and I am done for. He doesn’t even
squeeze me, he doesn’t even stroke me—he holds me and I come
immediately.
We both watch as thick ribbons of white spill from the tip and over his
fingers, my erection visibly jerking with each and every surge. I’m
ashamed, I’m so ashamed, but there’s no stopping it, no stopping the heavy
spurts desperate to leave my body. And even in the midst of my shame, it
feels so fucking good, so good that I don’t care how lewd I’m being, how
I’m dirtying Bastien’s hand and dripping onto his floor, I don’t care, if
someone tried to stop me before I was finished, I’d rip them in half, because
I need to finish more than I need to take my next breath, that’s how urgent
and necessary this is.
Not that there’s any possibility of stopping anyway. The surges are a
mindless, animal pleasure, hooked deep into my belly, and by the time I’m
spent in Bastien’s hand, I barely know my own name. I couldn’t have torn
myself away from this moment even if I’d had bands of brother priests to
help me, and it isn’t until the uncivilized spilling stops that I realize I was
grunting and pushing into Bastien’s hand.
I go silent and still, feeling like a dirty beast.
Bastien looks up at me with something like shock, and I’m wondering if
maybe he’s never had a clumsy virgin come all over him before, and maybe
he’s disgusted by it—
Before I can even finish the thought, he’s kissing me, devouring my
mouth with skillful, pressing strokes, driving every other thought and worry
from my mind. Between us, my exposed cock gives an eager kick, and he
pulls back, lips swollen and pupils blown.
“I have to fuck you now,” he says hoarsely.
“Okay,” I agree, and then he grabs my hand and yanks me toward his
bedroom. I manage to sort of tuck myself back together as we go, although
the horse is rather out of the barn as far as pride goes at this point, given
that I just came all over his floor after he did nothing more than hold me in
his hand.
“That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says, partially to himself
as he tugs me along. “And I’ve seen a lot. My God, how am I going to do
this. A virgin. Think, Bastien, think.” He lets go of my hand to flap his own
in a sort of vague, horny distress.
“Bastien,” I say as we reach his bed.
“What?”
“I’m very big.”
“I know that, Aaron, I just saw how big you are. Why do you think I’m
in such a state?”
It’s never occurred to me before that a vampire could be, well, cute, but
there’s something very cute about how fussy he is when it comes to his
reactions to me. “No, I mean, I’m a strong bloke. Sturdy and tough, you
know? And the Order—” I won’t mention the grim endurance tests of pain
and strength, because even in my limited experience, I know it wouldn’t
make good bedroom talk, so I settle for, “The Order made me even tougher.
You can’t hurt me.” I think of the stranger Bastien drank from last night, his
eyes fluttering in ecstasy as his hips mindlessly rolled against a vampire’s.
“I want you to be at your wickedest. Please.”
For a moment, Bastien looks almost young. Helpless with his own
wanting. And then he’s all vampire again, hungry and heavy-lidded. Very,
very wicked as he unbuttons his shirt and lets it fall to the floor. The
wickedest as he toes off his shoes and removes his socks and unbuttons his
pants. The ruddy head of his erection peeps out above his zipper, swollen
and dark against his pale stomach, and the fading sun over the ocean bathes
his perfect form in pink and purple-hued light as he walks toward me.
“Clothes off,” he says, not bothering with please or thank you. “Let me
see this priest who needs to sin so badly.”
With shaking hands, I do as he says, peeling off my sweater and shoes
and pants. The bedroom has large glass doors that fold open, and the breeze
comes right up off the water, sweet and soft and somewhere right between
warm and cool. Shadows move through the room as the trees and shrubs
outside rustle in the breeze, and by the time I’m naked, Bastien is in front of
me, running appreciative hands all over my body like a shadow himself,
like the actual darkness is beckoning me into an embrace.
And I go willingly.
“Down, sweet priest,” he whispers, guiding me onto the bed, onto my
back. “Down, down. Let me have a taste.”
I expect his mouth on mine after that, or maybe even on my neck, but
it’s my stomach where I feel his kiss first, hungry and quick, and by the
time I tense and gasp underneath it, he’s already moved down to my navel,
and then down the trail of hair to the base of my cock.
I’m not ready for it, not ready for how soft his mouth is, how wet, how
it’s almost like tickling but it’s not, tickling isn’t the right word at all.
“What can’t I do to you,” Bastien murmurs, almost to himself.
“Nothing,” I whisper to the ceiling. And then his fangs sink into my
erection.
It should hurt, and for the first instant it does, a spark of pain sizzling up
my spine, but it’s replaced immediately with pure, delicious pleasure as
Bastien begins to suck. It’s indecent, yes, so indecent, a vampire there doing
that—it should be the ultimate boundary for a priest sworn to destroy
vampires. But I’m not a priest anymore, and my body is aching down to the
marrow for his sharp, bloody kiss. I don’t know what kind of magic
vampires possess—or if it’s some biological mechanism designed to help
them catch and keep prey—but his fangs feel good. An invasion, yes, but an
invasion like his tongue in my mouth is an invasion, an invasion like his
dark eyes in my mind are an invasion. And each suck—the suck—oh my
God, it’s almost better than coming itself, it’s like Bastien is yanking
pleasure out of my body, like he’s drawing the very heart of me out through
his bite.
And that it’s on my cock …
“Fuuuck,” Bastien says, wrenching himself away, his mouth bloody in
the dark. I can feel the wet smear of where he was sucking me on my dick,
and I’m harder than fucking ever. “Fuck. I could do that forever, do you
understand? I could drink from your cock every night and never get sick of
it. What are you doing to me? No, don’t try to answer, I know you’ll just
grunt at me and then I won’t have any more information than before you
grunted. Don’t move.”
It’s nearly dark outside, with only the last lavender blush of dusk and
the pool lights outside to light the room, and so it’s his silhouette I watch as
he goes to a table by the bed and pulls out a small bottle.
“In case you don’t already know, vampires can’t carry human
infections,” Bastien says, coming back to the bed. “So we don’t need
protection.”
“You’re not worried about getting me pregnant?” I ask, and Bastien
pauses between my legs, his head tilted.
“Aaron, did you just make a joke? You did! You made a joke! I’m so
proud, I’m like your joke-father, except not really, that would be creepy,
unless—I mean, if you want to call me daddy, I am not opposed to that at
all, I think I could get used to Daddy Bastien if we worked on it.”
I’m smiling at him, at the ebullience of him even with his dick jutting
out from his hips and his mouth still wet with blood, and that’s when I hear
the bottle click open and then feel the slick press of his finger.
I grunt as my blood-smeared cock gives a leap. A hot feeling knots itself
tight in my belly, low down, and it cinches my balls up to my body.
“My virgin priest,” Bastien croons, adding another finger. He does
something—presses somewhere—and a groan tears out of my chest. My
hips leave the bed as I follow some unknown instinct and try to fuck up in
the air, needing more, needing to fuck or be fucked or anything really, so
long as it’s more.
“I’m giving you my cock now, mon prêtre. Open for me—yes, like that
—do you feel me against you? That’s it, yes, breathe, breathe, my
wonderful seeker of wickedness. Oh, I love how you squirm, I love how
those powerful hips buck for me. Yes, almost there, breathe, breathe. Do
you feel me, sweetheart? I feel you, and you feel like a hot fist clenched
around my shaft. I’m not going to last long, not with you, you sweet, brutal
man. Fuck.”
It’s like being split in two but in the best possible way. Bastien is so
much bigger than his fingers, and the power behind each and every stroke is
enough to make me grunt even though he’s going slow. He moves between
my thighs with sleek, near-cruel strength, but I love it. I’m throbbing into
the cool ocean air with how good it feels to be underneath this vampire, and
each stroke is hitting me someplace deep inside that has my grunts getting
louder, longer, lower.
“It’s happening again,” I moan. “It’s gonna— I’m gonna—”
He lunges forward, fangs shining in the shadows, and right as I begin
the shameful spurting again, his face is in my neck and he’s biting me and
drinking me down. The sheer, intoxicating pleasure of his bite coupled with
the possessive invasion of him inside me—I feel ridden, I feel owned, I feel
dirty and wild and seen. I feel like I want this forever, this exact moment,
Bastien buried inside me, both fang and cock, while my own cock throbs
and spills between our stomachs.
And it’s as he’s drinking me that his own orgasm begins jolting inside
my arse, as if the pleasure of tasting me has pushed him over the edge, and
he sucks his fill as his hips keep fucking and fucking and fucking, shoving
into me with a desperation that drives my own climax further and further
on, spattering again and again between us both.
Minutes go by, and then hours. Eternities. Both of us caught in a
dizzying world of bleeding, primal orgasms. Until finally Bastien lifts his
head and hisses his deep, predatory satisfaction into the dark.
The sound warms up the inside of my chest. I satisfied him. I’ve felt
more alive tonight than I have in years, I’ve found the wicked ecstasy I
came here looking for—and yet the thing that has me smiling at the ceiling
is that I’ve pleased him.
He notices. “You like being my toy?” he murmurs, nuzzling into my
bloody neck and kissing it, licking it clean. “My personal priest toy?
Hmm?”
“Yes,” I grunt. I turn so he has to look at me. “I—I want to do it again.”
He laughs a little, kissing my lips and then draping himself on top of
me. “We need to wait a while before I drink from you again. Maybe a day
or two. But everything else …”
Hope is scarier than being bitten by a vampire, but I let myself feel it.
“You want to see me in a day or two?”
Bastien’s ribs heave against mine, and I can’t tell if he’s laughing at me
or if it’s one of those self-deprecating laughs for himself. “Aaron,” he says,
“I don’t want to frighten you, but I’m already trying to figure out how I can
marry you, or at least keep you locked up naked for my pleasure for the
next decade. Yes, I want to see you in a day or two. And a month or two.
And a year or two. I have nowhere else to be, and you’re the best thing I’ve
found in more than two hundred years. So by all means, consider yourself
penciled in.”
“Oh,” I say. It’s about all I can say. I’m feeling too many things to say
anything more. Except. “I was a priest in the Order, Bastien. I want this
more than you can know, but … our pasts …”
Bastien kisses my chest, his hips beginning a gentle war of pressure and
friction as he does. “I’ll tell you a secret, mon prêtre,” he murmurs. “I was a
priest too.”
For a moment, there is only the sound of the ocean outside. I can’t
think. I can’t even breathe, I’m so stunned. “You were a priest?” I manage.
“I joined during la revolution,” he says between presses of his lips to
my skin. “Because I was terrified. I was the pointless, wastrel son of a
comte, and I felt certain I’d be thrown in prison or worse, so I left the
Second Estate for the First for no better reason than I was scared of my own
bloodline and what it meant. I was asked to join the Order not long after,
which I did, and was sent back to Paris to hunt vampires. There were many
there that decade, drawn by the slaughter, and there were many vicious,
murdering ones that I still don’t regret killing. But all it took was one faster
than me, one cleverer, and then I was at her mercy, and she drank from me,
of course, that unforgivable sin for the Order. She gave me a choice, after—
she could let me go back to the Church, where I would have to lie for the
rest of my life about being bitten, or she could turn me. I only knew panic
then; I was still chasing after some idea of safety. I didn’t know I would be
trading a short, lonely life for a long, lonely one, or I might have chosen
differently, you see.”
Bastien falls into silence then, and my chest hurts for him. I wrap my
arms around him and brace my heels, and flip us over, so I’m caging him in.
“Christ, you’re big,” he mutters, but it’s with delight as he runs both his
hands over my bum and hips and back. My cock likes it when I’m patted
and stroked like a prized stud, I guess, because it’s all the way hard again,
aching a little but ready for more. I rub it against his fresh erection, and we
both groan.
“Bastien, I don’t want you to be lonely,” I say.
“It was maudlin of me to phrase it that way. I’m not lonely right now.”
“No.” I try again, searching for better words. “I’m not going to let you
be lonely. Starting now. I want—I want to be tied to your bed. Married to
you. I want your teeth in my neck whenever you’re thirsty. I want it, and
you’ve said that I’ve earned every dirty thing I want by being so good, so
I’ve earned this and I’m taking it.”
Bastien’s eyes glitter in the dark. “So you are, mon prêtre. So you
shall.” He sounds happy and hopeful and just as scared as me, and yes, it’s
undeniable now, I’m falling in love with a vampire. “And if you are to be
mine for all these months and years, what shall I do with you next?” he
asks.
I rub my cock along the length of his, making us both shiver. “I think I
have a few ideas,” I tease.
“Look at you,” Bastien says proudly. “One day with me and you’re
making jokes and smiling! You’re the blithe one, my friend, yes, you are.”
I lean down to kiss his beautiful mouth, and I can still taste blood
between us. “I think you mean sanguine,” I say, and then as we’re still
laughing, Bastien reaches for the bottle and the night sharpens once again
into wonderful, wicked desire.
And it doesn’t escape my notice that as Bastien worships me into sweet
oblivion, the stars outside are raining down light over the sea.

The end.

Do you like your m/m romance with a dash of the forbidden?

Keep reading for a sneak peek of my upcoming m/m (and very

forbidden) standalone, Saint!

OceanofPDF.com
SAINT SNEAK PEEK

OceanofPDF.com
PROLOGUE

DEAR ROYAL E,

The girl I love keeps ghosting me.

That’s right—keeps.
Because she reappears after a week or so—full of love and apologies—
and then for a month-ish, it’s like the ghosting never happened and she’s the
best girlfriend in the world.
And then she disappears again.
She’s not on drugs, and I don’t think she’s cheating on me. What gives?

—Frustrated in Fairway

Dear Frustrated,

My friend, a flake has happened to you.

If this is your first experience with a flake, let me offer my hearty
condolences and also a pamphlet for next week’s meeting of Flake-lovers
Anonymous, because you are not alone. Many of us have been lured in by
the vivacious energy and bright charm of a flake; many of us have been
dashed upon the rocks of a flake’s inconstancy and fickleness.
I once loved a boy who was a flake. I told him I loved him, he nodded at
me, and the next morning, he moved to a monastery, where he is a monk
even now, and I was flake-sick for years.
You cannot cure a flake, but you can decide what you can and can’t live
with. Tell your flake your boundaries, and if she can’t honor them, you
know what you have to do. It’s better to end things now than with marriage
on the horizon and your future on the line.

Signed with empathy and a reminder to join us at next week’s Flake

Anon,
The Royal E

OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER 1

I DREAM OF HIM AGAIN.

This one is slow and almost painful in its sweetness. We are on a plane
holding hands, and he is scolding me for getting extra rental insurance for a
car we’ve hired at our destination. I respond by scraping the pads of his
fingers with my teeth until his scolds turn into shivers. We can’t bear to wait
until we get to our hotel later that day to ease the aches we’ve created in
each other, but the cabin is full, and the first class seats aren’t convenient
for under-the-airplane-blanket relief.
What if… he murmurs to me.
And it feels like the plane will never land, and maybe it never should,
because at least if I’m here, then he’s here with me, and if we’re together,
then that means I never left—
And then I wake up.
I’m sweating and my heart is racing and the sheets are slick with spilled
semen. And my God, it’s like losing him all over again when I dream about
him like this. All fucking over again.
I sit up and scrub my hair, miserable with myself. My cock—trapped in
a cage I wear for just this purpose—twinges from its thwarted erection. Not
that it matters. I somehow managed to ejaculate anyway.
Four years.
Four years and six months, and I am still trying to claw myself free
from heartbreak and a love that I swear I still feel in my guts and my
marrow.
I am still trying to let Elijah Iverson go.

Silence, if you didn’t already know, is a lie.

For example, I am currently in a hermitage in the woods, on the last day
of a two-week period of silence. My monastic brothers are two miles away,
and there is nothing and nobody anywhere near me. It should be the
definition of silence. It should be a vacuum of sound, a bubble of pure,
undisturbed stillness.
And yet.
My breath is sawing in and out of my body. A storm-laden wind is
yanking impatiently at the trees. Beyond them, just past the edge of my
vision, a creek is rushing, glutted with recent rain. And from two miles
away, I hear the faint toll of the bells from the basilica.
No, there is no silence here. Not in the truest sense of the word. And yet,
it’s somehow the utter opposite of noise.
I came from a world of noise. Of phones ringing, laptops humming,
fingers tapping on iPad screens. Of cars and planes and clinking glasses of
airport beer. Of voices—arguing, negotiating, cajoling. Of myself—loud
and giddy and wild.
But there is only one phone here, shared by all of us, and only a handful
of computers, used specifically for abbey business. There is beer, but it’s
drunk with pure pleasure, not desperation, and there is no negotiation, no
wheeling and dealing, no hustling.
The silence here is birdsong and creeksong and wind in the trees. It’s
singing, praying, chanting, the ringing of bells and the drone of the organ.
The whirr of tractors going up to the barley fields, the chirr and ruffle of the
printing machines. The clink of rosary beads and the whisper of Bible pages
and the echoes of music from places unseen.
It’s the sound of Brother Patrick’s life, not Aiden Bell’s.
I drop my ax and wipe my forehead with my forearm, listening to the
bells tolling for lauds. Normally, I would do what I’ve done every day for
the past two weeks and say my daily office on my own. And then resume
clearing the deadfall around the hermitage and turning the fallen trees into
usable lumber to be hauled off to Brother Andrew’s woodshed. But I’m still
shaken from my dream, and I feel at loose ends with myself.
I’m worried that if I stay here alone, my thoughts will go back to him.
I lift my eyes to the hills.
I have just enough time to wash up and trot the two miles to the basilica
before lauds begin, and I make it to the sanctuary just in time to bow
towards the altar and slip into my choir stall before my brothers begin
singing the first hymn. The smell of incense is heavy in the air, but I still
catch the scent of fresh wood and damp soil and hard work on myself, even
though I’d shucked my clothes and pulled on a fresh habit to wear to prayer.
I hope to escape notice, but even before I look up, I know it’s
impossible. Our basilica is built so that the chairs for the lay congregation
face the altar, and the choir stalls in the chancel face each other. Which
means when I look up, the first thing I see is not the altar or the crucifix
behind it, but my former novice master Father Harry glaring at me. Glaring
because I am unexpected or late, I’m not sure. It could be merely that he’s
never liked me. Not when I was a postulant, not now when I’m less than a
year away from making my solemn vows.
But when I look across the aisle at my mentor, Brother Connor, and at
Abbot Jerome, they both look like they’re trying not to smile. And then I
see Brother Titus and Brother Thomas giving me twin grins, and I relax a
little. I haven’t been late to lauds since I was a novitiate, and I’ve worked
hard to scrub away all traces of Aiden Bell, the eternal disappointment.
Aiden who was always late, always scrambling, always putting out his own
goddamn fires.
Brother Patrick does none of that. Brother Patrick is on time for
everything. Brother Patrick rarely speaks and even more rarely laughs. He
is responsible and hard-working and serious. He oversees the monastery’s
accounting, he helps wherever he’s needed, he’s never a burden on anybody.
Brother Patrick isn’t late for lauds, and he certainly doesn’t come in his
sheets dreaming of his ex-boyfriend.
My fingers tighten briefly around my liturgy as I remember dream-
Elijah’s face as I nipped at his fingers. My body tightens too, pressure
coming from the cage I’m still wearing around myself, and a heat settles
low in my belly. It matches the heat in my chest, that eternal lance of
longing for him.
How will I make it through another year of this? Through forty more?
But Mount Sergius provides the answer, as it always does. My fellow
brothers move into the first psalm, and the singing forces my breath to keep
moving in and out. Forces my eyes across the page, my mouth to move, my
lungs to expand and contract. Song fills the air just as the morning sunlight
does, consoling in its timelessness. The sun has always been here, and so it
seems, has the song.
The sound of my own voice is near-alien to me after the two weeks at
the hermitage. Rough with disuse, still husky from my two-mile jog here.
I’ve grown to like the sound of my voice less and less over the years—and I
used to be the asshole who dragged friends and clients to karaoke bars at
the end of a long night without a shred of contrition. I used to fill up entire
meetings with bullshit, jokes, gossip, proposals, pitches, apologies,
promises. I used to talk so much that Sean would hang up on me
sometimes, so much that when I was in junior high, my mother started
wearing headphones when she drove me to basketball practice because I
wouldn’t shut up about why Kansas City deserved a pro team.
One of the things I craved when I came here was to learn how to be
silent, how to listen. To be purified and refined like precious metal, all my
dross burned away, and I wanted to burn it by any means possible. Prayer,
routine, labor, isolation, anything—anything all. Just make me a good man.
Fuck, please. Just make me a good man.
After some more psalms, canticles, and prayers to St. Catherine of Siena
—it’s her feast today—Lauds ends. I close the liturgy still feeling restless
and tight. Itching inside of my skin. Usually the Divine Office grounds me:
the hymns, the remembrances to saints, the prayer not only with thoughts,
but with bodies too. With our breath and muscle and bone.
But I’m not grounded now. And I don’t feel like a good man, because I
came here to leave my past life behind, I came here to live entirely for God.
But Elijah keeps blooming in me, and I can’t seem to stop him. I can’t stop
the tender shoots and slender, seeking roots of him, and I am his garden, his
soil, his place, and it would be wonderful if I wasn’t supposed to be the
garden of my god instead.
Since I’m already here at the abbey, I eat breakfast with the others. We
observe the Grand Silence until after our morning meal, and so the refectory
is filled only with the the slow clank of coffee mugs and the rustling of
habits on the floor.
A central theme to monastic life is being present int he moment. When
you are eating toast, you are only eating toast, you aren’t also answering an
email while waiting on a car and listening to your administrative assistant
run through your schedule and also wondering if you can sneak off after
your one-thirty meeting for a quick screw. It’s something I’ve worked hard
to grow in myself since I came here, this capability for mono-tasking, for
being wholly intent on one thing. Chopping wood when I’m chopping
wood, singing when I’m singing. Eating toast when I’m eating toast.
Which is why I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin right now, because
my mind is miles away from my homemade bread and black coffee. Instead
I’m reliving every breakfast at the splintering table in my fixer-upper
farmhouse, reliving the morning light catching the amber flecks in Elijah’s
eyes and illuminating the previous night’s marks on his throat. I’m
remembering that weekend we spent in Chicago, fucking against a hotel
window while a pink dawn crested over Lake Michigan.
I’m aching for the way he used to trace circles on the inside of my wrist
while we scrolled through the morning news on our phones.
I finish breakfast before everyone else and take care of my dishes as
quickly as I can. As suddenly as I decided I needed the company of my
brothers, I decide I can’t bear anything but solitude right now. Those
tendrils of Elijah are twisting around my ankles and twining up my throat,
and I don’t know whether I need to pray or chop wood about it, but
whatever I need to do, it’s not here, it’s not with other people around. This
is between me and God.
But when I leave the refectory, I see Brother Connor waiting for me, his
hands folded together in front of him and his lips creased in a kind smile.
“Brother Patrick,” he says warmly. “Will you walk with me?”

OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER 2

EVEN THOUGH ALL I want to do is to go swing an ax until I can’t move

any more, I nod and fall into step next to him as he begins walking.
Brother Connor could ask me to scrub the cow shit off the barn walls
and I’d agree, because I trust him completely. He is short, slender white
man with a snowy mustache and bright blue eyes, well into his sixties but
with the energy and strength of a man half that age. Before he came to
Mount Sergius in the eighties, he owned a karate school in Kansas City, and
most days, he can be spotted under the large oak tree near the graveyard,
practicing his old forms under its shady branches.
“I know you are silent today, so you don’t have to respond to my
rambling,” Brother Connor tells me.
It’s a courtesy, because there isn’t a ‘you broke your vow of silence’ jail
at the abbey, or anything. In fact, there are no vows of silence at Catholic
monasteries at all, at least not in the permanent sense. There are periods of
silence throughout the day, and brothers and visitors often take temporary
vows of silence to induce greater introspection and contemplation—as I
have been doing for the last two weeks—but there is no total surrender of
words. We sing out loud, we pray out loud, and during certain periods of
community recreation, we talk a whole hell of a lot. And I’d be lying if I
told you there wasn’t a fair bit of bitching, gossiping, and bullshitting too.
Less than there was in portfolio management, sure, but still more than zero.
The only silences that are enforced—mainly by frowning and mild
scolding (for severe infractions)—are the Grand Silence between compline
and breakfast, silence at meals, and in the chapels where monks and visitors
alike go for prayer.
Still, though, I appreciate Brother Connor’s courtesy. It’s important for
me to honor my promises to myself—even if they only matter to myself.
Especially if they only matter to myself.
Like, for example, the promise to have God and God alone as the sole
object of my devotion.
“The abbot would like to see you,” Brother Connor says as we walk
from the refectory under a covered walkway towards the building that
houses our various offices and the welcome center. Visitors are already
beginning to mill about the cloister, sitting on the green, grassy garth or on
the many wooden benches. “And I hope you don’t mind, but I asked for the
privilege of being with you while he speaks to you. I think you’ll be very
excited by what he has to say, and I wanted to see my Brother Lumberjack
smile for once.”
He says the last part in a teasing voice—it’s an ongoing joke at the
abbey. All the brothers here are assigned work according to their strengths,
and with my background in finance, my work has been primarily of a
QuickBooks and Excel nature. But my other strengths are quite literally
strengths, and so the abbot has designated me the official grunt of Mount
Sergius. I heave plastic tubs of hops in the brewhouse, I lug around reams
of paper in the print house, and when I’m at the hermitage, which is less
frequently than I would like, I’m tasked with chopping up the deadfall and
bringing it to Brother Andrew, who is our resident carpenter.
And the years of labor have left their imprint. While I’ve always been
tall and wide-shouldered, there’d never been any doubt that my muscles
came from a gym, but now…
Well, now I’m built like a lumberjack. And given that I haven’t shaved
in a week, I probably look like one too.
“And if you don’t mind me saying so,” Brother Connor says as I rub
self-consciously at the thick stubble on my jaw, “you seem like you could
use a smile today.”
I’m grateful for my shield of silence right now, because I worry if I start
talking, the old version of myself will take over and I’ll never stop. I’m
worried that I’d trap my friend in this walkway and steal hours from his day
by making him listen to me describe the precise arch of Elijah’s eyebrows
and the low, rough notes of his voice. So instead of speaking, I give a slow
nod of assent.
Yes.
Maybe I could use a smile. God knows I don’t get to see Elijah’s
anymore.
“I often find that silence begets memories,” Brother Connor says,
stepping forward to open the door for us. “The worst memories. And the
best.”
I give him a look as we move inside the building. All the windows are
wide open, letting in the humid spring air and a stiff breeze intent on
ruffling every paper in the building. It smells like coffee, grass, and
something unique to Mount Sergius. Like incense and old paper and name
brand clothing starch.
“Memories aren’t meant to be torments, Brother Patrick,” Brother
Connor says softly, meeting my gaze. “They are gifts.”
Gifts, my ass, I want to say. But I don’t. Brother Connor knows what I
left behind when I came here. He knows whom I left behind. Everyone
does.
I didn’t want it to be a secret that I was queer. No more than the
widowed brothers kept their late wives a secret, no more than the brothers
who still speak fondly of past girlfriends and teenage sweethearts. I wasn’t
coming back into the Catholic fold because I felt shame about whom I liked
to take to my bed (everyone) or whom I let into my heart (only Elijah).
I came here for God.
I came here too be a good man for him and to pull myself out of the
outside world where I’d done nothing but let people down. Where I’d been
chaotic and selfish and messy. I felt like I owed the world that. The retreat
of myself.
That’s why I came, but I wasn’t about to let the price of my surrender be
the best and most honest parts of myself. I wasn’t going to let anyone inflict
spiritual violence on me. Only I got to do that!
Anyway, looking back, I can’t help but think God led me to Mount
Sergius for a reason, because the abbot understood me completely when I
explained my stance to him, and then introduced me to Brother Connor,
who eventually told me his story of the man he’d left behind to come here
almost forty years ago, and who listened with the understanding of the
fellow broken-hearted when I told him about Elijah.
Only Father Harry has been what I’d braced for—cold gazes and
pointed Leviticus readings at mealtimes and things of that nature. It would
have been something I could guard against if he hadn’t also been my novice
master, but after the fifth meeting with him silkily suggesting that my soul
was in mortal danger if I didn’t repent of my lust for men, I went to the
abbot and asked for help. That was when my spiritual development was
given over to Brother Connor instead. It was an unusual arrangement, but
monasteries are their own little worlds, somewhat removed from the rigid,
ultramontane politics that stifles parishes and dioceses, and so Abbot
Jerome was able to do as he saw fit. And then when the year was up, the
post of novice master was given over to Father Matteo and Father Harry
was put in charge of ordering monastery supplies like giant rolls of toilet
paper and industrial-sized bags of coffee.
Brother Connor seems to sense my inner disagreement with his words
of wisdom, and his eyes twinkle as he pats me on the shoulder. “Gifts,
Brother Patrick,” he says again. “Because of what they can teach us.”
My memories aren’t teaching me anything other than how to discreetly
wear a chastity device under my robes, but I don’t say that, of course,
because I don’t say anything at all. Temporary vow of silence and all that.
Abbot Jerome is already sitting behind his desk when we get to his
office, the ubiquitous breeze blowing through the room and an audiobook
playing from some unknown source. It’s in French, and Brother Connor
asks, “Proust again?” as we sit down in the sturdy wooden chairs set across
from the abbatial desk. Brother Andrew had made them years ago, and they
were some of the only chairs that I enjoyed sitting in, because the arms
were set back far enough that I could sit with my thighs slightly apart,
which was more comfortable with the cage.
“I’m on to Camus now,” the abbot says, looking up from the papers on
his desk to us. “Vivre, c'est faire vivre l'absurde, and so forth. Hello,
Brother Patrick.”
The abbot looks like no one more than he looks like Friar Tuck from the
cartoon Robin Hood, except he doesn’t have a tonsure. And he isn’t a
badger, obviously. He’s short and round, with fair skin, bushy eyebrows,
and silver hair. His nose is as prodigious as his chin isn’t, and his scoldings
are as common as his smiles. He spends most of his free time writing essays
about apophatic theology, transformation, and a very, very dead person
named Gregory of Nyssa.
We sell his books in the gift shop. They have a lot of footnotes.
I nod my hello at the abbot, and he pushes something across his desk—
scattering pens and what looks suspiciously like spilled Tic Tacs to the side
as he does.
“I am aware that you’re silent today,” the abbot says as I reach forward
to take the packet of papers he’s offering. “So I’m not expecting you to
respond immediately to what you’re about to look at. But I wanted you to
have the chance to think about it while you’re alone at the hermitage
tonight. This, I believe, will require much discernment.”
Paper-clipped to the top of the packet are three glossy pictures. In them,
rocky cliffs jut against a dark and cold-looking sea; a simple medieval
church sits among austere hills with a crop of weathered gravestones around
it; a small stone structure—cottage seems a generous term, but perhaps hut
is better—perches at the edge of the cliff, with a thin curl of smoke
emerging from the chimney. The sky is dark and coffered with clouds, and
sea mist hangs in the air. The grass around the cottage seems nearly
flattened with wind.
It looks like the end of the world. The absolute end of the world, and
someone’s built a monastery there.
My soul gives out a sharp and silent cry at the sight of it.
“St. Columba’s Monastery,” the abbot says softly. When I look up, he’s
watching me closely. “A Trappist monastery on the west coast of Ireland.”
Trappist.
Mount Sergius is a Benedictine abbey, meaning we follow the Rule of
St. Benedict, who was the first person to lay out an actual plan for how
clumps of people could live and work and pray in the same place without
descending into spiritual chaos or unredeemable smelliness. But five
hundred years after St. Benedict wrote out his plan, a group of monks
decided nobody was following the plan hard enough and moved to a swamp
and spent the rest of their lives in a sort of austerity-off with each other.
Until eventually they turned the marsh into viable farmland and everyone
remembered that it was nice to eat and rest and wear shoes once in a while,
and by a few hundred years later, the Cistercians weren’t much more
austere than the Benedictines they’d broken off from. So then, another
group of monks broke off from them and went hardcore austerity. Barely
any food, constant work, silence, penitence, isolation—the whole thing. For
a while, they even lived without a roof over their heads. Literally.
They are called Trappists. And aside from the Carthusians—who are
like the antisocial Silent Bobs of Christian monasticism—the Trappists are
the most dedicated to a life of prayer and contemplation of all the monastic
orders.
I look back down at the desolate landscape in the pictures.
“You’ll see some information about St. Columba’s below the pictures,
and underneath the St. Columba pile, there are more monasteries. All
Trappist.”
I flip through the papers quietly, quickly. Even though I used to be the
definition of a hard-partying business bro, I was actually pretty good at my
job, and part of that job was being able to accurately skim and metabolize
information while people stared at you from across a table. And so I see that
indeed, all the monasteries are Trappist. Two are here in America—the
famous Mepkin and the even more famous Gethsemani—and the rest are
scattered between France, Belgium, and Italy. All have pictures as well, and
I glimpse sun-soaked stone arches, cheerful gardens, and a fairy tale forest
before I stack all the papers as they were.
From the top of the stack, the lonely cliffs of St. Columba’s stare up at
me, beckoning almost. I can practically smell the sea and hear the gusting
wind. I can imagine my muscles aching, and my soul singing. Cleansed of
everything but love for my eternal bridegroom, because in a place like that,
there would be nothing left. There would be only sea and sky and God.
The breeze is tousling the abbot’s eyebrows as he studies me.
“I know you have been craving more, Brother Patrick. More silence,
more solitude, more work. More prayer. And I have deliberated some time
about the papers you have in your hands, because I have seen this passion in
young men before. They crave more, they desire to be burned down to the
bone with devotion, and more often than not, it leads to an irrecoverable
consumption. They don’t burn down, they burn out. And they either leave
or they become listless and untethered, and struggle to find peace in a
community again.”
I look down at my hands, rough and calloused with amateur forestry. To
be burned to the bone with devotion is my entire dream right now, my sole
vision for my future.
I want to be holy and good. I want my heart and body to be God’s in
total, all of it burned up on his altar.
I look down at the picture of St. Columba’s again.
“On the other hand,” the abbot continues, “there are other men I see
come through here, with your drive and your relentless seeking. They go on
to do great things, and to lead lives that I can only call saintlike. But they
must find a place that fits them. This is the trouble with the monastic life,
you see—you must be able to find an entire life in a single place. You must
be able to find the deepest corners of your own soul in one chosen fold of
the world. And I wonder if eastern Kansas is that chosen fold for you. I
wonder if the Benedictines are the right order for you. And so to that
point…”
Next to me, Brother Connor adjusts his hands in his lap. From any other
person, the gesture would mean nothing. But from Brother Connor, it means
he’s roiling with excitement.
The abbot smiles at Brother Connor and then at me. “And so I have
permission and the funds to send you to three of these monastic houses to
see if one of them might be a good fit for you.”
Brother Connor jumps in. “Officially on the books, this is a brewing
research trip, so you would tour the breweries at each monastery and
engage in some mild corporate espionage while you were there.”
“Ethical corporate espionage,” the abbot says. “You know, Christian
corporate espionage. Be holy about it and stuff.”
“But the research is only the justification for sending you, not the real
reason,” Brother Connor says. “You are the real reason. Your future is the
real reason. And our hope is that you’ll find the answers you’re seeking on
this trip.”
Even if I weren’t silent today, I still wouldn’t know what to say. These
kinds of trips were extremely rare for mere brothers, especially trips outside
the order and outside the country. Did I want to spend a trip drinking beer
and seeking holy ground? Yes, of course, but I also felt a profound
uncertainty. An unworthiness and a cutting doubt.
I don’t deserve this gift.
“I am so excited for you,” Brother Connor says, touching my hand
where it rests on the St. Columba paperwork. “But I also know what we’re
discussing. If you take this trip and ultimately decide to join a new order…”
The flinch at the realization is instinctive. If I join a new order, then I
will never see Brother Connor again after I leave. Or Abbot Jerome or
Brothers Thomas, Titus, and Andrew. I will never see my woods again or
my troublesome creek.
We will write emails to each other, I’m sure of it, but we will no longer
sing together or pray together or walk together under the trees. These men
have become my family, and I would have to leave them behind. And for
what? For some formless need I can barely express even to myself?
“Now, St. Columba’s in particular is a hard life,” the abbot begins,
leaning back in his chair. “But their prior is looking for—well, he used the
word sturdy—and there’s no one sturdier than my Brother Lumberjack. Ah,
yes, Brother Thomas, what is it?”
I turn to see Brother Thomas and Brother Titus crowding at the door,
their shoulders heaving like they sprinted into the building.
“Brother Patrick has a visitor,” Brother Titus pants. “In the south
cloister. Waiting.”
“I see the Lord is using his favorite tool to teach today—interruptions,”
says the abbot dryly. “Very well, then. I assume you informed this visitor
that Brother Patrick will be silent today?”
“We did,” Brother Thomas pipes up. “He said that’s okay.”
He.
I stand, my interest piqued. There’s only four hes who would visit me at
present—my three brothers and my father. I wonder if Sean has brought a
baby from his growing baby pile for me to hold while he updates me on the
family gossip. My ordinary, human heart warms at the thought.
“Brother Patrick,” the abbot says before I leave, “you have time to
decide about the trip and which monasteries you’d like to visit. Three weeks
before we’d have to finalize arrangements. And Brother Connor and I will
be here any time you’d like to talk about it.”
I give both men a grateful nod, hoping they can see my humble thanks
in my body since I cannot express it in words. And holding the information
about the Trappist monasteries tight, I follow Brother Titus and Brother
Thomas out of the office building and down the warren of covered
walkways that lead to the south cloister, where my visitor awaits.
The young monks hover at the entryway into the cloistered garden,
curious, and I can’t blame them. Not much happens here that’s worthy of
remarking upon, and sometimes visitors turn out to be fairly interesting
people—prominent Catholics or artists or adherents of other faiths. But
they’re going to be disappointed when they realize it’s just an asshole
named Sean.
Except I finally see who is waiting for me on the other side of the
fountain, and it’s not Sean. It’s not any of my brothers, and it’s not my
father.
It’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, with his arm slung along the
back of the bench, and his long legs sprawled everywhere, like a bored king
on his throne. His eyebrow is lifted ever so slightly, as if I’m the riddle
here, as if I’m the anomaly in an otherwise seamlessly ordered world.
I forget how to breathe.
I forget how to think.
“Hello, Aiden,” says Elijah.

Aiden and Elijah are ready to scorch up your screen…

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ALSO BY SIERRA SIMONE:

Thornchapel:
A Lesson in Thorns
Feast of Sparks
Harvest of Sighs
Door of Bruises

Misadventures:
Misadventures with a Professor
Misadventures of a Curvy Girl
Misadventures in Blue

The New Camelot Trilogy:

American Queen
American Prince
American King
The Moon (Merlin’s Novella)
American Squire (A Thornchapel and New Camelot Crossover)

The Priest Series:

Priest
Midnight Mass: A Priest Novella
Sinner
Saint

Co-Written with Laurelin Paige

Porn Star
Hot Cop

The Markham Hall Series:

The Awakening of Ivy Leavold
The Education of Ivy Leavold
The Punishment of Ivy Leavold (now including the novella The Reclaiming of Ivy Leavold)

The London Lovers:

The Seduction of Molly O’Flaherty (now bundled with the novella The Persuasion of Molly
O’Flaherty)
The Wedding of Molly O’Flaherty

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sierra Simone is a USA Today bestselling former librarian who spent too much time reading romance
novels at the information desk. She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.

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www.thesierrasimone.com
[email protected]

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