The Priest's Forbidden Love
Father Lucien is Terranova's most beloved priest, he is steady, faithful, meek. Seraphina De Luca is the town's most notorious scandal , beautiful, reckless, ungovernable, having multiple men at her beck and call . When her family sends her to Father Lucien for spiritual counselling after getting caught in a motel with a man on a holy day , neither of them is prepared for what walks through that door.
Because they have met before.
Four years ago, one week before his ordination, Lucien wandered into a garden at an engagement party and found the most beautiful woman he had ever seen drinking stolen wine alone. They spent one night together, a night that cost him his vow of chastity and gave him something he has never been able to name. He left before she woke. He left her his rosary. He has spent four years building walls around that memory and calling it penance, a mistake that was never supposed to happen , but was it really? Lucien instantly recognizes the woman he has spent four years trying to forget.
Now she is sitting three feet away from him in his own counselling room
Wearing his rosary he had left on her neck that night .
And she has no idea who he is.
The Priest's Forbidden Love is a sweeping historical romance, a story of forbidden desire, buried secrets, family betrayal, and two people who were each other's greatest sin discovering they might be each other's only salvation.
Baca
Chapter: Chapter Six
: The Hidden TruthLucien did not answer immediately.That was the first time. In many years of friendship through seminary walls and shared midnight prayers and ordination morning and four years of parish life that had asked things of both of them they had not anticipated when they were young men kneeling on cold stone floors making promises to God, Giovanni had learned to read Lucien's silences the way other people read faces. He knew the silence of a man thinking. He knew the silence of a man praying. He knew the silence of a man who had heard something difficult and was deciding how to carry it.This silence was none of those things.This was the silence of a man standing at the edge of something and looking down."Lucien," Giovanni said again. Not pushing. Just staying. The way you stay beside someone when you are not sure what they need but you are certain they should not be alone with whatever it is.The upper courtyard was very still around them. The grey morning had not brightened. The city bel
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-08-02
Chapter: Chapter Five : The Wrong Side of the DoorThe chair across the desk was empty.Seraphina had been sitting in the small room at the end of the corridor for six minutes , she had counted, because counting was something to do other than look at the plain walls and the wooden crucifix and the single narrow window that looked out onto a grey courtyard with nothing interesting in it. The room smelled of candle wax and old paper and the particular variety of self-righteousness she had come to associate with church buildings in general. A Bible sat on the corner of the desk. A small vase of white flowers she could not name sat beside it. Everything in the room was arranged with the deliberate simplicity of a space designed to remind visitors that they were here to be humble.Seraphina was not feeling especially humble.She had dressed for this room. That was the thing. She had stood in front of her mirror that morning and chosen every detail with the precision of a general choosing ground before a battle , the green silk, the hair d
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-31
Chapter: Chapter Four : What God EstablishedThe Church of Sant'Angelo had been standing at the top of Via Sacra for four hundred years.It was not the largest church in the province, not the most ornate, but it had the particular quality of very old places of worship, cool and dim inside regardless of the weather, smelling of candle wax and incense and centuries of accumulated prayer, its silence a different kind of silence from the silence outside. The kind that pressed against the ears. The kind that reminded a person, whether they wanted reminding or not, that they were standing in a place that had witnessed considerably more than they had.Father Lucien had loved it from the first morning he walked through its doors four years ago.He was at his desk in the small counselling room at the end of the corridor when Brother Matteo found him, seated, unhurried, his breviary closed at his elbow, his notes for the session open before him. He had heard about the De Luca girl. Everyone in Terranova had heard about the De Luca girl
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-31
Chapter: Chapter Three : The Devil Wears SilkFerdinand De Luca came home on a Tuesday.There was no warning, no letter sent ahead, no messenger dispatched from the road to give Angela time to prepare the house and her face and the particular version of domestic peace she liked to present to her husband after a long absence. He simply appeared at the door of the house on Via Margherita with his travelling coat still on and his luggage behind him, looking exactly the way he always looked after weeks on the road, larger than the doorframe, darker than the hallway, filling whatever room he entered with a quality of silence that made everyone in it instinctively straighten their backs.He was not a tall man, Ferdinand, not especially broad, but had the kind of presence that had nothing to do with size, the presence of a man who had never once in his life wondered whether he had the right to speak first, sit first, eat first, decide first. A merchant by profession, a patriarch by disposition, and a man who believed with complete since
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-31
Chapter: Chapter Two : The House on Via MargheritaThe De Luca house on Via Margherita looked well from the outside.That had always been Angela's doing. The iron gate freshly painted. Geraniums in the window boxes. The stone steps swept every morning without exception. From the street, anyone passing would see exactly what Angela De Luca wanted them to see, a prosperous merchant's wife keeping things together in her husband's absence, a mother of three daughters who had all turned out well. Respectable. Enviable, even.Seraphina had spent twenty-two years watching her mother tend that image the way other women tended their gardens. Carefully. Obsessively. Pruning anything that threatened to grow in the wrong direction.Today, she had apparently grown in the wrong direction again.They came through the front door in silence, Angela first, then Maria, then Seraphina, who shut the door behind her with a quietness that was somehow more insolent than slamming it. The feast-day decorations still hung above the doorframe. The candle beneat
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-31
Chapter: Chapter One : The Saint’s Day"Open this door!"Angela De Luca's voice tore through the narrow corridor of the Fontana Inn like a blade through silk. It was not a request. It was never a request when Angela De Luca spoke. The hotel manager, a small, round man named Bertolini who had managed thirty years of scandal within these walls without losing his composure for once, found himself trembling for the first time in his career."Madam, I assure you, the guest in room seven has paid for her privacy and…""Her privacy?" Angela laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that made children cry and grown men step backward. " Give me that key, Bertolini, or I will have this establishment closed before the feast day bells stop ringing."He gave her the key.By then, the corridor had filled. It was Saint Michael's Feast Day, the holiest day on the Calabrian calendar, a day when every decent family in the province sat together at long tables laden with roasted lamb and fresh bread, when the church bells rang from sunrise to s
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-07-31
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