CHAPTER 8: TAKE ME TO CHURCH

The storm outside had reached a crescendo, but it was nothing compared to the force of the man behind me.

Elias had stopped being a priest somewhere between the second orgasm and the moment he’d wrapped his hand around my throat. What was left was something older and hungrier. It was something that had been locked behind fifteen years of scripture, stiff collars, and cold showers. Now that the cage was open, it had no interest in going back in.

“Elia… Father,” I whimpered out, my entire body jerking from the force of his thrusts. I was getting overwhelmed. “I… I need to…”

He stopped, then pulled out of me slowly. I whimpered at the loss of him, my body already aching for the fullness he’d just taken away but also grateful for the break. 

“Turn around.” He growled, his voice almost unrecognizable. It wasn't the baritone that had vibrated through church pews and settled in my bones during sermons. It was lower and stripped of every performance. 

I turned to see him sitting back on his heels, chest heaving, his broad shoulders taunt with tension. His abdomen was ridged and slick with sweat. 

A whimper escaped my lips when I saw his cock. It was thick, flushed, and still iron-hard, as if he hadn’t just wrecked me twice already.

He looked at me the way a man looks at something he knows will cost him everything but has already decided it’s worth it.

“Come here,” he said, his voice a low growl.

He watched every movement I made with dark, dilated eyes as I inched toward him. His jaw was tight, and his hands were fisted against his thighs as if he were physically restraining himself from grabbing me before I reached him.

When I got close enough, he cupped my face with both hands. Instead of grabbing me as I had expected, his thumbs traced my cheekbones like I was something delicate… something he was afraid he had already broken.

“Look at you,” he whispered, his eyes drinking me in worshipfully. “As I look at you, the song ‘Take Me to church’ plays in my head.”

I giggled through my kiss-swollen lips. My thighs were trembling, and I could feel the evidence of him cooling on my skin. I knew I looked ruined, and the way he looked at me made it clear that he liked that he was the one who had done it.

Then something flashed across his face. It wasn't guilt exactly, but something more complicated and more dangerous than guilt.

“Jade.” He whispered my name, making it sound like a confession.

“Don’t,” I said softly.

His eyes sharpened. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t think right now,” I whispered, reaching up and wrapping my fingers around his wrists, holding his hands to my face. “You can hate yourself tomorrow. But tonight, you’re mine.”

The complicated look in his expression didn't disappear, but it moved aside.

He gently pulled me into his lap in one smooth motion, his hands finding my hips as he positioned me over him with an accuracy that made it clear this was not his first time orchestrating this. Then he held me there, just above him, not letting me sink.

“Father,” I breathed.

“Elias,” he corrected, his voice softer. It wasn't a command this time; it was almost a question. As if he were asking if that man still existed—if I could still see him, even now.

“Elias,” I whispered back.

Something broke open in his face, and he lowered me onto him slowly, inch by deliberate inch, watching my expression the entire time like it was the only scripture that had ever told him the truth. 

I felt every ridge of him, every thick, pulsing inch as he filled me completely. When I finally sank to the base of him, I let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped in my chest since I was sixteen years old.

We stayed still for a moment, just breathing.

His forehead dropped to mine with his eyes closed, his hands trembling slightly against my hips as if he were gathering all the self-control left in him. 

It was the most undone I had ever seen him. It was more real than the growling or the spanking, because this was not a claiming. This was a man sitting in the rubble of everything he had built and feeling, for the first time, that the rubble was worth it.

When he started to move, it was nothing like before. 

It had been a punishment before… fifteen years of repression detonating all at once.

This was something else. It was slow, grinding, and unbearably intentional. 

His hips rolled upward in a rhythm that was almost meditative, his hands moving from my waist to my back to my hair, memorizing me by touch.

“You’ve been doing this to me for so long,” he said against my temple, grinding into me in a sensual roll of his hips. “Every time I see you. Every time you sat in that front row and looked at me like you could see straight through me.”

His hips rolled deep, and I gasped, my nails finding his shoulders.

“I prayed for you to stop, you know? I got on my knees many times, and I begged God to make me numb to you. To kill those feelings.”

“Did it work?” I managed.

A low, humorless sound left him, and he thrust into me, pulling me down harder at the same time. “What do you think?”

The sound that came out of me was not dignified. My head fell back, and he took the opportunity to drag his mouth down my throat, biting and sucking a trail of marks I would have to cover for a week.

“Tell me you wanted this,” he rasped against my collarbone.

“I wanted this.”

“Tell me you came back for this.”

“I came back for you,” I said, my voice cracking because it was the truest thing I had ever said.

He went still for a half second. Then his arms wrapped around me completely, crushing me against his chest. His face buried in my neck, and he began to move again, leaving no space between us. 

Every stroke was deep, slow, and total, like he was trying to climb inside my bones.

The orgasm that built this time was a rising tide. It started in my belly and spread through my limbs until I was shaking, my face pressed into his shoulder, my breath coming in broken, hitching sobs.

“That’s a good girl. I’ve got you,” he murmured, his hand cradling the back of my head as he quickened his rhythm. “Let go for me, baby.”

I let go.

My orgasm crashed through me in long, rolling waves, leaving my body limp and boneless against his. 

I heard him follow seconds later, his whole body shuddering. A low, broken sound left his throat that sounded nothing like a preacher and everything like a man.

We collapsed together into the sheets.

For a long time, neither of us moved or spoke. The rain had slowed to a soft, steady rhythm against the stone. Blending perfectly with his heartbeat under my ear. While his hand moved in slow, absent strokes through my tangled hair.

After a couple of minutes, his hand stilled, and breathing got back to normal.

The slight tension returned to his body before he spoke. The way his breathing changed as the silence gave him room to think.

“Jade.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

There was a long pause. “This can never—”

“I know, Elias.”

He took in a deep breath. Then his hand resumed moving through my hair, slower now. “I know,” he said finally, almost to himself.

But he didn't let go of me. And when the first grey light of morning began to press through the curtains, he still hadn't.

Six hours later, I sat in the front pew as the sun broke through the clouds, watching him standing at the pulpit, his collar crisp, his voice steady as he spoke of the love of God. 

He didn't look at me once, but as he lifted the chalice, I saw the faint, red crescent of my fingernails still marked into the back of his hand.

I smirked to myself. The Shepherd was back, but the Wolf was mine.