Wild guess, that wasn’t a coincidence.
I stared up at him, speechless.
“I’ll do the math for you,” Auggie offered. “The deacons alone have over two million dollars in their accounts. The church’s accounts, which by the way aren’t taxed, are even more healthy. And I haven’t gotten into the ‘wife’ situation, considering most of them aren’t legally married. So they file separate. Which means they have their own accounts. But I’ll bottom line it and share that Reverend Clyde has direct access to over seventeen million dollars.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed. “How are they making all that money?”
“That’s what we wanna know.”
“So you’re investigating my family’s church?”
He drew in a big breath that expanded his (awesome) chest.
Then he said, “Pepper, the last thing I wanna do is freak you. I just managed to nail down my first date with you. And that task took me three years.”
Three years.
I couldn’t stop the smirk I gave him.
He definitely noted my smirk, if his nostrils flaring in a sexy way had anything to say about it, but he kept talking.
“But like I told you, I’m taking this serious.” He flicked a hand in the spare space between him and me. “That means, in my mind, I’m making you mine. Juno mine. You’re both gonna be in my life. And I look after the people in my life that I care about. You’re out of this mess, whatever is going on there, so it can’t touch you in one way. If it’s what we think it is, though, it can touch you in another. It can upset you. Upset Juno. And I gotta do what I can to make that not happen. And if I can’t do that, make it so the blow is as soft as I can possibly manage.”
Ummmmmmmmm…
“Did you just say that?” I asked, my chest warming, and other places warming too.
“I just said that,” he affirmed…firmly.
So of course, I jumped him.
There wasn’t far to jump, but still, I went at him with velocity, which meant my body slammed into his. Once connected, I wrapped one arm around his shoulders, the other hand I slid into his thick hair that instantly curled around my fingers, claiming them.
I then pulled his mouth down to mine and I kissed him.
A millisecond later I was up against the Hummer, crushed to Auggie, my kiss was taken over and we were making out, hot and heavy, around the corner from my family’s church.
I was grinding into him.
He was grinding into me.
I had a fistful of his shirt and a hand cupped around his head.
He had a fistful of my hair and a handful of my ass.
God, he could kiss.
His tongue was magic.
All of a sudden, though, it was gone, and his face was stuffed in my neck.
I could feel his breath hot on my skin.
I was panting.
“We need to cool it,” he murmured into my flesh.
We did, for multiple reasons. The primary one being that we’d done that before (including the me-jumping-him part), it had one consequence, and I didn’t want the second time we did it being in the back of a company Hummer.
Or in broad daylight at the side of it.
Being arrested for lewd behavior so close to church premises would likely blow my master plan.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
He lifted his head and looked down at me.
“You good?” he asked.
No, I was not.
I wanted to spend the next hour kissing Auggie and/or listening to him talk about how he wanted to look after me and Juno and/or having sex with Auggie (though, not in the backseat of the Hummer).
“Yes,” I said.
He grinned at me and I got the impression he could read my thoughts.
Then he said, “Your turn.”
“My turn, what?”
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I don’t want my sister to marry Reverend Clyde,” I answered.
“And?”
“And…we were going to do a little sleuthing.”
Woefully, since we were chatting and no longer going at each other, it seemed appropriate to take my hand from his hair and stop holding on to his shirt like he was keeping me upright.
This I did, but I didn’t go far because I liked the warm, hard feel of his flesh. It was solid. Stable. And it made me feel both.
And he smelled like sunshine.
So I rested my hands on his shoulders and kept talking.
(Incidentally, Auggie had moved his hand from my ass to my waist, but his other hand was totally still in my hair, but now absentmindedly fiddling with it…mm).
“Saffron is tight with Dad,” I said. “She’s always been his favorite and not because she was a suck-up. They just click. But she’s not an idiot and I honestly don’t think this…whatever it is that’s set up with her and Reverend Clyde, is something she wants. So we were trying to find some stuff I could use to appeal to her rational side. Because the church has changed. Something’s off. And she’s in it. It’s hard to have perspective when you’re in it. I wanted to give her some perspective.”