Reverend Dr. Mark Trade is too young, too handsome and too cocky...and Corabel Dennis is not impressed. Until that is, she learns that they share the same dirty secret...
Copyright ? 2018 by Sierra Simone All rights reserved.
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Until the Cock Crows
Reverend Dr. Mark Trade wasted no time in pissing me off.
There was, of course, the scowls whenever he passed by my desk and I didn’t appear to be working hard enough for him. There was the swagger when he walked to the pulpit—the same swagger that had all the teenage girls fluttering their eyelashes at him, like this was an Austen novel and he was the handsome young clergyman just come to town. And most damningly, there was the high-handed way he wanted to change things. They weren’t always bad ideas; some of the changes I’d been suggesting myself for the three years I’d been working in the Thrive United Methodist Church office. It was just the way he wanted to do them, as if he merely wanted to snap his fingers and have his will be done.
Like God. And I only liked my men godlike in bed.
“Cocky,” Edith the organist had muttered to me one day after a meeting. “I’ve seen preachers like him before. Too young, too handsome, and too damned cocky.”
It didn’t help that his cockiness—that swagger—wasn’t entirely unearned. He already had his ordination and his PhD at age thirty, a host of diplomas and certificates on his wall, and his sermons were…well…they were really fucking good. He didn’t perform his sermons like a southern televangelist because he didn’t have to; he could command a room of hundreds with his deep, slightly husky voice; he could captivate an audience with his brilliant, insightful thinking.
And he was handsome. Dangerously so, with dark eyebrows slashing over clear blue eyes and a straight bladed nose with the tiniest crook at the bridge. There was a mouth lush enough to belong in a cologne ad, fair skin with a hint of suntan, and a shock of silky brown hair just long enough to brush over his forehead sometimes, causing him to flick at it with an annoyed hand, as if offended that his hair had the audacity to pull his concentration out of whatever deep and powerful thought he was having at the moment.
But still. The reason I was a Methodist at all was because I’d needed to find a denomination with less men obsessed with power. Like I said—I have a place for powerful men (my bed), but once the sun rises, I’m back to wrinkling my nose at any man who so much as thinks about birth control policy within a fifty-foot radius of me.
And the good Reverend Dr. Mark Trade was not in my bed, he was my boss. And alleged spiritual leader. Sigh.
So I was not in the best frame of mind when two months after he’d started, he sent me an email. A terse, one-line email at the end of the day when I was the last one in the office, right before I was about to pack up my bag and head home.
Corabel—
See me in my office.
—Rev. Dr. Mark Trade
The fucking nerve…
My desk was in the staff room—I was the communications director and wedding coordinator for the church—and was possibly a whole two-minute walk from his own office on the other side of the sanctuary. He could have come and seen me right now! He could have called my office phone! He could have at least pretended I had better things to do than to be at his beck and call!
Righteous indignation burned through me, and I considered—really considered—not going. Simply pretending I hadn’t seen the email, finishing up for the day and then going home to my cat and my frozen entrée and my usual roster of British gardening shows.
Then a second email came in.
I mean it, Corabel.
Something else burned through me, so fast it was gone before I could catch hold of it. But it left contrails through my lower belly, tingled at the tips of my breasts, and a small shiver worked its way up from the base of my spine.
No! No. This was dumb. I was not one of those front-row teenage girls hoping the preacher man would take her flirting seriously, and I was not the kind of employee to be barked at like a dog. I was going to go to his office, fine, but I was going to go there to give him hell and that was it. If he wanted to bitch at me about the church bulletins needing more room for sermon notes or for the email newsletters needing better open rates, he could do it another day. After he’d scheduled a meeting with me.
I stormed down the hall to his office, not bothering to knock on the door before letting myself inside.
He was sitting at his desk, the usual sprawl of bibles, books, and papers in front of him, looking academic and stern in a thin sweater over a button-down shirt. He looked up at my sudden entrance, his expression mildly displeased. “It’s polite to knock,” he said.
Oh, that motherfucker.
“It’s also polite,” I seethed, “not to demand my presence like you’re entitled to it.”
My irritation had the simultaneous effect of both amusing and disappointing him. His eyes flashed with something hot as his jaw worked. But instead of scowling and lecturing me even more, he said nothing at all, getting to his feet and coming around his desk.
I couldn’t help it, my breath caught a little at the sight of him unfolding into a tower of wide shoulders and lean hips, of a firm, masculine body that even his sweater couldn’t entirely conceal. And the way he moved—with that kind of purpose and intensity—it made my heart race and my mouth go dry, arousal pushing up alongside the anger and making me dizzy. I suddenly thought about how the Reverend Doctor would be in bed, if he would push my head down and test my cunt with bored fingers. If he would make me crawl naked to him on the hardest floor he had, every light on, cold satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. If those broad shoulders and muscled arms were strong enough to take my weight as he fucked me against bookshelves full of lectionaries and tomes of Wesleyan theology.
I shivered.
“Close the door,” he said.
“I’d rather not,” I said, my voice still shaky with my earlier anger and now also shaky with something else. It wasn’t discomfort exactly—I was confident he wouldn’t hurt me, and even more confident that I could hold my own if we fought—but it was some kind of apprehension. I was nervous to be alone with him not because I thought he was dangerous, but because I suddenly realized that I might be just as dangerous.
He stopped walking toward me and raised a dark brow. “You’d rather not,” he repeated, and it reminded me of something, something, but I didn’t know what. I only knew that the déjà vu was so forceful it made me dizzy. “Alright then. We’ll have this conversation with the door open.”
“Fine,” I said, reaching down for my anger again, “and firstly, we need to talk about how peremptory you’re being with me. I’m not your secretary and I’m definitely not your servant. I do communications, I do weddings, I don’t do your bidding. Is that clear?”
To my immense frustration, a small smile tilted his mouth upward, and the effect was to make him unbearably handsome. “Preemptory,” he echoed. “Well, then.”
I had to resist the overwhelming urge to stamp a foot on the ground. “Are you listening? You can’t just summon me here, and you especially can’t treat me like you hate me for two months and then expect me to be cheerful when you order me around.”
At that, his smile fell and his brows pulled together. “I don’t act like I hate you.”
“Fine, like you dislike me,” I said, waving a hand to show that I didn’t care about the semantics.