“Why don’t you go and get him?”
“Because I’m a lady.” Her automatic reply came out of conditioning rather than any real belief. When she thought about going after Patrick and telling him how she felt about him, her mother’s voice cropped up in her head: If a man wants you more than any of his other options, he’ll let you know. If he doesn’t, you know he doesn’t want you.
Efficiency was the name of the game when it came to her mother and courting rituals. Not quality.
“I seriously had no idea how fucked up you were before this.” Hannah’s words made Sasha finally break Patrick’s gaze. “To think, I thought you had it all figured out when it came to dating.”
“To be fair, I am very good at dating. I can always get a man to ask me on another date.”
“I seem to remember a couple of proposals in there, too.”
None of those had been from serious prospects—and one of them hadn’t remembered proposing the next day. They didn’t count.
Also, she hadn’t been in love any of those times. “I might be good at dating, but I’m terrible at finding love.”
“It still looks to me like you found it.”
“I can’t ask him to leave the priesthood.”
“Why not?” Hannah put her hands on her hips. She was relentless when she sank her teeth into something, and Sasha had never been one of those things before. She wasn’t the kind of friend who needed to be picked up and put back together. She was the kind of friend who did the picking up and putting back together. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with the reversal.
“I don’t know that I love him.” Sasha laughed, and she sounded jaded, even in her own ears. “And I don’t know that he loves me. How am I supposed to know if I can compete with God?”
“So you’re refusing to even try?”
“What about him?” Sasha kept herself from pointing. “I think becoming a priest is making a pretty clear statement about how much he values romantic relationships.”
“Come to think of it, becoming a priest is really the ultimate fuckboy move,” Hannah said, sarcasm dripping from her voice. “Really says that he can’t make a commitment.”
“I think being pregnant has made you mean,” Sasha said.
“Not being able to have champagne will do that to a girl.”
Sasha threw up her hands and walked to the ladies’ room. She didn’t know what her hair was doing at any given moment now that it was short, and she had to make sure it wasn’t standing on end after her frustrating conversation with Hannah.
It actually looked kind of cute, and it was easier to stay cool. She dawdled, though, washing her hands and buying time where she didn’t have to be in the same room as Patrick.
But her time was up as soon as she walked out. He was leaning against the wood-paneled wall opposite the bathrooms.
“What are you doing here?” She sounded angry. And she was usually careful never to sound angry. She could be angry, but letting people know how she felt was not allowed. It was another thing that Finerghty women didn’t do.
“I can go.” Patrick held up his hands. “But I thought it would be good if we talked.”
Sasha shook her head and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I think it’s a bad idea.”
“Oh, it’s definitely a bad idea, but everything involving you and me is a bad idea.”
“Then why are you suggesting it?”
He paused and then smiled so that one of his dimples popped. Jesus, he could clean up if he weren’t a priest. And a rogue trail of jealousy hit her just thinking about it. He made her feel all the things at once—longing, anger, jealousy, happiness, lust.
“Because I can’t help myself.” His words sounded raw and vulnerable.
She couldn’t help asking. “Are priests allowed to dance?”
* * *
—
SASHA WAS QUITE BRILLIANT, Patrick thought, as he led her on to the dance floor. If people gave him, in his collar, looks about them dancing together, he didn’t notice. All he wanted to notice was how it felt to be able to touch her right now. To sway with her as the big band played music from a time that had long passed. To imagine that he wasn’t who he was and was allowed to feel the things he felt when he was in the room with her. To wish that he could touch his mouth to hers again and again. Out loud and in public. To feel the heat of her body radiating toward him along with her palpable irritation.
He wanted to know the how and why of that irritation. She fascinated him endlessly, and he wasn’t about to deny that he enjoyed the fact that he ruffled her normally unrufflable feathers.
“Is something bothering you, Sasha Finerghty?” He liked saying her name. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized that he’d been saying it for a long time in his head, but getting to say it out loud was even more of a tattoo on his heart.
“What do you want from me, Father Patrick Dooley?”
Of course she asked the one question that he couldn’t precisely answer. The answer wasn’t simple. What he wanted from her was absolutely everything. But he wasn’t in the position to ask anything of her right now.
So he gave her the only true answer he could give her in that moment. “I want to dance with you.”
“That’s not an answer.” Her eyes held fire, but he knew she wasn’t going to make a scene in front of all these people.
“I can’t have what I want.”
“Why not?” That was the question that had been in the back of his brain for weeks, and she’d just asked it. He also wondered why he couldn’t just walk away.
“Because, believe it or not, I don’t have all the answers.”
“Oh, I would believe that.” He loved it when she was biting like this. It felt truer than the flirtatious Sasha and the hyper-competent Sasha. It was the closest thing to the Sasha who had kissed him that he could have. “If you had all the answers, you wouldn’t be keeping me on a string.”
And then she made him mad, and he liked that feeling, too. Even with Ashley, he’d never liked fighting. It had always felt like it was the end of a relationship. It turned out that it had been when they finally told each other the truth.
As much as the fact that he didn’t know what he was going to do about the problem of him being a priest, the terrifying idea of telling Sasha the truth about how messed up his feelings for her had made him was what stopped him from saying anything. “You’re not the only one on a string.”
She looked up at him and they stared each other down for a long moment. At the same time, they both realized that they were in a stalemate. Neither was going to be the one to put their heart on the line. He could see that about her, and she could see that about him. It was written all over her face.