Ronan's POV
I made it back to the rectory with Vaelina's footsteps still echoing in my head, and the first thing I did once the door was locked behind me was laugh, low and short and completely without humor, standing alone in my own hallway like a man losing his mind.
Because I should've been terrified.
Should've been on my knees somewhere, begging for the kind of forgiveness men in my position are supposed to want after nearly getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar, except the cookie jar was Vaelina Whitlock's daughter, and the hand had been somewhere considerably more sacrilegious than a cookie jar an hour ago.
I wasn't terrified. I wasn't even close to sorry.
If anything, I felt more like myself than I had in a decade of pretending otherwise.
That was the part nobody
