Lessons in Sin

by Pam Godwin

But also mysterious. He was an enigma to me, and that made him dangerously intriguing. I wanted his secrets. I longed to know what corralled him into priesthood and prevented him from returning to his former sexual self. My internet searches yielded nothing but praise for his past achievements. Self-made billionaire? One hundred percent. He’d gotten rich by flipping businesses. In essence, he bought flailing corporations, fixed them up, and made an astronomical profit when he sold them. By day, he was the king of the corporate world. By night, he was New York’s most eligible bachelor. There were very few photos of him as if someone diligently erased them from the internet. But the ones I’d found showed him wearing suits and tuxedos, attending extravagant parties, each taken with a different woman on his arm. Always older ladies, closer to my mother’s age. All perfectly built and strikingly beautiful. Fashion models. Beauty queens. Celebrities. Looking at those pictures made my stomach turn. He could and did have any woman he wanted, and I hated that for reasons I refused to examine. Even now, dressed in his priestly black on black, he was an effigy of desire and temptation. Shadowed jawline, wicked mean mouth, brown hair falling over his forehead as he crouched to the floor. Then he straightened, turning.