Книга - The Prince

The Prince
Tiffany Reisz


One man taught her to loveShe left her old life for him. Now Nora is torn in two. Wanting to fit into this new, innocent relationship, yet relentlessly hungering for her darker self…and Søren, the man she left behind.While Nora's trying on innocence for size, Søren is stepping ever further into decadence, determined to block out the agony of watching Nora walk away.Will she ever choose to return to their life of glorious, addictive sin? Which man would you crave?The Original Sinners Series: The Red YearsBook 1: The SirenBook 2: The AngelBook 3: The PrinceBook 4: The MistressThe Original Sinners continues with The White Years Book 1: The SaintBook 2: The KingBook 3: The VirginPraise for Tiffany Reisz‘Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic’ - Author Miranda Baker ‘Stunning. One of the best novels I have ever read. I am simply in awe and feeling richer for the experience.’ - Good Reads Reviewer on The Siren ‘This book made me feel everything.’ - Author Courtney Milan on The Siren










Praise for Tiffany Reisz

‘The Siren is one of those books which has the amazing ability to create the scene in full colour in your mind’s eye—this is no small skill on the author’s part.’ http://carasutra.co.uk/

‘A beautiful, lyrical story … The Siren is about love lost and found, the choices that make us who we are … I can only hope Ms Reisz pens a sequel!’ —Bestselling author Jo Davis

‘THE ORIGINAL SINNERS series certainly lives up to its name: it’s mind-bendingly original and crammed with more sin than you can shake a hot poker at. I haven’t read a book this dangerous and subversive since Chuck

Palahniuk’s Fight Club.’ —Andrew Shaffer, author of Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

‘Tiffany Reisz is a smart, artful and masterful new voice in erotic fiction. An erotica star on the rise!’

—Award-winning author Lacey Alexander

‘Daring, sophisticated and literary … exactly what good erotica should be.’

—Kitty Thomas, author of Tender Mercies

‘Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic, Reisz writes unforgettable characters you’ll either want to know or want to be. The Siren is an alluring book-within-a-book, a story that will leave you breathless and bruised, aching for another chapter with Nora Sutherlin and her men.’ —Miranda Baker, author of Bottoms Up and Soloplay

‘You will most definitely feel strongly for these characters … this was an amazing story and I’m so happy that it’s not over. I can’t wait to jump back into Nora’s world.’

http://ladysbookstuff.blogspot.co.uk




About the Author


TIFFANY REISZ lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She graduated with a BA in English from Centre College and is making her parents and her professors proud by writing erotica under her real name. She has five piercings, one tattoo and has been arrested twice. When not under arrest, Tiffany enjoys Latin dance, Latin men and Latin verbs. She dropped out of a conservative seminary in order to pursue her dream of becoming a smut peddler. If she couldn’t write, she would die.

Also by Tiffany Reisz:

SEVEN-DAY LOAN

(part of 12 Shades of Surrender: Bound)

THE SIREN

(The Original Sinners 1)

THE ANGEL

(The Original Sinners 2)

Watch out for the fourth book in

The Original Sinners series

THE MISTRESS

Coming Soon




The

Prince

Tiffany Reisz







www.spice-books.co.uk (http://www.spice-books.co.uk)


All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

® and


are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.

First published in Great Britain 2012

Mills & Boon Spice, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited,

Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR

© Tiffany Reisz 2012

eISBN: 978-1-472-00867-1

Version: 2018-07-18


To Miranda Baker, who always makes me ask,

“What would Nora do?” when I really want to ask,

‘What would Miranda Baker do?’




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I keep forgetting that I’m allowed to put acknowledgments in my books. It’s only after I send off the final that I remember, “Oh, shit, I forgot to thank all those people who helped me.” So forgive me for putting three books’ worth of acknowledgments into one short page. My brain is so often lost in my fictional world I forget the real world is full of people even more wonderful.

First, thank you to my parents for being so surprisingly supportive of your unrepentant smut-peddler of a daughter. Thank you to my sister Alisha for being my biggest cheerleader.

Thank you to Patricia Correll, Robin Brecht and Jeff Hoagland for being my first ever beta readers and whipping, nay flogging, The Siren into shape.

Thank you to Karen Stivali for being the most eagle-eyed of all my beta readers.

Thank you to Team Awesome and my fearless editorial assistant Alli Sanders, otherwise known as ED.

Thank you to Sharon Biggs Waller, brilliant writer and horse expert, who told me everything I got wrong and how I could make it right. I love horses, and I have nothing but respect for the Sport of Kings. I only wish the racing drama in The Prince was a work of pure fiction and not based on actual tragedies and crimes that the few bad apples in the racing industry have committed (sadly, it is). If I get stuff right about horses in this book, it’s thanks to Sharon. If I get it wrong, I take the blame.

Bless you, Sara Megibow, my visionary agent, who three years ago saw the potential in my weird, twisty world and, against the advice of experienced others, took me on as a client. Boss—L’Chaim!

Most profound thanks to my editor, Susan Swinwood, who saw the magic of Mistress Nora three years ago and somehow knew the world would be needing the services of a young, smart, fearless kinky woman. Susan lets me get away with murder in my books. Okay, maybe not murder but everything else (and I do mean everything). I had a vision for my Original Sinners series, and I prayed at night I’d find someone who would trust my vision, would trust my judgment and let me put my guts on paper. I found the answer to every writer’s prayer in my editor. Thank you.

And thank you to Andrew Shaffer for coming into my life just when I need you even though I didn’t realize it at the time. Thank you for bring my editor, my other agent, my manager, my graphic designer, my best friend, my other half, my reason for coming to bed at night, my reason for not wanting to get out of bed the next morning and for being the most important thing of all—my Sir. I love you, Sir.


Four things greater than all things are

women

and horses

and power and war.

—Rudyard Kipling









PROLOGUE


File #1312—From the archives

SUTHERLIN, NORA

Née Eleanor Louise Schreiber

Born on March 15, 1977 (beware the Ides of March)

Father: William Gregory Schreiber, deceased (you’re welcome, ma cherie), formerly incarcerated in Attica on multiple counts of grand theft auto, and possession of stolen property. Had connections with organized crime—see file #1382.

Mother: Margaret Delores Schreiber, née Kohl, age fifty-six, currently residing near Guildford, New York, at the Sisters of Saint Monica convent (cloistered), known now as Sister Mary John.

Daughter and mother—estranged but currently in détente.

Age 15, Eleanor met Father Marcus Lennox Stearns (Søren, born to Gisela Magnussen). After her arrest for stealing five luxury vehicles in one night to aid her father in paying off a debt, Sutherlin was sentenced to probation and twelve hundred hours of community service supervised by Father Stearns. It was during these years that Sutherlin learned to submit. At age eighteen she became his collared submissive. At age twenty-eight she left him after terminating a pregnancy (father—me). For a year she lived with her mother at the convent upstate, before returning to the city and becoming a dominatrix in the employ of the devastatingly handsome Kingsley Edge, Edge Enterprises. At the time of this filing she has had five books published, four of which have been bestsellers. (See attached for financials. Her editor is Zachary Easton, publisher Royal House. See file #2112, drawer seven for Easton’s file.) At age thirty-three, after spending five years apart, she returned to her owner and has been with him ever since.

Sexual preferences—Sutherlin is bisexual although she generally shows a preference for men. A true switch, she tends to top with anyone but her owner (because, as we all know, he would break her if she tried).

Weaknesses—Blondes—men and women, younger men, tiramisu.

Ultimate weakness—Unknown. Possibly John Wesley Railey, born September 19, Versailles, Kentucky. Heir to the Railey Fortune (estimated at $930 million as of 2010) and The Rails Farm (Thoroughbreds, saddlebreds), Railey, known to friends and family as Wes or Wesley, lived with Sutherlin from January 2008 until April 2009. As the sole heir to the largest horse farm in the world, Wesley is known colloquially as the Prince of Kentucky. Six feet tall, a type 1 diabetic, boyishly handsome, not sexually active at the time of his filing (Railey file #561, drawer 4). Sutherlin has displayed intense emotion, affection and loyalty (and possibly even love) where Railey is concerned.

Strengths—Extremely intelligent, IQ 167, physically strong, cunning, highly manipulative when necessary, extremely beautiful (see attached photographs), Sutherlin is far more dangerous than she appears.



The final line in the file the thief read over and over again.

In all things involving Nora Sutherlin, proceed with caution.

Three months … for three long and sleepless months, the thief toiled over the file, which had been encrypted in layer upon layer of cipher. The thief knew French and Haitian Creole, but merely knowing the languages wouldn’t crack the code. One had to know Kingsley Edge, and luckily, the thief did—intimately.

The file thief read through all four pages of notes on Nora Sutherlin a thousand times until the words were as familiar as the thief’s own name. And as the thief read the pages until they grew tattered from wear, an idea began to form and grow until it gave birth to a plan.

The thief closed the file for the final time, and then and there decided the best course of action.

The thief would proceed … cautiously.









NORTH

The Past


They’d sent him here to save his life.

At least that was the line his grandparents laid on him to explain why they’d decided to take him out of public school and send him instead to an all-boys Jesuit boarding school nestled in some of the most godforsaken terrain on the Maine-Canadian border.

They should have let him die.

Hoisting his duffel bag onto his shoulder, he picked up his battered brown leather suitcase and headed toward what appeared to be the main building on the isolated campus. Everywhere he looked he saw churches, or at least buildings with pretensions of being one. A cross adorned every roof. Gothic iron bars grated every window. He’d been wrenched from civilization and dropped without apology in the middle of a medieval monk’s wet dream.

He entered the building through a set of iron-and-wood doors, the ancient hinges of which screamed as if being tortured. He could sympathize. He rather felt like screaming himself. A fireplace piled high with logs cast light and warmth into the dismal gray foyer. Huddling close to it, he wrapped his arms about himself, wincing as he did so. His left wrist still ached from the beating he’d taken three weeks ago, the beating that had convinced his grandparents that he’d be safe only at an all-boys school.

“So this is our Frenchman?” The jovial voice came from behind him. He turned and saw a squat man all in black beaming from ear to ear. Not all black, he noted. Not quite. The man wore a white collar around his neck. The priest held out his hand to him, but he paused before shaking it. Celibacy seemed like a disease to him—one that might be catching. “Welcome to Saint Ignatius. Come inside my office. This way.”

He gave the priest a blank look, but followed nonetheless.

Inside the office, he took the chair closest to the fireplace, while the priest sat behind a wide oak desk.

“I’m Father Henry, by the way,” the priest began. “Monsignor here. I hear you’ve had some trouble at your old school. Something about a fight … some boys taking exception to your behavior with their girlfriends?”

Saying nothing, he merely blinked and shrugged.

“Good Lord. They told me you could speak some English.” Father Henry sighed. “I suppose by ‘some’ they meant ‘none.’ Anglais?”

He shook his head. “Je ne parle pas l’anglais.”

Father Henry sighed again.

“French. Of course. You would have to be French, wouldn’t you? Not Italian. Not German. I could even handle a little ancient Greek. And poor Father Pierre dead for six months. Ah, c’est la vie,” he said, and then laughed at his own joke. “Nothing for it. We’ll make do.” Father Henry rested both his chins on his hand and stared into the fireplace, clearly deep in deliberation.

He joined the priest in his staring. The heat from the fireplace seeped through his clothes, through his chilled skin and into the core of him. He wanted to sleep for days, for years even. Maybe when he woke up he would be a grown man and no one could send him away again. The day would come when he would take orders from no one, and that would be the best day of his life.

A soft knock on the door jarred him from his musings.

A boy about twelve years old, with dark red hair, entered, wearing the school uniform of black trousers, black vest, black jacket and tie, with a crisp white shirt underneath.

All his life he had taken great pride in his clothes, every detail of them, down to the shoes he wore. Now he, too, would be forced into the same dull attire as every other boy in this miserable place. He’d read a little Dante his last year at his lycée in Paris. If he remembered correctly, the centermost circle of hell was all ice. He glanced out the window in Father Henry’s office. New snow had started to fall on the ice-packed ground. Perhaps his grandfather had been right about him. Perhaps he was a sinner. That would explain why, still alive and only sixteen years old, he’d been sent to hell on earth.

“Matthew, thank you. Come in, please.” Father Henry motioned the boy into the office. The boy, Matthew, cast curious glances at him while standing at near attention in front of the priest’s desk. “How much French did you have with Father Pierre before he passed?”

Matthew shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot. “Un année?”

Father Henry smiled kindly. “It’s not a quiz, Matthew. Just a question. You can speak English.”

The boy sighed audibly with relief.

“One year, Father. And I wasn’t very good at it.”

“Matthew, this is Kingsley …” Father Henry paused and glanced down at a file in front of him “… Boissonneault?”

Kingsley repeated his last name, trying not to grimace at how horribly Father Henry had butchered it. Stupid Americans.

“Yes, Kingsley Boissonneault. He’s our new student. From Portland.”

It took all of Kingsley’s self-control not to correct Father Henry and remind him that he’d been living in Portland for only six months. Paris. Not Portland. He was from Paris. But to say that would be to reveal he not only understood English, but that he spoke it perfectly; he had no intention of gracing this horrible hellhole with a single word of his English.

Matthew gave him an apprehensive smile. Kingsley didn’t smile back.

“Well, Matthew, if your French is twice as good as mine, we’re out of options.” Father Henry lost his grin for the first time in their whole conversation. Suddenly he seemed tense, concerned, as nervous as young Matthew. “You’ll just have to go to Mr. Stearns and ask him to come here.”

At the mention of Mr. Stearns, Matthew’s eyes widened so hugely they nearly eclipsed his face. Kingsley almost laughed at the sight. But when Father Henry didn’t seem to find the boy’s look of fear equally funny, Kingsley started to grow concerned himself.

“Do I have to?”

Father Henry exhaled heavily. “He’s not going to bite you,” the priest said, but didn’t sound quite convinced of that.

“But …” Matthew began “… it’s 4:27.”

Father Henry winced.

“It is, isn’t it? Well, we can’t interrupt the music of the spheres, can we? Then I suppose you’ll just have to make do. Perhaps we can persuade Mr. Stearns into talking to our new student later. Show Kingsley around. Do your best.”

Matthew nodded and motioned for him to follow. In the foyer they paused as the boy wrapped a scarf around his neck and shoved his hands into gloves. Then, glancing around, he curled up his nose in concentration.

“I don’t know the French word for foyer.”

Kingsley repressed a smile. The French for “foyer” was foyer.

Outside in the snow, Matthew turned and faced the building they’d just left. “This is where all the Fathers have their offices. Le pères … bureau?”

“Bureaux, oui,” Kingsley repeated, and Matthew beamed, clearly pleased to have elicited any kind of encouragement or understanding from him.

Kingsley followed the younger boy into the library, where Matthew desperately sought out the French word for the place, apparently not realizing that the rows upon rows of bookcases spoke for themselves.

“Library …” Matthew said. “Trois …” Clearly, he wanted to explain that the building stood three stories high. He didn’t know the word for stories any more than he knew library, so instead he stacked his hands on top of each other. Kingsley nodded as if he understood, although it actually appeared as if Matthew was describing a particularly large sandwich.

A few students in armchairs studied Kingsley with unconcealed interest. His grandfather had said only forty or fifty students resided at Saint Ignatius. Some were the sons of wealthy Catholic families who wanted a traditional Jesuit education, while the rest were troubled young men the court ordered here to undergo reformation. In their school uniforms, with their similar shaggy haircuts, Kingsley couldn’t tell the fortunate sons from the wards of the court.

Matthew led him from the library. The next building over was the church, and the boy paused on the threshold before reaching out for the door handle. Raising his fingers to his lips, he mimed the universal sign for silence. Then, as carefully as if it were made of glass, he opened the door and slipped inside. Kingsley’s ears perked up immediately as he heard the sound of a piano being played with unmistakable virtuosity.

He watched as Matthew tiptoed into the church and crept up to the sanctuary door. Much less circumspectly, Kingsley followed him and peered inside.

At the piano sat a young man … lean, angular, with pale blond hair cut in a style far more conservative than Kingsley’s own shoulder-length mane.

Kingsley watched as the blond pianist’s hands danced across the keys, evoking the most magnificent sounds he’d ever heard.

“Ravel …” he whispered to himself. Ravel, the greatest of all French composers.

Matthew looked up with panic in his eyes and shushed him again. Kingsley shook his head in contempt. Such a little coward. No one should be cowardly in the presence of Ravel.

Ravel had been his father’s favorite composer and had become Kingsley’s, too. Even through the scratches on his father’s vinyl records, he had heard the passion and the need that throbbed in every note. Part of Kingsley wanted to close his eyes and let the music wash over him.

But another part of him couldn’t bring himself to look away from the young man at the piano who played the piece—the Piano Concerto in G Major. He recognized it instantly. In concert, the piece began with the sound of a whip crack.

But he’d never heard it played like this … so close to him Kingsley felt he could reach up and snatch notes out of the air, pop them in his mouth and swallow them whole. So beautiful … the music and the young man who played it. Kingsley listened to the piece, studied the pianist. He couldn’t decide which moved him more.

The pianist was easily the most handsome young man Kingsley had ever seen in all his sixteen years. Vain as he was, Kingsley couldn’t deny he’d for once met his match there. But more than handsome, the pianist was also, in a way, as beautiful as the music he played. He wore the school uniform, but had abandoned the jacket, no doubt needing the freedom of unencumbered arm movement. And although he was dressed like all the other boys, he looked nothing like them. To Kingsley he appeared like a sculpture some magician had turned to life. His pale skin was smooth and flawless, his nose aquiline and elegant, his face perfectly composed even as he wrung glorious noise out of the black box in front of him.

If only … if only Kingsley’s father could be with him now to hear this music. If only his sister, Marie-Laure, were here to dance to it. For a moment, Kingsley allowed himself to mourn his father and miss his sister. The music smoothed the rough edges of his grief, however, and Kingsley caught himself smiling.

He had to thank the young man, the beautiful blond pianist, for giving him this music and the chance to remember his father for once without pain. Kingsley started to step into the sanctuary, but Matthew grabbed his arm and shook his head in a warning to go no farther.

The music ceased. The blond pianist lowered his arms and stared at the keys as if in prayer before shutting the fallboard and standing up. For the first time Kingsley noted his height—he was six feet tall if he was an inch. Maybe even more.

Kingsley glanced at Matthew, who seemed to be paralyzed with fear. The blond young man pulled on his black suit jacket and strode down the center of the sanctuary toward them. Up close, he appeared not only more handsome than before, but strangely inscrutable. He seemed like a book, shut tight and locked in a glass box, and Kingsley would have done anything for the key. He met the young man’s eyes and saw no kindness in those steely gray depths. No kindness, but no cruelty, either. He inhaled in nervousness as the pianist passed him, and smelled the unmistakable scent of winter.

Without a word to either him or Matthew, the young man left the church without looking back.

“Stearns,” Matthew breathed, once the pianist had gone.

So that was the mysterious Mr. Stearns who inspired both fear and respect from the students and Father Henry. Fascinating … Kingsley had never been in the presence of someone that immediately intimidating. No teacher, no parent, no grandparent, no policeman, no priest had even made him feel what standing in the same room with the piano player, with Mr. Stearns, had made him feel.

Kingsley looked down and saw his hand had developed a subtle tremor. Matthew saw it, too.

“Don’t feel bad.” The boy nodded with the wisdom of a sage. “He does that to everybody.”









NORTH

The Present


The fear had been his favorite part. The fear that followed him like the footsteps through the woods where he’d fled for sanctuary and found something better than safety. The footsteps … how his heart had raced as they grew louder, drew nearer. He’d been too afraid to run anymore, afraid that if he ran he would get away. He ran to be caught. That was the only reason.

Kingsley remembered his sudden intake of air as a viciously strong hand clamped down onto his neck … the bark of the tree trunk burning his back … the smell of the evergreens around him, so potent that even thirty years later he still grew aroused whenever he inhaled the scent of pine. And after, when he woke up on the forest floor, a new scent graced his skin—blood, his own … and winter.

Three decades later he could never uncouple sex from fear. The two were linked inextricably, eternally and unrepentantly in his heart. He’d learned the potency of fear that day, the power of it, even the pleasure, and now thirty years later, fear had become Kingsley’s forte.

Unfortunately, at this moment his Juliette was not afraid.

He could change that.

Kingsley watched her out of the corner of his eye while he sipped his wine. Standing next to Griffin and young Michael, she smiled in turns at each of them while they bent her exquisite ears with the tale of how Nora Sutherlin had brought them together. For one single solitary day without hearing about the amazing Nora Sutherlin, he would cash out half his fortune, lay it on a pyre in the middle of Fifth Avenue, set it afire and watch it turn to ashes. If only it were that easy to kill the monster he’d created.

No, he corrected himself. The monster they had created.

Juliette glanced his way and gave him a secret smile, a smile that needed no translation. But he would wait, bide his time, let her think he wasn’t in the mood tonight. He’d let her anticipation build first before replacing it with fear. How beautifully Juliette wore fear, how it shimmered in her bistre eyes, how it shivered across her ebony skin, how it caught in her throat like the scream he’d hold inside her mouth with his hand….

Kingsley’s groin tightened; his heart began to race. Setting his wineglass down, he strode from the bar through the back room and into the hallways of The 8th Circle. Right outside the door to the bar, his foot connected with something lying on the floor. Curious, he bent down. Shoes. A pair of shoes. He picked them up. White patent-leather stilettos … size six.

Shoes last seen on the feet of Nora Sutherlin.

Staring at the shoes, Kingsley pondered how and why they’d ended up in the hallway outside the bar. Nora could do almost anything in her high heels. He’d seen her top some of the most hardened masochists in them. She’d beaten them, whipped them, flogged them, kicked them…. She could stand on a man’s neck in high heels, walk on his bruised back, balance on one leg while her other foot was being worshipped. He knew of only one activity she couldn’t do in her towering high heels—run.

He carried the shoes down to the bottommost floor, where he and a few of the other VIPs kept their own private dungeons. At the last door on the left, he paused, but didn’t knock, before entering.

A man, blond and tall and deep in thought, stood by the bed, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed.

“Have you ever heard of knocking?” Søren uncrossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the bedpost. Kingsley clenched his jaw.

“I’ve heard rumors of knocking. I never believed them.” Kingsley stepped into the room. No one’s dungeon at the Circle exemplified the concept of minimalism better than Søren’s. It held nothing more than a four-poster wrought-iron bed tucked into an alcove, a Saint Andrew’s cross front and center, and a single trunk filled with various implements of torture. Søren’s sadistic side was the stuff of legend at The 8th Circle and throughout the Underground. He didn’t need a thousand types of floggers and single-tails and dozens of canes and tawse and toys. Such a piece of work was Søren—he could break a submissive with a word, a look, with his penetrating insight, his calm, cold dominance that left even the strongest quaking at his feet. He cowed them with the beauty of his exterior first, and second, with the beast that was his heart.

“I brought you a gift.”

Kingsley held out the shoes by the straps. Søren raised an eyebrow.

“Not really my size, are they?”

“Your pet’s.” Kingsley dropped them on the bed. “As you know. You must have walked past them as you left the bar.”

“I left them there so she would find them when she came back for them.”

Kingsley gave a small, mirthless laugh.

“Didn’t I overhear you telling her that if she had any mercy in that dark heart of hers, she wouldn’t run from you to her Wesley?”

Søren didn’t answer. He merely stared at Kingsley with his eyes of steel. Kingsley resisted the urge to grin. Schadenfreude … such an unbecoming emotion. He kept it to himself for as long as he could. Then, turning on his heel, he swept out of the room, quoting an old poem as he left Søren in his dungeon, with only Nora’s shoes on the bed for company.

“I saw pale kings and princes, too,

pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

they cried—’La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thy thrall.’“

Kingsley returned to his own dungeon and paced as he waited. His bed sat in the very center of the room, unlike the priest’s at the end of the hall. For Søren, pain was sex. He could possibly be what the church demanded him to be—a celibate priest—if it weren’t for Nora, for his Eleanor, who needed the flesh as much as Kingsley needed the fear. He could only imagine the tantrum she would throw if her owner decided to cut her off sexually. But Søren would never do that. He inflicted pain for his release, and the sex that followed was mere afterglow. And who didn’t enjoy the afterglow?

Kingsley paused midstep as he heard the floor creak in the hallway outside his chamber. Silently, he moved to stand by the door and waited. He’d spent two years in the French Foreign Legion after leaving school, and five years pretending to still be in the French Foreign Legion while he served his country in other quieter ways. He’d learned the lessons of a spy well. See everything but never be seen. Hear everything but never be heard. When Juliette slipped through his door, he knew she expected to find him in bed, waiting for her. When his hand shot out and captured her by the arm, she gasped in fear.

Parfait.

His hand over her mouth killed her scream as Kingsley shoved her into the wall. He kicked the door closed even as Juliette attempted to wrest herself from his grasp. And although at five-ten, his willowy Juliette could not match his strength—no woman could—that didn’t stop her from trying, from digging her heels into the hardwood floor as he dragged her toward the bed. Twisting in his arms, she cried out against his hand. My God, she was as good at this game as he was. Even racked with desire as potent as his, she could still put up the most impressive fight, even when he knew she wanted him as much or more than he needed her.

He loosened his grip on her wrists long enough to turn her. He wanted her facedown tonight, bent over the bed, impotent in her struggles. The spreader bars, cuffs, shackles and ropes hung unwanted, unneeded on the walls all about them. He’d rather hold her down with his own body than employ any tools.

“Monsieur …” she panted, her eyes wide with fear as he shoved her forward and she fell across the bed. The scent of fear and sweat graced her skin like the most drugging of perfumes. “Non … s’il vous plaît …”

Her voice broke at the end of her plea and Kingsley almost laughed. Anyone who’d ever chanted “no means no” had never met his Juliette. This wasn’t only his favorite of their games. It was hers.

Kingsley gripped her by the back of the neck and pressed her face into the sheets to silence her. With his free hand, he wrenched the back of her dress up, tearing it in the process. She did look so lovely in white. How it glowed against her dark skin. He’d found her on a beach in Haiti years ago … when she’d been eighteen, barely more than a child. But she’d suffered the miseries of a thousand lifetimes in those years. He’d brought her back with him, made her his property. And in the unlikely event she ever forgot who owned her now, this was how he refreshed her memory.

With his knees he pried her thighs apart as he opened his pants. When he shoved himself inside her, she let out a scream that anyone in the hall would have heard. But it didn’t matter. No one would come to her aid.

He rode her hard with brutal thrusts. Breathing deeply, Kingsley willed his pounding heart to slow. He wished to savor this moment, savor her fear. He never imbibed her fear right away. He’d always let it breathe first, decanted it, before pouring it out and drinking it deep.

At times Juliette forgot it was him, her Kingsley, and got lost in the memory of the man who’d done this to her out of hatred and not love. Kingsley knew when her body went stiff underneath him, when she stopped struggling, that her fear had reached its peak.

He lived for those moments.

Her grunts and cries of pain and fear were the sweetest sounds he could imagine. Only they could silence the music in his ears that he heard from the time he woke until he fell asleep and into blissful oblivion again. One piano concerto thirty years ago … and still he couldn’t unhear it.

Juliette’s breathing quickened. She made a last valiant attempt at escape, but Kingsley merely dragged her arms behind her back and held her immobile. He thrust again, thrust hard, and with a shudder he came inside her, as her inner muscles clenched around him with the orgasm she’d fought against until finally surrendering to him.

He lingered inside her and simply enjoyed the bliss of the moment, the emptiness of it. His people were so right to call orgasm le petite morte … the little death. He died while inside her and he cherished that death, that freedom, those few seconds when he was released from the spell of the only man in the Underground who wore a collar but belonged to no one.

Juliette’s laughter jarred him from his musings. He couldn’t help but join her in her postcoital amusement. Releasing her hands, he pulled out of her, and relaxed onto the bed as she straightened her clothes before draping herself over his chest.

“You scared me, monsieur. I thought you were still with le père.”

“I meant to scare you. And no, he’s praying, je pense.”

“Praying for what?” Juliette turned her eyes up to Kingsley and he stroked her cheek. His beautiful Juliette, his Jules, his jewel. He treasured her above all others. Only one person had he ever loved more. But the one he loved more, he hated with equal passion. He wished that the mathematics of the world were like the mathematics of the heart—then his equal love and hate would mean he felt nothing instead of double.

“For his lost pet to come back to him someday, I’m sure.”

Juliette sighed and relaxed against him.

“But she is not lost.” Juliette kissed his chest. “She’s just off her leash.”

Kingsley laughed.

“It’s much worse than that, mon amour. His pet’s run off, and this time, she hasn’t got her collar.”









SOUTH


As long as Wesley’s parents hadn’t heard of her, everything would be okay. And surely they hadn’t heard of her. Why would they have heard of her, a BDSM erotica writer from New York? Did they even sell her books in Kentucky? Ludicrous thought. Of course they hadn’t heard of her. And everything would be a-fucking-okay.

Nora sighed as they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line at Hagerstown, Maryland, and entered the South. Her stomach clenched hours later when they crossed the state line into Kentucky.

What the holy hell was she doing in Kentucky?

After she’d gotten over the shock of seeing Wesley again, she’d tried talking him into staying with her in her house in Connecticut. But he’d been unusually insistent.

“Kentucky,” he’d said.

“Please,” he’d said.

“I lived in your world. Come live in mine for a while,” he’d said.

She’d finally acquiesced, unable and unwilling to ever again see sadness in those big brown eyes of Wesley’s. But at her insistence they’d driven in separate cars—he in his Mustang, she in the Aston Martin Griffin had delivered to her. After all, Nora never went into any situation without an escape plan. She’d learned that lesson well back in her days as a professional Dominatrix. She hadn’t commanded her exorbitant fees by simply being more beautiful or more vicious than other pros. She did what few others of her kind did. Instead of working from a guarded, well-staffed dungeon, she went to her clients’ houses, their hotel rooms, wherever they paid her to go. Back then she’d joked her motto was Have Riding Crop, Will Travel. And travel she had. From New York to New Orleans, from Midtown to the Middle East, she went wherever Kingsley sent her. And for her own safety she relied on two things—her notoriety as the most dangerous Domme in the world, and Kingsley’s reputation as the last man in America anyone wanted to cross. She had only to say her name or his and the Underworld toed the line.

Now Nora prayed that where she went no one would have heard of her. Especially Wesley’s parents. Surely, as conservative as Wesley painted them, they’d never even been in the erotica section of a bookstore, much less heard the name Nora Sutherlin.

But it didn’t hurt to ask. She fished her cell phone out of her bag and called Wesley.

“Yes, we’re almost there,” he answered before she even said hello. Every hour on the hour she’d called to him to ask, “Are we there yet?”

“That’s not why I’m phoning this time.”

“Sure about that?”

“Nope. So you never told me what your parents think about me coming to visit.” Nora turned on her blinker as they veered onto exit 81.

“They’re fine with me having visitors. A lot of my college friends came by over the summer.”

Nora pursed her lips. She would have stared Wesley down had he not been in the yellow Shelby Mustang two cars ahead of her.

“Nice nonanswer there, kid.”

“It’s fine.” He laughed and Nora couldn’t help but smile. God, she’d missed that boy’s laugh in the fifteen months they hadn’t seen each other, hadn’t spoken. Wesley’s absence from her life had been a void no amount of sex or money or kink or fame had been able to fill.

“Seriously, Nor. My parents are nice people. They like all my friends.”

“Friends. Good. Let’s go with friends for introductions. Let’s practice. You’ll say, ‘Ma, Paw—’“

“You’re getting my family confused with the Waltons again.”

“Hush, John-Boy, we’re practicing. You say to them, ‘Mother, Father—this is my friend Nora. I used to work for her back at Yorke. She’s come to visit and not cause any trouble.’“

“Not going to be able to say that with a straight face.”

“Which is why we’re practicing, Your Highness.”

Wesley groaned, and now it was Nora’s turn to laugh at him.

“You’re never going to drop that, are you?”

Nora could easily envision him rubbing his forehead in amused frustration.

“I kind of like it—the Prince of Kentucky. Very sexy title.”

“One stupid reporter called me that three years ago in one article—”

“Yeah, in an article about you hanging out with Prince Harry at the Kentucky Derby. Crazy that he’s turned into the sexy one now. Can you get me his number?”

“We didn’t stay in touch.”

“So, if you’re the Prince of Kentucky,” Nora continued, unwilling to drop a thread of conversation that made Wesley so delightfully uncomfortable, “who’s the Princess? Are you supposed to marry the governor’s daughter or something?”

“God, I hope not.”

“What? She a dog?”

“She’s a very cute nine-year-old girl,” Wesley said as the first of the stars showed themselves at the edge of the southern sky. At the pace they were going, they’d be at Wesley’s house within the hour. “She also happens to be my cousin.”

Now Nora had to groan. Of course Wesley couldn’t just be the son of rich horse farmers. He had to be related to the governor, as well. Her poor little intern … She’d once thought had no money, no connections, no nothing … What else didn’t she know about him?

“Well, hey. You know what they say about Kentucky …”

“You’re disgusting.”

“True. But I’m also winning.” Nora hit the gas and passed Wesley’s Mustang. He apparently didn’t take kindly to her doing so on his home territory. Nora glanced in her rearview mirror and saw his car speed up. “Don’t worry, kid. I have no idea where I’m going. You’re gonna win this … oh, holy shit. Was that a castle?”

Nora craned her neck to look at the turreted building they passed.

“No. Sort of. It’s a hotel now. But it is a castle. Some lunatic built it for his wife years ago. Was her dream to live in a castle. She never got to do so.”

Nora frowned. “That’s sad. She died before they finished it?”

“Nope. Divorced.”

Laughing, Nora glanced back one more time at the strange sight of a castle situated in the middle of Kentucky bluegrass.

“Women. Just can’t please them sometimes. I think I’d stay married to a guy who built me a castle. Especially one that pretty.”

Nora heard Wesley laughing softly on the other end of the line. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him laugh like that before—sort of throaty, kind of arrogant and undeniably sexy.

“Wait until you see my castle.”

“Are we there yet?” she asked as they hung up their cell phones.

Nora followed Wesley’s taillights all the way to a town called Versailles, which he mispronounced as “Ver-sales.” They turned onto a dark winding road and had to slow down considerably. The entire way there Nora tried to will herself to be calm. It would be fine. Everything would be fine. She had Wesley back again.

Over the summer, she’d come to accept that she’d have to live without Wesley, that she couldn’t be Søren’s property and Wesley’s … whatever at the same time. Life with Søren seemed like a beautiful prison most days, a prison she chose, a prison she would never leave. Only Wesley’s absence had made it feel like a punishment and not a palace….

“Oh, holy shit,” Nora breathed. “That’s a fucking palace.”

Ahead of her, lit up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, was the biggest goddamn house she’d ever seen in her life. Kingsley’s three-story town house, Griffin’s estate, even Søren’s father’s New Hampshire mansion … all of them looked like suburban ranch homes in comparison to the stately sprawling ivory box before her. She counted no less than twenty-eight windows on the front of the house alone. Windows, doors, balconies … she’d seen smaller palaces nestled in the Rhine Valley of Europe, palaces that housed real European aristocracy and not just old American money.

Wesley pulled into the circular cobblestone drive and turned off his engine. Nora followed suit. She hoped it was late enough no one would be out and about to witness her wide-eyed, jaw-on-the-ground reaction to Wesley’s house.

Stepping out of her car, she nearly tripped on a crack in the cobblestone. Wesley caught her and pulled her close.

“I only tripped so you’d catch me,” she lied, wrapping her arms around him.

“I only put that crack there so you’d trip.” He smiled down at her and her breath caught in her throat.

Wesley raised a hand and mussed her hair with such easy familiarity that the past year and a half they’d spent apart vanished, as if all the longing and loneliness were merely the residue of a nightmare from which she’d just awoken. In the dream, she’d lost her best friend in a labyrinth and no path she took could bring her any closer to him. But now she’d screamed herself awake and found him right next to her in bed. And when she looked up at him, at those big brown eyes and that too-sweet smile, and asked him, “So what now?” she couldn’t even begin to care what the answer was. She had her Wesley back. Maybe for only a day or a week or a month … but they were together now and she’d go anywhere as long as he went with her.

“What now? We go in the house and grab some food—”

“Grand idea. Totally starving.”

“Then we’ll go to my house—”

“Wait. What? Whoa, you have your own house? Is there a house inside this house that’s your house?”

“Guesthouse. In the back. No food in it, though, right now. We can fix that tomorrow.” Wesley took her by the hand and led her toward the front door of his palace.

“And then?” Nora prompted, eager to figure out exactly what he expected of her. Would it be like old times? Them living under the same roof and trying not to fall into bed together? Or did he want more from her?

Wesley grinned down at her and her heart knotted up in her chest. God damn, she had missed this kid—so fucking much that being back with him hurt almost as much as letting him go had.

“Then …” Wesley said as he ran his hands up her arms, and Nora shivered with a need she thought she’d long buried, a need for hands on her that were always gentle. She shook off the thought and the need. Surely after they’d been a year and a half apart, Wesley’s feelings for her had changed. She couldn’t quite believe how much he had changed. He seemed taller now. His Southern accent had gotten a little thicker. His longer hair made him look older. Now he looked like a man, not the boy she’d known and loved and teased and tortured.

The suspense was more than Nora could handle. Fuck it. She’d kiss the kid and see what happened. Rising up on her toes, she gripped Wesley by the back of the neck and brought his mouth to hers. He didn’t protest.

The front door of Wesley’s castle opened and a man’s voice called out to them. “John Wesley! You know you’re allowed to kiss Bridget in the house.”

Wesley took a step back and turned toward the voice. Nora saw a man standing in the front doorway who looked like every handsome rich white Southerner she’d ever seen on television or movies. Salt-and-pepper hair, broad shoulders, a broader smile … or it had been a broad smile until he got a good look at Nora and saw she wasn’t Bridget.

Nora smiled in a manner she hoped appeared friendly and nonthreatening, as opposed to her usual smiles, which tended to be described as “seductive” and “dangerous.”

“Hey, Dad.” Wesley grabbed Nora’s hand and half escorted, half dragged her forward.

Wesley’s father narrowed his eyes at her. “Who’s your friend, J.W.?”

Nora looked at Wesley and mouthed “J.W.?”

Wesley mouthed back “Eleanor.”

“Dad, this is my girlfriend, Nora Sutherlin.”

Nora’s eyes went even wider than they had at the first sight of the house. Girlfriend? Who? Her?

Wiping the look of shock off her face, she purposefully widened her smile at Wesley’s handsome father.

At that smile, Wesley’s handsome father gave her a look of deep, abiding, profound and unremitting disgust.

“Oh, yeah.” She sighed, as her one and only prayer about this trip went unanswered. “He’s heard of me.”









NORTH

The Past


Kingsley ate dinner with the other boys in silence, keeping his mouth occupied with food so as not to let any smirks and smiles betray his knowledge of English. He wasn’t entirely sure how long he could keep up the ruse, wasn’t entirely sure why he even tried. But as he sat in the dining room at a carved, black oak table, the boys on the left, the priests on the right, Kingsley tried to decide what sin he’d committed that had earned him this ice-cold hell on earth.

He wanted to blame Carol, head cheerleader at his old school. Blonde girls were a weakness of his. Or Janice, who sang the National Anthem at every home game. Sopranos with red hair could do no wrong in his book. Susan … Alice … and his blue-eyed Mandolin, the long-haired daughter of unrepentant hippies … He’d started in August and had fucked three dozen girls at his small Portland high school by Thanksgiving break. But he couldn’t blame a single one of them for sending him to this prison.

He blamed the boyfriends.

Naturally strong and quick, Kingsley knew he could take on any boy in the school who came at him. But seven boys all at once? No one could have walked away from that. And he hadn’t walked away.

He’d crawled.

He’d crawled a few feet before passing out in a puddle of blood that had come from a cut over his heart. The cut had likely saved his life. He remembered little from the beating he’d taken behind the stadium, but he did remember the knife. When the knife came out even the other boys who’d been kicking him, punching him, spitting on him as he fought to get back to his feet, took a step back. The boy with the knife—Troy—hadn’t been a boyfriend. Worse, he’d been a brother—Theresa’s older brother—and he took the protection of his sister very seriously. The knife came out and slashed at Kingsley’s heart. And that’s when the other boys had dragged Troy off and left Kingsley bleeding on the ground, broken and bruised but alive.

And as he looked around the dining hall and saw nothing but other boys—boys aged ten to eighteen, tall and short, fat and thin, handsome and unfortunately not so—he wanted to go back to that moment behind the stadium and step into the knife instead of away from it.

He sighed heavily as he took a sip of his tea, dreadful stuff, really. He missed the days when his parents had given him wine with his dinner.

“I know. Tastes like piss, doesn’t it?” Father Henry’s voice came from over his shoulder.

Kingsley almost nodded in agreement, but remembered that he didn’t understand English. Turning toward the voice, he composed his face into a mask of confusion.

Father Henry pointed at Kingsley’s tea and mimed a vicious grimace and a gag. Kingsley allowed himself a laugh then. Everyone spoke the universal language of disgust.

“Come with me, Mr. Boissonneault,” Father Henry said, pulling out Kingsley’s chair and motioning for him to follow. “Let’s see if we can’t find you a translator.”

Translator? As Kingsley stood up his heart started to race. Father Henry had said no one at the school spoke French but Mr. Stearns. And every student in the school seemed to be in the dining room, huddled over steaming bowls of tomato basil soup. Every student but Stearns. Not that Kingsley had been looking for him, watching the door, scanning the room between every sip of piss tea.

Father Henry led him to the kitchen and through a wall of steam. By a hulking black oven a young priest waved a spatula as he repeated a sentence over and over. He seemed to be conducting himself—the words his music, the spatula his baton.

“And now you, repeat this … Você não terá nenhum outro deus antes de mim.”

“Si, Father Aldo.” The words came from a table a few feet away from the stove. “Você não terá nenhum outro deus antes de mim.”

Kingsley almost shivered at the sound of the voice—an elegant tenor, rich and educated, but also cold, aloof and distant. The voice belonged to Stearns, the blond pianist, he saw, when he took two steps forward and peered around a refrigerator. At Stearns’s feet lay a black cat curled up in a tight ball, glaring at Kingsley with bright and malevolent green eyes. He watched as Stearns rubbed the cat’s head gently with the tip of his shoe as he recited the words in a language Kingsley didn’t recognize.

“Muito bom,” said the priest, crossing the spatula over his chest and bowing. “Father Henry, what are you doing in my kitchen? We’ve had this talk.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Father Aldo, Mr. Stearns.”

“No. You are not sorry. You always love to interrupt. It is what you are best at,” Father Aldo scolded with a broad smile on his face. Kingsley tried to place the accent. Brazilian, maybe? If so, it would mean the language he was teaching Stearns was Portuguese. But why would anyone in Nowhere, Maine, want to learn Portuguese?

“Father Aldo, I only interrupt you because you talk so much. I have to interrupt if I’m going to say my piece before sundown.”

“The sun is down, and yet you are still interrupting.”

“You’re interrupting my interrupting, Aldo. And I am very sorry to interrupt Mr. Stearns’s lesson. But it’s his language faculties we need. This is Kingsley Boissonneault, our new student. He doesn’t speak any English, I’m afraid. We’re hoping Mr. Stearns could be of some assistance. If he would oblige …”

“Of course, Father.” Stearns closed the book in front of him and stood up. Once more Kingsley was stuck by the blond pianist’s height, his face so unbearably handsome. “I will be happy to help in any way I can. Of course, Monsieur Boissonneault doesn’t need my help. After all, he speaks English perfectly. Don’t you?”

Kingsley froze when Stearns directed the last two words at him.

Father Aldo and Father Henry both looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Mr. Boissonneault?” Father Aldo said in his accented English. “Is this true?”

“Of course it is.” Stearns stepped over the black cat and stood before Kingsley.

Kingsley should have been afraid, should have been embarrassed. But that one step toward him, that look of penetrating insight, inspired other feelings in him, feelings he immediately shoved down deep into himself.

“He laughed while you two were arguing. He knew exactly what you both were saying. If he’s a French speaker in Maine he’s either from France, where he would start learning English at age seven or eight, or he’s Quebecois and therefore at least passably bilingual.”

Father Aldo and Father Henry continued to stare at him. Stearns studied him with penetrating, steel-gray eyes.

“I am most certainly not Quebecois,” Kingsley finally said, the pride in his Parisian blood trumping any desire to remain silent and anonymous. “I’m from Paris.”

Stearns smiled and Kingsley felt that smile in his blood like a shard of ice.

“A liar and a snob. Welcome to Saint Ignatius, Monsieur Boissonneault,” Stearns said. “So pleased to have you here.”

For the second time that day, Kingsley fantasized about stepping into Troy’s knife and letting the blade sink into his heart. Surely a blade of real steel would hurt less than the steely judgment in Stearns’s eyes.

“I didn’t want to come,” Kingsley protested. “I’m here against my will. I shouldn’t have to talk if I don’t want to.”

“You have a bright future with the Cistercians,” Stearns said, crossing his arms over his chest. “They take vows of silence, too. Although for reasons of piety and not obnoxious attention seeking.”

“Mr. Stearns,” Father Aldo gently chided. “We may be Jesuits, but we do practice the rule of Benedict here.”

Stearns exhaled heavily. “Of course, Father. Forgive me.” He didn’t sound particularly contrite to Kingsley, but neither Father Aldo nor Father Henry raised any further objections. They seemed as cowed as Matthew had earlier. Who was this Stearns person?

“Perhaps you would show Mr. Boissonneault the dormitories. Give him more of an introduction to the school than young Matthew did,” Father Henry said. “If you have the time.”

Stearns nodded, took one more step toward Kingsley and looked down into his eyes. Down? Kingsley had been measured in the hospital and stood at exactly six feet. Stearns had to be six-two at the least.

“I have the time.” Stearns gave him another smile. “Shall we?”

Kingsley thought about saying no, demurring, protesting that Matthew had given him a thorough introduction to the school and he needed no other, but merci beaucoup for offering. And yet, although Stearns already seemed to dislike him, loathe him even, Kingsley couldn’t deny that everything in him wanted a moment alone with this mysterious young man who even the priests deferred to.

“Oui,” Kingsley whispered, and Stearns’s sculpted lips formed a tight line.

Kingsley followed him from the kitchen. As soon as they were out of the door and alone in the hallway, Stearns turned and faced him.

“Père Henry est un héro,” Stearns began in flawless French. Father Henry is a hero. “You’ll have to forgive him for knowing very little about France. During World War II, he was in Poland smuggling Jews to safety and hiding women and girls from the Russian soldiers. I only know this because another priest here told me. Father Henry does not talk about the hundreds of lives he helped save. He talks about Italian food and mystery novels. Father Aldo is Brazilian. He and twelve others were held captive by guerrillas in 1969. Father Aldo was twenty-nine years old and, despite being from a wealthy and politically connected family, was the last captive to be released—by choice. He would not leave until the others were safely freed. He forgave his captors and publicly asked the court to show them leniency. Now he cooks for us.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Kingsley asked in English, feeling for the first time since his parents’ death that he could easily start crying.

“Father Henry asked me to introduce you to Saint Ignatius. That is what I’m doing. Coming?” he asked, still speaking French.

Kingsley said nothing, but followed him down the hall.

Stearns paused in the doorway to the dining room. Only two boys remained at the table, eating and talking.

“Ton ami Matthew,” Stearns said, inclining his head toward the small redheaded boy who had first given him a tour of the school, sitting next to a slightly taller boy with black hair and glasses. “He came here a year and a half ago. Although eleven years old when we saw him first, he looked hardly older than eight. His parents had neglected him to the point of starvation. A wealthy Catholic family in the neighborhood where Matthew was found digging through garbage cans is paying his tuition here. The boy he’s sitting with is the son of the people paying Matthew’s tuition. Neither of them knows that. They became friends on their own.”

Kingsley swallowed, said nothing and followed Stearns from the dining room.

“I think Father Henry meant for you to tell me what time classes start, that sort of thing.”

“Breakfast is at seven. Chapel is at eight. Classes start at nine. Tomorrow you’ll meet with Father Martin, who will set your class schedule.”

“I suppose Father Martin is a hero, too.”

“Father Martin is an astronomer. He discovered three comets and invented a formula for calculating the expansion of the universe. Retired now. His eyes aren’t strong enough to keep searching the heavens. So now he teaches math and science to us.”

Stearns led them from the dining hall, outside and to the library. The main room was empty but for three boys about Kingsley’s age huddling by the fireplace on the west wall. Stearns picked up an abandoned book off a table, glanced at the spine and headed to a bookcase not far from where the boys sat and talked.

“Stanley Horngren—he’s the one wearing the jacket,” Stearns said, inclining his regal blond head toward one of the boys. “He has twelve brothers and sisters. He works two jobs every summer in order to pay his own tuition here and not burden his family with the extra expense. James Mitchell, sitting next to him, is here on a full academic scholarship. Rather impressive considering he is completely deaf and never had access to a school for the deaf. When you speak to him, speak clearly and make sure he can see your lips. And speak only in English,” Stearns said, giving Kingsley a dark look. He slipped the book onto a shelf in what was no doubt the correct spot. “The boy on the sofa is Kenneth Stowe. He spent two years in an institution because his teachers thought he was mentally deficient. In reality he has a minor learning disability and a genius IQ. He is now a straight-A student. The library closes at nine. If you need to stay later, you can ask Father Martin for a pass.”

Stearns turned on his heel and headed back outside. He paused outside the door to the church.

“Weekend Mass is at 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays and 10:00 a.m. on Sundays. It’s a traditional Catholic mass. Are you Catholic?”

Kingsley shook his head. “We’re descended from the Huguenots.”

Stearns exhaled through his nose. “Calvinists.” He said the word like a curse before continuing on. “You are encouraged but not required to attend chapel. You will not be asked to cut your long hair. You will be asked to wear the school uniform, but for no reason other than it helps foster an environment of equality. None of us here is better than any of the others. You do understand that, yes?”

Kingsley stared at the floor. “Yes.”

Stearns took them to the dormitory building, stopping outside long enough to gather an armful of logs. Kingsley picked up some firewood as well, thinking they would be carrying it up to their dormitory room on the second floor, but instead Stearns went into the room where the youngest boys slept and piled the wood neatly next to the hearth.

He took the wood out of Kingsley’s arms and added it to the pile.

Several young boys sat on their beds reading. Only one managed to mumble a muted “thank you” as the two of them walked out. Stearns said nothing, only tapped the boy lightly on the forehead in a gesture almost brotherly. All the boys in the room followed Stearns with wide, awe-filled eyes.

Kingsley trailed after Stearns to the top floor of the dormitory, where the oldest boys slept.

“Lights-out is at nine,” his guide continued in his shockingly fluent French. Had Kingsley not known otherwise, he would have assumed Stearns was a native. “If you have homework that keeps you up later, you can work in the common room downstairs. As Father Henry says, ‘Firewood does not grow on trees.’ Please replace any of the wood you use.”

“Bien sûr,” Kingsley said, but knew he wouldn’t have thought to replace the firewood without someone telling him.

“Eighteen of us sleep in this room. Nineteen now that you’re here. Nathan Weitz has night terrors for reasons he hasn’t chosen to share with anyone yet. At least once a week he wakes up screaming. Ignore it. He will go back to sleep in a few minutes. If you see him sleepwalking, follow him. Last winter he wandered outside and nearly developed hypothermia. Joseph Marksbury is in charge of the chore list. I suggest you talk to him before he comes to you, unless you want nothing but bathroom duty for the entire semester. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my Portuguese.”

“You’re learning Portuguese, too?” Kingsley asked. “How many languages do you speak?”

“Eight.”

“I’m bilingual. What do they call someone like you?”

Stearns arched an eyebrow at him. “Intelligent.”

Kingsley started to laugh, but then realized Stearns hadn’t been joking.

“Eight,” Kingsley repeated. “I would go crazy with so many words in my head. I have enough trouble keeping my French and English separate.”

“A few students here speak a little French, but since Father Pierre died, I’m the only one fluent at the school. If you need to speak French, speak it to me. And as you’ve seen, this place is full of kind and courageous priests and intelligent and hardworking young men, many of whom have had to overcome great obstacles to be here. If you ever feel the need to lie again, tell your lies to me.”

Kingsley blushed and crossed his arms. “I’ll apologize to Matthew.”

“A very good idea, Mr. Boissonneault,” Stearns said.

“You can call me Kingsley. That’s my name.”

Stearns seemed to mull the invitation over.

“Kingsley …” He nodded, and Kingsley tensed at the sound of his name spoken by the blond pianist who seemed to own the school. “This school has been my salvation. I would appreciate if you at least pretended to show it some respect.”

Stearns turned and started to walk from the dormitory room.

“Merci,” Kingsley said, before he was gone. “Thank you.”

“For what?” Stearns asked from the doorway.

“The Ravel today. Mon père aimait Ravel.”

For a moment Stearns only stared at him. Kingsley wanted to shrink from his penetrating gaze, but held his ground and didn’t blink, didn’t look away.

“Aimait? Your father is dead?”

Kingsley nodded. “Et maman. A train crash last May. You play piano beautifully. I’ve never heard Ravel like that before.”

Stearns came back into the room and stood before him. Kingsley felt his eyes on his face again and found himself suddenly shy. Shy? At age sixteen Kingsley had slept with nearly fifty girls already. No, not just girls—women, too. Even the wife of his late father’s business partner.

“I was named Marcus Stearns,” Stearns finally said. “No one ever calls me Marcus.”

“Why not?”

“Because Marcus is my father’s name, and I am not my father’s son.” He spoke the words slowly, deliberately, as if imparting a threat instead of just information.

“Can I call you something other than Stearns? It seems very formal.”

Stearns seemed to ponder the question.

“Perhaps someday.”

“Anything else I need to know?” Kingsley asked, intimidated by him, but for some reason not wanting to let him go yet.

Stearns fell silent and looked at Kingsley’s suitcase sitting at the foot of a bed. “Your bed is the one next to mine,” he finally said.

Kingsley’s hands tingled at the mention of the proximity of their two beds. He didn’t know why he was reacting to this young man the way he only ever reacted to a beautiful girl. He couldn’t stop staring at him, couldn’t stop wondering what secrets he kept, and what it would be like to hear those secrets whispered across a pillow at night.

“How did you get stuck sleeping so far from the fireplace?”

“I volunteered. I stay warm enough. A word of advice,” Stearns said, turning to stare Kingsley in the eyes, “do not wake me up at night.”

Kingsley barked a laugh. “What? Will you kill me?”

Stearns turned and headed toward the door again.

“Or worse.”









NORTH

The Present


Kingsley took a length of rope and twisted it into a slipknot. With wary eyes the girl watched him as he brought the rope down over her head and let the knot rest at her throat.

“It’s a simple game, chèrie.” He made a circuit of her body and nodded his approval. Lovely girl. Twenty-nine years old. Blue eyes. A yoga instructor or something equally silly. He’d bend her in half tonight, and she’d thank him for it after. “One end of the rope is around your neck. The other end …” He tapped the back of her knee until she raised her leg like a well-trained show pony. Grasping her calf, he raised it, and looped the other end of the rope around it. “Goes là, on your lovely, well-turned ankle. You say you can hold your yoga poses for hours. Let’s see how long you can keep your back leg up and bent while I fuck your ass. The leg starts to drop … you start to choke. Simple. Oui?”

Her pupils widened. She swallowed audibly.

“Oui, monsieur,” she whispered.

“Bon. Now allow me to simply tighten this a bit.”

Kingsley bound her wrists to the bedpost in front of her and shortened the rope that connected her neck to her ankle by a few inches. So far he could tell her boasts had been honest. Her leg stayed up, high and bent, and her breathing remained unconstricted. Of course, once he started fucking her, she might lose her concentration.

He did love this game.

From the bedside table, he pulled out his lubricant and a condom. Her fear and her arousal mingled so powerfully he could smell it from three feet away. Standing behind her, he started to open his pants.

The door to Kingsley’s bedroom opened and Søren strode inside, glanced at them with only the merest arch of an eyebrow before sitting down in the armchair by Kingsley’s bed and throwing his long legs up onto the covers, shoes and all.

“We need to talk.”

Kingsley leveled a stare at Søren that would have sent any submissive at The 8th Circle into paroxysms of panic. Søren only stared back without blinking.

With a sigh of frustration, Kingsley unknotted the ropes, slapped the girl on her bottom and uttered a quick, angry, “Out.”

“But …” She looked first at him, then at Søren, who, thankfully, had come to the town house incognito tonight. No collar. He wore only a black T-shirt, black pants and he carried his black motorcycle helmet in his hand.

“Out,” Søren repeated, and this time she listened. Quickly, she gathered her clothes off the floor and raced from the room. Kingsley started to shut the door behind her, but his second favorite girl, Sadie, slipped inside and sat at his feet.

“You’ve never heard of knocking, have you?” Kingsley asked, dropping into French. He grabbed Sadie, his lone female rottweiler, by the collar and shepherded her to the bed. She hopped up nimbly and onto his covers, making herself at home.

Søren smiled and answered in English. “I’ve heard rumors of knocking. I never believed them.”

“I had a lovely evening planned.”

“Now you have a new plan. I called. Irena answered, not Juliette.”

“Juliette is gone.” Kingsley sat on the bed next to Sadie and scratched her ears.

“Gone. Where has she gone?”

“Haiti. She left today.” He kept scratching Sadie, refusing to meet Søren’s gaze.

“You never let Juliette go to Haiti alone.”

Kingsley raised his chin. “Special circumstances.”

“How special?” Søren pulled his legs off the bed and set his feet on the floor. With one movement Søren signaled their conversation had ceased to be of the casual variety.

“I saw a ghost.”

Søren raised his hand and mindlessly rubbed his bottom lip with the tip of his thumb. Kingsley bit his own bottom lip in a sympathetic response. Those lips … both cruel and sensual … the damage they’d done to him he couldn’t even begin to calculate. And yet he craved them as much now as he had a lifetime ago.

“I don’t believe in ghosts and neither should you, Kingsley.”

“Why not? I’ve been in love with a ghost for thirty years.” Kingsley strolled over to the armchair and sat on the ottoman between the other man’s knees.

Søren narrowed his eyes at him. “The body’s not even cold yet. Eleanor’s been gone one day and you’re already trying to get me into bed again?”

“Again?” Kingsley laughed and rolled his eyes. “Always. Are you surprised?”

Søren shrugged. “Not really. Tell me about your ghost.”

On the nightstand lay a folder. Almost reluctantly, he picked it up and carried it over.

Søren eyed him for a moment before taking the black file folder from him and opening it. He studied the contents before closing the file again and looking back at Kingsley.

“It’s us at Saint Ignatius. Eleanor has a copy of this photograph. What of it?”

Kingsley took the file and opened it. Thirty years disappeared in that foot of space between his eyes and the photograph he gazed at. Thirty years gone in a heartbeat.

Kingsley still remembered the day it was taken. His closest friend at St. Ignatius, a native Mainer named Christian, had gotten a camera for Christmas and decided some day he would work for National Geographic. The first animals he’d stalked with his lens were his fellow students. That day, the day the photo had been taken, Kingsley and Søren had disappeared into the woods by the school and had argued. Underneath his school uniform Kingsley’s body had sported bruises and welts over nearly every inch of his back and thighs. The only marks visible were two small fingertip-shaped bruises that remained on his neck from the act that had ended the fight.

“I have a copy of the photograph, too,” Kingsley confessed. “I’ve kept it all my life.”

“And?” Søren crossed his ankle over his knee and waited.

“And …” Kingsley slid the photo out of the file and turned it over. On the back someone had inked their initials. The white of the celluloid had faded and yellowed. “This isn’t my copy. This is the original.”

Søren narrowed his eyes at Kingsley. “The original?”

Kingsley nodded. “I received this in the mail yesterday. No note. No letter. No return address on the envelope. The photograph in the folder and nothing else.”

Søren said nothing for a moment. Kingsley waited.

“Postmark?”

“New Hampshire—your home sweet home.”

Søren came slowly to his feet and walked to the window. Pushing back the curtains, he gazed out onto the Manhattan skyline. Kingsley would have written the man a check for a million dollars then and there to know what he was thinking. But he knew Søren too well. Money meant nothing to him. Secrets were a far dearer currency.

“It isn’t Elizabeth,” Søren said. Kingsley stood next to him and watched his gray eyes watch the city.

“Are you certain of that?”

“What possible motive would she have for this? For stealing Eleanor’s file from your office? For sending you that photograph?”

“You know Elizabeth better than I. She’s devoted her whole life to helping abused children.”

“And?”

“You and your Little One? How would she feel if she learned about you two?”

“Eleanor is thirty-four.”

“She wasn’t thirty-four when you fell in love with her. I know you did nothing wrong with her. I know you kept her safe and protected her even from yourself, even when your own pet begged you not to. But would Elizabeth see it that way?”

Søren exhaled and furrowed his brow.

“No. No, Elizabeth would not. She’d assume the worst, assume I was like our father.”

“Your sister is even more damaged than you are, Père Stearns. She would destroy you first and not even bother to ask questions later.”

“Possibly. But she certainly wouldn’t go to these lengths to do it, not when a phone call would suffice.”

“Elizabeth would do everything in her power to destroy you if she knew about you and your pet. But yes, this doesn’t seem to be her style. Or your pet’s.” When he said “pet” Sadie lifted her massive head and stared at him with worshipful devotion. If only all the women in his world were so easy to control …

Kingsley glanced at the photograph one more time. Elizabeth, Søren’s sister … a beautiful woman even at age forty-eight. Beautiful but broken. No, far more than broken—shattered. Kingsley had been in her presence only a few times, and he’d met French soldiers—war veterans, men who’d liberated death camps and watched the Nazis put Paris under their heels—with fewer ghosts in their eyes than Søren’s sister. If she’d merely been raped by her father as a child, she might have survived without the damage she carried inside her. But she’d turned her darkness onto her own brother. When she’d ceased to be a victim and become a perpetrator herself … there was no telling what such a broken soul was capable of. Kingsley knew broken souls—he possessed one of his own, after all.

“Who else then?” he asked, sliding between the window and Søren. Søren glared down at him. Kingsley only grinned and waited for him to move. He didn’t.

Søren stood in silence. Kingsley knew not to speak, knew not to rush the answer. It would come in time. Patience. Søren always rewarded patience. Eleanor had learned that as a girl. Had she tried to force his hand, Søren would have walked away from his obsession with her. She seduced and teased, challenged and defied, but all the while she waited, wanting answers but never demanding them. Until the day Søren told her everything and gave her everything. And then she’d had the audacity to walk away from it all. Søren laid out feasts for her that she merely picked at, while Kingsley lapped up the crumbs that fell to the floor.

“It’s not Elizabeth,” Søren said again. “But she might know something. After all, Lennox is entirely populated by Elizabeth and her two children. If it was postmarked from there, then …”

“Then what, mon père?”

Kingsley waited, hoping Søren would say exactly what he wanted him to say. Eleanor gone. Juliette gone. Just the two of them once more. It could be perfect again, like it was when they were boys in school together. If only Søren would say what he needed him to say.

“Then we should go talk to her—you and I.”

Kingsley nodded. “Oui.”

Perfect.









SOUTH


At moments like these Wesley wished he was as fluent in profanity as Nora. A good “fuck” would have summed up his feelings pretty well right now. From the look on his father’s face Wesley could tell that this wasn’t the first time he’d heard the name Nora Sutherlin. But how did his dad know who she was? Two types of people knew that—erotica readers and kinky people. Wes didn’t like to think his father fell into either of those camps.

“Um … Dad?”

“J.W…. Where’s Bridget?”

Wesley glanced down at Nora. He hadn’t quite told her about Bridget yet.

“I don’t know. At her house, I guess. We broke up.”

Wesley’s father gave him that look—that skeptical, eyebrow-half-cocked look that never boded well for anybody on the receiving end.

“When? You two were out here on the porch a week ago, laughing so loud I thought I’d have to turn the garden hose on you both to cool you down.”

Wincing, Wesley immediately stopped looking at Nora. Last thing he wanted was to see the expression on her face at that piece of news. But she must have taken it well, for Wesley felt her palm on his lower back. She gave him a quick pat before sliding her hand into the rear pocket of his jeans. As much as he liked having her hand on his Levi’s, her groping his ass might not be the best way to say hi to Dad tonight, given the mood he was in.

“We broke up after that. It wasn’t working. It—”

“Mr. Railey, I’m sure this is kind of a shock to you, me showing up out of nowhere,” Nora said, pulling her hand away from Wesley and taking a step forward. “The whole thing’s something of a shock to me, too. But Wes and I have known each other a long time. And—”

“My son is twenty years old, Miss Sutherlin. He hasn’t known anybody for a long time.”

Wesley watched Nora plaster a smile on her face. He’d seen that smile before. She usually used it on men she was trying to con into performing for her. That smile had gotten her out of more speeding tickets than Wesley could count—two on this trip alone. He wished he could communicate telepathically with Nora. The first thing he’d tell her would be stop smiling. Trust me on this.

“I feel like we’ve gotten off to a bad start, Mr. Railey,” Nora continued. “Can we talk inside for a few minutes? Wesley used to work for me back in Connecticut. He—”

Wesley’s father started forward at a leisurely place. Nothing new with that. Jackson Railey was well-known for doing everything at a leisurely pace. Back when he was a kid, Wesley had thought it meant his father was the laid-back sort, never in a hurry, never rushing himself or anybody else. As he got older, got smarter, he realized his father moved slowly because he liked making people wait for him. He’d make his mind up in a second, but make you wait a minute for the answer. He’d spend hours on something that should take only minutes, to prove he had the time and money to waste … even if nobody else did.

“I know who you are, Miss Sutherlin.”

Wesley’s heart raced harder with every step his father took closer to Nora. Things had started out ugly and were getting uglier by the second.

“A fan? How nice.” She kept smiling.

“Not quite, madam.”

“Dad. Let’s go in the house and talk.” Wesley took a step to the side, trying desperately to put himself between his father and Nora. His dad wasn’t the violent type, but he didn’t need to be. Words were weapon enough for his father, especially when he was angry like this.

“That woman is not allowed to cross the threshold of my home, J.W. And quite frankly, I’m shocked that you’d even suggest it.”

“That woman?” Wesley stood up straighter and stared into his father’s blue eyes. He’d gotten his brown eyes from his mother, his temperament from her. Most days it was only the similar set of their jaws that betrayed Wesley and his father were even related. “‘That woman’ is my best friend, Dad. She’s also a four-time New York Times bestselling author.”

“Five, actually,” Nora interjected with a sly wink at him.

That wink gave Wesley the courage to keep going. No matter what his dad said to her, Nora could take it. In their fifteen months apart, he’d almost forgotten how much fun she had getting yelled at.

“Sorry, Nor. Forgot about the new book. Multi-NewYork Times bestselling writer. She’s also—”

“A whore.”

The word came out of his father’s mouth and hung in the air between them. Wesley’s right hand balled up into a fist. His dad might not be violent, but he was coming damn close to getting Wesley to that point.

“Ohh …” Nora said with that wicked smile of hers, that smile that made men either fall at her feet or run for their lives “… he totally went there. I can respect that.”

“Take that back, Dad.” Wesley leveled his coldest stare at his father. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know exactly what I’m talking about, J.W. Did you think your mother and I believed it when you said you just wanted to come back home to Kentucky because you were homesick? You spent two years telling us how much you loved it at Yorke, how much you wanted to spend your whole life in Connecticut, how happy you were, and then one day it’s ‘I’m ready to come home.’ You think we bought that? Your mother did, because that’s what she wanted to believe. I knew better. Did a little digging—”

“Jesus, Dad, you investigated me?”

“Had to be done. And I did it for your own sake.”

Nora laughed softly. “Can I take a moment here to tell you both how cute your accents are when you’re angry?”

Wesley and his father both looked at her, Wesley in shock, his father in disgust.

“Okay, that’s a ‘no’ then. Carry on.” She took a step back and waved her hand at them to continue.

“You think this funny, don’t you, miss? Well, it’s not funny to me. Or to my wife. Our son was a wreck when he dragged his tail back down here. I had an uncle come home from Vietnam looking less shell-shocked than my boy did that day he turned up here.”

The smile fell from Nora’s face. Nodding, she stepped forward again and took Wesley’s hand. He squeezed her fingers and found them surprisingly cold, as if she was nervous or something. His Nora? Nervous?

“I’m sorry, Mr. Railey. I know I hurt your son. And I’ll regret it until the day I die. But I—”

“Hurt my son?” Wesley’s father shook his head and gave a horrible, cold laugh. “You didn’t hurt my son. He falls off a horse and gets hurt. You broke that boy’s spirit. Crushed him. I know about the smut you write. The wife’s got a whole case of trash like that in the library. From what I can tell, only thing different about your books and the ones she reads is that in yours they get a little more creative. Your books don’t bother me a bit. That you sell your body doesn’t even bother me. What does bother me is that you pulled your tricks on my son. You used him, chewed him up and spit him out.”

Wesley opened his mouth to protest, but Nora spoke up first.

“You say you know me, Mr. Railey, but obviously, you don’t. If you did, you’d know I don’t spit out.”

“Nora, please,” Wesley said, ready to drop on his hands and knees to beg her to let him handle this. Not that it would work. For a single second Wesley felt a pang of sympathy for Søren. Nora was lawless, unmanageable, uncontrollable. You told her one thing, she did everything but that. She laughed when others cried. Danced when others sat. She clawed her way to the top and didn’t even chip a nail on the way up. No one could break her. No one could handle her. No one could shut her up.

God, he had missed this woman.

Wesley turned to his father, stepped directly in front of Nora and raised his chin.

“Dad, my private life with Nora … what happened between the two of us isn’t any of your business. We worked it out. And she’s not a whore. I can’t believe you’d say that.”

“I said it, and I’ll say it again. What else do you call selling your body?”

“A good career move.” Nora peeked around Wesley’s arm. “Although technically, I was a Dom—”

“Nora, can you give me a minute here?” Wesley tried to ask as politely as his raw nerves would let him.

“Take your time, Wes.” She patted him on the back again.

“Dad, I love you. But you’re kind of pissing me off right now. Nora’s my best friend. She’s my girlfriend. She’s staying here with me while I figure out what I’m going to do next. If you’ve got a problem with that—”

“I certainly do have a problem with that—”

“Then we’ll go to a hotel.”

“Hotel’s a good idea,” Nora said from behind him. “I liked that castle we passed. Can we rent a turret? I’ll call about the weekly rates.”

“I’ll stay in a Motel 6 before I’ll let anybody treat you like this, Nora.”

“They do leave the lights on for you, I hear. Nice of them.” Nora already had her phone out, clearly ready to get the hell out of Kentucky. Or at least off his front lawn. He couldn’t quite blame her.

“Motel 6? What on earth?” Wesley’s mother called out from the front porch. “Wesley? Did you make it home?”

“Hey, Momma.” He grabbed Nora’s hand and pulled her across the lawn to where his mother stood under the archway. “I want you to meet my girlfriend, Nora. She came down from Connecticut to visit me.”

Wesley wanted to pull his mother into a bear hug, but decided against it. His dad had accused him in the past of using his mother to get away with murder. He wanted his father to accept Nora, not merely tolerate her because his mother liked her.

“Hello, Mrs. Railey.” Nora had a smile on again, but not the smile that made Wesley nervous. A simple smile he had only seen her wear it in private with him, or when she met a child. He’d never met anybody as good with kids as Nora. Broke his heart that she claimed to not want any. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

“Nora, you say?” his mother repeated, and returned Nora’s smile. His mom looked tired tonight. The business side of the farm wore her out, enough that Wesley feared guilt alone would keep him on the farm forever. “So nice to meet you, too. But, Wesley, I thought …”

Wesley laughed. “Mom, Bridget and I broke up a while ago. Nora and I were together when I was at Yorke. We’re back together again.”

“I’m much younger than I look, I promise.” Nora’s smile broadened. “I’m aging horribly.”

His mom laughed. “I had a feeling my Wesley would fall for an older woman. Girls his age just aren’t smart enough for him.” She reached up and ruffled Wesley’s hair. Nora stuck her tongue out at him and gave him that Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it? look.

“I’m definitely not smart enough for him. Must not be if I let him get away once. I’ll be more careful this time.”

“Smart girl.”

Wesley grinned as his mother reached out and patted Nora on the arm.

“It’s getting late, Mom. Shouldn’t you be in bed?” he asked, worried that his argument with his father had woken her up.

“Yes, Caroline. I think that’s a good idea,” said Wesley’s father in a tone that brooked no argument.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and reached for her husband’s hand. “Put me to bed. Make sure you tuck me in nice and tight.”

“I always do. Gotta tuck you in or you might run away on me.”

Wesley’s mother smiled broadly and her pale face instantly lit up with love.

Wesley couldn’t help but smile, too. He and his father had their differences, but they both worshipped the ground Caroline Railey walked on. That alone kept them from launching the New Civil War on Kentucky soil most days.

“It was nice to meet you, Nora,” she said, glancing over her shoulder as Jackson led her into the house. “Wesley, you make sure she’s got enough blankets. Might get even colder tonight.”

“I will, Mom. She’s out in the guesthouse with me.”

“I did not hear that, young man,” she said, laughing. Wesley glanced at Nora, who grinned at him.

Alone with her once again, Wesley slumped against one of the pillars on the front porch.

“Okay, that went worse than I thought it would,” he confessed. “Nora, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe my dad investigated you and me and—”

She closed the distance between them in two big steps and threw her arms around him.

“Whoa, where did that come from?” He wrapped her tight in his arms.

“Wes, you’re my hero. I can’t believe you talked back to your dad like that. He’s a little on the …” Nora pulled away and mimed the Psycho shower-stabbing scene. Wesley could only nod in agreement.

“Yeah, can’t argue with that. He’s a good guy. He is. Just overprotective of me and Mom.”

“Family man. I respect that. My father would have sold me down the damn river to pay off a ten-dollar debt if he thought he’d get a Hamilton for me.”

“Dad only dislikes you—”

“Hates … he hates me,” she corrected.

“Fine, he only hates you because he thinks you hurt me.”

Nora reached up and caressed Wesley’s cheek. He turned his face into her hand and kissed her palm.

“Wesley … I did hurt you.”

He nodded and said nothing else. Nora hugged him again. She held him for a long time, so long he forgot what she was hugging him for. He kissed her hair, inhaled the scent of her—orchids. Nora always smelled like orchids…. Someday he’d remember to ask her why.

“I should go.” She pulled away.

“What?”

“I can stay in town somewhere. I don’t want to cause you more trouble than I already have. Nora Sutherlin in the house equals trouble. It’s basic math.”

Wesley shook his head and took her hand. “When did you start doing math? Don’t answer. Listen … you’re not going to cause trouble. We’re going to hang out and relax and spend time together and figure stuff out. No trouble, right?”

Nora sighed heavily. She crossed her arms and leaned back against the pillar behind her.

“Stay a week. Promise me a week,” Wesley said. “If it’s still this bad with my father in a week, then we’ll go back to Connecticut. Okay?”

Wesley watched Nora. She closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose. Was there a more beautiful woman in the world than Nora Sutherlin? Even after driving all day, and wearing nothing fancier than jeans and a tight white T-shirt over those amazing breasts of hers that haunted his waking dreams, and her thick black hair back in a ponytail and with her eyeliner smudged and her lipstick fading … Behind that outer layer that drove him wild with one look was her mind, her sense of humor, her spirit no one could crush—not even Søren.

Damn. No other word for Nora Sutherlin. Just damn.

“Okay. One week,” she promised, opening her eyes.

“Good. Think you can behave yourself for one week?”

“Probably not. But I’ll try. For your sake.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem,” Nora said, heading toward her car. “I mean, really … not even I could cause any trouble in a week, right?”









NORTH

The Past


For two weeks, Kingsley did nothing but watch Stearns. He went to class, he ate his meals, he pretended to befriend the other boys … but everything he did was a mere ruse, a mask, misdirection. To make up for his behavior on his first day at Saint Ignatius, Kingsley played the saint of the school in the eyes of everyone around him. But he existed solely for Stearns, solely for sin.

But Stearns wasn’t playing along.

“Aristotle,” Father Robert intoned as his broken piece of chalk squeaked on the blackboard, “had a rather unusual idea about the mind, about consciousness. He thought that the seat of consciousness was the heart. The brain was a mere cooling factory—ventilation. Interestingly, the ancient Egyptians also thought the brain was a pointless organ while the heart itself was the seat of soul and thought. Modern science tells us this is wrong. But what does Jesus have to say?”

In the back of his mind, Kingsley knew the answer to this question. He’d never gone to church consistently as a child. But sometimes his mother would take him. A nearby Catholic church had one service in English for all the American expats like her. She’d go not to worship God so much as to bask in her first language for an hour. Kingsley enjoyed those times alone with his mother. His sister, Marie-Laure, never could get out of bed before noon on the weekend. His father, a proud Huguenot, refused to step foot in a Catholic church. So Kingsley had her all to himself. Nothing made him happier even as a small child than having a woman’s complete attention. Although sometimes he had paid attention to the priest and the readings. And something in one of those readings had stuck with him even so many years later. Something about the mind …

The classroom remained silent. Kingsley picked up his Bible and started to flip through it. Maybe if God was on his side, he’d find the page, the verse. Stearns was also in this theology class, sitting off to the side by the window—the coldest seat in the class. He’d been the first to arrive. He could have sat by the fireplace, but he never did.

“No one?” Father Robert turned around and faced the classroom. “Anyone?”

Kingsley saw Father Robert glance at Stearns, who appeared to suppress a sigh.

“Matthew twenty-two, verses twenty-seven through twenty-eight,” Stearns said, when it became clear no one else would speak.

“Very good, Mr. Stearns. Can you recite those verses for us?”

Recite? Kingsley stared at Stearns, who seemed the very picture of scholarly perfection. His school uniform was spotless and not a single hair on his blond head was out of place. No matter how hard Kingsley tried, he couldn’t help but appear tousled and rumpled. Father Henry teased him about always looking as if he had just crawled out of bed—if only.

Without opening his Bible, Stearns opened his mouth.

“Jesus said to him, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and the first commandment.”

“Very good, Mr. Stearns. And what does this verse have to do with our discussion of the mind and the heart?”

“Jesus makes a distinction between the mind and the heart and the soul. They are separate entities.”

Separate entities? Kingsley’s eyes widened at Stearns’s words. Who was teaching the class?

“Is this proof that the mind and heart and soul are completely separate and have nothing to do with each other?” Father Robert continued. He waved his hand at the ten students in the class, as if trying sweep answers out of their mouths. None were forthcoming.

“Mr. Stearns?”

Stearns sat up an inch straighter. “Not necessarily. The baptismal formula that decrees to baptize ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ was used as proof by the First Council of Constantinople that while the Trinity contained three distinct persons, they were one as well as three. When Jesus tells us to love God with our heart, soul and mind, He is telling us that they are three and one, just as the Godhead.”

“Very good, Mr. Stearns. Now, if you’ll turn in your catechisms …”

As the class opened their books, Kingsley could only continue to stare at Stearns. The clouds outside the window parted a moment and a ray of sunshine—not seen for days—filled the classroom with white light. Kingsley could count every single eyelash that rimmed Stearns’s eyes. And until the sun hid itself behind a cloud again, Kingsley ceased to breathe.

The sun disappeared. He exhaled. Stearns turned his head and met Kingsley’s unapologetic stare.

Kingsley knew he should look away. Politeness demanded it of him. Discretion demanded it of him. If he didn’t stop staring, he had a feeling Father Robert and Stearns himself would demand it of him.

But he couldn’t look away, any more than he could have looked away had he come face-to-face with God Himself.

As Peter read from the catechism, Stearns stood up and, without asking permission, left the classroom. Father Robert didn’t say a word to stop him, merely continued the conversation with the other students. Kingsley’s heart pounded, his hands clenched. Had he been sitting in a Judas chair he couldn’t have been any more uncomfortable.

After ten seconds of trying to hold still, he got up and followed Stearns.

Once in the hall, Kingsley looked around wildly. No Stearns to be seen. Which way had he gone? Out the front? The back? Upstairs?

Kingsley had no idea why he’d been seized with this mania, this absolute need to follow Stearns. But he’d done it now, left class without permission. No going back.

He heard the ringing of footsteps on the tile floor echoing off the concrete walls. Racing toward the sound, Kingsley found Stearns pacing the foyer between the third and fourth stories, a small Bible in his hand.

Stearns stopped in his pacing and faced Kingsley. He didn’t speak. Kingsley opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

“You left,” he finally said, reverting to French. Vous avez quitté.

Vous? They were the same, students in the same school. Why did Kingsley automatically use vous instead of the more familiar tu?

“Tu as quitté aussi.” You also left.

Tu. Not vous.

“I followed you.” Kingsley felt beyond foolish, stating the obvious. But he had no other words, no other reason. What could he explain? He was here because he was here. “Why did you leave?”

Stearns glared at him before turning back to his pacing.

“I’m allowed to leave.”

“I know that. You’re allowed to do anything you want. But that doesn’t answer the question.” Kingsley stared at him, dropped the English and asked again in French. “Pourquoi?”

“You were staring at me.”

Once, Kingsley had heard some phrase about discretion and valor, something his mother had said in English. He had forgotten how it went, however. Didn’t matter. He was beyond discretion now and couldn’t care less about valor.

“Oui. I was.”

“Why do you stare at me all the time?”

“Why do you care?”

Stearns didn’t answer for a moment. Finally, he met Kingsley’s eyes. “I don’t know. But I do.”

Had he been offered a million dollars at that moment in exchange for un-hearing those words, Kingsley would have said “Keep the money.”

“You should go back to class,” Stearns said, turning his attention back to his Bible.

Kingsley rolled his eyes. “Does it bother you that Father Robert treats you like that?” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall.

Stearns turned around again.

“Like what?”

Kingsley shrugged. “I don’t know. You do all the work in class. No one else answers any questions but you. He made you recite Bible verses. Recite them. Not read them. You perform for him.”

After looking at Kingsley a moment, Stearns resumed his pacing and reopened his Bible.

“He’s not making me perform. Father Robert loathes silence. No one here makes me do anything.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Stearns leveled his steely gaze at him again. Something in that stare caused Kingsley’s courage to falter. He took a quick breath and pushed ahead. This was the longest conversation he’d managed to have with Stearns since that first terrible day here. Even if he infuriated him, at least it would keep him talking.

“It’s only … you can come and go as you please in the classes. No one else can do that. You never eat in the dining room with us, although Father Henry said it was required for us all. Curfew doesn’t seem to apply to you. Why?”

“The rules are designed to keep students in line and safe. The Fathers know that if I stay up after curfew it’s because I’m reading. If I leave class it’s because I have other work to occupy myself. I eat with Father Aldo in the kitchen as it’s the only time we have for my Portuguese lessons.”

Kingsley shook his head. “No. It’s different. There’s more. You get special treatment here, and I want to know why.”

“It isn’t special treatment. I’m treated like an adult. And I’ve earned that. Behave like one, Kingsley, and you might earn it, as well.”

Stearns gave him one last glare before brushing past him and taking the steps down.

Kingsley knew he should go back to class. He wanted to follow Stearns but something told him Stearns had met his quota of words and wouldn’t be giving up any more to Kingsley today. Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. He’d keep waiting, keep watching…. Kingsley could tell he annoyed Stearns. Not the reaction he was going for, but better than nothing. Stearns usually walked around as if no one else in the world existed but him. To get under his skin was step one. Into his bed, that would be step two.

“King? What are you doing out here?”

Kingsley glanced over his shoulder and saw Christian coming down the hall. He and Christian had become fast friends almost by default the past two weeks. They were two of only five of the boys at Saint Ignatius who apparently had any experience with girls whatsoever. Christian also had a dirty sense of humor and the foulest mouth in school, when the priests weren’t around, that is. The virgins at the school gave them looks of awe mingled with jealousy when he and Christian and a couple of the others swapped stories of girlfriends and blow jobs and brushes with furious brothers and jealous boyfriends.

“Stearns,” Kingsley said, not looking Christian in the eyes. He couldn’t stop staring at the steps that Stearns had disappeared down.

“Yeah, he pisses me the hell off, too. But what are you going to do about it?”

“You don’t like him?” Kingsley asked, finally wrenching his attention away from the staircase.

“‘Course not. What’s there to like? He’s smarter than all the priests put together. The kids shit bricks the second he walks in the room. He won’t talk to any of us. I’ve gotten maybe five words out of him in four years.”

Kingsley suppressed a smile. Five words? He’d just had a full five-minute conversation with Stearns. That must be some kind of school record.

“Everyone acts like they’re scared of him,” Kingsley offered. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t talk more.”

Christian half laughed and clapped Kingsley on the shoulder. “It’s not an act. We are scared of him.”

“Why? He seems …” Kingsley searched for the right word. Safe wasn’t right. Stearns seemed anything but safe. “Rational?”

“Kingsley …” Christian began, and took a breath. “I keep forgetting you’re new here. Something you should know about your friend Mr. Asshole Stearns.”

“Quoi?” Kingsley asked. “What?”

“Rumor has it that at his last school … he killed somebody.”









NORTH

The Present


The drive from the city to Søren’s sister’s house in New Hampshire took approximately four hours. Søren usually grabbed every opportunity to take his Ducati out on the open roads, but Kingsley managed to talk him into riding in the Rolls-Royce with him. They needed to talk, Kingsley insisted. They needed to plan. With a skeptical tilt to his smile, Søren finally agreed. Kingsley knew full well that Søren wasn’t fooled. They had nothing to talk about yet. They knew nothing yet. Kingsley simply wanted to be alone with Søren in the back of his Rolls-Royce.

“What will we tell her?” Kingsley asked as they neared Elizabeth’s house. “She’ll want to know why we’re here.”

“We will tell her the truth. You received a threatening package postmarked from Lennox. I’ll watch her eyes, her face. We’ll see what it betrays.”

Søren sat on the opposite bench seat, staring out the window. He’d made little eye contact for the entire drive. Unusual for him. Søren seemed to delight in intense eye contact. He could read someone with a single glance—know their motives, their plans, what they wanted, who they trusted…. As teenagers, Kingsley had thought it a great parlor trick. It wasn’t until years later, working as a jack-of-all-trades for the French government, that he understood the root of Søren’s talent. Abused children often grew up with extraordinarily astute abilities to judge character. It wasn’t a gift. It wasn’t a parlor trick. It was life or death, a survival skill. But Søren wouldn’t look at him today. Kingsley decided to take it as a compliment.

The Rolls pulled into the long and winding drive that led to Elizabeth’s house. Although Søren wouldn’t look at Kingsley, that didn’t stop Kingsley from looking at him.

“I’m fine, Kingsley,” he said, giving him the barest of glances before turning his eyes outside the window again.

Kingsley nodded toward the house. “Your mother was raped in that house. Raped by your father.”

“This is not news to me,” Søren said, his voice even. “That is, in fact, the reason I exist.”

“You were raped in that house. By Elizabeth, with whom we are about to have a polite chat.”

“Kingsley, I said I was fine.”

“I know you’re fine. I know you aren’t simply saying you’re fine. And that’s why you alone of all the men and monsters in this world terrify me.”

“That is a lie and you know it. You and Eleanor are the only two people in the world who aren’t afraid of me.”

“Tell yourself that if it helps you sleep at night.”

Søren finally looked at him, looked him straight in the eyes.

“Boo,” Søren said, and Kingsley could only laugh.

“No ghosts, please.” Kingsley held up his hands. “There’s more than enough ghosts in that house.”

“I’m not one of them.” Søren sat back against the leather seat.

“Elizabeth is. She haunts that house still … or perhaps it haunts her.”

“I’ve asked her to move. She’ll have none of it.” Søren shrugged elegantly. He touched his neck where his Roman collar rested against his throat—a gesture that Kingsley rarely witnessed. He knew most priests seldom wore their clericals when visiting family. With his other sister, Claire, and his niece Laila, Søren always wore lay attire. But with Elizabeth he wore his clericals and his collar. Always. Simply another part of his armor.

“Masochist, you think?” Kingsley asked, smiling. “Fitting, since her brother’s a sadist.”

“Possibly. Or perhaps she has something to prove to herself. That our father didn’t win.”

Kingsley raised an eyebrow, stretched out his legs and rested them, ankles crossed, on the seat next to Søren’s knees.

“Or …”

Søren glared at him. “Or what?”

One deep winter’s night thirty years ago, after Søren had bared his body to Kingsley, he’d allowed himself to bare a sliver of his soul. He’d told Kingsley of his sister Elizabeth, what she’d done to him that night when he was a boy of eleven and she only twelve. And then, after a long pause, Søren had told Kingsley what they’d done together the next night and every night after until their father had caught them in the act.

“Perhaps it’s nostalgia.”

Søren didn’t deign to answer that with anything other than an even colder glare.

“You can’t deny jealousy would make sense as a motive for this,” Kingsley continued, taking his legs off the seat and sitting forward to return Søren’s glare.

“Jealousy? Really?”

“Don’t act so skeptical. I sent that reporter to Elizabeth to ask her questions about you. A strange woman she’d never seen before investigating her brother and what did Elizabeth do? Told her every last thing about you two.”

“Elizabeth was trying to protect me.”

“Or she was bragging.”

“I pray for you, Kingsley.”

Kingsley grinned. “Pray harder.”

“It’s not Elizabeth. She hates what happened between us as children even more than I do.”

“Hate? Really? You know you enjoyed yourself. What did you call it, that summer you two played together? Like Adam and Eve?”

Søren fell silent for a terrible moment before answering. “I said we were like Adam and Eve … in hell.”

The chauffeur opened the door and Søren got out without another word. In silence, they walked to the front door.

Before Kingsley could knock or ring the bell, the door flew open, to reveal Elizabeth standing in the vaulted foyer. Last time Kingsley had seen her, she’d looked ten years younger than her actual age. Auburn hair, violet eyes … a true New England beauty. But today she looked panicked, frantic and aged by fear.

“Thank God,” she breathed. Rushing forward, she threw her arms around Søren’s neck. Kingsley tensed, but Søren embraced her with the affection of a brother and nothing else. “Andrew called you?”

Søren pulled back. “No. No one called us. What is it?”

She ran a hand through her curly hair. “I even thought about calling the police,” she said and Kingsley’s eyes widened in surprise. Elizabeth had as good a relationship with the police as he did with reporters. Although he did recently fuck a reporter into near unconsciousness in the back of his Rolls. But that was business, not pleasure. Well … business and pleasure. Elizabeth glanced back and forth between Søren and Kingsley.

“Tell me what happened.” Søren spoke the words in his comforting pastor’s voice, although Kingsley could detect the faintest trace of fear under that calm.

Fear? Søren? Kingsley never thought he’d live to see this day.

“I’ll show you. Come with me.” Elizabeth finally noticed Kingsley. “You, too, Kingsley. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’ll take all the help I can get.”

“Always happy to be of service. We are family, after all … in a way.” He glanced at Søren, who said nothing to that. Elizabeth knew of her brother’s brief, tragic marriage to Marie-Laure, Kingsley’s sister. What she thought of it, he neither knew nor cared, but the marriage, ill-fated as it was, at least gave Søren a safe excuse to consort with the likes of him.

“I don’t know if this is a family you’d want to lay claim to,” Elizabeth said as she led them deep into the house toward the center staircase. At the top of the steps she turned left and guided them toward the east wing, the nursery wing.

Surreptitiously, Kingsley watched Søren’s face. Every room in this house held memories of the horrors of his childhood. His mother had given birth to him in her tiny room at the end of the east wing. Out of sheer willpower, she’d labored completely in silence, not willing to let Søren’s sadist of a father have the satisfaction of hearing her scream. In the library, Søren had nearly lost his life when his father had found him coupling with his sister on the floor by the fireplace.

Elizabeth led them to the last room on the left.

Søren’s childhood bedroom.

She opened the door and let the state of the room speak for itself.

“Mon Dieu …” Kingsley breathed, and covered his mouth.

In this room, an eleven-year-old Marcus Stearns had fallen asleep one night and woken up inside his own sister.

In that bed, he’d lost his virginity in an act of rape and incest.

And now someone had set that bed on fire and burned it to the floor.

On the wall, written in ashes, were the words Love Thy Sister.

“Should Kingsley …?” Elizabeth whispered.

“Kingsley knows. He’s one of two people I’ve told.”

Wincing internally, Kingsley glanced at Elizabeth’s face. Did Søren just let it slip that he had another confidant? Like her brother, Elizabeth was dangerously intelligent. Kingsley prayed she’d assumed Søren meant his own confessor. If she learned her priest-brother had seduced a girl in his congregation … the whole world would burn for it.

Elizabeth nodded. Søren only stared at the words on the wall.

“I didn’t call the police,” she continued. “I didn’t want to explain to them about us, what that meant. But I have alarms on the doors. I always arm them at night. I even have cameras on the front of the house, the driveway. No one came up. Should I call the police? I will if you say so.”

Søren slowly shook his head. “No. You shouldn’t. This is beyond them.”

“Then what—”

“Get out.” Søren faced her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Get out and take the boys with you, far away. Europe. Asia. Australia. Go abroad and stay on the move. Leave now.”

“What’s going on? Why did you come today? I found the bed like this just this morning. I sent the boys to a friend’s. Been trying to decide what to do all day.”

Søren looked back at that pile of ash where his bed had once stood, and didn’t speak.

Kingsley answered for him. “I received a photograph in the mail, taken of the two of us in our school days. It was postmarked from here. No other identifying marks. Merely a school photo, but threatening nonetheless.”

Elizabeth pulled away from the door and walked down the hallway a few steps before turning back around.

“Marcus, what’s happening?” she asked, her voice low and cold.

Kingsley stiffened. No one called Søren by his birth name of Marcus … ever. He didn’t allow it. And surely Elizabeth knew better, knew how much he hated being called by the name his father also bore. Either she was so distraught she’d forgotten, or so angry she didn’t care.

Søren looked at her and exhaled. “I don’t know, Elizabeth.”

“You’re lying to me. You know more than you’re telling me.”

“I do know more than I’m telling you. But I am not lying. I truly do not know who is behind this. Tell us everything you know.”

Shaking her head, she turned her back to them. “I have. I woke up this morning. I got out of bed. I noticed a strange smell in the house. I followed it. I checked every room. I came to this one last. I try to never go in here. You know that.”

Her brother nodded. Kingsley didn’t want to imagine what Søren felt, standing in the doorway to this room. He’d paused on the threshold like a film vampire, unable to cross without an invitation. No invitation came.

“I opened the door. I saw the bed, the words on the wall. I nearly vomited. Someone knows about us, about what happened. I racked my brain for anyone who could know. My mother is dead. Our father. Who does that leave? I told that reporter about us. But surely—”

“I know Suzanne,” Søren said. “Not only wouldn’t she do this, she couldn’t. She’s in Iraq right now.”

“That’s it. And you say Kingsley knows.” Elizabeth pointed his way. “Who else? You said he was one of two people you’d told. Who was the other?”

Søren’s jaw clenched almost imperceptibly. But Kingsley noticed.

“No one who would tell.”

“Are you sure about that?” she demanded.

“I’d stake my life on it.”

“Then that’s it.” She lifted her hands into the air before laying them on her face. “I just can’t imagine who or why … Kingsley.”

“Oui?”

“You know. Have you told anyone?”

It took all of Kingsley’s self-restraint not to level a look of utter disgust at her. He’d been a spy for the French government. A spy and so much more. Idle gossip could have gotten him killed in those days. He knew to use his mouth for activities other than gossiping.

“I have a reputation for having a tongue that gets around, ma chèrie. But not for talk. Your secret is safe with me. The only person I have told has been dead for thirty years.”

Elizabeth shook her head and exhaled. “Of course. I’m so sorry. This is the panic talking.”

“Pack, Elizabeth,” Søren ordered. “You’re wasting time. We’ll learn nothing staring at each other. Kingsley and I will find out what’s going on. Call me in a month. I’ll let you know if it’s safe to come back. Tell no one where you’re going. Not even me.”

She stared at them both a moment longer before turning and nearly running to the other wing of the house.

Kingsley opened the bedroom door again and studied the carnage. Nothing at all remained of the bed. He couldn’t even grasp how the perpetrator had managed to burn only the bed and leave nothing else damaged. Such a conflagration should have burned the house down. Ashes on the floor. Ashes on the wall. Nothing else out of place.

Love thy sister.

It sounded almost biblical. Love thy neighbor. Love the Lord thy God. What did it mean? Was it an order? Or a signature?

Love, Thy Sister.

The rest of the room remained untouched. As a child Søren had sat at that small ornate desk and practiced his English. As a quiet form of revenge, his mother had taught him Danish but not English. When his absentee father discovered his five-year-old bastard son didn’t understand a word of English, Søren’s mother had been sent back to Denmark. And every language but English had been banished from the house. Kingsley sometimes wondered if that act had been the root of Søren’s obsession with learning languages.

Next to the desk sat a bookshelf. On it were many classics of children’s literature in beautiful leather-bound editions, very likely worth a small fortune in their mint condition. Mint condition because young Marcus Stearns had never touched the books, never cracked the covers. He’d read the Bible as a child. Shakespeare, Milton. No George MacDonald or C. S. Lewis. Only Lewis Carroll’s books had gotten Søren’s attention at all. Considering Carroll’s obsession with young Alice Liddell, and a young Eleanor Schreiber’s obsession with the books, it seemed rather fitting.

Next to the bookshelf was the window that looked out on the rolling manicured lawns. A small wooded area bordered the back of the house. Søren had confided to Kingsley years ago that he and Elizabeth would often take their activities into the woods, far from the prying eyes of the household staff. There they were, just two children playing in the forest. So innocent. So bucolic and pastoral. If only the maids had known what passed between them behind the veil of those trees.

“The trees …” Kingsley said, gazing out the window onto the lawn.

“What of them?” Søren asked, still steadfastly refusing to cross the threshold and enter his old room.

“Whoever got into your room came from the trees.” Kingsley stood at the window and pointed. “He couldn’t have come through the doors. Elizabeth keeps them locked and alarmed. Had to come in the window. To avoid the cameras, he must have come through the woods. No other logical possibility.” Kingsley looked back at Søren. “Shall we?”

Søren didn’t answer. He stepped from the threshold back into the hall. Kingsley followed him down the stairs and out the rear door. They strode across the lawn in silence.

“I can go look alone if you prefer,” Kingsley offered. “I know this isn’t your favorite place.”

“It’s in the past, Kingsley. All in the past. If Elizabeth can stomach living here, I can certainly survive a day on the premises.”

“When did you come here last?”

“My father’s funeral … years ago.”

“Did you go into your room then?”

“Yes. My father was dead. It seemed a fitting celebration.”

They stopped speaking when they entered the copse of trees adjacent to Søren’s old bedroom window. The forest ground did seem recently disturbed, but with Elizabeth’s two sons living in the house, there was no telling if it had been done by them or the perpetrator.

The two men wandered a few minutes through the woods until they came to a clearing. Kingsley saw footprints in the dirt, small ones. Most likely Andrew’s—Elizabeth’s eleven-year-old son. They could belong only to a boy or a very petite woman.

Kingsley gazed up at the trees and breathed in the scents of the forest.

“Pine …” he murmured. With a deep inhalation, he took in another lungful of the clean, sweet air. Closing his eyes, he became sixteen years old again. He’d been scared that day in the forest, more scared even than today. And out of fear he’d run deep into the woods. He’d run then not to get away, but only to build the anticipation, to delay the inevitable. And to save a little face. He’d wanted it to happen, but there was no reason for Søren to know quite how much. But then … he’d been caught. He could still feel that iron grip on his neck, those fingers against his throat. The hard forest floor biting into his back and the mouth at his ear.

“Kingsley, really.”

Laughing, Kingsley looked at Søren. “I can’t help myself. The memories are too potent.”

“Try,” Søren said, although Kingsley could see the hint of a smile on his lips.

“Do you never think of it?” Kingsley asked, leaving large bootprints in the marshy soil as he strode toward him. “That night in the woods at school? That day changed us both, changed everything.”

“No good will come of us discussing this, as you know. The past must stay in the past.”

Kingsley shook his head. “Non. The past will stay in the past unless it doesn’t want to. Something in your past doesn’t want to stay there.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was Eleanor’s file that was stolen, out of the thousands of files I have. It was a photograph of you and me that I received in the mail. And it was Elizabeth’s house that was broken into and defiled. Eleanor, Elizabeth and me … What do we all have in common?”

Søren glanced down at the prints on the ground. Right next to Kingsley’s large bootprint was a much smaller bare footprint, lined up side by side.

From there Søren looked up to the heavens and closed his eyes. Kingsley said nothing and let him pray.

Slowly, Søren exhaled and opened his eyes.

“Me.”









SOUTH


For the second time that night, Nora’s jaw hit the ground and stayed there.

“Wes.”

“Nora?”

“Seriously?”

“What?”

“You said you stayed in the guesthouse.”

“This is the guesthouse.”

“It’s bigger than my house in Connecticut.”

“We have a lot of guests.”

Nora dropped her bag in the foyer and gazed around. The guesthouse looked nothing like the main house, but was no less grand in its own smaller way. The rough stone exterior masked an exquisite interior replete with plush tan and black furniture, well-matched and comfortable. Nora counted two stories, although she sensed a basement lurking underneath them. One entire wall in the living room consisted of a massive stone fireplace that climbed all the way to the ceiling.

“Wesley, this is a little ridiculous. What is this place?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“These are the old slave quarters. Refurbished, obviously.”

Nora’s eyes went wide. “Are you serious?”

He nodded. “Kentucky was a slave-holding state. We didn’t secede during the Civil War so the Emancipation Proclamation actually didn’t apply to us.”

“You’re telling me that you live in actual slave quarters? Actual slaves lived in this house?”

Wesley grimaced. “Well … if you can calling it living.”

Nora gazed around and nodded in approval. “Kinky.”

“Come on. I’ll show you your room.”

“Is it a slave room?”

“Probably.”

“Are you going to beat me and make me change my name to Toby?”

“How racist are you, Nora?”

“My lone female friend is Haitian, Wes. We like to watch Roots together and chug our vodka every time someone says Toby.”

“That’s it. Motel 6 time.”

Laughing, Nora threw her arms around Wesley again and pulled him into a hug. She couldn’t seem to stop doing that. The reality of him still shocked her. Fifteen months apart and suddenly … here he was right in front of her. In her arms. All six feet of his beautiful, twenty-year-old body. Nora sighed against his shoulder and basked in the warmth of him, the scent of him.

“Summer …” she whispered as she inhaled deeply. “You always smell like summer. Did I ever tell you that?”

Wesley chuckled and Nora smiled when his chest vibrated with the sound.

“You have. You told me that the first night I stayed at your house. You were out on the back porch sniffing the air. You said it smelled like …”

Nora looked up at him. “Søren.”

Wesley nodded. “Yeah. That guy.”

“You met him. Finally. What did you think?” Nora pulled away and sat on the back of the couch.

“I think he’s too tall.”

She crossed her legs at the ankles and smiled. “You can tell me the truth. There is no horrible thing you can say about him that I haven’t already heard or already thought and probably already said to his face.”

“Fine, then. I think he’s an asshole. He’s arrogant and cold, and he really truly believes you are his property. You get that, right? I know you kinky types like to play the property game. ‘He’s my slave.’ ‘She’s my pet.’ It isn’t that. He thinks he owns you. A hundred and fifty years ago, you’d be staying in this house when it was real slave quarters, and he would rape you and whip you whenever he felt like it.”

“Probably.” She didn’t argue, couldn’t argue. “Good thing it’s the twentieth century, right?”

“Twenty-first.”

“He’s not a bad person. He isn’t. He is, in fact, the best man on earth, not that anyone ever believes me when I tell them that.”

Wesley exhaled slowly. Nora cocked her head and smiled at him. She wasn’t sure if he saw the smile and she didn’t care. She just couldn’t look at him without smiling. That face of his, so sweet and handsome. Those sweet eyes. That goddamn too-long hair she was going to cut the second he let his guard down.

“I’ll say one nice thing about him,” Wesley finally said. “He did let you come with me.”

Nora swallowed. “There was no letting me. Wes, just the thought you were within a hundred yards of me … no army in this world or the next could have stopped me from getting to you.”

She met his eyes and saw the surprise in them. The surprise quickly changed to something else.

Wesley took a step forward. Then another. Nora didn’t make him take the third step. She stood and reached out for him and was in his arms once again. But this time no one stopped them when his lips crashed down onto hers. He tasted like summer and his touch burned her body like the sun.

His tongue sought hers with such tentativeness she nearly giggled. Poor kid. He had no idea how much he could give her, how much she would take from him. Digging her hands into his too-long hair, she pulled them even closer together, sighed into his mouth and rejoiced silently when Wesley took the hint. His hands slid down her back and cupped her bottom gently. The intimacy of his touch resonated deep within her. Some part of her had missed this … whatever it was, this tenuousness in him, this respect she felt in his hands, on his lips. He was careful with her. That was it. He touched her as if he worried he’d break her.

She’d never been with a man who hadn’t wanted to break or be broken by her.

This would take some getting used to.

“You’re so beautiful,” Wesley whispered in her ear. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since the second we broke up.”

He wove his hands into her hair and held her to his chest.

Okay, she was already used to this.

“I missed you, too. I know you might not believe that, but I missed you every damn day. I …” Nora held on to Wesley as if her life depended on it, and in that moment she thought it might. “I love Søren. I won’t lie to you. You don’t get what we have, and that’s fine. Very few people do. But when I was with you … Wesley, I liked who I was when I was with you. You make me a different person, a better person. And then you were gone and that Nora was gone, too. I missed you, yes. So fucking much. But I missed who I was with you just as much.”

Wesley kissed the top of her head. Taking her by the shoulders, he stared down at her.

“There’s only one Nora Sutherlin—the smart, funny, sweet, silly running-around-in-penguin-pajamas Nora Sutherlin who cares about writing and me and getting in two naps a day. The Nora you were with me was the real Nora, is the real Nora. Not the sadist Nora. Not the infamous Nora. Just … my Nora. If I don’t do anything else this week, I will convince you of that.”

“Good luck.” She smiled at him through tears. “That’s going to take a lot of convincing.”

“Then I better start right now.”

“It’s kind of late. Bedtime, kiddo.”

Wesley cupped the side of her face and brushed a tear off her cheek with his thumb.

“You’re right. It is late.” His hand moved from her face to her neck and down to her waist. His fingers hesitated only a moment before digging into the fabric of her T-shirt and starting to pull it up. “Let’s go to bed.”

Nora inhaled in shock and almost coughed. “Really?”

Wesley nodded and grinned.

“Really. Seriously. And I need you to believe that, ‘cause I’m not going to be able to get this off of you without a little cooperation on your part.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Nora lifted her arms and let Wesley pull her shirt off. She stood in front of him in the living room in her jeans and a black bra. She felt grimy from driving, exhausted, sore … and so turned on she could scarcely see straight. Reaching up, she unbuttoned the top button on Wesley’s wrinkled French-blue oxford shirt. “You know, I’ve always loved this color on you. Don’t know if I ever told you that.”

“You did once,” he said, running his hands up and down her arms. His fingertips on her suddenly bare skin sent shivers through her entire body. “Two years ago. That’s why I wore it.”

“You bought a French-blue shirt just to wear for me? Not even knowing if you’d see me again?”

“No.” Wesley dipped his head and kissed her quickly on the lips. “I bought five of them.”

Nora didn’t speak. She’d lost all power to. All she could do was keep unbuttoning. With each open button she pushed a little more of his shirt off his shoulders, until it came down his arms and hit the floor.

“Looks even better there than on you,” she said.

“I think all your clothes will looking amazing on the floor.”

Nora kissed his bare shoulder. “Let’s go find out.”

She reached for his hand and started to drag him toward the stairs. But he yanked her to him instead and lifted her in his arms.

“You’ve got to be kidding, Wes. I weigh a lot more than I look.”

“Yeah, you do. What’s up with that?” he asked as he carried her to the steps.

“Muscle. Pure muscle. And a pretty big ass.”

“Perfect ass.” He slapped it awkwardly and Nora giggled with luxurious, decadent happiness.

“You’re really going to carry me up the stairs? That’s so Gone with the Wind.”

“Never saw it.” Wesley mounted the wide, carpeted stairs.

“It’s a classic,” she chided. “Civil War stuff. Big dresses. Overacting. Hot nonconsensual sex.”

“It’s also four hours long. I got stuff to do.”

They arrived at the top of the stairs without incident.

“What stuff do you have to do that’s more important than watching the most legendary movie about the South ever filmed?” Nora asked as Wesley used his foot to push open the door to his bedroom.

He half laid, half threw her onto the bed, which was dressed in red-and-white sheets, and Nora sank deep into the covers.

Wesley met her eyes and slipped a hand into her hair. “Well, tonight I need to make love to you.”

Nora’s hands went momentarily numb at his words. The sweetness of them coupled with the look in his eyes crashed over her like a wave.

“Good excuse.” She ran her palms over his bare shoulders. He had such beautiful arms, such young, supple skin. For a moment she actually felt self-conscious of her thirty-four-year-old body.

“What?” he asked as she swept her fingers through his long, dark blond hair. “What’s wrong?”

“Your hair.”

Grinning, Wesley shook his head. “I’ll get it cut tomorrow. I swear.”

“Good. But that’s not it. You don’t have a single gray hair.”

Wesley rolled his eyes. “Neither do you, Nora.”

“Yeah, and I pay three hundred dollars every six weeks to keep it that way.”

For a moment his smile faltered. “I didn’t know you colored your hair.”

She shrugged. “Have to. Trademark black hair. Not trademark black-with-more-gray-than-I’d-care-to-admit-to hair. I’m thirty-four. You know that, right?”

“Of course I know. I don’t care about our age difference. I was just … I didn’t know you colored your hair, is all. Can you go red next time? I have a thing for red.”

Nora grinned. “How about we trade? I’ll get blond hair and you can go black.”

“Would it bring out the brown in my eyes?” he asked, and playfully batted his eyelashes.

“Don’t do that,” she teased. “You look like you’re having a seizure.”

“Oh, sorry.” Wesley’s eyelashes started behaving themselves again. “Where were we? I think we missed talking to each other so much, it’s getting in the way of the … you know. Not talking.”

“We don’t have to do this tonight. If you’re tired or if you want to talk … I’m not leaving you. I’m here. I’m with you. I don’t care if your dad already hates me. I’ve been hated by the best. I can take it.”

“No. I want to do this. I’ve wanted to do this since the day I saw you at Yorke.”

Nora pressed her lips to the hollow of his throat.

“Okay. We can do this. If you’ve been waiting for two years now …”

“Two years? I’ve been waiting twenty.” Wesley grinned sheepishly at her.

For the third time that night Nora’s eyes went wide with shock and her mouth dropped open in surprise.

She pushed back against the bed and scrambled into a sitting position.

“Nora … what?”

“Wesley? You’re still a virgin?”









NORTH

The Past


Maine. Kingsley hated Maine. The weather, the people, the absolute lack of … anything. Anything at all worth living for. Hated it. Loathed it. Could find nothing redeeming about the place at all.

So why could he not stop smiling lately?

Spring came early that year. The snow began to melt and the browns and greens of the forest floor proved their resilience again. After one week of not winter, spring fever hit the school and the entire student body—all forty-seven of them—poured onto the one flat patch of ground, bringing with them baseballs and footballs.

Footballs? Kingsley rolled his eyes. He would show these stupid American boys real football. From under his dorm bed, he pulled out his soccer ball and took it to the lawn. With the other boys tossing Frisbees and American footballs back and forth to each other, Kingsley stood alone off to the side and started juggling the ball with his knees. For fun he’d switch legs, switch from knee to ankle, left to right, and then back again. When a few minutes passed and the ball hadn’t stopped, hadn’t fallen to the ground, he began to acquire an audience. The audience of fellow students started to tease him, chide him, as they tried to break his concentration. But Kingsley could do this, had done this trick for over an hour once. For some reason he thought better when juggling the soccer ball. His mind cleared and everything he worried about disappeared—his parents now gone, his grandparents elderly and worried about him, his sister, Marie-Laure, a struggling ballerina in Paris. She wrote him letters constantly, tearstained letters he could hardly bear to read. Her grief, her desperation … she swore she’d go mad if she couldn’t see him again soon. He almost believed her.

But when alone with the soccer ball, she and everyone else disappeared.

Almost everyone else.

One face refused to dissipate from Kingsley’s mind. One infuriatingly handsome face that he noticed out of the corner of his eye, watching him along with every other boy at the school. Unlike the others, Stearns didn’t catcall him or do anything to break his focus. But the eyes alone, that simple stare of his, nearly caused Kingsley to drop the ball.

Left knee. Right knee. Right knee. Left knee.

Kingsley kept bouncing, kept breathing.

Just to elicit an “ohhh” from the audience and maybe to impress Stearns a little, Kingsley popped the ball into the air and bounced it off the top of his head and back to his knee. He popped it up again and let it rest a second on the back of his neck before sending it up again and back to his knee.

Right knee. Right knee. Left knee. Left ankle. Right knee.

“So can you actually play soccer, King?” Christian asked. “Or do you just play with your balls all day.”

“I can play,” Kingsley said without elaborating. He could do more than play. Back in Paris, he’d been the best in the school. He’d already been scouted by the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club and had every intention of joining them as soon as he came of age. But that was before the accident, before Maine. “The problem is, no one else here can play against me.”

“Sorry. We’re all Americans,” Christian teased. “We play real football.”

Kingsley laughed. Left ankle. Right ankle. “You should be sorry. I had an entire team on me once trying to keep me from the goal. Still made it.”

“Really?” Derek demanded. “A whole team?”

“Felt like it,” Kingsley said, grinning. “But what does it matter? None of you know how to play. So I’ll just play with myself.” He winked at Christian and for a few minutes the conversation was peppered with nothing but masturbation jokes.

Right knee. Right knee. Right knee. Left.

Oohs. Ahhs. Teasing. Laughter.

“I know how to play.”

In the shock of the silence that followed, Kingsley dropped the ball.

The twenty assembled students collectively turned their heads toward Stearns.

“You can play soccer?” Kingsley picked the soccer ball up off the ground. Stearns’s words had stunned everyone so thoroughly that not a single person teased Kingsley about dropping the ball after nearly ten minutes of juggling.

“I went to school in England.” Stearns slipped off his jacket and started to roll up his sleeves.

Kingsley could only stare at him, at his forearms he slowly unveiled with each turn of his cuff.

“But … you play piano.” Kingsley had no idea what that meant, only that he’d assumed a musician could not also be an athlete.

Stearns didn’t answer. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited. Everyone remained silent. Kingsley could feel the tension, the waiting expectation in the air. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. Stearns raised an eyebrow, and in his steel-gray eyes, Kingsley noted something he hadn’t seen before—amusement. Not only did Stearns clearly know how uncomfortable he made Kingsley, but he enjoyed it, too. The amusement annoyed Kingsley. Beyond annoyed him, it pissed him the hell off. Who was this guy who delighted in making people uncomfortable? What kind of sadist was he?

Stearns raised his blond eyebrow a millimeter higher. A smile played upon the corner of his perfect lips.

“School in England, oui?” Kingsley asked.

“Oui,” Stearns said. The eyebrow inched even higher. The smile spread over his entire mouth.

“That would explain your pretentious accent.”

A gasp rippled through the crowd. Kingsley realized he must have been the very first student to ever talk back to Stearns. If only, perhaps, because Stearns never seemed to talk to anyone.

“And who are we to talk pretentious accents?” Stearns asked, employing an exaggerated faux French accent. The accent sounded just like Kingsley’s natural way of speaking. He could speak English without his French accent, but it exhausted him so he seldom bothered trying. Especially since girls swooned over his French accent. Too bad Stearns seemed immune to its charms.

“Très bien,” Kingsley said. “Can you play as well as you talk?”

“We can find out. Drop the ball.” Stearns took a step forward.

“We don’t have a field.”

“Make one up.”

Kingsley glanced around. They really didn’t need a field, as they didn’t even have teams. With two players all they really needed was a goal.

“The trees …” Kingsley nodded toward two trees at the end of the field. “That’s our goal. I’ll try to score. You try to stop me.”

“You said you scored with an entire team on you. Surely you can score against only me.”

“Bien sûr.” Of course he could. Offense had been his forte.

“Then drop the ball.” Stearns took another step forward. The assembled students took a step back.

Kingsley couldn’t believe quite believe this was happening. The entire school watched in awed silence.

He dropped the ball.

At first Kingsley was afraid he’d been conned. Stearns didn’t move a muscle, only stared at him. Kingsley lifted his left foot in readiness to kick the ball.

Stearns beat him to it.

The ball sailed across the field, and out of instinct and training, Kingsley went after it. Stearns stayed right next to him, right next to the ball. Kingsley thought this game would be a lock. No pianist, no matter how tall or intimidating, should be able to give him any competition. But Stearns had the longer legs, the concentration and some incredible athletic ability of his own. Shoulder to shoulder they ran down the field. Just when Kingsley thought he had control of the ball, Stearns would kick out his foot and take possession again. Kingsley had never played with someone so aggressive before—aggressive and calm. A terrifying combination. Terrifying but also exhilarating. He’d never been this close to Stearns before. He could hear his breathing—loud but slow. He could smell the scent of his skin—winter tinged with heat. In the middle of such a vicious volley for the ball, there was no reason Kingsley should notice that Stearns had unusually dark eyelashes for having such pale blond hair. But he noticed. He noticed everything.

They neared the two trees they’d declared their goal. Kingsley swept his foot out, got the ball back and with one elegant kick let it soar toward the trees. No stopping it now. He started to smile.

But Stearns went into high gear. His long legs outpaced the ball’s high, arching flight, and with his hands outstretched, he caught it before it could pass between the trees.

The assembled crowd exploded into impressed laughter and cheers. Kingsley could only stare at Stearns, who held the ball in one hand, quietly smiling.

“You can’t be goalie and defender, too.” Kingsley glared at him.

“Why not? You didn’t set any rules. You simply named the goal and told me to stop you from getting the ball there. Done.”

“It’s not fair.”

“Then we’ll do it again.”

Stearns dropped the ball and bounced it on his ankle and then to his knee.

Right foot. Right foot. Right ankle. Right foot.

Kingsley said nothing, only watched. Stearns wasn’t just good at handling the soccer ball, he was as good as Kingsley himself.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to play anymore.”

“Because you lost the point?” Stearns asked, kicking the ball back into the air and catching it with one hand. Every move he made seemed designed to dazzle with the sheer effortlessness of it. Kingsley could make magic on a soccer field, but he had to work his ass off for every point. Stearns had barely broken a sweat.

“Because there is no point. You’ll play however you like and win no matter what I do.”

“Possibly. But if you set the rules, I’ll follow them.”

Kingsley shook his head, snatched the ball out of midair and started for the dorm.

“New rule—find someone else to beat.”

Kingsley left the field with all eyes on him as he departed. But he didn’t care about them. He only cared that Stearns watched him. Kingsley didn’t even know where his burst of anger had come from. Stearns was right—Kingsley hadn’t set any rules. But still, Stearns infuriated him. He was perfect. Kingsley had never met anyone smarter, more handsome, more talented…. He seemed unreal, like an angel or some sort of mythical creature. Kingsley loathed Stearns for it, for his beauty, his perfection … loathed him, desired him, ached for him all at once. The anger on the field—it hadn’t been anger at all, Kingsley realized, as he reached the dorm room and collapsed onto his bed. It was frustration.

The frustration worsened as the minutes passed and Kingsley replayed the entire scenario in his mind, while he gazed up at the ceiling of the dorm room and counted the cracks in the plaster. It could have been his chance to finally get close to Stearns. After all, Stearns never spoke to anyone but the priests, never consorted with any of the other students. Rarely if ever did he speak to a classmate unless the brave soul spoke to him first. And here Stearns had voluntarily joined him for some soccer. And Kingsley had ruined it.

“You’re good.”

Kingsley turned his head toward the source of the voice. Stearns stood in the doorway of the room.

Shrugging, Kingsley looked back up at the ceiling. His heart pounded in his chest, his breath quickened. He forced himself not to think about the reasons why.

“So are you. You played a lot in England?”

Stearns stepped into the room and came toward Kingsley’s bed.

“I did. But I haven’t played in a long time. I was ten when I left that school.”

Groaning, Kingsley sat up and crossed his legs. “This is why everyone hates you, you know. Because you’re so damn perfect. You haven’t played soccer in seven years and you’re better than me. I was scouted by the Paris Saint-Germain. That’s a professional team.”

Stearns didn’t say anything at first. Kingsley waited and stared.

“Everyone hates me?”

He didn’t sound hurt when he asked the question, but Kingsley immediately wanted to go back in time and take it back. He wanted to take everything back—the display of temper on the field, the angry words, the frustration that drove him closer and closer to the breaking point every day.

“Non, pas du tout,” Kingsley said, exploding into a flurry of French. For some reason, he felt only in French could he apologize effusively enough. “No one hates you. I just said that out of … well, I don’t hate you. I just wish I hated you.”

Stearns came even closer. He sat on the bed opposite Kingsley.

“Why do you wish you hated me?” Stearns leveled a stare at him and Kingsley once again noted the dark lushness of his eyelashes and how they made his gray eyes seem even more impenetrable.

Kingsley sighed. He dropped the soccer ball on the floor between them. Gently, he toed the ball and let it roll toward Stearns. Stearns set his foot on top of it to hold it stationary.

“What are you?” Kingsley asked, not knowing what he meant by the question, but needing the answer.

Stearns seemed to understand the question even if Kingsley didn’t. He sighed and tapped the ball so it gently rolled toward Kingsley.

“Father Pierre, the priest who taught me French, he had a theory about me.”

“Was it that you’re the Second Coming of Christ? If so, I’ve already heard that one.”

Stearns said nothing, only glared at Kingsley with his lips a thin, disapproving line.

“I’m sorry. Seriously, tell me his theory. I want to know.”

“Father Pierre had a photographic memory. He had the Bible committed entirely to memory—French and English. He could recall nearly everything he’d ever read decades after one glance. Amazing.”

“So you have a photographic memory?”

Stearns shook his head. “No, not at all. It’s different for me. If I do something once, do it well, I know how to do it … completely, almost intuitively. If I kick a soccer ball, my body understands the game. I learned the scales on the piano and somehow knew how to play. Father Pierre believed I have photographic muscle memory.”

“Football involves your feet. The piano your hands. Father Pierre’s theory doesn’t explain how you’re so good at languages.” Kingsley tapped the ball and sent it back to Stearns.

“But it does. The tongue is a muscle.”

Stearns said the words simply. Of course. Of course the tongue was a muscle. But the implications of the words … That Stearns could use his tongue once for something—a kiss, perhaps—and would forever know the perfect way to kiss …

“I lied,” Kingsley said softly. “I do hate you.”

Stearns only smiled again. “Why?”

“You …” Kingsley stopped. “I think about you too much.”

“That is a problem.” Stearns rolled the ball to him once more.

“Oui. Une grande probleme. I should be thinking about so many things … school, my sister in Paris, my parents, Theresa, Carol, Susan, Jeannine …”

“Who are they?”

Kingsley smiled. “Girlfriends.”

Stearns eyes widened slightly. “All of them?”

Nodding, Kingsley answered, “Oui. Or were. Before I came here. They write me letters, though. Wonderful terrible letters. I could sell those letters at this school and make enough money to pay my own tuition here.” Kingsley wagged his eyebrow at Stearns. “These girls … they want me. I wanted them.”

“Wanted? Past tense?”

“Past tense. Oui. I can barely remember what they look like now. I want to believe it’s because of what happened that I forgot them. But it isn’t.” Kingsley glanced at Stearns and then back at the floor. He barely touched the ball with his toe and the ball rolled between Stearns’s feet.

“What happened to you?”

“The football team. American football, not real football,” Kingsley clarified. “I had this girl—beautiful girl. And she had a brother. A very large brother. He found out we were together, that I’d taken his sweet sister’s innocence….” Kingsley almost laughed out loud just saying the words. Theresa? Innocent? The girl had spread her legs for half the school before he’d gotten to her. But Theresa hadn’t just spread for Kingsley, she’d fallen in love with him. And when he’d slept with another girl the next night … then she went crying to her brother.

Kingsley told Stearns the entire story … the hand on the back of his neck in the parking lot behind the stadium. The seven football players who’d surrounded him … the knife that Troy had drawn on him … the deep slash to his chest that had ultimately saved his life.

“A knife? You were cut?” Stearns cocked his head to the side and gave Kingsley a long, enigmatic look.

“Oh, oui. You haven’t seen the scar?” Kingsley yanked his T-shirt off over his head. He moved to the other bed and sat next to Stearns. “Lovely, no?”

Angling himself toward Stearns, Kingsley displayed the wound on his chest. The gash had mostly healed, after careful stitching and treatment, but a two-inch-long white line of scar tissue still decorated the skin over his heart.

Stearns said nothing, only studied the scar. Slowly, he raised his hand and with a fingertip caressed it from tip to tip. Kingsey held perfectly still and didn’t let himself move or breathe. How could he? Stearns was touching him. The words echoed in his mind: Stearns was touching him … Stearns was …

Kingsley leaned forward and pressed his lips to Stearns’s mouth.

And for one perfect second, Stearns let him leave them there.

Once that perfect second passed, Kingsley found himself flat on his back, his hands by his head, his wrists pinned hard and fast into the mattress. Stearns gripped his wrists so tightly that Kingsley thought he heard something crack inside his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I don’t know what …”

He struggled against Stearns’s viselike grip, but no amount of pushing back could free him. Stearns held himself steady overtop of Kingsley, one knee on the bed, one foot on the floor, and pushed him deeper and deeper into the mattress.

Stearns’s face hovered only six inches from his own. The pain in his wrists, the fear in his heart, all threatened to send Kingsley into a panic. But underneath the panic he felt something else—a strange calm, a sense of surrender. As much as Kingsley wanted Stearns, he would be content letting him do anything to him, even kill him.

“I’m sorry,” Kingsley repeated. “I—”

“Stop talking.” Stearns spoke the words coldly, calmly, and Kingsley obeyed immediately. He pushed up again and Stearns pushed back down with even greater force.

“Stop moving.”

Kingsley froze.

Waited.

Realized he’d never been so aroused in his entire life.

Looking up into Stearns’s eyes, Kingsley noticed the pupils had dilated hugely. And Stearns’s perfectly pale skin had flushed slightly. The exertions on the soccer field hadn’t caused half the reaction that simply holding him down on the bed clearly did.

“You are playing a very dangerous game, Kingsley.” Stearns lowered his voice as he spoke the threat, and every nerve in Kingsley’s body tightened.

He remained silent as ordered. Stearns’s thumb moved to press into the pulse point on Kingsley’s right wrist. The touch was so surprising, so suddenly gentle, that Kingsley moaned with the pleasure of it. A soft moan, barely audible. But Stearns clearly heard it, for his hooded eyes widened once more.

“You aren’t afraid of me right now.” A statement, not a question, and yet Kingsley heard the question underneath the words. Why?

“There’s nothing you could do to me now that I wouldn’t want.”

Stearns looked Kingsley up and down, as if he realized an alien lay beneath him instead of a person.





Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Получить полную версию книги.


Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/tiffany-reisz/the-prince/) на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.