Søren began to move in her.
She wrapped her arms and legs around him, dug her fingernails into his back and scored his skin. He bit at her neck and breasts, dug his fingers into her skin. Her body came alive with pain, pain that turned to pleasure as he continued his assault on her. She pressed her heels into the bed and arched back into his hips. When she came, she came hard. The orgasm racked her back. The pleasure spiked through her, clawed at her and cut into her like the sharpest of knives.
Søren kept thrusting and she clung to him in love and desperation. At moments like this, he was lost to himself, lost in the shadows that hid beneath his heart. Rarely did he let himself go, and when he did it was only with her. Nora lay beneath him and let him use her body as a vessel for his need. When he came at last, it was with a final thrust so fierce Nora knew she would be bruised inside from the force of it. He gasped her name as his whole body shuddered in her arms.
Nora held Søren as they lay intertwined, his body still embedded in hers. For a long time they said nothing, merely lying together content in their silence and their nearness to each other.
“You’re shaking, Eleanor,” Søren finally said, touching her cheek with his lips.
“A little. I’m just cold,” she admitted. Nora ran her hands through Søren’s hair and kissed his forehead.
“You’re shaking too.” His arms, his back trembled beneath her hands.
“Not from cold,” he confessed. She knew why, and he needed to say no more. “You belong to me … always.”
“Always,” she repeated.
“I will do whatever I must so you can come back to me.”
“I know you will, sir.”
“And we will keep our promise to each other.”
Nora reached up and touched his face.
“I will die in my collar.” She repeated her part of the pledge.
Søren turned his head and kissed the inside of her palm.
“And I will die in mine.”
Suzanne sat cross-legged on her sofa with her laptop open on her legs. She’d started a file on her computer called Asterisk and in it she was putting all the information she could dig up on Sacred Heart and Father Marcus Stearns. So far, it was a very small file. Patrick had gotten almost no additional information on the boy who’d attempted suicide in the sanctuary. No charges had been filed and the boy apparently still attended church there. What sort of kid would keep going back to the same church that had inspired him to kill himself? she wondered. Who was this priest who had that sort of pull on him? It turned her stomach just to imagine it.
She was dangerously close to thinking about her brother Adam when her cell phone rang. She checked the number. Patrick, of course.
“Any luck?” he asked as soon as she answered.
“Not much. This guy is a ghost. What about you?”
She heard a laugh on the other end of the line.
“What?” she demanded.
“I’m about to go into a dinner meeting so I can’t really talk. But you’ll never guess who goes to Sacred Heart. Not just goes but apparently never misses Sunday Mass.”
Suzanne exhaled noisily. She didn’t have time for games.
“I don’t know. The Dalai Lama?”
“Even better—Nora Sutherlin.”
Suzanne’s eyes widened and her stomach did a small flip.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’ve gotta run. I’ll call you back tomorrow. But no, I’m not kidding you.”
Hanging up, Suzanne simply stared out at her living room for a long time. She closed her computer and headed over to her bookcase. Scanning the titles, she finally found what she was looking for—a book entitled The Red. On the cover was a picture of a woman’s beautiful pale hands tied with a bloodred silk ribbon. The author? Nora Sutherlin. It was the story of a woman who owned a failing art gallery called The Red and the mysterious man who shows up and offers to save it in return for her submitting to him in every possible way for one year. Lurid and graphic with some of the most explicit sex scenes she’d ever read, The Red was possibly one of Suzanne’s favorite novels. Not that she ever told anyone that.
A fourteen-year-old boy attempting suicide in the middle of the sanctuary … the world’s most infamous erotica author attending Mass with the constancy of a nun … and that mysterious asterisk by the name of its priest.
“Jesus,” she breathed. “What kind of church is this?”
4
Søren made love to Nora twice more that night. He pulled her to the edge of the bed and took her while she lay on her stomach and he stood behind her. And after that they lay side by side, her back to his chest while he moved slowly and gently in her. As he thrust into her, he whispered how deeply he loved her, how much he would miss her and what he would do to her when she came back to him again. When Nora came the final time, she did so through tears.
“Hush, little one … it’s only for two months,” he promised her as he kissed the tears off her face.
She clung to him and cried even harder. “But I miss you already.”
Her tears dried, Nora lounged before the fireplace in the living room—Søren had built a low fire to warm her up again—and smiled at the sight before her. As if Søren hadn’t tortured her enough already tonight….
Studying the board on the floor before her, peering at it first through her left eye and then her right, Nora reached out and moved a pawn two spaces forward.
“Little one,” Søren said with thinly disguised disgust. “That was pointless.”
“Well, it wasn’t a step backward so we’ll consider it a step forward. Besides, I’m only playing chess with you to keep you awake longer,” she admitted. “I’m terrible at this game and you know it.”
“I do indeed.” Søren moved his queen. Checkmate.
“Fine. You win,” Nora conceded. “I’d kick your ass if we were playing Battleship though. That’s my game.”
“Battleship?”
Nora smiled. Søren had had such an unusual childhood that things she took for granted—silly board games, Saturday morning cartoons—Søren had no experience with. At age five he’d been sent to England to attend school. An unpleasant incident with a fellow student forced him back to America at age ten. A far more unpleasant incident at his home ended with him being shipped off to a Jesuit boarding school in rural Maine when he was only eleven. But it was there among the priests and monks that Søren found not only his salvation, but
