Текст книги "The Queen"

Автор книги: Tiffany Reisz

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“My answer is...no,” he said. “I can’t support this choice you’ve made. The work you do is too dangerous, and I love you too much to allow you to do it. If you were mine again, I would order you to quit.”

Nora already knew that was his answer, but hearing it reopened the wound she’d been trying to ignore for three years since she left him.

“So we’re at a stalemate,” she said, glancing over at Søren’s chessboard sitting on the bookshelf.

“Perhaps it’s time to break the stalemate,” Søren said.

“How?” Nora looked up at him.

Søren didn’t speak for a moment. He was weighing his words.

“I told you when I had my accident, I was on my way home from dinner with someone. That someone was the superior of my province.”

“Hot date?”

“Not quite. I’ve been asked to take my Final Vows.”

Nora’s brow furrowed in confusion.

“I thought you told them no years ago.”

“The last time they asked me was shortly after you left me.”

Nora sat very still and felt the weight of his decision heavy on her. She understood what it meant if he were to say yes. Final Vows were a big deal for a Jesuit. Jesuits usually took them twenty or more years after entering the order. When a priest’s life and ministry was examined by his peers and superiors and found worthy, he was invited to take his Final Vows. Søren had told her once that it was similar to a teacher being offered tenure.

If Søren took his Final Vows, he would be committing to remaining in the priesthood until he died. She understood it meant he would never again ask and/or order her to marry him. She understood it meant he had made his mind up about the rest of his life, and it didn’t include marriage or children, which she couldn’t blame him for as she didn’t want those things, either. But she wanted to make no more vows ever, no more promises she couldn’t keep. A vow was the opposite of freedom and she shrank from the very thought of it.

“The ceremony’s one week from Sunday.”

“So you’re going to do it?” she asked.

“Give me a reason to say no,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll tell them yes.”

Nora couldn’t look at him. She turned her head and stared at the chessboard again. Søren had taught her the game years ago. They’d often play when she’d spent the night with him after the kink and the sex were out of their systems. Although she always considered chess with Søren a sort of kink. He always beat her when they played. Except that one time she punished him for making her play by swallowing a pawn.

“Little One? Where are you?”

“Here,” she said. “I’m here with you.”

He pinched her nose. This time she couldn’t give him the smile he wanted.

“I want you to be there. Will you do that for me?”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said, her head still in his lap, his hand still on the back of her neck.

“Are you worried things will change between us after I take the vows?”

“Won’t they?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ll start keeping your vow of chastity, won’t you?”

“You left me, Eleanor, and you said yourself you’re not coming back.”

“That’s a yes, isn’t it?”

The pause between her question and his answer was the longest pause she’d ever lived through but if that thrumming empty air, that painful fermata, had gone on forever, it still wouldn’t have been long enough for her. She could have lived her entire life quite happily without hearing his answer. Someday she would learn never to ask questions she didn’t want the answer to.

“Yes.”

26

Snow in August

NORA TURNED ON the light in Søren’s bedroom and pulled down the covers on the bed.

“You’re staying the night,” Søren said. Not a question, a statement of fact.

“I’d stay until you were healed completely if I could. You know that, right?” she said, resting her head on his chest. He wrapped his good arm around her.

“A fool’s errand, Little One. If you waited until all my wounds were healed, you would be here forever.”

She didn’t tell him that was the point. She merely turned her face up to his and let him kiss her.

“I have something to show you,” he said.

“If it’s what I think it is, I’ve seen it before.”

“Behave, Eleanor. It was a gift from Laila,” Søren said. “It’s on the bedside table.”

The table in question sat between the bed and the wall of his upstairs bedroom. On it sat a little metal contraption. It appeared to be some sort of mobile no bigger than his hand. Tiny silver snowflakes dangled off fan blades suspended over a votive candle.

“It’s a spinner,” Søren explained. “You light the candle on the base. When the heat from the wick rises, the blades turn. Try it.”

Nora took a lighter from the bedside table and lit the candle. In only seconds the fan blades started to turn and the silver snowflakes rotated like a carousel. Søren reached past her and turned off the lamp.

She glanced around the darkened bedroom and smiled, delighted as a child as the light danced in the dark room.

“It looks like it’s snowing,” she said. “Indoors. In August.”

“A little Scandinavian magic,” he said. “Laila collects the spinners. At Christmas the house is full of them. A fire hazard but quite pretty at night.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said, as she slipped into bed to lie next to him. Together they watched the magic of snow indoors in August. But it wasn’t magic, merely an illusion. But if that were true, why did she smell snow?

Søren slid his bare leg over her hip and she said, “Stop.”

“Why?”

“You’ll hurt yourself,” she said as he ignored her stop. He rose up on his uninjured left arm, his right arm at her side. Even in the dark she could see his eyes watching her.

“I’m already hurt.” He dipped his head and kissed her. She didn’t say stop again.

She felt a thousand things as he kissed her—the fear of hurting him was first and foremost. Whenever she started to put her arms around his back she remembered his injuries and stopped herself. She placed her hands over her head and clung to the headboard instead of him. She felt other fears, as well. The fear of hurting herself. Kissing like this, deep kissing in bed at night, was the province of lovers, not ex-lovers. Ex-lovers could fuck on occasion without it meaning much of anything. But this was nothing but kissing and nothing but kissing was so much more than sex.

“Come back to me...” Søren whispered the words against her lips.

“I can’t.”

“It can’t snow indoors in August either, can it?” he asked as the magic snowflakes flickered and twinkled across the bed and over the ceiling and walls. He didn’t wait for an answer before kissing her again.

She pushed her hips against him. He wasn’t aroused. Of course not. Kissing wouldn’t arouse him unless he also hurt her. She only wished he knew that kissing her like this, as if she was the only woman in the world, hurt worse than a beating.

“If I come back to you, wearing your collar, submitting to you again, what’s to stop you from ordering me to give up everything I worked for—my name, my freedom, my job, my house, my whole life...?”

Søren ran the tip of his tongue from the base of her throat, up her neck and to her lips. Against them he whispered one word...

“Nothing.”

They were at an impasse. An impossible impasse not even General Hannibal and all the elephants in the world could traverse. She would not go back to him unless he let her be Nora. He would not take her back unless she became Eleanor again. They both wanted each other but apparently not enough to cede any ground to the other. Nothing left to do so Nora attempted retreat. Søren wouldn’t let her go, however. He twined their legs together, pressed his chest to her back. There would be no eluding his arms tonight, not that she wanted to. Tonight she was his prisoner. Tomorrow morning she would escape him again.

She slept fitfully, plagued by dreams of death, hers and his. She woke once with a start, disoriented in the darkness. The candle had burned itself out. The magic show was over. Next to her Søren slept, his eerily dark eyelashes resting lightly on his pale skin. He didn’t like being touched in his sleep but she couldn’t resist one small kiss on his slightly parted lips. He made the smallest sound in the back of his throat and she felt his erection against her thigh. She laughed softly, almost soundlessly, and laid her head back on the pillow. He couldn’t get hard from making out with her for half an hour, but let him fall asleep for a few hours and there it was...boys will be boys. Now she knew how Ruth felt lying next to Boaz on the threshing floor.

Her body vibrated with laughter as she remembered a better time. Søren’s eyelashes fluttered and opened. He moved on top of her and without thinking, Nora opened her legs to him. She was still slick and wet inside from her earlier arousal. Being near him, naked and in his bed, was the source of her aching arousal and when he penetrated her fully she cried out as much in surprise as pleasure. Nora took all of him she could into her. When it wasn’t enough she begged for more.

“Hurt me,” she murmured against his skin. “Please?”

“No.”

“Please...”

“No.” He kept thrusting, thrusting hard but not hard enough to hurt her. This must have tortured him as much as it tortured her. He needed pain, craved it, thrived on it. To deny her pain was to deny his pleasure.

He’d woken up hard. It happened sometimes, especially in the morning. But without more pain he might not be able to come. She feared he intended to punish her as she’d punished Kingsley—sex but no orgasm, coupling with no consummation.

“You slapped me our first night together.” She was so wet she felt it dripping onto the sheets beneath her, could hear it when he pulled back and pushed in. “You did it before you took my virginity.”

“I’ll do it again when you come back to me. Not before.”

“You’re only punishing yourself.”

“And yet it’s you who is begging...”

Nora shifted beneath him, tilting her hips so that his cock was in the deepest part of her, hitting her cervix painfully. Better. Her head fell back and she moaned. Yes...this is what she wanted from him...to be used, hurt, taken, ravished, impaled, invaded, breached and violated. She let herself be weak because he was so strong and to fight it would be futile. She didn’t want to fight it. She’d broken a teenage boy last night, taken his virginity, and she submitted to Søren as her penance. It was no great punishment to watch him fuck her, all the hardness of his body, his arms and stomach and long thighs, against and inside the softness of her. She couldn’t lose this...she needed it...she was so close...

“Please hurt me, sir...”

“No,” he said again. If there were a crueler word in the world than that one she’d never heard it.

Maybe his own pain was enough. It had to be hurting him, moving like this when half his back was black and purple. She lifted her hips again and again into his, seeking release. But it was too late. It was over. Søren pulled out of her, his erection already gone.

Nora lay panting, overwhelmed with the realization of what had just happened, what they’d just attempted. The failure hung over the bed like a poison cloud.

“You’re punishing me,” she said. The words sounded hollow in the room. They rang off the walls and back against the bed.

“I am.”

“Because I left you? Or because I won’t come back?”

“Because I can.”

“And you wonder why I left you...”

“Don’t lie to yourself, Eleanor. And don’t lie to me. The pain wasn’t why you left. The pain was why you stayed.”

She didn’t argue with him because she couldn’t. He turned his back to her and once more became a wall of silence, a wall of stone. Closing her eyes, Nora slipped her hand down her body and against her clitoris. He’d left her slick and sore and empty, and she had to come or she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She dipped her fingertip into her own wetness and touched herself until the pleasure hit its peak and her muscles contracted around the nothing inside her.

Spent now, she considered leaving. Leaving tonight, this minute. Getting up, getting dressed and walking out without another word. He’d fucked her and hadn’t finished to prove a point. When he was inside her it wasn’t his come or his cock she begged for but his pain. If she were to do something so foolish as to fall in love with someone vanilla, this was what she could expect...endless frustration. It would leave her as unfulfilled as her body was right now. It would leave her always wanting more.

She could leave. She should leave.

Or she could go back to sleep and leave him in the cold light of morning. That would hurt him more so that’s what she did.

When she woke again it was to sunlight in an otherwise empty bed. Not an empty house, however. She heard Søren’s voice but not only his voice.

In a panic she grabbed the nearest clothes she could find, one of his shirts, and threw it on. She crept over to Søren’s closet, shutting herself in as silently as she could.

Through an air duct she could hear the voices. Søren’s she recognized. The other she didn’t. It was a male voice, however. It could be another priest. Oh, that would be bad. Or the bishop. Worst-case scenario.

The voices stopped. Nora heard footsteps approaching. The closet door swung open.

Søren looked at her with a cocked eyebrow.

“Is he gone?” she whispered.

“If only I had a camera,” he said. “Kingsley’s Red Queen hiding in my closet between a cassock and a garment bag.”

“Oh, shut up. Is he gone?”

“He is. He was delivering a plant.”

“A plant? I had a panic attack over a goddamn fern?”

“It was a ficus.”

“If we’re going to destroy your career in the church, I hope it’s over something better than a ficus.”

“It’s a very nice ficus.”

“Can I come out of your closet now?” she asked.

“No. For one thing...is this really the best you could do?” Søren asked. “The closet?”

“I assumed under the bed was the first place they’d look.”

“Yes, considering these were on top of the bed.” He held up a pair of underwear. Hers.

She grabbed them out of his hand.

“Sorry. I’m a little out of practice,” she said. “I used to be better at this.”

“Better at what?”

“Leaving before sunrise. I’ll go now before anyone else shows up with another fern.”

“Ficus.”

Nora pushed past him and found her jeans over the back of the armchair and her shirt hanging on the doorknob. When she was still Søren’s sub, she knew better than this. She’d put her clothes right next to her side of the bed so she could find them in an instant and dress. They’d had a couple close calls before. Diane had come to Søren’s with church emergencies while she and Søren were in bed together. Once while Søren was inside her. They’d both stayed calm. Nora had dressed as quickly and quietly as she could while Søren went downstairs. Then she’d sunk to the floor between the bed and the wall, out of sight. Rule number one was “leave the bedroom door open.” If the door was closed, it would raise suspicion. An open door meant he had nothing to hide. If someone came into the bedroom she could slip under the bed. But that wouldn’t happen because no one would suspect a priest of hiding a lover in a room with the door wide-open, right?

Søren walked over to her and took her clothes out of her hands.

“What?” she demanded.

“I need your help.”

“After that stunt you pulled last night? You’re on your own, Blondie.”

“It involves putting a knife to my throat.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“Now you’re talking.”

Five minutes later Nora sat on the bathroom counter with Søren standing between her knees. She held a straight razor in her hand and she ran it carefully down Søren’s cheek, wet with shaving soap.

“I thought you were Mister Ambidextrous,” she said, rinsing the shaving soap of the blade.

“I trust my left hand for eating, not for shaving with a straight razor.”

“You could use a normal razor like a normal person. I’m kinky and I love playing with knives as much as the next dominatrix, but you don’t catch me shaving my legs with a straight razor.”

“Sentimental value. It belonged to my grandfather.”

“Which one?”

“My mother’s father. I never met my paternal grandfather. He died before I was born.”

She tilted Søren’s chin up to shave along his throat.

“Do you know anything about him?”

“He was an English baron and a raging alcoholic who very likely abused my father as much as my father abused my sister.”

Nora rinsed off the straight razor again and turned Søren’s head to the left.

“Does that change how you feel about him at all?”

“I’ve met dozens of people who were abused as children who did not turn into abusers themselves as adults. Elizabeth didn’t.”

“You didn’t.”

“Some would disagree.” He gave her a pointed look.

“I don’t and only my opinion counts in this instance. What you and I did and what happened between your father and your sister are worlds apart. I wouldn’t blame you if you’d given your father the Holofernes treatment.”

Nora mimed slicing her head off with the razor.

“Don’t cut yourself. I’d have enough trouble explaining a half-naked woman in my closet. I don’t need a headless corpse in my bathroom.”

“No decapitation? You’re getting so vanilla in your old age,” she said.

He cocked his eyebrow at her. “Is that so?”

“We had about one minute of vanilla sex last night.”

“Only to prove a point. The point being you need, want and desire pain, and wouldn’t enjoy being with someone who couldn’t give that to you.”

“I give it to other people.”

“You know it’s not the same. I can torture my own body and it takes the edge off the need, but it doesn’t take it away. Do you even submit to Kingsley anymore?”

“I can’t talk to you about what Kingsley and I do together.”

“Why not? You always told me in delightfully exacting detail what you two had done in my absence.”

“He’s a client,” she said. “I don’t gossip about clients.”

“Kingsley pays you for pain and sex?”

“No, don’t be silly. He pays me for pain. I give him the sex for free.”

“You know you miss it, Eleanor. The way you were begging me to hurt you last night? That wasn’t pillow talk.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re injured and can’t even shave your own face. Now shut up before I accidentally give you the Holofernes treatment.”

He shut up and so did she while she finished shaving his face. She knew his sudden good behavior wasn’t due to any desire of his to actually submit to her. He simply didn’t want her nicking him. He stared placidly past her, letting her move his chin this way and that while she scraped off the last of his stubble. When she finished, she soaked a hand towel under the hot water and used it to wipe the last of the soap off his cheeks and chin and throat. She might have taken longer than necessary doing this. She did love his face, the sharp planes of his chin and jaw, the sculpted lips, the gunmetal-gray eyes that saw everything and revealed nothing.

She kissed him.

Søren returned the kiss, but only for a moment before pulling back.

“What was that for?” His tone was skeptical.

“You’re very handsome and when there’s a very handsome man standing between my knees, I kiss him.”

“I should spend more time between your knees then.”

“That is not the sentiment of a priest about to take Final Vows.”

“Not true. Half the priests taking Final Vows with me would say the same to you if they knew you.”

“What about the other half?”

“Gay.”

“Right,” she said, laughing. “Forgot.”

“Please be there with me,” he said. “Will you?”

She rested her forehead on the center of his bare chest. He kissed her hair.

“Just because I didn’t want you leaving the church for me, doesn’t mean I can sit there and watch you give away the rest of your life to the church. Your life and your body.” This body that she’d thought of as hers for so long would now be the sole property of the church. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Do you know the Danish fairy tale Den Lille Havfrue?”

“In English?”

“The Little Mermaid.”

“Of course I know it.”

“The real story? Not the sanitized modern version?” Søren took his razor from her hand and washed it under scalding water in the sink.

“I think so. Mermaid falls in love with a prince and gets herself turned into a human being so they can be together, right?”

“The little mermaid’s fins are rent in two as if a sword has passed through her body. But since she was never meant to walk on land, with every step she takes, she feels something like knives cutting into her feet and her body bleeding from the wounds.”

“How cheerful.”

“Danes are known for many virtues—cheerfulness is not chief among them.”

Søren took Nora’s ankle in his left hand and lifted her foot. With the razor tip held between two fingers on his injured right hand, Søren carefully placed a small cut on the heel of her foot—a small wound, yes, but she knew until it healed in a day or two, she’d feel it with every step she took.

“The little mermaid fails to win her prince’s heart and returns to the ocean,” Søren continued. “When she dies she finds she has a soul, a reward for all her suffering.”

“But she doesn’t get her prince?”

“No. Being transformed into something she isn’t fails to win the prince. A good moral. Very Danish. Don’t try to be something you aren’t.”

“And what are you?” she asked.

“I am a priest,” he said. “Which I always knew I was. I knew I belonged in the church when I fell in love with you. I knew I was born to be a priest whether I wanted to be one or not. If I’d left the church to marry you, I would have felt the pain of it with every step I took...” He made a second small cut in the heel of her other foot.

“Yes, we could have been together on land,” he continued, “but at what price? You didn’t let me leave the ocean I belong in and in a way, I’m grateful to you. Especially since you’re here now.”

“Of course I’m here,” she said, reaching down to take the razor from his hand. She set it on the counter and placed her hands on either side of his strong neck. “I know how to swim.”

Søren kissed her, kissed the words on her lips that she knew had comforted him even more than a promise of attending his Final Vows would. She kissed him back with equal ardor, brushing her lips over his now smooth chin. Cutting her feet had aroused him. She slipped her hand into his pants and wrapped her fingers around his erection.

“Eleanor,” he said breathlessly, “what are you doing?”

“Solving the crisis in the priesthood,” she said. “I met a nun once who said the secret was giving priests daily hand jobs. It’s not intercourse—not anal, not vaginal, not oral—but it can get a priest off. I might join a religious order if I were guaranteed daily orgasms hand-delivered by a handsome oblate.”

“I should run that idea by the superior of the Paraclete order.”

“What are they?”

“An order of priests and sisters dedicated to helping and comforting other priests.” Søren wrapped his left arm around her back and pressed closer to her.

“Then consider me your Paraclete.”

“I always have.”

He bit her earlobe while she continued to stroke him. She loved hearing his labored breathing in her ear. His left hand, the uninjured once, dug hard into the small of her back. Nora didn’t mind. The pain he gave her stoked his pleasure. He was brutally hard. Hard and soft, aroused and yet putty in her hand. But that’s how men worked. Even dominant sadists like Søren. He’d teased her that morning that their little kingdom would be aghast to see their fearsome Red Queen hiding in a closet from a ficus-delivery boy. Well, wouldn’t they be equally amused to see their god of pain melting against her, at once tense and loose, over nothing more than a well-timed hand job?

Nora wet her hand under the tap. Søren gasped a little against her neck as she took him in her grasp again, rubbing him with warm wet fingers. His hips moved, but only just into her grip, tiny pulses that were more erotic to her than hard thrusts because she knew how badly he wanted to stay in control and he couldn’t entirely master himself. But he could master her.

“Don’t stop,” he ordered.

“No, sir.” She could tell Søren hadn’t come in some time. Fluid dripped from the tip onto her hand and she massaged it back into the frenulum. His chest rose in sharp breaths. It pleased her to be able to distract him from his own pain for a few minutes. It soothed her aching conscience. She knew leaving him had been the right thing to do, and she knew going back to him would be a mistake. But Kingsley had trained her well as a dominatrix. It went against her nature to hurt someone who didn’t ask for pain. Søren not only hadn’t asked for the pain she’d given him, he hadn’t paid for it up front.

“I love touching you,” she said. “I didn’t get to do this very often when I was in your collar. You always tied me up and touched me while I lay there dying to touch you.”

“You should have begged a little more, and I might have let you.” Of course he would tell her this now, years after it mattered. Such a talented sadist, he could torment her in the past by giving her secrets in the present.

“If I stopped touching you now, would you beg?”

“No.”

“What would you do?”

“Finish with my left hand.”

She laughed and felt his smile against her skin. She wrapped her foot around his left leg for no reason other than she wanted to be closer to him while she touched him. Now she concentrated on the head, the thick tip, rubbing her thumb over the little slick indentation at the top. Her hand roved down against him, clasping him firmly at the base before dragging her hand all the way to the head again. She did it again, pulling harder this time, making Søren shudder slightly. She gripped him tightly but moved slowly. He wasn’t the only sadist in the room.

And because he wasn’t the only sadist in the room, right when she had him, when she knew he’d come any second, she stopped.

She stopped and smiled at him, leaning back on the bathroom counter onto her hands.

“Okay,” she said, “finish with your left hand.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“If you insist.”

With his left hand he grabbed her by the arm and drew her roughly to him. Even with his right arm remaining mostly out of commission, he was still stronger than Nora. In an instant he had her turned around. He grabbed the back of her neck, pushed her onto the counter and held her there. She heard the sound of fabric moving only seconds before she felt him inside her. Touching him had made her wet, and he entered her easily. With cruel thrusts he slammed into her as she lay helpless, pinned to the tile countertop by his left hand on the back of her neck.

Nora should have known better than to think she could get the upper hand with him. As roughly as he held her down, there was no chance for escaping. Unless she said her safe word. But then he’d stop and where was the fun in that? His thrusts were deep and long and in this position she felt exposed, open, helpless. She loved it. She hated it. She hated that she loved it and loved that she hated it because hating it meant she wasn’t completely his yet. There was still hope she could escape him completely. Someday. Eventually. But not yet. Not while he felt this good.

Delicious tremors passed through her hips and up into her back and down her thighs as he fucked her. She felt filled by him, stretched open, owned and mastered. When she came she did so silently, a final last rebellion against him. When he came in her, she sighed, grateful for the warm wet heat she’d missed so much. She made her other lovers wear condoms. Not Søren, though. She could never be with him with something between them.

Søren pulled out of her and let her up. The back of her neck ached where his hands had gripped her. Without a word to him she walked out of the bathroom, heading to the bedroom to put on her clothes leaving bloody footprints behind her.

“Where are you going?” Søren demanded.

“Getting out of the ocean,” she said. “I’m done swimming.”