Author: Tiffany Reisz

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 his calling. That and he met a certain young half-blood Frenchman who would change the course of his life forever.

“Battleship. It’s this stupid game Wes and I played when we were procrastinating from doing our work.”

“You so rarely speak of Wesley, Eleanor. And yet so many memories you have of him make you smile. Why don’t you talk about him more?”

Why didn’t she talk about him more? Nora shook her head and stared at the chessboard. Looking back she still wasn’t sure why she’d asked Wesley to move in with her, other than he’d intimated that he might have to move back home to Kentucky as Yorke was a prohibitively expensive liberal-arts college. But as soon as Wesley was in her home, she’d begun to wonder how she’d ever lived without him. Before Wesley, she’d practically lived at Kingsley’s Manhattan town house. She worked in the city so much that several days would pass before she’d return to her home in Connecticut. Once Wesley was there, however, she’d find herself racing back to her house after a job, throwing on normal clothes and curling up on the couch with him.

Nora would never forget the day she got tired of writing in her office and had taken her laptop to the kitchen just for a change of scenery. Wesley joined her in the kitchen and sat opposite her at the table. He opened his laptop and started working on a paper due in his European History class that week. Nora remembered casting furtive glances over the top of her computer at him. He had brown eyes with little flecks of gold in them and dark blond hair that fell over his forehead. Only eighteen then, he was utterly adorable, and sometimes she had to practically sit on her hands to keep from reaching out and grabbing him when he walked past her. They were just roommates, just friends, she always had to remind herself. And Wesley was a good Christian kid and a virgin. One night with her wouldn’t just take his virginity, it would steal his innocence too. But that day all she felt for him was affection. Affection and amusement.

“Wes, I’m going to say it,” she said, glancing at their back-to-back open laptops.

“Don’t say it, Nora,” Wesley said as he kept typing.

“I have to say it.”

“Do. Not. Say. It,” Wesley ordered, trying and failing to sound intimidating. His sexy hybrid Kentucky-Georgia accent made her toes curl but it did not lend itself to intimidation. “If you say it, I’m leaving.”

“Wesley…”

“Nora…”

Nora took a deep breath, pretended to type something and whispered, “Wes?”

“What?”

“You sunk my Battleship!”

At that Wesley stood up and left the kitchen. Nora dissolved into giggles as Wesley threw on his coat, grabbed his car keys and walked out of the house. She was still laughing half an hour later when Wesley returned carrying a just-purchased Battleship game with him. Nora closed their computers and they set up the game on the kitchen table. She beat him soundly, two to one. After that, every time one or both of them needed a break from work, they’d sneak up behind the other, yell, “You sunk my Battleship,” and the game would be on.

“Eleanor?” Søren’s voice pulled her out of the memory and back to the present.

Nora touched her face and held out her hand. In the light of the fireplace, the tears shimmered on the tips of her fingers.

“This is why I don’t talk about Wes,” she said, and Søren reached for her and pulled her into his arms.

He bent his head and kissed her as his hand crept under the shirt she wore—his shirt—and slipped two fingers into her. She wanted him to make love to her again, but the moment had passed. A true sadist, Søren could only become aroused by inflicting pain and humiliation. So instead it was his probing fingers that penetrated her. He spread his fingers wide within her, slipped in a third and pushed hard up against her pubic bone. Nora’s hips lifted as her inner muscles gripped him. She grew wet at his touch even as the cut on her labia still ached and burned.

“Come for me,” Søren ordered, “and then we’re sleeping.”

“I can hold off having an orgasm for a long time,” she teased. “Anything to keep you awake.”

Søren, as she knew he would, took that as a challenge. He pressed his thumb into her clitoris and made precision circles that left her panting. Still she breathed through the pleasure.

With his free hand, Søren unbuttoned her shirt and bared her breasts. He kissed her nipples and they hardened in his warm mouth. As his lips and tongue made languid circles on her breasts, his fingers continued their gentle onslaught inside her. Nora flinched and clutched at the rug beneath her. Still she didn’t let herself come.

Søren slid his hand behind her neck and forced her to meet his eyes.

“The day we met, you were wearing a black pleated skirt and combat boots,” he said, and Nora knew no matter how hard she fought him, he would win. “You had scrapes on your knees and wore too much eye makeup. And I would have laid you out on the altar, beaten you and taken your virginity in front of God, Christ, all his saints and angels, and the entire church that very day had I one ounce less of self-control. I would have drunk the blood off your thighs, turned you onto your stomach and taken you again, fucking you until you begged me to stop. And do you know what I would have done had you begged me to stop?”

“No, sir,” she breathed, her heart pounding so hard she thought it would burst from her chest.

“I wouldn’t have stopped,” he said and shoved his hand hard into her. Nora cried out; the climax ripped through her stomach and hips as her inner muscles contracted wildly around Søren’s fingers.

She lay underneath him gasping through the orgasm that was so intense her lower back spasmed. After a few minutes her heart slowed and her eyes were able to focus again.

“You cheated.”

“I can’t imagine what you’re referring to,” Søren said, carefully pulling his hand out of her sore opening.

“You brought up the day we met. That’s cheating.”

Søren rolled onto his back and Nora crawled on top of his chest and collapsed against him.

“You’re the one who is going to be sleeping with two young men who are not me this summer, and you accuse me of cheating?”

Nora grinned up at him.

“Jealous?”

“Not even remotely,” he said and she knew it was true. Søren’s certainty in her love for him precluded even the slightest hint of jealousy. He couldn’t care less who she had sex with as long as he owned her. More than not caring, Søren was aroused by the sight and thought of her with other men. He didn’t even mind if she did kink with others as long as no one hurt her—that was his job alone.

“Speaking of jealous, Simone and Robin said they’d happily take my place on the rack this summer while I’m gone.”

“Lovely girls, both of them,” Søren said, smiling. If Nora was going to spend the summer in bed with two other guys, the least she could do for Søren was arrange for him to have access to two of the most beautiful, well-trained and discreet submissives in the Underground. She knew he wouldn’t have sex with them. Sadism was sex for him. So Søren going two months without beating someone would be akin to her going two months without sex—horrifying thought.

“Now I’m afraid this nonsense will have to end. I’m hearing confessions in—” Søren paused and glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel “—four hours.”

Nora winced.

“Shit, I knew there was something I was supposed to do before I left. Will you have time for me before I leave tomorrow morning?” she asked. She’d meant to go to confession during the past week but had completely forgotten. Wasn’t her fault. She blamed her editor Zach—the other sadist in her life—for sending her fifty pages to revise in two days.