“Were you happy for her?”

“No,” Nora admitted. “We weren’t even speaking then. I moved back in with her after college to try to mend the rift. Didn’t work. Instead she found out about me and Søren. It was a bad time. I didn’t speak to her for three years. So … you should forgive Kingsley and your mother.” She poked him in the chest. “Trust me on this. Do it now before it’s too late.”

“I want to love him,” Nico said.

He gave her a tired smile.

“I’ll tell you the story of him and Sam and his club, The 8th Circle, one day. Then you’ll love him.”

“Tell me now.”

“No, it’s almost dawn.”

“My vines need me,” he said, reaching for her and pulling her close.

“Do you like being needed?” She settled against his chest, so broad and so warm. “Doesn’t it scare you?”

“I like knowing another life depends on me for its being. I like proving it made the right choice to put its faith in me. Does it scare you?”

“Being needed? Yes. Very much. Probably one reason why I decided long ago I didn’t want children, not even Søren’s. And it’s why I’ve never owned anyone.”

“Never?”

She shook her head. “I’ve had pets—human ones. But that was just play at the club. I never owned anyone the way Søren owned me. It’s terrifying to be needed. Being responsible for another human being? For years? Sounds like a prison sentence. I don’t even have plants.”

“You should try it,” he said. “It’s not as bad as you think it is. It’s not always a prison. Sometimes it’s a palace. Subjects need their kings and queens.”

He brushed her hair off her shoulder. Nora smiled to herself.

“What?” Nico asked, touching her lips. “What’s the smile for?”

“You just reminded me of something I said once—it’s nothing.” She kissed his fingertips.

“You said you never needed Søren, but he needed you.”

“He did, yes. Even after I left him he would call me sometimes and tell me he needed me. I loved him so I went to him.”

“Did that feel like a prison sentence to you?”

“No,” she confessed, recalling those nights she slipped over to the rectory and gave her body to him. “It felt like a privilege.”

“That’s what it felt like to me,” Nico said. “When you needed me last night? A privilege. An honor.”

“What are you saying, Nico?” Nora asked.

“I need you.”

He touched her face, her lips.

“I need you,” he said again. “You’re everything I ever dreamed of in one woman. My Rosanella. Beautiful, graceful, intelligent, fearless, and yet you trembled in my arms during the storm and then you drank me from a wineglass. You owned me last night with everything you did to me and everything you let me do to you. No one on this earth deserves to have everything they desire. No one is entitled to have what he wants. But if I were to have what I wanted, I would need you to give it to me. Because it’s you, Mistress Nora.”

Nora couldn’t look at Nico. Hearing him call her Mistress Nora was like hearing Søren call her “Little One” for the first time, like learning her real name. After she’d told Nico who his father was, he’d asked her for Kingsley’s last name. “Nicholas Boissonneault,” he’d said, his eyes shining with unshed tears as he tried out his new name. It hurt to learn who he was. It hurt her, too, but for a different reason.

“Go to sleep, my love.” She kissed him on the forehead. “It’s an order. You have a long drive back.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But I’ll be okay. I always am.”

Nico’s eyelashes fluttered and in minutes his breathing settled into the deep rhythms of sleep. She gazed down at him, at this beautiful young man in her bed with callouses on his hands from the hard work he did every day. She’d never loved a man with calloused hands before. She had callouses, however. The callous on her finger from so much writing. The callous on her heart from so much loving.

She dragged herself from the bed and found her nightgown. She pulled a book from her suitcase and took it downstairs with her.

After building up the fire again, she curled into a chair. Carefully so as not to let any papers fall out, she opened her Bible.

More and more lately she found herself turning to this book for comfort and guidance. Queen Esther still enchanted her, as did Ruth and her threshing floor seduction of Boaz. The Psalms brought her solace—“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” King David and King Solomon spoke to her from ages past—two adulterers who found their way into the lineage of Christ. And how she loved Isaiah and the words that had become so much more meaningful to her of late—“For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given.”

But it wasn’t the words of the Bible that she turned to in this last hour of night. From its pages she pulled a photograph, a child barely a year old with his mother’s turquoise eyes and his father’s blond hair.

She stared at the photograph of Fionn in her hand. In it her editor, Zach, held his son on his shoulder. The first time she’d held the boy in her own arms, the sudden depth of love she had for him had shaken her like fear. She’d trembled so hard she had to give him back to Grace almost immediately.