Eleanor didn’t know what she heard, only that she shouldn’t have heard it. She turned back and retreated into her room. She slid into bed, where Claire lay sound asleep. Her entire body trembled as visceral memories of her time with Søren in his bedroom flashed across her mind’s eye.

He’d ordered her to go to bed and she had. But she didn’t sleep, not until dawn.

Groggy and sore, she reluctantly threw the covers off her when Claire nudged her awake.

“I’m up, I’m up,” she said and started to stand up.

“Holy crap, what happened to your legs?” Claire asked, staring wide-eyed at her. Eleanor glanced down and saw the bruises Søren had left on her were already turning purple.

“Um … I was walking in the hall last night and ran into something. Some table or something. It was dark,” she lied and disappeared into the bathroom.

Once in the bathroom she splashed water on her face and stripped naked. Before stepping into the shower, she gazed at herself in the mirror.

“Oh, my God …”

With his bare hands and nothing else, Søren had turned her upper thighs black. She turned around and lifted her hair. On her back were four black bruises about the size of her palm. She had bruises on her right breast and one on her shoulder. She counted two more on her upper arms, one on her forearms and four finger-mark bruises on the side of each hip and a black thumbprint on the top. If she had seen a naked woman with the identical bruises, she would have assumed she’d been raped.

Eleanor leaned back into the wall and put one leg up on the bathroom counter. While looking at her bruises, she brought herself to orgasm. She couldn’t help herself. She’d never seen anything more erotic in her life than the marks Søren had left on her.

Luckily she’d packed a long-sleeved wrap dress for the funeral that covered both her back and her legs down to her knees. She and Claire ate a quick breakfast before the guests started to arrive at the home. They entered some sort of dining room—Claire called it the morning room. About forty people were packed into the room, drinking tea and coffee and whispering to each other. Still, the effect of forty people whispering all in one room sounded almost deafening to Eleanor’s ringing head. She’d slept only two hours the night before. She’d never felt better about feeling shitty her entire life. Funeral, she reminded herself. No shit-eating grins allowed.

She spotted Søren across the room in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. A woman—young and lovely—stood next to him. Claire took her hand and dragged her over to them.

“Who is this?” the woman asked, giving Søren a fragile smile.

“This is Eleanor. She’s a friend of Claire’s.”

“Hi.” Eleanor sat her cup on a table and shook the woman’s hand.

“Eleanor, this is my sister, Elizabeth,” Søren said.

It was a good thing she had sat her coffee cup down, otherwise she would have dropped it. It took all her willpower not to gasp or gape as she looked at her. A beautiful woman with auburn hair and violet eyes, she could have been anyone’s lovely older sister. She and Søren, despite having the same father, looked nothing alike. She must have taken after her mother. As much as Eleanor wanted to see Elizabeth with eyes of compassion only, she couldn’t help but recall that this woman had done terrible things to Søren when they were children. But he didn’t blame her, only their father, so Eleanor tried not to blame her, either. Eleanor looked in her eyes, trying to find the human being behind the mask of good daughter in mourning, but Eleanor saw nothing—only a blank, as if she stared into a body without a soul.

“The cars are here,” Elizabeth said to Søren with no emotion in her voice. “Time to go.”

Søren put an arm around Claire, who looked up at him and smiled.

“Good,” Søren said, dropping a quick kiss onto Claire’s forehead. “Let’s go and bury the bastard.”

23

Eleanor

IF ELEANOR HAD BELIEVED ALL THE LIES TOLD TO HER in her Catholic high school’s sex-ed classes, she would have thought her life would enter a terrible and tragic downward spiral after daring to spread her legs for a man before marriage. Her Ursuline teacher had stressed that any sort of sexual behavior would lead to pregnancy, poverty, raging venereal diseases and death. Poor Jordan had bought into the lies hook, line and sinker. She’d not only decided she wouldn’t have sex until she was married, but she also wouldn’t even kiss a man until they were engaged. Better safe than sorry. But when Eleanor walked out the front steps of her school two days after Søren’s father’s funeral and saw a silver Rolls-Royce waiting for her, she decided that stripping naked for a priest was about the best idea she’d ever had.

“Holy crap,” Jordan said, noticing the Rolls-Royce at the same time Eleanor did. “What is that?”

Eleanor tried not to burst into laughter at the sight of the Rolls-Royce idling in the car pickup lane with the minivans and the beige Camrys.

“That would be my ride.”

“Holy crap,” Jordan said again. The Rolls inched up until it waited at the bottom of the front stairs. The driver door opened and a man in a chauffeur’s uniform stepped out. He opened the passenger door, and none other than Kingsley Edge himself stepped out. He walked around the car, leaned back on the door, raised his hand and crooked his finger at her.

He wore riding boots, some sort of long frock coat and sleek modern sunglasses. He looked positively punk with his long dark hair loose down to his shoulders and a little smile on his lips.