The Siren
The Siren
Tiffany Reisz
Some love stories you never forget. Some books will change your world. Be prepared… this is one of them. She tore herself from the man she adored, who transformed her, who possessed her… who would have destroyed her. Now she is adored by a man she must not have. She thinks she knows what it means to be pushed to her limits. She’s wrong.The Original Sinners Series: The Red YearsBook 1: The SirenBook 2: The AngelBook 3: The PrinceBook 4: The MistressThe Original Sinners continues with The White Years Book 1: The SaintBook 2: The KingBook 3: The VirginPraise for Tiffany Reisz‘Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic’ - Author Miranda Baker ‘Stunning. One of the best novels I have ever read. I am simply in awe and feeling richer for the experience.’ - Good Reads Reviewer on The Siren ‘This book made me feel everything.’ - Author Courtney Milan on The Siren
In the world of kink authors, she’s the top.
Notorious Nora Sutherlin is famous for her delicious works of erotica, each one more popular with readers than the last. But her latest manuscript is different—more serious, more personal—and she’s sure it’ll be her breakout book…if it ever sees the light of day.
Zachary Easton holds Nora’s fate in his well-manicured hands. The demanding British editor agrees to handle the book on one condition: he wants complete control. Nora must rewrite the entire novel to his exacting standards—in six weeks—or it’s no deal.
Nora’s grueling writing sessions with Zach are draining…and shockingly arousing. And a dangerous former lover has her wondering which is more torturous—staying away from him…or returning to his bed?
Nora thought she knew everything about being pushed to your limits. But in a world where passion is pain, nothing is ever that simple.
Advance Praise for The Siren
“Tiffany Reisz is a smart, artful, and masterful new voice in erotic fiction! An erotica star on the rise!”
—Award-winning author Lacey Alexander
“The best erotica either leaves slut-marks on your back or a bruise on your heart. The Siren does both and I wish I’d written it.”
—Scarlett Parrish, author of By the Book
“Provocative, smart and downright cheeky. The Siren put me through my paces and had me begging for more.”
—Emma Petersen, author of Reign of Pleasure
“Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic, Reisz writes unforgettable characters you’ll either want to know or want to be. The Siren is an alluring book-within-a-book, a story that will leave you breathless and bruised, aching for another chapter with Nora Sutherlin and her men.”
—Miranda Baker, author of Bottoms Up and Soloplay
“The Siren is a powerful, evocative tale of discovering who you truly are. Tiffany Reisz nails the complicated person inside all of us.”
—Cassandra Carr, author of Talk to Me
“Daring, sophisticated, and literary…exactly what good erotica should be.”
—Kitty Thomas, author of Tender Mercies
The Siren
Tiffany Reisz
www.spice-books.co.uk (http://www.spice-books.co.uk)
To Jason Isaacs—
otherwise known as The Most Beautiful Man Alive.
Thank you for being my Zachary and my Muse.
To Alyssa Palmer—
mon Canard—if yours were the only eyes that read my books, I would still write for you alone.
And to B.
Contents
Chapter 1 (#u5992c510-970f-5232-b7ed-0a2dbb7884de)
Chapter 2 (#ue8740029-4808-5ead-be6e-56ae82b7e2e3)
Chapter 3 (#ua342094e-71bf-5198-be5c-286cf5ae92a8)
Chapter 4 (#ud5773729-c692-5ec6-a2c3-a9ec5849385d)
Chapter 5 (#u71c1f36a-a0ce-59be-a0c0-14128135ae00)
Chapter 6 (#ue81ed6d6-9f80-5328-b7b0-103e16fc35c1)
Chapter 7 (#ue7a0172b-fd19-5e24-b8ac-3c186a2aa5c6)
Chapter 8 (#ue0b26664-a6b9-5fe2-a3e0-43a5c92b263f)
Chapter 9 (#uf1189b71-873f-5fa3-a8f3-9dc6d24d3f95)
Chapter 10 (#u681a5706-f50c-5ca8-b0d5-89276b595e31)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
1
There was no such thing as London fog—never had been. The London Fog of legend was only that. In reality London fog was London smog, and at the height of the Industrial Revolution it had killed thousands, choking the city with its poisonous hands. Zach Easton knew that in the offices of Royal House Publishing, he was known as the London Fog, the disparaging nickname coined by a fellow editor who disapproved of Zach’s dour demeanor. Zach had no love of his nickname or the editor who’d coined it. But today he was eager to earn his epithet.
As he knew he would, Zach found John-Paul Bonner, the chief managing editor of Royal House Publishing, still hard at work even after hours. J.P. sat on the floor of his office, piles of manuscripts stacked about him like a paper Stonehenge in miniature.
Zach stopped in J.P.’s doorway and leaned against the frame. He stared his chief editor down and did not speak. He didn’t have to tell J.P. why he was here. They both knew.
“Death—she comes to me on an Easton fog,” J.P. said from the floor as he sorted through another stack of books. “A poetic enough way to die. You are here to kill me, I presume.”
At sixty-four and with his gray beard and spectacles, J.P. was literature personified. Usually Zach enjoyed playing word games with him, but he was in no mood for repartee today.
“Yes.”
“‘Yes’?” J.P. repeated. “Just ‘yes’? Well, brevity is the soul of wit after all. Help an old man off the floor, will you, Easton? If I’m going to die, might as well die on my feet.”
Sighing, Zach stepped into the office, reached down and helped J.P. stand. J.P. patted Zach gratefully on the shoulder and collapsed into his chair behind his desk.
“I’m a dead man anyway. Can’t find that damn Hamlet galley for John Warren. Should have had it in the mail yesterday. But happiness is good health and a bad memory they say, and I am a happy, happy man.”
Zach studied J.P. for a moment and silently cursed him for being so endearing. His affection for his boss made this conversation far less pleasant. Zach walked over to J.P.’s bookshelves and ran his hand along the top of the case. He knew J.P.’s habit of stashing important papers where even he couldn’t reach them. Zach found a manuscript and pulled it down. He threw it on J.P.’s desk and watched it kick up a small cloud of dust.
“Bless you,” J.P. said, coughing as he put his hand over his heart. “You have saved my life.”
“Now I get to be the one who kills you.”
J.P. eyed Zach and pointed at the chair across from the desk. Zach reluctantly sat down, pulling his gray coat around him like a suit of armor.
“Easton, look,” J.P. began but it was as far as Zach let him get.
“Nora Sutherlin?” Zach infused the name with as much disgust as he could muster, a considerable amount at the moment. “You must be joking.”
“Yes, Nora Sutherlin. I’ve thought about it, looked at the sales projections. I think we should acquire her. I want you to work with her.”
“I will do no such thing. It’s pornography.”
“It’s not pornography.” J.P. peered at Zach over the top of his glasses. “It’s erotica. Very good erotica.”
“I had no idea there was such a thing.”
“Two words—Anaïs Nin,” J.P. retorted.
“Two more words—Booker Prize.”
J.P. exhaled noisily and leaned back in his chair.
“Easton, I know your track record. You’re one of the top talents in the industry by far. I wouldn’t have paid to import you here to New York if you weren’t. Yes, your writers have won Booker Prizes.”
“And Whitbreads, Silver Daggers—”
“And Sutherlin’s last book outsold your Whitbread and Silver Dagger combined. We’re in a recession, if you hadn’t noticed. Books are a luxury. If it can’t be eaten, no one is buying it right now.”
“So Nora Sutherlin’s the answer?” Zach challenged.
J.P. grinned. “Janie Burke at the Times called her last book ‘highly edible.’”
Zach shook his head and looked up at the ceiling in disgust.
“She’s a guttersnipe writer at best,” Zach said. “Her mind’s in the gutter, her books are in the gutter. I wouldn’t be surprised if her last publishing house kept its offices in the gutter.”
“She might be a guttersnipe, but she’s our guttersnipe. Well, your guttersnipe now.”
“This isn’t My Fair Lady. I’m not Professor Henry Higgins, and she is no Eliza bloody Doolittle.”
“Whoever she is she’s a damn fine writer. You would know this if you’d bothered to read one of her books.”
“I left England for this job,” Zach reminded him. “I left one of the most respected publishers in Europe because I wanted to work with the best young American writers.”
“She’s young. She’s American.”
“I did not leave England, my life…” Zach stopped himself before he said, “and my wife.” After all, it was his wife who’d left him first.
“This book has real potential. She brought it to us because she’s ready to make a change.”
“Give her twenty shillings for a pound if she wants change. I leave for L.A. in six weeks. I can’t believe you want me to set everything aside and give my last six weeks to Nora Sutherlin. Not a chance.”
“I’ve seen your in-box, Easton. It’s not so full you can’t work with Sutherlin while you tie up loose ends around here. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time when we both know you just don’t have the inclination.”
“Fine. I don’t have the time or the inclination to edit erotica, even good erotica, if there is such an animal. I’m not the only editor here. Give it to Thomas Finley.” Zach named his least favorite coworker, the one who’d given him his nickname. “Or Angie Clark even.”
“Finley? That pansy? He’d make a pass at Sutherlin, and she’d eat him alive. If you punched him in the face, he wouldn’t even know how to bleed right.”
Zach nearly laughed in agreement before remembering he was fighting with J.P.
“Then what about Angie Clark?”
“She’s too busy right now. Besides…”
“Besides what?” Zach demanded.
“Clark’s afraid of her.”
“Can’t say I blame her,” Zach said. “I’ve heard grown men practically whisper her name at parties. The rumor is she slept her way to her first book deal.”
“I’ve heard that rumor, too. But she hasn’t slept her way to this one. Unfortunately,” J.P. said with a playful grin.
“I read on Rachel Bell’s blog that she never leaves the house in any other color than red. She said Sutherlin’s got a sixteen-year-old boy working as her personal assistant.”
J.P. smiled at him. “I believe she prefers ‘intern’ to ‘personal assistant.’”
Zach nearly choked on his own frustration. He’d been ready to leave for the evening, even had his coat on, when some demon voice in his head told him to check his work email one more time. He had a note from J.P. telling him that he was considering acquiring erotica writer Nora Sutherlin and her latest book for their big fall/winter release. And since Zach didn’t have much to occupy him until he left for L.A. in a few weeks…
“I need you to do this for me. You and no one else,” J.P. said.
“Why am I the only one who can handle her?”
“Handle her?” J.P. practically chortled the words before turning serious. “Listen to me—no one handles Nora Sutherlin. No, you’re just the only one I’ve got who can keep up with her. Easton…Zach. Hear me out, please.”
Zach swallowed and resigned himself to a moment’s détente. It was a rare thing indeed when John-Paul Bonner called anyone by his first name.
“She writes romances, J.P.,” Zach said quietly. “I hate romances.”
J.P. met his eyes with sympathy.
“I know you’ve been through hell this past year. I’ve met your Grace, remember? I know what you’ve lost. But Sutherlin…she’s good. We need her.”
Zach took a slow, deep breath.
“Has she signed the contract yet?” Zach asked.
“No. We’re still ironing out the terms.”
“Is there a verbal agreement in place?”
J.P. eyed him warily. “Not yet. I told her we’d have to look at the figures and get back to her, but we were leaning toward yes. Why?”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“A good start.”
“And I’ll read the manuscript. If I think there’s any chance she—we—can make something decent out of her book, I’ll give her my last six weeks. But the book doesn’t go to press until I sign off on it.”
J.P.’s eyes bored into Zach. Zach refused to blink or look away. He was used to having final say on all his books. He wasn’t about to relinquish that power, not for J.P., not for Nora Sutherlin, not for anyone.
“Easton, one Dan Brown title will outsell in a month what the entire poetry section of a bookstore will sell in five years. Sutherlin’s ‘pornography,’ as you call it, could pay for a lot of poetry around here.”
“I want the contract in my hands, J.P., or I won’t even meet her.”
J.P. sat back in his chair and exhaled loudly through his nose.
“Fine. She’s all yours. She’s got a nice little place in Connecticut. Take the train. Take my car. I don’t care. She’ll be home on Monday, she said.”
“Very well then.” Zach knew he was likely safe. When the mood struck him, Zach could be merciless to an author about his or her book’s shortcomings. The great writers took the criticism. The hacks couldn’t handle it. If he was hard enough on her, she’d beg for another editor.
The argument now at a stalemate, Zach rose tiredly from the chair and with hunched and aching shoulders headed toward the door.
A small cough stopped Zach before he could leave the office. J.P. didn’t meet his eyes, only ran his hand over the first page of the Hamlet reader’s copy in front of him.
“You should read this book when it comes out,” J.P. said, tapping the page. “Fascinating exploration of the feigned madness of Hamlet—‘I am but mad north north-west…’”
“‘But when the wind is southerly, I can tell a hawk from a handsaw,’” Zach finished the famous quotation.
“Sutherlin’s only as mad as Hamlet was. Don’t believe everything you’ve heard about her. The lady knows her hawks from her handsaws.”
“Lady?”
J.P. closed the book and didn’t answer the insult. Zach turned to leave again.
“You know, you’re still young, Easton, and too handsome for your own good. You should try it sometime.”
“What? Madness?” Zach asked, nodding toward the book.
“No. Happiness.”
“Happiness?” Zach allowed himself a bitter grin. “I’m afraid my memory’s too good for that.”
Zach returned to his office. His assistant, Mary, had left Nora Sutherlin’s manuscript on his desk along with a file folder.
Zach flipped the file open and barely glanced at Sutherlin’s bio. She was thirty-three, about a decade younger than him. Her first book had come out when she was twenty-nine. She’d released five titles since then; her second book, entitled Red, had created a minor sensation—great sales, lots of buzz. Zach studied the numbers in the file and saw why J.P. was so eager to acquire her. With each subsequent release, her sales had nearly doubled. Zach ran through the little he knew of erotica writers in his mind. These days erotica was about the only growth market in publishing. But it shouldn’t be about the money. Just the art.
Zach threw Sutherlin’s bio and sales projections in the trash. He’d stolen his philosophy of editing from the old New Critics—it’s just about the book. Not the author, not the market, not the reader…one judged a book only by the book. He shouldn’t care that Nora Sutherlin’s personal life was rumored to be as torrid as her prose. Only her book mattered. And his hopes for the book were not high.
Zach examined the manuscript with suspicion. Mary knew he preferred to read his books in hard copy versions. But she’d obviously had a little too much fun printing out this one for him. Across the scarlet-red cover blazed the title in a lurid Gothic font—The Consolation Prize. Editors almost invariably changed a book’s title, but he had to concede it was an interesting choice for a work of erotica. He opened the manuscript and read the first sentence: “I don’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it.”
Zach paused in his reading as he felt the shadow of something old and familiar whisper across his shoulder. He brushed the sensation off and read the line again. Then the next one and the next one…
2
Some days Zach hated his job. The actual editing he loved, taking a novel with pretensions of greatness and actually making it great. But the politics he hated, the budget crises, having to let a brilliant midlister go to make room for a better-selling hack… And now here he was, hauling his arse into Connecticut to meet some loony smut writer who’d somehow convinced one of the most respected lions in publishing that she deserved one of the best editors in literary fiction. Yes, some days he hated his job. Today he felt quite certain it hated him back.
Zach parked J.P.’s car in front of a rather quaint two-story Tudor cottage in the tame and pedestrian suburb. He checked the address, his directions and stared at the house. Nora Sutherlin—the notorious erotica writer whose books were banned as often as they were translated lived here? Zach could imagine his own grandmother in this house forcing tea and biscuits on small children.
With a heavy sigh, he strode to the front door and rang the bell. Shortly after, he heard footsteps approaching—sturdy, masculine footsteps. Zach allowed himself the pleasure of imagining that Nora Sutherlin might simply be the pen name for some overweight bloke in his mid-fifties.
A man did open the door. No, not a man—a boy. A boy wearing nothing but plaid pajama pants and a cluster of hemp necklaces, one dangling a small silver cross, stood across the threshold from Zach and regarded him with a sleepy smile.
“Nineteen,” he said in an accent Zach immediately recognized as American South. “Not sixteen. She just tells everybody I’m sixteen for the street cred.”
“Street cred?” Zach asked, stunned that the rumor of the teenage intern had proved true.
The boy shrugged his sun-freckled shoulders. “Her words. Wesley Railey. Just Wes.”
“Zachary Easton. I’m here to meet with your…employer?”
The boy, Wesley, laughed and brushed a swath of dark blond hair out of his brown eyes with the graceful languor of youth.
“My employer is right this way,” he said, exaggerating the Southern accent for comic effect. Zach entered the house and found it cozy and homey, replete with overstuffed furniture and bursting bookcases. “I like your accent. You’re British?”
“Lived in London the past ten years. You don’t sound like a native, either.”
“Kentucky. But Mom’s a Georgia peach so that’s where I get this mess from. I keep trying to lose it, but Nora won’t let me. Has a thing for accents.”
“That does not bode well,” Zach said as Wesley grabbed a V-neck white T-shirt off a pile of folded laundry and pulled it on. Zach noted the boy’s slim but muscular frame and wondered why Nora Sutherlin bothered with the intern pretense. A nineteen-year-old lover might be rather disgraceful for a woman of thirty-three but certainly legal.
Wesley led him down an abbreviated hallway. Without knocking he pushed open a door.
“Nor, Mr. Easton’s here.”
He stepped to the side and Zach blinked in surprise at his first glimpse of the infamous Nora Sutherlin.
From all the rumors he’d heard, he’d expected some sort of Amazonian in red leather wielding a riding crop. Instead, he found a pale, petite beauty with wavy black hair barely contained in a loose knot at her nape. And no red leather in sight at all. She wore men’s style pajamas, blue ones covered in what appeared to be little yellow ducks.
Her legs rested on top of her desk and she had her keyboard balanced across her lap. With quick nimble fingers she typed away, saying nothing and giving them only her beguiling profile.
“Nora?” Wesley prompted.
“I’ve got a crisp new Benjamin for the first person who can give me a good synonym for thrust, noun form. Go,” she said, her voice both honeyed and sardonic.
Although irritated by her cavalier attitude and her unfortunate attractiveness, Zach couldn’t help but scroll through his substantial mental thesaurus.
“Push, lunge, shove, attack, force, jab,” he rattled off the words.
“His slow, relentless jabs sent her reeling…” she said. “Sounds like commentary on a boxing match. Goddammit, why are there no good synonyms for thrust? Bane of my existence. Although…” She set her keyboard aside and turned to face him for the first time. “I do love a man with a big vocabulary.”
Zach’s spine stiffened as the most unusually beautiful woman he’d seen in years smiled at him. She stood up and walked on bare feet to him.
“Ms. Sutherlin.” Zach took her proffered hand. “How do you do?”
From her small stature he expected a dainty grip. But she grasped his hand with surprisingly strong fingers.
“Gorgeous accent,” she said. “Not a bit of the old Scouser left, is there?”
“You’ve done your homework, I see,” Zach replied, troubled that she seemed to know more about him than he knew about her. He now regretted tossing her bio into the bin. “But not everyone born in Liverpool speaks like a young Paul McCartney.”
“Shame.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as she continued to gaze at him. “What a shame.”
Zach forced himself to really meet her eyes and then wished he hadn’t. At first glance her eyes appeared a deep green, but she blinked and they seemed to change to a black so dark they likely could not remember the green they had just been. He knew that she looked only at his face, but still he felt stripped bare by her penetrating gaze, torn open. She knew him. He knew it, and he sensed she knew it, too.
Determined to regain control of the situation, Zach pulled his hand back.
“Ms. Sutherlin—”
“Right. Work.” She returned to her desk. Zach glanced around her office and saw even more books than were in the living room: books and notebooks, stacks of paper and dark wooden filing cabinets.
“One quick question, Mr. Easton,” she said, dropping into her desk chair. “Are you, by any chance, ashamed of being Jewish?”
“Excuse me?” Zach said, not quite certain he’d heard her correctly.
“Nora, stop it,” Wesley scolded.
“Just curious,” she said with an indifferent wave of her hand. “You go by Zachary but your name is actually Zechariah like the Hebrew prophet. Why did you change it?”
The question was so personal, so entirely none of her concern that Zach couldn’t believe he deigned to answer it.
“I’ve been called Zach or Zachary since the day I was born. Only when filling out formal documents do I even remember Zechariah is actually my name.” Zach kept his tone cool and even. He knew that he could only win here if he stayed calm and didn’t allow her to get the rise out of him she so clearly desired. “And the only thing I am ashamed of currently is this sudden downturn in my career.”
He expected her to flinch or fight. Instead, she just laughed.
“I really can’t blame you. Have a seat and tell me all about it.”
Warily, Zach sat down in the battered paisley armchair across from her desk. He started to cross his ankle over his knee but froze in midmovement as his foot tapped an unusually long black duffel bag that sat on the floor. He heard the distinct, unnerving sound of metal clinking against metal.
“I’ve got to get to class,” Wesley said, sounding desperate to leave. “That okay?”
“Oh, I doubt Mr. Easton will bend me over my desk and ravish me the second you leave,” she said, winking at Zach. “Unfortunately.”
The words and the wink forced an image into Zach’s mind of doing that very act. He forced the thought out just as quickly as she put it in.
Wesley shook his head in amused disgust.
“Mr. Easton, good luck,” Wesley said, turning to him. “Just don’t act impressed, and she’ll eventually settle down.”
“Impressed?” Zach repeated. “I doubt that will be a problem.”
Zach waited for his words to register. He saw Wesley’s eyes narrow, but she only looked at him from under her veil of black eyelashes.
“Oh…” She nearly purred the word. “I like him already.”
“God help us all.” Wesley left on the heels of his prayer. Zach glanced back at Wesley’s retreating form. He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to be left alone with this woman.
“Your son, I presume?” Zach asked after Wesley departed.
“My intern. Sort of. He cooks so I guess that makes him more of a factotum. Intern? Factotum?”
“Houseboy,” Zach supplied, putting his large vocabulary to use again. “And a rather well-trained one, I see.”
“Well-trained? Wesley? He’s horribly trained. I can’t even train him to fuck me. But I don’t think you drove all the way from the city just to talk about my intern with me, adorable as he is.”
“No, I did not.” Zach fell silent. He waited and watched as Nora Sutherlin sat back in her chair and studied him with her unnerving eyes.
“So…” she began. “I can tell you don’t like me. Shows you’ve got good taste in women at least. Also shows you’ve heard of me. Am I what you expected?”
Zach stared at her a moment. The last three writers he’d worked with had been men in their late fifties and early sixties. Never once had he seen any of them in their pajamas. And never had he met a writer as uncomfortably alluring as Nora Sutherlin.
“You’re shorter.”
“Thank God for stilettos, right? So what’s the verdict? J.P. said he’s giving you total control over the book and me. It’s been a long time since I’ve let a man boss me around. I kind of miss it.”
“The verdict is undecided.”
“A well-hung jury then. Better give me a retrial.”
“You’re very clever.”
“You’re very handsome.”
Zach shifted in his seat. He wasn’t used to flirtation from his writers, either. Then again, she wasn’t one of his writers.
“That wasn’t a compliment. Cleverness is the last recourse of an amateur. I look for depth in my books, passion, substance.”
“Passion I have.”
“Passion is not synonymous with sex. I’ll admit your book was interesting and not entirely without merit. At one point I even detected a heart inside all that flesh.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there.”
“But the heartbeat was very faint. The patient might be terminal.”
She looked at him and glanced away. Zach had seen that look before—it was defeat. He’d scared her away as he’d planned. He wondered why he wasn’t happier about it.
“Terminal…” She turned her face back to him. A new look was shining in her eyes. “It’s almost Easter—the season of Resurrection.”
“Resurrection? Really?” Zach said, astonished by her tenacity. “I leave for Royal’s L.A. offices in six weeks. Six weeks is not nearly enough time to involve myself with any project of worth or magnitude. But six weeks is all we have.”
“You just said six weeks isn’t long enough—”
“But it’s all I have to give. Fix it in six and it’s off to press. If not—”
“If not, it’s back to the gutter for the guttersnipe writer, right?”
Zach stared at her in stunned silence.
“John-Paul Bonner’s the biggest gossip in the publishing industry, Mr. Easton. He told me what you think of me. He told me you think I’ll fail.”
“I’m quite certain of it.”
“If you’re my editor, my failure will take you down, too.”
“I’m not your editor yet. I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“You will. So why did you quit teaching?”
“Quit teaching?”
“You were a professor at Cambridge, right? Pretty good gig especially for someone so young. But you quit.”
“Ten years ago,” Zach said, shocked by how much she seemed to know about him. How on earth had she learned about Cambridge?
“So why—”
“Why my personal life is of such fascination to you, I cannot fathom.”
“I’m a cat. You’re a shiny object.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“I am, aren’t I? Somebody should spank me.” She sighed. “So you’re kind of an asshole. No offense.”
“And you appear to be two or three words I don’t feel quite comfortable saying aloud.”
“I’d tell you to say them anyway, but I promised Wesley I wouldn’t let you flirt with me. But I digress. Tell me what’s wrong with my book. Say it slowly,” she said, grinning.
“You have a very sanguine attitude toward the editing process. What will you say when I tell you that you must cut out the ten to twenty pages you’re certain constitute the living, beating heart of your book?”
She said nothing for a long minute. Her eyes glanced away from him and she seemed to lose herself in a dark place. He watched as she breathed in slowly through her nose, held the breath then exhaled out her mouth. She turned her uncanny green eyes to him.
“Then I’ll say that I once cut the living, beating heart out of my own chest,” she said, her voice devoid of its usual flippancy. “I survived that amputation. I’ll survive this one.”
“May I ask why you’re so determined to work with me? I’ve done my research, Ms. Sutherlin. You have a rabid fan following that would buy your phone bill in hardcover and still manage to wank off to it.”
“I’m also very big in France.”
Zach gritted his teeth and felt the first stirrings of an impending headache. “Didn’t your ‘intern’ say you would settle down at some point?”
“Mr. Easton,” she said, rolling back in her swivel chair and throwing her legs back on her desk. “This is me settled down.”
“I was afraid of that.” Zach stood, prepared to leave.
“This book,” she began and stopped. She moved her legs off the desk and sat cross-legged in her chair. For a moment she looked both very earnest and terribly young.
“What about it?”
She looked away and seemed to search for words. “It…means something to me. It’s not another one of my dirty little stories. I came to Royal because I need to do right by this book.” She met his eyes again and without a trace of levity or mirth said, “Please. I need your help.”
“I only work with serious writers.”
“I’m not a serious person. I know that. But I am a serious writer. Writing is one of the only two things in this world I do take seriously.”
“And the other?”
“The Roman Catholic Church.”
“I think we’re done here.”
“You’re not much of an editor then,” she taunted as he headed to the door. “It’s much too early for an ending. I’m no editor and even I know that.”
“Ms. Sutherlin, you’re obviously emotionally involved in your book. That’s fine for writing, but editing a book you love hurts.”
“I like doing things that hurt.” She gave him a Cheshire cat grin. “J.P. said you were the best. I think he’s right. I’ll do whatever it takes, whatever you say. I’ll beg if it will help my case. I’ll get down on my knees and beg if it’ll help yours.”
“I’m going now.”
“J.P. also said they call you the London Fog around the office,” she said as he turned his back to her. “Is that because of the long coat, the accent or your gift for putting a cold, wet damper on everyone’s good time?”
“I’ll leave you to decide that.”
“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” she called out, and Zach was forced to admire her stubbornness. He couldn’t believe he was tempted to consider rewarding it.
“A writer writes,” he said, facing her again. “Write something for me, something good. I don’t care how long it is, and I don’t care what it’s about. Just impress me. You’ve got twenty-four hours. Show me you can create under pressure, and I’ll consider it.”
“You’ll be surprised what I can do under pressure,” she said, but Zach had his doubts. The houseboy, the jokes, the flirting—she was no serious writer. “Any suggestions?” she asked, slightly more sincere this time.
“Stop writing what you know and start writing what you want to know. And,” he said, pointing a finger at her, “none of your cheap tricks.”
Her spine straightened as if he’d finally found an insult that stuck. “I assure you, Mr. Easton,” she said in a tone both stern and reproving, “my tricks are anything but cheap.”
“Prove it then. You’ve got twenty-four hours.”
She leaned back in her chair and smiled.
“Fuck your twenty-four hours. You’ll have it tonight.”
3
Numbing.
As an editor Zach often forced his writers to dig deep, cast aside the obvious and find the perfect word for every sentence. And the perfect word to describe this book release party he’d been forced to attend? Numbing.
Zach stalked through the party saying little more than the occasional hello to various colleagues. He’d only come because once again J.P. had twisted his arm, and Rose Evely—the guest of honor—had been a Royal House writer for thirty years now. What a ludicrous party anyway—someone dimmed the lights to create a nightclub sort of atmosphere but no amount of ambience could turn the banal hotel banquet hall into anything other than a beige box. He wandered toward a spiral staircase in the corner of the room to surreptitiously check his watch. If he could survive two hours at this party, maybe it would be long enough to placate his social butterfly of a boss.
Scanning the crowd, he saw his twenty-eight-year-old assistant, Mary, trying to talk her new husband into dancing with her. His first week at Royal, he’d been pleasantly surprised to find out his spitfire of an assistant was, like him, Jewish. He’d teased her he’d never known a Jew named Mary before and started calling her his pseudoshiksa. Mary, for all her endearing brusqueness, only ever called him “Boss.” J.P. stood with Rose Evely. Both J.P. and Evely had been happily married to their respective spouses for decades but nothing stopped J.P. from chivalrously flirting with any woman who had the patience to listen to his literary rambles. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves at this miserable party. Why wasn’t he?
Once more he glanced down at his watch.
“I can save you, if you want,” came a voice from above him.
Zach spun around and looked up. Smiling down at him from over the top of the staircase was Nora Sutherlin.
“Save me?” He narrowed his eyes at her.
“From this party.” She crooked her index finger at him.
Zach’s better judgment warned him that climbing that staircase could be a very bad idea indeed. Yet his feet overruled his reason, and he mounted the steps and joined her on the platform at the top. He raised his eyebrow as he cast a disapproving gaze over her clothes. That morning at her house, she’d worn shapeless pajamas that concealed every part of her but her abundant personality. Now he saw on full display what his mind had before only imagined.
She wore red, of course. Scarlet red and not much of it. The dress stopped at the top of her thighs and started at the edge of her breasts. She had miraculous curves that the dramatic floor-length red jacket she wore over her dress did nothing to hide. Even worse, she wore black leather boots that laced all the way above her knees. Pirate boots and a roguish grin on a beautiful black-haired woman…for the first time in a long time Zach felt something other than numb.
“How do you know I want to be saved from this party, Miss Sutherlin?” Zach leaned back against the railing and crossed his arms.
“I’ve been watching you from my little crow’s nest here since the second you walked in. You’ve said maybe five words to four people, you’ve checked your watch three times in as many minutes, and you whispered something to J.P., which, guessing from the look on his face, was a death threat. You’re here against your will. I can get you out.”
Zach cocked a self-deprecating smile at her.
“Unfortunately, you’re right. I am here against my will. I have to wonder, however, why you’re here at all. Didn’t I give you homework?” he asked, remembering his rash decision this morning to give her one chance to impress him.
“You did. And I was a good girl and finished it. See?”
He tried and failed to look away as she reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to him. The paper was still warm from her skin.
“This is it?” he asked, seeing only three paragraphs on the page.
“Don’t judge a book by its mother. Just read.”
Zach glanced at her once more and wished he hadn’t. Every time he looked at her, he found something else to attract him. Her jacket had slipped down her arm and her pale sculpted shoulder peeked out. Sculpted? His petite little writer had some muscle to go along with her impressive curves. Tougher than she looked.
Remembering himself, Zach turned from her, tilted the page into a patch of light and read.
First she noticed his hips. The eyes might be the windows to the soul, but a man’s hips were his seat of power. She doubted he’d chosen those perfectly fitted jeans and that black T-shirt that belied the tautness of his stomach for the purpose of flattering his lower body, but he had and now she lost herself in the thought of caressing with her lips that exquisite hollow that lay between smooth skin and elegantly jutting hip bone.
She had to meet his eyes eventually. With reluctance she dragged her gaze to his face, as dignified and angular as the rest of him. Pale skin and dark Brutus-cut hair contrasted with eyes the color of ice. Glacial, she decided his eyes were—they spoke of hidden depths. A stark beauty, he was a man made to be admired by intelligent women.
Lean and tall but with the substantial mass of an athlete, he was utterly masculine. The world had fallen away in his presence and now that he was gone, she was left in the equally potent presence of his absence.
Zach read the words one more time trying all the while to ignore the annoyingly pleasant image of Nora Sutherlin caressing his naked hips with her mouth.
“I’ve noticed you usually shy away from long descriptive passages in your book,” he said.
“I know people think erotica is just a romance novel with rougher sex. It’s not. If it’s a subgenre of anything, it’s horror.”
“Horror? Really?”
“Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear. You’re terrified of me, aren’t you?”
“Slightly,” he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck.
“A smart horror writer will never put too much detail in about the monster. The readers’ imaginations can conjure their own demons. In erotica you never want your main characters to be too physically specific. That way your readers can insert their own fantasies, their own fears. Erotica is a joint effort between writer and reader.”
“How so?” Zach asked, intrigued that Nora Sutherlin would have her own literary theories.
“Writing erotica is like fucking someone for the first time. You aren’t sure exactly what he wants yet so you try to give him everything he could possibly want. Everything and anything…” She enunciated the words like a cat stretching in sunlight. “You hit every nerve and eventually you’ll hit the nerve. Have I hit any nerves yet?”
Zach clenched his jaw. “Not any of them you were aiming for.”
“You don’t know what I was aiming for. So what do you think of the writing?”
“Could be better.” He refolded the page. “You use ‘was’ too much.”
“Rough draft,” she said unapologetically. She stared at him with dark, waiting eyes.
“The last line’s the strongest—‘the equally potent presence of his absence.’” Zach knew he should give the page back to her but for some reason he stuck it in his pocket. “It’s good.”
She gave him a slow, dangerous smile.
“It’s you.”
Zach only stared at her a moment before pulling the folded page back out.
“This is me?” he asked, his skin flushing.
“It is. Every last long, lean inch of you. I wrote it right after you left this morning. I was, needless to say, inspired by your visit.”
Swallowing hard, Zach unfolded the sheet again. Brutus-cut black hair…ice-colored eyes…jeans, black shirt… It was him.
“Excuse me,” Zach began, trying to regain control of this conversation, “but didn’t I repeatedly insult you this morning?”
“Your kvetching was very fetching. I like men who are mean to me. I trust them more.”
She tilted her head to the side and her unruly black hair fell over her forehead, veiling her green-black eyes.
“Forgive me. I might be speechless right now.”
“Your orders,” she said. “You told me to stop writing what I knew and start writing what I wanted to know. I want to know…you.”
She took a step closer and Zach’s heart dropped a few feet and landed somewhere in the vicinity of his groin.
“Who are you, Ms. Sutherlin?” he asked, not quite knowing what he meant by that question.
“I’m just a writer. A writer named Nora. And you can call me that, Zach.”
“Nora then. I’m sorry. I’m not used to being hit on by my writers. Especially after verbally abusing them.”
Nora’s eyes flashed with amusement.
“Verbal abuse? Zach, where I come from ‘slut’ is a term of endearment. Want to see where I come from?”
“No.”
“Pity,” she said, sounding not at all surprised or disappointed. “Where should we go then? I promised to save you from this party, didn’t I?”
“I really shouldn’t leave,” Zach said, terrified what would happen the second he found himself alone with Nora.
“Come on, Zach. This party sucks and not in the good way. I’ve had pap smears more fun than this.”
Zach covered a laugh with a cough.
“I must admit you do have a way with words.”
“So you’ll edit me then? Please?” She batted her eyelashes at him in mock innocence. “You won’t regret it.”
Zach glanced up at the ceiling as if it could give him some hint of what the hell he was getting himself into. Nora Sutherlin…he had only six weeks left in New York until he left for L.A. Why was he even considering getting involved with Nora Sutherlin and her book? He knew why. He had nothing else in his life right now. He liked Mary and enjoyed working for J.P. But he’d made no friends in New York, no connections of any kind. He hadn’t allowed himself to even consider dating. One day he’d taken off his wedding ring in a fit of anger and couldn’t find a reason to put it back on. He wouldn’t consider inflicting himself on any woman right now. At least working with Nora Sutherlin might give him a much-needed distraction from his misery. She seemed like the type of woman who’d help you forget about your headache by setting your bed on fire.
Won’t regret it? He already did.
“You do realize that working with you could be bad for my career,” Zach said. “I do literary fiction, not—”
“Literary friction?”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Zach shook his head.
Nora leaned in close to him. He was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the long, bare curve of her neck. She smelled of hothouse flowers in bloom.
“I can.” She breathed the words into his ear.
Zach exhaled slowly and pulled, reluctantly, away from her.
“I’m a brutal editor.”
“I like brutal.”
“I’ll make you rewrite the whole book.”
“Now you’re trying to turn me on, aren’t you? Shall we?”
“Fine,” he finally said. “Save me then.”
“Let’s do it,” she said. “If J.P. gives you shit about leaving the party with me, tell him it was my idea for us to go work on my book. J.P. won’t spank me.”
“I’m not certain of that,” Zach said.
“I knew I liked that man for a reason.”
“I need to say a few goodbyes if we’re leaving.” J.P. for one. Then Mary. And he hadn’t met her husband yet. And Rose Evely, too.
“Nope. Can’t do that,” Nora said. “Never say goodbye when you leave a party. That way you leave a mystery in your place. They’ll have so much more fun talking about us than they ever would talking to us. Can’t you already hear them? Zach Easton just left with Nora Sutherlin. Are they…surely not…of course they are—”
“We aren’t,” Zach said with finality.
“I know that. You know that. They don’t know that.”
Zach looked around the room. Everywhere he looked he saw eyes glancing furtively in their direction. The most intense gazing came from Thomas Finley, his least favorite coworker. Zach noted that Finley didn’t so much stare at him as he did at Nora. And the look in his eyes wasn’t particularly friendly.
“I prefer not being a topic of gossip,” Zach said.
“Too late. At least with me, it’ll be really good gossip.” She strode down the staircase with an audacious kick of her heels on each step.
Zach followed in her wake. The crowd parted for her as she cut a bloodred swath through the center of the room.
Finally free of the suffocating party, Zach threw on his coat and breathed in the bracing winter evening air.
A cab stopped within seconds for Nora and she slipped gracefully inside. He took a sharp breath as her black-booted legs disappeared into the cab. One more time he asked himself what the hell he was doing before sliding in next to her.
Nora said nothing as he joined her, only turned her head and gazed out at the night. She seemed to be trying to stare down the city. He had a feeling the city would blink first.
Nervously, he rubbed the empty spot where he’d once worn his wedding band. Nora reached out and wrapped her hand around his ring finger. Facing him now, she raised her eyebrow in a question.
“Grace,” he answered.
Nora nodded. “You married a princess.”
Princess Grace—her mother called her that.
“She hates being called ‘Princess.’” Zach heard the anguish in his voice.
Nora lifted his hand and brought it to her neck. She pressed his fingers into her throat. Her pulse throbbed through her warm, soft skin.
“Søren,” she said and met his eyes. In those dark, dangerous depths he saw a glimmer of something human—not merely sympathy but empathy. And he felt something inhuman in response—not passion but pure animal need. For a brief moment he imagined his hands digging into her thighs and the bite of her leather boots on his back. He tore his gaze away before her uncanny ability to read him saw that image in his hungry gaze.
She released his hand just as the cab pulled up in front of Zach’s apartment building. He opened the door and got out. He wanted to ask her up, wanted to spend a few hours forgetting his pain and all the reasons for it. But he couldn’t, could he? Because of Grace, not that she would care anymore. Zach opened his mouth but before he could ask Nora up, she reached out to shut the door.
“See, Zach? I told you I’d save you.”
* * *
Nora watched Zach stare after the cab before turning and walking into his building. What a beautiful wreck of a man. Kingsley always said beautiful wrecks were a specialty of hers. He should know. He certainly qualified as one himself.
“Where to, lady?”
Nora thought about it for a moment. For the next six weeks she and Zach would rewrite her book. If he started kicking her ass tomorrow, might be cathartic to kick a little ass of her own tonight.
“Lady?” her driver prompted.
Nora rattled off an address for a Manhattan town house and nearly laughed as she saw her driver’s eyes widen in the rearview mirror.
“You sure about that? That’s no place for a nice girl to go after dark. Or ever.”
This time Nora did laugh out loud. Every cabdriver in town knew Kingsley’s address. No one with anything to lose would ever turn up there in his or her own car. Good thing she had nothing to lose. Not anymore anyway.
Nora looked back out onto the city night. Søren might kill her for getting involved with a guy like Zach, a guy still technically married. Pissing off Søren—yet another reason to go for it.
“Don’t worry.” She crossed her legs and leaned back in the seat. She’d tip the driver a Benjamin just for giving her a giggle. “I’m not a nice girl.”
4
Everything hurt—back, arms, wrists, fingers, neck—everything. Nora hadn’t been this sore in years. Not since the old days anyway. Zach hadn’t been kidding—he was a brutal editor. And she’d been right—he was kicking her ass. Nora allowed herself a smile. She’d forgotten how much she liked having her ass kicked.
She read through Zach’s notes again on her first chapters. Nice to see he had quite the sadistic streak in him. Of course she couldn’t imagine him taking a real whip to her—more’s the pity. But he had a gift for tongue-lashings. He’d been her editor for all of three days and so far he’d already called her a “guttersnipe writer” whose books were “melodramatic,” “maniacal” and “unhygienic.” Unhygienic had been her personal favorite.
Nora stretched her aching back as Wesley entered her office and collapsed into the armchair across from her desk.
“How’s the rewrite going?” he asked.
“Horrible. It’s day three and I’ve rewritten…nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Zach shredded the book.” Nora held up a sheaf of paper. The morning after the release party Zach sent her a dozen pages of notes on the first three chapters alone. “You sure this guy’s the right editor for you? Can’t you work with somebody else?”
Nora picked up her tea and sipped at it. She’d rather not talk about the contract situation with Wesley. J.P. had told her Zach got final say on whether her book got published, but she hadn’t passed that information on to Wesley. Poor kid worried about her enough as it was.
“Apparently not. John-Paul Bonner had to practically beg to even get Zach to meet me.”
Wesley shrugged and crossed his arms.
“Not sure I like him. He was kind of, I don’t know—”
“An ass? You can say ‘ass’ around me. It’s in the Bible,” she reminded him with a wink.
“He was a jerk to you. How’s that?”
“Zach’s a slave-driver. But I like that about him. Brings back memories.” She sat back in her chair and smiled into her tea.
Wesley groaned. “Do you really have to bring up Søren?”
Nora grimaced. Wesley hated it when she brought up her ex.
“Sorry, kiddo. But even if Zach’s an ass, he’s still amazing at his job. I feel like I’m finally learning how to write a book. Books at Libretto were commodities. Royal treats writers like artists. I think this book deserves more than Libretto could give it.”
Nora didn’t mention that Libretto wouldn’t publish it even if she wanted them to. Once Mark Klein found out she’d been shopping around for a new publisher, he cut off everything but contractually obligated contact with her. Wesley didn’t need to know that Royal House was the only reputable publisher who’d given her the time of day. Despite their rocky start, she looked forward to working with Zach. He had a sterling reputation in the publishing industry, not to mention being stunning and fun to flirt with. Especially since he pretended he hated it when she did.
“What’s this book about anyway?” Wesley asked.
“It’s kind of a love story. Not my usual boy-meets-girl, boy-beats-girl story. My two characters love each other but they don’t belong together. The whole book is them—against their will—breaking up.”
Wesley plucked at a loose thread in the battered armchair.
“But they love each other? Why wouldn’t they belong together?”
Nora released a wistful sigh. “Spoken like a nineteen-year-old.”
“I like happy endings. Is that a crime?”
“It’s just unrealistic. You don’t think two people can break up and still be happy eventually?”
Wesley paused. He tended to act before thinking, but he always thought before he spoke. She studied him while he pondered her question. Gorgeous kid. He drove her up the wall with those big brown eyes of his and sweetly handsome face. For the millionth time since asking him to move in with her she wondered what the hell she’d been thinking by dragging this innocent into her world.
“You left him,” Wesley finally said. Him…Søren.
“Yeah,” she said, biting her bottom lip, a habit Søren had been trying to break her of for eighteen years. “I did.”
“Are you happy without him?” Wesley turned his eyes back to her.
“Some days, yes. Then some days it’s like I just got my arm blown off. But this book isn’t about Søren.”
“Can I read it?”
“Not a chance. Maybe when it’s rewritten. Or maybe…”
Nora grinned at him, and Wesley suddenly looked nervous.
She got out of her chair and sat on the edge of her desk and put a foot on each arm of his chair.
“Let’s play a game,” she said leaning in close. Wesley sat up straight and pressed back into the chair. “I’ll trade you my book for your body.”
“I’m your intern. This counts as sexual harassment.”
“Being sexually harassed is in your job description, remember?”
Wesley shifted in the chair. She loved how jumpy she still made him even after over a year in the same house. A sandy-blond lock of hair fell over his forehead. She reached out to brush it back.
Wesley ducked under her leg before she could touch him and stood just out of reach.
“Coward,” she teased.
Wesley started to say something but they both froze at the blaring ring that echoed from the vicinity of her desk.
The smile that had been in Wesley’s eyes vanished as Nora dug out a sleek red cell phone from under a pile of papers.
“La Maîtresse speaking,” she answered.
“The book,” Wesley mouthed. His eyes pleaded with her.
With the phone still at her ear Nora walked up to Wesley. She moved so close he started stepping back. She took another step toward him, and he took another step back.
“Go do your homework, junior,” she said, and Wesley gave her the closest thing to a mean look he had.
“You have homework, too,” he reminded her.
“I’m not a biochemistry major at a fucking brutal liberal arts college. Scoot. The grown-ups are talking now.”
She shut the door in his face.
“Talk, Kingsley,” she said into the phone. “This better be good.”
* * *
“Working late as usual, I see.”
Zach glanced up from his notes on Nora’s book and found J.P. standing outside his office with a newspaper under his arm. He checked his watch.
“After eight already?” Zach asked, shocked by his sudden immunity to the passage of time. “Good Lord.”
“Must be reading something good.” J.P. entered Zach’s office and sat down.
“Possibly. Here—listen to this.” Zach opened her manuscript to a marked page and read aloud.
It is a pleasure to watch her work. From my desk in the office I need only to move my chair six inches to the right and I can see the kitchen’s reflection in the hall mirror with such clarity that I feel like a ghost in the room.
This is what I see—Caroline, who at twenty still retains the coltish legs of a much younger girl, pushes a stool to the counter. It wobbles nervously under her knees as she kneels on it with a steadying breath. She opens the cabinet that houses my wineglasses, my deliberately mismatched collection, all of which are older than her and one or two which are older than this adolescent country. She takes them one by one from the rack; their fragile stems shiver in her delicate fingers.
I brought her to this moment by design. I could have tortured her with tasks, with arduous acts of service. Instead, I chose to torture her with boredom, curious to see what the devil would do with her idle hands. Interesting that in my home it is the objects most easily broken that draw her attention first. With a soft, clean cloth she polishes every glass. She holds the bowl like a bird, strokes the stem like the back of a cat, wipes every old whisper off the lip. I see her eyes count the glasses. I count them with her. Thirteen. Last night I showed her the lash but did not use it on her. Thirteen…one lash for every glass she touched without my permission.
Thirteen…tonight I think I’ll whip her first and tell her why after.
Zach closed the manuscript and waited for J.P.’s reaction. J.P. whistled, and Zach raised his eyebrow at him.
“I think that rather turned me on. Should that worry me?” J.P. asked with a rakish grin.
“Since I’m the only other person in the room, I think it should probably worry me a great deal more,” Zach said. “It’s rather good, isn’t it? The content is slightly unsettling but the writing…”
“She’s got talent. I told you. I hope this means you are no longer planning on killing me.”
“Killing you?”
J.P. grinned. “Yes, for twisting your arm over Sutherlin.”
Zach laughed a little. “No, I’m not going to kill you anymore. But tell me—was I really the only editor who could or would work with her?”
“I suppose I could have dug up someone else. No one near as good as you, though. Anyway, Sutherlin requested you.”
Zach looked up in surprise.
“She did?”
“Well, not by name.” J.P. looked slightly sheepish. “She told me to give her to whichever editor would flog her the hardest. Yours was the first and quite honestly the only name that came to mind.”
“I’m hardly flogging her.”
“What would you call it?” J.P. had a dark twinkle in his eyes.
“I don’t believe I will justify that insinuating tone in your voice with a response. We were discussing the book after all.”
“Yes, quite a stunning little book you waltzed out of Rose’s party with Monday night.”
“I’m a professional,” Zach said calmly. “I don’t shag my writers.”
He omitted mentioning how shamefully close he’d come to asking Nora up after the cab ride to his building. He still couldn’t believe she’d gotten to him that fast. In ten years of marriage he’d never once been unfaithful to Grace, never even wanted to be. And then in one day Nora Sutherlin was putting thoughts in his head he hadn’t let himself have in years.
“I’ve seen her. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But it’s just a shock. I’m surrounded by postfeminists and neo-Freudians. Whatever happened to that ‘forgot the author, only the book matters’ philosophy?”
“One cab ride and one good conversation hardly makes me a Freudian. I’ll admit I was a bit of a prig about her. She is a good writer and the book has potential. If I’m warming up to her it’s only because I’m warming up to the book. But she is starkers. That I was right about.”
“She’s a writer. She’s supposed to be mad.”
“At least she’s also a mad worker. She’s already sent me a full synopsis of every chapter and the new outline I ordered.”
“How’s the new outline?”
“Better,” Zach said and glanced at his notes. “But still, more sex than substance. I think she’s capable of substance. Just afraid of it.”
“She does seem fairly married to her bad-girl writer persona,” J.P. said, and Zach nodded his agreement. “It lends her credibility if she makes people think that she practices what she preaches. Getting her to retire her proverbial whip and take up the pen full-time won’t be easy.”
“But if she did…” Zach glanced down at the manuscript and remembered his reaction Tuesday morning when he’d forced himself to read it again, this time with an open mind. The words had simmered on the page, flared into life and burned. He’d gotten so engrossed in the story he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be editing it. “If she did, she could set the world on fire, and she wouldn’t even need a candle. And don’t you dare tell her anything I just said. I’ve got to keep her afraid of me if I’m going to keep her writing.”
J.P. laughed to himself, and Zach stared at him.
“What?” Zach demanded.
J.P. took the newspaper out from under his arm and unfolded it. It was a copy of the New Amsterdam Noteworthy, a biweekly New York trade publication that carried the most recent news in publishing. J.P. threw the paper on Zach’s desk. On the bottom front page was a small photo of him and Nora on the staircase at Rose Evely’s party. Zach hadn’t remembered a camera flash. Apparently the photographer had been far enough away he’d missed it. In the photo Nora leaned toward Zach with her mouth near his ear. It looked as if she was about to kiss him on the neck. Zach knew exactly what moment that was. It was when he’d said he couldn’t believe he was doing this and she’d responded with a seductive “I can.” The caption under the photograph read, “Nora Sutherlin—the only writer who could make Anaïs Nin blush.”
“She doesn’t look scared to me,” J.P. said. “You look a little petrified, however.”
“J.P., I—”
“I don’t want to have to find another editor for Sutherlin. But I will if I must. I don’t mind if the book sells because of the sex in it. But I don’t want anyone thinking that writers have to do more than write when they come to Royal.”
Zach rubbed his forehead.
“I swear it’s just about the book. And no, you don’t have to find another editor for her. I know we can make something good together.”
“I think you can, too. If you stay focused.” J.P. sounded skeptical.
“I am focused.”
“Easton, I’m an old man. My hearing’s going and I’ve got two knees on the way out. But my eyes can still see. Since the day you arrived here, you haven’t once smiled like you meant it. And when I walked into this office and caught you reading her book, you were smiling like a lad who just found his father’s Playboy stash. I’ve tried writing in bed before. I never seem to get much done.”
Zach opened his mouth again, but J.P. raised his hand to cut him off.
“You can keep working with Sutherlin. For now. Just take a little advice—”
“I’d rather not.”
J.P. reached across Zach’s desk and grabbed the manuscript. He flipped it open and whistled. No doubt his eyes had landed on one of the myriad erotic encounters in the book.
“In the words of Charlotte Brontë,” J.P. began, “‘Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.’ Or in the words of me… Keep it on paper, Easton.”
Zach clenched his jaw and did not reply. J.P. grabbed the newspaper with Zach and Nora’s picture and left him alone once again with her book.
Closing his eyes, Zach conjured an image of Grace. God, he was glad she was in England where she wouldn’t see that photo. But why worry? Even if she saw it, saw him with another woman, would she care? Of course not. If she did, she’d be with him in New York right now.
With a tired sigh he turned to a page in Nora’s book he’d marked with a paperclip. Caroline is sleeping in a separate room from her lover after an argument. William wakes and walks on silent feet to her door. Cracking it just slightly, he pauses and listens until he hears her breathe. The image haunted Zach. The last year with Grace had become a nightmare of shutting doors and separate rooms. Still he could never let the night pass without at least looking in on his sleeping wife until that one terrible night when he found the door locked. The next day J.P. called and invited him to New York and to Royal House with the promise of the chief managing editor position at the L.A. offices when the current chief retired. Zach didn’t even bother to ask what he would be paid before saying yes.
Why was he letting himself think about this? He had to stay objective about the book and its enigmatic author with her dark hair and red dress and her words that burned.
Keep it on paper, Easton…
Easier said than done.
5
The phone rang at seven and the call itself consisted of only seven words—her hello followed by his “The club at nine. Wait blindfolded.”
With shaking hands she hung up the phone and went to shower.
She arrived at 8:46. In most areas of her life she ran habitually five minutes late. But she’d learned the hard way never to keep him waiting.
He had his own room at the club, only one of seven people who did. And she had a key to his room, only one of two people who did.
His room was spare and strangely elegant considering its only purpose. Apart from three floor-standing candlesticks, his room was simply adorned. Rich white and black linens covered the bed. White sheets waiting to be stained.
She undressed completely and found the black silk scarf. Kneeling on the bed with her back to the door, she closed her eyes and wrapped the sash around her head. She hated this part, hated sacrificing her sight to him. It wasn’t fear so much as greed. She wanted to see him, wanted to see him hurt her, wanted to see him in her. He knew that’s what she wanted. That’s why he ordered the blindfold so often.
She waited.
While she waited for him to arrive, she began the deep, slow breathing he had taught her long ago. She took the air in through her nose and pulled it into her stomach before exhaling out through her mouth. The breaths weren’t simply to relax her although they did take the edge off her nervousness. The hypnotic breathing lulled her and helped her slip closer into subspace, that safe place where the mind went while the body was elsewhere being tortured. There was a third reason for the breathing he had never told her, but she knew was true—he’d ordered her to do it. Even the very air that went into her lungs did so at his command.
She exhaled when she heard the door quietly open. Straining her ears, she tried to hear everything he did. He didn’t speak. He rarely spoke at these moments. She listened and heard with some relief the sound of only one set of feet. Sometimes he didn’t come alone. She heard him strike a match and light the candles; she sensed the room brighten.
Five minutes or more passed in silence before he came to the bed. A shiver ran through her body as he placed his fingertips on the small of her back. The pleasure of the shockingly gentle touch was so intense it felt like something had pierced her back all the way through to her stomach. She sighed as he kissed her naked shoulder. She stiffened when he locked her collar around her neck.
He rarely used the leash in their private interludes. He reserved the leash to humiliate her when he paraded her through the club. When alone he simply slipped two fingers under her collar and dragged her like a dog to where he wanted her. The collar tightened when his fingers gripped the leather band. He pulled and she came with him as he brought her carefully off the bed. He was always so cautious with her when she was blindfolded, careful to never let her trip or hurt herself in any way. Hurting her was his privilege alone.
He pushed her forward and she felt the bedpost against her shoulder. Taking her arms one by one, he pulled them behind her back. She leaned her weight into the wood as he buckled the leather bondage cuffs on each wrist. He raised her arms over her head and secured them high to the top of the bedpost.
She stiffened as she felt his hands cover her face. They did nothing but rest there a moment before they moved over her head. Slowly, they ran over her neck and across her shoulders, up her arms and down them again. His arms encircled her and slid over her chest, breasts, and stomach and up her sides before gliding up and down the expanse of her back. One hand slipped between her legs as the other passed over hips and buttocks, down one leg and up again, then down the other. Finally, he ran his hands over the tops of her feet and then lightly passed them over the sensitive soles. She tried not to smile at the exquisitely gentle sensation of his hands touching every part of her body. She knew what he was doing. If more than three days passed without him taking her, he would perform this ritual of re-marking his territory. Her body was his territory, his hands were saying. Every inch of it.
She sensed him step away from her. She began her slow deep breathing again. When the first blow landed between her shoulders, she flinched but did not cry out. The second one came harder and this time she did flinch. By the tenth her back was on fire. After twenty she lost count.
Behind her blindfold, time ceased to pass in its customary manner. Five minutes of flogging lasted an hour. One night in his arms passed in minutes. An hour-long beating was something to be grateful for. The beating would seem to last forever. Even eternity in Hell was no Hell if he was there.
The flogging finally ceased. He pressed in close to her. She felt his strong, bare chest against her burning back. She breathed in and inhaled his scent. Even warm from exertion and arousal he still smelled like a deep winter night.
He placed his hands on her fluttering stomach and brought them slowly up to her breasts. A night with him always meant waning pleasure and waxing pain, waxing pleasure and waning pain. He brought her through the cycle over and over again. The pain brought her body to life. The pleasure was always most acute when it followed the pain.
Now it was pleasure alone she felt as he caressed her breasts and teased her nipples. His mouth found the spot between her shoulder blades that when touched sent a thrill straight into her stomach. One hand slid between her legs and touched her clitoris. With his finger and thumb he massaged it until she was so close to coming she felt the first muscle contraction.
He pulled away from her, leaving her panting and desperate for him. She prayed he’d let her down now, let her down and finally take her.
When she heard the whistling sound of something slicing through the air, she knew he wasn’t done hurting her yet.
After so many years together she’d learned how to prepare herself for a flogging, for the whip and the strap. She knew tricks, ways to breathe, ways to hold herself, to alleviate the pain even as she received it. But when it came to the cane, nothing helped. And when the first strike landed on her lower thighs, she could do nothing but cry out. The second came on the heels of the first, a little harder and one inch higher. On the fourth strike she screamed and felt the blindfold turn wet with tears. The fifth was lighter only because the sixth and final strike was always the worst. The sixth landed in a diagonal across all five previous welts. She sagged in her bonds and cried. He didn’t always beat her until she cried. She learned to love and fear those nights he did. He saved up her pain, counted it like currency and the more pain she endured, the more pleasure she could buy with it.
When he untied her from the bedpost, her arms fell like dead weight to her sides and her knees buckled. He caught her before she collapsed and laid her tenderly on the center of the bed.
His mouth was at her ear now. With words intimate and secret he whispered his love for her, his pride that she was his property, his possession, his heart. She was always his, would forever be his. New tears flowed now but they were ones wrenched from her by love and not torture. This was her favorite pain.
He kissed her now on the mouth for the first time. He kissed her like he owned her, as he owned her. He kissed her like her mouth was his mouth, her lips were his lips, her tongue was his tongue. They were one flesh. They needed no wedding ring, no ceremony to know that was true. She had the collar around her neck. She did not envy married women what they had. She would take his collar over a blood diamond and a cheap gold band any day and for all time.
He moved away from her again. She waited on her aching back and relished the absence of pain. When he returned to her he pulled the coverlet down underneath her so she lay on the sheets. He took her by the knees and wrapped a soft cotton rope around them. She relaxed and let him tie her to the bed. Her knees were up and pulled wide. She lay completely open now. No matter how hard she could try to close her legs, she couldn’t. She never tried.
The bed shifted. She knew he knelt between her wide-open thighs. She inhaled sharply when she felt his fingers slowly enter her. He opened his fingers to widen her, to prepare her for his penetration. He pushed into the back wall of her vagina and pressed down until she flinched hard around his hand. Her passage was slick and wet for him. But he was large enough that he could tear her or bruise her if he didn’t ready her for him first. There were times he took her so roughly she bled. Those were the nights he was lost to himself, lost in the darkness that hid beneath the shadow of his heart. But tonight he wasn’t lost. He was with her.
She felt the wet tip of him poised at the entrance to her body. He pushed in slowly. She whimpered as she stretched and opened to take all of him. If she could have taken his whole being inside her she would. If she could disappear inside him and live in his skin she would.
He moved in her with long meticulous thrusts that filled and emptied her. His pace did not quicken. He gripped her wrists and pressed them into the bed. Many nights he would secure her wrists with rope, as well. But some nights he needed to hold her down with his own hands.
She lay beneath him and panted. Tied as she was she could do little more than take him. She wanted to beg but he hadn’t given her permission to speak. She tilted her hips up as much as she could to take even more of him in her. With one hand still on her wrists, his other hand reached between them and caressed her where their bodies joined. The pressure built in her hips. A knot tightened in her stomach and she felt an invisible rope pull her toward the ceiling. She came hard and spasmed around him. He didn’t stop.
The second climax came not long after the first one. He could manipulate her body as if he knew it better than his own. It terrified her at times how in control of himself he was even when inside her.
He thrust harder. He pushed in deeper, moved faster. She gasped as his grip on her wrists tightened to the point of pain. With one final push he poured into her. When he came at last it was in complete silence.
Still inside her he reached behind her head and untied the blindfold. She looked to the side and didn’t meet his eyes.
“Look at me,” he ordered and she did so gratefully. His steel-gray eyes glowed with his love for her.
“I love you, sir,” she whispered.
The slap came so sudden and fierce that her whole body shuddered in shock.
“Did I give you permission to speak?”
This time she didn’t answer. She shook her head. The movement dislodged a tear that had been lurking at the corner of her eye.
He smiled at her and dipped his lips to hers. He kissed her again and she relaxed into his mouth. His lips moved to her neck and up to her ear.
“I love you, too.”
Still buried deep inside her, he began to thrust into her once again. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back as he wrapped his hand around her neck. Her collar bit into her throat.
She swallowed hard against his hand and breathed and breathed.
He’d only just begun to hurt her tonight.
“Hey, Nor, I’m home. Want some dinner?”
Nora blinked and rubbed her eyes, which had gone dry from staring at her computer screen for so long.
Wesley stood just inside her office and at first she could barely focus on him. She saw him but saw through him and past him at the same time.
“Sounds good.” She glanced at the words on her screen. “I’m starving.”
“Pasta?”
“Too many carbs.”
Wesley rolled his eyes. “Fine. Salad and fish?”
“Fish? But it’s not Friday.”
“You’re the Catholic. I’m Methodist. We eat fish whenever we want. Give me twenty minutes.”
Wesley left her alone again. She printed out the pages she’d been typing and read through them.
The phone rang at seven and the call itself consisted of only seven words…
She read to the end and pressed the pages, still warm from the printer, briefly to her chest. Reluctantly, she slid the pages under her desk and fed them one by one through the shredder. She highlighted the text on her computer screen and hit Delete, flinching as the text disappeared. She closed the document and let the words disappear into the ether. She hated to do it. But she knew The Rule. She obeyed the Ruler.
Nora stood up for the first time in an hour and left her office. When she saw Wesley standing at the kitchen counter she actually could see him now. He smiled at her. She smiled back.
“So what did you write today?” he asked as he expertly sliced through the skin of a ripe red tomato.
“A really hot sex scene with a lot of S&M between a girl and her true love,” she said and Wesley rolled his eyes at her, his usual response to her wickeder scenes. “But don’t worry, I deleted it.”
“How come?” he asked, popping a chunk of tomato into his mouth.
Nora leaned against Wesley, taking temporary comfort in his warm, strong chest. He wrapped his arm around her and rested his chin on top of her head.
“It wasn’t fiction.”
6
My Caroline,
I didn’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it. It’s us. Of course it’s us. A name changed here, a date changed there…but still us. You have always been my only muse. I cannot paint or sculpt. I have only my words to render your likeness. Sometimes I wish I were both God and Adam so I could tear out my rib and create you from my own flesh. I would say I’d create you from my heart, but I gave that to you when you left me. But that’s a cliché, isn’t it? Sadly, that’s all I have these days. The whole story is a cliché. I desired you. I ate of you. I lost you. That ancient story—older than the Garden, old as the Snake. I would have liked to call this story of ours The Temptation but the word temptation, once the province of pious theologians, has now been co-opted by every third second-rate romance novelist. And although I loved you, my beautiful girl, this is not a romance novel.
“Like it, Zach?”
Zach blinked at the interruption, lost as he was in Nora’s new words.
“It’s quite an improvement.”
“An improvement? Oh, I meant the cocoa.”
Zach sat in Nora’s bright kitchen, the winter sun turning everything white. Nora’s new draft of the first chapter sat in front of him and a cup of hot chocolate steamed at his elbow. He sipped the cocoa and felt like a lad again in his grandmother’s kitchen.
“Very good,” he said, inhaling the warm steam. “So is this.”
He tapped the pages in front of him. Nora had taken his advice and created a frame story for her book. It would be a letter her narrator, William, was writing to Caroline, the woman he loved and lost. It was working beautifully already—the book and the partnership with Nora. He’d rarely gone to his writers’ homes and certainly never sat with them at their kitchen table and drank cocoa. Nora was proving to be a different breed from any writer he’d ever before known. “‘This is not a romance novel…’” Zach read from her new first chapter. “Excellent line. Evocative and provocative. Ironic, as well.”
“Ironic?” Nora sipped at her own mug of hot cocoa. She sat across from him at the table and pulled one leg up to her chest. “It’s true. It isn’t a romance novel.”
“Not a traditional one, of course. Your protagonists don’t end up together, but it is a love story.”
“A love story is not the same as a romance novel. A romance novel is the story of two people falling in love against their will. This is a story of two people who leave each other against their will. It starts to end the minute they meet.”
“Why does it end? You seem like an optimist to me, but the end is heartrending. The last thing she wants to do is leave him, and yet in the end she goes.”
Nora left her chair and went to the kitchen cabinet by the refrigerator.
“I’m no optimist,” she said as she opened the cabinet door. “I’m just a realist who smiles too much. And the reason William and Caroline don’t stay together is that while he really is in the lifestyle, she’s not. She’s only in the relationship for him. It’s their sexuality that’s the problem, not the love. It’s like a gay man being married to a straight woman. No matter how much he loves her, it’s a sacrifice every moment they’re together. The sex is secondary to the sacrifice.”
“A very close second, I notice.”
Nora laughed. She closed the cabinet door and knelt on the floor. She opened the bottom door and gave a victorious laugh.
“Found them.” She pulled out a bag of marshmallows. “I have to hide the sugar from Wes.”
“Has a sweet tooth, does he?”
“He has type 1 diabetes. And a sweet tooth. Bad combination. He’s usually really good about what he eats, but I catch him staring pretty longingly when I have cocoa and marshmallows.”
Zach wondered if it was actually the sugar Wesley had been staring at and not Nora. He couldn’t take his own eyes off this woman. She’d been captivating in her signature red Monday night. And now in casual clothes she looked casually stunning. He watched her as she rolled back onto her toes and rose straight up off the floor with the well-trained grace of a geisha. He marveled at her offhand display of almost balletic agility while she leaned over the table and dropped a handful of marshmallows into his cocoa and hers.
“Zach, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re even more ridiculously handsome when you look happy,” she said, dropping back into her chair and popping a marshmallow into her mouth. “You aren’t, by any chance, enjoying working with me? The London Fog isn’t lifting, is it?”
Zach took a sip of his cocoa to cover his embarrassment. He was used to women hitting on him but never before had any woman been so shamelessly forward with him.
“As this is the first time we’ve actually sat down and worked on your book together,” Zach said and coughed uncomfortably, “I think a verdict on my meteorological conditions would be premature.”
“What’s the verdict on the book then?”
“The verdict is…you might actually pull this off. But not without some major revisions. Keep the letters at the beginning and end. But I want the body of the book in third, not first, person.”
Nora looked down at her notes. She picked up her pen and wrote something on a sheet of paper. She looked at it a moment before sliding it across the table.
The first time William saw Caroline was on Ash Wednesday. She still had the ashes on her forehead.
“Like that, Zach?”
Zach read and nodded his approval. “Perfect. That’s exactly what I want. Now rewrite the entire book like that.”
“Yes, sir,” she said and saluted. “What else? Since you’re being nice to me, I have the feeling you’re about to hit me with some more changes, yes?”
Zach grimaced, unnerved by how well this near stranger could read him.
“Just some minor ones—have you considered going a more mainstream route with your characters?”
“I like virgins, perverts and whores,” Nora said without apology. “I couldn’t care less about the people who just fuck for fun on weekends.”
“The sex shouldn’t be the story, Nora.”
“The sex isn’t the story, Zachary. The sacrifice is. Caroline is actually vanilla, not kink. So she sacrifices who she really is to be with the man she loves—she sacrifices the good for the better.”
“But they end it, yes?”
“That’s the point of the book—sacrifice can only get you so far. William and Caroline are just too different to make it work. And although two people can love each other deeply, sometimes love alone doesn’t cut it. We can only sacrifice so much of ourselves in a relationship before there’s nothing left to love or be loved.”
Zach’s stomach clenched. Even now he ached for Grace with an impotent fury. Zach could only raise his cup of cocoa.
“I’ll drink to that.”
He and Nora clinked their tea mugs together in a mock toast. Across the table their eyes met, and Zach could see the ghost of his pain reflected in hers.
Zach’s next question was cut off by Wesley’s sudden entrance in the kitchen.
“Hey, you,” Nora said to Wesley. “What’s up?”
“I’m not here,” Wesley said. “Keep working. I just need my coffee mug.” Wesley threw open the cabinets and took an aluminum travel mug from a shelf.
“Where are you going?” Nora asked.
“Study group at Josh’s. I’m helping him with calculus, and he’s giving me his history notes.”
“What are you majoring in, Wesley?” Zach asked politely, trying not to show how unnerving he found Nora’s relationship with her young intern—unnerving and familiar.
“Biochem. I’m premed.”
“That’s wonderful. Your parents must be very pleased.” Zach winced internally at how old he sounded.
“Not really.” Wesley shrugged. “My whole family has worked with horses for generations. They want me to come home and stay in the business. If I have to do medicine, at least it could be equine medicine.” He poured a mugful of coffee and screwed the lid on tightly. “I have this conversation with them every week.”
“I think he should just let me talk to them.” Nora batted her eyelashes at Wesley.
“You,” Wesley said, pointing his finger at her, “don’t exist. So don’t even think about it.”
Nora responded by wrinkling her nose at him in mock disgust.
“What?” Zach said. “Your parents don’t know you and Nora are living together?”
A faint blush suffused Wesley’s face. “There’s a lot they don’t know. They were going to pull me out of school and send me to the state school down there. It was money reasons, the usual, and Nora offered to let me live with her and work for my room and board. They just know I got a job to cover it and a place off-campus. They don’t know what I’m doing.”
“How did you two meet?”
“School,” Nora answered for Wesley. “His school was obviously a little desperate—they asked me to be their writer-in-residence that semester. Wes was in my class.”
“You were her student?” Zach asked, his hands going cold even as he said the words.
“The class met at one.” Wesley smiled at Nora. “I needed to meet my Humanities requirement, and I would have taken anything that let me sleep late on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“I’m very flattered.” Nora stuck her tongue out at him.
“I’m very leaving. Later,” Wesley said. He reached for Nora’s mug and she slapped his hand.
“What are your numbers?” she demanded.
“One-seventeen. I can have a sip,” Wesley protested.
“Not on my watch. Drink your coffee black, and keep your hands off my cocoa.”
Wesley feinted to the left and stuck his finger in her cocoa and licked it off as he disappeared through the kitchen door. Zach felt a pang at the easy intimacy between Nora and Wesley. He missed his play-fights with Grace in the kitchen and the bargains they struck to make up. He would cook dinner if she would wear the lingerie he’d gotten her for her birthday. She’d do the dishes if she could be on top tonight…amazing how they both came out victors in those battles.
“So he’s…nineteen?”
“You have a dirty mind, Zachary Easton. Wesley’s as pure as, well, I’m not.”
“You’re telling me that Wesley’s a virgin? The young attractive houseboy of an infamous erotica writer is a virgin?”
“Believe it or not, I do have some self-control. And even if I didn’t, Wes certainly does—apart from sticking his damn hand into my cocoa every now and then. He’s a good Christian kid and I respect him more than I can say for his decision to wait. Mark my words, Zach, I will put the first randy bitch who lays a hand on him in the hospital.”
“And he doesn’t mind what you write? What you do?”
Nora leaned back in her chair. “We made a deal. I can top, but not bottom.”
“Are you secretly a gay man?” Zach eyed her curiously.
“I’m not so secretly kinky. Top and bottom are S&M terms, too. Wes leaves me alone about my sex life as long as I’m not the one coming home with the bruises.”
Zach swallowed. “Did you ever come home with bruises?”
Nora bit her bottom lip.
“I won’t bore you with the whole story of me and Søren,” she said, glancing away. “Let’s just say we’ve got history and leave it at that. Last year, I went to see Søren on the day we consider our anniversary. I do it every year. Can’t stop myself for some reason. Anyway, I had a weak moment. I came home the next morning covered in welts and bruises and with a nice fat lip. Wes was horrified. He started packing.”
Zach winced. The thought of welts and bruises on Nora horrified him, too.
“So you made your deal?”
“Right. If I go back to Søren one more time, Wes is gone.”
“Moving out seems a rather extreme threat. Of course, moving in with you seems a rather odd decision.”
“He’s Methodist. I think he’s trying to save me. Methodists are always trying to save people.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t have feelings for you?”
“He does have feelings for me. Namely irritation, frustration and disgust mingled with amusement. But that’s not surprising since he’s not in the game.”
Zach sympathized with the boy. He had the same feeling for Nora, too. As well as intoxicated, amazed and aroused mingled with petrified.
“You said he was a virgin. How do you know he isn’t like you?”
“K-dar,” Nora said and tapped the side of her nose. “Kinksters can smell it on each other. And my Wesley smells like warm vanilla.”
“Wonder what I smell like.” Zach cursed himself for accidentally speaking the words aloud.
Nora cocked her head at him; Zach’s heart started to race. She rose up out of her chair and slid onto the top of the kitchen table. She stretched across it and put her nose at his neck. Slowly, she inhaled. A slight rush of air whispered over Zach’s skin and he immediately knew what every muscle in his body was doing.
“Not kink. But not vanilla, either. Smells like…curiosity. It killed the cat, you know.”
“Nora,” Zach said in a warning tone. J.P. would yank him off Nora’s book in a heartbeat if he saw them right now.
“S&M is as psychological as it is physical and sexual, Zach. Imagine being as deep inside a woman’s mind as you are inside her body.”
Zach’s hands gripped his mug, still warm from the steaming liquid inside.
“We’re working,” he reminded her, reminded himself. He remembered their photograph in the newspaper; her mouth had been at his ear just the way it was now. If he turned his head only a few inches their lips would meet.
“I write erotica. I am working. Want to earn some overtime?”
“Nora, we’ve got less than six weeks and more than four hundred pages to write. Now get off the table and stop wasting my time.”
“Oh, fine,” she said, sounding playfully disappointed. Zach exhaled with relief when she slid back and sat in her chair again. She reached under her notes and pulled out a copy of the trade newspaper that had their picture in it. She leaned back in her chair and threw her legs up on the table as she flipped through the paper. Zach stared at their picture again prominently displayed right in front of his face. The byline read Erotica Writer Nora Sutherlin Gets the Royal Treatment.
Nora turned another page and sighed. “And to think I thought the fog was finally lifting.”
* * *
Zach stared at his computer screen for the seventeenth straight minute in a row. The words of the book review he’d sworn he would start writing for the Times tonight simply would not come. He had words, the wrong words, Nora’s words, but not the words he needed.
Not kink, she’d purred into his ear, sending every nerve in his long neglected body firing. But not vanilla, either… Nora… Zach understood now why some people were afraid of her. He was afraid of her, of her power to take captive his every thought. He felt unmoored around her, unsafe, and yet of everyone he had met since coming to New York, he sensed only she could be trusted.
As deep inside a woman’s mind… Zach tried and failed to stem the tide of images that her words conjured. Grace’s soft skin, moon-white against midnight sheets, her back against his chest, his hands over hers, his mouth to her neck as he drove into her, knowing her flesh and yet still knowing so little of her soul. Her body had been so open to him once. But her mind? Her heart?
Zach shook his head, trying to pull himself out of his dangerous reverie. Grace, who he had made love to countless times, told him nothing. And Nora, on whom he had never laid a hand, said everything.
On a whim, Zach minimized his document and opened Google. Nora threw out S&M terminology like a doctor tossed around the names of exotic diseases. He wasn’t entirely clueless when it came to matters of kink. An old lover of his had even accused him of being kinky because he preferred positions other than missionary. He certainly knew what S&M meant—sadomasochism, knew the French called it “the English vice” because his countrymen had an amusing obsession with corporeal punishment. Not him—he tried to avoid giving or receiving pain whenever possible. He’d been known to bite a little during lovemaking, something Grace was inordinately fond of, but actual hitting or whipping was something entirely out of his purview.
After they were done working on her book today, Zach had worked up the courage to ask Nora about Søren, her former lover who she spoke about with the reverent sadness of a knight speaking of a fallen king. She said they were a D/S couple like William and Caroline in her book. She’d been collared to him for years, and that leaving him had been akin to dying.
Zach typed in D-S couple and quickly discovered he’d mentally spelled it incorrectly. Spelled D/s it stood for Dominant and submissive. Interesting that while the D was capitalized the s was always lowercase to illustrate the lower status held by the submissive. The whole thing seemed rather strange and sexist to him, but he couldn’t deny that there seemed to be quite a few male submissives and some rather impressive-looking female Dominants out there. He couldn’t imagine a woman as vivacious as Nora being content to sit at a man’s feet. His only guess was that this man, this Søren person, was a rather impressive specimen. He wondered what Søren did for a living—probably something innately alpha male like a pilot or a military officer. Or perhaps he was independently wealthy like Nora seemed to be. Something certainly afforded her an impressive quality of life. She drove a late-model black Lexus with a cheeky license plate that read “Say Ouch” and she lived in an elegant, historic home. He knew award-winning writers in England with a dozen or more books under their belts who still couldn’t afford the house or the neighborhood she lived in.
Curiosity got the better of him, and Zach typed in Nora Sutherlin and hit Enter. She found several fan pages, some links to fan fiction and Nora’s official website. Zach kept scrolling through all the mentions of Nora on the web. He clicked the link to someone’s blog that carried an entry entitled “Last Night with THE Nora Sutherlin.” But as soon as Zach clicked the link the page disappeared. He hit Back and tried to find it again, but the page had vanished. Maybe the blog server was down.
Zach gave up nosing on Nora and looked up more S&M terminology. As uncomfortable as the idea of coupling pain with sex, he did appreciate that people in the community seemed fairly responsible in their play. Every webpage he landed on carried the mantra “safe, sane and consensual.” He stared for a long time at an image of a young woman wearing a brown leather collar that buckled and locked at the base of her neck. Zach remembered Nora had said she’d been “collared” to Søren. Collars were apparently quite an important part of the S&M scene. Nora had touched his naked wedding ring finger that night in the cab and then brought his hand to her bare neck. She’d equated being collared with marriage. Maybe that’s why he and Nora had found common ground so quickly despite being such wildly different people—they were both going through a divorce of sorts.
But was he going through a divorce? Every day when he checked his mail, he expected papers from Grace’s attorney. Every time his home phone rang, he expected it to be Grace telling him they needed to stop putting it off. But so far he’d received no calls or legal papers. Was she waiting on him to start the process? If so, she might have to wait a long time. He couldn’t deny their marriage had fallen apart in the past year and a half, but he was in no hurry to put the final nail in the coffin. He’d hoped if he came to New York, she’d miss him enough to want to make it work again. But every day the phone stayed mute.
Zach closed the internet and exited from his empty document without writing a single sentence. He’d left Nora in her kitchen hours ago. Surely she’d sent him another email by now—she emailed him constantly. But his in-box sat empty but for a reminder from J.P. about the next staff meeting and a question from his assistant, Mary. Both could wait.
He clicked on New and typed in Nora’s email address. Of course she would have an address with “littleredridingcrop” in it. Ludicrous as it was, at least it made it easy to remember.
Nora, he wrote and stopped. Why was he writing her? They’d discussed her book for hours today. There was no more to talk about for now. And considering they already had a reputation for working too closely together, he knew he didn’t need to be writing her about anything but the book. What would he say if he did write her? He had those words, those sentences. But they had tumbled about in his head so much since meeting her that they had crashed against each other, against him, and broken into fragments.
Nora, I don’t want to I won’t it’s been so bloody long I can’t I think of you of her too much I still love but I I hurt her Grace Now it’s hell worse Limbo I hurt too young too much…
Zach deleted it all, even Nora’s address. He knew better than this, knew better than to get involved. He would not make this mistake again. She would not pull him off course.
It didn’t matter, he told himself. He was gone in five weeks. Off to L.A. where he could start over again and perhaps get it right this time. But did he want to start over? At forty-two a new life seemed a far more terrifying prospect than it had at thirty-two when he and Grace married and moved to London.
The blank email sat waiting before him. He looked down at his fingers poised above the keyboard. Was it the words that failed him or his hands? They felt too heavy now. It made no sense. Without the weight of his wedding ring they should have been lighter.
The screen still waited, the cursor winking at him like an eye.
Zach typed in another address.
Gracie, he wrote, using the nickname that never failed to make her smile. Please talk to me.
* * *
Nora stood at the kitchen window peering into the dark. Sunset came so early in the winter that whole days seemed to pass in darkness. Zach had left her several hours ago, left her with a thousand ideas and admonitions. But now she could only wait and think and gaze at the light falling in from the lamppost outside the kitchen window. It illuminated the tremulous flakes of snow and cast white shadows that gathered round but did not touch her.
She turned toward a sound and saw Wesley standing in the doorway watching her with the same intensity as she watched the snow-lit play between the light and the shadows.
“How long have you been hanging out here in the dark?” Wesley asked, stepping into the lone pool of light.
She sighed at a shadow. “For as long as it’s been dark.”
Wesley reached out to flip the light switch.
“Leave them off.”
Wesley dropped his hand back to his side.
“I didn’t know you could write in the dark.”
Nora gave him only the barest hint of a smile.
“You’d be surprised what I can do in the dark, Wes.”
Wesley grimaced. “Zach know what you do in the dark?”
Nora shook her head.
“No. He thinks I’m just a writer. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”
“It’s not anything I’ll ever brag about.”
“Wes, you knew what I was when you signed up for this job.”
“And you knew how I felt about it when you asked me to move in.”
Nora took a slow deep breath.
“And yet you moved in anyway. Why is that?” Wesley lifted his chin and only looked at her. “His silence says it all.”
Nora stepped away from the window and took a wineglass from the cabinet.
“What are you doing?” he asked as he came deeper into the dark kitchen.
“If you’re going to pout, I’m going to drink,” she said, pouring herself a steep glass of red wine. “I read somewhere that red wine is good for diabetics. Want one?”
“I’m not pouting. And I don’t drink.”
“There’s a lot you don’t do.”
Nora sat on top of the kitchen table across from him. She watched him, daring him with her eyes to either speak or leave.
“I’ve got homework,” he said.
“Then go.” Nora gestured to the door.
Wesley moved to walk past her. But Nora reached out and stopped him with a hand on his chest.
“Or stay,” she said as she took a deliberate sip of her wine before setting the glass down on the table next to her. “Staying is better.” She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled Wesley to her, positioning him between her knees. His face was a blank mask and his eyes would not meet hers.
Nora laid her hand on his stomach, smiling as the taut muscle quivered through his T-shirt.
“Nora, don’t—”
“Søren and I used to play a game on his kitchen table,” Nora said, ignoring the plea in Wesley’s voice. “Did I ever tell you about that?”
“No,” Wesley said, visibly tensing as Nora raised his shirt and slid her hands underneath, pressing her palms into his warm skin. She saw his fingers curl into fists.
“Simple game—he’d fill a wineglass with one of his expensive reds and set it on the edge of the table. Then he would fuck me. Hard.” Nora grinned as Wesley flinched. “If I thrashed too much, or fought him and knocked the glass off…then the wine wasn’t the only red that we spilled that night.”
Wesley closed his eyes as if trying to block out the image.
“The secret is,” Nora said as she raked her fingernails up Wesley’s chest and back down his stomach, “sometimes I’d knock it off on purpose.”
“I won’t play that game with you,” he said as Nora continued relentlessly caressing the delicate skin of his chest and sides. “I won’t play this game with you, either.”
“But it doesn’t have to be a game, Wesley.” She narrowed her eyes like a cat’s. “It can be very real.”
“Don’t do this.” His voice was a plea. His breathing was getting harder, everything was getting harder now. “Not to me.”
“Your heart is racing.” She let her hand rest on the left side of his chest.
From his chest she traced a languid path down his stomach, his breath catching as she deftly unbuttoned the top button of his jeans.
“Nora…”
“I’m not holding you here. You can go if you want to. Do you?”
She grabbed his belt loops and pulled him even closer until his hips pressed against her inner thighs. She knew she shouldn’t be doing this. But Wesley was a constant source of frustration. Sometimes she had to retaliate. And she knew that every now and then he forgot what she really was. It didn’t hurt to remind him.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered.
“Now that is a refreshing bit of candor on your part. Since we’re being so honest now, tell me, why are you being so pissy about Zach?”
Wesley’s eyes widened. Nora bit her bottom lip as she waited for his answer.
“You like him.”
“I do like him.” She took another deep drink of the wine and set the glass down again. “But we’ve just met and we’re not fucking. Not even I work that fast.”
At that Wesley gave a grim chuckle and looked up at the ceiling.
“I couldn’t care less if you were fucking him.”
“My God, did you just say ‘fuck’? You’re a good, clean Methodist. You don’t swear.”
“You have no idea what I do.”
“I do know what you do. I know you sleep with your bedroom door unlocked,” Nora retorted. “Expecting company?”
“I know you stand in my door at night and watch me sleep. Expecting an invitation?”
Now it was Nora’s eyes that widened. But she recovered herself quickly.
“You’re pretty good at this game,” she said, nodding her approval. “For a beginner.”
“I told you. I’m not gonna play with you.”
“Too bad. I think you’d like the prize.” Nora went for the next button on his jeans, but Wesley grabbed her by the wrist to stop her.
“Harder,” she instructed. Wesley let her go as if her skin had burned him.
“I thought so. Go,” she said, dropping her hands to her sides. Wesley took a step back, his palm pressed into his stomach. “Go do your homework, kid.”
She picked up her nearly forgotten wineglass and lifted it to her lips. But before she could drink, Wesley took the glass from her.
He held the glass in his subtly shaking hand before raising it and drinking. Finished, he lowered the glass and set it next to her on the table. He left the kitchen without another word.
Nora picked up the glass and stared inside.
He’d drained it to the dregs.
Nora set the glass back down and turned to follow Wesley. She hated when they fought even though it was almost always her fault.
Wesley would be fine, she told herself. He needed a little toughening up anyway. She’d never forget the first day she saw him. She walked into his classroom at Yorke, and the first thing she’d noticed was a pair of big brown eyes looking at her like he’d never seen anything like her before. And the minute he opened his mouth and those soft Southern syllables came out, she knew this kid was going to be no end of trouble. She’d made all her students talk about their favorite story. Wesley had said his favorite was O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi—the story of the wife who sold her hair to buy her husband a watch chain and the husband who sold his watch to buy his wife combs for her hair. Nora had called it a horror story. Wesley had objected and called it a love story. The debate had continued even after the class ended. Two people who give up their most precious possessions for love and end up with nothing—that’s a love story? she’d demanded. Wesley had argued that they still had each other. She’d laughed and told him he might see things a little differently when he was her age.
She knew she’d been too rough with him tonight, but she couldn’t stop herself sometimes. After all, Søren had put her through ten kinds of hell when she was Wesley’s age. And now she was grateful for the discipline he’d taught her, the fortitude he’d instilled in her. Now a guy like Zach could look her in the eyes and tell her she wasn’t worth his time and energy, and she could look back and smile and ask him if that was the best he could do. Søren had made her strong and for that she’d be forever grateful. And Zach was making her a real writer, which was the one fantasy Søren could never make come true for her. And Wesley…she looked down at the empty wineglass and quickly refilled it in his honor—Wesley was just making her crazy.
Nora turned and saw her book and Zach’s notes lying on top of the kitchen table.
“Goddammit, Zach,” she said to herself and poured the wine down the drain. “Why did you have to tell me it was going to work?”
7
Five weeks left…
A tear formed in the corner of Nora’s eye and fled down her cheek before she could stop it. She rubbed it off with her sleeve and made herself blink. She’d been staring at her computer screen for so long her eyes were watering. Stretching while she backed up her work, Nora decided to check her private email account before taking a bathroom break. She breezed through a note from her agent and deleted a few bits of spam. Just before logging out a new message popped into her in-box. From Zach, it bore the subject line “Regarding Sex.”
“Why, Zachary,” she said, chuckling to herself, “yes, I think I will regard sex.”
The email dragged on for two pages and detailed every reason why she needed to cut out the majority of her sex scenes. She stopped reading after the fifth use of the word gratuitous.
You’re no fun, she wrote Zach back. Can’t I just keep three of my scenes?
Zach was obviously still at his computer. He quickly replied with one word.
No.
Two? she wrote back.
No.
Nora was about to fall out of her chair laughing. She could imagine his stern but strikingly handsome visage right now, his brow furrowing deeper with each annoying little email from her.
One? I promise I’ll make it good. Please? I’ll buy you a puppy.
I’m allergic to dogs, he replied.
Nora bit her lip as the wheels in her head turned.
Let’s play a game, she wrote back. I’ll give you fifty extra pages this week if you let me keep three of my scenes—heavily edited, of course.
She held her breath as she waited for his reply. An email finally popped up in her in-box.
Fine. But any sex on the page must serve both the plot and the character development. Now stop playing and start writing. You’ve got five weeks left and over four hundred pages to rewrite.
I’m keeping the puppy, she wrote back. She wasn’t surprised when he didn’t reply.
Nora was rereading Zach’s most recent note on her new chapters when her hotline rang. She heard its Klaxon ringtone in her office all the way from the kitchen. Rolling her eyes, she stood up and headed in that direction in no particular hurry. When she got there, she found Wesley standing by the counter with the phone in his hand. He looked oddly tired and grim. He handed it to her without a word and walked past her. “King, I swear I’m going to beat the shit out of you if you don’t stop calling me.”
“Now you’re flirting, ma chérie.”
Nora ground her teeth together and took a deep breath. Was there any man in the world more infuriating than Kingsley Edge? Søren, she remembered. Only Søren.
“I am not flirting. I am working.” She said the words slowly as if she were speaking to a child. “I have another job, recall?”
“I try everything I can to forget your other job, maîtresse. Your other job costs me money.”
“Well, it makes me money.”
“And that helps me how?”
“Kingsley, tell me what you want and then leave me alone. My editor is making me rewrite my entire book.”
“The Nora Sutherlin taking orders from a man. I thought those days were long over.”
Nora clenched her jaw. She would not let him goad her into a fight today.
“I’m une petite peu busy, monsieur.”
“Never too busy for a client. For this client in particular.”
Nora leaned her head against the cold metal of the refrigerator. Most of her clients were on her time; she saw them at her leisure. Just part of the mystique of being a Dominatrix. But there were a handful of clients not even she felt comfortable keeping waiting. She guessed it was Jake Sizemore, CEO of some company that made something that kept the world going. King never let her turn Sizemore down when he came to town.
“Fine. What do I need to know?”
“Just wear your finest and be there in an hour. C’est ça.”
Nora scribbled the time and place down in her datebook. She’d been trying so hard not to take any jobs while working with Zach. Zach had all the signs of someone going through a fairly serious depression. She knew depression well, knew it was anger turned inward. That much depression signaled an impressive cache of anger lurking under that ridiculously handsome exterior. Her gorgeous blue-eyed editor already oozed disapproval of her at every turn. She could only imagine how bad his reaction would be if he found out that writing wasn’t her only job. For over a year now she’d dreamed of quitting the game altogether, but without a signed contract from Royal, she was scared to give up her day job.
“I’m getting a little sick of this, you know, King?”
“You say that and yet I hear la petite morte under your breath. You know you love this job.”
“I love the money. That’s it.”
“You love him, chérie.”
Nora closed her eyes and swallowed the growl in the back of her throat.
“He has nothing to do with this.” Nora refused to get into a discussion of Søren with Kingsley. Kingsley reported to Søren.
“Ma petite,” he chided. “You do this for his attention. C’est vrai, oui?”
“That’s like saying criminals commit crimes to get the cops’ attention.”
She heard Kingsley’s soft, heady laugh.
“Exactement. One hour, maîtresse.”
Nora hung up and went to her bedroom. The house was too quiet. She couldn’t hear Wesley anywhere. Usually at this time of day he was working on his homework and listening to music. Or if homework was light that night, he’d be playing his guitar and singing softly to himself. She remembered the first time she’d caught him playing and singing. She’d told him he sounded a little like the nineties band Nelson. He’d said, “Who’s he?” and Nora had thrown a book at him.
She dressed in her black leather skirt with the back slit and her black-and-red brocade bustier. She found her black gauntlets and pulled them on. They laced up her arms and she had a horrible time tightening the laces and tying them off on her own. She went to find Wesley. He hated that she worked as a professional Dominatrix, but he tolerated it more or less. Before he’d moved in over a year ago she’d explained what she did, what she was. He’d been shocked. He didn’t even know such things existed. He was relieved, however, when she explained she was in no way a prostitute and that she never had sex with clients—not the male clients anyway. They weren’t even allowed to kiss her except on the toe of her boot. No, she was no prostitute, she explained. She was, if anything, a kind of massage therapist who simply inflicted pain instead of pleasure. Despite his shock, Wesley moved in anyway. She’d been so impressed by how well he took it, she’d even told him about Søren.
“Just don’t ever let me in the same room with him,” Wesley had said when Nora revealed the nature of their relationship.
“You think you can take Søren?”
“You said he was, what, forty-five? Eighteen versus forty-five? And any guy who beats up on women doesn’t know what to do around a guy who’d only hit another man.”
Nora had laughed then, so hard she’d almost fallen over. Could Wesley get any more precious? When she’d stopped laughing, she’d taken Wesley’s chin in her hand and forced him to meet her eyes. Søren once told her she had the most dangerous eyes of any woman who’d ever lived. He told her when men looked in her eyes they saw their own darkest fears reflected back. Usually she tried to tamp down that particular trick of hers. This time she’d let Wesley see all her fears and all of his in one glance.
“Kid, Søren could eat you for breakfast and not even need to chew. Don’t ever fuck with a sadist, Wesley. For Søren, torture’s just foreplay.”
“Why did you stay with him?” he’d whispered.
Nora had grinned at him, and she saw a new fear in Wesley’s sweet brown eyes.
“I like foreplay.”
Wesley…she couldn’t find him anywhere. She stood in the living room and noticed a note taped to the door. It said he was at the library but he’d be home around six. And at the bottom of the note were the words he always said when she went out for a job—“You don’t have to do this.” No, she didn’t have to. But she owed it to Kingsley. Nora grabbed her coat and toy bag and made a quick stop in the bathroom. She took a pill bottle from the medicine cabinet, swallowed one without bothering with water and left.
It took forty minutes to get to the hotel. Her clients were among the elite of the world—only the wealthiest and most powerful men and women could afford her. Quite a few were even household names. So it was rare she ever went in through the front doors of a home or hotel. But Kingsley hadn’t mentioned the need for discretion so she didn’t bother.
She strode through the front lobby of one of the grandest and oldest hotels in the city and worried for a second that someone from Royal might recognize her. She shook off the worry—no one who worked in publishing could afford this place. The lobby was littered with women dripping with Prada and men stuffed inside their Armani suits. Nora bit back a smile as she breezed past them in her leather and lace with her black toy bag slung across her back and her sunglasses on even though she was indoors and it was still winter. She wasn’t ashamed of what she did. But it was fun to be around people who were nervous just being in the same room with her.
A couple standing near the elevator walked off when she joined them in their waiting. Vanilla people were so cute sometimes. She entered the elevator, hit the button for the nineteenth floor and headed up alone.
Nora stepped out, got her bearings and made her way to room 1909. A key card lay hidden under a newspaper in front of the door. She unlocked the door, stepped inside and saw a tall, blond man in black standing with his back to her.
“Hello, Eleanor,” he said.
Nora gasped and her bag hit the floor with a nervous clatter of metal.
“Oh, my God…Søren.”
* * *
Zach sat at his desk in his office at Royal. He checked his email one last time before shutting down the computer. He was surprised he hadn’t gotten more of a fight from Nora about paring down her sex scenes. Perhaps she now understood the kind of book she was writing, was starting to understand she could write something erotic without being an erotica writer.
Straightening the papers on his desk, Zach found a copy of the contract that the legal department had worked up. It wasn’t signed yet. And even if Nora signed it today, it wasn’t valid until he signed it. He looked over the terms. J.P. had been very generous. Royal didn’t dole out significant advances very often. Of course, Nora brought her own impressive fan base with her. Zach knew J.P. hoped she would bring a certain libidinous cachet to the rather staid old publishing house. It was a bold move that might actually pay off if Zach did his job right.
Zach smiled as he flipped through Nora’s unsigned contract. When he and Grace had bought their first house, the paperwork hadn’t been half this preposterous. Poor Grace. He remembered watching her at their tiny kitchen table in their first horrid little flat they’d rented sight unseen when they’d moved to London. They’d been married less than a year. She thought she was supposed to know what every word of the contract meant, what every clause referred to. She sat for hours poring over every page. He’d leave and come back and she would have another twelve questions to ask him. What did first right of refusal mean? Did they know the assessed value? Did they need a variance if he worked from home?
It was so damn endearing watching her spend an entire day trying to understand everything as if she thought she should that Zach finally had to come over, shove the papers away and make love to her right on top of their settlement statement. He remembered it so clearly, the shock on her face when the papers scattered to the four winds. She thought he was angry with her. But he remembered her smile when he kissed her so fiercely the table scooted a foot back. He remembered her red hair against the dark wood, how her legs had wrapped around him with almost childlike eagerness as he moved inside her.
He’d heard once there was nothing like buying a house together to make or break a relationship. That was the day he decided they were going to make it.
Zach put the contract down, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Maybe they should have bought more houses.
* * *
An hour later Nora left the hotel and strode to her car cursing Søren under her breath the whole way. She kept cursing, knowing if she let up on the fury for one second, she would collapse into tears. It had been months since they’d spoken. She did everything she could to avoid him. Sometimes she saw him at the club and they only looked at each other across the room while bystanders subtly moved a few steps back like unwitting townspeople caught between two gunslingers. Søren wasn’t on the attack today, however. Worse—he’d wanted to talk.
Nora ran over their conversation again in her mind. The conversation, as all conversations with him were these days, was rather one-sided. She’d sat on the bed like a child in trouble for staying out too late and ground her foot into the plush carpeting as he stood in front of her and ticked off, one by one, all her multifarious sins. Nora had known him since she was fifteen years old. Shocking how much ammunition one could stockpile in eighteen years.
And then near the end he’d revealed why he’d gone to the trouble of setting up the meeting. Kingsley had told him she’d been acting different lately—quieter, angrier, desperate to work one day, reluctant the next. She’d explained she was heavy into revisions on her new book, that her new editor was a hard-ass who was giving her the chance and the challenge of a lifetime. Søren seemed skeptical, asking if there might be something she wasn’t telling him. The hour he’d paid for finally up, Nora started to leave. On her way out the door Søren had stopped her with a word—“Wesley.”
Nora had turned around slowly. Trying to keep her tone neutral she’d asked, “What about him?”
“Next time we meet, little one, we will have much more to discuss.”
Her heart flinched when he’d used his old pet name for her. But she merely stared at his handsome face, hoisted her toy bag and left. After all these years, all the practice, she was getting good at that. Nora sat behind the wheel of her car and closed her eyes. She said a prayer of thanks Søren hadn’t touched her. That’s what had happened on their last anniversary. She’d gone to his home too late in the evening. She’d let him give her a glass of wine. They’d talked about mutual friends and even played a game of chess at the kitchen table he’d made brutal love to her on so many times. For a few minutes she’d let herself forget that she wasn’t his property anymore. One curl had fallen forward across her face when she’d bent to move her bishop. Søren had reached out and brushed it behind her ear. He’d caressed her cheek with his thumb. Within minutes they were in his bedroom and she was strapped to the bedpost. He’d beaten her so hard that night she’d nearly gagged on her own tears. And when he finally gave up on the pain, he’d untied her and let her collapse into his arms. His darkness spent, he laid her in his bed and made love to her so tenderly she’d cried again. In the past when they were still together, he’d talk to her while inside her. Sometimes he would articulate in shocking detail the intensity of his desire for her. Sometimes he would simply claim her, calling her his property, his possession. That night as he moved in her he spoke in Danish, the language he fell into when his heart was its most open. He’d taught her some Danish when she was a restless teenager. It became one of their secret ways to communicate. She’d forgotten a lot of it in the four years they’d been apart, but she never forgot Jeg elsker dig. It was Danish for “I love you” and he whispered it again and again into her skin.
Afterward he’d stayed inside her and pulled them into a sitting position at the center of his bed. Her legs wrapped around his waist; her arms twined around his shoulders. He ran his hands up and down her beaten back as he kissed her bare neck. She rocked her hips slowly, relishing having him inside her again after so long.
“You miss your collar,” he’d said—a statement, not a question. She’d taken it with her when she’d left him four years ago.
“I miss it.” She tilted her head back to give him better access to her naked throat. She bent forward again and he kissed her bruised lips. If she pretended it was only today and that there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, she could stay with him forever.
“You can come back to me, Eleanor. Always.”
“I can’t.” She shook her head. “They need you more than I do. I can’t rip your life in half.”
“It is my life,” he’d reminded her. “You tore my life in half the day you ran from me.”
“Don’t,” she said, and the tears burned bright in her eyes. Her chest heaved and she clung to him so hard her fingernails bit into his skin. “Don’t say I ran. I didn’t run. It wasn’t running and you know it. You know I didn’t want to leave you. I no more ran from you than I’d ever run into a burning building. I could never run from you.”
He laughed at her vehemence.
“Then what would you call it if it wasn’t running, little one?” He pressed his lips to her forehead.
“I crawled.” She tried to smile for him. “It’s what I’m good at after all.”
He wrapped his arms even tighter around her. She prayed he’d chain her to his bed and make her stay there the rest of her life. But she knew he’d let her go at dawn. He wouldn’t keep her against her will even if against her will was what she wanted.
“When you come back to me—” he began and she pulled back to meet his eyes.
“I won’t.”
“If you come back to me,” he said, making a rare concession, “will you run or will you crawl?”
Nora had pressed her whole body into him at that moment. Resting her head on his strong shoulder, she watched as a tear forged a river down his long and muscled back.
“I’ll fly.”
To Søren she knew that night was proof that she still belonged to him. But to Wesley it was a waking nightmare when he’d seen the welts and bruises, her cracked lip, her purpling cheek. It took her a solid hour to convince him she didn’t need to go to the hospital. For some reason telling him she’d had worse didn’t seem to comfort him. For the second time in twenty-four hours, she’d had to beg.
“It’s not violence,” she’d tried to tell him. “It’s love. Some loves only come out after dark, Wes.”
“Not with me, Nora. Don’t pull that writer romance crap on me. He beats you and you let him. And if this is love then he shouldn’t love you anymore,” Wesley had said on his way to the front door, his clothes in a duffel bag and his guitar case across his back.
“I wish he didn’t. For his sake and mine. For yours, too.”
Something in her voice changed his mind. He’d dropped his duffel by the floor and set his guitar down. He’d walked back to her and wrapped his arms gingerly around her. He’d been so careful not to hurt her. She’d cried then for the pain she’d caused him. Wesley had gone with her to her room and helped her take her shirt off. She lay on her stomach in her bed while he iced her bruises and put antibiotic ointment on her welts. They hadn’t talked while he helped her. But when she was finally comfortable enough to sleep, Wesley had told her his decision. He couldn’t stop her from working, but if she ever went back to Søren again, ever let him hurt her again, Wesley was gone. It was like asking her to close her eyes and never open them again, but for Wesley, she’d agreed.
Nora drove home and put her regular clothes back on and decided that once and for all she was cutting off all contact with Søren. She knew it would be hard considering that they ran in the same circle but she would find a way. She would never talk to him again. Not after he’d tricked her into seeing him.
Nora paused in her bedroom and took slow, deep breaths. She checked the clock—6:36. Wesley should have been home from the library half an hour ago. She went to his bedroom—no backpack, no keys. She called his cell phone and no one picked up. She waited another half hour thinking he was just pissed at her for answering her hotline. But she knew Wesley—he wasn’t the vindictive type. She called his cell phone again. No answer. By seven-thirty she was scared. By eight-thirty she was terrified. At nine she gave up and called the only person besides Wesley she trusted completely.
The phone rang only once.
“Søren, I need your help,” she said as soon as he answered. The fear clutched at her throat like a claw. “I can’t find my Wesley.”
8
At nine-thirty Zach still remained in his office reading through Nora’s rewritten chapters. Going with third person had opened the book up. The prose was more atmospheric in third person. He needed to talk to her about the end of chapter three, however. She was sliding into self-reflection when what she needed was a strong plot element.
He picked up his phone and dialed her number. She answered on the first ring.
“Nora, it’s Zach.”
“Dammit, Zach. I can’t talk right now. I’m busy.” She sounded angry for some reason. Angry and out of breath.
Busy and breathless…he knew immediately what she was busy doing.
“You’re on my time now, Nora. I don’t care what you’re doing. The book is more important.”
“Fuck the book.”
“Nora, I went out on a limb to work with you. If you think—”
“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”
Zach sat back in his chair. What had happened to the Nora he’d shared cocoa with just a few days ago? She’d been so passionate about her book then, so interested in all of his ideas.
“I’m thinking you obviously don’t have your priorities in order.”
He heard Nora take a hard breath.
“Then fuck you, too, Zach.” She hung up.
Zach set his phone down and stared at it. He expected to feel furious but instead his heart dropped. Apart from J.P. and Mary, Zach hadn’t felt any connection with anyone since coming to New York. Then he’d met Nora and as exasperating as she was, she was also funny, beautiful and made him feel alive again. And she had been the first person who’d seemed to care about him. Now she’d yanked away from him, away from the book. He knew they wouldn’t and couldn’t ever be lovers. But he’d thought they might be able to forge something like a friendship while they worked together. What the hell had happened?
The phone rang again and Zach answered it immediately, hoping to hear Nora on the other end. Instead the chief managing ditor of Royal West in L.A. started speaking. Zach had only spoken to her once or twice after he’d been offered her job once she retired. Now she was telling him he could come out sooner if he liked since she’d heard he didn’t have much to hold him in New York. She wouldn’t mind sharing her office for a couple of weeks while he got acclimated. Might ease the transition for the staff. Still reeling from his fight with Nora, Zach promised her he’d think about it.
After all, he agreed, there really wasn’t anything keeping him in New York.
He hung up the phone again and pulled on his coat. Glancing down, he saw Nora’s manuscript sitting on his desk. He picked it up and tossed it into the recycling bin.
“Fuck you, too, Nora.”
* * *
Nora paced the hallways of her house with her private cell phone in her hand and her hotline phone in her pocket. Wesley didn’t have her hotline number but she knew either Kingsley or Søren would call her back soon. Søren had connections at every hospital within eighty miles, and Kingsley had half the judges, attorneys and police chiefs in the tristate area in his back pocket. Between the two of them, one of them should be able to find Wesley.
She’d gone into his room and dug through his desk trying to find any of his friends’ phone numbers. But they were all programmed into his cell phone and his cell phone was with him, wherever he was. She tore through his closet, his dirty clothes hamper, and found nothing to help her hunt him down.
Nora sat on the edge of his bed and opened his nightstand. She knew Wesley would be less than thrilled she was digging through his things. He’d probably get quite the shock if he saw what she kept in her nightstand. But she didn’t find anything helpful or incriminating—ChapStick and a spare set of keys to his car. Under the file of his medical stuff she found a small photo album. Pulling it out she smiled through tears when she flipped it open and found it full of pictures from last summer.
Leafing through the pages of photos she remembered…
At first she’d been suspicious when Wesley had woken her up early on a Saturday morning in May and told her to get up and put on jeans and boots. He’d driven that day in his beat-up yellow VW bug, and they’d listened to weird music the whole way there. “Who is this?” she’d asked. “Wilco.” “Who’s this?” “The Decembrists.” Finally he’d demanded to know what the last album she bought was. She thought for a good five minutes before remembering—Ill Communication, the Beastie Boys, 1994. Wesley would have been a toddler and she’d been fifteen or sixteen years old.
After a long drive they’d arrived at a farm—a horse farm. Wesley had told her that he’d grown up around horses. From what he’d said it sounded as if his father worked as a horse trainer and his mother did the books at a horse farm in Central Kentucky. But that was the first day she’d actually seen Wesley around the big animals. For someone as blessed by Mother Nature as he was in the looks department, he often seemed nervous and unsure of himself. But the second they hit the stables he became a different person. Walking right up to them, he slapped their sides with sure hands. For a good forty-five minutes he took a turn on three or four different horses, saddling them, and riding them around the paddock.
“Being a little picky, aren’t you, kid?” she’d asked him. “Just get a horse for yourself and let’s go.”
“I’m not picking one for me.” He dismounted nimbly from a large Appaloosa. “I can ride anything. I’m trying to find one for you. You need something tame since you’re a rookie.”
“I’ll take anything but a gelding,” she’d told him.
“What’s wrong with geldings?”
“We won’t have anything to talk about.”
Wesley had laughed then, open and easy, and for a moment she saw the man he would become in ten or twenty years—strong and kind, growing a little more handsome and a little less innocent with every year that passed. She envied the woman he’d end up with. Lucky lady indeed. Finally, after the fourth horse, he’d found her a young buckskin mare named Speakeasy.
“She’s smart and submissive—perfect for a first-timer.” Wesley handed her the reins.
“Smart and submissive—I should introduce you to Søren,” she whispered in Speakeasy’s twitching ear. “Do you like riding crops, too?”
Nora remembered following him back into the stables to watch him pick his horse. A teenage girl walked with Wesley giving him suggestions. Nora watched as the pretty girl cast adoring glances at Wesley while Wesley had eyes only for the horses.
“He’ll do.” Wesley picked out a large heavily muscled sorrel. “What’s his name?”
“Bastinado,” the stable-girl said. “The boss named him that. Don’t know why.”
“Is he bad about stepping on your feet?” Nora had asked.
“Very bad about it.” The girl looked at Nora for the first time. “How did you know?”
“Bastinado—it’s a fancy term for foot torture.” Both Wesley and the stable-girl had stared at her with wide eyes. “What?”
Wesley saddled his horse with effortless proficiency. Nora watched his knowing fingers as they tightened the stirrups and adjusted the rigging. He swung up into the saddle, shoved his straw cowboy hat on his blond head, shifted his hips and took the leather reins as though he’d been born on a horse. Nora took a slow breath and silently repeated her Wesley mantra.
Look but don’t touch…look but don’t touch…
They’d gone easy that day since it was her first time on a horse. The sprawling farm had miles of trails connected to it. Wesley led them down paths that meandered all over the scenic hillside. They stopped every few minutes and took pictures. Nora flipped through the album and remembered when they’d passed over a small creek. Wesley must have sensed her apprehension because he took her reins and led both their horses easily through it.
Nora turned to another page and found her favorite photo. Wesley had bent over the saddle to pat Bastinado on the neck when Nora had snapped the picture. Wesley looked up just in time to flash her his million-watt smile. Nora closed the album and started to slide it in the drawer when she noticed another photo—this one in a frame and hidden all the way at the back. “Wes…” Nora breathed, looking at the picture of her and Speakeasy alone together. She remembered the moment the photo was captured. She had dismounted and was rubbing her horse down after they were done riding. She thought Wesley was taking a picture of the rolling pasture behind her. She’d pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and pressed her forehead to Speakeasy’s. Tendrils of her hair had gone loose and wild around her face. Her eyes were closed in the picture and she wore a smile of pure happiness. She couldn’t believe Wesley had framed the photo. She looked so silly in it.
Nora put everything back in his nightstand the way she found it and stretched out on Wesley’s bed. She ran through every possible scenario in her mind—was he sick? Car accident? Lost his phone? Lost his mind? Did he have his insulin pen with him? Did he have his med-alert bracelet on? She knew Wesley. He’d call her if he was going to be five minutes late. Another college boy she wouldn’t have worried about. Any other college sophomore was surely out at a party or a bar or back in some girl’s dorm room. Not her Wesley—apart from occasionally sleeping in on Saturdays, he woke up at the same time every day, came home at the same time every day. He had to keep his meals regular because of his insulin injections. He had to get plenty of sleep. He worked out at the school gym every day. He didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, didn’t smoke, didn’t have sex. He went to class, he went to church, he went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas…he was the most boring teenage boy alive. Alive…please let him be alive.
Nora closed her eyes and turned onto her side. She could smell Wesley’s warm, clean scent on his pillows. For the first time in a long time she prayed with everything within her.
God, I know You’re probably still pissed about Søren, and I really don’t blame You. But please don’t take Your wrath out on Wesley. Flog me all You want. He doesn’t deserve it.
At 4:30 a.m. she was still wide-awake and staring at his ceiling when her red hotline phone rang. She sat straight up and found her hands were shaking so much she could barely hit the answer button.
“King, please tell me you know something.”
“Oui, chérie. Your intern is a most interesting young man.”
“Just tell me where he is. Is he okay?”
“He’s in the hospital, but he is unharmed if rather the worse for wear.”
“What happened?” Nora ran a hand through her hair. She leaned over and breathed through her fear and relief.
“A comely little nurse took a peek at his chart for me. Something called DKA? Is that familiar to you?”
Nora’s hands went numb at the initials. “It’s diabetic ketoacidosis. It can be fatal.”
Kingsley rattled off the story sliding in and out of French as he did so. From what she gleaned from his hasty bilingual recitation, Wesley had gotten sick at the library and passed out after throwing up several times in the bathroom. He’d been admitted to the hospital in full-blown DKA.
“Which hospital?” she asked. “What room? Please tell me he’s at General.”
“Oui. I’ve already called Dr. Jonas.”
“Tell him I’ll give him the freebie of his dreams if he can get me in.”
“No freebies, mistress. He’s already promised to help any way he can. He would never cross La Maîtresse.”
“Great. Wonderful. Where is he? ICU?”
“PICU,” Kingsley said and laughed. Nora laughed a little, too. They’d put Wesley in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. “Mais chérie, you cannot go.”
“Fuck you. Of course I can.”
“His parents flew in. They’re with him.”
Nora swore. Wesley would kill her if she turned up at his bedside with his parents sitting right there. He did everything he could to keep her a secret from them. His parents would yank him back to Kentucky so fast his head would spin if they discovered he was living with an infamous erotica writer—especially one who worked as a Dominatrix. Jaded New York parents wouldn’t let their kids near her much less these conservative Southerners.
“Forget it. Just tell me where he is.”
Nora jotted down his hospital room number.
“Thanks, King. I owe you.”
“Pas moi. Our mutual friend was the one who found where they’d taken your pet.”
“Then tell him we’re even now for him tricking me.”
Nora hung up the phone and ran to her room. She threw water on her face and changed clothes again. At 6:00 a.m. she arrived at the hospital and found Dr. Jonas. He explained that Wesley ended up in the PICU because the ICU was full. Nora told him not to tell Wesley that.
He brought her down several hallways past dozens of hospital rooms. She glanced at the figure of a priest talking quietly to a family in tears in one room. Nora lowered her eyes respectfully and kept walking. Passing through a set of double doors, they entered the pediatric ICU. Teddy bears holding balloons were painted on the walls. Oh, yes, she’d never let Wes hear the end of this. Dr. Jonas put his finger over his lips and left her by room 518. She stood outside the open door and listened intently—a woman’s voice with a heavy Southern accent, his mother’s she guessed, loudly whispered to a man with a softer accent. In hushed tones they went back and forth about how they never should have let their son move so far from home for college. Fighting was a good sign. That meant Wesley was out of the woods. But her relief was short-lived. His mother sounded determined to have him back in Kentucky again while his father argued that he was old enough to be on his own, that they couldn’t keep an eye on him forever. Nora found herself nodding her agreement with his father. But she could hear the distress in his mother’s voice, the pain and the fear and the wrought-iron determination. Wesley’s mom wanted him home with her to keep an eye on him. Nora felt the same way.
Nora didn’t know what to do. She found Dr. Jonas again and made him call Wesley’s attending physician. Wesley was in and out of consciousness after they’d brought him in, but he’d been awake and speaking a few hours ago. They’d stabilized his insulin levels and he’d be clear to go home in a day or two. Apparently Wesley wasn’t absorbing his insulin as well as he needed to. He might need to start using a bigger needle. Nora ached with sympathy. Wesley loathed needles. He always injected himself in his upper left arm where he couldn’t see the needle going in. Shoving needles into his own thighs or stomach would probably kill him before it cured him.
Dr. Jonas told her he’d call Kingsley if he heard anything else but there was nothing Nora could do for him now. She might as well go home.
Reluctantly, Nora left the hospital. She drove home and decided she would let herself sleep. She checked the clock—almost 8:00 a.m. She’d been awake for over twenty-four hours.
Once in her driveway Nora turned off her car. But after that she lost the energy to do anything else. She leaned forward on the steering wheel and cried tears of relief, exhaustion and fear. Wesley’s mother was the proverbial steel magnolia and she clearly wanted her son back home. Nora prayed Wesley had learned the fine art of telling someone off while living under her roof.
Telling someone off…
Nora leaned her head back against the headrest.
“Shit…Zach.”
She turned the car back on and headed south toward Manhattan.
9
The next morning Zach headed straight to J.P.’s office without even bothering to stop in his own first.
J.P. looked up from his reading and blanched.
“I am reminded of the last words of Emily Dickinson at this moment,” J.P. said. “The fog is rising.”
“I’m done with her.”
J.P. stared at him over the top of his glasses. “Easton, she could make Royal a great deal of money.”
“Find another editor then. I don’t care if we publish her or not. But I’m finished. Patricia Grier called me last night. She said I’m welcome to come out to L.A. a few weeks early and work with her. It’s not a bad idea.”
“It’s a terrible idea. The staff won’t know who’s in charge. You won’t know who’s in charge. She’ll undermine you. You’ll undermine her. Regime change has to be quick and dramatic for it to be effective.”
“It’s Royal’s West Coast office, not France in 1799.”
J.P. took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead.
“Bring me her contract. I’ll keep it.”
Zach turned on his heel without another word and walked to his office. He paused at the door when he noticed it was cracked open. He remembered very clearly locking it last night since he’d left his laptop on his desk. Warily, he opened the door and entered.
“Hey, Zach,” Nora said. She sat in his chair behind his desk with her eyes closed.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “How did you get into my office? It was locked.”
“Magic.” She opened her eyes and smiled.
“You look like hell,” Zach said. Nora had dark circles under her eyes and her face appeared gaunt from lack of sleep.
Zach came around his desk and she stood up to give him his chair back. She sat on top of his desk and rolled back on it like a bed.
“I’ve spent the last twelve hours in hell. Sorry, I forgot to bring you a souvenir.”
“I have all the souvenirs I need from my own trips there. What are you doing here, Nora?”
“Apologizing for going off on you last night.”
“Apology accepted. Now you can go. J.P. is going to find another editor for you to work with. Probably Thomas Finley. He’s an asshole. You’ll like him.”
“There are good assholes and bad assholes. You’re the good kind. I only want to work with you.”
“Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have told me to first, fuck the book and second, to fuck myself.”
Nora rolled up off his desk and turned to face him. She crossed her arms over her chest. She exhaled slowly.
“Wesley didn’t come home last night.”
“He’s old enough he can go anywhere he pleases, Nora.”
“But you don’t know Wes. He calls. He calls all the time. If he’s going to be five minutes late he calls me. I was in Miami a while ago and he called me to tell me he was going to the movies so if I tried to call him and didn’t get him, I wouldn’t worry. That’s Wes. He didn’t come home and he didn’t call. I freaked out.”
“I assume you found him?”
Nora laughed coldly. “Sort of. He’s in the hospital.”
Zach sat up in his chair.
“Good Lord. Is he all right?”
“He went into diabetic ketoacidosis at the library. No one called me because no one knows I exist. I’m not next of kin. I’m not any kin.”
“Have you seen him?”
“I just came from the hospital where I spent half an hour eavesdropping on his parents while lurking out in the hallway. I can’t go in since they’re there. Zach, I feel…impotent. Bad feeling.”
Zach looked away from her and stared out his window. His view was to the east, and if the world was flat and his vision was telescopic he could see all the way to England. He knew how Nora felt. Grace…her parents had come as soon as he called and told them she was in the hospital. As soon as they arrived he knew he’d made a mistake by calling them. The doctors immediately stopped talking to him and starting talking to them instead. He remembered his fury then, how he’d stepped between Grace’s parents and the doctor and told the doctor in no uncertain terms that when a married woman was in the emergency ward, you spoke to her husband first and her parents second. He hadn’t told the doctor to go fuck himself. He’d been far less polite than that.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“When you called last night I was waiting for news. If God Himself had called me and started telling me the secrets of the universe, I would have told Him to go fuck Himself, too. You can’t take me personally, Zach. Can I make it up to you? Coffee? Tea? Me?”
Zach laughed. Even exhausted she was still shameless.
“You need sleep, not caffeine or any other stimulant,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. She smiled and nodded in agreement.
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone. Soon as Wes is home again, I promise I’ll get back to the book. Can you email me whatever it was you were going to tell me last night? I’ll read it and do whatever it is you want me to do.”
Zach promised to do so and Nora started to leave.
“When’s the last time you slept, Nora?” he asked before she walked out of his office.
“Twenty-six hours ago.”
Zach winced. “You shouldn’t be driving. Dead writers revise no tales.”
“We’ll put that on my tombstone,” Nora said. Zach stared her down. “Fine. I’ve got a friend with a town house a few blocks from here. I’ll go crash at his place.”
“No stimulants, remember?” he reminded her. “Actors playing Hamlet are told to stay celibate lest they ruin their performance.”
Nora threw a smile over her shoulder. Suddenly, she didn’t look tired or worried anymore. She looked wild and beautiful and so alive.
“Celibate, Zach? Have you met me?”
Zach was still laughing after she’d left him. He looked up and saw J.P. standing in the door to his office.
“So the contract?” J.P. asked.
Zach looked at his boss.
“I think I might keep it a little while longer,” Zach said a little sheepishly.
“And her?”
Zach reached under his desk and pulled Nora’s manuscript out of the paper-recycling bin.
“I think I might keep her, too.”
* * *
Nora pulled in at Kingsley’s town house and walked inside without knocking. Nora announced herself to Juliette, Kingsley’s beautiful Haitian secretary and the only other woman in the world besides her he was afraid of. Juliette gave her breakfast and took her up to Kingsley’s opulent bedroom. She could sleep there since Kingsley was gone until tomorrow. Nora stripped out of her clothes and crawled between the sheets—sheets she’d spent more than a few nights on before. She took both of her cell phones out and laid them on the pillow next to hers in case Wesley, Zach, King or Søren called.
As she faded into sleep, Nora’s mind went to Wesley’s side—she hoped he was feeling better and would be home with her soon. As she pressed deeper into the luxurious sheets, a little part of her sort of wished Søren was there.
When Nora finally woke up it was almost nine at night. She’d slept for almost twelve straight hours. She showered in Kingsley’s decadent bathroom and dressed in the clothes Juliette had brought for her and left on the chair next to the bed. When she got out of the shower, her hotline rang. She grabbed it and answered it with still wet hands.
“King—what’s the news?”
“The good doctor says you are clear for a rendezvous with ton petit garçon malade. His parents succumbed to the doctor’s insistence they let your pet sleep tonight. They are at a hotel.”
“Tell Dr. Jonas next time I’ll do that thing he likes with the peanut butter and the cock ring.”
“It is without a doubt the sole reason he went to medical school.”
Nora left Kingsley’s town house and made her way back to the hospital feeling like a new person. Nearly shivering from the excitement at getting to see Wesley, she parked her car and headed straight to his room. Tiptoeing in, she saw Wesley lying in his hospital bed sound asleep.
She came up to the bed and looked down at him. His eyelashes fluttered against his tan cheeks and his chest rose and fell slowly. She bent forward and kissed him on the forehead. His eyes flew open and he looked at her as if she was something out of a dream.
“Nora, thank God.” He tried to throw his arms around her. But he winced when he realized his arms were taped up with tubes.
“Don’t move, kid. You’re going to rip something out. I’m right here. How are you feeling?”
“Perfect now that you’re here. I’ve been going nuts all day trying to figure out how to call you. But if Mom left the room Dad was here and vice versa. They finally left a few minutes ago. The doctor was really insistent they leave me alone tonight.”
Nora grinned at him.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.
“Friend of a friend. It’s good to have friends in strange places. I’ve got a cop who owes me a favor, too, if you ever get arrested.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Wesley reached out and took her hand in his. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Me, too. I was here earlier creeping in the hallway. I heard your parents talking. Your mom wants you to move home.”
“She does, but I’m not going to. I’ve got Dad on my side. We’ll wear her down.”
“You better. Good help is so hard to find. So what did the doctor say?”
Wesley groaned and Nora ran her hand through his hair. It felt so good just to touch him again, to be near him again. She couldn’t believe it had been only one day they’d been apart.
“I’ve given myself so many shots in the arm that I’ve got scar tissue,” Wesley said, rubbing his upper left biceps. “The insulin isn’t getting through it well enough. I have to change my injection site.”
“Thighs?” she asked. “Your cute little ass?”
“Worse. All my daytime shots in my stomach now and my thigh at night. You know, sticking a needle into your own stomach and leaving it there for five seconds is sort of overrated.”
“Tell me about it. Even the biggest kinksters don’t play rough on the stomach. Very sensitive area. When can you come home?”
“They may let me out tomorrow or the day after. I feel a lot better. Just really tired.”
“You look like you lost ten pounds and you didn’t really have any extra to lose.”
“You’re the one who’s too skinny, Nora.”
“I have gained eight pounds since you moved in and started cooking every day.”
“You needed those eight pounds. You were all gristle when I moved in.”
“I have to be very tough to beat up on all my bad little boys and girls. I’m going to beat up on you, too, if you ever scare me like that again.”
“I don’t plan to. Promise.”
Wesley smiled at her and she clutched his hand.
“Do you want me to run home and bring you anything? Clothes or anything?”
“Mom will use any excuse to go shopping. She was going to pick some stuff up for me tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. I’ll go and let you sleep then.”
Wesley sat up and shook his head.
“Don’t go. Please.”
“I’ll stay as long as you want me to, Wes,” she said to the almost panic in his voice. “Scoot over and make room.”
Wesley laughed but she wasn’t joking. She carefully crawled into his hospital bed and slid under the wires and tubes. She stretched out next to him and Wesley wrapped an IVed arm around her back. She lay against his chest and closed her eyes.
“You know, I’ve fooled around in a hospital before but never in the pediatric ward.”
“Nora, you’re disgusting. Go to sleep.”
“You sleep first.”
“I don’t want to sleep. I want to talk to you.”
“Good. I don’t want to sleep, either. What do you want to talk about? Horses?”
“You want to talk about horses?”
“Don’t be mad but I was digging through your stuff trying to find your friends’ phone numbers. I found the photo album from last summer. And the stupid picture of me with Speakeasy.”
She looked up at him. Even in the dark she could see Wesley’s blush.
“It’s not a stupid picture. You look happy in it.”
“Of course I do. I was with you.”
Wesley smiled down at her. Nora kissed him on the cheek and rested her head once more against his chest. It was such a relief to hear his heart beating steadily against her ear.
“How did you find out where I was?” Wesley asked. He ran his hand up and down her arm. She knew the last thing he wanted to hear was that Søren had hunted him down for her, and that Kingsley, her partner in crime, had used some of his connections to get confidential information.
Nora shut her eyes and nestled in closer to Wesley.
“Magic.”
10
Zach was relieved to find almost fifteen thousand new words from Nora in his email when he arrived at work two days after finding her half-unconscious in his office. Apparently she was working out her nervous energy from not having Wesley at home by writing five breathlessly intense chapters. He read through them and jotted down notes as he went. He was thrilled with what she was doing with the book. But he needed to steer her in a new direction before she wrote any more. The whole book couldn’t be a sprint. She needed to stop and let the reader breathe for a chapter or two before kicking into high gear again.
Zach read through his notes again and dialed her office number.
“Sophocles’s House of Patricide and Incest,” Nora answered. “How may I blind you?”
Zach bit the inside of his cheek to keep her from hearing him laugh.
“Nora.”
“Zachary,” she said breathlessly.
“You’re in a chipper mood, I see.”
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Tiffany Reisz
Some love stories you never forget. Some books will change your world. Be prepared… this is one of them. She tore herself from the man she adored, who transformed her, who possessed her… who would have destroyed her. Now she is adored by a man she must not have. She thinks she knows what it means to be pushed to her limits. She’s wrong.The Original Sinners Series: The Red YearsBook 1: The SirenBook 2: The AngelBook 3: The PrinceBook 4: The MistressThe Original Sinners continues with The White Years Book 1: The SaintBook 2: The KingBook 3: The VirginPraise for Tiffany Reisz‘Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic’ - Author Miranda Baker ‘Stunning. One of the best novels I have ever read. I am simply in awe and feeling richer for the experience.’ - Good Reads Reviewer on The Siren ‘This book made me feel everything.’ - Author Courtney Milan on The Siren
In the world of kink authors, she’s the top.
Notorious Nora Sutherlin is famous for her delicious works of erotica, each one more popular with readers than the last. But her latest manuscript is different—more serious, more personal—and she’s sure it’ll be her breakout book…if it ever sees the light of day.
Zachary Easton holds Nora’s fate in his well-manicured hands. The demanding British editor agrees to handle the book on one condition: he wants complete control. Nora must rewrite the entire novel to his exacting standards—in six weeks—or it’s no deal.
Nora’s grueling writing sessions with Zach are draining…and shockingly arousing. And a dangerous former lover has her wondering which is more torturous—staying away from him…or returning to his bed?
Nora thought she knew everything about being pushed to your limits. But in a world where passion is pain, nothing is ever that simple.
Advance Praise for The Siren
“Tiffany Reisz is a smart, artful, and masterful new voice in erotic fiction! An erotica star on the rise!”
—Award-winning author Lacey Alexander
“The best erotica either leaves slut-marks on your back or a bruise on your heart. The Siren does both and I wish I’d written it.”
—Scarlett Parrish, author of By the Book
“Provocative, smart and downright cheeky. The Siren put me through my paces and had me begging for more.”
—Emma Petersen, author of Reign of Pleasure
“Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic, Reisz writes unforgettable characters you’ll either want to know or want to be. The Siren is an alluring book-within-a-book, a story that will leave you breathless and bruised, aching for another chapter with Nora Sutherlin and her men.”
—Miranda Baker, author of Bottoms Up and Soloplay
“The Siren is a powerful, evocative tale of discovering who you truly are. Tiffany Reisz nails the complicated person inside all of us.”
—Cassandra Carr, author of Talk to Me
“Daring, sophisticated, and literary…exactly what good erotica should be.”
—Kitty Thomas, author of Tender Mercies
The Siren
Tiffany Reisz
www.spice-books.co.uk (http://www.spice-books.co.uk)
To Jason Isaacs—
otherwise known as The Most Beautiful Man Alive.
Thank you for being my Zachary and my Muse.
To Alyssa Palmer—
mon Canard—if yours were the only eyes that read my books, I would still write for you alone.
And to B.
Contents
Chapter 1 (#u5992c510-970f-5232-b7ed-0a2dbb7884de)
Chapter 2 (#ue8740029-4808-5ead-be6e-56ae82b7e2e3)
Chapter 3 (#ua342094e-71bf-5198-be5c-286cf5ae92a8)
Chapter 4 (#ud5773729-c692-5ec6-a2c3-a9ec5849385d)
Chapter 5 (#u71c1f36a-a0ce-59be-a0c0-14128135ae00)
Chapter 6 (#ue81ed6d6-9f80-5328-b7b0-103e16fc35c1)
Chapter 7 (#ue7a0172b-fd19-5e24-b8ac-3c186a2aa5c6)
Chapter 8 (#ue0b26664-a6b9-5fe2-a3e0-43a5c92b263f)
Chapter 9 (#uf1189b71-873f-5fa3-a8f3-9dc6d24d3f95)
Chapter 10 (#u681a5706-f50c-5ca8-b0d5-89276b595e31)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
1
There was no such thing as London fog—never had been. The London Fog of legend was only that. In reality London fog was London smog, and at the height of the Industrial Revolution it had killed thousands, choking the city with its poisonous hands. Zach Easton knew that in the offices of Royal House Publishing, he was known as the London Fog, the disparaging nickname coined by a fellow editor who disapproved of Zach’s dour demeanor. Zach had no love of his nickname or the editor who’d coined it. But today he was eager to earn his epithet.
As he knew he would, Zach found John-Paul Bonner, the chief managing editor of Royal House Publishing, still hard at work even after hours. J.P. sat on the floor of his office, piles of manuscripts stacked about him like a paper Stonehenge in miniature.
Zach stopped in J.P.’s doorway and leaned against the frame. He stared his chief editor down and did not speak. He didn’t have to tell J.P. why he was here. They both knew.
“Death—she comes to me on an Easton fog,” J.P. said from the floor as he sorted through another stack of books. “A poetic enough way to die. You are here to kill me, I presume.”
At sixty-four and with his gray beard and spectacles, J.P. was literature personified. Usually Zach enjoyed playing word games with him, but he was in no mood for repartee today.
“Yes.”
“‘Yes’?” J.P. repeated. “Just ‘yes’? Well, brevity is the soul of wit after all. Help an old man off the floor, will you, Easton? If I’m going to die, might as well die on my feet.”
Sighing, Zach stepped into the office, reached down and helped J.P. stand. J.P. patted Zach gratefully on the shoulder and collapsed into his chair behind his desk.
“I’m a dead man anyway. Can’t find that damn Hamlet galley for John Warren. Should have had it in the mail yesterday. But happiness is good health and a bad memory they say, and I am a happy, happy man.”
Zach studied J.P. for a moment and silently cursed him for being so endearing. His affection for his boss made this conversation far less pleasant. Zach walked over to J.P.’s bookshelves and ran his hand along the top of the case. He knew J.P.’s habit of stashing important papers where even he couldn’t reach them. Zach found a manuscript and pulled it down. He threw it on J.P.’s desk and watched it kick up a small cloud of dust.
“Bless you,” J.P. said, coughing as he put his hand over his heart. “You have saved my life.”
“Now I get to be the one who kills you.”
J.P. eyed Zach and pointed at the chair across from the desk. Zach reluctantly sat down, pulling his gray coat around him like a suit of armor.
“Easton, look,” J.P. began but it was as far as Zach let him get.
“Nora Sutherlin?” Zach infused the name with as much disgust as he could muster, a considerable amount at the moment. “You must be joking.”
“Yes, Nora Sutherlin. I’ve thought about it, looked at the sales projections. I think we should acquire her. I want you to work with her.”
“I will do no such thing. It’s pornography.”
“It’s not pornography.” J.P. peered at Zach over the top of his glasses. “It’s erotica. Very good erotica.”
“I had no idea there was such a thing.”
“Two words—Anaïs Nin,” J.P. retorted.
“Two more words—Booker Prize.”
J.P. exhaled noisily and leaned back in his chair.
“Easton, I know your track record. You’re one of the top talents in the industry by far. I wouldn’t have paid to import you here to New York if you weren’t. Yes, your writers have won Booker Prizes.”
“And Whitbreads, Silver Daggers—”
“And Sutherlin’s last book outsold your Whitbread and Silver Dagger combined. We’re in a recession, if you hadn’t noticed. Books are a luxury. If it can’t be eaten, no one is buying it right now.”
“So Nora Sutherlin’s the answer?” Zach challenged.
J.P. grinned. “Janie Burke at the Times called her last book ‘highly edible.’”
Zach shook his head and looked up at the ceiling in disgust.
“She’s a guttersnipe writer at best,” Zach said. “Her mind’s in the gutter, her books are in the gutter. I wouldn’t be surprised if her last publishing house kept its offices in the gutter.”
“She might be a guttersnipe, but she’s our guttersnipe. Well, your guttersnipe now.”
“This isn’t My Fair Lady. I’m not Professor Henry Higgins, and she is no Eliza bloody Doolittle.”
“Whoever she is she’s a damn fine writer. You would know this if you’d bothered to read one of her books.”
“I left England for this job,” Zach reminded him. “I left one of the most respected publishers in Europe because I wanted to work with the best young American writers.”
“She’s young. She’s American.”
“I did not leave England, my life…” Zach stopped himself before he said, “and my wife.” After all, it was his wife who’d left him first.
“This book has real potential. She brought it to us because she’s ready to make a change.”
“Give her twenty shillings for a pound if she wants change. I leave for L.A. in six weeks. I can’t believe you want me to set everything aside and give my last six weeks to Nora Sutherlin. Not a chance.”
“I’ve seen your in-box, Easton. It’s not so full you can’t work with Sutherlin while you tie up loose ends around here. Don’t tell me you don’t have the time when we both know you just don’t have the inclination.”
“Fine. I don’t have the time or the inclination to edit erotica, even good erotica, if there is such an animal. I’m not the only editor here. Give it to Thomas Finley.” Zach named his least favorite coworker, the one who’d given him his nickname. “Or Angie Clark even.”
“Finley? That pansy? He’d make a pass at Sutherlin, and she’d eat him alive. If you punched him in the face, he wouldn’t even know how to bleed right.”
Zach nearly laughed in agreement before remembering he was fighting with J.P.
“Then what about Angie Clark?”
“She’s too busy right now. Besides…”
“Besides what?” Zach demanded.
“Clark’s afraid of her.”
“Can’t say I blame her,” Zach said. “I’ve heard grown men practically whisper her name at parties. The rumor is she slept her way to her first book deal.”
“I’ve heard that rumor, too. But she hasn’t slept her way to this one. Unfortunately,” J.P. said with a playful grin.
“I read on Rachel Bell’s blog that she never leaves the house in any other color than red. She said Sutherlin’s got a sixteen-year-old boy working as her personal assistant.”
J.P. smiled at him. “I believe she prefers ‘intern’ to ‘personal assistant.’”
Zach nearly choked on his own frustration. He’d been ready to leave for the evening, even had his coat on, when some demon voice in his head told him to check his work email one more time. He had a note from J.P. telling him that he was considering acquiring erotica writer Nora Sutherlin and her latest book for their big fall/winter release. And since Zach didn’t have much to occupy him until he left for L.A. in a few weeks…
“I need you to do this for me. You and no one else,” J.P. said.
“Why am I the only one who can handle her?”
“Handle her?” J.P. practically chortled the words before turning serious. “Listen to me—no one handles Nora Sutherlin. No, you’re just the only one I’ve got who can keep up with her. Easton…Zach. Hear me out, please.”
Zach swallowed and resigned himself to a moment’s détente. It was a rare thing indeed when John-Paul Bonner called anyone by his first name.
“She writes romances, J.P.,” Zach said quietly. “I hate romances.”
J.P. met his eyes with sympathy.
“I know you’ve been through hell this past year. I’ve met your Grace, remember? I know what you’ve lost. But Sutherlin…she’s good. We need her.”
Zach took a slow, deep breath.
“Has she signed the contract yet?” Zach asked.
“No. We’re still ironing out the terms.”
“Is there a verbal agreement in place?”
J.P. eyed him warily. “Not yet. I told her we’d have to look at the figures and get back to her, but we were leaning toward yes. Why?”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“A good start.”
“And I’ll read the manuscript. If I think there’s any chance she—we—can make something decent out of her book, I’ll give her my last six weeks. But the book doesn’t go to press until I sign off on it.”
J.P.’s eyes bored into Zach. Zach refused to blink or look away. He was used to having final say on all his books. He wasn’t about to relinquish that power, not for J.P., not for Nora Sutherlin, not for anyone.
“Easton, one Dan Brown title will outsell in a month what the entire poetry section of a bookstore will sell in five years. Sutherlin’s ‘pornography,’ as you call it, could pay for a lot of poetry around here.”
“I want the contract in my hands, J.P., or I won’t even meet her.”
J.P. sat back in his chair and exhaled loudly through his nose.
“Fine. She’s all yours. She’s got a nice little place in Connecticut. Take the train. Take my car. I don’t care. She’ll be home on Monday, she said.”
“Very well then.” Zach knew he was likely safe. When the mood struck him, Zach could be merciless to an author about his or her book’s shortcomings. The great writers took the criticism. The hacks couldn’t handle it. If he was hard enough on her, she’d beg for another editor.
The argument now at a stalemate, Zach rose tiredly from the chair and with hunched and aching shoulders headed toward the door.
A small cough stopped Zach before he could leave the office. J.P. didn’t meet his eyes, only ran his hand over the first page of the Hamlet reader’s copy in front of him.
“You should read this book when it comes out,” J.P. said, tapping the page. “Fascinating exploration of the feigned madness of Hamlet—‘I am but mad north north-west…’”
“‘But when the wind is southerly, I can tell a hawk from a handsaw,’” Zach finished the famous quotation.
“Sutherlin’s only as mad as Hamlet was. Don’t believe everything you’ve heard about her. The lady knows her hawks from her handsaws.”
“Lady?”
J.P. closed the book and didn’t answer the insult. Zach turned to leave again.
“You know, you’re still young, Easton, and too handsome for your own good. You should try it sometime.”
“What? Madness?” Zach asked, nodding toward the book.
“No. Happiness.”
“Happiness?” Zach allowed himself a bitter grin. “I’m afraid my memory’s too good for that.”
Zach returned to his office. His assistant, Mary, had left Nora Sutherlin’s manuscript on his desk along with a file folder.
Zach flipped the file open and barely glanced at Sutherlin’s bio. She was thirty-three, about a decade younger than him. Her first book had come out when she was twenty-nine. She’d released five titles since then; her second book, entitled Red, had created a minor sensation—great sales, lots of buzz. Zach studied the numbers in the file and saw why J.P. was so eager to acquire her. With each subsequent release, her sales had nearly doubled. Zach ran through the little he knew of erotica writers in his mind. These days erotica was about the only growth market in publishing. But it shouldn’t be about the money. Just the art.
Zach threw Sutherlin’s bio and sales projections in the trash. He’d stolen his philosophy of editing from the old New Critics—it’s just about the book. Not the author, not the market, not the reader…one judged a book only by the book. He shouldn’t care that Nora Sutherlin’s personal life was rumored to be as torrid as her prose. Only her book mattered. And his hopes for the book were not high.
Zach examined the manuscript with suspicion. Mary knew he preferred to read his books in hard copy versions. But she’d obviously had a little too much fun printing out this one for him. Across the scarlet-red cover blazed the title in a lurid Gothic font—The Consolation Prize. Editors almost invariably changed a book’s title, but he had to concede it was an interesting choice for a work of erotica. He opened the manuscript and read the first sentence: “I don’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it.”
Zach paused in his reading as he felt the shadow of something old and familiar whisper across his shoulder. He brushed the sensation off and read the line again. Then the next one and the next one…
2
Some days Zach hated his job. The actual editing he loved, taking a novel with pretensions of greatness and actually making it great. But the politics he hated, the budget crises, having to let a brilliant midlister go to make room for a better-selling hack… And now here he was, hauling his arse into Connecticut to meet some loony smut writer who’d somehow convinced one of the most respected lions in publishing that she deserved one of the best editors in literary fiction. Yes, some days he hated his job. Today he felt quite certain it hated him back.
Zach parked J.P.’s car in front of a rather quaint two-story Tudor cottage in the tame and pedestrian suburb. He checked the address, his directions and stared at the house. Nora Sutherlin—the notorious erotica writer whose books were banned as often as they were translated lived here? Zach could imagine his own grandmother in this house forcing tea and biscuits on small children.
With a heavy sigh, he strode to the front door and rang the bell. Shortly after, he heard footsteps approaching—sturdy, masculine footsteps. Zach allowed himself the pleasure of imagining that Nora Sutherlin might simply be the pen name for some overweight bloke in his mid-fifties.
A man did open the door. No, not a man—a boy. A boy wearing nothing but plaid pajama pants and a cluster of hemp necklaces, one dangling a small silver cross, stood across the threshold from Zach and regarded him with a sleepy smile.
“Nineteen,” he said in an accent Zach immediately recognized as American South. “Not sixteen. She just tells everybody I’m sixteen for the street cred.”
“Street cred?” Zach asked, stunned that the rumor of the teenage intern had proved true.
The boy shrugged his sun-freckled shoulders. “Her words. Wesley Railey. Just Wes.”
“Zachary Easton. I’m here to meet with your…employer?”
The boy, Wesley, laughed and brushed a swath of dark blond hair out of his brown eyes with the graceful languor of youth.
“My employer is right this way,” he said, exaggerating the Southern accent for comic effect. Zach entered the house and found it cozy and homey, replete with overstuffed furniture and bursting bookcases. “I like your accent. You’re British?”
“Lived in London the past ten years. You don’t sound like a native, either.”
“Kentucky. But Mom’s a Georgia peach so that’s where I get this mess from. I keep trying to lose it, but Nora won’t let me. Has a thing for accents.”
“That does not bode well,” Zach said as Wesley grabbed a V-neck white T-shirt off a pile of folded laundry and pulled it on. Zach noted the boy’s slim but muscular frame and wondered why Nora Sutherlin bothered with the intern pretense. A nineteen-year-old lover might be rather disgraceful for a woman of thirty-three but certainly legal.
Wesley led him down an abbreviated hallway. Without knocking he pushed open a door.
“Nor, Mr. Easton’s here.”
He stepped to the side and Zach blinked in surprise at his first glimpse of the infamous Nora Sutherlin.
From all the rumors he’d heard, he’d expected some sort of Amazonian in red leather wielding a riding crop. Instead, he found a pale, petite beauty with wavy black hair barely contained in a loose knot at her nape. And no red leather in sight at all. She wore men’s style pajamas, blue ones covered in what appeared to be little yellow ducks.
Her legs rested on top of her desk and she had her keyboard balanced across her lap. With quick nimble fingers she typed away, saying nothing and giving them only her beguiling profile.
“Nora?” Wesley prompted.
“I’ve got a crisp new Benjamin for the first person who can give me a good synonym for thrust, noun form. Go,” she said, her voice both honeyed and sardonic.
Although irritated by her cavalier attitude and her unfortunate attractiveness, Zach couldn’t help but scroll through his substantial mental thesaurus.
“Push, lunge, shove, attack, force, jab,” he rattled off the words.
“His slow, relentless jabs sent her reeling…” she said. “Sounds like commentary on a boxing match. Goddammit, why are there no good synonyms for thrust? Bane of my existence. Although…” She set her keyboard aside and turned to face him for the first time. “I do love a man with a big vocabulary.”
Zach’s spine stiffened as the most unusually beautiful woman he’d seen in years smiled at him. She stood up and walked on bare feet to him.
“Ms. Sutherlin.” Zach took her proffered hand. “How do you do?”
From her small stature he expected a dainty grip. But she grasped his hand with surprisingly strong fingers.
“Gorgeous accent,” she said. “Not a bit of the old Scouser left, is there?”
“You’ve done your homework, I see,” Zach replied, troubled that she seemed to know more about him than he knew about her. He now regretted tossing her bio into the bin. “But not everyone born in Liverpool speaks like a young Paul McCartney.”
“Shame.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as she continued to gaze at him. “What a shame.”
Zach forced himself to really meet her eyes and then wished he hadn’t. At first glance her eyes appeared a deep green, but she blinked and they seemed to change to a black so dark they likely could not remember the green they had just been. He knew that she looked only at his face, but still he felt stripped bare by her penetrating gaze, torn open. She knew him. He knew it, and he sensed she knew it, too.
Determined to regain control of the situation, Zach pulled his hand back.
“Ms. Sutherlin—”
“Right. Work.” She returned to her desk. Zach glanced around her office and saw even more books than were in the living room: books and notebooks, stacks of paper and dark wooden filing cabinets.
“One quick question, Mr. Easton,” she said, dropping into her desk chair. “Are you, by any chance, ashamed of being Jewish?”
“Excuse me?” Zach said, not quite certain he’d heard her correctly.
“Nora, stop it,” Wesley scolded.
“Just curious,” she said with an indifferent wave of her hand. “You go by Zachary but your name is actually Zechariah like the Hebrew prophet. Why did you change it?”
The question was so personal, so entirely none of her concern that Zach couldn’t believe he deigned to answer it.
“I’ve been called Zach or Zachary since the day I was born. Only when filling out formal documents do I even remember Zechariah is actually my name.” Zach kept his tone cool and even. He knew that he could only win here if he stayed calm and didn’t allow her to get the rise out of him she so clearly desired. “And the only thing I am ashamed of currently is this sudden downturn in my career.”
He expected her to flinch or fight. Instead, she just laughed.
“I really can’t blame you. Have a seat and tell me all about it.”
Warily, Zach sat down in the battered paisley armchair across from her desk. He started to cross his ankle over his knee but froze in midmovement as his foot tapped an unusually long black duffel bag that sat on the floor. He heard the distinct, unnerving sound of metal clinking against metal.
“I’ve got to get to class,” Wesley said, sounding desperate to leave. “That okay?”
“Oh, I doubt Mr. Easton will bend me over my desk and ravish me the second you leave,” she said, winking at Zach. “Unfortunately.”
The words and the wink forced an image into Zach’s mind of doing that very act. He forced the thought out just as quickly as she put it in.
Wesley shook his head in amused disgust.
“Mr. Easton, good luck,” Wesley said, turning to him. “Just don’t act impressed, and she’ll eventually settle down.”
“Impressed?” Zach repeated. “I doubt that will be a problem.”
Zach waited for his words to register. He saw Wesley’s eyes narrow, but she only looked at him from under her veil of black eyelashes.
“Oh…” She nearly purred the word. “I like him already.”
“God help us all.” Wesley left on the heels of his prayer. Zach glanced back at Wesley’s retreating form. He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to be left alone with this woman.
“Your son, I presume?” Zach asked after Wesley departed.
“My intern. Sort of. He cooks so I guess that makes him more of a factotum. Intern? Factotum?”
“Houseboy,” Zach supplied, putting his large vocabulary to use again. “And a rather well-trained one, I see.”
“Well-trained? Wesley? He’s horribly trained. I can’t even train him to fuck me. But I don’t think you drove all the way from the city just to talk about my intern with me, adorable as he is.”
“No, I did not.” Zach fell silent. He waited and watched as Nora Sutherlin sat back in her chair and studied him with her unnerving eyes.
“So…” she began. “I can tell you don’t like me. Shows you’ve got good taste in women at least. Also shows you’ve heard of me. Am I what you expected?”
Zach stared at her a moment. The last three writers he’d worked with had been men in their late fifties and early sixties. Never once had he seen any of them in their pajamas. And never had he met a writer as uncomfortably alluring as Nora Sutherlin.
“You’re shorter.”
“Thank God for stilettos, right? So what’s the verdict? J.P. said he’s giving you total control over the book and me. It’s been a long time since I’ve let a man boss me around. I kind of miss it.”
“The verdict is undecided.”
“A well-hung jury then. Better give me a retrial.”
“You’re very clever.”
“You’re very handsome.”
Zach shifted in his seat. He wasn’t used to flirtation from his writers, either. Then again, she wasn’t one of his writers.
“That wasn’t a compliment. Cleverness is the last recourse of an amateur. I look for depth in my books, passion, substance.”
“Passion I have.”
“Passion is not synonymous with sex. I’ll admit your book was interesting and not entirely without merit. At one point I even detected a heart inside all that flesh.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there.”
“But the heartbeat was very faint. The patient might be terminal.”
She looked at him and glanced away. Zach had seen that look before—it was defeat. He’d scared her away as he’d planned. He wondered why he wasn’t happier about it.
“Terminal…” She turned her face back to him. A new look was shining in her eyes. “It’s almost Easter—the season of Resurrection.”
“Resurrection? Really?” Zach said, astonished by her tenacity. “I leave for Royal’s L.A. offices in six weeks. Six weeks is not nearly enough time to involve myself with any project of worth or magnitude. But six weeks is all we have.”
“You just said six weeks isn’t long enough—”
“But it’s all I have to give. Fix it in six and it’s off to press. If not—”
“If not, it’s back to the gutter for the guttersnipe writer, right?”
Zach stared at her in stunned silence.
“John-Paul Bonner’s the biggest gossip in the publishing industry, Mr. Easton. He told me what you think of me. He told me you think I’ll fail.”
“I’m quite certain of it.”
“If you’re my editor, my failure will take you down, too.”
“I’m not your editor yet. I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“You will. So why did you quit teaching?”
“Quit teaching?”
“You were a professor at Cambridge, right? Pretty good gig especially for someone so young. But you quit.”
“Ten years ago,” Zach said, shocked by how much she seemed to know about him. How on earth had she learned about Cambridge?
“So why—”
“Why my personal life is of such fascination to you, I cannot fathom.”
“I’m a cat. You’re a shiny object.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“I am, aren’t I? Somebody should spank me.” She sighed. “So you’re kind of an asshole. No offense.”
“And you appear to be two or three words I don’t feel quite comfortable saying aloud.”
“I’d tell you to say them anyway, but I promised Wesley I wouldn’t let you flirt with me. But I digress. Tell me what’s wrong with my book. Say it slowly,” she said, grinning.
“You have a very sanguine attitude toward the editing process. What will you say when I tell you that you must cut out the ten to twenty pages you’re certain constitute the living, beating heart of your book?”
She said nothing for a long minute. Her eyes glanced away from him and she seemed to lose herself in a dark place. He watched as she breathed in slowly through her nose, held the breath then exhaled out her mouth. She turned her uncanny green eyes to him.
“Then I’ll say that I once cut the living, beating heart out of my own chest,” she said, her voice devoid of its usual flippancy. “I survived that amputation. I’ll survive this one.”
“May I ask why you’re so determined to work with me? I’ve done my research, Ms. Sutherlin. You have a rabid fan following that would buy your phone bill in hardcover and still manage to wank off to it.”
“I’m also very big in France.”
Zach gritted his teeth and felt the first stirrings of an impending headache. “Didn’t your ‘intern’ say you would settle down at some point?”
“Mr. Easton,” she said, rolling back in her swivel chair and throwing her legs back on her desk. “This is me settled down.”
“I was afraid of that.” Zach stood, prepared to leave.
“This book,” she began and stopped. She moved her legs off the desk and sat cross-legged in her chair. For a moment she looked both very earnest and terribly young.
“What about it?”
She looked away and seemed to search for words. “It…means something to me. It’s not another one of my dirty little stories. I came to Royal because I need to do right by this book.” She met his eyes again and without a trace of levity or mirth said, “Please. I need your help.”
“I only work with serious writers.”
“I’m not a serious person. I know that. But I am a serious writer. Writing is one of the only two things in this world I do take seriously.”
“And the other?”
“The Roman Catholic Church.”
“I think we’re done here.”
“You’re not much of an editor then,” she taunted as he headed to the door. “It’s much too early for an ending. I’m no editor and even I know that.”
“Ms. Sutherlin, you’re obviously emotionally involved in your book. That’s fine for writing, but editing a book you love hurts.”
“I like doing things that hurt.” She gave him a Cheshire cat grin. “J.P. said you were the best. I think he’s right. I’ll do whatever it takes, whatever you say. I’ll beg if it will help my case. I’ll get down on my knees and beg if it’ll help yours.”
“I’m going now.”
“J.P. also said they call you the London Fog around the office,” she said as he turned his back to her. “Is that because of the long coat, the accent or your gift for putting a cold, wet damper on everyone’s good time?”
“I’ll leave you to decide that.”
“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” she called out, and Zach was forced to admire her stubbornness. He couldn’t believe he was tempted to consider rewarding it.
“A writer writes,” he said, facing her again. “Write something for me, something good. I don’t care how long it is, and I don’t care what it’s about. Just impress me. You’ve got twenty-four hours. Show me you can create under pressure, and I’ll consider it.”
“You’ll be surprised what I can do under pressure,” she said, but Zach had his doubts. The houseboy, the jokes, the flirting—she was no serious writer. “Any suggestions?” she asked, slightly more sincere this time.
“Stop writing what you know and start writing what you want to know. And,” he said, pointing a finger at her, “none of your cheap tricks.”
Her spine straightened as if he’d finally found an insult that stuck. “I assure you, Mr. Easton,” she said in a tone both stern and reproving, “my tricks are anything but cheap.”
“Prove it then. You’ve got twenty-four hours.”
She leaned back in her chair and smiled.
“Fuck your twenty-four hours. You’ll have it tonight.”
3
Numbing.
As an editor Zach often forced his writers to dig deep, cast aside the obvious and find the perfect word for every sentence. And the perfect word to describe this book release party he’d been forced to attend? Numbing.
Zach stalked through the party saying little more than the occasional hello to various colleagues. He’d only come because once again J.P. had twisted his arm, and Rose Evely—the guest of honor—had been a Royal House writer for thirty years now. What a ludicrous party anyway—someone dimmed the lights to create a nightclub sort of atmosphere but no amount of ambience could turn the banal hotel banquet hall into anything other than a beige box. He wandered toward a spiral staircase in the corner of the room to surreptitiously check his watch. If he could survive two hours at this party, maybe it would be long enough to placate his social butterfly of a boss.
Scanning the crowd, he saw his twenty-eight-year-old assistant, Mary, trying to talk her new husband into dancing with her. His first week at Royal, he’d been pleasantly surprised to find out his spitfire of an assistant was, like him, Jewish. He’d teased her he’d never known a Jew named Mary before and started calling her his pseudoshiksa. Mary, for all her endearing brusqueness, only ever called him “Boss.” J.P. stood with Rose Evely. Both J.P. and Evely had been happily married to their respective spouses for decades but nothing stopped J.P. from chivalrously flirting with any woman who had the patience to listen to his literary rambles. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves at this miserable party. Why wasn’t he?
Once more he glanced down at his watch.
“I can save you, if you want,” came a voice from above him.
Zach spun around and looked up. Smiling down at him from over the top of the staircase was Nora Sutherlin.
“Save me?” He narrowed his eyes at her.
“From this party.” She crooked her index finger at him.
Zach’s better judgment warned him that climbing that staircase could be a very bad idea indeed. Yet his feet overruled his reason, and he mounted the steps and joined her on the platform at the top. He raised his eyebrow as he cast a disapproving gaze over her clothes. That morning at her house, she’d worn shapeless pajamas that concealed every part of her but her abundant personality. Now he saw on full display what his mind had before only imagined.
She wore red, of course. Scarlet red and not much of it. The dress stopped at the top of her thighs and started at the edge of her breasts. She had miraculous curves that the dramatic floor-length red jacket she wore over her dress did nothing to hide. Even worse, she wore black leather boots that laced all the way above her knees. Pirate boots and a roguish grin on a beautiful black-haired woman…for the first time in a long time Zach felt something other than numb.
“How do you know I want to be saved from this party, Miss Sutherlin?” Zach leaned back against the railing and crossed his arms.
“I’ve been watching you from my little crow’s nest here since the second you walked in. You’ve said maybe five words to four people, you’ve checked your watch three times in as many minutes, and you whispered something to J.P., which, guessing from the look on his face, was a death threat. You’re here against your will. I can get you out.”
Zach cocked a self-deprecating smile at her.
“Unfortunately, you’re right. I am here against my will. I have to wonder, however, why you’re here at all. Didn’t I give you homework?” he asked, remembering his rash decision this morning to give her one chance to impress him.
“You did. And I was a good girl and finished it. See?”
He tried and failed to look away as she reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to him. The paper was still warm from her skin.
“This is it?” he asked, seeing only three paragraphs on the page.
“Don’t judge a book by its mother. Just read.”
Zach glanced at her once more and wished he hadn’t. Every time he looked at her, he found something else to attract him. Her jacket had slipped down her arm and her pale sculpted shoulder peeked out. Sculpted? His petite little writer had some muscle to go along with her impressive curves. Tougher than she looked.
Remembering himself, Zach turned from her, tilted the page into a patch of light and read.
First she noticed his hips. The eyes might be the windows to the soul, but a man’s hips were his seat of power. She doubted he’d chosen those perfectly fitted jeans and that black T-shirt that belied the tautness of his stomach for the purpose of flattering his lower body, but he had and now she lost herself in the thought of caressing with her lips that exquisite hollow that lay between smooth skin and elegantly jutting hip bone.
She had to meet his eyes eventually. With reluctance she dragged her gaze to his face, as dignified and angular as the rest of him. Pale skin and dark Brutus-cut hair contrasted with eyes the color of ice. Glacial, she decided his eyes were—they spoke of hidden depths. A stark beauty, he was a man made to be admired by intelligent women.
Lean and tall but with the substantial mass of an athlete, he was utterly masculine. The world had fallen away in his presence and now that he was gone, she was left in the equally potent presence of his absence.
Zach read the words one more time trying all the while to ignore the annoyingly pleasant image of Nora Sutherlin caressing his naked hips with her mouth.
“I’ve noticed you usually shy away from long descriptive passages in your book,” he said.
“I know people think erotica is just a romance novel with rougher sex. It’s not. If it’s a subgenre of anything, it’s horror.”
“Horror? Really?”
“Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear. You’re terrified of me, aren’t you?”
“Slightly,” he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck.
“A smart horror writer will never put too much detail in about the monster. The readers’ imaginations can conjure their own demons. In erotica you never want your main characters to be too physically specific. That way your readers can insert their own fantasies, their own fears. Erotica is a joint effort between writer and reader.”
“How so?” Zach asked, intrigued that Nora Sutherlin would have her own literary theories.
“Writing erotica is like fucking someone for the first time. You aren’t sure exactly what he wants yet so you try to give him everything he could possibly want. Everything and anything…” She enunciated the words like a cat stretching in sunlight. “You hit every nerve and eventually you’ll hit the nerve. Have I hit any nerves yet?”
Zach clenched his jaw. “Not any of them you were aiming for.”
“You don’t know what I was aiming for. So what do you think of the writing?”
“Could be better.” He refolded the page. “You use ‘was’ too much.”
“Rough draft,” she said unapologetically. She stared at him with dark, waiting eyes.
“The last line’s the strongest—‘the equally potent presence of his absence.’” Zach knew he should give the page back to her but for some reason he stuck it in his pocket. “It’s good.”
She gave him a slow, dangerous smile.
“It’s you.”
Zach only stared at her a moment before pulling the folded page back out.
“This is me?” he asked, his skin flushing.
“It is. Every last long, lean inch of you. I wrote it right after you left this morning. I was, needless to say, inspired by your visit.”
Swallowing hard, Zach unfolded the sheet again. Brutus-cut black hair…ice-colored eyes…jeans, black shirt… It was him.
“Excuse me,” Zach began, trying to regain control of this conversation, “but didn’t I repeatedly insult you this morning?”
“Your kvetching was very fetching. I like men who are mean to me. I trust them more.”
She tilted her head to the side and her unruly black hair fell over her forehead, veiling her green-black eyes.
“Forgive me. I might be speechless right now.”
“Your orders,” she said. “You told me to stop writing what I knew and start writing what I wanted to know. I want to know…you.”
She took a step closer and Zach’s heart dropped a few feet and landed somewhere in the vicinity of his groin.
“Who are you, Ms. Sutherlin?” he asked, not quite knowing what he meant by that question.
“I’m just a writer. A writer named Nora. And you can call me that, Zach.”
“Nora then. I’m sorry. I’m not used to being hit on by my writers. Especially after verbally abusing them.”
Nora’s eyes flashed with amusement.
“Verbal abuse? Zach, where I come from ‘slut’ is a term of endearment. Want to see where I come from?”
“No.”
“Pity,” she said, sounding not at all surprised or disappointed. “Where should we go then? I promised to save you from this party, didn’t I?”
“I really shouldn’t leave,” Zach said, terrified what would happen the second he found himself alone with Nora.
“Come on, Zach. This party sucks and not in the good way. I’ve had pap smears more fun than this.”
Zach covered a laugh with a cough.
“I must admit you do have a way with words.”
“So you’ll edit me then? Please?” She batted her eyelashes at him in mock innocence. “You won’t regret it.”
Zach glanced up at the ceiling as if it could give him some hint of what the hell he was getting himself into. Nora Sutherlin…he had only six weeks left in New York until he left for L.A. Why was he even considering getting involved with Nora Sutherlin and her book? He knew why. He had nothing else in his life right now. He liked Mary and enjoyed working for J.P. But he’d made no friends in New York, no connections of any kind. He hadn’t allowed himself to even consider dating. One day he’d taken off his wedding ring in a fit of anger and couldn’t find a reason to put it back on. He wouldn’t consider inflicting himself on any woman right now. At least working with Nora Sutherlin might give him a much-needed distraction from his misery. She seemed like the type of woman who’d help you forget about your headache by setting your bed on fire.
Won’t regret it? He already did.
“You do realize that working with you could be bad for my career,” Zach said. “I do literary fiction, not—”
“Literary friction?”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Zach shook his head.
Nora leaned in close to him. He was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the long, bare curve of her neck. She smelled of hothouse flowers in bloom.
“I can.” She breathed the words into his ear.
Zach exhaled slowly and pulled, reluctantly, away from her.
“I’m a brutal editor.”
“I like brutal.”
“I’ll make you rewrite the whole book.”
“Now you’re trying to turn me on, aren’t you? Shall we?”
“Fine,” he finally said. “Save me then.”
“Let’s do it,” she said. “If J.P. gives you shit about leaving the party with me, tell him it was my idea for us to go work on my book. J.P. won’t spank me.”
“I’m not certain of that,” Zach said.
“I knew I liked that man for a reason.”
“I need to say a few goodbyes if we’re leaving.” J.P. for one. Then Mary. And he hadn’t met her husband yet. And Rose Evely, too.
“Nope. Can’t do that,” Nora said. “Never say goodbye when you leave a party. That way you leave a mystery in your place. They’ll have so much more fun talking about us than they ever would talking to us. Can’t you already hear them? Zach Easton just left with Nora Sutherlin. Are they…surely not…of course they are—”
“We aren’t,” Zach said with finality.
“I know that. You know that. They don’t know that.”
Zach looked around the room. Everywhere he looked he saw eyes glancing furtively in their direction. The most intense gazing came from Thomas Finley, his least favorite coworker. Zach noted that Finley didn’t so much stare at him as he did at Nora. And the look in his eyes wasn’t particularly friendly.
“I prefer not being a topic of gossip,” Zach said.
“Too late. At least with me, it’ll be really good gossip.” She strode down the staircase with an audacious kick of her heels on each step.
Zach followed in her wake. The crowd parted for her as she cut a bloodred swath through the center of the room.
Finally free of the suffocating party, Zach threw on his coat and breathed in the bracing winter evening air.
A cab stopped within seconds for Nora and she slipped gracefully inside. He took a sharp breath as her black-booted legs disappeared into the cab. One more time he asked himself what the hell he was doing before sliding in next to her.
Nora said nothing as he joined her, only turned her head and gazed out at the night. She seemed to be trying to stare down the city. He had a feeling the city would blink first.
Nervously, he rubbed the empty spot where he’d once worn his wedding band. Nora reached out and wrapped her hand around his ring finger. Facing him now, she raised her eyebrow in a question.
“Grace,” he answered.
Nora nodded. “You married a princess.”
Princess Grace—her mother called her that.
“She hates being called ‘Princess.’” Zach heard the anguish in his voice.
Nora lifted his hand and brought it to her neck. She pressed his fingers into her throat. Her pulse throbbed through her warm, soft skin.
“Søren,” she said and met his eyes. In those dark, dangerous depths he saw a glimmer of something human—not merely sympathy but empathy. And he felt something inhuman in response—not passion but pure animal need. For a brief moment he imagined his hands digging into her thighs and the bite of her leather boots on his back. He tore his gaze away before her uncanny ability to read him saw that image in his hungry gaze.
She released his hand just as the cab pulled up in front of Zach’s apartment building. He opened the door and got out. He wanted to ask her up, wanted to spend a few hours forgetting his pain and all the reasons for it. But he couldn’t, could he? Because of Grace, not that she would care anymore. Zach opened his mouth but before he could ask Nora up, she reached out to shut the door.
“See, Zach? I told you I’d save you.”
* * *
Nora watched Zach stare after the cab before turning and walking into his building. What a beautiful wreck of a man. Kingsley always said beautiful wrecks were a specialty of hers. He should know. He certainly qualified as one himself.
“Where to, lady?”
Nora thought about it for a moment. For the next six weeks she and Zach would rewrite her book. If he started kicking her ass tomorrow, might be cathartic to kick a little ass of her own tonight.
“Lady?” her driver prompted.
Nora rattled off an address for a Manhattan town house and nearly laughed as she saw her driver’s eyes widen in the rearview mirror.
“You sure about that? That’s no place for a nice girl to go after dark. Or ever.”
This time Nora did laugh out loud. Every cabdriver in town knew Kingsley’s address. No one with anything to lose would ever turn up there in his or her own car. Good thing she had nothing to lose. Not anymore anyway.
Nora looked back out onto the city night. Søren might kill her for getting involved with a guy like Zach, a guy still technically married. Pissing off Søren—yet another reason to go for it.
“Don’t worry.” She crossed her legs and leaned back in the seat. She’d tip the driver a Benjamin just for giving her a giggle. “I’m not a nice girl.”
4
Everything hurt—back, arms, wrists, fingers, neck—everything. Nora hadn’t been this sore in years. Not since the old days anyway. Zach hadn’t been kidding—he was a brutal editor. And she’d been right—he was kicking her ass. Nora allowed herself a smile. She’d forgotten how much she liked having her ass kicked.
She read through Zach’s notes again on her first chapters. Nice to see he had quite the sadistic streak in him. Of course she couldn’t imagine him taking a real whip to her—more’s the pity. But he had a gift for tongue-lashings. He’d been her editor for all of three days and so far he’d already called her a “guttersnipe writer” whose books were “melodramatic,” “maniacal” and “unhygienic.” Unhygienic had been her personal favorite.
Nora stretched her aching back as Wesley entered her office and collapsed into the armchair across from her desk.
“How’s the rewrite going?” he asked.
“Horrible. It’s day three and I’ve rewritten…nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Zach shredded the book.” Nora held up a sheaf of paper. The morning after the release party Zach sent her a dozen pages of notes on the first three chapters alone. “You sure this guy’s the right editor for you? Can’t you work with somebody else?”
Nora picked up her tea and sipped at it. She’d rather not talk about the contract situation with Wesley. J.P. had told her Zach got final say on whether her book got published, but she hadn’t passed that information on to Wesley. Poor kid worried about her enough as it was.
“Apparently not. John-Paul Bonner had to practically beg to even get Zach to meet me.”
Wesley shrugged and crossed his arms.
“Not sure I like him. He was kind of, I don’t know—”
“An ass? You can say ‘ass’ around me. It’s in the Bible,” she reminded him with a wink.
“He was a jerk to you. How’s that?”
“Zach’s a slave-driver. But I like that about him. Brings back memories.” She sat back in her chair and smiled into her tea.
Wesley groaned. “Do you really have to bring up Søren?”
Nora grimaced. Wesley hated it when she brought up her ex.
“Sorry, kiddo. But even if Zach’s an ass, he’s still amazing at his job. I feel like I’m finally learning how to write a book. Books at Libretto were commodities. Royal treats writers like artists. I think this book deserves more than Libretto could give it.”
Nora didn’t mention that Libretto wouldn’t publish it even if she wanted them to. Once Mark Klein found out she’d been shopping around for a new publisher, he cut off everything but contractually obligated contact with her. Wesley didn’t need to know that Royal House was the only reputable publisher who’d given her the time of day. Despite their rocky start, she looked forward to working with Zach. He had a sterling reputation in the publishing industry, not to mention being stunning and fun to flirt with. Especially since he pretended he hated it when she did.
“What’s this book about anyway?” Wesley asked.
“It’s kind of a love story. Not my usual boy-meets-girl, boy-beats-girl story. My two characters love each other but they don’t belong together. The whole book is them—against their will—breaking up.”
Wesley plucked at a loose thread in the battered armchair.
“But they love each other? Why wouldn’t they belong together?”
Nora released a wistful sigh. “Spoken like a nineteen-year-old.”
“I like happy endings. Is that a crime?”
“It’s just unrealistic. You don’t think two people can break up and still be happy eventually?”
Wesley paused. He tended to act before thinking, but he always thought before he spoke. She studied him while he pondered her question. Gorgeous kid. He drove her up the wall with those big brown eyes of his and sweetly handsome face. For the millionth time since asking him to move in with her she wondered what the hell she’d been thinking by dragging this innocent into her world.
“You left him,” Wesley finally said. Him…Søren.
“Yeah,” she said, biting her bottom lip, a habit Søren had been trying to break her of for eighteen years. “I did.”
“Are you happy without him?” Wesley turned his eyes back to her.
“Some days, yes. Then some days it’s like I just got my arm blown off. But this book isn’t about Søren.”
“Can I read it?”
“Not a chance. Maybe when it’s rewritten. Or maybe…”
Nora grinned at him, and Wesley suddenly looked nervous.
She got out of her chair and sat on the edge of her desk and put a foot on each arm of his chair.
“Let’s play a game,” she said leaning in close. Wesley sat up straight and pressed back into the chair. “I’ll trade you my book for your body.”
“I’m your intern. This counts as sexual harassment.”
“Being sexually harassed is in your job description, remember?”
Wesley shifted in the chair. She loved how jumpy she still made him even after over a year in the same house. A sandy-blond lock of hair fell over his forehead. She reached out to brush it back.
Wesley ducked under her leg before she could touch him and stood just out of reach.
“Coward,” she teased.
Wesley started to say something but they both froze at the blaring ring that echoed from the vicinity of her desk.
The smile that had been in Wesley’s eyes vanished as Nora dug out a sleek red cell phone from under a pile of papers.
“La Maîtresse speaking,” she answered.
“The book,” Wesley mouthed. His eyes pleaded with her.
With the phone still at her ear Nora walked up to Wesley. She moved so close he started stepping back. She took another step toward him, and he took another step back.
“Go do your homework, junior,” she said, and Wesley gave her the closest thing to a mean look he had.
“You have homework, too,” he reminded her.
“I’m not a biochemistry major at a fucking brutal liberal arts college. Scoot. The grown-ups are talking now.”
She shut the door in his face.
“Talk, Kingsley,” she said into the phone. “This better be good.”
* * *
“Working late as usual, I see.”
Zach glanced up from his notes on Nora’s book and found J.P. standing outside his office with a newspaper under his arm. He checked his watch.
“After eight already?” Zach asked, shocked by his sudden immunity to the passage of time. “Good Lord.”
“Must be reading something good.” J.P. entered Zach’s office and sat down.
“Possibly. Here—listen to this.” Zach opened her manuscript to a marked page and read aloud.
It is a pleasure to watch her work. From my desk in the office I need only to move my chair six inches to the right and I can see the kitchen’s reflection in the hall mirror with such clarity that I feel like a ghost in the room.
This is what I see—Caroline, who at twenty still retains the coltish legs of a much younger girl, pushes a stool to the counter. It wobbles nervously under her knees as she kneels on it with a steadying breath. She opens the cabinet that houses my wineglasses, my deliberately mismatched collection, all of which are older than her and one or two which are older than this adolescent country. She takes them one by one from the rack; their fragile stems shiver in her delicate fingers.
I brought her to this moment by design. I could have tortured her with tasks, with arduous acts of service. Instead, I chose to torture her with boredom, curious to see what the devil would do with her idle hands. Interesting that in my home it is the objects most easily broken that draw her attention first. With a soft, clean cloth she polishes every glass. She holds the bowl like a bird, strokes the stem like the back of a cat, wipes every old whisper off the lip. I see her eyes count the glasses. I count them with her. Thirteen. Last night I showed her the lash but did not use it on her. Thirteen…one lash for every glass she touched without my permission.
Thirteen…tonight I think I’ll whip her first and tell her why after.
Zach closed the manuscript and waited for J.P.’s reaction. J.P. whistled, and Zach raised his eyebrow at him.
“I think that rather turned me on. Should that worry me?” J.P. asked with a rakish grin.
“Since I’m the only other person in the room, I think it should probably worry me a great deal more,” Zach said. “It’s rather good, isn’t it? The content is slightly unsettling but the writing…”
“She’s got talent. I told you. I hope this means you are no longer planning on killing me.”
“Killing you?”
J.P. grinned. “Yes, for twisting your arm over Sutherlin.”
Zach laughed a little. “No, I’m not going to kill you anymore. But tell me—was I really the only editor who could or would work with her?”
“I suppose I could have dug up someone else. No one near as good as you, though. Anyway, Sutherlin requested you.”
Zach looked up in surprise.
“She did?”
“Well, not by name.” J.P. looked slightly sheepish. “She told me to give her to whichever editor would flog her the hardest. Yours was the first and quite honestly the only name that came to mind.”
“I’m hardly flogging her.”
“What would you call it?” J.P. had a dark twinkle in his eyes.
“I don’t believe I will justify that insinuating tone in your voice with a response. We were discussing the book after all.”
“Yes, quite a stunning little book you waltzed out of Rose’s party with Monday night.”
“I’m a professional,” Zach said calmly. “I don’t shag my writers.”
He omitted mentioning how shamefully close he’d come to asking Nora up after the cab ride to his building. He still couldn’t believe she’d gotten to him that fast. In ten years of marriage he’d never once been unfaithful to Grace, never even wanted to be. And then in one day Nora Sutherlin was putting thoughts in his head he hadn’t let himself have in years.
“I’ve seen her. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But it’s just a shock. I’m surrounded by postfeminists and neo-Freudians. Whatever happened to that ‘forgot the author, only the book matters’ philosophy?”
“One cab ride and one good conversation hardly makes me a Freudian. I’ll admit I was a bit of a prig about her. She is a good writer and the book has potential. If I’m warming up to her it’s only because I’m warming up to the book. But she is starkers. That I was right about.”
“She’s a writer. She’s supposed to be mad.”
“At least she’s also a mad worker. She’s already sent me a full synopsis of every chapter and the new outline I ordered.”
“How’s the new outline?”
“Better,” Zach said and glanced at his notes. “But still, more sex than substance. I think she’s capable of substance. Just afraid of it.”
“She does seem fairly married to her bad-girl writer persona,” J.P. said, and Zach nodded his agreement. “It lends her credibility if she makes people think that she practices what she preaches. Getting her to retire her proverbial whip and take up the pen full-time won’t be easy.”
“But if she did…” Zach glanced down at the manuscript and remembered his reaction Tuesday morning when he’d forced himself to read it again, this time with an open mind. The words had simmered on the page, flared into life and burned. He’d gotten so engrossed in the story he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be editing it. “If she did, she could set the world on fire, and she wouldn’t even need a candle. And don’t you dare tell her anything I just said. I’ve got to keep her afraid of me if I’m going to keep her writing.”
J.P. laughed to himself, and Zach stared at him.
“What?” Zach demanded.
J.P. took the newspaper out from under his arm and unfolded it. It was a copy of the New Amsterdam Noteworthy, a biweekly New York trade publication that carried the most recent news in publishing. J.P. threw the paper on Zach’s desk. On the bottom front page was a small photo of him and Nora on the staircase at Rose Evely’s party. Zach hadn’t remembered a camera flash. Apparently the photographer had been far enough away he’d missed it. In the photo Nora leaned toward Zach with her mouth near his ear. It looked as if she was about to kiss him on the neck. Zach knew exactly what moment that was. It was when he’d said he couldn’t believe he was doing this and she’d responded with a seductive “I can.” The caption under the photograph read, “Nora Sutherlin—the only writer who could make Anaïs Nin blush.”
“She doesn’t look scared to me,” J.P. said. “You look a little petrified, however.”
“J.P., I—”
“I don’t want to have to find another editor for Sutherlin. But I will if I must. I don’t mind if the book sells because of the sex in it. But I don’t want anyone thinking that writers have to do more than write when they come to Royal.”
Zach rubbed his forehead.
“I swear it’s just about the book. And no, you don’t have to find another editor for her. I know we can make something good together.”
“I think you can, too. If you stay focused.” J.P. sounded skeptical.
“I am focused.”
“Easton, I’m an old man. My hearing’s going and I’ve got two knees on the way out. But my eyes can still see. Since the day you arrived here, you haven’t once smiled like you meant it. And when I walked into this office and caught you reading her book, you were smiling like a lad who just found his father’s Playboy stash. I’ve tried writing in bed before. I never seem to get much done.”
Zach opened his mouth again, but J.P. raised his hand to cut him off.
“You can keep working with Sutherlin. For now. Just take a little advice—”
“I’d rather not.”
J.P. reached across Zach’s desk and grabbed the manuscript. He flipped it open and whistled. No doubt his eyes had landed on one of the myriad erotic encounters in the book.
“In the words of Charlotte Brontë,” J.P. began, “‘Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.’ Or in the words of me… Keep it on paper, Easton.”
Zach clenched his jaw and did not reply. J.P. grabbed the newspaper with Zach and Nora’s picture and left him alone once again with her book.
Closing his eyes, Zach conjured an image of Grace. God, he was glad she was in England where she wouldn’t see that photo. But why worry? Even if she saw it, saw him with another woman, would she care? Of course not. If she did, she’d be with him in New York right now.
With a tired sigh he turned to a page in Nora’s book he’d marked with a paperclip. Caroline is sleeping in a separate room from her lover after an argument. William wakes and walks on silent feet to her door. Cracking it just slightly, he pauses and listens until he hears her breathe. The image haunted Zach. The last year with Grace had become a nightmare of shutting doors and separate rooms. Still he could never let the night pass without at least looking in on his sleeping wife until that one terrible night when he found the door locked. The next day J.P. called and invited him to New York and to Royal House with the promise of the chief managing editor position at the L.A. offices when the current chief retired. Zach didn’t even bother to ask what he would be paid before saying yes.
Why was he letting himself think about this? He had to stay objective about the book and its enigmatic author with her dark hair and red dress and her words that burned.
Keep it on paper, Easton…
Easier said than done.
5
The phone rang at seven and the call itself consisted of only seven words—her hello followed by his “The club at nine. Wait blindfolded.”
With shaking hands she hung up the phone and went to shower.
She arrived at 8:46. In most areas of her life she ran habitually five minutes late. But she’d learned the hard way never to keep him waiting.
He had his own room at the club, only one of seven people who did. And she had a key to his room, only one of two people who did.
His room was spare and strangely elegant considering its only purpose. Apart from three floor-standing candlesticks, his room was simply adorned. Rich white and black linens covered the bed. White sheets waiting to be stained.
She undressed completely and found the black silk scarf. Kneeling on the bed with her back to the door, she closed her eyes and wrapped the sash around her head. She hated this part, hated sacrificing her sight to him. It wasn’t fear so much as greed. She wanted to see him, wanted to see him hurt her, wanted to see him in her. He knew that’s what she wanted. That’s why he ordered the blindfold so often.
She waited.
While she waited for him to arrive, she began the deep, slow breathing he had taught her long ago. She took the air in through her nose and pulled it into her stomach before exhaling out through her mouth. The breaths weren’t simply to relax her although they did take the edge off her nervousness. The hypnotic breathing lulled her and helped her slip closer into subspace, that safe place where the mind went while the body was elsewhere being tortured. There was a third reason for the breathing he had never told her, but she knew was true—he’d ordered her to do it. Even the very air that went into her lungs did so at his command.
She exhaled when she heard the door quietly open. Straining her ears, she tried to hear everything he did. He didn’t speak. He rarely spoke at these moments. She listened and heard with some relief the sound of only one set of feet. Sometimes he didn’t come alone. She heard him strike a match and light the candles; she sensed the room brighten.
Five minutes or more passed in silence before he came to the bed. A shiver ran through her body as he placed his fingertips on the small of her back. The pleasure of the shockingly gentle touch was so intense it felt like something had pierced her back all the way through to her stomach. She sighed as he kissed her naked shoulder. She stiffened when he locked her collar around her neck.
He rarely used the leash in their private interludes. He reserved the leash to humiliate her when he paraded her through the club. When alone he simply slipped two fingers under her collar and dragged her like a dog to where he wanted her. The collar tightened when his fingers gripped the leather band. He pulled and she came with him as he brought her carefully off the bed. He was always so cautious with her when she was blindfolded, careful to never let her trip or hurt herself in any way. Hurting her was his privilege alone.
He pushed her forward and she felt the bedpost against her shoulder. Taking her arms one by one, he pulled them behind her back. She leaned her weight into the wood as he buckled the leather bondage cuffs on each wrist. He raised her arms over her head and secured them high to the top of the bedpost.
She stiffened as she felt his hands cover her face. They did nothing but rest there a moment before they moved over her head. Slowly, they ran over her neck and across her shoulders, up her arms and down them again. His arms encircled her and slid over her chest, breasts, and stomach and up her sides before gliding up and down the expanse of her back. One hand slipped between her legs as the other passed over hips and buttocks, down one leg and up again, then down the other. Finally, he ran his hands over the tops of her feet and then lightly passed them over the sensitive soles. She tried not to smile at the exquisitely gentle sensation of his hands touching every part of her body. She knew what he was doing. If more than three days passed without him taking her, he would perform this ritual of re-marking his territory. Her body was his territory, his hands were saying. Every inch of it.
She sensed him step away from her. She began her slow deep breathing again. When the first blow landed between her shoulders, she flinched but did not cry out. The second one came harder and this time she did flinch. By the tenth her back was on fire. After twenty she lost count.
Behind her blindfold, time ceased to pass in its customary manner. Five minutes of flogging lasted an hour. One night in his arms passed in minutes. An hour-long beating was something to be grateful for. The beating would seem to last forever. Even eternity in Hell was no Hell if he was there.
The flogging finally ceased. He pressed in close to her. She felt his strong, bare chest against her burning back. She breathed in and inhaled his scent. Even warm from exertion and arousal he still smelled like a deep winter night.
He placed his hands on her fluttering stomach and brought them slowly up to her breasts. A night with him always meant waning pleasure and waxing pain, waxing pleasure and waning pain. He brought her through the cycle over and over again. The pain brought her body to life. The pleasure was always most acute when it followed the pain.
Now it was pleasure alone she felt as he caressed her breasts and teased her nipples. His mouth found the spot between her shoulder blades that when touched sent a thrill straight into her stomach. One hand slid between her legs and touched her clitoris. With his finger and thumb he massaged it until she was so close to coming she felt the first muscle contraction.
He pulled away from her, leaving her panting and desperate for him. She prayed he’d let her down now, let her down and finally take her.
When she heard the whistling sound of something slicing through the air, she knew he wasn’t done hurting her yet.
After so many years together she’d learned how to prepare herself for a flogging, for the whip and the strap. She knew tricks, ways to breathe, ways to hold herself, to alleviate the pain even as she received it. But when it came to the cane, nothing helped. And when the first strike landed on her lower thighs, she could do nothing but cry out. The second came on the heels of the first, a little harder and one inch higher. On the fourth strike she screamed and felt the blindfold turn wet with tears. The fifth was lighter only because the sixth and final strike was always the worst. The sixth landed in a diagonal across all five previous welts. She sagged in her bonds and cried. He didn’t always beat her until she cried. She learned to love and fear those nights he did. He saved up her pain, counted it like currency and the more pain she endured, the more pleasure she could buy with it.
When he untied her from the bedpost, her arms fell like dead weight to her sides and her knees buckled. He caught her before she collapsed and laid her tenderly on the center of the bed.
His mouth was at her ear now. With words intimate and secret he whispered his love for her, his pride that she was his property, his possession, his heart. She was always his, would forever be his. New tears flowed now but they were ones wrenched from her by love and not torture. This was her favorite pain.
He kissed her now on the mouth for the first time. He kissed her like he owned her, as he owned her. He kissed her like her mouth was his mouth, her lips were his lips, her tongue was his tongue. They were one flesh. They needed no wedding ring, no ceremony to know that was true. She had the collar around her neck. She did not envy married women what they had. She would take his collar over a blood diamond and a cheap gold band any day and for all time.
He moved away from her again. She waited on her aching back and relished the absence of pain. When he returned to her he pulled the coverlet down underneath her so she lay on the sheets. He took her by the knees and wrapped a soft cotton rope around them. She relaxed and let him tie her to the bed. Her knees were up and pulled wide. She lay completely open now. No matter how hard she could try to close her legs, she couldn’t. She never tried.
The bed shifted. She knew he knelt between her wide-open thighs. She inhaled sharply when she felt his fingers slowly enter her. He opened his fingers to widen her, to prepare her for his penetration. He pushed into the back wall of her vagina and pressed down until she flinched hard around his hand. Her passage was slick and wet for him. But he was large enough that he could tear her or bruise her if he didn’t ready her for him first. There were times he took her so roughly she bled. Those were the nights he was lost to himself, lost in the darkness that hid beneath the shadow of his heart. But tonight he wasn’t lost. He was with her.
She felt the wet tip of him poised at the entrance to her body. He pushed in slowly. She whimpered as she stretched and opened to take all of him. If she could have taken his whole being inside her she would. If she could disappear inside him and live in his skin she would.
He moved in her with long meticulous thrusts that filled and emptied her. His pace did not quicken. He gripped her wrists and pressed them into the bed. Many nights he would secure her wrists with rope, as well. But some nights he needed to hold her down with his own hands.
She lay beneath him and panted. Tied as she was she could do little more than take him. She wanted to beg but he hadn’t given her permission to speak. She tilted her hips up as much as she could to take even more of him in her. With one hand still on her wrists, his other hand reached between them and caressed her where their bodies joined. The pressure built in her hips. A knot tightened in her stomach and she felt an invisible rope pull her toward the ceiling. She came hard and spasmed around him. He didn’t stop.
The second climax came not long after the first one. He could manipulate her body as if he knew it better than his own. It terrified her at times how in control of himself he was even when inside her.
He thrust harder. He pushed in deeper, moved faster. She gasped as his grip on her wrists tightened to the point of pain. With one final push he poured into her. When he came at last it was in complete silence.
Still inside her he reached behind her head and untied the blindfold. She looked to the side and didn’t meet his eyes.
“Look at me,” he ordered and she did so gratefully. His steel-gray eyes glowed with his love for her.
“I love you, sir,” she whispered.
The slap came so sudden and fierce that her whole body shuddered in shock.
“Did I give you permission to speak?”
This time she didn’t answer. She shook her head. The movement dislodged a tear that had been lurking at the corner of her eye.
He smiled at her and dipped his lips to hers. He kissed her again and she relaxed into his mouth. His lips moved to her neck and up to her ear.
“I love you, too.”
Still buried deep inside her, he began to thrust into her once again. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back as he wrapped his hand around her neck. Her collar bit into her throat.
She swallowed hard against his hand and breathed and breathed.
He’d only just begun to hurt her tonight.
“Hey, Nor, I’m home. Want some dinner?”
Nora blinked and rubbed her eyes, which had gone dry from staring at her computer screen for so long.
Wesley stood just inside her office and at first she could barely focus on him. She saw him but saw through him and past him at the same time.
“Sounds good.” She glanced at the words on her screen. “I’m starving.”
“Pasta?”
“Too many carbs.”
Wesley rolled his eyes. “Fine. Salad and fish?”
“Fish? But it’s not Friday.”
“You’re the Catholic. I’m Methodist. We eat fish whenever we want. Give me twenty minutes.”
Wesley left her alone again. She printed out the pages she’d been typing and read through them.
The phone rang at seven and the call itself consisted of only seven words…
She read to the end and pressed the pages, still warm from the printer, briefly to her chest. Reluctantly, she slid the pages under her desk and fed them one by one through the shredder. She highlighted the text on her computer screen and hit Delete, flinching as the text disappeared. She closed the document and let the words disappear into the ether. She hated to do it. But she knew The Rule. She obeyed the Ruler.
Nora stood up for the first time in an hour and left her office. When she saw Wesley standing at the kitchen counter she actually could see him now. He smiled at her. She smiled back.
“So what did you write today?” he asked as he expertly sliced through the skin of a ripe red tomato.
“A really hot sex scene with a lot of S&M between a girl and her true love,” she said and Wesley rolled his eyes at her, his usual response to her wickeder scenes. “But don’t worry, I deleted it.”
“How come?” he asked, popping a chunk of tomato into his mouth.
Nora leaned against Wesley, taking temporary comfort in his warm, strong chest. He wrapped his arm around her and rested his chin on top of her head.
“It wasn’t fiction.”
6
My Caroline,
I didn’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it. It’s us. Of course it’s us. A name changed here, a date changed there…but still us. You have always been my only muse. I cannot paint or sculpt. I have only my words to render your likeness. Sometimes I wish I were both God and Adam so I could tear out my rib and create you from my own flesh. I would say I’d create you from my heart, but I gave that to you when you left me. But that’s a cliché, isn’t it? Sadly, that’s all I have these days. The whole story is a cliché. I desired you. I ate of you. I lost you. That ancient story—older than the Garden, old as the Snake. I would have liked to call this story of ours The Temptation but the word temptation, once the province of pious theologians, has now been co-opted by every third second-rate romance novelist. And although I loved you, my beautiful girl, this is not a romance novel.
“Like it, Zach?”
Zach blinked at the interruption, lost as he was in Nora’s new words.
“It’s quite an improvement.”
“An improvement? Oh, I meant the cocoa.”
Zach sat in Nora’s bright kitchen, the winter sun turning everything white. Nora’s new draft of the first chapter sat in front of him and a cup of hot chocolate steamed at his elbow. He sipped the cocoa and felt like a lad again in his grandmother’s kitchen.
“Very good,” he said, inhaling the warm steam. “So is this.”
He tapped the pages in front of him. Nora had taken his advice and created a frame story for her book. It would be a letter her narrator, William, was writing to Caroline, the woman he loved and lost. It was working beautifully already—the book and the partnership with Nora. He’d rarely gone to his writers’ homes and certainly never sat with them at their kitchen table and drank cocoa. Nora was proving to be a different breed from any writer he’d ever before known. “‘This is not a romance novel…’” Zach read from her new first chapter. “Excellent line. Evocative and provocative. Ironic, as well.”
“Ironic?” Nora sipped at her own mug of hot cocoa. She sat across from him at the table and pulled one leg up to her chest. “It’s true. It isn’t a romance novel.”
“Not a traditional one, of course. Your protagonists don’t end up together, but it is a love story.”
“A love story is not the same as a romance novel. A romance novel is the story of two people falling in love against their will. This is a story of two people who leave each other against their will. It starts to end the minute they meet.”
“Why does it end? You seem like an optimist to me, but the end is heartrending. The last thing she wants to do is leave him, and yet in the end she goes.”
Nora left her chair and went to the kitchen cabinet by the refrigerator.
“I’m no optimist,” she said as she opened the cabinet door. “I’m just a realist who smiles too much. And the reason William and Caroline don’t stay together is that while he really is in the lifestyle, she’s not. She’s only in the relationship for him. It’s their sexuality that’s the problem, not the love. It’s like a gay man being married to a straight woman. No matter how much he loves her, it’s a sacrifice every moment they’re together. The sex is secondary to the sacrifice.”
“A very close second, I notice.”
Nora laughed. She closed the cabinet door and knelt on the floor. She opened the bottom door and gave a victorious laugh.
“Found them.” She pulled out a bag of marshmallows. “I have to hide the sugar from Wes.”
“Has a sweet tooth, does he?”
“He has type 1 diabetes. And a sweet tooth. Bad combination. He’s usually really good about what he eats, but I catch him staring pretty longingly when I have cocoa and marshmallows.”
Zach wondered if it was actually the sugar Wesley had been staring at and not Nora. He couldn’t take his own eyes off this woman. She’d been captivating in her signature red Monday night. And now in casual clothes she looked casually stunning. He watched her as she rolled back onto her toes and rose straight up off the floor with the well-trained grace of a geisha. He marveled at her offhand display of almost balletic agility while she leaned over the table and dropped a handful of marshmallows into his cocoa and hers.
“Zach, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re even more ridiculously handsome when you look happy,” she said, dropping back into her chair and popping a marshmallow into her mouth. “You aren’t, by any chance, enjoying working with me? The London Fog isn’t lifting, is it?”
Zach took a sip of his cocoa to cover his embarrassment. He was used to women hitting on him but never before had any woman been so shamelessly forward with him.
“As this is the first time we’ve actually sat down and worked on your book together,” Zach said and coughed uncomfortably, “I think a verdict on my meteorological conditions would be premature.”
“What’s the verdict on the book then?”
“The verdict is…you might actually pull this off. But not without some major revisions. Keep the letters at the beginning and end. But I want the body of the book in third, not first, person.”
Nora looked down at her notes. She picked up her pen and wrote something on a sheet of paper. She looked at it a moment before sliding it across the table.
The first time William saw Caroline was on Ash Wednesday. She still had the ashes on her forehead.
“Like that, Zach?”
Zach read and nodded his approval. “Perfect. That’s exactly what I want. Now rewrite the entire book like that.”
“Yes, sir,” she said and saluted. “What else? Since you’re being nice to me, I have the feeling you’re about to hit me with some more changes, yes?”
Zach grimaced, unnerved by how well this near stranger could read him.
“Just some minor ones—have you considered going a more mainstream route with your characters?”
“I like virgins, perverts and whores,” Nora said without apology. “I couldn’t care less about the people who just fuck for fun on weekends.”
“The sex shouldn’t be the story, Nora.”
“The sex isn’t the story, Zachary. The sacrifice is. Caroline is actually vanilla, not kink. So she sacrifices who she really is to be with the man she loves—she sacrifices the good for the better.”
“But they end it, yes?”
“That’s the point of the book—sacrifice can only get you so far. William and Caroline are just too different to make it work. And although two people can love each other deeply, sometimes love alone doesn’t cut it. We can only sacrifice so much of ourselves in a relationship before there’s nothing left to love or be loved.”
Zach’s stomach clenched. Even now he ached for Grace with an impotent fury. Zach could only raise his cup of cocoa.
“I’ll drink to that.”
He and Nora clinked their tea mugs together in a mock toast. Across the table their eyes met, and Zach could see the ghost of his pain reflected in hers.
Zach’s next question was cut off by Wesley’s sudden entrance in the kitchen.
“Hey, you,” Nora said to Wesley. “What’s up?”
“I’m not here,” Wesley said. “Keep working. I just need my coffee mug.” Wesley threw open the cabinets and took an aluminum travel mug from a shelf.
“Where are you going?” Nora asked.
“Study group at Josh’s. I’m helping him with calculus, and he’s giving me his history notes.”
“What are you majoring in, Wesley?” Zach asked politely, trying not to show how unnerving he found Nora’s relationship with her young intern—unnerving and familiar.
“Biochem. I’m premed.”
“That’s wonderful. Your parents must be very pleased.” Zach winced internally at how old he sounded.
“Not really.” Wesley shrugged. “My whole family has worked with horses for generations. They want me to come home and stay in the business. If I have to do medicine, at least it could be equine medicine.” He poured a mugful of coffee and screwed the lid on tightly. “I have this conversation with them every week.”
“I think he should just let me talk to them.” Nora batted her eyelashes at Wesley.
“You,” Wesley said, pointing his finger at her, “don’t exist. So don’t even think about it.”
Nora responded by wrinkling her nose at him in mock disgust.
“What?” Zach said. “Your parents don’t know you and Nora are living together?”
A faint blush suffused Wesley’s face. “There’s a lot they don’t know. They were going to pull me out of school and send me to the state school down there. It was money reasons, the usual, and Nora offered to let me live with her and work for my room and board. They just know I got a job to cover it and a place off-campus. They don’t know what I’m doing.”
“How did you two meet?”
“School,” Nora answered for Wesley. “His school was obviously a little desperate—they asked me to be their writer-in-residence that semester. Wes was in my class.”
“You were her student?” Zach asked, his hands going cold even as he said the words.
“The class met at one.” Wesley smiled at Nora. “I needed to meet my Humanities requirement, and I would have taken anything that let me sleep late on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“I’m very flattered.” Nora stuck her tongue out at him.
“I’m very leaving. Later,” Wesley said. He reached for Nora’s mug and she slapped his hand.
“What are your numbers?” she demanded.
“One-seventeen. I can have a sip,” Wesley protested.
“Not on my watch. Drink your coffee black, and keep your hands off my cocoa.”
Wesley feinted to the left and stuck his finger in her cocoa and licked it off as he disappeared through the kitchen door. Zach felt a pang at the easy intimacy between Nora and Wesley. He missed his play-fights with Grace in the kitchen and the bargains they struck to make up. He would cook dinner if she would wear the lingerie he’d gotten her for her birthday. She’d do the dishes if she could be on top tonight…amazing how they both came out victors in those battles.
“So he’s…nineteen?”
“You have a dirty mind, Zachary Easton. Wesley’s as pure as, well, I’m not.”
“You’re telling me that Wesley’s a virgin? The young attractive houseboy of an infamous erotica writer is a virgin?”
“Believe it or not, I do have some self-control. And even if I didn’t, Wes certainly does—apart from sticking his damn hand into my cocoa every now and then. He’s a good Christian kid and I respect him more than I can say for his decision to wait. Mark my words, Zach, I will put the first randy bitch who lays a hand on him in the hospital.”
“And he doesn’t mind what you write? What you do?”
Nora leaned back in her chair. “We made a deal. I can top, but not bottom.”
“Are you secretly a gay man?” Zach eyed her curiously.
“I’m not so secretly kinky. Top and bottom are S&M terms, too. Wes leaves me alone about my sex life as long as I’m not the one coming home with the bruises.”
Zach swallowed. “Did you ever come home with bruises?”
Nora bit her bottom lip.
“I won’t bore you with the whole story of me and Søren,” she said, glancing away. “Let’s just say we’ve got history and leave it at that. Last year, I went to see Søren on the day we consider our anniversary. I do it every year. Can’t stop myself for some reason. Anyway, I had a weak moment. I came home the next morning covered in welts and bruises and with a nice fat lip. Wes was horrified. He started packing.”
Zach winced. The thought of welts and bruises on Nora horrified him, too.
“So you made your deal?”
“Right. If I go back to Søren one more time, Wes is gone.”
“Moving out seems a rather extreme threat. Of course, moving in with you seems a rather odd decision.”
“He’s Methodist. I think he’s trying to save me. Methodists are always trying to save people.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t have feelings for you?”
“He does have feelings for me. Namely irritation, frustration and disgust mingled with amusement. But that’s not surprising since he’s not in the game.”
Zach sympathized with the boy. He had the same feeling for Nora, too. As well as intoxicated, amazed and aroused mingled with petrified.
“You said he was a virgin. How do you know he isn’t like you?”
“K-dar,” Nora said and tapped the side of her nose. “Kinksters can smell it on each other. And my Wesley smells like warm vanilla.”
“Wonder what I smell like.” Zach cursed himself for accidentally speaking the words aloud.
Nora cocked her head at him; Zach’s heart started to race. She rose up out of her chair and slid onto the top of the kitchen table. She stretched across it and put her nose at his neck. Slowly, she inhaled. A slight rush of air whispered over Zach’s skin and he immediately knew what every muscle in his body was doing.
“Not kink. But not vanilla, either. Smells like…curiosity. It killed the cat, you know.”
“Nora,” Zach said in a warning tone. J.P. would yank him off Nora’s book in a heartbeat if he saw them right now.
“S&M is as psychological as it is physical and sexual, Zach. Imagine being as deep inside a woman’s mind as you are inside her body.”
Zach’s hands gripped his mug, still warm from the steaming liquid inside.
“We’re working,” he reminded her, reminded himself. He remembered their photograph in the newspaper; her mouth had been at his ear just the way it was now. If he turned his head only a few inches their lips would meet.
“I write erotica. I am working. Want to earn some overtime?”
“Nora, we’ve got less than six weeks and more than four hundred pages to write. Now get off the table and stop wasting my time.”
“Oh, fine,” she said, sounding playfully disappointed. Zach exhaled with relief when she slid back and sat in her chair again. She reached under her notes and pulled out a copy of the trade newspaper that had their picture in it. She leaned back in her chair and threw her legs up on the table as she flipped through the paper. Zach stared at their picture again prominently displayed right in front of his face. The byline read Erotica Writer Nora Sutherlin Gets the Royal Treatment.
Nora turned another page and sighed. “And to think I thought the fog was finally lifting.”
* * *
Zach stared at his computer screen for the seventeenth straight minute in a row. The words of the book review he’d sworn he would start writing for the Times tonight simply would not come. He had words, the wrong words, Nora’s words, but not the words he needed.
Not kink, she’d purred into his ear, sending every nerve in his long neglected body firing. But not vanilla, either… Nora… Zach understood now why some people were afraid of her. He was afraid of her, of her power to take captive his every thought. He felt unmoored around her, unsafe, and yet of everyone he had met since coming to New York, he sensed only she could be trusted.
As deep inside a woman’s mind… Zach tried and failed to stem the tide of images that her words conjured. Grace’s soft skin, moon-white against midnight sheets, her back against his chest, his hands over hers, his mouth to her neck as he drove into her, knowing her flesh and yet still knowing so little of her soul. Her body had been so open to him once. But her mind? Her heart?
Zach shook his head, trying to pull himself out of his dangerous reverie. Grace, who he had made love to countless times, told him nothing. And Nora, on whom he had never laid a hand, said everything.
On a whim, Zach minimized his document and opened Google. Nora threw out S&M terminology like a doctor tossed around the names of exotic diseases. He wasn’t entirely clueless when it came to matters of kink. An old lover of his had even accused him of being kinky because he preferred positions other than missionary. He certainly knew what S&M meant—sadomasochism, knew the French called it “the English vice” because his countrymen had an amusing obsession with corporeal punishment. Not him—he tried to avoid giving or receiving pain whenever possible. He’d been known to bite a little during lovemaking, something Grace was inordinately fond of, but actual hitting or whipping was something entirely out of his purview.
After they were done working on her book today, Zach had worked up the courage to ask Nora about Søren, her former lover who she spoke about with the reverent sadness of a knight speaking of a fallen king. She said they were a D/S couple like William and Caroline in her book. She’d been collared to him for years, and that leaving him had been akin to dying.
Zach typed in D-S couple and quickly discovered he’d mentally spelled it incorrectly. Spelled D/s it stood for Dominant and submissive. Interesting that while the D was capitalized the s was always lowercase to illustrate the lower status held by the submissive. The whole thing seemed rather strange and sexist to him, but he couldn’t deny that there seemed to be quite a few male submissives and some rather impressive-looking female Dominants out there. He couldn’t imagine a woman as vivacious as Nora being content to sit at a man’s feet. His only guess was that this man, this Søren person, was a rather impressive specimen. He wondered what Søren did for a living—probably something innately alpha male like a pilot or a military officer. Or perhaps he was independently wealthy like Nora seemed to be. Something certainly afforded her an impressive quality of life. She drove a late-model black Lexus with a cheeky license plate that read “Say Ouch” and she lived in an elegant, historic home. He knew award-winning writers in England with a dozen or more books under their belts who still couldn’t afford the house or the neighborhood she lived in.
Curiosity got the better of him, and Zach typed in Nora Sutherlin and hit Enter. She found several fan pages, some links to fan fiction and Nora’s official website. Zach kept scrolling through all the mentions of Nora on the web. He clicked the link to someone’s blog that carried an entry entitled “Last Night with THE Nora Sutherlin.” But as soon as Zach clicked the link the page disappeared. He hit Back and tried to find it again, but the page had vanished. Maybe the blog server was down.
Zach gave up nosing on Nora and looked up more S&M terminology. As uncomfortable as the idea of coupling pain with sex, he did appreciate that people in the community seemed fairly responsible in their play. Every webpage he landed on carried the mantra “safe, sane and consensual.” He stared for a long time at an image of a young woman wearing a brown leather collar that buckled and locked at the base of her neck. Zach remembered Nora had said she’d been “collared” to Søren. Collars were apparently quite an important part of the S&M scene. Nora had touched his naked wedding ring finger that night in the cab and then brought his hand to her bare neck. She’d equated being collared with marriage. Maybe that’s why he and Nora had found common ground so quickly despite being such wildly different people—they were both going through a divorce of sorts.
But was he going through a divorce? Every day when he checked his mail, he expected papers from Grace’s attorney. Every time his home phone rang, he expected it to be Grace telling him they needed to stop putting it off. But so far he’d received no calls or legal papers. Was she waiting on him to start the process? If so, she might have to wait a long time. He couldn’t deny their marriage had fallen apart in the past year and a half, but he was in no hurry to put the final nail in the coffin. He’d hoped if he came to New York, she’d miss him enough to want to make it work again. But every day the phone stayed mute.
Zach closed the internet and exited from his empty document without writing a single sentence. He’d left Nora in her kitchen hours ago. Surely she’d sent him another email by now—she emailed him constantly. But his in-box sat empty but for a reminder from J.P. about the next staff meeting and a question from his assistant, Mary. Both could wait.
He clicked on New and typed in Nora’s email address. Of course she would have an address with “littleredridingcrop” in it. Ludicrous as it was, at least it made it easy to remember.
Nora, he wrote and stopped. Why was he writing her? They’d discussed her book for hours today. There was no more to talk about for now. And considering they already had a reputation for working too closely together, he knew he didn’t need to be writing her about anything but the book. What would he say if he did write her? He had those words, those sentences. But they had tumbled about in his head so much since meeting her that they had crashed against each other, against him, and broken into fragments.
Nora, I don’t want to I won’t it’s been so bloody long I can’t I think of you of her too much I still love but I I hurt her Grace Now it’s hell worse Limbo I hurt too young too much…
Zach deleted it all, even Nora’s address. He knew better than this, knew better than to get involved. He would not make this mistake again. She would not pull him off course.
It didn’t matter, he told himself. He was gone in five weeks. Off to L.A. where he could start over again and perhaps get it right this time. But did he want to start over? At forty-two a new life seemed a far more terrifying prospect than it had at thirty-two when he and Grace married and moved to London.
The blank email sat waiting before him. He looked down at his fingers poised above the keyboard. Was it the words that failed him or his hands? They felt too heavy now. It made no sense. Without the weight of his wedding ring they should have been lighter.
The screen still waited, the cursor winking at him like an eye.
Zach typed in another address.
Gracie, he wrote, using the nickname that never failed to make her smile. Please talk to me.
* * *
Nora stood at the kitchen window peering into the dark. Sunset came so early in the winter that whole days seemed to pass in darkness. Zach had left her several hours ago, left her with a thousand ideas and admonitions. But now she could only wait and think and gaze at the light falling in from the lamppost outside the kitchen window. It illuminated the tremulous flakes of snow and cast white shadows that gathered round but did not touch her.
She turned toward a sound and saw Wesley standing in the doorway watching her with the same intensity as she watched the snow-lit play between the light and the shadows.
“How long have you been hanging out here in the dark?” Wesley asked, stepping into the lone pool of light.
She sighed at a shadow. “For as long as it’s been dark.”
Wesley reached out to flip the light switch.
“Leave them off.”
Wesley dropped his hand back to his side.
“I didn’t know you could write in the dark.”
Nora gave him only the barest hint of a smile.
“You’d be surprised what I can do in the dark, Wes.”
Wesley grimaced. “Zach know what you do in the dark?”
Nora shook her head.
“No. He thinks I’m just a writer. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”
“It’s not anything I’ll ever brag about.”
“Wes, you knew what I was when you signed up for this job.”
“And you knew how I felt about it when you asked me to move in.”
Nora took a slow deep breath.
“And yet you moved in anyway. Why is that?” Wesley lifted his chin and only looked at her. “His silence says it all.”
Nora stepped away from the window and took a wineglass from the cabinet.
“What are you doing?” he asked as he came deeper into the dark kitchen.
“If you’re going to pout, I’m going to drink,” she said, pouring herself a steep glass of red wine. “I read somewhere that red wine is good for diabetics. Want one?”
“I’m not pouting. And I don’t drink.”
“There’s a lot you don’t do.”
Nora sat on top of the kitchen table across from him. She watched him, daring him with her eyes to either speak or leave.
“I’ve got homework,” he said.
“Then go.” Nora gestured to the door.
Wesley moved to walk past her. But Nora reached out and stopped him with a hand on his chest.
“Or stay,” she said as she took a deliberate sip of her wine before setting the glass down on the table next to her. “Staying is better.” She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled Wesley to her, positioning him between her knees. His face was a blank mask and his eyes would not meet hers.
Nora laid her hand on his stomach, smiling as the taut muscle quivered through his T-shirt.
“Nora, don’t—”
“Søren and I used to play a game on his kitchen table,” Nora said, ignoring the plea in Wesley’s voice. “Did I ever tell you about that?”
“No,” Wesley said, visibly tensing as Nora raised his shirt and slid her hands underneath, pressing her palms into his warm skin. She saw his fingers curl into fists.
“Simple game—he’d fill a wineglass with one of his expensive reds and set it on the edge of the table. Then he would fuck me. Hard.” Nora grinned as Wesley flinched. “If I thrashed too much, or fought him and knocked the glass off…then the wine wasn’t the only red that we spilled that night.”
Wesley closed his eyes as if trying to block out the image.
“The secret is,” Nora said as she raked her fingernails up Wesley’s chest and back down his stomach, “sometimes I’d knock it off on purpose.”
“I won’t play that game with you,” he said as Nora continued relentlessly caressing the delicate skin of his chest and sides. “I won’t play this game with you, either.”
“But it doesn’t have to be a game, Wesley.” She narrowed her eyes like a cat’s. “It can be very real.”
“Don’t do this.” His voice was a plea. His breathing was getting harder, everything was getting harder now. “Not to me.”
“Your heart is racing.” She let her hand rest on the left side of his chest.
From his chest she traced a languid path down his stomach, his breath catching as she deftly unbuttoned the top button of his jeans.
“Nora…”
“I’m not holding you here. You can go if you want to. Do you?”
She grabbed his belt loops and pulled him even closer until his hips pressed against her inner thighs. She knew she shouldn’t be doing this. But Wesley was a constant source of frustration. Sometimes she had to retaliate. And she knew that every now and then he forgot what she really was. It didn’t hurt to remind him.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered.
“Now that is a refreshing bit of candor on your part. Since we’re being so honest now, tell me, why are you being so pissy about Zach?”
Wesley’s eyes widened. Nora bit her bottom lip as she waited for his answer.
“You like him.”
“I do like him.” She took another deep drink of the wine and set the glass down again. “But we’ve just met and we’re not fucking. Not even I work that fast.”
At that Wesley gave a grim chuckle and looked up at the ceiling.
“I couldn’t care less if you were fucking him.”
“My God, did you just say ‘fuck’? You’re a good, clean Methodist. You don’t swear.”
“You have no idea what I do.”
“I do know what you do. I know you sleep with your bedroom door unlocked,” Nora retorted. “Expecting company?”
“I know you stand in my door at night and watch me sleep. Expecting an invitation?”
Now it was Nora’s eyes that widened. But she recovered herself quickly.
“You’re pretty good at this game,” she said, nodding her approval. “For a beginner.”
“I told you. I’m not gonna play with you.”
“Too bad. I think you’d like the prize.” Nora went for the next button on his jeans, but Wesley grabbed her by the wrist to stop her.
“Harder,” she instructed. Wesley let her go as if her skin had burned him.
“I thought so. Go,” she said, dropping her hands to her sides. Wesley took a step back, his palm pressed into his stomach. “Go do your homework, kid.”
She picked up her nearly forgotten wineglass and lifted it to her lips. But before she could drink, Wesley took the glass from her.
He held the glass in his subtly shaking hand before raising it and drinking. Finished, he lowered the glass and set it next to her on the table. He left the kitchen without another word.
Nora picked up the glass and stared inside.
He’d drained it to the dregs.
Nora set the glass back down and turned to follow Wesley. She hated when they fought even though it was almost always her fault.
Wesley would be fine, she told herself. He needed a little toughening up anyway. She’d never forget the first day she saw him. She walked into his classroom at Yorke, and the first thing she’d noticed was a pair of big brown eyes looking at her like he’d never seen anything like her before. And the minute he opened his mouth and those soft Southern syllables came out, she knew this kid was going to be no end of trouble. She’d made all her students talk about their favorite story. Wesley had said his favorite was O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi—the story of the wife who sold her hair to buy her husband a watch chain and the husband who sold his watch to buy his wife combs for her hair. Nora had called it a horror story. Wesley had objected and called it a love story. The debate had continued even after the class ended. Two people who give up their most precious possessions for love and end up with nothing—that’s a love story? she’d demanded. Wesley had argued that they still had each other. She’d laughed and told him he might see things a little differently when he was her age.
She knew she’d been too rough with him tonight, but she couldn’t stop herself sometimes. After all, Søren had put her through ten kinds of hell when she was Wesley’s age. And now she was grateful for the discipline he’d taught her, the fortitude he’d instilled in her. Now a guy like Zach could look her in the eyes and tell her she wasn’t worth his time and energy, and she could look back and smile and ask him if that was the best he could do. Søren had made her strong and for that she’d be forever grateful. And Zach was making her a real writer, which was the one fantasy Søren could never make come true for her. And Wesley…she looked down at the empty wineglass and quickly refilled it in his honor—Wesley was just making her crazy.
Nora turned and saw her book and Zach’s notes lying on top of the kitchen table.
“Goddammit, Zach,” she said to herself and poured the wine down the drain. “Why did you have to tell me it was going to work?”
7
Five weeks left…
A tear formed in the corner of Nora’s eye and fled down her cheek before she could stop it. She rubbed it off with her sleeve and made herself blink. She’d been staring at her computer screen for so long her eyes were watering. Stretching while she backed up her work, Nora decided to check her private email account before taking a bathroom break. She breezed through a note from her agent and deleted a few bits of spam. Just before logging out a new message popped into her in-box. From Zach, it bore the subject line “Regarding Sex.”
“Why, Zachary,” she said, chuckling to herself, “yes, I think I will regard sex.”
The email dragged on for two pages and detailed every reason why she needed to cut out the majority of her sex scenes. She stopped reading after the fifth use of the word gratuitous.
You’re no fun, she wrote Zach back. Can’t I just keep three of my scenes?
Zach was obviously still at his computer. He quickly replied with one word.
No.
Two? she wrote back.
No.
Nora was about to fall out of her chair laughing. She could imagine his stern but strikingly handsome visage right now, his brow furrowing deeper with each annoying little email from her.
One? I promise I’ll make it good. Please? I’ll buy you a puppy.
I’m allergic to dogs, he replied.
Nora bit her lip as the wheels in her head turned.
Let’s play a game, she wrote back. I’ll give you fifty extra pages this week if you let me keep three of my scenes—heavily edited, of course.
She held her breath as she waited for his reply. An email finally popped up in her in-box.
Fine. But any sex on the page must serve both the plot and the character development. Now stop playing and start writing. You’ve got five weeks left and over four hundred pages to rewrite.
I’m keeping the puppy, she wrote back. She wasn’t surprised when he didn’t reply.
Nora was rereading Zach’s most recent note on her new chapters when her hotline rang. She heard its Klaxon ringtone in her office all the way from the kitchen. Rolling her eyes, she stood up and headed in that direction in no particular hurry. When she got there, she found Wesley standing by the counter with the phone in his hand. He looked oddly tired and grim. He handed it to her without a word and walked past her. “King, I swear I’m going to beat the shit out of you if you don’t stop calling me.”
“Now you’re flirting, ma chérie.”
Nora ground her teeth together and took a deep breath. Was there any man in the world more infuriating than Kingsley Edge? Søren, she remembered. Only Søren.
“I am not flirting. I am working.” She said the words slowly as if she were speaking to a child. “I have another job, recall?”
“I try everything I can to forget your other job, maîtresse. Your other job costs me money.”
“Well, it makes me money.”
“And that helps me how?”
“Kingsley, tell me what you want and then leave me alone. My editor is making me rewrite my entire book.”
“The Nora Sutherlin taking orders from a man. I thought those days were long over.”
Nora clenched her jaw. She would not let him goad her into a fight today.
“I’m une petite peu busy, monsieur.”
“Never too busy for a client. For this client in particular.”
Nora leaned her head against the cold metal of the refrigerator. Most of her clients were on her time; she saw them at her leisure. Just part of the mystique of being a Dominatrix. But there were a handful of clients not even she felt comfortable keeping waiting. She guessed it was Jake Sizemore, CEO of some company that made something that kept the world going. King never let her turn Sizemore down when he came to town.
“Fine. What do I need to know?”
“Just wear your finest and be there in an hour. C’est ça.”
Nora scribbled the time and place down in her datebook. She’d been trying so hard not to take any jobs while working with Zach. Zach had all the signs of someone going through a fairly serious depression. She knew depression well, knew it was anger turned inward. That much depression signaled an impressive cache of anger lurking under that ridiculously handsome exterior. Her gorgeous blue-eyed editor already oozed disapproval of her at every turn. She could only imagine how bad his reaction would be if he found out that writing wasn’t her only job. For over a year now she’d dreamed of quitting the game altogether, but without a signed contract from Royal, she was scared to give up her day job.
“I’m getting a little sick of this, you know, King?”
“You say that and yet I hear la petite morte under your breath. You know you love this job.”
“I love the money. That’s it.”
“You love him, chérie.”
Nora closed her eyes and swallowed the growl in the back of her throat.
“He has nothing to do with this.” Nora refused to get into a discussion of Søren with Kingsley. Kingsley reported to Søren.
“Ma petite,” he chided. “You do this for his attention. C’est vrai, oui?”
“That’s like saying criminals commit crimes to get the cops’ attention.”
She heard Kingsley’s soft, heady laugh.
“Exactement. One hour, maîtresse.”
Nora hung up and went to her bedroom. The house was too quiet. She couldn’t hear Wesley anywhere. Usually at this time of day he was working on his homework and listening to music. Or if homework was light that night, he’d be playing his guitar and singing softly to himself. She remembered the first time she’d caught him playing and singing. She’d told him he sounded a little like the nineties band Nelson. He’d said, “Who’s he?” and Nora had thrown a book at him.
She dressed in her black leather skirt with the back slit and her black-and-red brocade bustier. She found her black gauntlets and pulled them on. They laced up her arms and she had a horrible time tightening the laces and tying them off on her own. She went to find Wesley. He hated that she worked as a professional Dominatrix, but he tolerated it more or less. Before he’d moved in over a year ago she’d explained what she did, what she was. He’d been shocked. He didn’t even know such things existed. He was relieved, however, when she explained she was in no way a prostitute and that she never had sex with clients—not the male clients anyway. They weren’t even allowed to kiss her except on the toe of her boot. No, she was no prostitute, she explained. She was, if anything, a kind of massage therapist who simply inflicted pain instead of pleasure. Despite his shock, Wesley moved in anyway. She’d been so impressed by how well he took it, she’d even told him about Søren.
“Just don’t ever let me in the same room with him,” Wesley had said when Nora revealed the nature of their relationship.
“You think you can take Søren?”
“You said he was, what, forty-five? Eighteen versus forty-five? And any guy who beats up on women doesn’t know what to do around a guy who’d only hit another man.”
Nora had laughed then, so hard she’d almost fallen over. Could Wesley get any more precious? When she’d stopped laughing, she’d taken Wesley’s chin in her hand and forced him to meet her eyes. Søren once told her she had the most dangerous eyes of any woman who’d ever lived. He told her when men looked in her eyes they saw their own darkest fears reflected back. Usually she tried to tamp down that particular trick of hers. This time she’d let Wesley see all her fears and all of his in one glance.
“Kid, Søren could eat you for breakfast and not even need to chew. Don’t ever fuck with a sadist, Wesley. For Søren, torture’s just foreplay.”
“Why did you stay with him?” he’d whispered.
Nora had grinned at him, and she saw a new fear in Wesley’s sweet brown eyes.
“I like foreplay.”
Wesley…she couldn’t find him anywhere. She stood in the living room and noticed a note taped to the door. It said he was at the library but he’d be home around six. And at the bottom of the note were the words he always said when she went out for a job—“You don’t have to do this.” No, she didn’t have to. But she owed it to Kingsley. Nora grabbed her coat and toy bag and made a quick stop in the bathroom. She took a pill bottle from the medicine cabinet, swallowed one without bothering with water and left.
It took forty minutes to get to the hotel. Her clients were among the elite of the world—only the wealthiest and most powerful men and women could afford her. Quite a few were even household names. So it was rare she ever went in through the front doors of a home or hotel. But Kingsley hadn’t mentioned the need for discretion so she didn’t bother.
She strode through the front lobby of one of the grandest and oldest hotels in the city and worried for a second that someone from Royal might recognize her. She shook off the worry—no one who worked in publishing could afford this place. The lobby was littered with women dripping with Prada and men stuffed inside their Armani suits. Nora bit back a smile as she breezed past them in her leather and lace with her black toy bag slung across her back and her sunglasses on even though she was indoors and it was still winter. She wasn’t ashamed of what she did. But it was fun to be around people who were nervous just being in the same room with her.
A couple standing near the elevator walked off when she joined them in their waiting. Vanilla people were so cute sometimes. She entered the elevator, hit the button for the nineteenth floor and headed up alone.
Nora stepped out, got her bearings and made her way to room 1909. A key card lay hidden under a newspaper in front of the door. She unlocked the door, stepped inside and saw a tall, blond man in black standing with his back to her.
“Hello, Eleanor,” he said.
Nora gasped and her bag hit the floor with a nervous clatter of metal.
“Oh, my God…Søren.”
* * *
Zach sat at his desk in his office at Royal. He checked his email one last time before shutting down the computer. He was surprised he hadn’t gotten more of a fight from Nora about paring down her sex scenes. Perhaps she now understood the kind of book she was writing, was starting to understand she could write something erotic without being an erotica writer.
Straightening the papers on his desk, Zach found a copy of the contract that the legal department had worked up. It wasn’t signed yet. And even if Nora signed it today, it wasn’t valid until he signed it. He looked over the terms. J.P. had been very generous. Royal didn’t dole out significant advances very often. Of course, Nora brought her own impressive fan base with her. Zach knew J.P. hoped she would bring a certain libidinous cachet to the rather staid old publishing house. It was a bold move that might actually pay off if Zach did his job right.
Zach smiled as he flipped through Nora’s unsigned contract. When he and Grace had bought their first house, the paperwork hadn’t been half this preposterous. Poor Grace. He remembered watching her at their tiny kitchen table in their first horrid little flat they’d rented sight unseen when they’d moved to London. They’d been married less than a year. She thought she was supposed to know what every word of the contract meant, what every clause referred to. She sat for hours poring over every page. He’d leave and come back and she would have another twelve questions to ask him. What did first right of refusal mean? Did they know the assessed value? Did they need a variance if he worked from home?
It was so damn endearing watching her spend an entire day trying to understand everything as if she thought she should that Zach finally had to come over, shove the papers away and make love to her right on top of their settlement statement. He remembered it so clearly, the shock on her face when the papers scattered to the four winds. She thought he was angry with her. But he remembered her smile when he kissed her so fiercely the table scooted a foot back. He remembered her red hair against the dark wood, how her legs had wrapped around him with almost childlike eagerness as he moved inside her.
He’d heard once there was nothing like buying a house together to make or break a relationship. That was the day he decided they were going to make it.
Zach put the contract down, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Maybe they should have bought more houses.
* * *
An hour later Nora left the hotel and strode to her car cursing Søren under her breath the whole way. She kept cursing, knowing if she let up on the fury for one second, she would collapse into tears. It had been months since they’d spoken. She did everything she could to avoid him. Sometimes she saw him at the club and they only looked at each other across the room while bystanders subtly moved a few steps back like unwitting townspeople caught between two gunslingers. Søren wasn’t on the attack today, however. Worse—he’d wanted to talk.
Nora ran over their conversation again in her mind. The conversation, as all conversations with him were these days, was rather one-sided. She’d sat on the bed like a child in trouble for staying out too late and ground her foot into the plush carpeting as he stood in front of her and ticked off, one by one, all her multifarious sins. Nora had known him since she was fifteen years old. Shocking how much ammunition one could stockpile in eighteen years.
And then near the end he’d revealed why he’d gone to the trouble of setting up the meeting. Kingsley had told him she’d been acting different lately—quieter, angrier, desperate to work one day, reluctant the next. She’d explained she was heavy into revisions on her new book, that her new editor was a hard-ass who was giving her the chance and the challenge of a lifetime. Søren seemed skeptical, asking if there might be something she wasn’t telling him. The hour he’d paid for finally up, Nora started to leave. On her way out the door Søren had stopped her with a word—“Wesley.”
Nora had turned around slowly. Trying to keep her tone neutral she’d asked, “What about him?”
“Next time we meet, little one, we will have much more to discuss.”
Her heart flinched when he’d used his old pet name for her. But she merely stared at his handsome face, hoisted her toy bag and left. After all these years, all the practice, she was getting good at that. Nora sat behind the wheel of her car and closed her eyes. She said a prayer of thanks Søren hadn’t touched her. That’s what had happened on their last anniversary. She’d gone to his home too late in the evening. She’d let him give her a glass of wine. They’d talked about mutual friends and even played a game of chess at the kitchen table he’d made brutal love to her on so many times. For a few minutes she’d let herself forget that she wasn’t his property anymore. One curl had fallen forward across her face when she’d bent to move her bishop. Søren had reached out and brushed it behind her ear. He’d caressed her cheek with his thumb. Within minutes they were in his bedroom and she was strapped to the bedpost. He’d beaten her so hard that night she’d nearly gagged on her own tears. And when he finally gave up on the pain, he’d untied her and let her collapse into his arms. His darkness spent, he laid her in his bed and made love to her so tenderly she’d cried again. In the past when they were still together, he’d talk to her while inside her. Sometimes he would articulate in shocking detail the intensity of his desire for her. Sometimes he would simply claim her, calling her his property, his possession. That night as he moved in her he spoke in Danish, the language he fell into when his heart was its most open. He’d taught her some Danish when she was a restless teenager. It became one of their secret ways to communicate. She’d forgotten a lot of it in the four years they’d been apart, but she never forgot Jeg elsker dig. It was Danish for “I love you” and he whispered it again and again into her skin.
Afterward he’d stayed inside her and pulled them into a sitting position at the center of his bed. Her legs wrapped around his waist; her arms twined around his shoulders. He ran his hands up and down her beaten back as he kissed her bare neck. She rocked her hips slowly, relishing having him inside her again after so long.
“You miss your collar,” he’d said—a statement, not a question. She’d taken it with her when she’d left him four years ago.
“I miss it.” She tilted her head back to give him better access to her naked throat. She bent forward again and he kissed her bruised lips. If she pretended it was only today and that there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, she could stay with him forever.
“You can come back to me, Eleanor. Always.”
“I can’t.” She shook her head. “They need you more than I do. I can’t rip your life in half.”
“It is my life,” he’d reminded her. “You tore my life in half the day you ran from me.”
“Don’t,” she said, and the tears burned bright in her eyes. Her chest heaved and she clung to him so hard her fingernails bit into his skin. “Don’t say I ran. I didn’t run. It wasn’t running and you know it. You know I didn’t want to leave you. I no more ran from you than I’d ever run into a burning building. I could never run from you.”
He laughed at her vehemence.
“Then what would you call it if it wasn’t running, little one?” He pressed his lips to her forehead.
“I crawled.” She tried to smile for him. “It’s what I’m good at after all.”
He wrapped his arms even tighter around her. She prayed he’d chain her to his bed and make her stay there the rest of her life. But she knew he’d let her go at dawn. He wouldn’t keep her against her will even if against her will was what she wanted.
“When you come back to me—” he began and she pulled back to meet his eyes.
“I won’t.”
“If you come back to me,” he said, making a rare concession, “will you run or will you crawl?”
Nora had pressed her whole body into him at that moment. Resting her head on his strong shoulder, she watched as a tear forged a river down his long and muscled back.
“I’ll fly.”
To Søren she knew that night was proof that she still belonged to him. But to Wesley it was a waking nightmare when he’d seen the welts and bruises, her cracked lip, her purpling cheek. It took her a solid hour to convince him she didn’t need to go to the hospital. For some reason telling him she’d had worse didn’t seem to comfort him. For the second time in twenty-four hours, she’d had to beg.
“It’s not violence,” she’d tried to tell him. “It’s love. Some loves only come out after dark, Wes.”
“Not with me, Nora. Don’t pull that writer romance crap on me. He beats you and you let him. And if this is love then he shouldn’t love you anymore,” Wesley had said on his way to the front door, his clothes in a duffel bag and his guitar case across his back.
“I wish he didn’t. For his sake and mine. For yours, too.”
Something in her voice changed his mind. He’d dropped his duffel by the floor and set his guitar down. He’d walked back to her and wrapped his arms gingerly around her. He’d been so careful not to hurt her. She’d cried then for the pain she’d caused him. Wesley had gone with her to her room and helped her take her shirt off. She lay on her stomach in her bed while he iced her bruises and put antibiotic ointment on her welts. They hadn’t talked while he helped her. But when she was finally comfortable enough to sleep, Wesley had told her his decision. He couldn’t stop her from working, but if she ever went back to Søren again, ever let him hurt her again, Wesley was gone. It was like asking her to close her eyes and never open them again, but for Wesley, she’d agreed.
Nora drove home and put her regular clothes back on and decided that once and for all she was cutting off all contact with Søren. She knew it would be hard considering that they ran in the same circle but she would find a way. She would never talk to him again. Not after he’d tricked her into seeing him.
Nora paused in her bedroom and took slow, deep breaths. She checked the clock—6:36. Wesley should have been home from the library half an hour ago. She went to his bedroom—no backpack, no keys. She called his cell phone and no one picked up. She waited another half hour thinking he was just pissed at her for answering her hotline. But she knew Wesley—he wasn’t the vindictive type. She called his cell phone again. No answer. By seven-thirty she was scared. By eight-thirty she was terrified. At nine she gave up and called the only person besides Wesley she trusted completely.
The phone rang only once.
“Søren, I need your help,” she said as soon as he answered. The fear clutched at her throat like a claw. “I can’t find my Wesley.”
8
At nine-thirty Zach still remained in his office reading through Nora’s rewritten chapters. Going with third person had opened the book up. The prose was more atmospheric in third person. He needed to talk to her about the end of chapter three, however. She was sliding into self-reflection when what she needed was a strong plot element.
He picked up his phone and dialed her number. She answered on the first ring.
“Nora, it’s Zach.”
“Dammit, Zach. I can’t talk right now. I’m busy.” She sounded angry for some reason. Angry and out of breath.
Busy and breathless…he knew immediately what she was busy doing.
“You’re on my time now, Nora. I don’t care what you’re doing. The book is more important.”
“Fuck the book.”
“Nora, I went out on a limb to work with you. If you think—”
“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”
Zach sat back in his chair. What had happened to the Nora he’d shared cocoa with just a few days ago? She’d been so passionate about her book then, so interested in all of his ideas.
“I’m thinking you obviously don’t have your priorities in order.”
He heard Nora take a hard breath.
“Then fuck you, too, Zach.” She hung up.
Zach set his phone down and stared at it. He expected to feel furious but instead his heart dropped. Apart from J.P. and Mary, Zach hadn’t felt any connection with anyone since coming to New York. Then he’d met Nora and as exasperating as she was, she was also funny, beautiful and made him feel alive again. And she had been the first person who’d seemed to care about him. Now she’d yanked away from him, away from the book. He knew they wouldn’t and couldn’t ever be lovers. But he’d thought they might be able to forge something like a friendship while they worked together. What the hell had happened?
The phone rang again and Zach answered it immediately, hoping to hear Nora on the other end. Instead the chief managing ditor of Royal West in L.A. started speaking. Zach had only spoken to her once or twice after he’d been offered her job once she retired. Now she was telling him he could come out sooner if he liked since she’d heard he didn’t have much to hold him in New York. She wouldn’t mind sharing her office for a couple of weeks while he got acclimated. Might ease the transition for the staff. Still reeling from his fight with Nora, Zach promised her he’d think about it.
After all, he agreed, there really wasn’t anything keeping him in New York.
He hung up the phone again and pulled on his coat. Glancing down, he saw Nora’s manuscript sitting on his desk. He picked it up and tossed it into the recycling bin.
“Fuck you, too, Nora.”
* * *
Nora paced the hallways of her house with her private cell phone in her hand and her hotline phone in her pocket. Wesley didn’t have her hotline number but she knew either Kingsley or Søren would call her back soon. Søren had connections at every hospital within eighty miles, and Kingsley had half the judges, attorneys and police chiefs in the tristate area in his back pocket. Between the two of them, one of them should be able to find Wesley.
She’d gone into his room and dug through his desk trying to find any of his friends’ phone numbers. But they were all programmed into his cell phone and his cell phone was with him, wherever he was. She tore through his closet, his dirty clothes hamper, and found nothing to help her hunt him down.
Nora sat on the edge of his bed and opened his nightstand. She knew Wesley would be less than thrilled she was digging through his things. He’d probably get quite the shock if he saw what she kept in her nightstand. But she didn’t find anything helpful or incriminating—ChapStick and a spare set of keys to his car. Under the file of his medical stuff she found a small photo album. Pulling it out she smiled through tears when she flipped it open and found it full of pictures from last summer.
Leafing through the pages of photos she remembered…
At first she’d been suspicious when Wesley had woken her up early on a Saturday morning in May and told her to get up and put on jeans and boots. He’d driven that day in his beat-up yellow VW bug, and they’d listened to weird music the whole way there. “Who is this?” she’d asked. “Wilco.” “Who’s this?” “The Decembrists.” Finally he’d demanded to know what the last album she bought was. She thought for a good five minutes before remembering—Ill Communication, the Beastie Boys, 1994. Wesley would have been a toddler and she’d been fifteen or sixteen years old.
After a long drive they’d arrived at a farm—a horse farm. Wesley had told her that he’d grown up around horses. From what he’d said it sounded as if his father worked as a horse trainer and his mother did the books at a horse farm in Central Kentucky. But that was the first day she’d actually seen Wesley around the big animals. For someone as blessed by Mother Nature as he was in the looks department, he often seemed nervous and unsure of himself. But the second they hit the stables he became a different person. Walking right up to them, he slapped their sides with sure hands. For a good forty-five minutes he took a turn on three or four different horses, saddling them, and riding them around the paddock.
“Being a little picky, aren’t you, kid?” she’d asked him. “Just get a horse for yourself and let’s go.”
“I’m not picking one for me.” He dismounted nimbly from a large Appaloosa. “I can ride anything. I’m trying to find one for you. You need something tame since you’re a rookie.”
“I’ll take anything but a gelding,” she’d told him.
“What’s wrong with geldings?”
“We won’t have anything to talk about.”
Wesley had laughed then, open and easy, and for a moment she saw the man he would become in ten or twenty years—strong and kind, growing a little more handsome and a little less innocent with every year that passed. She envied the woman he’d end up with. Lucky lady indeed. Finally, after the fourth horse, he’d found her a young buckskin mare named Speakeasy.
“She’s smart and submissive—perfect for a first-timer.” Wesley handed her the reins.
“Smart and submissive—I should introduce you to Søren,” she whispered in Speakeasy’s twitching ear. “Do you like riding crops, too?”
Nora remembered following him back into the stables to watch him pick his horse. A teenage girl walked with Wesley giving him suggestions. Nora watched as the pretty girl cast adoring glances at Wesley while Wesley had eyes only for the horses.
“He’ll do.” Wesley picked out a large heavily muscled sorrel. “What’s his name?”
“Bastinado,” the stable-girl said. “The boss named him that. Don’t know why.”
“Is he bad about stepping on your feet?” Nora had asked.
“Very bad about it.” The girl looked at Nora for the first time. “How did you know?”
“Bastinado—it’s a fancy term for foot torture.” Both Wesley and the stable-girl had stared at her with wide eyes. “What?”
Wesley saddled his horse with effortless proficiency. Nora watched his knowing fingers as they tightened the stirrups and adjusted the rigging. He swung up into the saddle, shoved his straw cowboy hat on his blond head, shifted his hips and took the leather reins as though he’d been born on a horse. Nora took a slow breath and silently repeated her Wesley mantra.
Look but don’t touch…look but don’t touch…
They’d gone easy that day since it was her first time on a horse. The sprawling farm had miles of trails connected to it. Wesley led them down paths that meandered all over the scenic hillside. They stopped every few minutes and took pictures. Nora flipped through the album and remembered when they’d passed over a small creek. Wesley must have sensed her apprehension because he took her reins and led both their horses easily through it.
Nora turned to another page and found her favorite photo. Wesley had bent over the saddle to pat Bastinado on the neck when Nora had snapped the picture. Wesley looked up just in time to flash her his million-watt smile. Nora closed the album and started to slide it in the drawer when she noticed another photo—this one in a frame and hidden all the way at the back. “Wes…” Nora breathed, looking at the picture of her and Speakeasy alone together. She remembered the moment the photo was captured. She had dismounted and was rubbing her horse down after they were done riding. She thought Wesley was taking a picture of the rolling pasture behind her. She’d pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and pressed her forehead to Speakeasy’s. Tendrils of her hair had gone loose and wild around her face. Her eyes were closed in the picture and she wore a smile of pure happiness. She couldn’t believe Wesley had framed the photo. She looked so silly in it.
Nora put everything back in his nightstand the way she found it and stretched out on Wesley’s bed. She ran through every possible scenario in her mind—was he sick? Car accident? Lost his phone? Lost his mind? Did he have his insulin pen with him? Did he have his med-alert bracelet on? She knew Wesley. He’d call her if he was going to be five minutes late. Another college boy she wouldn’t have worried about. Any other college sophomore was surely out at a party or a bar or back in some girl’s dorm room. Not her Wesley—apart from occasionally sleeping in on Saturdays, he woke up at the same time every day, came home at the same time every day. He had to keep his meals regular because of his insulin injections. He had to get plenty of sleep. He worked out at the school gym every day. He didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, didn’t smoke, didn’t have sex. He went to class, he went to church, he went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas…he was the most boring teenage boy alive. Alive…please let him be alive.
Nora closed her eyes and turned onto her side. She could smell Wesley’s warm, clean scent on his pillows. For the first time in a long time she prayed with everything within her.
God, I know You’re probably still pissed about Søren, and I really don’t blame You. But please don’t take Your wrath out on Wesley. Flog me all You want. He doesn’t deserve it.
At 4:30 a.m. she was still wide-awake and staring at his ceiling when her red hotline phone rang. She sat straight up and found her hands were shaking so much she could barely hit the answer button.
“King, please tell me you know something.”
“Oui, chérie. Your intern is a most interesting young man.”
“Just tell me where he is. Is he okay?”
“He’s in the hospital, but he is unharmed if rather the worse for wear.”
“What happened?” Nora ran a hand through her hair. She leaned over and breathed through her fear and relief.
“A comely little nurse took a peek at his chart for me. Something called DKA? Is that familiar to you?”
Nora’s hands went numb at the initials. “It’s diabetic ketoacidosis. It can be fatal.”
Kingsley rattled off the story sliding in and out of French as he did so. From what she gleaned from his hasty bilingual recitation, Wesley had gotten sick at the library and passed out after throwing up several times in the bathroom. He’d been admitted to the hospital in full-blown DKA.
“Which hospital?” she asked. “What room? Please tell me he’s at General.”
“Oui. I’ve already called Dr. Jonas.”
“Tell him I’ll give him the freebie of his dreams if he can get me in.”
“No freebies, mistress. He’s already promised to help any way he can. He would never cross La Maîtresse.”
“Great. Wonderful. Where is he? ICU?”
“PICU,” Kingsley said and laughed. Nora laughed a little, too. They’d put Wesley in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. “Mais chérie, you cannot go.”
“Fuck you. Of course I can.”
“His parents flew in. They’re with him.”
Nora swore. Wesley would kill her if she turned up at his bedside with his parents sitting right there. He did everything he could to keep her a secret from them. His parents would yank him back to Kentucky so fast his head would spin if they discovered he was living with an infamous erotica writer—especially one who worked as a Dominatrix. Jaded New York parents wouldn’t let their kids near her much less these conservative Southerners.
“Forget it. Just tell me where he is.”
Nora jotted down his hospital room number.
“Thanks, King. I owe you.”
“Pas moi. Our mutual friend was the one who found where they’d taken your pet.”
“Then tell him we’re even now for him tricking me.”
Nora hung up the phone and ran to her room. She threw water on her face and changed clothes again. At 6:00 a.m. she arrived at the hospital and found Dr. Jonas. He explained that Wesley ended up in the PICU because the ICU was full. Nora told him not to tell Wesley that.
He brought her down several hallways past dozens of hospital rooms. She glanced at the figure of a priest talking quietly to a family in tears in one room. Nora lowered her eyes respectfully and kept walking. Passing through a set of double doors, they entered the pediatric ICU. Teddy bears holding balloons were painted on the walls. Oh, yes, she’d never let Wes hear the end of this. Dr. Jonas put his finger over his lips and left her by room 518. She stood outside the open door and listened intently—a woman’s voice with a heavy Southern accent, his mother’s she guessed, loudly whispered to a man with a softer accent. In hushed tones they went back and forth about how they never should have let their son move so far from home for college. Fighting was a good sign. That meant Wesley was out of the woods. But her relief was short-lived. His mother sounded determined to have him back in Kentucky again while his father argued that he was old enough to be on his own, that they couldn’t keep an eye on him forever. Nora found herself nodding her agreement with his father. But she could hear the distress in his mother’s voice, the pain and the fear and the wrought-iron determination. Wesley’s mom wanted him home with her to keep an eye on him. Nora felt the same way.
Nora didn’t know what to do. She found Dr. Jonas again and made him call Wesley’s attending physician. Wesley was in and out of consciousness after they’d brought him in, but he’d been awake and speaking a few hours ago. They’d stabilized his insulin levels and he’d be clear to go home in a day or two. Apparently Wesley wasn’t absorbing his insulin as well as he needed to. He might need to start using a bigger needle. Nora ached with sympathy. Wesley loathed needles. He always injected himself in his upper left arm where he couldn’t see the needle going in. Shoving needles into his own thighs or stomach would probably kill him before it cured him.
Dr. Jonas told her he’d call Kingsley if he heard anything else but there was nothing Nora could do for him now. She might as well go home.
Reluctantly, Nora left the hospital. She drove home and decided she would let herself sleep. She checked the clock—almost 8:00 a.m. She’d been awake for over twenty-four hours.
Once in her driveway Nora turned off her car. But after that she lost the energy to do anything else. She leaned forward on the steering wheel and cried tears of relief, exhaustion and fear. Wesley’s mother was the proverbial steel magnolia and she clearly wanted her son back home. Nora prayed Wesley had learned the fine art of telling someone off while living under her roof.
Telling someone off…
Nora leaned her head back against the headrest.
“Shit…Zach.”
She turned the car back on and headed south toward Manhattan.
9
The next morning Zach headed straight to J.P.’s office without even bothering to stop in his own first.
J.P. looked up from his reading and blanched.
“I am reminded of the last words of Emily Dickinson at this moment,” J.P. said. “The fog is rising.”
“I’m done with her.”
J.P. stared at him over the top of his glasses. “Easton, she could make Royal a great deal of money.”
“Find another editor then. I don’t care if we publish her or not. But I’m finished. Patricia Grier called me last night. She said I’m welcome to come out to L.A. a few weeks early and work with her. It’s not a bad idea.”
“It’s a terrible idea. The staff won’t know who’s in charge. You won’t know who’s in charge. She’ll undermine you. You’ll undermine her. Regime change has to be quick and dramatic for it to be effective.”
“It’s Royal’s West Coast office, not France in 1799.”
J.P. took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead.
“Bring me her contract. I’ll keep it.”
Zach turned on his heel without another word and walked to his office. He paused at the door when he noticed it was cracked open. He remembered very clearly locking it last night since he’d left his laptop on his desk. Warily, he opened the door and entered.
“Hey, Zach,” Nora said. She sat in his chair behind his desk with her eyes closed.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “How did you get into my office? It was locked.”
“Magic.” She opened her eyes and smiled.
“You look like hell,” Zach said. Nora had dark circles under her eyes and her face appeared gaunt from lack of sleep.
Zach came around his desk and she stood up to give him his chair back. She sat on top of his desk and rolled back on it like a bed.
“I’ve spent the last twelve hours in hell. Sorry, I forgot to bring you a souvenir.”
“I have all the souvenirs I need from my own trips there. What are you doing here, Nora?”
“Apologizing for going off on you last night.”
“Apology accepted. Now you can go. J.P. is going to find another editor for you to work with. Probably Thomas Finley. He’s an asshole. You’ll like him.”
“There are good assholes and bad assholes. You’re the good kind. I only want to work with you.”
“Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have told me to first, fuck the book and second, to fuck myself.”
Nora rolled up off his desk and turned to face him. She crossed her arms over her chest. She exhaled slowly.
“Wesley didn’t come home last night.”
“He’s old enough he can go anywhere he pleases, Nora.”
“But you don’t know Wes. He calls. He calls all the time. If he’s going to be five minutes late he calls me. I was in Miami a while ago and he called me to tell me he was going to the movies so if I tried to call him and didn’t get him, I wouldn’t worry. That’s Wes. He didn’t come home and he didn’t call. I freaked out.”
“I assume you found him?”
Nora laughed coldly. “Sort of. He’s in the hospital.”
Zach sat up in his chair.
“Good Lord. Is he all right?”
“He went into diabetic ketoacidosis at the library. No one called me because no one knows I exist. I’m not next of kin. I’m not any kin.”
“Have you seen him?”
“I just came from the hospital where I spent half an hour eavesdropping on his parents while lurking out in the hallway. I can’t go in since they’re there. Zach, I feel…impotent. Bad feeling.”
Zach looked away from her and stared out his window. His view was to the east, and if the world was flat and his vision was telescopic he could see all the way to England. He knew how Nora felt. Grace…her parents had come as soon as he called and told them she was in the hospital. As soon as they arrived he knew he’d made a mistake by calling them. The doctors immediately stopped talking to him and starting talking to them instead. He remembered his fury then, how he’d stepped between Grace’s parents and the doctor and told the doctor in no uncertain terms that when a married woman was in the emergency ward, you spoke to her husband first and her parents second. He hadn’t told the doctor to go fuck himself. He’d been far less polite than that.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“When you called last night I was waiting for news. If God Himself had called me and started telling me the secrets of the universe, I would have told Him to go fuck Himself, too. You can’t take me personally, Zach. Can I make it up to you? Coffee? Tea? Me?”
Zach laughed. Even exhausted she was still shameless.
“You need sleep, not caffeine or any other stimulant,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. She smiled and nodded in agreement.
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone. Soon as Wes is home again, I promise I’ll get back to the book. Can you email me whatever it was you were going to tell me last night? I’ll read it and do whatever it is you want me to do.”
Zach promised to do so and Nora started to leave.
“When’s the last time you slept, Nora?” he asked before she walked out of his office.
“Twenty-six hours ago.”
Zach winced. “You shouldn’t be driving. Dead writers revise no tales.”
“We’ll put that on my tombstone,” Nora said. Zach stared her down. “Fine. I’ve got a friend with a town house a few blocks from here. I’ll go crash at his place.”
“No stimulants, remember?” he reminded her. “Actors playing Hamlet are told to stay celibate lest they ruin their performance.”
Nora threw a smile over her shoulder. Suddenly, she didn’t look tired or worried anymore. She looked wild and beautiful and so alive.
“Celibate, Zach? Have you met me?”
Zach was still laughing after she’d left him. He looked up and saw J.P. standing in the door to his office.
“So the contract?” J.P. asked.
Zach looked at his boss.
“I think I might keep it a little while longer,” Zach said a little sheepishly.
“And her?”
Zach reached under his desk and pulled Nora’s manuscript out of the paper-recycling bin.
“I think I might keep her, too.”
* * *
Nora pulled in at Kingsley’s town house and walked inside without knocking. Nora announced herself to Juliette, Kingsley’s beautiful Haitian secretary and the only other woman in the world besides her he was afraid of. Juliette gave her breakfast and took her up to Kingsley’s opulent bedroom. She could sleep there since Kingsley was gone until tomorrow. Nora stripped out of her clothes and crawled between the sheets—sheets she’d spent more than a few nights on before. She took both of her cell phones out and laid them on the pillow next to hers in case Wesley, Zach, King or Søren called.
As she faded into sleep, Nora’s mind went to Wesley’s side—she hoped he was feeling better and would be home with her soon. As she pressed deeper into the luxurious sheets, a little part of her sort of wished Søren was there.
When Nora finally woke up it was almost nine at night. She’d slept for almost twelve straight hours. She showered in Kingsley’s decadent bathroom and dressed in the clothes Juliette had brought for her and left on the chair next to the bed. When she got out of the shower, her hotline rang. She grabbed it and answered it with still wet hands.
“King—what’s the news?”
“The good doctor says you are clear for a rendezvous with ton petit garçon malade. His parents succumbed to the doctor’s insistence they let your pet sleep tonight. They are at a hotel.”
“Tell Dr. Jonas next time I’ll do that thing he likes with the peanut butter and the cock ring.”
“It is without a doubt the sole reason he went to medical school.”
Nora left Kingsley’s town house and made her way back to the hospital feeling like a new person. Nearly shivering from the excitement at getting to see Wesley, she parked her car and headed straight to his room. Tiptoeing in, she saw Wesley lying in his hospital bed sound asleep.
She came up to the bed and looked down at him. His eyelashes fluttered against his tan cheeks and his chest rose and fell slowly. She bent forward and kissed him on the forehead. His eyes flew open and he looked at her as if she was something out of a dream.
“Nora, thank God.” He tried to throw his arms around her. But he winced when he realized his arms were taped up with tubes.
“Don’t move, kid. You’re going to rip something out. I’m right here. How are you feeling?”
“Perfect now that you’re here. I’ve been going nuts all day trying to figure out how to call you. But if Mom left the room Dad was here and vice versa. They finally left a few minutes ago. The doctor was really insistent they leave me alone tonight.”
Nora grinned at him.
“Friend of yours?” he asked.
“Friend of a friend. It’s good to have friends in strange places. I’ve got a cop who owes me a favor, too, if you ever get arrested.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Wesley reached out and took her hand in his. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Me, too. I was here earlier creeping in the hallway. I heard your parents talking. Your mom wants you to move home.”
“She does, but I’m not going to. I’ve got Dad on my side. We’ll wear her down.”
“You better. Good help is so hard to find. So what did the doctor say?”
Wesley groaned and Nora ran her hand through his hair. It felt so good just to touch him again, to be near him again. She couldn’t believe it had been only one day they’d been apart.
“I’ve given myself so many shots in the arm that I’ve got scar tissue,” Wesley said, rubbing his upper left biceps. “The insulin isn’t getting through it well enough. I have to change my injection site.”
“Thighs?” she asked. “Your cute little ass?”
“Worse. All my daytime shots in my stomach now and my thigh at night. You know, sticking a needle into your own stomach and leaving it there for five seconds is sort of overrated.”
“Tell me about it. Even the biggest kinksters don’t play rough on the stomach. Very sensitive area. When can you come home?”
“They may let me out tomorrow or the day after. I feel a lot better. Just really tired.”
“You look like you lost ten pounds and you didn’t really have any extra to lose.”
“You’re the one who’s too skinny, Nora.”
“I have gained eight pounds since you moved in and started cooking every day.”
“You needed those eight pounds. You were all gristle when I moved in.”
“I have to be very tough to beat up on all my bad little boys and girls. I’m going to beat up on you, too, if you ever scare me like that again.”
“I don’t plan to. Promise.”
Wesley smiled at her and she clutched his hand.
“Do you want me to run home and bring you anything? Clothes or anything?”
“Mom will use any excuse to go shopping. She was going to pick some stuff up for me tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. I’ll go and let you sleep then.”
Wesley sat up and shook his head.
“Don’t go. Please.”
“I’ll stay as long as you want me to, Wes,” she said to the almost panic in his voice. “Scoot over and make room.”
Wesley laughed but she wasn’t joking. She carefully crawled into his hospital bed and slid under the wires and tubes. She stretched out next to him and Wesley wrapped an IVed arm around her back. She lay against his chest and closed her eyes.
“You know, I’ve fooled around in a hospital before but never in the pediatric ward.”
“Nora, you’re disgusting. Go to sleep.”
“You sleep first.”
“I don’t want to sleep. I want to talk to you.”
“Good. I don’t want to sleep, either. What do you want to talk about? Horses?”
“You want to talk about horses?”
“Don’t be mad but I was digging through your stuff trying to find your friends’ phone numbers. I found the photo album from last summer. And the stupid picture of me with Speakeasy.”
She looked up at him. Even in the dark she could see Wesley’s blush.
“It’s not a stupid picture. You look happy in it.”
“Of course I do. I was with you.”
Wesley smiled down at her. Nora kissed him on the cheek and rested her head once more against his chest. It was such a relief to hear his heart beating steadily against her ear.
“How did you find out where I was?” Wesley asked. He ran his hand up and down her arm. She knew the last thing he wanted to hear was that Søren had hunted him down for her, and that Kingsley, her partner in crime, had used some of his connections to get confidential information.
Nora shut her eyes and nestled in closer to Wesley.
“Magic.”
10
Zach was relieved to find almost fifteen thousand new words from Nora in his email when he arrived at work two days after finding her half-unconscious in his office. Apparently she was working out her nervous energy from not having Wesley at home by writing five breathlessly intense chapters. He read through them and jotted down notes as he went. He was thrilled with what she was doing with the book. But he needed to steer her in a new direction before she wrote any more. The whole book couldn’t be a sprint. She needed to stop and let the reader breathe for a chapter or two before kicking into high gear again.
Zach read through his notes again and dialed her office number.
“Sophocles’s House of Patricide and Incest,” Nora answered. “How may I blind you?”
Zach bit the inside of his cheek to keep her from hearing him laugh.
“Nora.”
“Zachary,” she said breathlessly.
“You’re in a chipper mood, I see.”
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Tiffany Reisz
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Some love stories you never forget. Some books will change your world. Be prepared… this is one of them. She tore herself from the man she adored, who transformed her, who possessed her… who would have destroyed her. Now she is adored by a man she must not have. She thinks she knows what it means to be pushed to her limits. She’s wrong.The Original Sinners Series: The Red YearsBook 1: The SirenBook 2: The AngelBook 3: The PrinceBook 4: The MistressThe Original Sinners continues with The White Years Book 1: The SaintBook 2: The KingBook 3: The VirginPraise for Tiffany Reisz‘Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic’ – Author Miranda Baker ‘Stunning. One of the best novels I have ever read. I am simply in awe and feeling richer for the experience.’ – Good Reads Reviewer on The Siren ‘This book made me feel everything.’ – Author Courtney Milan on The Siren