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“Kid, S?ren could eat you for breakfast and not even need to chew. Don’t ever fuck with a sadist, Wesley. For S?ren, 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…S?ren.”
* * *
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 S?ren 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. S?ren 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. S?ren 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 S?ren 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 S?ren 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. S?ren 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 S?ren 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 S?ren 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 S?ren. 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.
“S?ren, 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 S?ren would call her back soon. S?ren 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 S?ren,” 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 S?ren, 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.
