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Okay, she was already used to this.
“I missed you, too. I know you might not believe that, but I missed you every damn day. I …” Nora held on to Wesley as if her life depended on it, and in that moment she thought it might. “I love Søren. I won’t lie to you. You don’t get what we have, and that’s fine. Very few people do. But when I was with you … Wesley, I liked who I was when I was with you. You make me a different person, a better person. And then you were gone and that Nora was gone, too. I missed you, yes. So fucking much. But I missed who I was with you just as much.”
Wesley kissed the top of her head. Taking her by the shoulders, he stared down at her.
“There’s only one Nora Sutherlin—the smart, funny, sweet, silly running-around-in-penguin-pajamas Nora Sutherlin who cares about writing and me and getting in two naps a day. The Nora you were with me was the real Nora, is the real Nora. Not the sadist Nora. Not the infamous Nora. Just … my Nora. If I don’t do anything else this week, I will convince you of that.”
“Good luck.” She smiled at him through tears. “That’s going to take a lot of convincing.”
“Then I better start right now.”
“It’s kind of late. Bedtime, kiddo.”
Wesley cupped the side of her face and brushed a tear off her cheek with his thumb.
“You’re right. It is late.” His hand moved from her face to her neck and down to her waist. His fingers hesitated only a moment before digging into the fabric of her T-shirt and starting to pull it up. “Let’s go to bed.”
Nora inhaled in shock and almost coughed. “Really?”
Wesley nodded and grinned.
“Really. Seriously. And I need you to believe that, ‘cause I’m not going to be able to get this off of you without a little cooperation on your part.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Nora lifted her arms and let Wesley pull her shirt off. She stood in front of him in the living room in her jeans and a black bra. She felt grimy from driving, exhausted, sore … and so turned on she could scarcely see straight. Reaching up, she unbuttoned the top button on Wesley’s wrinkled French-blue oxford shirt. “You know, I’ve always loved this color on you. Don’t know if I ever told you that.”
“You did once,” he said, running his hands up and down her arms. His fingertips on her suddenly bare skin sent shivers through her entire body. “Two years ago. That’s why I wore it.”
“You bought a French-blue shirt just to wear for me? Not even knowing if you’d see me again?”
“No.” Wesley dipped his head and kissed her quickly on the lips. “I bought five of them.”
Nora didn’t speak. She’d lost all power to. All she could do was keep unbuttoning. With each open button she pushed a little more of his shirt off his shoulders, until it came down his arms and hit the floor.
“Looks even better there than on you,” she said.
“I think all your clothes will looking amazing on the floor.”
Nora kissed his bare shoulder. “Let’s go find out.”
She reached for his hand and started to drag him toward the stairs. But he yanked her to him instead and lifted her in his arms.
“You’ve got to be kidding, Wes. I weigh a lot more than I look.”
“Yeah, you do. What’s up with that?” he asked as he carried her to the steps.
“Muscle. Pure muscle. And a pretty big ass.”
“Perfect ass.” He slapped it awkwardly and Nora giggled with luxurious, decadent happiness.
“You’re really going to carry me up the stairs? That’s so Gone with the Wind.”
“Never saw it.” Wesley mounted the wide, carpeted stairs.
“It’s a classic,” she chided. “Civil War stuff. Big dresses. Overacting. Hot nonconsensual sex.”
“It’s also four hours long. I got stuff to do.”
They arrived at the top of the stairs without incident.
“What stuff do you have to do that’s more important than watching the most legendary movie about the South ever filmed?” Nora asked as Wesley used his foot to push open the door to his bedroom.
He half laid, half threw her onto the bed, which was dressed in red-and-white sheets, and Nora sank deep into the covers.
Wesley met her eyes and slipped a hand into her hair. “Well, tonight I need to make love to you.”
Nora’s hands went momentarily numb at his words. The sweetness of them coupled with the look in his eyes crashed over her like a wave.
“Good excuse.” She ran her palms over his bare shoulders. He had such beautiful arms, such young, supple skin. For a moment she actually felt self-conscious of her thirty-four-year-old body.
“What?” he asked as she swept her fingers through his long, dark blond hair. “What’s wrong?”
“Your hair.”
Grinning, Wesley shook his head. “I’ll get it cut tomorrow. I swear.”
“Good. But that’s not it. You don’t have a single gray hair.”
Wesley rolled his eyes. “Neither do you, Nora.”
“Yeah, and I pay three hundred dollars every six weeks to keep it that way.”
For a moment his smile faltered. “I didn’t know you colored your hair.”
She shrugged. “Have to. Trademark black hair. Not trademark black-with-more-gray-than-I’d-care-to-admit-to hair. I’m thirty-four. You know that, right?”
“Of course I know. I don’t care about our age difference. I was just … I didn’t know you colored your hair, is all. Can you go red next time? I have a thing for red.”
Nora grinned. “How about we trade? I’ll get blond hair and you can go black.”
“Would it bring out the brown in my eyes?” he asked, and playfully batted his eyelashes.
“Don’t do that,” she teased. “You look like you’re having a seizure.”
“Oh, sorry.” Wesley’s eyelashes started behaving themselves again. “Where were we? I think we missed talking to each other so much, it’s getting in the way of the … you know. Not talking.”
“We don’t have to do this tonight. If you’re tired or if you want to talk … I’m not leaving you. I’m here. I’m with you. I don’t care if your dad already hates me. I’ve been hated by the best. I can take it.”
“No. I want to do this. I’ve wanted to do this since the day I saw you at Yorke.”
Nora pressed her lips to the hollow of his throat.
“Okay. We can do this. If you’ve been waiting for two years now …”
“Two years? I’ve been waiting twenty.” Wesley grinned sheepishly at her.
For the third time that night Nora’s eyes went wide with shock and her mouth dropped open in surprise.
She pushed back against the bed and scrambled into a sitting position.
“Nora … what?”
“Wesley? You’re still a virgin?”
NORTH
The Past
Maine. Kingsley hated Maine. The weather, the people, the absolute lack of … anything. Anything at all worth living for. Hated it. Loathed it. Could find nothing redeeming about the place at all.
So why could he not stop smiling lately?
Spring came early that year. The snow began to melt and the browns and greens of the forest floor proved their resilience again. After one week of not winter, spring fever hit the school and the entire student body—all forty-seven of them—poured onto the one flat patch of ground, bringing with them baseballs and footballs.
Footballs? Kingsley rolled his eyes. He would show these stupid American boys real football. From under his dorm bed, he pulled out his soccer ball and took it to the lawn. With the other boys tossing Frisbees and American footballs back and forth to each other, Kingsley stood alone off to the side and started juggling the ball with his knees. For fun he’d switch legs, switch from knee to ankle, left to right, and then back again. When a few minutes passed and the ball hadn’t stopped, hadn’t fallen to the ground, he began to acquire an audience. The audience of fellow students started to tease him, chide him, as they tried to break his concentration. But Kingsley could do this, had done this trick for over an hour once. For some reason he thought better when juggling the soccer ball. His mind cleared and everything he worried about disappeared—his parents now gone, his grandparents elderly and worried about him, his sister, Marie-Laure, a struggling ballerina in Paris. She wrote him letters constantly, tearstained letters he could hardly bear to read. Her grief, her desperation … she swore she’d go mad if she couldn’t see him again soon. He almost believed her.
But when alone with the soccer ball, she and everyone else disappeared.
Almost everyone else.
One face refused to dissipate from Kingsley’s mind. One infuriatingly handsome face that he noticed out of the corner of his eye, watching him along with every other boy at the school. Unlike the others, Stearns didn’t catcall him or do anything to break his focus. But the eyes alone, that simple stare of his, nearly caused Kingsley to drop the ball.
Left knee. Right knee. Right knee. Left knee.
Kingsley kept bouncing, kept breathing.
Just to elicit an “ohhh” from the audience and maybe to impress Stearns a little, Kingsley popped the ball into the air and bounced it off the top of his head and back to his knee. He popped it up again and let it rest a second on the back of his neck before sending it up again and back to his knee.
Right knee. Right knee. Left knee. Left ankle. Right knee.
“So can you actually play soccer, King?” Christian asked. “Or do you just play with your balls all day.”
“I can play,” Kingsley said without elaborating. He could do more than play. Back in Paris, he’d been the best in the school. He’d already been scouted by the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club and had every intention of joining them as soon as he came of age. But that was before the accident, before Maine. “The problem is, no one else here can play against me.”
“Sorry. We’re all Americans,” Christian teased. “We play real football.”
Kingsley laughed. Left ankle. Right ankle. “You should be sorry. I had an entire team on me once trying to keep me from the goal. Still made it.”
“Really?” Derek demanded. “A whole team?”
“Felt like it,” Kingsley said, grinning. “But what does it matter? None of you know how to play. So I’ll just play with myself.” He winked at Christian and for a few minutes the conversation was peppered with nothing but masturbation jokes.
Right knee. Right knee. Right knee. Left.
Oohs. Ahhs. Teasing. Laughter.
“I know how to play.”
In the shock of the silence that followed, Kingsley dropped the ball.
The twenty assembled students collectively turned their heads toward Stearns.
“You can play soccer?” Kingsley picked the soccer ball up off the ground. Stearns’s words had stunned everyone so thoroughly that not a single person teased Kingsley about dropping the ball after nearly ten minutes of juggling.
“I went to school in England.” Stearns slipped off his jacket and started to roll up his sleeves.
Kingsley could only stare at him, at his forearms he slowly unveiled with each turn of his cuff.
“But … you play piano.” Kingsley had no idea what that meant, only that he’d assumed a musician could not also be an athlete.
Stearns didn’t answer. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited. Everyone remained silent. Kingsley could feel the tension, the waiting expectation in the air. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. Stearns raised an eyebrow, and in his steel-gray eyes, Kingsley noted something he hadn’t seen before—amusement. Not only did Stearns clearly know how uncomfortable he made Kingsley, but he enjoyed it, too. The amusement annoyed Kingsley. Beyond annoyed him, it pissed him the hell off. Who was this guy who delighted in making people uncomfortable? What kind of sadist was he?
Stearns raised his blond eyebrow a millimeter higher. A smile played upon the corner of his perfect lips.
“School in England, oui?” Kingsley asked.
“Oui,” Stearns said. The eyebrow inched even higher. The smile spread over his entire mouth.
“That would explain your pretentious accent.”
A gasp rippled through the crowd. Kingsley realized he must have been the very first student to ever talk back to Stearns. If only, perhaps, because Stearns never seemed to talk to anyone.
“And who are we to talk pretentious accents?” Stearns asked, employing an exaggerated faux French accent. The accent sounded just like Kingsley’s natural way of speaking. He could speak English without his French accent, but it exhausted him so he seldom bothered trying. Especially since girls swooned over his French accent. Too bad Stearns seemed immune to its charms.
“Très bien,” Kingsley said. “Can you play as well as you talk?”
“We can find out. Drop the ball.” Stearns took a step forward.
“We don’t have a field.”
“Make one up.”
Kingsley glanced around. They really didn’t need a field, as they didn’t even have teams. With two players all they really needed was a goal.
“The trees …” Kingsley nodded toward two trees at the end of the field. “That’s our goal. I’ll try to score. You try to stop me.”
“You said you scored with an entire team on you. Surely you can score against only me.”
“Bien sûr.” Of course he could. Offense had been his forte.
