The Mistress (17 page)

Part Three

QUEEN’S GAMBIT

20

THE PAWN

E
vening came and Laila knew she would go mad from waiting. Her uncle and Kingsley had something planned but whatever their scheme, she wouldn’t be allowed to take any part in it. She wandered the house they’d been brought to and found little in it to distract her. A beautiful house, well-decorated and clearly loved. She’d found one stray pink sock in the hallway outside the bedroom she’d been given. A little girl’s sock... Laila had stared at it until finally picking it up and putting it in the laundry room. She felt like an intruder in this private home. She didn’t belong here in these rooms and halls. Children did. Love should fill every room. Instead, Laila found only fear.

Knowing he’d discourage her from leaving the house, Laila didn’t even tell her uncle she decided to go on a short walk. She left a note on her bed in case he came looking for her and set out on her own. But she hadn’t made it to the end of the drive before she heard footsteps behind her.

“Your legs are too long.” Wes jogged a little to catch up with her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling at him as he met her at the end of the long driveway. “I’ll try to shorten them.”

“I’m used to walking with Nora. I’d forgotten not every woman on the planet is a shrimp.”

“She can walk really fast when she wants to.” Laila set out again down the tree-lined road. “But don’t ever ask her to—”

“Run. I know. Hates running. Told me she’s allergic to it. She has a long list of allergies.”

“Yes. Let’s see, there’s...cooking.”

Wes nodded. “She’s definitely allergic to cooking. Anything that required more than two ingredients—or, as she called them, the hard stuff and the chaser—she’d give up and order takeout.”

“Cleaning,” Laila thought of another.

“That was one. She had scared off six housekeepers by the time I moved in with her.”

“Six?” Laila gazed around her at the beautiful August evening with the sun low through the trees and this man walking with her. She wished she could enjoy it even a little but the fear held her heart in its unforgiving grasp. “Why so many?”

“Um...” Wes winced and Laila knew she’d inadvertently stumbled into secret territory.

“Let me guess...I don’t want to know.”

“She had a bad habit of not picking up after herself.”

Laila weighed whether or not to tell Wes what she wanted to tell him. Might as well. Her uncle tried to shield her from the truth about him and her, but her aunt never had.

“I have read her books. You don’t have to pretend she’s...you know...”

“Normal?” Wes supplied.

“Vanilla,” Laila said. “You read even one of her books and you learn the words.”

Wes exhaled with obvious and profound relief.

“Thank God. I wasn’t sure what you knew and what you didn’t.”

“I know enough to know that I wouldn’t go sneaking around in her bedroom without body armor on first.”

“It’s not that bad, I promise. I lived with her. She keeps most of the stuff in her closet. Sometimes I’d find snap hooks between the couch cushions. One time I accidentally sat on a Wartenburg wheel. That sucker hurt. And ripped a hole in my jeans.”

Laila laughed and the sound bounced off the road and into the trees.

“And she had this big long bag,” Wes said, stretching his arms three feet wide. “Kept it in her office most of the time. She told me not to open it unless I never wanted to look her in the eyes again.”

“Did you open it?”

“Nope.” He shook his head and Laila’s heart jumped as a sliver of the day’s last sunlight caught in Wes’s hair. She felt the most overwhelming urge to run her fingers through it. But she restrained herself. He probably wouldn’t like some girl he barely knew messing with his hair right now. “I liked looking her in the eyes.”

“I think I could have, anyway, even after opening the bag. My uncle, on the other hand...” She let her voice trail off and Laila found herself blushing.

“I guess you know about him, too, then.” Wes crossed his arms over his chest.

Laila nodded. “Well, if she is like that, then he is. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have stayed together so long. I’ve even accidentally heard them.” Accidentally? Not quite but he didn’t need to know that.

“I overheard my parents once. Oh, my Lord, I thought I’d never be normal again.”

“My parents got divorced when I was very young. I think I would have liked to have parents in love enough to sometimes overhear them in bed together.”

“I’m sorry. Yeah, hearing your parents having sex is better than not hearing it, I guess. How old were you when they broke up?”

“Six. Gitte was two. It was a bad match, my mother said. Neither of them did anything wrong. They didn’t have anything in common. She had the good job, and all the money, so we stayed in the house and he moved away.
Min onkel
Søren tried to step in, but it wasn’t easy for him across an ocean. He called all the time to check on us.”

“Min onkel?”

“My uncle Søren,” she corrected herself. “Sorry.”

Wes only smiled. “Don’t apologize. Seriously. I like when you slip into Danish.”

Laila blushed as if he’d complimented her breasts instead of her words. Maybe since they were outside in the sun he wouldn’t notice how much talking to him made her turn so red.

“Happens when I’m tired. I slip in and out.”

“We should go back if you’re tired.”

She shook her head. “No, not yet. I don’t want to go back. It’s too...”

“I know,” he said quietly, staring into the sun for a moment before looking back at her. “Everyone’s so scared and we make it worse being around one another, scaring one another even more.”

“It’s hard to be around him,” she said. “My uncle. He loves her so much, and I can’t help him. I can’t even look in his eyes...I hate seeing him so scared. I don’t ever remember seeing him scared before.” Laila stepped off the road and into the manicured woods.

“Never?”

Wes followed right behind her. Inside a clearing she found a downed tree and sat on it.

“I didn’t think anything could scare him. Anything bad that happened, he was always so calm. Gitte fell once and hit her head on a rock. So much blood...I’d never seen so much. All of us were screaming and crying. He picked her up and carried her into the house and held her until help came. He made her tell him about her day at school and what she’d learned that week. Anything to keep her calm and awake. I realized that day that he was different from us.”

“Different how?” Wes sat next to her on the tree trunk. As he lifted himself and settled in, Laila noticed the muscles flexing in his arms. She needed to stop noticing stuff like that.

“No one in Denmark is Catholic. It’s a secular country. No one goes to church. I think that was the day I realized that him being Catholic and believing in God...he did believe there was some higher power taking care of people. He did have faith and it kept him calm when everyone else was afraid.”

“Is it weird having a priest for an uncle?”

“Yes and no.” Laila looked up at the darkening sky. “I’m so used to it now that it’s only strange when I stop to think about it. I’ll see something on television about the pope or Rome and I’ll think, ‘He’s one of them....’”

“He’s not one of them. Priests aren’t supposed to have girlfriends.”

“The girlfriend is the part that isn’t weird. If he didn’t have her, then that would be strange. What man would choose to be alone if he could have her?”

“No man in his right mind.”

Laila tried to smile at him but Wes didn’t meet her eyes. For some reason it seemed he was hiding something from her. But he glanced her way again.

“I don’t blame him for being in love with her. I just wish, for her sake, she wasn’t in love with him.”

Wes said the words tentatively, as if he worried about giving offense.

“Don’t tell him I said this,” Laila found herself almost whispering, “but I’ve thought the same thing.”

“You have?” Wes looked at her with new eyes and in shock. “I thought—”

“I love him. Completely. He was a father to me and Gitte after our father was gone. But I love my aunt, too, and I can’t imagine how hard it is for her.”

“Hard?”

“In our house in Copenhagen, she’s his wife. We treat her like family because she is family. Everywhere else she goes, she’s just...”

“The mistress,” Wes finished the sentence for her, and she was glad he had. The word felt like treason to her.

“Yes, the mistress. She told me she fell in love with him when she was fifteen years old and loved him every day since the day they met. That’s almost twenty years now. And not once has he been able to publicly say they’re together. She’s his dirty secret. She’s something he has to hide. When I found out that she’d left him, I wasn’t surprised and I wasn’t angry. I was sad, but I understood why.”

“I’m glad you get it,” Wes said. “I didn’t want her to go back to him. For a lot of reasons. I feel like she thinks I’m the bad guy because I don’t want her in a relationship like that. She deserves better.”

“She does,” Laila agreed. “And he tried to give her more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tante Elle and I went for a walk together last time she came to visit. I asked her why she and my uncle never got married. I said I felt bad for her because she couldn’t be his wife. I asked her if she was mad at him for not leaving his job and marrying her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said being a priest was like being a writer or a healer or a parent. It was a calling, not a job. It wasn’t something you did, it was who you are. And she would no more ask him to quit being a priest than he would ever ask her to quit being a writer, or ask my mother to quit being a mother. She said that for Catholics the priesthood was a sacrament. Being a priest was written into his very DNA. She loved him and he was a priest, and if he quit the priesthood, he wouldn’t be him anymore. He’d give up so much of himself there would be nothing left of him to love. And then she told me something I’d never known....”

“What did she say?” Wes asked, seemingly clinging to every word she spoke. She’d never had anyone like him paying so much attention to her before.

“She said I shouldn’t judge him for not leaving the church and marrying her. He’d offered once and she said no.”

Wes went completely still. He didn’t even seem to be breathing. Why her aunt and uncle’s love life mattered to him so much, she couldn’t guess and didn’t want to. But she wasn’t stupid. Obviously Wes had feelings for her aunt. But it seemed to go deeper than a crush.

“He asked her to marry him and she said no,” Wes repeated.

“Yes, and that’s when she left him. She said she was scared she’d change her mind and say yes and he would leave the church for her. She said it was like hearing someone offer to commit suicide to prove their love. She left so he wouldn’t destroy the man she fell in love with.”

For a few minutes they sat side by side in silence as the evening faded out and became night.

“It’s crazy,” Wes finally said. “All this time I thought she left him because he wouldn’t stop being what he was for her.”

“He offered. She refused. She said she’d rather be the mistress of a priest than the wife of the ghost of a priest.”

Wes started to say something but she heard a woman’s voice calling her name.

“We’re here, Grace,” Laila said as Wes jumped off the log. Laila started to jump down, too, but Wes stood in front of her and held out his hand. She took his hand in hers and let him help her down. She probably would have landed okay even in the dark but she couldn’t turn down a chance to hold Wes’s hand, could she?

“What’s up?” Wes asked as Grace jogged into the clearing.

“Your uncle was wondering where you’d gone,” Grace said as the three of them retook the road toward the house.

“I needed to walk,” Laila said. “I was going crazy in that house.”

“I don’t blame you.” Grace gave her hand a quick squeeze, a kind and affectionate gesture that Laila appreciated even as part of her wished to feel her hand in Wes’s again. “But it’s late and your uncle wants us all under the same roof tonight.”

A car passed them and Wes watched as it drove away.

“Yeah? Well, then, where the hell is Kingsley going?”

21

THE QUEEN

N
ora spent the entire day in Søren’s childhood bedroom, searching it for anything she could possibly use against her kidnappers. Apart from the razor blade she found nothing else hidden away and for that she was almost grateful. Søren had made her promise to not think about, not to imagine, what had transpired between him and his sister. She wanted no reason to break that promise to him. Hopefully the one razor blade would be enough if Nora could keep it, save it, use it, if and when the time came.

The hours ticked by with excruciating slowness. She knew Marie-Laure was waiting for...something. Some move to be made by Søren or Kingsley...or perhaps even Nora herself. Marie-Laure had put the pieces into play. Now she sat back and waited for someone else to take their turn. But who?

An hour after nightfall, Nora heard footsteps outside her room. She’d been hearing them all day...random squeaks of the hardwood, the slight creak of leather soles. She knew one of Marie-Laure’s boys was out there making noise to scare her. It worked. With every sound she sat up straight as her heart hammered in her chest. She slept a little but not enough. Every sound the house made sent her into immediate fight or flight mode. The constant surges of adrenaline exhausted her. She wanted nothing more than to be at home in Søren’s bed and to sleep for weeks, sleep until every moment in this house felt like it was nothing more than the absurdity of a dream, and when she woke up, she would tell Søren, “I had the craziest dream last night—your wife was still alive and she came for me....” And he would laugh and tell her to stop eating Cajun food before bed. By noon the last embers of the dream would have burned out entirely, and she’d remember nothing of the dream except that she’d had it.

Nora smiled at the thought as the door opened and Damon stood staring down at her on the floor.

This was no dream.

“Story time,” he said. Nora stood up and reluctantly joined him in the hallway.

He followed behind her, his right hand in his pocket, his left hand resting like a silent threat on the back of her neck.

Deciding to test the waters, Nora cleared her throat and opened her mouth.

“Don’t,” he said before she could get a word out.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t even bother. You can threaten me, flirt with me, bribe me all you want, it won’t work.”

“True love, then, is it? You and her?”

“Not even close.”

“Do I get a hint?”

“Threaten me,” Damon said, “and I’ll laugh. Her dead husband made all his money smuggling drugs and guns. I used to work for him. He killed people for amusement when he got bored and he died a billionaire. No one you know is scarier than he was. No one you know is richer than she is. And as for the flirting, I’ve heard all about you. I’ve fucked Eastern European prostitutes with fewer miles on them than you. No thank you.”

“I do have a lot of STDs. Most of them raging and fatal.” Nora hoped she sounded slightly convincing with that. She didn’t have anything but they didn’t need to know that. She’d never been so grateful for her bad reputation in her life.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“What about the other guy? Any use bribing, fucking or threatening him?”

“No.”

“Same reason as you?”

“You were right the first time.”

Nora laughed mirthlessly.

“He’s in love with her? Well, how sweet. I know a good priest if they decide to get married.”

“I’m sure they’ll send you the invite. It can be a double ceremony. Their wedding. Your funeral.”

He pushed her hard through the door of Marie-Laure’s bedroom, hard enough she almost hit the floor, but she managed a graceful recovery and remained on her feet, her back to the bed.

“Très bien,”
Marie-Laure said from the bed. She sat in her nightgown and robe, her left foot propped up on a tissue as she painstakingly painted her toenails. “You’re very graceful. Were you ever a dancer?”

“I can do a mean Davy Jones ‘Daydream Believer’ shimmy. But no formal training.”

Marie-Laure shrugged. “Too bad. You’re short and that’s an asset for a ballerina. Not thin enough, though, and your breasts are too large.”

“Mother Nature’s a bitch.”

Marie-Laure capped her polish and stretched her leg out on the bed. Even at fifty years old, she still retained her dancer’s physique. She must work at it constantly to stay so lean and graceful. Marie-Laure might be thin and older than her, but Nora didn’t doubt for one second that she was strong enough to seriously hurt her.

“Have a seat.” Marie-Laure tapped the edge of the bed. She knew what was next and, sure enough, Damon brought out rope to bind her to the bedpost before leaving the two women alone in the room. “Did you have a nice day?”

Leaning back against the pillows, Marie-Laure gave her a broad innocent smile. One could almost believe they were nothing but two schoolgirls having a slumber party.

“Lovely day. Stared at the wall, stared at the ceiling, counted cobwebs.” Nora pulled on her bonds—rope only. Thank God for small mercies.

“You’ve probably stared at a lot of ceilings in your life.”

“Not too many. I like being on top. Except with Søren, and then it’s a lot of floor staring. Unless I’m blindfolded.”

“You have sex with my husband often?”

“I didn’t know he was your husband at that time he and I were fucking. You’re the one who faked your death. Can’t blame me.”

“I don’t blame you. I blame him, and I blame my brother.”

“They didn’t know you were alive, either.”

“I don’t blame them for not knowing. That was the plan. I blame them for not caring.”

Nora’s blood momentarily turned to ice in her veins. She felt as though she was standing on the edge of a cliff, maybe even the very cliff Marie-Laure had supposedly fallen from. But this time it would be her who would fall off it if she wasn’t careful.

“They did care,” Nora said, weighing her words.

“That’s not what you said earlier today. You said my revenge against them didn’t work. And you promised me a story to prove it. I want this story of yours.”

Fuck... Nora felt the wind rushing past her as the ground sped toward her. Marie-Laure had set a nice little trap and she’d fallen into it.

“I said your revenge didn’t work because it didn’t break up Kingsley and Søren. I never said they didn’t care.”

“It’s the same thing to me. If my love for someone had killed my brother, I would never want to see that person again.”

“Yes, I can tell how much you love Kingsley.”

Marie-Laure leaned forward and rested her elbows on her legs. With her chin on her hand and a dangerous glint in her eyes, Marie-Laure only responded with four words.

“Tell me the story.”

“You sure you want to hear a graphic narration of me having sex with your brother?”

“But of course. Leave us, Damon. She’s shy.”

Damon finished off Nora’s knots and left them alone in the bedroom. Marie-Laure reached into the nightstand and pulled out a gun. She laid it by the lamp and leaned back against the pillows. A nice little taunt. The gun lay pointed at Nora. Nora ignored it.

“Get comfortable,” Nora warned Marie-Laure. “This story, much like sex with Kingsley, takes a while.”

* * *

Four years...that’s how long Eleanor waited to have sex with Søren. Too long for her tastes but then again, knowing her, she would have let him have her the day they met. Stupid priest had scruples, however, and this weird idea that she should be fully mentally and emotionally prepared for what it meant to share his bed. He said it like that, too.
Share his bed.
So classy...respectful even. He never said anything about “fucking” her. He only swore when he wanted to deliberately provoke or shock someone. She, on the other hand, swore like a sailor with Tourette’s syndrome. She never told Søren how much she liked the way he talked to her about their private life, how it made her feel like a lady to have sex discussed in such discreet civilized terms. Of course, it wasn’t until they became lovers that she realized how much of a mindfuck that delicate talk of his was. Outside the bedroom, he was all euphemisms and elegance. Once she started “sharing his bed,” she discovered the gentleman outside the bedroom turned almost savage inside it, inside her. Sex with Søren was raw, brutal and merciless, and she’d loved it, reveled in it, couldn’t get enough of it, enough of him.

Three months after they’d become lovers, she lay across his strong stomach, spent from the beating he’d given her and bruised from the sex. She made the mistake of uttering a very dangerous sentence to a very dangerous man.

“I wish I had two of you,” she said, dropping a kiss onto the center of his chest as she traced his rib cage with her fingertips. “I want this every night.”

All she meant by it was that she loved him, that she loved being with him, submitting to him, seeing the real him that he kept hidden away from the world and who only came out at night.

But instead of laughing at her insatiable desire for him, teasing her about her libido that rivaled any teenage boy on earth, he simply said, “I’ll speak to Kingsley.”

Nora, then still Elle or Eleanor, sat up straight in bed and stared down at him.

“You’re not kidding, are you, sir?”

“Of course I’m not.”

She shook her head and tears filled her eyes.

“I belong to you,” she whispered, and she put meaningful and desperate emphasis on the “you.”

At that the hint of a smile appeared on the corner of Søren’s perfect lips and within seconds she found herself flat on her back underneath him, her hands pinned over her head by his steel-strong arms.

“I’m a Jesuit,” he reminded her. “We share everything in common.”

Using his knees he pushed her thighs wide open and shoved two fingers inside her. As always her body responded to his touch even against her will.

“I don’t want to be with anybody but you. I waited for you.” She tried squirming away from him but he held her down hard and in place. There was nowhere to go.

“Kingsley’s been waiting for you almost as long as I have.” He lowered himself onto her and kissed her. At first she ignored the kiss, tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, but his mouth was too insistent, her heart too willing. She gave into the kiss, gave into him. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”

So it was decided entirely without consulting her feelings on the matter that the two of them would spend an evening at Kingsley’s the very next week. No amount of pouting and protesting would talk Søren out of it. Before they became lovers they’d talked at length about what her limits were. She had a hard time coming up with any. She knew he wouldn’t shave her head or cut off her arms or stab her in the heart. So she’d told him that she trusted him, that she knew he would never push her past her breaking point.

“I will never take you anywhere you don’t want to go,” he promised, taking her hand in his, raising it to his lips to kiss her palm. “But there will be times you might not enjoy the trip there. Will you still go with me?”

She’d answered simply with “Anywhere.” A mistake, possibly, because it appeared “anywhere” meant Kingsley’s bedroom.

* * *

“You let him force you to have sex with my brother?” Marie-Laure interrupted, pulling Nora out of the past.

“Your use of ‘let’ and ‘force’ are a tiny bit contradictory,” Nora reminded her. “Søren owned me. I was his property. I was his property because I let him own me. It was my choice to let him own me. Once he owned me, though, he
owned
me.”

“You didn’t want to be with Kingsley?”

“I didn’t
want
to want to,” she said, smiling. “I had this idea in my head that once you fell in love with someone and they loved you back, that was it. There was no one else, right? That’s how it should be. Don’t judge me. I was so young and foolish.”

“You were in love.”

“I am in love. Søren was kind enough to show me the folly of that sort of thinking early on. One person for your entire life? One? Ridiculous. Who needs that kind of pressure? Expecting someone to fulfill all your needs is blasphemy. You’re expecting a human to be God for you.”

“You have a strange theology. My husband let my brother rape you and you make it about love.”

“Rape? Are you serious? Have you met your brother? I don’t think he’s physically capable of raping someone. He speaks and your panties spontaneously combust.”

“You didn’t want to be with him and my husband made you. That’s not rape?”

“A rape victim can’t say a single word to get her rapist to stop. I could have. I had my safe word, and I chose not to use it.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to disappoint Søren.”

“That’s all?”

“Well...and admittedly, I’d always been attracted to Kingsley.”

“Was he attracted to you? My brother?”

“You sound skeptical.” Nora raised her chin and stared down at Marie-Laure.

“I am. But I suppose I was wrong thinking my brother had good taste in women.”

“He has amazing taste in women. He’s probably fucked the thousand most beautiful women on earth.”

“And you.”

Nora laughed, low and throaty. Catfights...she didn’t get into them often. The women in her world were usually too scared of her to even blink wrong in her direction. She might not play this game often but that didn’t mean she didn’t know how.

“You know what they used to call me in the Underground?”

“Tell me.”

“The White Queen. The subs wore white. I wore it better than anyone. The other submissives were scared of me. They took orders from me like I was a Domme. Being Søren’s property made me something special in that world. I was envied, feared and desired. And you better fucking believe your brother wanted me. And he wanted Søren. That night we went to his house...he got us both.”