The Saint: The Original Sinners Book 5 (22 page)

“I think she was,” Eleanor said. “I liked this, what we did.
Loved it.”

“I won’t lie to you, Eleanor. It’s been several weeks since
I’ve hurt anyone. When you’re starving nearly any food will do. When you’re
sated it takes much more to tempt you.”

“Is that a fancy way of saying I got off easy tonight?”

“I’m saying I got off easy tonight.”

Eleanor laughed. God, this felt good, being intimate with him.
Naked. Talking. Laughing. Perfect.

Søren dropped a kiss on her sore shoulder.

“Tonight I gave you bruises, Little One. Someday it will be
welts. It will be cuts and burns. I would never do anything to you that you did
not want to do. Unfortunately, you may not know you dislike a certain act until
you’ve tried it.”

“Eventually you’re going to have to realize I’m not scared of
you.”

“Eventually you’ll have to realize that you need to be for both
our sakes. Say ‘yes, sir’ if you understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now put your clothes on before I change my mind.”

“Change your mind about what?” She slid off the bed and found
her pajamas. It amazed her how comfortable she felt being naked around
Søren. She didn’t even like taking her shirt off at the doctor’s
office.

“About not taking your virginity in the bed where I lost mine
without having any say in the matter.”

Eleanor’s heart plummeted at his words, spoken so simply and
without any hint of the sorrow and shame she knew he must have felt that night.
She came to him and wrapped her arms around him. He sat on the bed. She stood in
front of him. Finally they were the same height.

“I want our first time in your bed at the rectory. Can we do
that?” she asked.

“Yes. But it won’t be any time soon. You may feel ready for it,
but I know I’m not. Tonight shouldn’t have happened. I don’t regret it and I
certainly don’t want you to feel upset or ashamed about anything we did
together. But the consequences for what we did could be enormous.”

“We’ll wait, then, as long as you think we should, until you
feel safe.”

“I’ll feel more safe when you start feeling less safe.”

“I’ll work on that,” she promised, kissing his neck.

“This is why I want you to let Kingsley show you a few things.
You might understand the risk involved better.”

“He won’t try to lose his watch inside me, will he?”

“I’m not entirely certain he wears a wristwatch.”

“That’s a relief.”

Søren raised a hand to her hair and brushed it off her
face.

“You are too young for what I’ll ask of you. The pain is one
thing, but the time, the intense commitment to me I’ll ask of you, is another. I
love you too much to steal your youth from you no matter how much I want it for
myself. You need to focus on your life. You need to go to college. You need to
have a life outside of the church and away from me. You need to meet
people....”

He paused then and let those words hover in the air between
them. Meet people? What people? Before she could ask, he continued.

“The stronger and smarter and more independent the person, the
better he or she is at submitting without losing themselves. I was with someone
once a long time ago who would have died at my command. It terrified me to be
loved that much. I’ll need you to help me stay in control.”

“I can do that. Order me to die for you.”

“Eleanor.”

“Try me,” she said, digging her fingers into the back of his
hair. She had no idea when she’d get the chance to be alone with him like this
again, to touch him so intimately again. She wanted to drink in every precious
second of him.

“Die for me,” he ordered, his face a mask of seriousness.

“Go fuck yourself,” she replied, and kissed the tip of his
nose.

He laughed and pulled her close to him.

“Was that the right answer?”

“It was.”

Eleanor relaxed into the embrace, tears ready to fall from her
eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she began. “I mean, I’m sorry about what happened to you
when you were a kid.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m not. I’m sorry for what happened to
Elizabeth but not sorry for me. It took years to come to a sense of peace about
it, but that I am here with you in my arms means I can repent of nothing in my
past that brought me to this moment.”

“Thank you. I guess I should say the same. We might not be here
if I hadn’t stolen those cars.”

“Don’t let that be an excuse to ever do it again.”

“I promise. I’m a saint from now on.”

“I don’t believe a word of that.”

She laughed softly and held him even closer.

“I’m glad you finally told me what you are,” she said. “I like
knowing I’m not the only one with a fucked-up family and some embarrassing stuff
in my past.”

Søren tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and kissed
her forehead.

“When I was eighteen,” Søren began, “I left the Jesuit
school that had been my home for eight years. I was leaving for Europe, to
seminary in the fall. Before I left, I came here one more time.”

“Here? This house?”

“This house. I knew I would be gone for ten years. I didn’t
want my father beguiling another young woman into marrying him. I...”

“What? Tell me. You can tell me anything.”

“I came here at night. I knocked my father unconscious and
castrated him. I couldn’t bring myself to kill him, but I could prevent him from
remarrying and having more children that he would damage. He never knew it was
me. I was on my way to Europe by the time he woke up.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“You wanted to know who I was. That I have the capacity to
cause that sort of harm is part of who I am. To my everlasting shame, I don’t
regret it.”

She laid both hands on each side of his face and looked him in
the eyes.

“I’m proud of you,” she said. “If I were you, I would have done
the same thing.”

“Thank you for loving me, Little One. You restore my
faith.”

She pushed close to him again but she could sense him pulling
back from her, and she wasn’t ready to let him go yet.

“Go to bed, Eleanor. You need sleep. So do I.”

“Can I sleep with you? Just sleep, I mean?”

“Not tonight. Not in this house.”

“But someday?”

He slapped her hard on the bottom, hard enough she yelped. The
yelp turned into a laugh. He pulled her even tighter to him.

“If you choose, Little One, I can own you. You would be my
property, mine alone.”

“Of course you can own me. You always have. You always will.”
She made the pledge without thinking. She no more needed to think about her
words than she did about breathing. Yes, he could own her. Breathe in. Breathe
out. He always had.

“But not yet,” she said.

“I’ll leave first.” Søren released her from his arms.
“Wait a few minutes and then go straight to bed.”

He kissed her quick on the lips and walked to the door.

At the door he paused with his hand on the knob.

“Little One, you should know something else.”

She sat back on the bed and pulled her knees to her chest.

“What is it?”

“What you know of me, what you’ve seen, this is only one small
part of me. There are far less likable aspects to my character than what I’ve
allowed you to see. If you don’t believe me, you can ask Kingsley.”

“What should I ask him?”

“Ask him to tell you why you should be afraid of me.”

“What will he tell me?”

“Nothing. But ask him anyway.”

She nodded although she didn’t understand.

“Try to sleep. I’d like you to come to the funeral tomorrow.
You’ll meet Elizabeth, so prepare yourself.”

“Is she okay? I mean, after all that happened to her.”

Søren crossed his arms over his chest.

“She wants to have children,” he said. “More than anything. I
doubt she’ll ever date or marry, but she does want to be a mother desperately.
She was doing well until recently. Medical tests revealed she can’t have
children. What our father did to her, it had consequences.”

“She can’t have kids?”

Søren shook his head.

“She did not take the news well,” he said and she heard a
deeper meaning in his words. “But I have faith in her. Try to have compassion
for her.”

“I do. I will.”

“Good girl. Go to sleep.”

“Yes, sir. Sir?”

“Yes, Little One?”

“Will you say it again? Please?”

He smiled at her. “In Danish or English?”

“You already said it in English. Let’s go for Danish.”

Søren walked back to where she sat on the bed. He took her
face in his hands and kissed her long and deep.

“Jeg elsker dig, min lille en.”

He kissed her again, told her good-night and slipped into the
hallway.

Eleanor collapsed back onto the bed. Staring up at the ceiling
she ran her hands over her upper thighs, feeling the new tenderness in them.
Touching the bruises left on her by Søren and lying in the bed where he’d
penetrated her with his finger was like lying in a bed of fire. She slid her
hand into her shorts and started to tease her clitoris again. Søren told
her to wait a few minutes before returning to bed. Getting herself off while
imagining Søren fucking her would certainly take a minute or two. She came
again quickly, quietly, trying not to moan aloud as her cervix bucked inside her
and her vaginal muscles contracted onto themselves.

She dragged herself off the bed and left the room as quietly as
she could. In the doorway she glanced back at the bed and had a vision of it
burning. That was what she’d felt lying on it—fire. She shut the door behind her
and crept down the hallway.

Careful of the darkness, she headed toward her room. As she
passed into the main hallway, she heard voices. Next to a window, she made out
the outline of two people. Hiding in the shadows she moved in closer. She saw
Søren and a woman speaking softly, their heads bowed as if in prayer.

“I’m not sorry,” the woman whispered. “I know that isn’t much
of a confession, but I’m not. At most I’m sorry I’m not sorry.”

Søren crossed his arms over his chest as if wanting to
hide behind them like a shield. He looked up into the woman’s eyes.

“I’m not sorry, either.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, my God...”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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