SOUTH
As soon as they entered the guesthouse, Nora got on her laptop and on her phone. For some reason, Kingsley wasn’t answering his private line. She tried calling his assistant and got nothing but the cryptic runaround. Kingsley—he was just the man she needed for this job.
“Nora, let it go,” Wesley said as she tried Kingsley’s hotline again.
“He’s going to answer.” Nora hit the number on her cell phone again. “It’s the hotline. He always answers the hotline. I’ve heard that man fucking so many times, I’ve lost count, because no matter what he’s doing or who he’s doing, he always answers his hotline.”
“Stop calling him. If Spanks for Nothing died from electrocution or something, the investigators will figure it out and fine whoever needs to be fined.”
“But that’s Talel’s horse.” Nora turned to Wesley, who sat on the corner of his bed, watching her where she sat on the floor. “I know Talel. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less electrocute a horse.”
Wesley got off the bed and stood in front of her.
“Look, Nora, I know he’s a friend of yours and that’s great. But horse racing’s a rough business. It’s not all silks and Millionaires’ Row. It’s brutal and dangerous and messy.”
“But Talel…” Nora started scrolling through her cell files. Surely she had Talel’s number in here somewhere. She had to talk to him about today. She knew him. Biblically, even. He wanted to be hurt—that was his kink. But to hurt another? Never. She refused to believe that.
“Talel’s a millionaire horse owner and a kinky freak like the rest of your friends. He’s not a saint, okay? You know how you can tell if a Thoroughbred mare has been bred?”
Nora heard the barely restrained anger in Wesley’s voice.
“No. How?”
“Because the mare has scar tissue and visible stitching under her vagina. Yeah. Fact. They cut the mare open so it can take more stallion. Then she gets stitched up. Then cut again for the next breeding. Then stitched up. Then cut again. Over and over.”
Nora clamped a hand over her mouth in disgust. “You’ve got to be—”
“Kidding? No. I’ve seen it myself. That’s just part of the shit that goes on in this Sport of Kings. Your best buddy Spanks for Nothing could have lived thirty years or more. But either someone wanted some insurance money off him, or wanted him to have a few more wins to get those stud fees up there. You saw a horse, a pet. Talel and every other horse owner sees a dollar sign. Lots of dollar signs. Horses are just like race cars to these people. You crash the car, you call the insurance company and get a check. I don’t like it, either, but that’s how it is.”
Nora’s stomach tightened into a hard fist of guilt. “Race cars aren’t alive. They can’t feel pain. They…”
“Now you know why I’m not all into the family business.”
“Yeah, I can see that. I’m sorry, Wes. It’s just, Talel and I go way back and he’s a good—”
“You slept with him, didn’t you?”
Wesley asked the question without a hint of malice in his voice, and no accusation, either. Only sadness. She would rather he’d called her a whore to her face like his father had.
“Yes, I did. A few years ago. He gave me my Aston Martin.”
For a moment Wesley didn’t speak. Nora only stared at him as he seemed to search for words. She’d rarely seem him so somber and so silent. Back when they’d lived together, he’d joked with her constantly, teased her constantly. And she’d gloried in his young male attention. But Wesley wasn’t a teenage boy with a hard-on for an older woman anymore. He’d admitted he loved her, still loved her after fifteen months apart. And he’d had his chance to have sex with his beautiful older girlfriend and hadn’t taken it. No schoolboy crush this—Wesley loved her. And she’d left Søren, left her collar, for Wesley. For how long, she didn’t know. But Søren had forbidden her to run from him, and the second she’d been out of his sight she’d kicked off her high heels and raced as if the world depended on her getting to Wesley in record time. She loved him, too.
Whether she wanted to or not.
“Wesley?”
“You know,” he said, giving her a broken smile, “I could afford to buy you all the Aston Martins you want.”
Nora tossed her cell phone aside and pushed her laptop onto the floor. Coming to her feet, she started to reach for him, but he took a step back.
“I’m gonna go feed the catfish. I’ll be back.”
He turned on his heel and abruptly left the room.
Looking around the empty space, Nora could only repeat, “Feed the catfish?”
She started to follow him, but her cell phone rang—Ravel’s Bolero.
“King, thank God. I’ve been calling you all day. Well, for the last five minutes. Where the hell are you?”
“Maine, ma chérie,” Kingsley answered in his most debonair voice. “I see you called me many times. How much do you miss me?”
“Not a damn bit. But I have missed your connections. Guess who I ran into today?”
“Talel.”
Nora held out her hand and stared at the phone a moment before putting it back to her ear. “I hate when you do that, know more about my life than I do.”
“I pay attention, ma chérie. You, on the other hand, are a writer.”
“Point taken. Anyway, his horse died. And it might have been electrocuted. I don’t think—”
“Chérie…” Kingsley exhaled heavily and Nora heard something in his voice she rarely if ever heard—frustration. “I’m afraid the death of a horse is the least of my worries right now. Your priest and I have much graver concerns.”
“But—”
“It’s for your own good, Maîtresse. Let it go. It’s only a horse. They make an excellent entrée.”
“But—”
“Nora?”
“What?”
“You’re on your own.”
And with those truly unhelpful words, Kingsley hung up.
Nora stared at the phone for a few seconds before tossing it onto the floor and racing after Wesley.
Feed the catfish? Did that mean he was actually going to…feed the catfish?
Outside the guesthouse, Nora paused and looked around. Where the hell had Wesley gone? She found a cobblestone path at the back of the house and decided to follow it. A low stone fence bordered the path. As she walked, Nora thought about the past couple of days with Wesley. Everything had been perfect and a wreck at the same time.
Their first hours together they’d done nothing but talk nonstop about the past fifteen months, everything that had happened while they’d been apart. Fifteen months had separated them when they’d embraced each other in the White Room at The 8th Circle. But as the hours passed and they told story after story, that gap between them closed. Nora told Wesley about reuniting with Søren, how weird it had been those first few weeks as his property again. The night they’d shown up at The 8th Circle with her in her collar again, the entire club had stared, aghast. She’d been so nervous, so uncomfortable—she’d been a Mistress, and now she’d become Søren’s submissive once more. How the mighty had fallen. But then she’d seen it—money changing hands. High-fives. Fingers pointing. And lots of told-you-so’s and I-knew-it’s. People had been making bets about when she’d go back to Søren. It had never been a question of if she’d surrender to him. Merely when.
And Wesley, he’d told her about what had happened in his world during those fifteen months after he moved out of their house and back to Kentucky. Nothing…nothing had happened, according to him. He’d finished out the school year in a daze, packed his things, gave away his beat-up yellow VW and flew back to Kentucky. A couple days a week he worked at a local hospital as an orderly, just to keep his head on straight about all the money and privilege in his world, and all the poverty and suffering everywhere else. The rest of the time he helped out on the farm. The Rails consisted of several thousand acres littered with million-dollar Thoroughbreds. The farm had not one but two equine hospitals on the premises, dozens of barns that were as palatial as mansions, even swimming pools…for the horses. Wesley admitted he felt more comfortable, more at home, in his room at Nora’s little Tudor cottage in Connecticut than he ever did on his parents’ farm. That’s why he hadn’t told her about the money, the farm, the fame that he wore like an ill-fitting suit in racing circles. That’s why he’d bought a used Bug to drive in Connecticut, and hadn’t brought his Shelby Mustang with him to school. That’s why he’d left his Gucci at home in Kentucky and had worn clothes from the GAP and Old Navy while at Yorke. And when Nora had decided to become a Dominatrix again, and Wesley had offered her every penny he had, that’s why she should have taken it.
Nora had fallen asleep in the middle of Wesley’s chest their first night back together. They hadn’t kissed, hadn’t made love…only talked. But their words had brought them back together that night. And words, being the powerful force they were, had tonight pulled them apart.
As she neared the end of the cobblestone path, Nora inhaled the scent of warm stagnant water and algae. Ahead of her she saw a high spotlight shining onto a wooden dock that overlooked a large pond. And at the end of the dock stood an ornate gazebo, as well-appointed as her own house back in Connecticut, with wild ivy twisting up its sides and half a dozen burning citronella candles keeping the mosquitoes away. Wesley stood at the edge of the dock, the gazebo behind him, staring out across the black water. A thousand stars shimmered across the still surface.
“So…” Nora came out onto the dock and stood at his side. “Feeding the catfish?”
He didn’t look at her when he nodded. “Yup. Watch this.”
He picked up a metal scoop of what looked like dog food and tossed it across the pond.
“Good arm,” Nora said. The dog food had arced high in the air and now floated on the surface thirty feet out from the dock.
“That’s not the cool part. This is.”
“What is—oh, my God, what was that?” Nora heard a loud splash and saw the water start to churn.
“The catfish.” Wesley smiled. “Damn city girl.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “That’s so…holy crap, there’s millions of them.”
The water began to writhe with what seemed like hundreds of long brown bodies flipping and flopping and turning in the water.
“Only about a hundred, I think.” Wesley threw another scoop of food across the water. “Can’t remember how many they counted last time. They sleep on the bottom all day, come up at night. Especially if you feed them. We’ve got a couple albino ones in there. You see a gray one anywhere?”
“No mini Moby Dicks.” Nora dropped to her hands and knees at the edge of the dock and studied the water. Long scaly whiskers peeked out of it, far cuter and less intimidating than shark fins. “Wes, they’re so cool. Can I have one?”
She reached out and touched the back of one of the writhing catfish. It felt warm and clammy against her finger. Squealing as it splashed her, Nora jumped back up to her feet.
“You can have them all.”
“Thank you. I’ll just keep them in the pond for now.”
“Good plan.”
Wesley sat the metal scoop back down, crossed his arms over his chest and looked up into the night. Nora followed his gaze. They didn’t seem to be staring at the moon or even the stars, but the few dark places in between.
The fish ate their fill and the water went still once more. Nora found herself holding her breath and not quite knowing why.
Wesley inhaled and exhaled deeply and slowly.
“Nora…I should hate you. You know that, right?”
She glanced at him and nodded. Turning her eyes up to the sky, she found one bright star and studied it. “Yes. I know.”
“You electrocuted people. I’m trying to wrap my mind around that.”
“Don’t try. There’s no need to. It’s just part of the job. Some people like being flogged. Other people like being whipped. Some people like having electrical currents run through their bodies. Everybody has their kinks.”
“I don’t.”
“Not being kinky is a kink in itself.”
“Thanks for not telling me again how vanilla I am.”
“Wesley…why am I here?”
“We’re feeding the catfish. That’s why you’re here.”
“You know what I mean.”
He shook his head. “If you don’t know why you’re here, then I certainly can’t tell you.”
Nora laughed awkwardly. She never knew how to handle Wesley when he got like this—so distant that two feet between them seemed like two miles.
“It’s nice here. Beautiful. I like the gazebo.”
“My parents got married in there.” Wesley turned and looked at it. “Right under that arch. All the guests lined up on the dock like some kind of honor guard. Wedding of the year, they said. They said I’d get married out here, too.”
Wesley walked to the arched entryway of the white gazebo and stared down the long dock. “I used to come out here to get away from everything. It was a nice safe place to think about you. Or try not to think about you, really.”
“I thought about you every day we were apart,” Nora confessed. “Every single day.”
“Me, too. No matter how hard I tried not to. I’d come here and stand and look at the stars. And when I turned around I’d see you walking down the deck toward me.”
“I did that tonight.”
“Not the way I dreamed of.” He smiled shyly. “In my dreams…you were in a wedding dress.”
Nora flinched, but only on the inside. “I think I’d look a little silly in a big white wedding dress.”
“Not in my dreams. In my dreams…you looked beautiful.”
She took a step closer to him, wanting to touch him, but suddenly afraid to.
“Wes, you shouldn’t love me this much. I’m a lot of things, but good for you is not one of them. I don’t know why I’m here other than I can’t be anywhere else right now. I couldn’t leave if I tried.”
“Not yet, anyway. But you will leave again, won’t you?”
Nora exhaled heavily. “Someday you’ll learn not to ask questions you don’t want the answer to.”
“No reason not to ask the questions. You can’t hurt me anymore, Nora. Not more than you already have. You broke me.”
“I never meant to hurt you. I was trying to save you.”
“Save me? From what?”
“Me. My life. My world.”
“I didn’t need saving. I just needed you. I needed our life together in our house. That was our house, you know. You bought it—I know that. But it was ours.”
A lump swelled in Nora’s throat and she had to swallow twice to get rid of it.
“I could have bought your house from you with the money I had in my checking account,” Wesley continued. “That’s pocket change in the Railey family. You don’t know this, you probably didn’t even notice, but every now and then, when you’d send in your mortgage payment to the bank…I’d take the check and tear it up. And I’d make the payment myself, just because I could. So yeah, it was our house.”
Nora didn’t try to speak again. She wasn’t actually sure if she could.
“And you kicked me out. For Søren. You made me leave after living with you for a year and a half. After doing your dishes and cooking your meals and cleaning up your office and carrying you to bed after you passed out from either too much wine or too much writing…or both…I was gone. As if all that meant nothing to you.”
Finally, Nora found her voice. “It meant everything to me. I just…Wesley…” She closed her eyes to obliterate the stars. “You were eighteen years old the day I met you.”
“Seventeen.”
“What?”
“I was seventeen. Birthday’s in September, remember? I turned eighteen during the second week of classes.”
Nora pressed her hand to her stomach. “Seventeen…not even old enough to vote. Seventeen the day I met you, the first day of class. Kingsley called me that morning. I was hungover and on top of Griffin Fiske when the phone rang. One of Kingsley’s best clients was the academic dean of your old school.”
Wesley laughed coldly. “I didn’t want or need to know that.”
“You need to know this. Kingsley called me and ordered me to Yorke, to your school. The guy who was supposed to teach that freshman creative-writing class had a heart attack. They need a sub…I mean, a substitute. I was the one writer they could get on such short notice. God, that was a fucking awful morning. Fighting with Kingsley about the job, fighting with Griffin about how I’d never let him top me, half-sick from a few too many shots the night before…and then my old editor at Libretto sent me seventeen pages of changes on my book. Seventeen fucking pages. I told her she had me confused with Nora Roberts—I wrote smut. I got my six hard fucks in the book. Take it or leave it.
“Bad day. Very bad day. All I wanted that day…all I desperately fucking wanted, was Søren. I ached for him. He would have made all the bad stuff go away. Had I been his that morning, he would have put the fear of God in Griffin, told Kingsley to find someone else, told me to shut up and do whatever my editor told me to do, and then he would have stripped me naked, put me into bed, pressed his beautiful naked body to mine and held me until I fell asleep and woke up human again.”
“I don’t want to hear this. I don’t—”
“Wesley, just listen. The day I met you started out horrible. So horrible all I wanted was to give up on the life I’d made for myself, and go back to Søren and live at his feet. You think he’s terrifying and dangerous. The truth is I was never safer than I was when I was with him. And when I left him…things got scary and they got ugly and they got hard. Some days I loved working for Kingsley. Some days I would nearly puke in my car after a session with a client who paid me to do things no one should have ever done, not for love or money. I was ready to do it, to go back to Søren. I was going to call him…that day. I’d go to your school and check out this stupid class, raise some hell in the hopes that they’d show me the door, and then I was going to call him and ask if I could meet him at the rectory. And once there, I’d give him my collar, get down on my knees and beg him to take me back. That was the plan. And it would have happened. No doubt in my mind. Except for one thing.”
Wesley tore his eyes from the night sky and looked at her.
“What?” he whispered.
Nora smiled.
“I saw you.”
Finally, Nora silenced Wesley.
“I saw you, my Wesley. And I just…forgot. I forgot I was going to go back to him. Totally slipped my mind. And for the rest of that day, after that first class, you were all I could think of. Those big brown eyes of yours and that smile and the way you looked at me like…like—”
“Like I’d never seen anything like you before and didn’t think I ever would again, so I better not take my eyes off you for one second.”
“Yeah.” Nora sighed. “Just like that. And I didn’t even remember to go back to Søren the next day. Or the next. I had you. Remember all those lunches we had in the cafeteria at Yorke? All those looks we got?”
“They couldn’t believe I was having lunch with my hot writing teacher and bringing my Bible with me.”
“Those were some good debates we had. I’m still sad, though, that I never converted you to liberation theology.”
“Too Methodist. Sorry.”
Nora laughed. Then the laugh faded and died. “You said you thought you’d have to leave Yorke. Scared the hell outta me. That’s why I asked you to move in.”
“I only said that hoping you’d say something about missing me. Winter break was coming up. I just wanted your phone number.”
“Well, you got that and then some.”
“More than I ever dreamed I’d get.”
“But still not enough?” Nora met his eyes and tried to smile.
Wesley rested his forehead against hers for the barest second. “That might be one of those questions you shouldn’t ask.”
“Wes, I…” And nothing. Nothing else came out. No words could heal the hole she’d bored in his heart.
“I’m going to bed,” Wesley said as he stepped back and away from her. “It’s late. I’m sorry I brought you down here. We should have stayed up north somewhere. I just wanted you to see my world. But it’s not as pretty as I thought it was.”
“You’re here. And that makes this beautiful country.”
Wesley said nothing, only looked back up at the night sky.
Nora reached out a hand to touch his arm and stopped without making contact. Funny…during those fifteen months apart she’d felt closer to him than she felt right now, only a foot away.
She took a step back. And another. Tomorrow…tomorrow would be better. Tonight they’d sleep and clear their heads if they could.
Three days in and Nora had to admit that things between them would never be like they used to be.
“Nora?”
She spun back around. Wesley turned the full force of his gaze onto her face. His eyes burned as bright as the candles in the gazebo.
“What is it, Wes?”
“I should hate you…but I don’t.”
Nora recognized the look in his eyes. She’d seen it in the eyes of dozens of men—the heat, the hunger, the need…. But never had it shone so sweet, so bright and so beautiful.
No, things would never be the same between them again. But they might be better.
For three years Wesley had loved her and wanted her. He’d even saved himself for her.
Three years…she wouldn’t make him wait another day longer.