The Angel

“I will do whatever I must so you can come back to me.”

“I know you will, sir.”

“And we will keep our promise to each other.”

Nora reached up and touched his face.

“I will die in my collar.” She repeated her part of the pledge.

Søren turned his head and kissed the inside of her palm.

“And I will die in mine.”

Suzanne sat cross-legged on her sofa with her laptop open on her legs. She’d started a file on her computer called Asterisk and in it she was putting all the information she could dig up on Sacred Heart and Father Marcus Stearns. So far, it was a very small file. Patrick had gotten almost no additional information on the boy who’d attempted suicide in the sanctuary. No charges had been filed and the boy apparently still attended church there. What sort of kid would keep going back to the same church that had inspired him to kill himself? she wondered. Who was this priest who had that sort of pull on him? It turned her stomach just to imagine it.

She was dangerously close to thinking about her brother Adam when her cell phone rang. She checked the number. Patrick, of course.

“Any luck?” he asked as soon as she answered.

“Not much. This guy is a ghost. What about you?”

She heard a laugh on the other end of the line.

“What?” she demanded.

“I’m about to go into a dinner meeting so I can’t really talk. But you’ll never guess who goes to Sacred Heart. Not just goes but apparently never misses Sunday Mass.”

Suzanne exhaled noisily. She didn’t have time for games.

“I don’t know. The Dalai Lama?”

“Even better—Nora Sutherlin.”

Suzanne’s eyes widened and her stomach did a small flip.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’ve gotta run. I’ll call you back tomorrow. But no, I’m not kidding you.”

Hanging up, Suzanne simply stared out at her living room for a long time. She closed her computer and headed over to her bookcase. Scanning the titles, she finally found what she was looking for—a book entitled The Red. On the cover was a picture of a woman’s beautiful pale hands tied with a bloodred silk ribbon. The author? Nora Sutherlin. It was the story of a woman who owned a failing art gallery called The Red and the mysterious man who shows up and offers to save it in return for her submitting to him in every possible way for one year. Lurid and graphic with some of the most explicit sex scenes she’d ever read, The Red was possibly one of Suzanne’s favorite novels. Not that she ever told anyone that.

A fourteen-year-old boy attempting suicide in the middle of the sanctuary … the world’s most infamous erotica author attending Mass with the constancy of a nun … and that mysterious asterisk by the name of its priest.

“Jesus,” she breathed. “What kind of church is this?”

4

Søren made love to Nora twice more that night. He pulled her to the edge of the bed and took her while she lay on her stomach and he stood behind her. And after that they lay side by side, her back to his chest while he moved slowly and gently in her. As he thrust into her, he whispered how deeply he loved her, how much he would miss her and what he would do to her when she came back to him again. When Nora came the final time, she did so through tears.

“Hush, little one … it’s only for two months,” he promised her as he kissed the tears off her face.

She clung to him and cried even harder. “But I miss you already.”

Her tears dried, Nora lounged before the fireplace in the living room—Søren had built a low fire to warm her up again—and smiled at the sight before her. As if Søren hadn’t tortured her enough already tonight….

Studying the board on the floor before her, peering at it first through her left eye and then her right, Nora reached out and moved a pawn two spaces forward.

“Little one,” Søren said with thinly disguised disgust. “That was pointless.”

“Well, it wasn’t a step backward so we’ll consider it a step forward. Besides, I’m only playing chess with you to keep you awake longer,” she admitted. “I’m terrible at this game and you know it.”

“I do indeed.” Søren moved his queen. Checkmate.

“Fine. You win,” Nora conceded. “I’d kick your ass if we were playing Battleship though. That’s my game.”

“Battleship?”

Nora smiled. Søren had had such an unusual childhood that things she took for granted—silly board games, Saturday morning cartoons—Søren had no experience with. At age five he’d been sent to England to attend school. An unpleasant incident with a fellow student forced him back to America at age ten. A far more unpleasant incident at his home ended with him being shipped off to a Jesuit boarding school in rural Maine when he was only eleven. But it was there among the priests and monks that Søren found not only his salvation, but his calling. That and he met a certain young half-blood Frenchman who would change the course of his life forever.

“Battleship. It’s this stupid game Wes and I played when we were procrastinating from doing our work.”

“You so rarely speak of Wesley, Eleanor. And yet so many memories you have of him make you smile. Why don’t you talk about him more?”

Why didn’t she talk about him more? Nora shook her head and stared at the chessboard. Looking back she still wasn’t sure why she’d asked Wesley to move in with her, other than he’d intimated that he might have to move back home to Kentucky as Yorke was a prohibitively expensive liberal-arts college.

But as soon as Wesley was in her home, she’d begun to wonder how she’d ever lived without him. Before Wesley, she’d practically lived at Kingsley’s Manhattan town house. She worked in the city so much that several days would pass before she’d return to her home in Connecticut. Once Wesley was there, however, she’d find herself racing back to her house after a job, throwing on normal clothes and curling up on the couch with him.

Nora would never forget the day she got tired of writing in her office and had taken her laptop to the kitchen just for a change of scenery. Wesley joined her in the kitchen and sat opposite her at the table. He opened his laptop and started working on a paper due in his European History class that week. Nora remembered casting furtive glances over the top of her computer at him. He had brown eyes with little flecks of gold in them and dark blond hair that fell over his forehead. Only eighteen then, he was utterly adorable, and sometimes she had to practically sit on her hands to keep from reaching out and grabbing him when he walked past her. They were just roommates, just friends, she always had to remind herself. And Wesley was a good Christian kid and a virgin. One night with her wouldn’t just take his virginity, it would steal his innocence too. But that day all she felt for him was affection. Affection and amusement.

“Wes, I’m going to say it,” she said, glancing at their back-to-back open laptops.

“Don’t say it, Nora,” Wesley said as he kept typing.

“I have to say it.”

“Do. Not. Say. It,” Wesley ordered, trying and failing to sound intimidating. His sexy hybrid Kentucky-Georgia accent made her toes curl but it did not lend itself to intimidation. “If you say it, I’m leaving.”

“Wesley …”

“Nora …”

Nora took a deep breath, pretended to type something and whispered, “Wes?”

“What?”

“You sunk my Battleship!”

At that Wesley stood up and left the kitchen. Nora dissolved into giggles as Wesley threw on his coat, grabbed his car keys and walked out of the house. She was still laughing half an hour later when Wesley returned carrying a just-purchased Battleship game with him. Nora closed their computers and they set up the game on the kitchen table. She beat him soundly, two to one. After that, every time one or both of them needed a break from work, they’d sneak up behind the other, yell, “You sunk my Battleship,” and the game would be on.