Søren slid his bare leg over her hip and she said, “Stop.”

“Why?”

“You’ll hurt yourself,” she said as he ignored her stop. He rose up on his uninjured left arm, his right arm at her side. Even in the dark she could see his eyes watching her.

“I’m already hurt.” He dipped his head and kissed her. She didn’t say stop again.

She felt a thousand things as he kissed her—the fear of hurting him was first and foremost. Whenever she started to put her arms around his back she remembered his injuries and stopped herself. She placed her hands over her head and clung to the headboard instead of him. She felt other fears, as well. The fear of hurting herself. Kissing like this, deep kissing in bed at night, was the province of lovers, not ex-lovers. Ex-lovers could fuck on occasion without it meaning much of anything. But this was nothing but kissing and nothing but kissing was so much more than sex.

“Come back to me...” Søren whispered the words against her lips.

“I can’t.”

“It can’t snow indoors in August either, can it?” he asked as the magic snowflakes flickered and twinkled across the bed and over the ceiling and walls. He didn’t wait for an answer before kissing her again.

She pushed her hips against him. He wasn’t aroused. Of course not. Kissing wouldn’t arouse him unless he also hurt her. She only wished he knew that kissing her like this, as if she was the only woman in the world, hurt worse than a beating.

“If I come back to you, wearing your collar, submitting to you again, what’s to stop you from ordering me to give up everything I worked for—my name, my freedom, my job, my house, my whole life...?”

Søren ran the tip of his tongue from the base of her throat, up her neck and to her lips. Against them he whispered one word...

“Nothing.”

They were at an impasse. An impossible impasse not even General Hannibal and all the elephants in the world could traverse. She would not go back to him unless he let her be Nora. He would not take her back unless she became Eleanor again. They both wanted each other but apparently not enough to cede any ground to the other. Nothing left to do so Nora attempted retreat. Søren wouldn’t let her go, however. He twined their legs together, pressed his chest to her back. There would be no eluding his arms tonight, not that she wanted to. Tonight she was his prisoner. Tomorrow morning she would escape him again.

She slept fitfully, plagued by dreams of death, hers and his. She woke once with a start, disoriented in the darkness. The candle had burned itself out. The magic show was over. Next to her Søren slept, his eerily dark eyelashes resting lightly on his pale skin. He didn’t like being touched in his sleep but she couldn’t resist one small kiss on his slightly parted lips. He made the smallest sound in the back of his throat and she felt his erection against her thigh. She laughed softly, almost soundlessly, and laid her head back on the pillow. He couldn’t get hard from making out with her for half an hour, but let him fall asleep for a few hours and there it was...boys will be boys. Now she knew how Ruth felt lying next to Boaz on the threshing floor.

Her body vibrated with laughter as she remembered a better time. Søren’s eyelashes fluttered and opened. He moved on top of her and without thinking, Nora opened her legs to him. She was still slick and wet inside from her earlier arousal. Being near him, naked and in his bed, was the source of her aching arousal and when he penetrated her fully she cried out as much in surprise as pleasure. Nora took all of him she could into her. When it wasn’t enough she begged for more.

“Hurt me,” she murmured against his skin. “Please?”

“No.”

“Please...”

“No.” He kept thrusting, thrusting hard but not hard enough to hurt her. This must have tortured him as much as it tortured her. He needed pain, craved it, thrived on it. To deny her pain was to deny his pleasure.

He’d woken up hard. It happened sometimes, especially in the morning. But without more pain he might not be able to come. She feared he intended to punish her as she’d punished Kingsley—sex but no orgasm, coupling with no consummation.

“You slapped me our first night together.” She was so wet she felt it dripping onto the sheets beneath her, could hear it when he pulled back and pushed in. “You did it before you took my virginity.”

“I’ll do it again when you come back to me. Not before.”

“You’re only punishing yourself.”

“And yet it’s you who is begging...”

Nora shifted beneath him, tilting her hips so that his cock was in the deepest part of her, hitting her cervix painfully. Better. Her head fell back and she moaned. Yes...this is what she wanted from him...to be used, hurt, taken, ravished, impaled, invaded, breached and violated. She let herself be weak because he was so strong and to fight it would be futile. She didn’t want to fight it. She’d broken a teenage boy last night, taken his virginity, and she submitted to Søren as her penance. It was no great punishment to watch him fuck her, all the hardness of his body, his arms and stomach and long thighs, against and inside the softness of her. She couldn’t lose this...she needed it...she was so close...

“Please hurt me, sir...”

“No,” he said again. If there were a crueler word in the world than that one she’d never heard it.

Maybe his own pain was enough. It had to be hurting him, moving like this when half his back was black and purple. She lifted her hips again and again into his, seeking release. But it was too late. It was over. Søren pulled out of her, his erection already gone.

Nora lay panting, overwhelmed with the realization of what had just happened, what they’d just attempted. The failure hung over the bed like a poison cloud.

“You’re punishing me,” she said. The words sounded hollow in the room. They rang off the walls and back against the bed.

“I am.”

“Because I left you? Or because I won’t come back?”

“Because I can.”

“And you wonder why I left you...”

“Don’t lie to yourself, Eleanor. And don’t lie to me. The pain wasn’t why you left. The pain was why you stayed.”

She didn’t argue with him because she couldn’t. He turned his back to her and once more became a wall of silence, a wall of stone. Closing her eyes, Nora slipped her hand down her body and against her clitoris. He’d left her slick and sore and empty, and she had to come or she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She dipped her fingertip into her own wetness and touched herself until the pleasure hit its peak and her muscles contracted around the nothing inside her.

Spent now, she considered leaving. Leaving tonight, this minute. Getting up, getting dressed and walking out without another word. He’d fucked her and hadn’t finished to prove a point. When he was inside her it wasn’t his come or his cock she begged for but his pain. If she were to do something so foolish as to fall in love with someone vanilla, this was what she could expect...endless frustration. It would leave her as unfulfilled as her body was right now. It would leave her always wanting more.

She could leave. She should leave.

Or she could go back to sleep and leave him in the cold light of morning. That would hurt him more so that’s what she did.

When she woke again it was to sunlight in an otherwise empty bed. Not an empty house, however. She heard Søren’s voice but not only his voice.

In a panic she grabbed the nearest clothes she could find, one of his shirts, and threw it on. She crept over to Søren’s closet, shutting herself in as silently as she could.

Through an air duct she could hear the voices. Søren’s she recognized. The other she didn’t. It was a male voice, however. It could be another priest. Oh, that would be bad. Or the bishop. Worst-case scenario.

The voices stopped. Nora heard footsteps approaching. The closet door swung open.