The Prince (11 page)

“You’re good.”

Kingsley turned his head toward the source of the voice. Stearns stood in the doorway of the room.

Shrugging, Kingsley looked back up at the ceiling. His heart pounded in his chest, his breath quickened. He forced himself not to think about the reasons why.

“So are you. You played a lot in England?”

Stearns stepped into the room and came toward Kingsley’s bed.

“I did. But I haven’t played in a long time. I was ten when I left that school.”

Groaning, Kingsley sat up and crossed his legs. “This is why everyone hates you, you know. Because you’re so damn perfect. You haven’t played soccer in seven years and you’re better than me. I was scouted by the Paris Saint-Germain. That’s a professional team.”

Stearns didn’t say anything at first. Kingsley waited and stared.

“Everyone hates me?”

He didn’t sound hurt when he asked the question, but Kingsley immediately wanted to go back in time and take it back. He wanted to take everything back—the display of temper on the field, the angry words, the frustration that drove him closer and closer to the breaking point every day.

“Non, pas du tout,”
Kingsley said, exploding into a flurry of French. For some reason, he felt only in French could he apologize effusively enough. “No one hates you. I just said that out of…well, I don’t hate you. I just
wish
I hated you.”

Stearns came even closer. He sat on the bed opposite Kingsley.

“Why do you wish you hated me?” Stearns leveled a stare at him and Kingsley once again noted the dark lushness of his eyelashes and how they made his gray eyes seem even more impenetrable.

Kingsley sighed. He dropped the soccer ball on the floor between them. Gently, he toed the ball and let it roll toward Stearns. Stearns set his foot on top of it to hold it stationary.

“What are you?” Kingsley asked, not knowing what he meant by the question, but needing the answer.

Stearns seemed to understand the question even if Kingsley didn’t. He sighed and tapped the ball so it gently rolled toward Kingsley.

“Father Pierre, the priest who taught me French, he had a theory about me.”

“Was it that you’re the Second Coming of Christ? If so, I’ve already heard that one.”

Stearns said nothing, only glared at Kingsley with his lips a thin, disapproving line.

“I’m sorry. Seriously, tell me his theory. I want to know.”

“Father Pierre had a photographic memory. He had the Bible committed entirely to memory—French and English. He could recall nearly everything he’d ever read decades after one glance. Amazing.”

“So you have a photographic memory?”

Stearns shook his head. “No, not at all. It’s different for me. If I do something once, do it well, I know how to do it…completely, almost intuitively. If I kick a soccer ball, my body understands the game. I learned the scales on the piano and somehow knew how to play. Father Pierre believed I have photographic muscle memory.”

“Football involves your feet. The piano your hands. Father Pierre’s theory doesn’t explain how you’re so good at languages.” Kingsley tapped the ball and sent it back to Stearns.

“But it does. The tongue is a muscle.”

Stearns said the words simply. Of course. Of course the tongue was a muscle. But the implications of the words…that Stearns could use his tongue once for something—a kiss, perhaps—and would forever know the perfect way to kiss…

“I lied,” Kingsley said softly. “I do hate you.”

Stearns only smiled again. “Why?”

“You…” Kingsley stopped. “I think about you too much.”

“That is a problem.” Stearns rolled the ball to him once more.

“
Oui. Une grande probleme.
I should be thinking about so many things…school, my sister in Paris, my parents, Theresa, Carol, Susan, Jeannine…”

“Who are they?”

Kingsley smiled. “Girlfriends.”

Stearns eyes widened slightly. “All of them?”

Nodding, Kingsley answered, “
Oui.
Or were. Before I came here. They write me letters, though. Wonderful terrible letters. I could sell those letters at this school and make enough money to pay my own tuition here.” Kingsley wagged his eyebrow at Stearns. “These girls…they want me. I wanted them.”

“Wanted? Past tense?”

“Past tense.
Oui.
I can barely remember what they look like now. I want to believe it’s because of what happened that I forgot them. But it isn’t.” Kingsley glanced at Stearns and then back at the floor. He barely touched the ball with his toe and the ball rolled between Stearns’s feet.

“What happened to you?”

“The football team. American football, not real football,” Kingsley clarified. “I had this girl—beautiful girl. And she had a brother. A very large brother. He found out we were together, that I’d taken his sweet sister’s innocence…” Kingsley almost laughed out loud just saying the words. Theresa? Innocent? The girl had spread her legs for half the school before he’d gotten to her. But Theresa hadn’t just spread for Kingsley, she’d fallen in love with him. And when he’d slept with another girl the next night…then she went crying to her brother.

Kingsley told Stearns the entire story…the hand on the back of his neck in the parking lot behind the stadium. The seven football players who’d surrounded him…the knife that Troy had drawn on him…the deep slash to his chest that had ultimately saved his life.

“A knife? You were cut?” Stearns cocked his head to the side and gave Kingsley a long, enigmatic look.

“Oh,
oui.
You haven’t seen the scar?” Kingsley yanked his T-shirt off over his head. He moved to the other bed and sat next to Stearns. “Lovely, no?”

Angling himself toward Stearns, Kingsley displayed the wound on his chest. The gash had mostly healed, after careful stitching and treatment, but a two-inch-long white line of scar tissue still decorated the skin over his heart.

Stearns said nothing, only studied the scar. Slowly, he raised his hand and with a fingertip caressed it from tip to tip. Kingsey held perfectly still and didn’t let himself move or breathe. How could he? Stearns was touching him. The words echoed in his mind:
Stearns was touching him... Stearns was…

Kingsley leaned forward and pressed his lips to Stearns’s mouth.

And for one perfect second, Stearns let him leave them there.

Once that perfect second passed, Kingsley found himself flat on his back, his hands by his head, his wrists pinned hard and fast into the mattress. Stearns gripped his wrists so tightly that Kingsley thought he heard something crack inside his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I don’t know what…”

He struggled against Stearns’s viselike grip, but no amount of pushing back could free him. Stearns held himself steady overtop of Kingsley, one knee on the bed, one foot on the floor, and pushed him deeper and deeper into the mattress.

Stearns’s face hovered only six inches from his own. The pain in his wrists, the fear in his heart, all threatened to send Kingsley into a panic. But underneath the panic he felt something else—a strange calm, a sense of surrender. As much as Kingsley wanted Stearns, he would be content letting him do anything to him, even kill him.

“I’m sorry,” Kingsley repeated. “I—”

“Stop talking.” Stearns spoke the words coldly, calmly, and Kingsley obeyed immediately. He pushed up again and
Stearns pushed back down with even greater force.

“Stop moving.”

Kingsley froze.

Waited.

Realized he’d never been so aroused in his entire life.

Looking up into Stearns’s eyes, Kingsley noticed the pupils had dilated hugely. And Stearns’s perfectly pale skin had flushed slightly. The exertions on the soccer field hadn’t caused half the reaction that simply holding him down on the bed clearly did.

“You are playing a very dangerous game, Kingsley.” Stearns lowered his voice as he spoke the threat, and every nerve in Kingsley’s body tightened.

He remained silent as ordered. Stearns’s thumb moved to press into the pulse point on Kingsley’s right wrist. The touch was so surprising, so suddenly gentle, that Kingsley moaned with the pleasure of it. A soft moan, barely audible. But Stearns clearly heard it, for his hooded eyes widened once more.

“You aren’t afraid of me right now.” A statement, not a question, and yet Kingsley heard the question underneath the words.
Why?

“There’s nothing you could do to me now that I wouldn’t want.”

Stearns looked Kingsley up and down, as if he realized an alien lay beneath him instead of a person.

“What are you?”

Stearns asked him the same question Kingsley had asked him, but Kingsley had a much simpler answer.

“I’m French.”

Stearns took a deep and ragged breath. Closing his eyes, he pushed Kingsley one millimeter deeper into the bed before finally letting his wrists go.

Kingsley forced himself to sit up as Stearns strode toward the door.

“Did you really kill a boy at your last school?” he called out after him, desperate to do anything, say anything to get him to stay.

“Yes.” Stearns paused in the doorway.

“What did he do?” Kingsley started to walk to the door. The look Stearns gave him stopped him in midstep.

“He kissed me.”

NORTH

The Present

Kingsley couldn’t take his eyes off Søren the entire drive to the airport. After what they’d witnessed at Elizabeth’s house, after what they’d talked about, after what Kingsley had seen in Søren’s eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to look anywhere else but at his closest friend, his dearest foe. What was this madness happening to them? In thirty years, Kingsley had seen rage in Søren’s eyes, lust, need, hunger, piety, even the occasional flashes of love. But never had he seen fear before, real fear. Not like he’d seen at Elizabeth’s house, in the doorway of his old classmate’s childhood bedroom.

“Stop staring at me, Kingsley,” Søren said as he turned his eyes from the road outside the window to Kingsley’s face.

“I’ve been staring at you for thirty years. You should be used to it by now,
mon ami.
”

Søren gave a slight laugh, which helped. He scared Kingsley.

“I suppose I should be. You don’t have to come with me. This may very well prove to be a pointless trek. And I know you don’t hold the fondest of memories of Saint Ignatius.”

Kingsley exhaled slowly. The words were both true and a lie.

“Before Marie-Laure…” he began, and paused to steady himself. Talk of his sister troubled him like no other subject. “Before she came, everything was perfect. My fondest memories are of Saint Ignatius. I wish you believed that.”

“I do believe it.” Søren sighed. “I only wish you didn’t.”

Kingsley tilted his head. Only fearless audacity had ever gotten Søren’s attention in the past. It’s what had worked that day in their dorm room, when Kingsley had kissed him. Maybe it would work now.

“Does it bother you that I’m still in love with you?”

“Kingsley, really.” Søren crossed his ankle over his knee.

“I am. I am that I am.”

“Blasphemy will get you nowhere.”

“I have given up trying to get anywhere with you.
Mais…c’est vrai.
”

“Thirty years, Kingsley. We were lovers thirty years ago.”

“Non.”
Kingsley leaned forward in his seat. He glanced to make sure the window between them and the chauffeur was completely closed. The last thing he needed was for his past with Søren to get out. The BDSM community gave great lip service to respecting the kinks of others, but he knew male submissives were often looked down upon by male Dominants. And female Dominants. And female submissives…

“No?”

“It wasn’t thirty years ago. It was fourteen years ago. That was the night—”

“I remember the night.” Søren cut him off coldly and Kingsley leaned back in the seat once more.

“
Bon.
I’m glad you remember. I’ve never forgotten that night even if you want to.”

Søren looked away once more and gazed out the car window. “I did not forget. And I did not want to forget that night.”

Kingsley’s heart rose a notch at Søren’s words.
I did not want to forget that night.

That night…

Still a few minutes from the airport, Kingsley closed his eyes and let his thoughts fall away, fall into the past. That night…he would remember that night on his death bed.

He still recalled the icy chill that had passed through his body the day Søren confessed he’d fallen in love with a girl at his church. Kingsley had known things would be different between them once they’d reunited as adults, after ten years apart. Søren had come back from his exile with a white collar around his neck. Kingsley had returned from hell with healed bullet wounds on his body and unhealed holes in his heart. They’d been polite to each other after they’d reunited. At times even affectionate. But Kingsley’s dreams that he and Søren would take up where they’d left off at Saint Ignatius’s were dashed as night after night passed and Søren left him alone in his bed.

And then those words…those terrible words.

“Kingsley…I found her.”

Søren had seen Kingsley’s distress and reassured him that nothing would change. They had dreamed of such a girl as this, dreamed but never dared to hope she actually existed. The one girl wilder and more dangerous than the two of them put together…Søren had found her. And he would share her.

But the years passed and Søren left his Eleanor a virgin. Kingsley was driven nearly mad with longing, with hunger to be with this perfect wild creature Søren had found for them. His desire wasn’t really for Eleanor, although he’d never met a woman more exciting, more intoxicating. To share her meant he and Søren would be in the same bed once again. Even if Eleanor lay between them, Kingsley would have a chance to at least see him once again naked and beautiful and aroused.

Perhaps even touch him.

And touch him he had.

For a few months, Søren had kept Eleanor to himself. That didn’t surprise Kingsley. The girl needed training, needed taming. And for all Søren’s promises that she would belong to them, Kingsley knew that Eleanor would belong to the priest alone. Søren had wanted to own this girl.