The Prince (23 page)

“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.

NORTH

The Past

One day passed. Two days. By day three Kingsley thought he would die if Søren didn’t make some kind of move on him again. He’d never been in this position before. Always he’d been the pursuer, the seducer. He chose a girl and made the right moves on her, and when he invited her to his bedroom and told her to open her legs, she did as she was told. Always. Without fail. Then he let her go and left her to wait by the phone for his next summons.

Now he waited and watched and told himself, “Today…it will be today.” But it wasn’t today. Or the next.

Kingsley had never been more grateful that the bathrooms in the older boys’ dorm had doors that locked. He’d been spending more time than usual there, and not for reasons of hygiene or gastrointestinal distress. This torture, this horrible waiting for Søren to strike, kept Kingsley in a constant state of nervous arousal. He’d come and in mere minutes would be feeling the familiar tightness in his stomach, the ache in his back, the strain in his thighs... Nothing could and would alleviate the need but a night with Søren. A night that never seemed to come.

After one week back at school, Kingsley decided that Søren had been fucking with him. That night in the forest had been violence and nothing more. Not lust, not love…mere violence. It had meant everything to Kingsley and nothing to Søren. At least that’s what he told himself, or tried to. Had he still been Stearns and not Søren, Kingsley might have believed that night had meant nothing. But he knew Søren’s name now and he felt the power of that. So he continued to walk around with his testicles as heavy as lead, his stomach sore, his heart in agony.

On Friday night sleep was impossible for Kingsley. The physical discomfort paled before the mental anguish of wanting Søren and waiting for Søren and getting absolutely nothing from Søren.

At some point Kingsley nodded off, because he dreamed of a house and a bed on fire, and woke up just as the flames began to lick at his legs. His eyes shot open and he sat up in bed, panting. Raising a hand to his forehead, he felt his sweat-soaked skin. He ran his fingers through his long, wet hair.

A cup of cold water came to his lips and Kingsley gulped it eagerly.

Wait. Water?

Kingsley nearly choked on the water, but a hand covered his mouth and silenced his cough.

“Are you sick?”

Kingsley felt the whisper more than heard it.