The Angel (The Original Sinners) (11 page)

Trailing behind a boisterous family of five or six children
arguing over where to eat dinner, Suzanne made her way to the parking lot. Once
inside Patrick’s car she pulled out her notepad again.

Extremely intelligent,
she wrote.
And ridiculously handsome. He was expecting
me.

At the bottom of the page she scrawled,
I
don’t trust him,
and underlined it three times.

* * *

Nora sorted through her luggage, separating her clothes
from her toys. At times like this she missed having her own dungeon. Back in her
dominatrix days, she had a palatial dungeon, if such a thing could exist, in the
VIP wing of The 8th Circle. Søren still had his own personal quarters there, of
course. As did Kingsley and Griffin. But once she returned to Søren as his
submissive, she’d had to give up her dungeon to her replacement—Mistress V.
However, she’d kept most of her gear for those occasions when Søren gave her
permission to top someone. Some of the kinksters in their community frowned on
her playing switch while in the possession of their alpha dom. But Søren loved
her and understood her. And he knew better than to put his foot down in this
area. She loved topping women and even a certain secretly switch-hitting
Frenchman of their acquaintance. The jealous haters could have her spreader bars
and her signature red riding crop when they pried them out of her cold, dead
hands.

Nora’d bought a collar for Michael, a black one to match his
hair. She had no intention of collaring him permanently, but he needed to get
used to wearing one if he planned on joining the Underground with her and Søren.
She dug to the very bottom of her bag. Whips and chains, a Wartenberg wheel, two
sets of handcuffs—rope and metal—bondage cuffs, snap hooks…all ended up in an
impressive array on the floor. Nora dove once more into her luggage and laughed
at what she pulled out. How did her duckie pajamas get in with her kink gear?
She remembered she’d been on the phone arguing with Zach, her editor, while
packing. Obviously Zach had distracted her a little.

Nora stared at her pajamas, at the little baby ducks printed on
the blue flannel. Pajamas had been the cause of her first fight with Wesley
right after he moved in. No one would ever call her an exhibitionist—she knew
too many real exhibitionists to even make a claim on that title—but she had a
good body and didn’t care who saw it. So the first morning after Wesley moved in
she came down to the kitchen in her usual sleepwear—a little nearly transparent
black camisole and panties. Half-asleep still, she’d entered the kitchen, patted
Wesley on the top of his blond head, grabbed a croissant and a cup of coffee,
and headed for her office. A few minutes later a visibly troubled Wesley came
into her office and stood with his back to her.

“Yes, Wesley, those jeans do make your ass look fabulous,”
she’d said, glancing over at his tall, lean and
way-too-sexy-to-belong-to-a-virgin body.

“That is not why I have my back to you. You have no clothes on,
Nora,” he’d said, sounding royally perturbed.

“I do have clothes on. I have on my pajamas.”

“You’re wearing saran wrap and nothing else.”

“That is not true. I’ve worn saran wrap before and it looks
nothing like this. This is La Perla.”

“It’s La Transparent. Pajamas have substance to them. They are
made of cotton or equally opaque fabrics. If I’m going to live with you without
losing my mind—”

“Or your virginity,” she teased.

“You need to wear real pajamas around me. That’s final.”

He’d gone off to school in a huff that day. When he came home
she surprised him with a little pajama fashion show. First the sock monkeys,
then the penguins, then the baby ducks wearing galoshes on their little
feet.

“Better?” she’d asked.

Wesley had grinned at her as he reached out and buttoned the
topmost button of her baby-duck pj’s. She’d feigned choking although she felt
quite comfortable with a tight collar around her neck. Wesley had undone the
button again, and for a moment their eyes had met and she wanted nothing more in
the world than for him to keep going. His fingers shook enough that she knew
he’d been tempted to do just that.

Wesley had smiled at her and whispered, “Perfect.”

“He’s perfect, Nora.”

The words pulled her out of the past. Turning around she saw
Griffin coming into the guest bedroom he’d given her, the room right next to
his, naturally, looking both annoyed and aroused.

“Nobody’s perfect, Griffin,” Nora said, throwing her duckies
into a drawer. “Except Søren.”

“Søren’s not perfect.”

Nora stared at Griffin. “Bastard priest lied to me.”

Griffin rolled his eyes. “Michael’s perfect. He’s my dream
man…boy. Whatever. Holy shit, Nora.” Griffin threw himself across her bed. He
picked up a pair of handcuffs and laid them on his face like a giant pair of
glasses.

“Very fetching.” Nora removed the handcuffs from Griffin’s face
and put them in her bondage-gear pile on the end of the bed. “Did you finish his
checklist?”

“Yeah. Junior’s a freak. I’m in love.”

Nora threw her thigh-high boots in the closet.

“You aren’t in love.”

“Would you buy ‘love with honorable intentions’?”

“Nope.”

Griffin glared at her.

“Griffin Fiske, you know as well as I do you’ve never had a
relationship that lasted longer than three weeks. And that was when you were
cheating on your girlfriend with her stepbrother. You just met Michael.”

“Yeah, so? How long did it take for you to fall in love with
the Pope?”

Nora smiled to herself. “Two to three seconds. But that lasted
about one week before I decided I hated him.”

“It is pretty impressive how long you two have lasted.” She
heard the grudging respect in Griffin’s tone. Griffin had scores of lovers and
approximately zero serious relationships under his belt. “What’s your
secret?”

“Well, Søren has great staying power. And it does help I’m
still in love with him. Helps even more that I still hate him,” she said,
suddenly not wanting to talk about Søren. It hurt too much knowing it could be
two months or more before she saw him again. “So what’s up with Michael’s
checklist? Anything I need to know?”

Griffin flipped over and dug the papers out of his back pocket.
Nora made the bad decision to join him on the bed. It took all of two seconds
before she landed flat on her back with Griffin slapping the handcuffs from her
bondage pile onto her wrists.

“That reminds me,” Nora said, relaxing into the grip of the
cuffs, “I need to call my editor.”

“You can call him after I fuck you.”

“Can you fuck me after we talk about Michael’s checklist?”

Griffin collapsed next to her and left her lying on her stomach
still cuffed. Groaning in frustration, Nora used her shoulder to flip herself
onto her side.

“Checklist first, then fucking. What’s up with junior?”

“Sex stuff? Fives across the board. Horny little twerp.”

“He’s seventeen.”

“Point taken.”

“What else?” Nora asked.

“No big fetishes. No watersports or anything.”

“Good,” Nora said, “I have a shy bladder.”

“The usual kink works for him,” Griffin continued. “Bondage is
good, all kinds. Pain is good, all kinds. This was weird though,” Griffin said
as he flipped to the last page.

“What?”

“He wants pain and domination. All fours and fives in that
area. But when I asked about cutting, he gave it a big number one. Weird,
huh?”

Nora’s mind immediately went to the scars on Michael’s wrists.
Didn’t seem weird to her at all—he’d had more than enough cutting in his life
already.

“I hate bastinado,” Nora said, trying to deflect Griffin’s
attention. If Michael wanted Griffin to know about his suicide attempt, she’d
let Michael tell him. “Do whatever you want to me but don’t beat my feet. I’m
ticklish.”

Griffin raised an eyebrow at her. “Duly noted. Oh, he doesn’t
like yelling, either.”

Nora sighed. That probably came from Michael’s asshole
father.

“I was never a fan of yelling at my clients. Hard on the
throat. Plus a really good dominant can put the fear of God into a sub with a
whisper. Søren certainly can.”

“Søren can put the fear of God into a sub by just showing up,”
Griffin said with barely concealed envy.

“I know. I love that man,” Nora said, smiling with pride. In
their huge underground kinky community, no one commanded more respect or fear
than Søren. Sometimes she thanked God Søren had gone into the church and not the
military. He’d be a dictator for sure.

“One final thing about Mick,” Griffin said, folding the
checklist back up.

“Mick?”

“That’s what I’m calling him.
Michael
has too many syllables.”

“Okay, what’s the final thing about Mick?”

Griffin rolled onto his side and met Nora eye to eye. He
reached out and freed her hair from her black hair clip and caressed her face
and neck. Bad, Nora thought. It had to be bad news if Griffin was buttering her
up.

“It’s just, and don’t freak out,” Griffin said, opening her
shirt, pulling the strap of her bra down and taking one of her nipples into his
warm mouth.

“Freaked out is not why I’m feeling now,” she said, leaning
back to give him better access to her breasts. “Tell me the freak-out part while
I’m turned on.”

Griffin slid his hand under her skirt between her thighs; he
slipped a finger under her panties and inside her.

“It’s just, the thing about Mick is,” Griffin said as he
pressed a second finger into her wet warmth, “he’s bi.”

8

Alone in the room Nora and Griffin had given him,
Michael unpacked his duffel bag. His skateboard, wheels up, he’d packed on top
of his things and that came out first. Now that he held it in his hands, he
almost regretted bringing it. Nora knew he was a skater, but Griffin didn’t.
Surely someone like Griffin would find skateboarding childish. Michael sat the
board on the floor and rolled it under the bed.

He unpacked his clothes—jeans and T-shirts, boxer shorts,
socks, the usual—and tucked them in the empty dresser. Putting his rather ratty
clothes inside furniture that probably cost more than his mom’s car felt a
little wrong. Digging once more in his bag, Michael found his most precious
possession and pulled it out.

Right after he’d moved with his parents to Wakefield and
started attending Sacred Heart, Michael heard rumors that the writer Nora
Sutherlin attended that same church years before she’d become
the
Nora Sutherlin. One day at the mall he’d snuck off
to the Borders store and found a copy of her book
The
Red.
The cover had a picture of a woman’s wrists tied with a bloodred
silk ribbon. He remembered staring at the picture for so long without blinking
that his eyes had started to water. But there was no way they’d let a
thirteen-year-old buy a book like that. He thought about stealing it, but even
the idea of shoplifting made his stomach churn with guilt. He found a fantasy
novel about kings and unicorns that was the same price and size as
The Red
and he switched the covers. He didn’t need the
cover. The image of the tied wrists had burned into his retinas. When he looked
at it, looked at those tied wrists and pale hands, he couldn’t help but imagine
his own wrists and own hands. It spoke to him, that image. It whispered to him.
Love, he thought, when he first gazed on the image, looked just like that.

He bought the book and took it home. After his parents had gone
to bed he’d stayed up all night reading it. He stayed up all the next night
reading it again.

When Father Stearns started counseling him after his suicide
attempt, Michael finally worked up the courage to ask him about Nora, who Father
S called Eleanor. For some reason the first question that came out was, “Is she
pretty?”

Father Stearns answered, “Michael, Eleanor is without a doubt
the most beautiful woman who has ever or will ever live. If you could take a
nighttime thunderstorm and turn it into a woman, you would have a very good idea
what she looks like. And a fairly good idea how she behaves as well,” he’d said
and smiled. Michael was quiet for a long time after that. He loved storms at
night, how they made the whole house shiver with the force of the wind and the
rain and how they broke the sky open with white light. After a long silence his
priest had paused and turned to him. He looked at Michael for a long moment.
“Would you like to meet her?”

Father S had made him a deal: if Michael could go one entire
year without harming himself in any way—no burns, no bruises, no cuts, no
suicides attempts—he would arrange for him and Nora Sutherlin to meet. Eleven
months into their deal, Michael had been at Sacred Heart doing homework. His mom
had gotten a new job after the divorce was finalized. It paid better than her
old job but it meant she had to work until 11:30 p.m. some evenings. She didn’t
like leaving Michael home by himself. Father S had offered to stay late at
church on those days so Michael wouldn’t be alone.

A Monday night, a school night, he remembered. He was working
on a Mendel chart due in biology the next day. He heard Father S on the phone
with someone but couldn’t make out what he was saying. It sounded as though he
was speaking French. He did that sometimes on the phone. Sometimes French.
Sometimes another language that sounded maybe like Swedish to Michael, but which
he later learned was Danish. Michael heard Father S hang up the phone. When his
priest emerged from his office, he wore that same sad smile again.

“She would do her homework out here too,” he’d said without
preamble. Michael didn’t have to ask who “she” was. “You could always tell when
she was working on her math homework.”

“How could you tell?” Michael had asked.

“I, and anyone else in the church at the time, could hear the
litany of profanities.”

Michael had laughed then. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“You don’t have to wait anymore. Are you ready?”

Michael’s hands had gone numb then for the first time since
regaining all feeling a month after leaving the hospital. Her—Nora Sutherlin—the
woman who’d stolen his deepest dreams and put them on paper. Michael took a
scared, shallow breath and started putting his homework away.

Michael had nodded. “I’m ready.”

He’d followed Father S out of the church and into a gray Rolls
Royce that waited on the street. The car had pulled away from the curb and
Father Stearns had stared out the window.

“What do I do when I meet her?” Michael asked.

“You will call her ma’am or mistress. And you will do anything
she tells you to do.”

Michael had shivered then like a house in a thunderstorm.

“Will we… I mean, what will—”

“She’ll take your virginity, Michael. If that’s what you
want.”

Michael nodded and stared out the window. It seemed as though
the car was staying still and only the streets were moving.

“Yeah, that’s what I want.”

And now here he was in a freaking mansion in upstate New York
with Nora Sutherlin herself. God, it was surreal.
What the
hell am I doing here?
Michael asked himself as he put the book into
the bedside-table drawer. This house reeked of wealth and power and old money.
He was just a seventeen-year-old nobody with nothing going for him.

“If I ordered you to smile, would you?” came a voice from his
doorway.

Michael looked up and found Nora watching him with her arms
crossed and her usual little grin on her face.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, trying to smile for her. She entered his
room and came to him. Taking both of his hands in hers, she lifted his wrists to
her lips and gently kissed his scars.

The real smile finally came.

“He saved my life, you know?” Michael said. “Father S did.”

Nora pulled away and sat on the bench in the big bay
window.

“Did he?”

Michael nodded. “Not just that night when he found me. Telling
me about himself, about you…that helped more than anything.”

“Did he ever tell you how he saved my ass?” Nora asked,
crossing her lithe legs.

“No.”

“Well, he does try to keep my reputation as sterling as
possible. One of the labors of Hercules obviously. Right after I met Søren, I
got into some trouble. Almost went to juvie.”

Michael boggled at this news. “For what?”

“My mom thought she’d married a mechanic.” Nora leaned back
against the wall. “Nice blue-collar husband for a girl from a big, poor German
Catholic family. Not really a mechanic it turned out. More like he ran a chop
shop with mob connections.”

“Holy shit. Your dad was in the mob?”

Nora shrugged. “Not in it really. Just of it. He was in and out
of jail. Always owed some dangerous somebody money. Mom tried to keep me away
from him but it’s hard for a Daddy’s girl to tell her father no when he calls
and says he needs her help. Let’s just say I was a little too good at the family
business.”

“You got arrested stealing a car?”

Nora held up one hand and spread out her fingers.

“Five cars?” Michael asked, aghast.

“They caught me on the fifth one. I was on quite a roll that
night. Nobody suspected the fifteen-year-old girl skulking around Manhattan in
her Catholic school uniform was out for their Porsche. I looked so innocent. It
was the perfect disguise.”

“Innocent? You?”

Nora stared at him a moment before composing her face into a
blank expression. She widened her eyes, fluttered her eyelashes and bit her
bottom lip like a nervous child. She suddenly looked fifteen, sweet and
scared.

“Damn,” Michael breathed.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, her face returning to normal. “I can do
innocent. That look worked on everybody—Mom, Dad, cops…everybody except Søren.
He saw right through it. He sees right through everything.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“I was sitting in the police station in an interrogation room.
Fifteen years old, and the priest I’ve met all of twice before comes in and
unlocks my handcuffs…with his own personal handcuff key, I found out later. He
sat down across from me and waited, not saying a word, until I met his eyes. He
said he could get me out of this but I would have to do everything he told me to
do.”

“For how long?”

“That’s what I asked him. He said, ‘Forever.’”

“What did you say?” Michael asked, fascinated by the image of a
fifteen-year-old Nora trying to save herself from juvie by making a desperate
deal with the mysterious priest.

“You’ve met him. What do you think I said?” she asked and
winked at him. “But enough about me and ancient history. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Griffin’s nice,” he said and immediately regretted
it. Where the hell had that come from?

“He is. Very,” Nora said, staring at him long and hard. Michael
looked at the floor and studied the scuff marks on the white tips of his Chuck
Taylors. “I’m glad you like him. He and Søren do not get along.”

“How come?”

“Neither of them will tell me. If you can find out from either
of them, I’ll give you anything you want.”

Michael smiled and shook his head. “Nora, I’m here with you.
What else could I ask for?”

Nora stood up and walked over to him. Standing in front of him
she looked him up and down.

“How about this?” Nora asked as she opened his pants.

“Okay,” Michael agreed. “Maybe that.”

* * *

When Suzanne arrived at her apartment, she found a
folder on her desktop Patrick had labeled Nora Sutherlin, Fine Writer. She
thought that a rather odd name for the folder until she noticed the capitalized
initials: NSFW, internet slang for Not Safe For Work. That she believed.

Still shaken from her meeting with the ungodly handsome priest,
Suzanne poured a glass of wine to calm her nerves. She sat at her computer and
opened the file.

Hey
Beautiful,
read a note from Patrick when she clicked the folder.
I scoured the
interwebs for you and dug up everything I could on one Ms. Nora Sutherlin.
You’ll be shocked to learn I didn’t find out as much about her as I thought
I would. She, like your priest, seems to have some sort of internet force
field around her. Writing career stuff? Tons. Personal life? Not so much.
But I made some calls and got the scoop. Read file #1 first. Then read file
#69. Then call me and let me take you out to dinner, you beautiful obsessed
woman. I’m sexier than any priest, right?

Suzanne gave a little rueful laugh. Any priest but Father
Stearns. She still couldn’t believe he was so…
No,
Suzanne told herself. She was not going to let herself get blinded by the man’s
appearance. Something bad had to be up with this priest for someone to
anonymously fax her about him. As good-looking as he was, it wasn’t hard to
imagine him having a sexual-predator side to him. Even if he wasn’t going after
kids, he could be preying on the women in his congregation.

She opened the file marked #1 and found a list of quotes from
Nora Sutherlin in various interviews.

From
Writers’ Weekly.

Interviewer: Where do you get your ideas?

N.S.: I have my best plot ideas in the same place I have my best
orgasms.

Interviewer: In bed?

N.S.: At church.

Suzanne snickered out loud at that.

From
Literary Friction,
the largest erotica blog on the
web.

Interviewer: Do you rely on personal experiences when writing your sex
scenes?

N.S.: No.

Interviewer: Secretly vanilla?

N.S.: Legal advice. I don’t want anything out there that can be used
against me in a court of law.

Suzanne read through a few more of the quotes Patrick had
compiled. Nora Sutherlin certainly talked a good game. But she’d met a few too
many novelists to believe that any writer lived as wildly as his or her
characters. The days of crazy Kerouac and Hemingway types of writers was long
over. Nora Sutherlin could easily be an overweight fifty-year-old housewife
who’d only had missionary-position sex all her life and even that with just her
husband. That was Suzanne’s theory on what most romance writers were like
anyway.

She closed out file #1 and saw a file marked Pics. She clicked
on the folder and her eyes went wide.

“Wow,” Suzanne said out loud to the empty room. Patrick
apparently put a great deal of time and effort into finding photographs of Nora
Sutherlin. Poor thing. What a chore. Nora Sutherlin could have been Rachel
Weisz’s sister—wavy black hair, big green eyes, full pouty lips, pale skin and
curves that wouldn’t quit. In one photograph Nora Sutherlin sat at a table
signing books with a red Sharpie. The corset she wore did magnificent things to
her cleavage. In another photo she stood on the top of a spiral staircase in a
short red skirt with an extremely handsome man with a dark Brutus haircut.
Writer Nora Sutherlin with Royal House Editor Zachary
Easton,
read the photo caption. Something about the way they looked
at each other in the photo made Suzanne wonder if Mr. Easton did a little more
than just edit her books. Not that she would blame him. So much for her theory
on romance writers. The last photo appeared to have been taken at some sort of
party or fund-raiser. She wore a gorgeous bloodred satin gown. Next to her stood
a man, no, a boy really. Although significantly taller than she was, the boy
looked considerably younger. He couldn’t have been a day over eighteen or
nineteen at the most. In his tuxedo he looked like a teenager playing dress-up.
He, like Zachary Easton in the other photo, gazed at Nora Sutherlin with equal
parts longing and adoration. She seemed to be something of a man-collector.
Suzanne had to wonder if Nora ever “collected” Father Stearns.