“No whispering,” Søren said. “Against the rules.”

  Eleanor cupped her hand around Kingsley’s ear, ignoring Søren’s edict entirely.

  “I wish it,” Eleanor said to him. “Though I don’t know what to wish for.”

  “Demerit,” Søren said and pointed at Eleanor and then at Kingsley. “One for each of you.”

  Kingsley spoke to Søren sharply in rapid Italian that he knew Eleanor couldn’t understand.

  “What did he say?” Eleanor asked Søren.

  “He said I am an ass, and I should stop frightening you,” Søren translated. “Is that true?”

  “You aren’t frightening me, no,” she said. “But you are an ass.”

  Kingsley’s head fell back in delighted laughter.

  “You married well, My Lord,” he said to Søren. Then he looked at Eleanor. “Shall I show you how I could serve you? And then when the time comes and we’re alone or you’re in need…you’ll know what to ask of me?”

  “If you please,” she said.

  Kingsley raised a hand and stroked her face. It was burning bright and hot, like she had a fever. He leaned over her and brushed his lips across hers. Then he kissed her again, deeper. She opened her mouth to his tongue and he was pleased to hear her moaning softly for him.

  He smiled down at her. “Like that,” he said, “But here.” He slid his hand under the counterpane, over her stomach and then between her legs. He felt her warmth and her softness under his hand. It pleased him when she opened her legs a little wider for him.

  “Kiss me? There?” she asked, seemingly astonished. “That wasn’t in the pamphlet Aunt Adeline gave us.”

  “I have much better pamphlets,” Kingsley said. “Or perhaps I should demonstrate.”

  Before her nerves got the better of her and she stopped him, Kingsley pulled the counterpane down to her thighs. When he started to push her gown up to her waist, she stiffened and covered Kingsley’s hand with hers.

  “Don’t be shy, Eleanor. Remember…we’re only dreaming,” Søren said.

  “This,” she said, “is a very wicked dream.”

  “It’s about to get wickeder,” Kingsley said. “Wickeder? More wicked? Fuck, I hate English.”

  “Less talking, Kingsley,” Søren said. “Put your tongue to better use.”

  “You see what I put up with?” Kingsley said, shaking his head, as he lifted her gown up again. This time she didn’t try to stop him. “A brute. An absolute bastard.”

  In one easy practiced motion, Kingsley moved between her legs and opened her thighs. He looked down at her, at her open body. With his fingers, he explored her—the soft black curls, the red and tender flesh glistening wet, the inner lips so lovely and delicate. And when looking wasn’t enough for him, he lowered his head and tasted her.

  Eleanor gasped as he flicked his tongue over her open body. Gasped again when he did it once more. He tasted her wetness even more, he tasted Søren’s seed inside of her. The cocktail was potent and he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to drink every drop out of her.

  Kingsley stretched out on the bed, buried his head between her beautiful thighs and served her with everything he had. He served her with his tongue, licking and lapping at her, stroking her with his tongue and lips. He used his fingers to carefully pull back the flesh that surrounded her clitoris and licked the little bud with the very tip of his tongue. Eleanor gasped his name softly and he did it again, and then again, and over and over until she was pumping her hips into his mouth.

  He felt the bed shift and he glanced up to see Søren sitting at Eleanor’s side. He opened her gown and ran his large hands over his wife’s full breasts, stroking her pale red nipples, licking and sucking them. The sight of it excited Kingsley even more. Though he’d dreamed of it, they’d never shared a woman between them before and that it was Søren’s young bride, which made it all the sweeter.

  He wanted to please his master and mistress more than anything. And to please the master, all he had to do was please the mistress. He worked a finger into Eleanor and when she contracted around it, he pressed in another. He found the soft hollow on the front wall of her vagina—did she know these words or would he have to teach them to her?—and kneaded it. That was the magic touch for her, it seemed. She came then, her hips hovering two inches off the bed as Kingsley licked her roughly. She released a low hoarse whimper and all around his two fingers, she clenched and contracted with delicious womanly flutters.

  Kingsley could have lived between her thighs all night but Søren tugged his hair. He rose up and before he could wipe the wetness from his mouth, Søren kissed him. He didn’t merely kiss him, he licked Kingsley’s lips in one of the more sensual, sexual wicked kisses Kingsley had ever experienced in his life. Søren was tasting Kingsley’s mouth, his wife’s cunt, and his own seed in one long deep kiss.

  Bliss.

  “I’ve died,” she said, “and gone to Heaven.”

  “You’ve come three times in one night, Eleanor. You aren’t dead. You’re spent,” Søren said.

  “You’re a liar, you know,” she said to Søren. “You are one of them wicked lords who takes poor girls off the streets and does all sorts of nasty things to them.”

  Søren laughed low and soft. “You’re welcome.”

  As the new couple kissed their goodnights, Kingsley slipped out, across the hall, and into his bedroom where he collapsed back against the door and breathed and breathed again.

  That had been a rather unexpected turn of events.

  Before he even had a chance to catch his breath, someone knocked on his door. He opened it and Søren entered.

  “What—” Kingsley said, and what he was going to say was “What are you doing here?”

  When Søren grasped him by the back of the neck and pulled him for a kiss, he knew what Søren was doing there.

  Søren pushed him against the closed door and began to strip him of his clothes—his waistcoat, his tie, his shirt, his trousers…Kingsley was hard, painfully so, and needed using, especially after tasting Søren inside his young bride.

  Then Søren slapped him. Once. With the back of his hand. Right across the cheek. Hard enough to hurt. Not hard enough to leave much of a mark.

  “That,” Søren said, pointing at Kingsley’s face, “is for your insolence.” He slapped Kingsley again. “And that, was for keeping secrets from me.” Søren grabbed Kingsley by the throat and kissed the breath out of him. “And that was for making my wife very, very happy.”

  “Forgive me. Forgive me. And…” Kingsley said. “My pleasure.”

  Søren pulled Kingsley in front of the fireplace where a low smoldering blaze still burned. And then there, on the floor, on the rough Persian rug, with Kingsley on his back and Søren over him and inside him, they coupled like two beasts in a forest. Kingsley was spread wide as Søren pushed himself in deeper and deeper with every thrust. The pain was potent and the pleasure obliterating as his lover’s cock speared him.

  Søren’s weight bore down on him, and Kingsley lay pinned by the wrists and split beneath him. It had been some time since Søren had used him so roughly, and Kingsley’s body sang with the bliss of it. Søren gripped Kingsley’s cock and stroked it, bringing him to the edge of release and holding him there. The organ rammed into him mercilessly. And when Søren released into him, filling him with his thick hot seed, Kingsley couldn’t hold back another moment. He came onto his own stomach and chest with a dozen or more powerful spurts. And when it was done, and Kingsley lay limp on his back, and Søren knelt above him and over him that his master said the loveliest words Kingsley had ever heard spoken.

  “And that,” Søren said, “was for me.”

  “The Baron is dead,” Kingsley said. “Long live the Baron.”

  11

  Eleanor woke from her sleep when she felt the bed shift. Søren slipped in next to her, naked, and took her into his arms.

  “What time is it?” She asked, certain only minutes had passed since he’d kissed her goodnight.

  “After one,” he said. “Christmas.”

  She laughed sleepily. “Happy Christmas, My Lord.”

  “Happy Christmas, My Lady. Now go back to sleep.”

  She nestled her back against his chest, luxuriating in the heat of his long lean body.

  “Four,” she said.

  “Hmm?” he said.

  “You said there were four secrets you were keeping from me. One was that you did come to my room that night I invited you though you didn’t come inside. Two, that you must inflict pain to become aroused. Three was your stepmother attempting to seduce you and that’s why you left home. What’s the fourth secret?”

  “You don’t want to know, I promise.”

  “Go on, tell me,” she said, rolling over to face him. “If I can take all the others, I can take the last one.” She touched his strong chest and felt the steady rhythm of his beautiful heart under her hand.

  “If you insist,” he said and kissed her lightly on the lips. “The last secret is this…I can’t live without you, Eleanor.”

  “That’s the last secret?” She smiled, half-asleep and fading fast. “That’s the most beautiful secret of all.”

  “I can’t and I won’t,” he said. “So please, wake up, Little One. Come back to me.”

  “What? What do you mean? I’m here, right here.”

  “No, you aren’t,” he said.

  Eleanor opened her eyes.

  12

  Christmas Eve, 1998

  Manhattan

  Eleanor opened her eyes into a room dark and cool and smelling vaguely of bleach. Søren sat in a chair by the head of her bed, his hand brushing her hair from her forehead, and his eyes searching her face. He looked strange to her. He was her husband, of course. Same golden hair. Same marble gray eyes. Same age or thereabouts. But instead of his gray suit and waistcoat he wore a black long-sleeved t-shirt with jeans.

  Jeans?

  “Søren? What time is it?”

  “Oh, thank God,” he breathed. He kissed her forehead. “Thank God. Thank God. Thank you, God. Deo gratias.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in the hospital, Eleanor.”

  “Hospital?” Her mind was a fog.

  “You had the flu,” he said. “You’ve been unconscious almost all day. They gave you I.V. antibiotics. Do you remember any of this?”

  “The flu? No…no, I was with you.”

  “Yes, the flu, and a very bad case of it. So bad they thought it might be meningitis.”

  Everything was coming back to her. She’d ignored the aches in her body, busy as she was with finals and term papers. Her mother was out of town, spending the holidays with some religious order she’d gotten obsessed with so Eleanor was staying at Kingsley’s townhouse over Christmas break. She’d blamed her extreme exhaustion and upset stomach on end-of-semester stress. She’d gone to bed early on the night of the twenty-third in the blue guest room at Kingsley’s. That was the last she remembered.

  “What happened? Did I faint or something?”

  “Kingsley found you burning up with fever this morning and barely conscious. He brought you into the E.R. I came as soon as he reached me.”

  “Is it…Christmas?” She thought she remembered Søren telling her it was Christmas.

  “Christmas Eve. Nearly midnight.”

  “You should be—wait—shouldn’t you be saying Midnight Mass?”

  “Father Ballard is taking my place. He’ll tell the church I was called away to be with someone deathly ill. Not a lie, unfortunately. God, you scared me so much.” He moved from his chair to her hospital bed, sat next to her and leaned down and kissed her forehead.

  “Kingsley? In a hospital? You sure?”

  Søren pointed. Eleanor raised her head and saw Kingsley, all six feet of him, curled up awkwardly in a hospital room armchair, white blanket draped over him, sound asleep.

  “He carried you in his arms into the E.R. He stayed with you and made sure you were put in a private room. He read to you while you were resting. Even when I arrived, he still wouldn’t leave until you woke up.”

  “Read to me?”

  “The book you had in your backpack.” Søren picked up the book, still on the side table.

  “Christmas at Thompson Hall,” she said. A book by Anthony Trollope, the other great Victorian writer. “I read it for my Victorian lit seminar this semester. Oh my God.”

  “Eleanor? What’s wrong?”

  “I had the craziest dream,” she breathed.

  “While you were unconscious?”

  She nodded. “We were in Victorian England, and you were a Baron, and I’d stolen your pocket-watch and you’d made me your ward so I wouldn’t go to jail. And we…”

  All at once, she began to cry when it hit her that when she’d woken up, she’d lost her husband.

  “Eleanor?” Søren pulled her to him and held her in his arms.

  “We got married,” she said between her wrenching sobs. “I was your wife, Søren. I was…and you were my husband.”

  “Please stop crying, Little One. You’ll make yourself sicker.”

  But she couldn’t stop. It had been so beautiful and so real and so true. And she’d been so happy there, married to Søren.

  Her dream tumbled out in fits and starts. “I was so in love with you, and you were so scared to tell me you had to hurt me to make love to me. But you did and then it was wonderful. And Kingsley was there, being your wicked valet.”

  “Of course he was.”

  “Ah, it was so real. It was like being in a movie and reading a book all at the same time. I can still see everything…You and Kingsley on the train. He kicked you in the shins. Not very hard. But then you kicked back, really hard. And Claire’s lavender dress and the morning room and you played ‘Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming’ on piano. And I remember it all.”

  She told him everything. How Kingsley had been a cross-dressing teenaged prostitute named Princess in Magdalena’s Roman brothel. How Søren had left seminary because he’d fallen in love with Kingsley. How he’d had to marry because of his father’s will. How Kingsley had wanted them to get married so he could have children in his life. Proof positive it was all a dream—who could imagine Kingsley as a father? Or even wanting to be?

  The dream was so real, Eleanor had to remind herself this was New York, not England. She was twenty-one, a senior at NYU, not a nineteen-year-old former pickpocket turned baroness. This is what happened when a stressed-out college student took a Victorian lit class and a nineteenth-century British history survey in one semester.

  “I was your baroness,” she said to him. “Lady Eleanor Stearns. We lived at Edenfell. I’ll never forget how the house looked as the carriage drove up the lane. All those lampposts, it was so magical. You’d put a Christmas tree in the drawing room for me. There were even real lit candles on it.”

  “This dream version of me was not wise in the ways of fire hazards.” Søren took a tissue from the box on the side table and wiped her face.

  “God…I feel like I’m still there.” She put her hand on her forehead, closed her eyes. “We sat in this red velvet chair, tufted. We looked at old porn and then we fucked on the desk. And I knew nothing about sex, which should have told me it was a dream. That and all of us having English accents—except King. He was still French. And horny. You watched while he ate me out then after? You reamed that man. Like, fucked him to next Christmas and back. Third degree rug burn on his back. If he was an apple, you would have cored him. I mean—”

  “Yes, Eleanor, you’ve painted a sufficiently vivid picture.”

  “You also finger-fucked me in a freezing gazebo, while wearing leather gloves, you pervert.”

  “That wasn’t a dream,” he said. “That happened two years ago on New Year’s Eve. And I wasn’t wearing gloves because I was a pervert. I was wearing them because it was thirty degrees out.”

  “And you’re a pervert.”

  He surrendered with a smile. “That may have been a contributing factor.”

  She laughed to herself. Her head was splitting and she was so thirsty and she had to pee or die, but she couldn’t quite let Søren go yet.

  “You’re here,” she said, “but I miss you. The other you.” Her husband.

  He gently rubbed her back while rocking her against his chest. “I love you and always will,” he said. “Here and in your dreams.”

  When she stopped shaking, he slowly lowered her back onto her pillow.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to give your Christmas homily,” she said.

  “There’s always next Christmas.”

  “What was it about?”

  Søren took her hand in his and twined their fingers together, not easy to do as his hands were so much larger than hers.

  “Saint Joseph,” he said. “He’s a mystery to me, always has been. Mary conceived Christ with the Holy Spirit. No Joseph necessary. Yet God still wanted Mary and Joseph to be married. God sent angels to Mary and Joseph when she became pregnant with Christ and angels announced his birth, but when it was time for her to give birth—arguably the most dangerous part—there were no angels anywhere to be seen. She had to go it alone in a stable, never having given birth before, with no one to help her but Joseph. I think that means something, that God could have sent angels to Mary then, but He didn’t, because He didn’t have to, because—”

  “Because her husband was there.” Tears sprang into her eyes again.

  “Exactly,” Søren said. “I suppose the theme was the sacredness of ordinary human love, that although God could have done it all Himself, He still brought Joseph and Mary together as if the love people show each other and the way we care for each other is its own sort of divinity. Better even than angels.”

  “In sickness and health,” Eleanor whispered.