“That is Anya, his second wife. Maggie died of cancer a few years after they married. Daniel was even younger than Eleanor is now and already a widower.”
“Shit. That’s horrible.”
“It was. He was bereft. It’s difficult for those of our kind to find someone we’re compatible with, to find someone who understands our desires and even shares them. He was not only a man without a wife, he was a Dominant without a submissive, a master without his slave. And he was lost. He’d gone into such deep mourning after the funeral he stepped into this house and didn’t leave the property again for years.”
“Years?”
“Years. Maggie died and he decided he wanted to die, too. He buried himself alive in this house. The thought of someone so young and vital giving up offended me to my core. Catholics abhor suicide not for the death but for the despair. I couldn’t allow it to go on any longer. I believed Daniel simply needed reminding that there was something out there in the world worth living for. And if he had a reminder of what he was missing by staying in this beautiful coffin, he might come back to life again. So I lent him Eleanor.”
“You what?”
Søren took a deep drink of the wine. Wesley was about ready to start chugging the stuff himself.
“I allowed Daniel to keep Eleanor with him in this house for one week. He was allowed any liberty with her he desired—sex, dominance, the infliction of pain and punishments to a certain degree. I told him Eleanor’s limits and preferences, and as long as he didn’t violate them, she was his for seven days while I went to my conference in Rome.”
“And Nora was okay with this...why?” Wesley raised his hands in utter bafflement.
“I ordered her to submit to me by submitting to him. She did as she was ordered. She was not happy about it at first, to say the least.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not apologizing for lending her to Daniel for a week. She was my property and she knew she need only say her safe word, and I would have taken her back home again. I knew she would like it here. I knew she would be good for him. As you can tell from all the photographs of Daniel with his wife and children, it’s safe to say I was right.”
“So if giving Nora to some guy to screw for a week isn’t what you regret, what do you regret?”
“I had an ulterior motive for lending Eleanor to Daniel. You may not know this, but when Eleanor was nineteen years old, there was someone else in her life.”
“Someone else?” Wesley asked. Nora had never told him about another guy before.
“Yes. You weren’t her first brush with a vanilla sort of romance. I was away at the time, working on my dissertation when she and this young man struck up a friendship. It quickly became something more. They were the same age, had much in common, and he adored her as well he should have. Still, she chose me. Hardly a fair fight—I was 32 years old, he nineteen. But Daniel—now he could give me a fair fight. And I assure you he did. I never quite trusted Eleanor’s love for me only because it seemed far too good to be true. I could give her so little compared to what other men could. Our time together was and is limited by my calling. She and I could never be seen in public together. The simplest things you take for granted—going for a walk down the street holding hands, stealing a kiss under a streetlamp, being able to marry and have children—I could give none of that to her unless I left my life in the church. She claimed she didn’t want that, didn’t miss it, didn’t want me giving up who I was for her. I feared that she said that only to be kind. If given the chance to take it, I thought she would. I feared she would. But because I loved her and prized her happiness more than my own, I gave her a chance to be with someone who could give her all that I couldn’t. I loaned Eleanor to Daniel. I gave Daniel to Eleanor.”
“That sounds...nice is not the word. Hard,” Wesley said, finally finding the word he needed. “That sounds hard.”
“It was very hard letting her come here to be with him. It’s hard coming anywhere near that house I grew up in. I didn’t want to come here. She certainly didn’t. She was angry, petulant. I was cruel to her in response. Cruel on purpose. I wanted to give her ample reason to leave me. When I left her in this house, I didn’t even kiss her goodbye.”
“You were stacking the deck,” Wesley said, understanding immediately.
“Stacking it against myself. And, of course, Eleanor surprised me. Daniel asked her to stay. What man wouldn’t? Although tempted to stay with him, she came back to me. And when I told her that I was surprised she’d come back, she looked at me with so much hurt in her eyes...” Søren paused, lifted the wineglass but couldn’t seem to bring himself to drink from it. “She said, ‘I love you, you stupid man. Don’t ever f**king forget that.’ And that’s what I regret, putting her through a vain and cruel test of her love for no reason. There were other ways to help Daniel. I didn’t have to use her like I did. That I doubted her love...I regret that. I regret it enough that I went to confession over it. When I told Eleanor, she absolved me, too.”
“So that’s why you knew—when Nora fell that night she went back to you, when she fell on purpose—you knew she was doing it because she loved me.”
“Exactly. She pushed you away for the same reason I pushed her away. That deliberate act of cruelty, like my deliberate act of cruelty to her, was born of love.”