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 cle**age. 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.
Okay, Suzanne thought, so Nora Sutherlin was a babe. Interesting. And she wrote erotica. And in interviews she acted as though her books were pale shadows compared to her real life. Suzanne had read a few of the books. Hard to believe Nora Sutherlin could be living wilder than her characters. That would take a lot of effort. Suzanne remembered Patrick’s instructions—read file #1 first and then file #69. Classy, Patrick, she thought. Very classy.
She double-clicked on file #69. The document inside contained only two sentences.
If you want to know more, you have to have dinner with me, read sentence number one. But it was sentence number two that got Suzanne’s attention.
Nora Sutherlin is a world-famous dominatrix.
* * *
Michael groaned in ecstasy as Nora rubbed the backs of his legs with her incredibly talented hands. He’d been a little disappointed when Nora said they weren’t going to scene together or have sex yet. But a full-body massage from the one and only Nora Sutherlin? He couldn’t find much cause to complain.