The Angel (The Original Sinners 2)

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“Ellie? What on earth are you doing here?” Nora’s mother, Sister Mary John, stepped forward and pulled Nora into an embrace, an embrace Nora returned quickly and perfunctorily before taking an awkward step back.

“Long story. How are you, Mom?”

Nora felt her mother’s eyes on her face, studying her intently. Nora kept her expression neutral as she returned the gaze. The years were being kind to her mother. At fifty-two, the woman looked barely forty-two. Of course cloistered nuns were notoriously healthy. Their lives were so regimented and cut off from the stresses of the world that many of her mother’s sisters in the order lived well into their nineties and remained active during even their final years.

“I’m well. Very well. Come, let’s walk, shall we?”

“Sure.” Nora followed her mother through the gate and into the motherhouse. A sign warning that all men were barred from entering the enclosure greeted them as they passed into the recesses of the house. No men…not even priests. It was for that reason Nora fled to her mother’s abbey when she left Søren. As much as he’d wanted her back, he would never have stepped foot inside this place. At night sometimes she’d wake up in the tiny cell she’d been given and imagine him waiting outside the gates of the abbey for her. She’d sworn she’d heard the unique roar of his motorcycle engine more than once. All that time they’d been apart, he’d known exactly where she hid.

“How have you been, Ellie?” her mother asked as they passed through the back door and onto the lawns.

“Great. Amazing. I started working with a new editor last year, a new publisher. The new book hit all the big lists.”

“That’s wonderful for you.”

Nora cringed at the placid tone in her mother’s voice. Wonderful for you. Not wonderful. Just wonderful for her. Her mother disapproved of her books, her erotic writing. Always had. Always would.

“You might like the new book. Almost no sex in it. Well, compared to my other stuff.”

“That’s quite a change for you. What brought that on?”

Nora shrugged and said nothing as they stepped onto one of the winding paths. Out of the corner of her eye, Nora studied her mother. She hated how much they looked alike—the same small straight nose, the same changing eyes, the same pale complexion.

“Nothing. Just playing around, trying to write something different. Expanding my horizons…” Nora cringed. God, she sounded like she was giving an interview with her trite answers.

“You look well. In one piece at least.” A slight smile played across her mother’s lips.

“Is that your way of asking if we’re back together?”

“You can’t blame me worrying about you, can you?”

Nora sighed. Classic motherly deflection. She loved how her mother could take all the aspects of Nora’s life that were the most personal, the most private—her relationship with Søren, her sex life, her need to submit, her hunger to dominate…things that had nothing to do at all with her mother—and make them about her. Mothers must go to some sort of school to learn how to do that so well.

“We’re back together. And we’re happy. And I love him. And I always will. Oh, yeah, we’re still kinky as hell too. In case you were also wondering that.”

Her mother exhaled angrily.

“Eleanor, his is a man of God. He is a priest. Do you have any idea what seducing a priest means for your soul?”

“Seducing a priest?” Nora rolled her eyes. “Back in the day he was an abuser who’d seduced me. Now suddenly I’m the seducer here?”

“You’re a grown woman now, not a child anymore. You know better now. You know you could have a life apart from him. Going back to him? That’s willful disobedience.”

“It’s love. And I’m not disobeying anyone. Until God Himself tells me he and I aren’t allowed to be together, then we’re going to be together. It hardly renders him unfit for the priesthood. Almost all Protestant ministers are married, and Jewish rabbis. We Catholics are the freaks making our ministers stay celibate. Can you get more medieval than that?”

“He chose to become a priest knowing celibacy was one of the requirements. If he cannot honor that, he should leave the priesthood.”

“Yeah, let’s take the best priest in New England and turn him into, I don’t know, a piano teacher just because he’s in love with me. And we’ll let all those priests who like to rape the altar boys stay in the Church. Last time I read the Bible, I don’t remember sexually assaulting children being part of doing the Lord’s work.”

“You were fifteen—”

“I was fifteen when I fell in love with Søren. Fifteen years old when I told God, the devil and anyone who would listen that I would sell my soul for one night with him. When will you believe, when will you understand… Mother, I seduced him.”

“And that’s why he doesn’t belong in the Church. There are some priests who manage to keep their vows.”

“Yes, the ones who haven’t met me,” Nora said purely out of spite.

Her mother winced and Nora suppressed a twinge of guilt. Goddammit. She had a priest for a lover and a nun for a mother. Between the two of them she had enough Catholic guilt to start her own religious order. After ten years, Nora still couldn’t believe her mother had made good on her threat to have her marriage annulled and become a nun.