The Mistress (The Original Sinners 4)

“Her heart gave out,” he said, his voice quiet and steady. “She’s only eighteen years older than I am, and she’s gone.”

“She was sick for a long time. And her heart was never strong.” In fact, it was a miracle she’d survived as long as she had. A congenital heart problem had plagued Søren’s mother her entire life. A blessing in disguise, Gisela had always called it. Had she been a healthier child, she never would have had the patience to stay inside and learn the piano.

“I know, Little One. It’s only...I thought I would have her a few more years. The women I adore always leave me before I’m ready to let them go.”

She laughed and buried her face against his thigh.

“That is not fair.” She smiled up again. “I am here, after all. When you need me, I’m always here.”

He cupped her face in both hands and brought his lips to her forehead.

“I always need you.”

She raised her head and kissed him. Even in their shared grief there could be no denying the passion. He pulled her off the floor and into his arms.

“When does our flight leave?” he whispered against her lips.

“We have time.” That was all he needed to know, all that mattered.

He laid her on the rug in front of the fireplace and stripped her of her clothes. They had no time for equipment, for cuts or candle wax, whips or floggers. But they didn’t need them. Søren knew her body better than even she knew it, knew how to bring it to the extreme edge of pleasure and down into the depths of pain...all with his bare hands.

Gently he ran his fingers all over her naked body and desire quickened at the lightest of his touches. He didn’t meet her eyes, merely stared at her body that she’d given up to him. She was glad he didn’t look at her face since it gave her the freedom to study him. He’d no doubt been asleep when his sister in Denmark had called. Only in sleep did his perfect blond hair ever get mussed. It fell over his forehead, almost into his eyes. His eyes, how she loved looking at his eyes. She’d never known a more intelligent man with such perceptive eyes. And how strange that someone with such pale hair had such long dark eyelashes. She and Kingsley had gotten stoned together one night and spent an hour sitting in Kingsley’s bathtub waxing poetic about those damn eyelashes. If she remembered correctly, they never even turned on the water. Or taken their clothes off, for that matter.

“Are you ready?” he asked, running a finger over her lips.

“Always, sir.” She nodded, and tried to steady her breathing.

Søren slid his hand from her shoulder down to her wrist and back up again. He pressed his thumb hard into the top of the muscle where her forearm met her elbow. She gasped with a sudden pain she felt even in her legs. He pressed again and her back arched off the rug. If she’d been standing her legs would have involuntarily collapsed under her.

He moved his attention from her arm to her leg. Søren raised her ankle to his legs and kissed the soft spot above the outer heel. She braced herself for what was next. When Søren covered her mouth with his other hand, she made no protest.

With two fingers and two fingers only he dug deep into the cavity under her ankle bone. The pain came so sharp and sudden she screamed against his palm.

For what felt like an hour he traversed her body with his hands, finding all the pressure points on her that when touched the right way would send acute agony flashing through her body like lightning. By the time he stopped, she lay panting and sweating on the rug. She had not a single mark on her body, not a single bruise. A flogging would have hurt less.

Søren licked his fingertips and pressed them into her clitoris as he pushed her thighs wide open with his knees.

Pleasure pooled between her legs and radiated out through her entire body. He kissed her mouth, her neck, her ni**les, and she raised her hips into his hand.

“Please...” she whispered, desperate to have him inside her. Making her wait was always the cruelest of his tortures.

Tonight he didn’t make her wait. He moved her onto her stomach and raised her knee to her chest to open her more for him. He pushed inside her, releasing the slightest of groans as she raised her hips to take him deeper. As he thrust into her, he kissed the back of her neck, her shoulders. He pressed her wrists into the floor, holding her arms immobile.

“Jeg elsker deg, min lille en,” he breathed into her skin. “Du tilhører mig.”

I love you, Little One. You belong to me.

“Tonight, I do,” she whispered back in English.

He lingered inside her, not rushing, not hurrying to the end. She relaxed underneath him and cherished each moment of their joined bodies. She felt pleasure with other men, ecstasy even sometimes...but only when Søren was inside her did she feel whole.

Søren came with his hand digging into the back of her neck and his teeth in her shoulder. She turned her head and kissed his upper arm before he let her go.

They rarely traveled together—it was far too great a risk. Tonight she threw caution to the wind and had booked the same flight but seats on opposite ends of the plane. She’d give her grieving priest the first-class seat. She’d hide out in coach. They wouldn’t even get to speak to each other for the entire trip, but even apart for the eight-hour flight, she would keep something of him inside her.

Once in Denmark they could relax. A wonderful thing to come to a country so secular where no one knew him or her. When Søren told her years earlier that less than one percent of the Danish population was Catholic, she asked if they could move here. He’d laughed but she hadn’t been joking. Once at his sister’s house, the peace she felt being in such a safe and secular country evaporated. At the door she felt a sudden fearfulness, a sense of not belonging here anymore. Søren seemed to sense her fears for he took her hand in his, kissed it and whispered, “This is your home, too.”