Kingsley only grinned.

"You did."

"Sorry."

"Don"t be sorry. No one in this room can judge you. I"ve f.u.c.ked two different people today. And likely a third before the night is over."

"That should help me feel less horrible, but it doesn"t. A little jealous, though." She tried to smile.

"This should make you feel less horrible. He knew this would happen. I would say he wanted it to."

"S0ren wanted me to fall for someone else?"

"You think he is making you wait so long for him for no other reason than to torture you?"

"Well, yeah."

"It"s part of it." Kingsley sat back and threw his long booted legs up on the back of the sofa and crossed his ankles. "But the truth is he loves you. And he"s a Catholic priest. And he can"t marry you. And he can"t give you children. And he can"t hold your hand while you walk through Washington Square Park and kiss you under a streetlamp in the snow where all the world can see you. And if that"s something you want, he wants you to have it. s.e.x will seal you to him. You spend a night in his bed and you will never want to leave it. If you are going to get out, you need to do it now before it"s too late."

"I want them both."

"If le pretre would allow that, would your boy allow it?"

She shook her head.

"No. He"d hate that. The first day he wanted to know everything about S0ren. Now he flinches if I even mention him."

"Then you have a choice to make. But make it soon and make it clean."

"Make it clean?"

Kingsley sat his drink on the side table and, with adroit fingers, quickly unb.u.t.toned his white shirt. He pulled the fabric to the side to bare a large scar that looked recently healed.

"Bullet wound," he said. "Nearly killed me. Not the shot, however. The bullet shattered on a rib. They had to dig out thirty pieces of silver. You want to shoot someone? Have the decency to make it clean. In and out, straight through. No hope."

"No hope? That"s brutal, King."

"You say he"s an aspiring writer. Break him, then." Kingsley sipped his Scotch and laughed to himself. "It"ll be good for his art."

He started to b.u.t.ton his shirt, but Eleanor stopped him with a hand on his chest. She pressed her hand against the scar tissue. He didn"t seem surprised when she touched his chest. Not surprised and not at all displeased.

"This nun at my school always said h.e.l.l was the absence of hope," Eleanor said, tracing the hard line of the scar. She couldn"t imagine how much pain Kingsley had suffered, how he"d even survived such a wound. But it was beautiful in a way, this scar of his. She almost wanted to kiss it.

Kingsley covered her hand with his.

"Then your nun was never in love with someone she couldn"t have. If you care about this boy at all, give him no hope."

He raised his hand and traced her bottom lip with his thumb.

"I know you, Elle," Kingsley said, his voice so low it lulled her in closer to him, so close they could have kissed if one of them dared to do it. "I know what you are. You will never be content with a boy like that. He will be a game and you will play him and you will tire of the game and him. You need so much more than such a boy can give you. I know this because I"m the same way."

He looked into her eyes and Eleanor looked into his. She could almost imagine their lips meeting ... She could rip off his shirt, yank his pants open. He"d look beautiful on his back underneath her, her hands on his wrists, his c.o.c.k buried inside her as she rode him into the couch.

Wait. What the f.u.c.k was she thinking?

Eleanor pulled back and sat on the opposite end of the couch from Kingsley. He continued to stare at her, a smug smile on his lips as if he"d read her thoughts. He didn"t bother b.u.t.toning his shirt.

Kingsley took another swig of his Scotch, then handed it to her. She stared into the murky liquid before taking a deep drink of it. She coughed only once as the liquor burned its way down her throat.

"I"m f.u.c.ked, King."

"Not yet. But the night is still young."

"What should I do?"

"What do you want to do?"

"f.u.c.k them both." She laughed mirthlessly. "I know what I don"t want to do. I don"t want to hurt Wyatt. I don"t want to hurt S0ren."

"A nice dream, but this is life, the real world. You will hurt them. They will hurt you."

"Wyatt ... he"s my age, you know?" She stared down into the Scotch at the bottom of Kingsley"s gla.s.s in her hand. "He"s an NYU student. We can go places together, be seen together. We"re both writers. We make sense. S0ren and I? We don"t make sense. At least to no one but us."

Kingsley traced the wet rim of his gla.s.s with his fingertip.

"Elle ... I wish you could have known him back when he was a teenager."

"What was he like?"

"Old. He was older then than he is now. An old soul, as they say." Kingsley chuckled at what must have been a good memory. "Mon Dieu, you"d never met anyone more arrogant, haughty, pompous and condescending. Everyone at the school hated that blond s.h.i.t. Everyone but the priests."

Eleanor burst into laughter.

"I can totally picture that. Why was he such a p.r.i.c.k back then?"

"We"re all s.h.i.ts when we"re teenagers. G.o.d knows I was, but for him, I think it was this fear of his. He thought he"d been tainted by his father, his past. Better to be hated than loved. Love lets people in. He wanted no one near him. He"s better now. Being a priest ... he"s more open with his affections. Being with you ..." Kingsley paused as if the next words didn"t want to come. "Being with you makes him better. Happy. Less troubled. My G.o.d, he"s almost ..." Kingsley shook his head. "Almost fun."

Kingsley said the word with exaggerated horror.

Eleanor laughed. "He wasn"t fun as a teenager?" She gave Kingsley his Scotch back. If she kept it she might drink it all and then some.

"In a different way," he answered, and Kingsley smiled his secret sort of smile before the smile died. "No, he was not fun then. He was cold and closed off, dangerous and nearly impossible to get close to. It nearly killed me getting close to him, but in the end the reward was worth the price."

"If I left him ..." She faced Kingsley and stared into his dark eyes. "What would happen?"

Kingsley twirled the remaining Scotch and ice around the bottom of his gla.s.s.

"You have only seen him by day, and by day we see only light and shadow. But if you left him, the night would come. And then we would all see the darkness."

"What"s the darkness like?"

"I will say only this-when le pretre is in the right mood, he can make even the devil afraid to turn his back."

Kingsley downed the last of his drink. Eleanor buried her face in her hands again.

"I hate my life tonight," Eleanor said as his words slipped in through the hairline fractures in her heart and widened them.

"Elle, I once stood at the same crossroads you stand at now. I have never regretted walking the darker path. The view is better down here. And I am many things, but I am never bored."

"I don"t want S0ren to ever leave the priesthood, but if we get caught, if he gets in trouble ... I wish I could I see the future."

"What"s his last name, this young man of yours?"

"Why? You gonna make a file on him?" She knew all about Kingsley"s files he kept on anyone who interested him.

"Peut-etre," he admitted without shame. Maybe.

"It"s Sutherlin. Wyatt James Sutherlin. Want his birth date and blood type, too?"

Kingsley chuckled. "I can find that out myself. Wyatt Sutherlin ... Eleanor Sutherlin ... It has a nice ring to it, no?"

She sighed heavily. Absurd to think of someone like her getting married, having kids, doing the wife-and-mother thing. She sat in the music room of the most notorious house in the city talking to the most notorious kinkster in the city about the priest she loved.

"My high school best friend, well, my only friend, Jordan, is getting married next summer. She"s a soph.o.m.ore at Anna Maria and she"s already engaged. She can"t wait to have babies. She called me last week. I couldn"t even talk to her. How do I talk to someone like that? I thought ..." She stopped and laughed sheepishly. "I thought about asking you to pay her a visit. Seduce her, I mean. She saw you once and it was the only time she ever made a s.e.x joke. She"s going down the marriage-and-kids path at eighteen, and I want to stop her."

"I could stop her," he said without any arrogance in his tone. He simply stated a fact. "Would you like me to?"

She shook her head.

"Husband, kids-that"s what Jordan wants."

"And you?"

"I want more than that."

"Then you have your answer, Eleanor Sutherlin."

"You call me that again and I"ll slap you into the next century."

"Now, ma belle Elle, you are speaking my language."

Eleanor kissed Kingsley good-night on both cheeks and threw on her coat.

The temperature had dropped, so she decided to spring for a cab. While scanning the street in search of a yellow, she heard someone calling her name.

"Wyatt?" She turned around and faced Wyatt with shock. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

He clutched a bouquet of flowers in his hand, half-dead from the cold.

"You said you had to work tonight," he said without a smile on his face. She couldn"t remember seeing him without a smile on his face. "I wanted to surprise you at work with flowers. I didn"t know which bookstore you worked at so I followed you. I know that"s creepy, but I thought you"d forgive me since all I wanted to do was bring you flowers."

"You"ve been waiting out here for two hours?"

"The things we do for love, right?" He raised his hands and laughed at himself. "I kind of liked the mystery-girl vibe you have. You don"t talk about your past, your parents. I don"t even know the name of this guy you"re supposedly in love with. It"s kind of hot, this whole secrecy thing you"ve got going. But secrets are one thing. You lied to me."

"I did lie," she admitted. "I"m not at work, obviously. I was visiting a friend."

"A f.u.c.king rich friend from the looks of it."

"He"s also his friend. I didn"t want to hurt your feelings."

"Well, they"re hurt. No big deal. They"ll get unhurt. Eventually. Same way as I"ll get unfrozen."

"Eventually?"

"Right. Can we maybe go somewhere and talk-"

"Wyatt, I can"t see you anymore." Eleanor let the words rip fast and hard, like tearing off a bandage.

"Am I suddenly invisible?"

She rubbed her forehead.

"You have to stop being so cute and funny, okay?" she said. "He comes back in three days. I can"t do this anymore, play this game with you."

"It"s not a game. I"m in love with you."

"And I"m in love with him."

"You can"t be. He"s in his thirties. You"re nineteen. I mean, what could you have in common with someone that old? What could you two even talk about?"

"He"s brilliant and funny and fascinating, and I"ll never reach the end of the mystery of him."

"Guys that age love younger girls. You"re easy prey for them. They can impress you by just being older."

"I am not easy prey, okay? I"m not some sheep being eaten by a big bad wolf. He speaks eighteen languages. He"s six foot four. He"s stunningly beautiful and yes, I"m using the word beautiful. He rides a motorcycle and he lives this life like you can"t believe and he brought me into it. These parties I"ve seen, you can"t imagine it. And the people? Rich and powerful people like you wouldn"t believe. And, Wyatt, none of that matters. What matters is that he loves me and there is nothing he wouldn"t do for me. He loves me so much that if I wanted to be with you more than him, he"d let me be with you. He loves me and he knows me, and I am a more interesting person when I"m with him than when I am without him. Without him I"m just an NYU English major with a part-time job and too much homework."

"That"s all I am, too."

"Yeah. Exactly."

The words hung in the air between them, hovering like a poison cloud. She knew she"d crossed a line, pushed the knife in too deep. As much as she adored Wyatt, he could never compete with a man like S0ren. First of all, S0ren was a man and Wyatt was only a nineteen-year-old boy.

"You know what you"re doing, Elle?" Wyatt said. "You"re living in Wonderland. This guy is older and speaks all these languages and lives this crazy life. It"s different, it"s weird, it"s the Mad Kingdom down the rabbit hole. It"s fun for a while, but you still have to go home eventually. You can"t live there forever, Alice."

"I"m not Alice." She didn"t know what she was-White Rabbit, White Queen or Jabberwocky-but she knew one thing perfectly well. She was no stranger to Wonderland. She was born there.

"This is crazy, you and him."