Nora smiled. “Your office. I remember when you’d make me cocoa and help me with my math homework on that bench right outside your office.”

“I always knew when you were working on your math homework. The litany of profanities echoing through the halls was always an excellent indicator. Shall we? I’ll see what’s in the cupboard.”

He held out his hand and Nora reached into her pocket. She laid her collar on his waiting palm.

“I didn’t come here for the cocoa.” Nora met his eyes. For perhaps only the second time in eighteen years, she saw she’d surprised him.

Søren said nothing, merely closed his fingers around her collar. She’d seen those same fingers wrapped around his rosary a thousand times. He held her collar with the same love, the same devotion, the same grim determination to make heaven bend to his ear.

Without a word, Søren turned on his heel.

Nora followed him through the sanctuary and through door after door. A final door opened to a shadowy tree-shrouded pathway that led from the church to the rectory. How many times had she furtively stolen from the church to his home? A million times, she thought. A million was still not enough.

Secluded by a copse of old-world elms and oaks, Søren’s rectory stood graceful and quiet in the sheltered sanctuary created by the trees. A small two-story Gothic cottage, it afforded him both beauty and privacy—two very precious commodities.

Nora waited in submissive silence as Søren built a fire in the living-room fireplace. Glancing around, Nora saw the secret signs of their long association: the Bösendorfer piano she’d given him as a gift last December 21 for his forty-sixth birthday, the tassel of an embroidered bookmark she’d made for him at church camp the summer she turned sixteen peeking out from a volume of John Donne poetry, a lock on the bottom door of a cabinet under one of the bookcases. Only she and he knew what he kept behind that lock. And on the fireplace mantel were ten slight scratches in the wood left by her desperate fingernails on a night he had shown her no mercy. She knew she might add another ten there tonight.

Søren came to her and gazed down at her face. She kept her eyes respectfully lowered. It had been the first submissive act he’d taught her.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“To give myself to you, sir.”

“You wish to be mine again?”

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“And utterly, sir,” she said. “Without conditions or constraints.” The words came so easily to her she knew they must be true. Coming back felt as easy as falling, as simple as death.

“You weren’t mine last night, were you?” Søren demanded and Nora blushed.

“No, sir,” she whispered.

“You were with your editor last night. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“And did you do as I told you? Did you make him hurt you?”

“Yes, sir.”

From the corner of her eye she saw him raise his eyebrow at her in clear skepticism.