Dedication

Dedicated to the brave men and women who serve in the U.S. Navy.
You all are my knights in occasionally wet armor.

And to Tommy and Elizabeth.

About the Author

Tiffany Reisz’s books inhabit a sexy, shadowy world where erotica, romance and gothic literature meet and do immoral and possibly illegal things to each other. The first book in her international bestselling series The Original Sinners was named the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Erotic Romance. She is a very bad Catholic. Visit her website, www.tiffanyreisz.com, for news, gossip and wholly inappropriate bedtime stories.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Nora said as she stepped into his kitchen.

“How am I looking at you?” Søren closed the door behind her and locked it. She shucked off her coat and sat on the edge of the kitchen table.

“Like you’ve been expecting me.”

“I was expecting you. I knew you’d want to talk about Natasha. I saw it in your eyes last night at Kingsley’s.”

“Ha,” she said as Søren came to her and stood in front of her. “Shows how much you know. I don’t want to talk about Natasha.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. Now late evening, he’d abandoned his clerics for normal clothes—black long-sleeved T-shirt, black jeans. Even off-duty he couldn’t get away from all black. She saw a glass of wine on the kitchen counter and smelled a fire burning in his fireplace. Briefly she wondered if she’d interrupted him entertaining someone. But no, it was one glass of wine—not two—on the counter. They were alone, and she was ashamed of her relief.

“Is that so?” he asked. “Then what do you want to talk about, Eleanor?”

“Nothing,” she said as she raised her mouth to him for a kiss. “Nothing at all.”

Søren didn’t seem to care if they talked tonight or not. She kissed him first, but he kissed her harder, deeper, and with such desperate possessiveness she almost forgot she didn’t belong to him anymore—a dangerous sort of amnesia. Nora could have stopped him with a word but the only word that passed her lips came in the form of a question.

“Bedroom?”

“Now,” Søren ordered and in seconds they’d reached the top of his stairs. Once there he lifted her off the floor, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his back. As a Dominatrix she had to be strong, all the time. Men submitted to her, feared her, knelt at her feet and worshipped her. Tonight she needed to be his, needed to submit, needed to be the one on her knees. So she’d come to Søren, the one man she gave up her power to, if only for the night.

“Hurt me,” she begged and he slammed her back into the wall with bruising force. His kisses were equally bruising. He bit at her bottom lip and she tasted blood.

He let her down and the moment her feet touched the floor his hand grabbed the back of her neck with a vicious, merciless grip. In the open doorway of his bedroom, he shoved her to her knees, exactly where she wanted to be. Impossibly strong fingers dug into her skin as she rested her forehead against his hip. She breathed through the pain, breathed through it and into it, not fighting it. She had come here tonight for the pain, for the surrender, for the chance to forget everything she didn’t want to remember.