Winter Tales: An Original Sinners Christmas Anthology
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“Playing wife.”
“She played it too well. Sometimes I forgot we weren’t married. My nieces latched onto her and wouldn’t let her go the entire time we were there. She helped Gitte put on her pajamas, talked to her, read her bedtime stories, went for long walks with Laila, had heart-to-hearts with her. And at night, she slept with me, stayed with me, took care of me. It was the week my mother died, and it’s one of my most cherished memories of Eleanor. What does that say about me? About her?”
“It says that if the Catholic Church ever allowed priests to marry, and your Eleanor said yes, you’d marry her that day.”
“That hour,” he said. “That minute, if we could say the vows quickly enough.”
“Even if she did marry you, you know she doesn’t want children. But I suppose you found a way around that…”
“Ever since I heard the news, I find myself bouncing back and forth between joy and terror. Joy that I have a son. Terror that I’ll lose Eleanor over him.”
“You should have thought about that before you fucked a married woman.”
“You make it sound so sordid.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. She had permission to be with me, not only from her husband—who’d been with Eleanor and told his wife she could have her fun, too—but Eleanor as well. This was not…”
“You know I don’t care. I only torment you because I enjoy it, not because I believe a word I say. How many married men have I taken to bed? Most of them? A good ninety percent.”
“I come to you for help and you mock me.”
“It’s what I do.” She smiled at him so he would know she didn’t hate him, not completely, anyway. “Joy and terror—they’re twins, you know. Joy is born first. Then terror a few minutes after. Joy arrives when you recognize what you have. Terror comes on its heels, terror that you’ll lose the thing that gave you all that joy.”
He looked her in the eyes. “If she leaves me, I don’t know how I’ll survive it.”
“By coming and moaning to me, as usual. So let’s hope she doesn’t leave you. I’d rather not have a lovelorn priest moping around the house. Bad for business.”
“Then it would behoove you to help me, wouldn’t it?”
Laughing, she turned toward him, put her elbow on the back of the bench and rested her head on her hand. “You don’t really believe I can see the future, do you?”
“No, but you’re a woman, a dominant. You love and hate me, just like Eleanor. I think you understand her on a level I can’t. And perhaps me, as well.”
Even if Magdalena were to admit she had no soothsaying gifts—not that she ever would—it didn’t take a psychic to see that her Bambi, though a sadist and a dominant himself, was drawn to dominant women. He’d hung around her house every chance he had when he was in seminary in Rome. Oh, he claimed he only wished to learn from her but that didn’t explain the long quiet evenings they’d spent together talking of anything but sadism. Only a matter a time before he fell in love with a dominant woman.
“She should leave you,” Magdalena said. “I don’t think you can fathom how much you’ve complicated her life. Isn’t it enough she has to share your heart with Kingsley? Now she has to share you with your son?”
“Wives have always shared the hearts of their husbands with their children. And husbands have shared the hearts of their wives with their children. This is nothing new.”
“She’s not your wife. She’s the mistress of a Jesuit priest. She’s been your dirty little secret since she was fifteen years old. She can’t even walk down the street with you without being terrified she’ll ruin your life. That woman has given you her entire adult life, and when you’re in public you have to pretend you only know her from church. A slap in the face to any woman with pride. The bad sort of slap in the face.”
“It intrigues me how you always take Eleanor’s side, though you’ve known me thirty years and never met her once.”
“I have met you. That’s why I take her side. And I’ll always take the side of a dominant woman.”
“Let’s say I agree with you, that she should leave me. Eleanor never does what she should—so she’ll stay.”
“I didn’t say that either.”
He bent forward, elbows on knees, hands pressed together, fingertips at his lips. He looked like he was praying. She put her hand on his back, gently and with affection.
“Was it revenge? Sleeping with this woman? Having a child with her?”
He made a sound, almost a laugh. “Revenge? For what?”
“You know perfectly well. You’re a Catholic priest. She had an abortion. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me that didn’t bother you at all.”
“You really think so little of me? That I would have a child with another woman in order to punish Eleanor?”
“Yes, I think that little of you.”
Now he did laugh, a real laugh. He sat up again, shook his head.
“You can laugh all you want,” she said, “but don’t pretend that it didn’t hurt.”
He took a long breath. “It hurt. It did. That she didn’t discuss it with me first. I know why she did. She didn’t want to make me complicit in the decision. But still…yes, of course it hurt.”
“You would have talked her out of it. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know what I would have done or said. I didn’t get a chance.”
“So it did bother you.”
“It was her decision. And it wasn’t even mine.”
“No, but she was yours. Wasn’t she? And yet she made the choice to not have a child, entirely without you. And then a few years later you made a choice to have a child, entirely without her.”
“My son is not an act of revenge against Eleanor. Perhaps you would do something like that, but not me. Not to her. And if you think that about my son, that he is the product of something as vile as petty revenge against Eleanor, then this is the last conversation we should ever have. You can think as little of me as you like, but you will not say a word against him.”
He stood and started for the chapel door.
“Søren,” she said. His name, his real name, felt so strange in her mouth, awkward. Suurrn. Saying it did get his attention. He stopped at the door, but didn’t turn around.
“Your Kingsley told me your name years ago,” she said. “You’ve never given me permission to call you Søren, so Bambi it is.” Bambi, short for Bambino. He’d been a little baby Jesuit when they’d first met.
“You may call me Søren.”
“Thank you, Bambi.”
He returned to her.
“You’re a manipulative bastard,” she said to him. “You know I never want you to leave. It’s the only threat that works on me.”
“It wasn’t a threat. I really was going to leave.”
“Of course you were.”
She held out her hand and—reluctantly—he put his into hers.
“I’ll look and see what I can see,” she said, squeezing his fingertips. “But we do it my way. And my way requires blood money.”
He smiled down at her. “I couldn’t bring my scalpels on the plane with me.”
She slipped her hand into the left pocket of her dress and pulled out a small knife in a leather case.
“Then we’ll use mine.”
Six
Blood & Snow
“Altar?” she said.
“I would prefer we didn’t.”
“Sometimes, you’re such a…such a priest. If you insist. The window, please. I am taking a candle from the altar, whether you like it or not.”
“I can accept that.”
The monastery was so old that every window had a window bench under it. In the long, dark centuries before electricity, the monks would sit in those benches by day to read or mend their robes in the only bright light they could find. Now she sat there to read the palm of a priest by the light of the winter moon.
She brought over one candle and set it on the bench, sat by it and gestured for hi
m to sit across from her.
“I’ll need snow,” she said. “Blood and snow. Warm blood for your heart. Ice cold snow for your soul.”
As she ran the blade of her small, sharp, wicked little scalpel through the flame of the candle to sterilize it, he opened the iron latch on the window. The wind was still that night, so the cold air merely sauntered into the chapel instead of blasting in. The snow was fresh, thick and heavy on the window sill. He scooped up a handful, brought it inside, and closed the window.
“Hold the snow in your right hand until it melts,” she said. “Give me your left.”
He gave her his left hand. With the tip of the scalpel, she cut a diagonal line into his palm.
“This is the secret of my happiness,” she said. “I learned how to change my fate. You don’t have to live with the lines fate draws for us. We can cut our own lines if we’re willing to take up the knife and put the blade to ourselves.”
Blood welled up in the inch-long cut. A thin cut, it would heal by the time he returned home to his Eleanor. She smiled to herself when she saw his pupils begin to dilate. They took over his eyes until his gray irises became nothing but silver frames encircling ebony stones.
She ran her thumb over the blood on his palm, spreading it over the lines of his life.
“Bring your hands together in prayer,” she said. “Palms flat.”
He did as ordered.
“Open them.”
He opened his hands and held them palms up. The snow had melted and mingled with the blood, tinting the insides of his hands pink.
She put on a good show of tracing the lines in his palms, reading the drying blood. It was a pretense, a game, really. She’d cut him because she wanted to cut him, because it pleased her to cut him.
“No,” Magdalena said softly, “she won’t leave you. Although she probably should.”
“You’re certain?”
“I would bet what little of my life is left on it.” She pointed. “There. The line of love, it’s unbroken to the end.” She traced the line from one side of his palm to the other. “She will not leave you, even when future events tempt her. She will love that little boy as foolishly as she loves you. Because he is part of you and you are part of him.”
Marcus leaned forward, pressed his forehead to hers. She let him, then lifted her chin to kiss his temple.
Ah, like old times again, when she’d break him apart, only to put him back together afterwards, a little stronger than before. She ran her fingers through his golden hair, gold and silver now.
“Relieved?”
“Profoundly.”
“I wouldn’t be if I were you.”
He looked up at her.
“You might be above petty revenge, but she isn’t.”
“Oh God, what is she doing now?”
Magdalena grinned. Had she seen something in his hand, in his fate? A dark, handsome, very young man with thick, waving hair and kissable lips pressed to the arch of Eleanor’s foot? Had she seen it in his palm, or was she simply imagining what she herself would do in Eleanor’s position? It didn’t matter, really. What was coming was coming, sure as winter comes after autumn, sure as night comes after day.
“You’ll see. If it’s any comfort at all, when she gets her revenge on you…you will deserve it.”
About the Author
Tiffany Reisz is the USA Today bestselling author of the Romance Writers of America RITA®-winning Original Sinners series from Harlequin’s Mira Books.
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Her erotic fantasy The Red—self-published under the banner 8th Circle Press—was named an NPR Best Book of the Year and a Goodreads Best Romance of the Month. It also received a coveted starred review from Library Journal.
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Tiffany lives in Kentucky with her husband, author Andrew Shaffer, and two cats. The cats are not writers.
Subscribe to the Tiffany Reisz e-mail newsletter and receive a free copy of Something Nice, an Original Sinners ebook novella:
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www.tiffanyreisz.com/mailing-list
More Books by Tiffany Reisz
Novels
THE BOURBON THIEF
THE LUCKY ONES
THE NIGHT MARK
THE RED
THE ROSE
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The Original Sinners Novels
THE SIREN (#1)
THE ANGEL (#2)
THE PRINCE (#3)
THE MISTRESS (#4)
THE SAINT (#5)
THE KING (#6)
THE VIRGIN (#7)
THE QUEEN (#8)
THE PRIEST (#9)
THE CHATEAU (standalone)
PICTURE PERFECT COWBOY (standalone)
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The Original Sinners Novellas
THE GIFT (previously published as SEVEN DAY LOAN)
IMMERSED IN PLEASURE
THE LAST GOOD KNIGHT (PARTS I—V)
LITTLE RED RIDING CROP
MISCHIEF
THE MISTRESS FILES
SOMETHING NICE
SUBMIT TO DESIRE
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The Original Sinners Collections
ABSOLUTION (Australia Only)
THE CONFESSIONS
MICHAEL’S WINGS
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Harlequin Category Romances
THE HEADMASTER (e-Shivers)
HER HALLOWEEN TREAT (Blaze/Men At Work)
HER NAUGHTY HOLIDAY (Blaze/Men At Work)
MISBEHAVING (Red-Hot Reads)
ONE HOT DECEMBER (Blaze/Men At Work)
SEIZE THE NIGHT (Red-Hot Reads)
Available for Pre-Order Now
The Original Sinners series begins a new chapter in April 2020 with The Priest, the long-awaited sequel to The Queen.
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“Tiffany Reisz’s The Original Sinners series is painful, prideful, brilliant, beautiful, hopeful, and heart-breaking. And that’s just the first hundred pages.” — New York Times bestselling author Courtney Milan
eBook, Paperback, and Audio | 8thCirclePress.com
Also Available
As the Jack-of-All-Wicked-Trades for a secretive French military intelligence agency, Kingsley Boissonneault has done it all—spied, lied, and killed under orders. Now his commanding officer’s nephew has disappeared inside a sex cult, and Kingsley has been tasked with bringing him home to safety. Will he be able to resist the enigmatic Madame, a woman of wisdom, power, and beauty?
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“Masterly and rich... Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (Starred Review)
eBook, Paperback, and Audio | 8thCirclePress.com
Also Available
Mona Lisa St. James made a deathbed promise that she would do anything to save her mother’s art gallery.
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Just as she realizes she has no choice but to sell it, a mysterious man comes in after closing time and makes her an offer: He will save The Red…but only if she agrees to submit to him for the period of one year.
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“Deliciously deviant… Akin to Anne Rice’s ‘Beauty’ series.” — Library Journal (Starred Review)
eBook, Paperback, and Audio | 8thCirclePress.com
Also Available
Jason “Still” Waters’ life looks perfect from the outside—money, fame, and the words “World Champion Bull-Rider” after his name. But Jason has a secret, one he never planned on telling anybody...until he meets Simone. She’s the kinky girl of his dreams...and his conservative family’s worst nightmare.
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Picture Perfect Cowboy is a standalone erotic romance from Tiffany Reisz, set in her bestselling Original Sinners series.
eBook, Paperback, and Audio | 8thCirclePress.com
Also Available
Father Stuart Ballard has been Marcus Stearns’ confessor since the young Jesuit was only eighteen years old. He thought he’d heard every sin the boy had to confess until Marcus uttered those three fateful words: “I met Eleanor.”
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So begins “The Confession of Marcus Stearns,” a moving coda to the RITA® Award-winning Original Sinners series.
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“This is the reward for the tempestuous journey of all those who have read the series…” — Heroes & Heartbreakers
eBook, Paperback, and Audio | 8thCirclePress.com
Also Available
A companion collection to The Angel, featuring a new novella and five previously-published short stories starring the Original Sinners’ Michael and Griffin.
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Stories include “Griffin in Wonderland,” “Gauze,” “The Theory of the Moment,” “A Better Distraction,” “Christmas in Suite 37A,” and a brand new erotic novella guest-starring Mistress Nora!
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“Trademark Tiffany Reisz... I loved every minute of it.” — TotallyBooked
eBook, Paperback, and Audio | 8thCirclePress.com
WINTER TALES: AN ORIGINAL SINNERS CHRISTMAS ANTHOLOGY
Copyright © 2019 Tiffany Reisz