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0778318435 (A) Page 40

by Tiffany Reisz


  “My pleasure,” Nora said, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “So what will we do tonight?” Kingsley asked as he left the heat of the fireplace and walked to the window. Outside the storm continued its assault on the castle. “Tell ghost stories? It’s a good night for it.”

  “Perhaps Eleanor would be willing to tell us about the time she, and I quote, ‘fucked a nun’ at her mother’s convent,” Søren said, sitting on the bed and stacking a large red pillow behind his back.

  “You fucked a nun at your mother’s convent?” Kingsley asked, turning back to stare at her askance. “When did that happen?”

  “That year,” Nora said, and Kingsley winced. He knew what she meant, as well.

  “And you never told me?” Kingsley asked.

  “How is me sleeping with a nun any of your business?”

  “Because it’s you sleeping with a nun,” Kingsley said with dramatic emphasis. “That is the very definition of my business. I need to know what she looked like, her name, if she had small breasts or large. Do you have pictures of her and you together? And can you tell me exactly what you did with her in detail while I take notes?”

  “I could,” Nora said. “I’m not going to.”

  “I could order you to,” Søren said, and Nora groaned.

  “You’re as bad as he is,” she said, pointing a finger at Kingsley. “You’re perverts, the both of you. J’accuse.”

  Kingsley nodded. “J’accepte.”

  “That was a really hard year for all of us,” Nora said. “And it was twelve years ago. Can you give me one good reason why we should dredge all of that up tonight?”

  “I can,” Kingsley said. “Because you fucked a nun. C’est la raison.”

  Nora put a hand to her forehead. “Dear Lord, save me from these men tonight.”

  “I would like to know,” Søren said, and the room went still and solemn with the tenor of his words. “Neither of you ever told me what happened that year you both were gone.”

  “Maybe because you don’t want to know,” Nora said as she walked to the bed and crawled into it on the side opposite Søren. She pulled a pillow to her stomach and sat cross-legged. “You weren’t our favorite person that year, after all.”

  “I wasn’t my favorite person that year, either,” Søren said, bending his leg to rest his arm on his knee. Kingsley came to the bed and stretched out at the foot, lying on his side to face them. “You both had disappeared on me and when you came back, everything had changed.”

  “I met Juliette,” Kingsley said. “That’s what I did that year.”

  “You’ve never told me how,” Søren said. “And you—” he looked at Nora “—never told me why you came back.”

  “Do you really want to know?” she asked, meeting his eyes. “We’re happy now, all of us.” She glanced at Kingsley and back at Søren.

  “Ignorance is a poor excuse for bliss,” Søren said, looking pointedly at her. “Tell me what happened.”

  Nora turned her head and looked into Kingsley’s dark brown eyes. They stared at each other for a long quiet moment. She’d never told Kingsley what had happened when she’d left Søren. And Kingsley had never told her. In her more honest moments she’d admit she was curious what Kingsley did in that time and why he’d left when she had.

  “That sounded like an order,” Nora said to Kingsley.

  “It was,” Kingsley said, as accustomed to following Søren’s orders now as she.

  “Who starts?” she asked him.

  “You left first,” Kingsley said to Nora. The playfulness had left his demeanor. She saw the dark light of secrets in his eyes.

  “You left after me, though. Why?”

  “You don’t know?” Kingsley said.

  “No. I was afraid to ask,” Nora confessed. “I thought...I thought all kinds of things that year. I think I went a little crazy for a while. But I guess you would too if you were trapped in a convent surrounded by nuns with nothing but your thoughts to keep you company.”

  “And a nun in your bed,” Kingsley reminded her.

  “And yes, there was a nun in my bed,” Nora said with a sigh.

  “This is my favorite story already,” Kingsley said. “Go on.”

  Nora took a breath, got comfortable with the sheets and pillow.

  “Well...” she began. “It was a dark and stormy night...”

  “Eleanor,” Søren said.

  “It was,” she said. “I’m not making that up. That night we fought, it was dark and stormy, remember?”

  Søren nodded. “I remember. Go on.”

  Nora closed her eyes, let herself drift back to that night, that terrible night and that year, that dark and stormy year.

  She was twenty-six years old.

  Søren had just returned home from Rome.

  And she was in the worst pain of her life.

  “It was a dark and stormy night,” Nora began again, opening her eyes to look at Søren. He returned her gaze with placid, waiting curiosity. “And I was leaving you. Forever.”

  Copyright © 2015 by Tiffany Reisz

  ISBN: 978-1-474-03564-4

  THE QUEEN

  © 2015 Tiffany Reisz

  Published in Great Britain 2015

  by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited

  Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

  By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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  Table of Contents

  Back Cover Text

  Praise

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

&nbs
p; Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Extract

  Copyright

 

 

 


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