about that yet. When she was done being sick, she rinsed her mouth out and splashed cold water on her face. Then she pulled her pants down and checked her bleeding. It was heavy and thick. She tried to feel sad, feel remorse or regret. Instead, she felt only relief. She held on to that relief as she made her way back to her seat.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. The man in the seat next to her patted her clammy hand and she opened her eyes. He placed three saltines in her palm. For the rest of the trip she nibbled on her crackers. In her weakened state and on her empty stomach, they tasted like manna from heaven.
“Thank you,” she said. He reached out and patted her shoulder. A kind, grandfatherly touch. She ached so much for human warmth right now she wanted to sit next to him and lean against him. When another cramp slammed into her back, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it.
“It’s all right,” the man said in a low voice. “We’re almost there. I get carsick too sometimes. Especially if I try to read. You’re gonna make it.”
She smiled so he knew she heard him, but didn’t tell him the truth. She wasn’t carsick. Elle Schreiber did not get carsick. Any car, any kind, she could drive it. She’d been driving since she was twelve years old. She could hot-wire a car in under fifteen seconds. She could shift like a race car driver. She felt more at home in a car than she did anywhere else on earth—except for Søren’s bed. Carsick was the last thing she was.
When the pain passed, she lifted her head and rested back against the seat. For a few minutes all she did was breathe. Long breaths. Slow breaths. Breaths that filled her lungs and emptied her mind. At first she didn’t realize what she was doing. Then she remembered.
“Little One, take deep breaths when you’re on the cross. Deep full breaths. Fill your lungs and empty your mind. When I beat you, it’s for us, for our pleasure—yours and mine. Don’t be afraid. Never be afraid of me.”
“Never ever, sir,” she’d whispered back to him.
But now she was afraid.
“You running away from home, young lady?” the man in the seat next to her asked. She could hear the joking tone in his voice.
“I don’t run,” Elle said. “It’s not running away from home if you’re not running, right?”
“That’s a good point. Visiting friends or family here?”
“A friend,” she said. “I think he’s a friend. I hope he is.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“I broke his heart once,” she said, smiling again.
“You look like a heartbreaker.” The man nodded sagely and Elle laughed.
“I don’t mean to be. I never mean to hurt anybody,” she said. “But I do.”
They’d been joking the way strangers packed into a crowded elevator or jostled about on an airplane joked. But what she’d said was too true and too somber, and he gave her a look of curiosity and compassion.
“A little girl like you couldn’t hurt a fly,” he said kindly.
Elle looked up and took a breath. If he only knew.
“I could hurt a fly,” she whispered.
After six hours and two bus changes, she finally arrived in New Hampshire. She wasn’t done with her journey yet. At the station she followed a young woman to a parking lot and offered her a hundred dollars to drive her forty miles. The woman seemed skeptical at first, but Elle held up the money. That did the trick.
Elle sat in the backseat of the beat-up Ford Thunderbird. The front seat was taken up by a child’s car seat, and Elle was happy to sit in the back and not look at it. She thought about asking the woman where the kid was, but she didn’t want to talk, especially about children. She apologized for her lack of conversation. Still recovering from car sickness, Elle said. The woman turned on the radio to cover the silence, and Elle kept her eyes closed all the way there.
A little after one in the afternoon, she arrived at her destination. Elle almost wept with relief at the sight of the long curving driveway she remembered so well, the columns, the stairs, the rows of windows in this old Colonial mansion.
The woman seemed stunned that this house, this mansion, was her destination.
“Old friend,” Elle said by way of explanation. “I hope.”
She paid the woman her one hundred dollars from the cash in her duffel bag. Five thousand dollars wouldn’t last very long, but a deal was a deal.
The relief Elle felt faded as she walked up the long, curving cobblestone driveway to the house. Her back spasmed with every few steps and the heavy duffel bag dug into her shoulder. The blazing sun followed her every step. She took off the Mets cap and ran her hands through her sweat-drenched hair. As she walked, she wondered...would he take her in? Would he help her? She’d broken his heart, yes, but she’d also helped him when he needed her most.
Elle rang the doorbell and waited.
As rich as he was, no one would have begrudged him a housekeeper or a butler. But it was the master of the house who opened the door. His blue eyes widened as he looked at her and took in her paleness, her exhaustion and her fear.
“Oh my God...Eleanor. What did he do to you?” he asked.
Elle almost laughed. If she’d had the energy, she would have.
“Don’t ask, Daniel,” she said as she walked past him into the house. “Just don’t ask.”
4
DANIEL GAVE HER tea and put her in the downstairs guest room. The entire time she was in his presence she stared at the gold band on his left hand.
“Where are Anya and the baby?” Elle asked. She hadn’t seen either when Daniel brought her into the house.
“Upstairs in the nursery. Marius has the flu. We’re taking shifts. She’s on the day shift. I take the night shift so she can sleep.” He smiled and she saw the contentment on his handsome face.
“God, you’re so married.”
“I am. Again,” he said and smiled.
“Enjoying it? Being married again? Being a dad?” Elle asked as she pulled the blanket to her stomach.
“You show up on my doorstep with no warning and nothing but a bag and the clothes on your back and you want to talk about me right now?” Daniel pulled a chair up to the bed. It was barely two o’clock in the afternoon, but Daniel had seen right away that all she needed right now was rest. “Eleanor, please—”
“Elle,” she said.
“What?”
“I told him the day I met him that I went by Elle. Not Eleanor. My whole life my mom called me Elle or Ellie. That’s who I am. But he called me Eleanor anyway. He calls me Eleanor. I prefer Elle.”
Daniel looked at her, rubbed his hands together.
“Elle,” he said. “Please tell me what’s happening. Can you do that for me?”
“You don’t want to know.” She tried to smile. She hoped he appreciated the effort that took her.
Daniel met her eyes, and she held the gaze. Back when he was a regular player in Kingsley’s world, his blue-eyed Dominant glare was the stuff of legend. His late wife, Maggie, had even named it—The Ouch, she called it with equal parts fear and affection. When he gave her that look she knew she’d be saying “ouch” the next day, maybe the next week. But it wasn’t the infamous Ouch he gave her now. Instead, he looked at her steadily with curiosity and compassion. And pity.
She hated pity.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I needed to get away for a few days.”
“You didn’t come here because you needed to get away for a few days. You go to the Hamptons to get away for a few days.”
“You go to the Hamptons to get away for a few days because you’re rich. Normal people do not go to the Hamptons.”
“Elle.” Daniel met her eyes. “You’re the most famous submissive in the entire city of New York. You’re owned by a Catholic priest, and you’re sleeping with the King of the Underground. You are not normal people.”
“I am now,” she said. “Trying to be anyway.”
“How did you get here?”
“Kingsley’s driver dropped me
off.”
“Kingsley drives a beat-up Ford Thunderbird now?”
If she had had the strength to give Daniel The Ouch, she would have.
“I have security cameras,” he said. “I saw someone drop you off. It wasn’t King.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Does King know where you are?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me what happened.”
“You don’t want to know,” she repeated. “Just don’t tell anyone I’m here, okay?”
“I think I do want to know. Remember, I’ve known Søren for years. Not only do I know him, I like him. We’re friends. If I can know him and still like him, I think I can handle anything you tell me.”
“Maybe you can handle hearing it. I don’t know if I can handle saying it.”
Daniel moved from his chair to the bed. She tensed immediately and he seemed to sense it.
“I’m not going to touch you if you don’t want me to,” he said, raising his hands in surrender.
“You’re married, you have a kid and I’m—” she paused to find a suitable lie and decided on a half-truth instead “—not feeling well.”
He reached his hand out but didn’t touch her with it, only waited. Slowly Elle leaned forward the three necessary inches and rested her face against the palm of his hand.
“You don’t have a fever,” he said.
“No.”
“I don’t see any bruises on your arms or your neck.”
“Søren didn’t beat me up or rape me,” she said, annoyed that he would even think something like that had happened.
Daniel nodded.
“But he did hurt you.”
“You didn’t put a question mark at the end of that sentence.”
“I told you, I’ve known him for years. It wasn’t a question.”
“Yes,” she admitted finally, closing her eyes. “He hurt me.”
“Kingsley?”
She shook her head. “This isn’t his fault,” she said, rolling over onto her side. “This is my fault.”
“I refuse to believe that,” Daniel said. “But you have to give me something here. If Anya left me, ran away, I would be so sick with worry I wouldn’t be able to breathe. Søren pisses me off too sometimes, and I consider him a friend, but I have never doubted his love for you. Unless you have a very good reason to scare him like this, you need to go home.”
“I can’t go home.”
“Tell me why you left him or I’m calling Kingsley right now.”
Elle weighed her options. She could tell him the whole truth, which would hurt more than the pain she was currently in. She could lie and come up with a suitable story he would believe to explain why she left. Or she could tell him a half-truth, just enough truth to get him to stop asking questions.
She went with option three.
“Do you remember that thing you told me?” she asked.
“I told you a lot of things.”
“I told you I was happy, content. You said that I should enjoy my contentment because someday something would happen and it would be gone.”
He nodded. “I remember.”
“It happened.”
“What happened?”
“Søren ordered me to marry him,” she said.
Daniel looked at her and looked at her and looked at her, and finally he spoke.
“Get some sleep. We’ll talk more tomorrow. Do you need anything?”
“You have any other sheets?” she asked, her face warming.
“Are you cold?”
“No,” she said, pushing the blankets. A red stain had formed underneath her. “I’m bleeding.”
It took ten minutes of begging and pleading to convince Daniel not to call an ambulance. This was just part of the process, she told him. Nothing to worry about. She was fine. A little blood never killed any woman...
Even after calming him down Daniel still seemed dubious and worried. He stayed in the bathroom with her while she took a quick hot bath. He kept his back to her to give her privacy although he’d seen her naked before. Once upon a time she’d been his lover. They’d fucked in this very bathroom. Down the hall was the library where he’d bent her over his desk and taken her from behind. In the living room by the fireplace, he’d fisted her and given her one of the better orgasms of her life. In the bed he now shared with his wife, he’d fucked her more times than she could remember. But now that felt like a lifetime ago. Had it only been two years ago she’d last been with him? So much had happened in those two years. He’d fallen in love with someone who wasn’t her, got remarried, had a son. And her? What had she done since then?
Elle got out when the water turned pink, and she drained the tub before Daniel could see it.
He ordered her to eat to some soup and then ordered her into bed. There was nothing at all erotic about any of these orders.
“You really are a dad now, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Don’t get any ideas. I don’t do the Daddy-Dom thing,” he said, pulling the covers up to her chest.
“Could have fooled me,” she said.
“Don’t flirt. Anya’s the jealous type.” He winked at her so she would know he was kidding. Not that he needed to tell her. She’d known Anya before he did. Knowing Anya, she would worry Elle would catch the flu from Marius, not that she would sleep with her husband. For the first time in Elle’s adult life, sex was the last thing on her mind.
He kissed her on the forehead once and on the lips twice.
She smiled up at him.
“Get some rest, Elle,” he said.
“It’s not even night yet.”
“I don’t care. You’re exhausted. Sleep.”
“Is that an order?”
He smiled down at her. “If I gave you that kind of order, would you obey me?”
“No.”
“Then no, it wasn’t an order.”
He caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. A fatherly touch. She didn’t remember him ever touching her like that. Becoming a parent had changed him, changed him for the better. But she knew that didn’t happen with every man. Her own father was proof. Her father, Søren’s father, her mother...
Her mother.
“Good night, Elle,” Daniel whispered, and she saw his reluctance to leave her alone.
“Good night, Daniel.” He started to leave. She stopped him with a question. “Daniel—what am I going to do?”
Daniel turned around in the doorway and looked back at her.
“If you took orders from me, which you don’t, but if you did...I’d order you to go back to Søren and marry him.”
Elle rolled onto her side and gazed at Daniel through the dark.
“Now I remember why I left you,” she said.
“Because I wanted to take care of you?”
“Because you don’t know me at all.”
The smile faded from Daniel’s face.
“Rest,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
It wasn’t an order, but Elle followed it anyway. She slept an hour or two and when she woke up, there was a terrifying moment when she couldn’t remember how she’d got here. But the moment passed, and she remembered.
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