The Saint(137)

“Did that feel like a prison sentence to you?”

“No,” she confessed, recalling those nights she slipped over to the rectory and gave her body to him. “It felt like a privilege.”

“That’s what it felt like to me,” Nico said. “When you needed me last night? A privilege. An honor.”

“What are you saying, Nico?” Nora asked.

“I need you.”

He touched her face, her lips.

“I need you,” he said again. “You’re everything I ever dreamed of in one woman. My Rosanella. Beautiful, graceful, intelligent, fearless, and yet you trembled in my arms during the storm and then you drank me from a wineglass. You owned me last night with everything you did to me and everything you let me do to you. No one on this earth deserves to have everything they desire. No one is entitled to have what he wants. But if I were to have what I wanted, I would need you to give it to me. Because it’s you, Mistress Nora.”

Nora couldn’t look at Nico. Hearing him call her Mistress Nora was like hearing Søren call her “Little One” for the first time, like learning her real name. After she’d told Nico who his father was, he’d asked her for Kingsley’s last name. “Nicholas Boissonneault,” he’d said, his eyes shining with unshed tears as he tried out his new name. It hurt to learn who he was. It hurt her, too, but for a different reason.

“Go to sleep, my love.” She kissed him on the forehead. “It’s an order. You have a long drive back.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But I’ll be okay. I always am.”

Nico’s eyelashes fluttered and in minutes his breathing settled into the deep rhythms of sleep. She gazed down at him, at this beautiful young man in her bed with callouses on his hands from the hard work he did every day. She’d never loved a man with calloused hands before. She had callouses, however. The callous on her finger from so much writing. The callous on her heart from so much loving.

She dragged herself from the bed and found her nightgown. She pulled a book from her suitcase and took it downstairs with her.

After building up the fire again, she curled into a chair. Carefully so as not to let any papers fall out, she opened her Bible.

More and more lately she found herself turning to this book for comfort and guidance. Queen Esther still enchanted her, as did Ruth and her threshing floor seduction of Boaz. The Psalms brought her solace—“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” King David and King Solomon spoke to her from ages past—two adulterers who found their way into the lineage of Christ. And how she loved Isaiah and the words that had become so much more meaningful to her of late—“For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given.”

But it wasn’t the words of the Bible that she turned to in this last hour of night. From its pages she pulled a photograph, a child barely a year old with his mother’s turquoise eyes and his father’s blond hair.

She stared at the photograph of Fionn in her hand. In it her editor, Zach, held his son on his shoulder. The first time she’d held the boy in her own arms, the sudden depth of love she had for him had shaken her like fear. She’d trembled so hard she had to give him back to Grace almost immediately.

“If anyone ever tries to hurt that boy I will burn their world down,” she’d said to Zach. “But please never ask me to babysit.”

Zach had laughed and pulled her into a tender embrace, not caring that his wife stood five feet away watching and rolling her eyes at the both of them. They were long past jealousy and shared only joy among them all.

“Born to be a soldier, not a politician,” Zach had teased her, then kissed her quick on the lips.

“What do you mean?” she’d asked.

Zach had looked into her eyes and smiled.

“Love the risk, hate the responsibility.”

She hadn’t argued. Zach knew her all too well by now.

Nora studied the boy in the photograph. She’d shown the picture to Nico once after showing him a picture of his newly acquired half sister Céleste.

“My godson,” she’d said with pride.

“He doesn’t take after his father,” Nico had said, noting Zach’s black hair and Fionn’s blond locks.

“He does actually,” she’d said with a secret smile. “So let’s pray he gets his personality from his mother.”

She needed to look at Fionn’s picture right now. That little face of his with those wide, watching eyes consoled her more than any words of any song or psalm or prayer could right now. Death had come to her house and stolen a precious thing from her. But life had won this round. Fionn was her victory banner.