“Pourquoi pas?” Why not?

“Theresa of Avila…she wrote once that she didn’t love God and didn’t want to love God, but she wanted to want to love God. I understand that.”

Kingsley hid his smile. “You don’t want to want me,” he said, turning his eyes up to Søren. “But you do.”

Søren’s slid his hand from the top of Kingsley’s head to the side of his face.

“Yes.”

Kingsley waited. It would come. Søren would raise his hand and bring it down onto his face with a slap, a slap that would hurt worse than the many punches he’d taken in his day. And then Søren would grip him by the throat and force him onto his stomach or his back. With Kingsley’s own belt, Søren would beat him, perhaps even choke him. There was no end to the possibilities. Some sadists took years learning to master the art of inflicting pain without causing harm. But Søren was a natural. He was fluent in nineteen modern languages, five ancient languages and the one true universal language—pain.

“I am yours.” Kingsley slipped into French, the language they always spoke to each other during their most private moments. French was Kingsley’s first language, and he fell into it when tired, when weak, when at his most vulnerable. With others he used it as a weapon to disarm or a shield to deflect. With Søren, he spoke French in his moments of surrender. French was what he had spoken as a small child. With Søren, he became that defenseless yet again.

Je suis le vôtre. J’étais toujours le vôtre, monsieur.

I am yours. I have always been yours, sir.

“Oui. Tu es le mien.”

Yes, you are mine.

Kingsley froze, not able, not willing to move. For the first time in thirty years, Søren had called Kingsley his. He’d waited decades for this moment.

Slowly, Søren traced Kingsley’s lips with the tip of his finger. Kingsley remembered that first night on the forest floor…Søren pushing Kingsley’s broken body onto his back, and those perfect pianist’s fingers on his mouth. The fingers then replaced by lips. The kiss had seemed less personal than the touch. He’d kissed his mother, his sister, his father, his friends. All the French kissed all the time. A kiss was nothing. But to touch fingertips to another’s lips…so erotic, so possessive, so intimate. By now, Kingsley had easily kissed a thousand women, half a thousand men. But he could count only three people who he’d ever allowed the liberty of touching his face with their hands—Nora, Juliette and Søren.

“I still love you as I did that night you broke me.” Kingsley spoke the confession aloud, his lips moving against the back of Søren’s hand. “You can break me again.”

“I can’t break you.” Søren shook his head. “I never could. Your body, yes. But there is a core inside you that I could never touch, never reach, never break. It’s the part of you that was never afraid of me.”

“Is that why you loved her and not me?”

“She has that core, too. And it’s why of all the people in the world, it’s only you and her I’ve ever loved.”

Kingsley’s heart rose. Hope buoyed it. That Søren would even put him in the same sentence as his Little One meant more than the touch of his hands against Kingsley’s lips.

“I have nothing in me that you cannot break. I would let you destroy me, and then I would resurrect myself from my own ashes for the honor of being destroyed by you again.”

“Your sister died because of what you and I were to each other. I can’t risk losing Eleanor the way we lost Marie-Laure.”

“Marie-Laure loved me madly. I was her brother. And she loved you even more madly. You were her husband. We are neither to your Eleanor. And she has left us both. Close your eyes, monsieur. Do you see her now? She’s in his bed right now, opening her legs for him. She’s beneath him. He’s inside her. She walked away from us. No…she didn’t walk. She ran.”

Søren dropped his hand from Kingsley’s lips. Leaning back into the seat, he closed his eyes.

“You might be the devil, Kingsley.”

With a rueful laugh, Kingsley kissed Søren’s knee before sliding back up to his seat. He became the notorious French Dominant again, his feet on the leather seat, one ankle crossed over the other.

“The devil is the Prince of Lies, remember?” He returned to his English. “And you and I both know I speak only the truth.”

The brutal truth hung between them the rest of the journey back to New York. Kingsley pushed no further. If it would happen, it would happen at the time of Søren’s choosing, not his. That was always the way. Their underground world had taken the wildness of relationships like theirs and tamed them, domesticated them. They used labels like Dominant and submissive, and bandied about slogans like Safe, Sane and Consensual. They all had safe words. Even the most violent and perverse among them played by the rules lest they be ejected from their underworld Eden. But Kingsley knew it was all artifice, window dressing, self-deception. He and Søren, they were more than a Dominant and submissive, and the rules didn’t apply to them. This was no game. When Kingsley said “I am yours” he meant it. If Søren had desired to burn him, maim him, sell him, break him—he could, and Kingsley knew he would not and could not stop him. His love for Søren had sold him into slavery, and all the riches of all the kingdoms left in the world couldn’t buy him out of it.