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A laugh like the popping of a champagne cork.
Daniel froze and met Kingsley’s dark, watching eyes.
“Eleanor’s here?” Daniel whispered.
Kingsley didn’t answer at first. The charming French rogue had disappeared again and the dangerous guardian of the Underground gave him a steely warning stare.
“Non,mon ami,” he finally answered.“Theyare here.”
5
Daniel didn’t move, couldn’t move. And as long as Kingsley stood there watching him, he wouldn’t move. But he listened. He heard a man’s voice, low and stern, a voice he hadn’t heard since that one perfect week with Eleanor. Then he heard her laugh again. That laugh, so joyous and lusty…it floated up the stairs and passed through him, chilling him to the core.
The voices retreated and Kingsley raised his hand, beckoning Daniel to follow him in silence. At the next landing, they stopped and waited. From their post, he and Kingsley could stay hidden in the shadows and still look into the private drawing room at the back of the townhouse.
There she was. The girl he’d been thinking of non-stop, even while inside other women, for the past year and a half.
Eleanor…she looked as beautiful now as the day he first saw her. She wore a white summer dress that showed off her legs, her black hair was pulled high on her head in a messy knot, and around her graceful neck was her white collar. At the liquor cabinet, she poured two glasses of white wine, then carried them back to a table where she offered one—with a curtsy—to a tall blond man in black trousers, black jacket, and a white shirt open at the collar.
Him. Søren.
Daniel watched as Eleanor sat opposite Søren at a small game table, a chessboard between them. They spoke in low tones. Daniel couldn’t hear what was said, but it made her smile.
Even cowering in the shadows on the staircase landing, looking far down into the sitting room, Daniel could see the radiant happiness shining in her eyes as she feigned luxurious, yawning boredom. Søren casually reached out and snapped his fingers in her face to get her attention. Instantly sat up straighter. With reluctance, Daniel dragged his eyes from her to gaze at Søren, a man he once considered a friend but now, since losing her, thought of as a rival. He hated himself for the bitterness he harbored in his heart toward Eleanor’s owner. But no amount of reasoning and rationalizing could help him swallow the bitter pill that remained lodged in his throat since the moment he’d asked her to stay with him and she’d said, “No.”
“He’s a priest,” Daniel said in a voice so soft he doubted Kingsley heard.
“He is.”
“How can she be that happy with him?” Looking at her face, her eyes, he had no doubt he was looking at a woman completely and utterly in love. “He can’t marry her. Can’t give her children…not without getting excommunicated.”
“She doesn’t want marriage. She doesn’t want children.”
“What does she want?”
“Him,” Kingsley said simply. His laugh was the low rumble of a distant train. “Trust me, my friend, there’s no way to break them up. Even I know they belong together.”
Daniel heard something in Kingsley’s voice, a note of bitterness that matched his own. Together they stared at the couple in the drawing room—the tall man in all black—handsome, distinguished, intimidating.
And her—that wild black hair, those black and green eyes, those full lips…lips designed for acts more intimate than simply kissing other lips.
Daniel noted that while his own eyes studied every line and curve of Eleanor, Kingsley’s gaze focused elsewhere, onto the face of the man who owned her, onto the face of Kingsley’s best, and some would say only, friend.
The sight of them together, so content, briefly overwhelmed him. Closing his eyes, Daniel found himself hurtled into the past, further than he wanted to go.
Back to the day of his wife’s funeral.
How he’d even gotten dressed that morning remained a mystery. He’d been able to knot his tie but only from muscle memory.
“I’m burying my wife today,” was the refrain that echoed through his mind. “I’m a widower at thirty-four…and I don’t know why.”
He must have spoken the words aloud because he heard an answer from the door to his and Maggie’s bedroom.
“I’m certain it will be of no consolation to you, but I don’t know why either.”
Daniel turned and there stood a six-foot-four blond priest. Søren.
“Actually, it is a consolation. I don’t want to live in a world where Maggie’s death makes sense.”
