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  Søren got out of bed and stood in front of Kingsley. He grasped the back of Kingsley’s neck, bent down and kissed him. Nora went back for the wine and let them have their moment of privacy. She opened the Syrah and poured three steep glasses. She brought one to Kingsley, one to Søren and kept one for herself.

  “When are you telling Nico he’s going to be a brother again?” Nora asked as she slid back onto the bed, careful not to spill any wine on the sheets. They’d already pushed their luck with fire-play and very wet sex. If she got her deposit back on this room, it would be a miracle.

  “Soon,” Kingsley said. “Now that you both know, I’ll call him tomorrow. You think he’ll be happy?”

  “Thrilled and relieved,” Nora said. “The more kids you have, the less pressure he feels to have them. He’s already made Céleste the legal heir to his vineyard. But don’t tell her that. She’s only three, but I can see her attempting a coup.”

  “I’m relieved I won’t have to worry about being a grandfather anytime soon,” Kingsley said with a wink at her. He pushed a pillow behind his back, stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles. He had the legs of a professional soccer player, which the kilt displayed to marvelous affect. No wonder Juliette with her fetish and her pregnancy hormones had been all over him the past two days.

  “No chance of that from me,” Nora said. “Cheers to the good Doctor Hélène Faber.” She and Kingsley clinked glasses, which was likely the first time in history two people had ever toasted to a woman’s sterilization procedure before. Then again, no two people in history had Kingsley and Nora’s history. With everything they’d put each other through, they’d had two choices—hate each other or love each other. They were so much alike, hating each other would have been like hating themselves. And both of them were rather too self-important for that sort of nonsense.

  So they picked love.

  “I have you to thank for my children,” Kingsley said, pointing his wineglass at her. “All two and one-third of them.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I would never have known about Nico if it wasn’t for you. I would never have met Juliette if you hadn’t left him.” He pointed at Søren.

  “Then shouldn’t I get some credit here?” Søren asked.

  “Oui, you get all the credit for being such an enormous asshole neither of us wanted to see you for a full year.”

  “Thank you,” Søren said, saluting with his wineglass. “Credit where credit is due.”

  “Did you know Juliette would be the mother of your children when you met her?” Nora asked.

  “The opposite,” Kingsley said. “I thought she’d be a terrible mother when I saw her. In my defense, she was assaulting children. In her defense, they deserved it.”

  “No wonder Juliette wouldn’t tell me about when you all met,” Nora said, pulling the sheets up around her again. She pressed close to Søren, relishing his warmth and his nearness.

  “Juliette,” Kingsley began, and his voice changed subtly as he spoke. He sounded far away and Nora wondered what he was remembering and why it hurt so much. “She was in a difficult position back then. Trapped, you could say.”

  “So what did you do?” Nora asked, as eager to hear Kingsley’s story of that year as they were to hear hers.

  “I did what I always do when I meet a beautiful woman,” Kingsley said with a shrug. “I fucked her.”

  9

  2004

  Haiti

  KINGSLEY WOKE UP that morning and decided to fuck the first girl who’d let him. Luckily there was a girl conveniently located in his bed. Who she was he didn’t quite remember, but it didn’t really matter. She was there by his invitation and her choice. Names, dates, places—the rest was irrelevant.

  Last night—that’s when he’d met her. He’d gone to a bar last night, drunk a few gallons of rum...or something. He’d met a waitress who spoke no traditional French and a little English. He spoke English and enough Creole to have her sitting on his lap by the third drink and home with him after the sixth. Home wasn’t anything more than a shack on the beach furnished with a bed and a well-stocked bar, but that hadn’t deterred her from spending the night with him and on him. Gorgeous girl. Coffee-colored skin and eyes, short curly hair that formed a halo around her face, lips like candy he clearly remembered biting.

  And any minute now he’d remember her name. He rolled onto his side, spooned against her back and kissed the tip of her shoulder. Her name—it started with an S. He wanted to say Sabrina but that wasn’t quite it. She stretched out in her sleep and pushed back against him. Fuck it. He didn’t even remember his own name this morning.

  She rolled onto her stomach as Kingsley ran his hand down her back. She had the soft smooth skin of a woman who spent her days naked on the sand.

  “Bon maten,” she murmured as he nibbled the back of her neck that smelled lightly of citrus. Without taking his mouth off her body, he reached over the bed, pulled out a condom and rolled it on. No more accidents. No more mistakes. No more mornings like that one he’d had last year when he saw with his own eyes the consequences of his carelessness.

  He pushed the thought out of his mind as he moved on top of the girl.

  “Oui?” he asked. “Non?”

  “Wi,” she said, Haitian Creole for yes and gave him a smile that also said yes.

  He laughed in her ear, nudged her thighs apart with his knees and settled into her with a few slow thrusts. She was still wet and open inside from the sex they’d had a few hours earlier. Wet and warm and he groaned from the pleasure of it. It had been a long time since he’d let himself have vanilla sex. It felt like a vacation—lazy, easy, self-indulgent.

  But he wasn’t complaining and neither was Sabatina.

  Sabatina—that was her name.

  Kingsley rolled his hips against hers, keeping the pace slow and easy. Her mouth opened under his, inviting his tongue in for a dozen more kisses, a dozen more bites. She tasted like white wine and pears. Lowering his head, he took a nipple into his mouth and sucked deeply while she arched underneath him. He pushed deep and her hips rose off the bed to welcome him into her. Last night...he could barely remember fucking her, although he knew he’d enjoyed it and so had she. Still, it felt like the first time with her so he took his time, relishing each push and the pleasant pressure it gave him in his stomach, thighs and back.

  Her mouth curled into a smile of intoxication. She murmured softly in Creole. He didn’t understand a word of it, but the tone was definitely encouraging. He licked and kissed his way from one breast to the other. Still he moved in her, harder and deeper. She reached her arms up to wrap them around his neck. Out of pure instinct he grabbed her arms and pressed her wrists down into the bed on either side of her head and bore down on her with a brutal thrust. She gasped and cried out. Kingsley froze.

  “Don’t stop,” she said in her heavily accented English. He put more weight onto her wrists, more power into his thrusts and fucked her six inches into the mattress. Spread out beneath him, she received everything he gave her without protest and with enthusiasm. He released one of her wrists and yanked her leg around his back. When he pulled out¸ he pulled out all the way to the tip. When he thrust back in, it was with every inch at once as far as he could go. A deep pulsing resonated inside his thighs and hips all the way to his cock. He couldn’t hold out much longer, but thankfully neither could she. He increased his pace and was rewarded with the lusty cry of her orgasm and the subsequent contractions of her vagina around him.

  He dug his fingers into her flesh and let himself come at last. The relief as he collapsed on her body was profound. He wanted to close his eyes, fall asleep inside her and not wake up for days. Instead, he pulled out and lay on his side facing her.

  “You liked that?” he asked.

  “Non,” she said, smiling broadly. “I loved it. But...”

  “No buts,” he said. “You stay. I’ll find breakfast.”

  “I can’t.” She rolled up a
nd stretched her neck left to right. From the floor she picked up her dress and pulled it on over her head. “I have to go.”

  “You have to work?”

  “Babysit,” she said. “Maman has to work today.” She kissed him quick and hard before sliding off the bed. She shoved her feet into her sandals and tied a ribbon in her hair to tame it. “But I can come back tomorrow night.”

  “You should,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

  “For how long?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Until they kick me off the island.”

  “This is Haiti. You spend money here, you can stay forever.”

  “Maybe I will.” His money wasn’t running out anytime soon. And the thought of returning to New York now, in winter, with no one to welcome him home but a brokenhearted priest?

  “Good. I never fucked a white man before.”

  “Is that why you came back here with me?”

  “Wi,” she said with a wink.

  Kingsley laughed. “I feel so used.”

  “You want me to come back and use you again?”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She stared at him through narrowed eyes. “You were talking about another girl in your sleep last night.”

  “I was? Who?” Kingsley hadn’t talked in his sleep in years as far as he knew. Not since that year after he moved to Manhattan and was still recovering from his gunshot wound.

  “You never said her name. It was ‘she.’ Who is she?”

  “I must have been dreaming. I know a lot of girls. They all have names.”

  Sabatina grinned. “I’ll use you again tonight maybe. Come back to the club if you want. I can be your Valentine’s Day date.”

  “It’s Valentine’s Day?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I don’t remember what year it is.”

  Laughing, she bent over and kissed him once more.

  “It’s 2004. Valentine’s Day. Now I have to get home before Maman kills me.”

  “You live with your parents?” Kingsley asked.

  She nodded as she bent to tie the laces of her sandals.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Eighteen,” she said, standing up straight again.

  Kingsley’s stomach flipped a few times. Eighteen? She was only eighteen? His last girlfriend had been twenty-seven. Somewhere deep in his psyche, his conscience reminded him it still existed.

  “I have a rule. I don’t fuck women under twenty-five.”

  “Then you broke your rule.” She laughed again. “It’s good. I like older men.”

  She ran a hand through his hair once, and after one more kiss, a kiss he didn’t return, she left him.

  Somewhere he had a watch but he didn’t bother checking it. All he did was grab a towel, wrap it around his waist and walk out to the ocean. It must have been early. It looked early. But the temperature had to be in the eighties already. No one else was on his stretch of beach yet so he dropped his towel and dived naked into the clear waters. He swam out a hundred yards and rested on his back in the water. When was the last time he’d taken an actual bath or shower? He couldn’t remember. Who needed a porcelain bathtub when he had the ocean fifty feet from his front door?

  As he floated under the morning sun, he tried to forget he’d fucked a girl twenty-one years his junior last night. Twenty-one years. He was old enough to be her father and then some. Then again, he’d lost his virginity when he was twelve or thirteen...twelve maybe. Thirteen? Whichever it was, by that math he couldn’t fuck anyone more than thirteen years younger than him. That was Elle’s age...twenty-six. For a minute he let himself think about her, something he’d been trying to avoid for months. Where had she landed? Had she given up and gone back to Søren? He doubted it. Once a week he called back to his office and spoke to Calliope. No news from her yet. The house was quiet. The city was quiet. The dogs were content and his clubs were thriving in the hands of their capable managers. Everyone missed him, Calliope said. But no one needed him.

  And no one back at the house had seen or heard from Elle or Søren since Kingsley had left the country in June. Either they were tucked tenderly in Søren’s bed making up for all that happened between them, or she was still gone and he was still searching. Kingsley refused to admit that he cared which one it was. His part in their domestic drama was done. They were adults. They didn’t need him around to solve their problems for them.

  Yet...

  Still...

  He couldn’t stop wondering.

  Reluctantly he swam toward the shore and grabbed his towel off the sand. He didn’t dry off with it. No need in this heat. He’d be mostly dry by the time he reached his beach hut. Back inside, he drank a bottle of water and pulled on a pair of tattered khaki pants and a white shirt. He didn’t bother buttoning it. He put on a pair of sunglasses and walked back out into the heat of the day in search of food and alcohol and anything else that would get him through the day.

  A hut on another patch of beach half a mile away sold fish and fruit to visitors. He might eat there. He might keep walking. Didn’t really matter. He wasn’t going to starve. And he had no schedule to keep. If he was honest with himself, he’d admit he was bored. Bored in Paradise. But after five weeks of sleeping on a beach, bathing on a beach, walking on a beach, eating on a beach, having sex on a beach...he’d kill for the sight of a skyscraper or a mansion or a television broadcasting a French football match. He had no idea how Les Bleus were doing this season. As long as they were beating Denmark he could sleep at night. When he called home next time, he’d ask Calliope to check the scores for him. Even in Paradise, a man had needs.

  Kingsley turned a corner and smelled fish frying in the near distance. Instead of awakening his appetite, it made his stomach tighten. After all he drank last night, he wasn’t quite ready for solid food yet. Maybe in an hour or two he could eat. For now he would wander and not care where his feet took him.

  He started caring very quickly where his feet took him when he realized they had taken him into a heavily touristed area. He would have been happy to go his entire stay in Haiti without setting eyes on any white Americans. So far he’d done fairly well staying away from happy families and/or businessmen trying to find a new way to exploit Haiti’s beauty and resources. Yet everywhere he looked, he saw white faces squinting behind fashionable sunglasses, teenage girls in tiny bikinis, little boys building and destroying each other’s sand castles, and bored mothers and bored fathers trying to pretend they weren’t annoyed when their children interrupted their naps or their reading.

  How did people go through life being so bored and so boring without killing themselves? Never be boring was the one and only commandment he followed. All the other commandments he considered mere suggestions.

  He hated to admit that maybe if he stayed here in Haiti he would turn boring, too. Sleeping with an eighteen-year-old girl by mistake had been the only not-boring thing he’d done in weeks.

  Bored and boring. He did the same things every day, walked the same paths, saw the same faces give or take a few minor variations. He’d caused no trouble, started no fights, blackmailed no politicians and engaged in only the most minor and unimpressive of sexual peccadilloes. If things didn’t get more interesting fast, he’d be forced to go back to Manhattan to find a reason not to shoot himself in the head.

  Good thing he hadn’t packed his gun.

  A few women and even more teenage girls gave him appreciative stares as he wove through the path of their chaises longues and beach chairs. He saw the rapacious looks in their eyes, their knowing smiles at each other. American women in foreign countries were more ravenous than a pack of sharks in a feeding frenzy. Could they not get laid back in the suburbs where they came from? He glanced at the men with them and rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. No wonder they were staring at him. They really should have left their excess baggage back home.

  He passed through a cluster of torchwood
and palm trees. Off the path now, the ground grew rockier. He didn’t care. This morning he’d remembered to put on shoes before heading out. Shoes were pleasantly optional on the beach in the morning. And if he wasn’t going to wear boots, he’d rather wear nothing at all.

  Boots. He did miss his boots. He missed his boots and his bed. The beach hut wasn’t bad but the bed was no bigger than a full-size. He could only fit two people in it. After island hopping from New Zealand to the Philippines, he’d come to Haiti five weeks ago, rented a hut and settled down. But perhaps it was time to go home. Calliope asked him every week when he was coming home. He still didn’t have an answer for her. If Elle was still on the run, he’d given her an eight-month head start to hide. And perhaps Søren had gotten the hint that Kingsley wouldn’t do his dirty work for him this time. Kingsley turned around. He’d make a call. See what the flight options were for the week. Maybe it was time to go back. Or at least go somewhere else. Martinique? St. Croix? Miami? Manhattan? He would miss Haiti. After all it was beautiful, peaceful, restful.

  And boring.

  Kingsley heard a scream.

  He whipped around, all senses on high alert. The scream had been loud, high-pitched and pained. He raced a few steps deeper into the trees and saw a boy—pasty white and still wearing his baby fat despite being twelve or thirteen—squealing in agony. Another boy next to him dropped a coconut-sized rock on the ground.