Tiffany Reisz - The Queen

Once upon a time, Nora and Søren made a fateful deal—if he gave her everything, she would give him forever.

The time has finally come to keep their promises.

Out of money and out of options after her yearlong exile, Eleanor Schreiber agrees to join forces with Kingsley Edge, the king of kink. After her first taste of power as a Dominant, Eleanor buries her old submissive self and transforms into Mistress Nora, the Red Queen. With the help of a mysterious young man with a job even more illicit than her own, Nora squares off against a cunning rival in her quest to become the most respected, the most feared Dominatrix in the Underground.

While new lovers and the sweet taste of freedom intoxicate Nora, she is tempted time and time again by Søren, her only love and the one man who refuses to bow to her. But when Søren accepts a new church assignment in a dangerous country, she must make an agonizing choice—will the queen keep her throne and let her lover go, or trade in her crown for Søren’s collar?

With a shattering final confession, the last link in the chain is forged in The Original Sinners saga. It’s the closing chapter in a story of salvation, sacrifice and the multitude of scars we collect in the name of ecstasy—and love.

Praise for Tiffany Reisz:

‘ The Siren is one of those books which has the amazing ability to create the scene in full colour in your mind’s eye – this is no small skill on the author’s part.’ http://carasutra.co.uk/

‘A beautiful, lyrical story … The Siren is about love lost and found, the choices that make us who we are … I can only hope Ms Reisz pens a sequel!’ —Bestselling author Jo Davis

‘ The Original Sinners series certainly lives up to its name: it’s mind-bendingly original and crammed with more sin than you can shake a hot poker at. I haven’t read a book this dangerous and subversive since Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club .’ —Andrew Shaffer, author of Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

‘Tiffany Reisz is a smart, artful and masterful new voice in erotic fiction. An erotica star on the rise!’

—Award-winning author Lacey Alexander

‘Daring, sophisticated and literary … exactly what good erotica should be.’

—Kitty Thomas, author of Tender Mercies

‘Dazzling, devastating and sinfully erotic, Reisz writes unforgettable characters you’ll either want to know or want to be. The Siren is an alluring book-within-a-book, a story that will leave you breathless and bruised, aching for another chapter with Nora Sutherlin and her men.’ —Miranda Baker, author of Bottoms Up and Soloplay

‘The best erotica either leaves slut-marks on your back or a bruise on your heart. The Siren does both and I wish I’d written it.’ —Scarlett Parrish, author of By the Book

‘You will most definitely feel strongly for these characters … This was an amazing story and I’m so happy that it’s not over. I can’t wait to jump back into Nora’s world.’

http://ladysbookstuff.blogspot.co.uk

TIFFANY REISZ’s books inhabit a sexy, shadowy world where erotica, romance and gothic literature meet and do immoral and possibly illegal things to each other. The first book in her international bestselling series The Original Sinners was named the Romantic Times 2012 Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Erotic Romance. She is a very bad Catholic. Visit her website www.tiffanyreisz.comfor news, gossip and wholly inappropriate bedtime stories.

Tiffany Reisz

www.spice-books.co.uk

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Dedicated to …

The Author of the Universe

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

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Extract

Copyright

“Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.”

—Søren Kierkegaard,

The Journals of Kierkegaard

1

The First Wedding

NOW, THIS WAS a happy ending.

It was all Nora had hoped for, all she had prayed for, and she couldn’t stop grinning as the music began—Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary .

She smiled even wider when two elderly gentlemen in traditional servant’s livery opened the great oak double doors with a flourish befitting the exalted occasion.

After one deep breath, Nora stepped through the open doors and did the one thing she’d sworn she would never do—she walked down the aisle of a church in a wedding dress toward Søren, who waited for her at the altar.

He hadn’t seen her for hours and this moment was Søren’s first look at her in her wedding dress. It had been twenty years since she’d walked down an aisle toward Søren as a bridesmaid in a wedding he’d performed. Even now, halfway down the aisle, she could see the look in his eyes, a look that said the twenty years had been worth the wait.

As Nora took her place at Søren’s right hand, she leaned in close and whispered, “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Why?” he asked as the two hundred assembled guests rose to their feet when the groom made his entrance into the Great Hall that had been converted into a church for the wedding.

“You’re on duty,” she reminded him. “ Father Stearns.”

“Can I look at you like that after the wedding?”

She smiled at him as the two grooms joined hands in front of Søren.

“Today you can do anything you want.”

“Watch out. I’ll hold you to that promise,” he said as the music faded into silence leaving her unable to retort. She swallowed her words, composed her face and tried not to cry when Søren began to speak.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to join this man, Michael Luka Dimir, and this man, Griffin Randolfe Fiske, in holy matrimony. May your love be blessed by the sacrament of marriage and may we all who are gathered as witnesses rejoice together in the beauty of your commitment to each other as we would bask in the warmth of the sun...”

Nora made it three whole minutes into the ceremony before the tears started flowing. Luckily all eyes were on Michael and Griffin as they spoke their vows and made their promises. Once upon a time in a very different setting, Nora and Søren had made promises to each other and she wore those promises around her neck in the form of wedding bands engraved with two words— Forever and Everything . They weren’t wedding vows but they had bound them together nonetheless. What was a sacrament but the outward sign of inner grace? If she and Søren loving each other and staying together despite all they’d been through, all they’d put each other through for twenty-three years, wasn’t a miracle, she didn’t know what was.