The Priest (The Original Sinners #9) - Tiffany Reisz Page 0,87

calls…

Okay, so somebody knows about his lady. Somebody knows Ike got wild with a kinky lady at his vacation home. Only two hours from Nola. Anybody could go there on a day trip.

Or maybe the lady herself figures out she’d been sleeping with a Catholic priest and she gets mad he lied to her—it could happen—and she threatens to tell on him. He’s got over half a mill in a retirement account. A lot of money. Very tempting to blackmail a priest for that money, trip to hell be damned.

What’s Ike’s first instinct? Well, everybody’s first instinct is fight or flight. Flight? Put in for a transfer. Get out of Nola before the shit hits the fan.

Fight? Fight might mean he kills his blackmailer. Priests had committed murder before. Maybe it was an accident during a confrontation with the blackmailer? Either way, somebody or something ends up on Ike’s conscience. He can’t live with himself after what he did.

He kills himself.

But first he calls Mistress Nora. Why though? Why her? Why right before he eats a bullet? It’s all over by then, right? Not like he was going to make an appointment with a dominatrix he never planned to keep.

To confess his sins? He sinned with a kinky lady, so he wants to confess to a kinky lady?

That didn’t sound right.

Except Nora was sleeping with a priest herself. And if Ike was being blackmailed for sleeping with somebody, maybe he’d want to talk to Nora about it.

Or warn her.

Imagine there was a blackmailer out there going after sexually active priests. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that Father Ike might try to warn other possible victims before taking his own life, as a last act of compassion?

Farfetched? Yes. Impossible? No.

Only one way to find out if it had any legs to it.

He had to go down to Grand Isle, find some locals who lived near that vacation home Father Ike had rented. Ask if they remembered seeing Ike with anyone.

He shot Nora a quick text.

Long story but I’m heading to Grand Isle. Can you come with?

Nora replied a minute later. Can’t. Tied up.

Too busy?

No, literally tied up.

I thought you had a bangover, lady.

Only cure for a bangover, she wrote back, is hair of the Dom that bit you.

Chapter Thirty-One

S?ren’s piano was being delivered to his new house that day. He offered to reschedule the movers, but Nora wouldn’t let him. And it wasn’t as if Gmork could fit on the back of S?ren’s bike anyway.

Once she sent S?ren on his way home, Nora called Kingsley to come and pick her up at her dungeon. That was a mistake. He spent the entire ride lecturing her about letting strange women into her house in the middle of the night. He wasn’t very happy when Nora reminded him that he’d spent his entire thirties letting strange women—and men—into his house in the middle of the night and therefore he had, as they say, no room to talk.

“That’s an entirely different situation. I was fucking them,” he said.

“One of them stole your Rolex, remember?” Nora said.

“Ah, but she was good enough in bed I didn’t mind.”

Clearly, they had very different recollections of that incident.

Kingsley stood guard while Nora packed a bag at her house. She would be living with him, Juliette, and Céleste until she could get a security system installed on her house. Actually, she wasn’t allowed to handle the security system installation. Kingsley decided he would handle it since she couldn’t be trusted to make good decisions where her own safety was concerned.

“You’re being a little sexist here, King,” Nora said when he was scrolling through his phone, looking for the number of the company that installed his. “I can take care of my own house.”

“You have a thousand strings of cursed Mardi Gras beads hanging from your tree left by a witch over the course of three years trying to put a spell on you,” he said as he put the phone to his ear. “Tell me again why I should let you handle this?”

Nora opened her mouth to give him five good reasons he should back off and let her handle it.

Then he said, “I’ll pay for it.”

“All right,” Nora said. “It’s all yours.”

Kingsley ordered her to his house while he stayed at hers and waited for the installers to arrive. She was halfway out the door when she heard him on the phone with a new person now, requesting a tree trimmer come and trim her front tree and