The Prince

Nora sighed heavily. She crossed her arms and leaned back against the pillar behind her.

“Stay a week. Promise me a week,” Wesley said. “If it’s still this bad with my father in a week, then we’ll go back to Connecticut. Okay?”

Wesley watched Nora. She closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose. Was there a more beautiful woman in the world than Nora Sutherlin? Even after driving all day, and wearing nothing fancier than jeans and a tight white T-shirt over those amazing br**sts of hers that haunted his waking dreams, and her thick black hair back in a ponytail and with her eyeliner smudged and her lipstick fading...behind that outer layer that drove him wild with one look was her mind, her sense of humor, her spirit no one could crush—not even Søren.

Damn. No other word for Nora Sutherlin. Just damn.

“Okay. One week,” she promised, opening her eyes.

“Good. Think you can behave yourself for one week?”

“Probably not. But I’ll try. For your sake.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem,” Nora said, heading toward her car. “I mean, really…not even I could cause any trouble in a week, right?”

NORTH

The Past

For two weeks, Kingsley did nothing but watch Stearns. He went to class, he ate his meals, he pretended to befriend the other boys…but everything he did was a mere ruse, a mask, misdirection. To make up for his behavior on his first day at Saint Ignatius, Kingsley played the saint of the school in the eyes of everyone around him. But he existed solely for Stearns, solely for sin.

But Stearns wasn’t playing along.

“Aristotle,” Father Robert intoned as his broken piece of chalk squeaked on the blackboard, “had a rather unusual idea about the mind, about consciousness. He thought that the seat of consciousness was the heart. The brain was a mere cooling factory—ventilation. Interestingly, the ancient Egyptians also thought the brain was a pointless organ while the heart itself was the seat of soul and thought. Modern science tells us this is wrong. But what does Jesus have to say?”

In the back of his mind, Kingsley knew the answer to this question. He’d never gone to church consistently as a child. But sometimes his mother would take him. A nearby Catholic church had one service in English for all the American expats like her. She’d go not to worship God so much as to bask in her first language for an hour. Kingsley enjoyed those times alone with his mother. His sister, Marie-Laure, never could get out of bed before noon on the weekend. His father, a proud Huguenot, refused to step foot in a Catholic church. So Kingsley had her all to himself. Nothing made him happier even as a small child than having a woman’s complete attention. Although sometimes he had paid attention to the priest and the readings. And something in one of those readings had stuck with him even so many years later. Something about the mind…

The classroom remained silent. Kingsley picked up his Bible and started to flip through it. Maybe if God was on his side, he’d find the page, the verse. Stearns was also in this theology class, sitting off to the side by the window—the coldest seat in the class. He’d been the first to arrive. He could have sat by the fireplace, but he never did.

“No one?” Father Robert turned around and faced the classroom. “Anyone?”

Kingsley saw Father Robert glance at Stearns, who appeared to suppress a sigh.

“Matthew twenty-two, verses twenty-seven through twenty-eight,” Stearns said, when it became clear no one else would speak.

“Very good, Mr. Stearns. Can you recite those verses for us?”

Recite? Kingsley stared at Stearns, who seemed the very picture of scholarly perfection. His school uniform was spotless and not a single hair on his blond head was out of place. No matter how hard Kingsley tried, he couldn’t help but appear tousled and rumpled. Father Henry teased him about always looking as if he had just crawled out of bed—if only.

Without opening his Bible, Stearns opened his mouth.

“Jesus said to him, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and the first commandment.”

“Very good, Mr. Stearns. And what does this verse have to do with our discussion of the mind and the heart?”

“Jesus makes a distinction between the mind and the heart and the soul. They are separate entities.”

Separate entities? Kingsley’s eyes widened at Stearns’s words. Who was teaching the class?

“Is this proof that the mind and heart and soul are completely separate and have nothing to do with each other?” Father Robert continued. He waved his hand at the ten students in the class, as if trying sweep answers out of their mouths. None were forthcoming.

“Mr. Stearns?”

Stearns sat up an inch straighter. “Not necessarily. The baptismal formula that decrees to baptize ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ was used as proof by the First Council of Constantinople that while the Trinity contained three distinct persons, they were one as well as three. When Jesus tells us to love God with our heart, soul and mind, He is telling us that they are three and one, just as the Godhead.”

“Very good, Mr. Stearns. Now, if you’ll turn in your catechisms…”

As the class opened their books, Kingsley could only continue to stare at Stearns. The clouds outside the window parted a moment and a ray of sunshine—not seen for days—filled the classroom with white light. Kingsley could count every single eyelash that rimmed Stearns’s eyes. And until the sun hid itself behind a cloud again, Kingsley ceased to breathe.