American Prince (New Camelot Book 2)

after

It’s morning when I open my eyes. I can just tell—it’s something about the light out here, the way everything is filtered through the trees, streaming over the low Maryland mountains. I’m warm, something I register at the same moment I register why; a leanly muscled man is nestled on either side of me. I’m on my side and Embry is in front of me, sprawled on his back as usual, with covers twisted around him. One leg half-hangs off the edge of the bed, and one arm is flung up over his face, as if to block the faint light coming in from the window. His breathing is just under a snore, heavy and even, moving that delicious chest up and down. Mmm.

Speaking of chests, strong arms are wrapped around me from behind and pulling me tight into one, along with a hard abdomen and an even harder erection. I wriggle back into it on instinct, and powerful, hair-dusted legs wrap around my own, pressing my ass harder against him. I realize Ash is awake.

“Good morning, princess,” he murmurs into my ear.

“Good morning,” I breathe. There’s something pressing on the membrane of my sleepy thoughts, trying to break through, but the membrane is still too thick and Ash is so solid and warm next to me.

“How’d you sleep?” he asks.

“Deeply.” I roll over, still inside his arms to look at his face. It’s the same face I stared into when I recited my wedding vows, same high cheekbones and proud forehead, same full, firm lips. But things are different too—the sleepless bruises under his eyes that had almost completely gone away are back. His eyes are filled with reflections upon reflections of dark, unhappy feelings and I can see the line between his brows where he’s creased his face in worry.

I reach up with a thumb and try to smooth away the line. “How did you sleep?”

He gives a one-shouldered shrug. “I didn’t mostly. I watched you.”

“Must have been boring,” I remark.

He shakes his head, matching my motion and reaching up to stroke my face with his thumb. “I can sleep any time. Getting to see you safe in my arms…I needed that more than I needed a few hours of sleep.”

Safe.

The terrible something presses through, tearing into my mind with claws and teeth, and I stiffen. I can still feel Melwas’s hands on me, taste apples in my mouth. Feel his hand hard on my pussy, grinding against my public bone.

I push away from my husband, breathing hard, and he lets me push away, but he rolls on top of me as I do, keeping his weight on his elbows and knees so that it’s not actually pressing against me, but I’m still caged by him. He presses a hand to my forehead, his green eyes the only color in a world that’s suddenly lost all vibrancy and depth. I can’t bear to see them, not right now when I can feel the ghost of Melwas’s grabbing touch, taste those awful apples in my mouth.

“Greer,” Ash says quietly. “Look at me.”

Reluctantly, and with extreme effort, I do.

“I’m here for your rage and your fear and your shame. Vent it on me, Greer. Strike me with it, burn me with it, scratch it into my skin. Cry it, whisper it, scream it. I want it all. I’ll take it all, because I promised to care for your pain and your pleasure, did I not? And isn’t this pain?” I give him the smallest of nods, and he continues, “So then doesn’t it belong to me?”

He can’t know, he doesn’t know, what a mess this is. My feelings are a hall of mirrors, warped and stretched and grotesque, and yet when I spin to look at one closely, I see all the cheap tricks in the glass that make it so. I understand that my feelings come from this place or that place, I can even name them to myself in an oddly detached sort of way if I try. And yet the moment I lift my concentration, the warped images come back, a hollow mockery of real feelings, real reactions.

I don’t want this—how the fuck can he?

I struggle to put this in words, and I can’t. “This isn’t your problem,” I tell him, glancing away from his face to see Embry, who’s still deeply asleep and snoring.

Ash gently turns my head back to his, but there’s an inevitability in his gentleness, the way that the ocean or the wind is inevitable. I could resist, I could refuse, but he’d win in the end. Not through force or coercion, or maybe some of those things, but it is his will, his singular, unrelenting will, that will overwhelm me eventually, no matter how hard I try. “Let it be my problem,” he says.

I let him turn my head again, let him scorch the inside of my soul with that king’s gaze that misses nothing. “Oh princess,” he says with real sorrow in his voice.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” I hiss. I don’t know why this should make me angry, why his kindness should upset me, but it does.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he says. “You think I pity you? You think that I think you’re weak?” He rises up on his knees, and something about his posture makes my heart beat a little faster. It’s the studied relaxation of his shoulders, the way his hands are carefully open by his thighs. He’s naked, his cock half-hard against one thigh, but it doesn’t make him seem any less dangerous. In fact, it makes him more dangerous somehow, as if all semblance of civilized behavior has been stripped away.

Although the way he tilts his head and studies me is very civilized. Very calm. “Stand by the bed.”

“I don’t want to play games right now,” I say sullenly.

“This isn’t a fucking game. Stand by the bed.”

I narrow my eyes at him, my complicated feelings shifting into one primary one: anger.

“Fuck off.”

“Fuck off isn’t your safe word, angel. You can be furious with me, you can say whatever you want, but unless you say Maxen, nothing changes.” He points to the side of the bed. His cock is fully hard now. “Do as you’re told.”

I chew on the inside of my mouth. I glare at him. How the fuck dare he, after what I’ve been through? After what was done to me? The anger snaps me out of my hollow confusion, peels away the dissociative sadness, and I get off the bed and stand next to it, making as big of a mess of the blankets as possible, making my body as unavailable as possible by facing away from him and crossing my arms over my chest.

I hear a small chuckle, as if my tantrum is cute, and not a real expression of a grown woman’s feelings. I spin around to glare at him, but I’m stopped short by his face, which is folded in a smile of pure, adoring love. “You’re a spoiled princess,” he tells me as he winds his fists in the blankets. “I can’t wait to punish you for it.”

I open my mouth to—well, I don’t even know. To tell him what a bastard he is, what an insensitive fucking asshole. To tell him how strange the abduction feels in my mind, like wearing a cloak of nettles. Move one way and your whole body is stung. Move another and you’re saved from the sharp ends, but knowing it’s only a matter of time before you’re stung again. It’s both feeling and the absence of feeling all in the space of microseconds.

Except when I’m about to say it all, I realize it’s not quite true, at least not right now. My fury at Ash has pushed the memory Melwas back—not far—but enough that I can live and breathe in this moment without the last few days constantly pulling on my thoughts.

Ash ignores me, or at least pretends to, winding the blankets around his hand one more time and yanking them easily off the bed. Next comes the sheet, which is harder, since it’s wrapped around Embry’s hips. But he’s strong, the muscles in his chest and arm flexing as he pulls, and I keep my arms crossed over my breasts to hide how tight my nipples have grown at the sight of that body at work.

Embry’s eyes flutter open and he groans as he rolls over onto his stomach. “I don’t want to go to school, Ma,” he says into the pillow, his voice muffled.

“I can’t decide how I feel about being called your mother,” Ash says dryly.

“You should feel bad about it,” Embry says into the pillow. “She’s mean. Just like you.”

It’s enough to make me smile, the tiniest bit. Enough to make me relax my shoulders.

Ash smacks Embry’s bare ass, playfully, but it leaves a bright red handprint. “It’s time to wake up, Patroclus.”

“Patroclus?” I ask.

Embry rolls over onto his back with a sigh. “Ash thinks we belong in an ancient Greek epic about wife-robbing.”

“To be fair,” Ash says, climbing off the bed, “I didn’t realize how prophetic that would be.”

Embry sits up. “Scoff.”

Ash pauses, arching an eyebrow, saying nothing.

“That’s right, I scoffed at you,” Embry says with dignity. “You chose it because you liked the idea of being the mighty Achilles and me your fucktoy.”

“You know that Plato’s Symposium says that Achilles is the fucktoy, right?”

“Scoff again,” Embry scoffs again. “You quoted Aeschylus to me the first time you kissed me. Not Plato.”

I’m truly smiling now, despite everything, and I have to remember I’m angry. Trying to display that anger. With some difficulty, I muster up a frown again.

Ash delivers a dramatic sigh. “Does it matter?”

“You were the one who brought it up.”

Embry glances over at me, and his fake-scoffing disappears. “Greer,” he says, in a voice that lets me know he can see all sorts of things I don’t want him to see.

“Right,” Ash says, all business once again. “Embry, I need your help.”

Embry looks at me once more, eyes a stirring wildflower blue, and then he looks back at Ash. “Anything.”

Ash walks over to the chair in the corner—not the stuffed one, but the wooden desk chair with no arms. It’s an old chair, one of those things that somehow survived the Eisenhower administration, but the moment Ash sits in it, it becomes a throne. Solomon waiting to dispense wisdom. Even his nakedness makes him more regal somehow, more honestly powerful.

He snaps his fingers. The six months leading up to our wedding, the scenes we performed, the grooming, the delicious, loving preparation—it overrides everything. I’m over to him within the space of a second, on my knees with my arms boxed behind my back and my head down in the next. There’s no time for anger—in a way, not even room for it. He snaps, I obey. And the moment my knees touch the floor, the nettle cloak is lifted somewhat. No one can hurt me here at Ash’s feet. More importantly, I can’t hurt myself. Not with thoughts or feelings or memories. At his feet, I am His.

I serve at the pleasure of the President.

“Safe word?” he asks, a signal that things are about to get uncomfortable.

With my eyes downcast, all I can see are his shins and ankles and feet, dusted with that coal-black hair I adore so much. I focus on that as I answer, “Maxen.”

“Use it if you need it,” he says, and it’s still Ash for the moment, still the man who can’t sleep without me next to him. “I’m going to push you. It’s going to be hard.”

“Why are we doing this? Sir?” I remember to add.

He leans forward; I see the ends of his fingertips in the field of my vision. “Because you think that I think you’re weak. Because right now, you’re afraid that you are weak. Because your pain belongs to me and no one else, not even yourself. Because…” he takes a breath, and I can almost feel the pain, the need, radiating off him. “Because I almost lost you, Greer. Believe me when I say that I wish holding you for a night was enough to relieve this ache, this new distance between us, but it isn’t.” His fingers tangle gently in my hair. “I need it too, you see. I need to have it this way.”

I lean into his touch as much as possible, pushing against his hand like a cat. “So it’s for both of us?”

“Maybe me more than you. Embry told me what happened in Carpathia, what you asked him to do.”

Embry shifts behind us. I glance up at Ash, alarmed, but he trails a finger down to my lips, pressing its pad against them. “One demon at a time, Greer.”

“No one can wrestle one demon at a time,” I say from under his finger. “Demons link arms, join hands. They’re a package deal.”

He sticks two fingers in my mouth, silencing me. “Not today, not for you. I’m glad Embry was there to give you what you needed. I’m not angry…jealous, perhaps.” He looks at Embry while taking a deep breath and then looks back to me. “Okay, yes, I’m very jealous, but he saved you from Melwas. I would have given him anything. And you…you’d been through the pit of hell—do you think there’s any balm, any comfort I could refuse you after that? We won’t even think about it today—today is about having you here at my feet, where we both know you belong. My jealousy will keep for another day.”

I give his fingers a long suck, and then I nod. This is for both of us. One demon at a time.

I can do that.

He leans back. “Do you want to walk through what I have planned?”

I bite on the inside of my lip, my mind torn. Professor Greer wants to walk through it. In fact, Professor Greer wants to say Maxen right now and demand a back rub instead of a scene. But the more elemental part of me chides Professor Greer’s cowardice. In eight months, Ash has never harmed me, never pushed me where I didn’t need to go. If he thinks I need this, then I have to consider that he might be right.

And I do need it. In a way I can’t properly explain. I need something rough. Something grounding. Pain to drive out the pain.

Finally, I shake my head, still looking down. “I don’t want to know. I just want…” Fuck. Will I never be able to express what that unwanted touch made me feel? “I just want to feel like I’m yours. Not his.”

I don’t have to say his name for Ash to understand. His hands curl into fists. “You’re not his,” he says fiercely. “You’re mine.”

I nod, although tears are burning at my eyes. It’s such a basic truth—Melwas doesn’t have the power to change who I am, who I give myself to, how I crave my sex—yet right now the nettle cloak is back and it stings. Would Melwas have tried to rape me if I didn’t have Ash and Embry’s marks all over my body? If I didn’t have that undeniable scent of submissive on my skin? Was it something about me that invited his assault?

A finger comes under my chin, still wet from my mouth, and my face is lifted to my husband’s. It’s not Ash I see there, but my Sir.

“Tell me one thing you are remembering about it,” he orders, his gaze implacable and searching. “A color or a smell or a taste—”

“Apples.” I shudder out the word like it’s poison in my mouth. “There were apples at dinner before he brought me back to my room, and I could still taste them while he…” I trail off.

Ash releases my chin and looks over at Embry. “Kitchen. You know where they are.”

I hear Embry leave the room, and after he’s gone, Ash taps his fingers on his bare thigh. I stare at them, not dropping my gaze to the floor nor looking up into his face, staring at his hands and thinking about apples instead. The sour taste of them, how they brought saliva flooding to my mouth, how I couldn’t make that taste go away no matter how much I swallowed. How I could still taste them when Melwas touched me.

Ash’s fingers stop tapping. “Say it, angel.”

“I don’t want to do this,” I blurt.

“Because you think it won’t help? Or because it will be hard?”

“Both. That it will be hard and it will be for nothing.”

My chin is lifted again, and green eyes bore into mine. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” he says. “Because it’s my risk, isn’t it?”

I frown. It certainly isn’t—it was my body that was forcibly subdued and exposed to Melwas, it’s my mind and my memories blighted by it—and—

Cruel fingers reach down and pinch an exposed nipple. I squeak, a squeak that turns into a long cry as my husband twists my nipple hard. “Did that hurt?”

“Yes, Sir,” I gasp.

“And whom does that pain belong to? You or me?”

“You, Sir.”

He lets go of my nipple to slap my breast. “And that pain?”

“Yours.”

He grabs my hair and yanks my head to the side so he can bite my shoulder unimpeded. By now my body is singing, my nervous system baffled, sending all kinds of electric signals to my brain. “And this pain?”

“It’s yours, Sir,” I manage.

His hand drops to my chest, running fingertips down to the top of my left breast, where they come to rest against my heart. The movement is possessive and careful and deliberate. Very quietly, very slowly, he asks, “And this pain? Whom does that belong to?”

I want to argue, I want to scream at him that it can’t be his, it didn’t happen to him, it happened to me, but I’ve fallen enough in the cadence of our moment that I answer, “That pain belongs to you too.”

And the moment I say it, my face crumples and there’s no more hiding, no more pushing it away. It’s right there, and I find I’m begging him to take it. “Please make it go away,” I beg, tears running down my cheeks. “Take it away from me.”

“Always.” With no effort at all, he leans down and takes me into his arms, kissing away the salt water on my face. I feel his tongue flickering against my cheek as he licks at them, like a vampire feeding off of tears instead of blood. “It’s my risk because it’s already my pain, angel. Give it to me for the next hour, trust me for just the next hour. Let me carry it for you.”

I nod, still sniffling, curling into a ball on his lap. He runs his hands through my hair, and there’s an appreciative rumble from low in his chest when he lets the silky stuff fall through his fingers. I feel his erection burn against my thigh, and I almost smile at that—his thing for my hair never ceases to amuse me.

Embry comes in, an apple in hand. Those blue eyes warm with something I can’t read when he sees me in Ash’s lap, something molten and jealous. But it leaves as quickly as it came, and he closes the bedroom door and walks to us, apple extended.

“You ready, little princess?” Ash asks. “Snap your fingers if you need to stop, and we’ll stop. Otherwise, remember that your pain is my pain, and that I’m doing this for us. All of us.” I can feel him look up at Embry; Embry’s cock stirs under Ash’s gaze and he nods.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I’m ready.”

“Open your mouth then, angel. Just like you do when I want my cock in there. Oh very good, very good. What a pretty tongue you have, my little wife, so pink and so wet. Just like other parts of you. Embry, you know what to do.”

Embry’s face is slightly apologetic when he comes forward to put the apple in my mouth, but his cock is completely hard now, the skin at the crown stretched tight and dark. And the moment Ash murmurs, “Bite down,” and my teeth break the flesh of the apple, Embry’s face becomes angles and planes of pure, dangerous lust. Lost-to-himself lust, the kind I saw in Carpathia when he pretended to be my husband pretending to be my abductor, the kind I saw the night he pounded the virginity right out of me.

I’m so distracted by Embry’s face—like Mr. Darcy if Mr. Darcy fucked women to within an inch of their lives—that I don’t even think about the apple until the juice hits my tongue. But the moment it hits my tongue—sweet and tart and slightly floral—I buck and shudder in Ash’s arms, about to spit the damn thing out.

“Drop that apple, and you get the belt,” Ash warns, right as it’s about to fall from my mouth, and I have to bite deeper to keep it from tumbling. Juice runs out from the corner of my mouth and down my chin. I really don’t want the belt. Really, really, even though I know the high I have afterwards is like none other, that the way it drags me into the present and forces all other thought from my mind is probably exactly what I need right now.

“Clean her up,” Ash tells Embry, and I’m confused for a moment until I feel juice from the apple drip to my chest and run over the swells of my breasts.

Ash leans back to watch the show—me perched on his lap and loosely cradled in his arms as his lover approaches and kneels between his spread legs. Embry moves forward, pressing hungry lips to my flesh, lapping up the juice the way Ash earlier had lapped at my tears.

There’s a poem like this, I think dizzily, as Embry’s hot mouth moves to the nipple Ash abused earlier, and then to the other, sucking every bit of juice right off my skin. His mouth traces wet lines to my sternum and collarbone, his tongue light and fluttering in the hollow below my neck. Every movement of his mouth goes straight to my clit.

The Goblin Market, I remember. That’s the name of the poem. A Victorian poem about two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who must resist the forbidden fruits of the otherworldly goblin men. I taught it to undergraduates at Cambridge, and as Embry seals his mouth over the thudding pulse point in my neck and sucks, I remember some of the lines:

Did you miss me?

come and kiss me.

Never mind my bruises

hug me, kiss me, suck my juices.

…eat me, drink me, love me,

Laura, make much of me.

Embry licks the juice from my chin next, lips tickling along my jaw, which is tense from holding the fruit. He kisses around the apple, around the edges of my stretched lips. “All clean,” he whispers against my skin.

“Thank you, Embry,” Ash says, his voice husky. I can feel how much watching Embry lick the juices from my skin has affected him, and then I feel it even more as Ash easily lifts me up and resettles me over his lap belly-down, ass-up. His erection is hot hard steel against my bare stomach, and my clit pulses at the new posture, the air wafting between my legs against my exposed cunt.

It shouldn’t surprise me, after all we’ve done and gone through, but it still does—I’m wet. I’m so wet, with an apple in my mouth reminding me of my kidnapping, with my ass raised up for a spanking, with my body objectified by the only two people in the world I want to share it with.

“Keep that apple in your pretty little mouth, princess.”

Smack.

Heat blooms under his hand as he lifts it to smack me again. This time it’s harder, faster, the crack resounding through the room. I flinch, and the apple starts to slip, forcing me to bite down deeper. Embry, still on his knees, moves to the side of Ash’s legs so he can face me and take my hands in his. He presses his forehead to mine.

“Remember to breathe,” he advises, and I nod, even though it’s so hard with this fucking apple jammed between my teeth and—

Crack crack.

The apple muffles my cry, more juice spilling onto my tongue and running down my chin. I taste it, and taste Melwas, feel his breath on my neck—

Crack crack crack.

Embry squeezes my fingers. My teeth squeeze the apple.

Crack. Crack.

Crack.

On it goes, on and on, blows hard and deep sprinkled with blows light and fast until it doesn’t matter which ones are hard and which ones are light, they all hurt, they all burn. My skin is fire, my ass and thighs are fire, and all the while I’m gagging on a fucking piece of fruit.

My ass, Embry’s fingers, the apple. I don’t exist outside those three points, those three sensations. They are the points my existence is strung from, my only anchors to reality. It’s all I can do to keep breathing, to keep the apple in my mouth, the pain and fire of it driving out all thought. All memory. There’s only Ash’s punishing hands and Embry’s soothing ones, and the sweet juice on my tongue.

Ash rubs an appreciative hand over my ass, even the gentle caress burning against my skin. I’m just on the verge of gone, truly lost to myself—any more pain and I’d plunge headlong into subspace, which I almost crave. But Ash keeps me just at the brink of awareness, slowing the pain and my pulse.

A finger runs along my slit, teasing past the wet folds and sliding inside. “Who do you get wet for?”

“You, Sir,” I try to say around the apple. It comes out as a muffled wet sound.

“Mm. And who do you hurt for?”

“You, Sir.” Every time I attempt to speak, the apple comes precariously close to falling and I have to bite it deeper.

That finger, wet from the inside of me, traces up to tightly pleated entrance of my ass. It circles, not teasingly, but firmly, skillfully working the aperture open and then sliding inside. I arch, my hands squeezing Embry’s, trying to breathe. Ash’s fingers have been there before, several times, but every time feels new, just as elemental and dirty as the last.

“And who is this for?” Ash asks finally, pushing in to the knuckle.

“You, S—”

It finally happens. The apple falls from my mouth, thumping to the floor and rolling down to Embry’s ankle where it lands with the bitten side up.

“Oh, dear,” Ash tuts. “We dropped the apple.”

Eyes wide, I twist to look back at him and start to beg, “Please, I’ll put the apple back in, I’ll carry it in my mouth as long as you want, please—”

I stop. His silently arched eyebrow betrays nothing but mild amusement, the same amusement you might have picking up a squirming kitten or bunny, all the more adorable for its pointless thrashing. His hands and arms slide under me, and then I’m carried over to the bed, bent over it, and Embry lies on his stomach in front of me so he can hold my hands again. I don’t want the belt, I don’t want it, but I also do. I want to stop thinking, I want Ash’s ownership of me to be striped and branded on my body. I want the free fall of surrender, the stinging reminder of exactly how much I am able to choose and control. I can choose blinding pain for myself, I can choose blinding pleasure, I can choose sleep or kisses or space. My body belongs to me and me alone.

And for the first time since we came back to America, I believe it.

“Three’s the magic number,” Ash says, and I hear leather sliding through his fingers. “Count for her, little prince.”

The belt comes like fire, a sting and a snap so fierce that I don’t feel the full pain of it until it’s over. My ass already glows from the spanking, the warm-up both helping and making the belt hurt even more.

“One,” Embry whispers, holding my hands tighter. “Don’t forget to breathe.”

I always forget to breathe. I take in a deep breath right as the second blow comes, welting deep and mean a little lower on my ass. The air leaves my lungs in a rush, and Embry reaches out to rub my hair. “Two. One more, Greer. Last one.”

The last one is always the worst somehow, and this time is no exception, the leather biting into the tender skin where my thighs meet my ass. I let out yelp of pain, kicking my legs and pressing my face into the bed, hearing Embry croon, “Breathe, breathe, breathe.”

The belt is tossed up on the bed, and then Ash is kicking my legs apart and spearing me with his thick erection. Pleasure sings up my core, melody thrumming up to my fingertips and my scalp, my confused nerve endings converting everything into delicious sensation. “Jesus, you’re wet,” he grunts from behind me.

Embry groans from in front of me, still on his stomach, and I look up to see that he’s reached a hand underneath himself and is rubbing his cock as he watches Ash push deeper into me. “How does he feel?” Embry asks me, his eyes still on where Ash’s hips move against my ass.

“Big,” I say, squirming. That earns me a slap on the ass from Ash, and then he nudges my ankles together again, making it tighter for him.

“Yeah,” Embry breathes, still rubbing himself. “He is.”

I get another smack on the ass. “Up on the bed,” Ash says, the ragged edge to his voice sending a prideful thrill through me. I did that to him, to the leader of the free world. By doing nothing other than being me, nothing other than giving him what he needed and letting him give me what I needed in return. I expect him to keep fucking me on the bed, but instead he sits against the headboard next to me, his cock glistening in the warm light. “On your back,” he tells me. “Legs spread. Embry needs your cunt right now.”

My breathing comes faster as I obey, my already tight nipples furling into painfully tight peaks as I settle onto my back, as Embry watches me with liquid blue eyes.

“Can I?” Embry asks Ash in a shaking voice.

“I’m not asking either of you,” my husband answers sharply. “I expect you to mount her. I expect you to fuck her. I expect you to make her come. And I expect her to let you.”

The rough words make me shiver hard. Almost as hard as the hot emerald gaze that settles on my face. “Look at me while he’s inside of you,” he commands. “I want to see your face.”

“Oh, Ash,” I murmur. I’m nothing but hormones and electricity right now, nothing but what he makes me with his words. He knows it too, a pleased tilt to his mouth as he watches Embry crawl between my legs and penetrate me.

My husband’s own cock is massive and dark, pointing straight up to the ceiling, but he ignores it, crossing his arms against his wide chest as he watches his best friend pump in and out of my pussy, slowly at first, then faster and faster as his eyes hood and he begins to lose control. Embry lowers himself completely over me, our bellies pressing together and his forearms under my shoulders, and with his face in my neck, he jabs into me with fast, selfish thrusts.

Well, not entirely selfish. His base grazes my clit on every stroke, the tilt of his pelvis ensures that he hits that perfect spot every single time. And as my orgasm builds, I know what I want more than anything. I know what I need. And if Ash did this to remind himself how it felt to claim me, if I did this because I wanted to feel the full weight of my own agency again…not to mention it’s something I’ve wanted for years…

Our eyes are still locked, and I reach out to him, sliding my hand under his crossed arms to rest against his chest. “I want to ask you for something.”

Embry doesn’t slow his pace or lift his head from my neck, but I know he’s listening, waiting to hear what happens next.

Ash captures my hand and moves it down the hard ridges of his stomach to pull on his waiting cock. He uses my hand the way he likes, with his larger one wrapped around my smaller one, guiding the pressure and pace. “How do you know I haven’t already planned on doing it?”

“You don’t know what I was going to ask,” I say. I mean it to come out teasing and coy, but Embry’s body is a machine that drives out any feeling other than my growing climax, and so it comes out breathless. Panting.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ash says, in that casual way that’s beyond arrogance. It’s fact. “I’m going to do anything that I want to you, and you’re going to let me.”

He’s still using my hand to stroke his cock, but he doesn’t even glance at it, his eyes still burning into mine. I think of the moment we first met in London all those years ago. “Anything,” I say, repeating the words I spoke to a young soldier in an unfamiliar library. “I’ll let you do anything to me.”

I mean it even more than I did at sixteen—anything is such a large word now, as a woman. I’ve seen the horrors of anything, I’ve felt them, and yet in the deep green depths of my husband’s eyes, I rediscover what I always instinctively knew with him. That with him, anything is the delicious crevasse I longed to visit as a young woman, anything is a realm of things both pleasurable and frightening, anything is any depraved, bruising act transformed into something loving by consent and mutual pleasure.

Ash’s lips twitch at my words—he remembers that moment in the library just as I do—and his Sir-face flickers for a moment, revealing the tired yet playful man behind. “And that’s what makes you so dangerous,” he murmurs, using his other hand to brush hair away from my sweaty face.

“I’m going to come,” I whisper to him and Embry both.

“Good,” Ash says at the same moment Embry bites my neck in acknowledgement. “Who do you come for, Greer?”

“You, Sir,” I say, squirming underneath his friend.

“Good girl. Let Embry feel you. He deserves that, don’t you think? After all he’s done to make you safe?”

I’m beyond speech now, and I think Embry might be too, because he lets out a groan when Ash says, “Pull out after she comes, Embry, keep that cock hard for me,” but doesn’t protest beyond that one agonized noise.

“Good boy. You’ve earned yourself some warm pussy after serving me so well, haven’t you? Some time between my wife’s legs. It’s good, isn’t it? It feels so good to take what you deserve.”

Ash’s words are cruel and demeaning in the tastiest way, but even tastier is feeling the change they wreak on Embry. His strokes change—long and needy to rough and hard—and his fingers dig into my back and his teeth into my neck, all pure male animal. And as I watch Ash’s face, I know this is deliberate—he knew those words would do this to Embry, that those ideas are ideas that burn behind Embry’s thoughts when he thinks no one can see.

But Ash can see. And when he whispers, “Fuck her hard, Embry, fuck her like you wish you could all the time,” I know what he’s doing. Both feeding and riling the hungry jealousy between them. It inflames the Vice President, it inflames me, and like a barrel plunging over a waterfall, I abruptly go from anticipation to incoherent feeling, clenching wildly around Embry’s cock, gasping as the contractions drive all thought and knowledge out of my body. There’s nothing but deep, biological release, pure, hormonal pleasure.

Embry obeys Ash and pulls out, but I see from his clenched jaw and drawn-up balls that it’s a near thing. He comes to rest on his heels, his expression dazed. But it sharpens quite a bit when Ash says, “There should be lube in the end table. The usual place.”

The usual place? I wonder, but then remember those months between Jenny’s death and me. I shiver with unadulterated lust as I wonder how many times the men in front of me have fucked in this bed—it stirs me to think about at the same time it fills me with a familiar sense of fear and dread. They have so much history between them, so much love and sex and heartbreak, I feel like an interloper between them. Like I’ll always be on the other side of a curtain too thick for me to draw back on my own.

“Having you both in my bed is such a gift,” Ash says, as if sensing my thoughts. “I never could have imagined…” He trails off, shaking his head, and then extends his hand for the bottle Embry is handing him, all cold business once again. “On your stomach, Greer. Turn your head so Embry can use your mouth if he wants.”

Embry does want, and he kneels next to me and pushes past my lips the moment I’m ready. Ash puts a pillow under my hips, pinching my ass for wiggling it at him as he does.

“Don’t test me, Greer,” Ash warns. “You’ll want me patient for this.”

But his voice, his hands as they move rough and eager over my thighs and hips—his patience is already shredded, destroyed by the chance to fuck my ass. And he wastes no time once he has me ready, sliding a slick finger into the tight rosebud, probing and pressing around, readying me, as if anything can ready me for his huge erection. He adds a second finger and I moan around Embry’s cock, which sends Embry clutching at the headboard and my hair, muttering curses to himself.

“I can’t wait to fuck you here,” Ash says, those fingers beginning to thrust now in slow, twisting motions. “My little prince got to be the first inside you, but I’ll be the first man to come inside your ass, and I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about it. How hot it will be. How tight. How shameful.”

I pull my mouth off Embry and give Ash a happy smile over my shoulder. “Yes, please.”

“Dirty girl,” he breathes, working his fingers harder, sending frissons of delight scurrying across my skin. “Fucking dirty girl.”

And then he positions himself between my legs, his fingers leaving me to ready his cock. I expect Embry to keep fucking my mouth, especially when I feel his hand curl around my jaw and turn my face back to him, but instead of his cock, my lips meet his lips and he gives me a long, lingering kiss. “I love you,” he whispers against my mouth. “I love you so much.”

When he pulls back, I search his face. I’ll never understand him, I think, not even if I have a million years to try. I’ll never understand how he moves from selfish to selfless in the space of seconds, his inconstancy, his enormous capacity for both love and jealousy. Because why say those words now, with Ash about to fuck me, why say them so Ash can’t hear?

Before I can glean any answers from that near-flawless, aristocratic face, he says a little louder, “Keep breathing while he presses into you, keep breathing and push against him. He’s prepared you well, but it will still be uncomfortable at first. Just breathe.”

I nod, and Ash’s fingers trail up my back. I know without looking that it’s not to soothe me or comfort me; he’s stroking my flanks and spine like a buyer stroking a prize horse, like a collector running his hand along the hood of his new sports car. The touch is owning, possessive, appreciative but selfish. His hand rests at the back of my neck for a moment and the message is clear. I am his plaything, his pet, his wife. He will do with me whatever he wants.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

He bends down over me, and I feel the first pass of his tip against my entrance, a grazing pass with almost no pressure. It passes again, pressing in this time against the prepared opening, then pulling back.

“Relax,” Embry says, rubbing his nose against mine. “You’re tensing up.”

I am, and I don’t even know why. I want this, I’ve wanted it for a long time, I’m so aroused that my cunt feels heavy and swollen, there’s even been plenty of lube and prep work…but it feels like such an invasion, deep and strange, almost wrong but not quite.

On my next inhale, Ash presses against my hole and keeps pressing, the slick lube doing its work and making everything wet and gliding but oh God, oh fuck—

“Christ,” Ash says through clenched teeth as his tip is squeezed relentlessly by my virgin hole. “Jesus, that’s so fucking good.” He pushes in deeper, past the initial resistance.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” I mutter, pressing my eyes closed. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

“Kiss her, Embry,” Ash says, stroking my thigh as if I’m a skittish horse, but his hand is shaking and I know he’s barely holding on to his self-control right now.

Embry’s mouth presses against mine. His kiss is sweet and gentle and soothing—a stark contrast to the needy cock stretching my sensitive flesh—and I find myself captivated by it, the loving, tender motions of his mouth drawing me away from my pain and into something else. Something that feels like pain, a shimmering clench at my solar plexus, a catch in my breath, but that my body turns into something different.

“Keep breathing, sweetheart,” Ash says. “You’re doing so well.”

I feel him breach me, finally, finally, that flared head now past my gates and pushing deep inside.

“Oh fuck,” I whisper into Embry’s lips, but my voice is different from before, no longer panicked but filled with wonder. There is a part of it that still hurts, if hurt is even the right word for it. There’s still a part of it that feels wrong. But the clench in my chest is pulling on the clench low in my belly from Embry’s expert fucking earlier, and my body responds before my head can make sense of it, squirming and wriggling onto the thick cock between my cheeks, trying to take him deeper.

I’m rewarded for my efforts with a hard spank, and then he pulls out to the tip, pushing back in all the way now, so deeply that I can feel his testicles against my pussy. Embry has propped himself up to watch, pretty mouth parted ever so slightly, his breathing fast and uneven.

“Look at this, Embry,” my husband says, and Embry obediently crawls over to look. Ash palms my ass cheeks and spreads them as far apart as they’ll go, exposing the place where we’re joined. “Look how big she’s stretched around me. Look how tight her ass is around my cock.”

I can’t see Embry, but I hear the quiet need in his voice when he asks, “Does it feel good?”

“There aren’t words for how fucking good it feels.”

A finger—Embry’s I presume—traces the place where I’m stretched around Ash’s erection. I shiver, Ash shivers. I hear a murmured question from Embry followed by a murmured assent from Ash, and I look back over my shoulder to see Embry biting his lip, reaching a hand out towards my husband. He seems hesitant, nervous, as if touching Ash this way isn’t something he gets to do very often and he wants to remember every second of it. And instead of reaching for his chest or hips, Embry slides his hand against Ash’s jaw, his thumb stroking his lover’s silver-flecked hairline.

The moment Embry touches him, Ash goes still, his cock still inside me, his hands still on my hips. His eyes flutter closed as Embry cradles his face, and his lips part. For a long moment, no one moves, nothing moves, frozen in a moment I don’t understand but that still rends my heart in two. The pain between them is palpable, as real as our sweat and our flesh, palpable and alive. And if I ever thought Ash held all the power in their relationship, I see it clearly now: Embry holds my husband’s heart in his hands and he doesn’t even know it. He’s too busy looking at the details of Ash’s face to see Ash’s expression, too busy being in love to see how loved he is.

It breaks my heart.

“Kiss me,” Ash says quietly. “Please.”

Hesitating for only a second, Embry leans in and brushes his lips against Ash’s, an electric shudder running through his body as their mouths touch. Ash sighs, those long eyelashes resting on his cheeks, a hand leaving my hip to wrap around Embry’s waist and pull him tight against his side. Then with some reluctance, he pulls away and gives me a rueful smile. “We’re ignoring our princess.”

“It’s hard to feel ignored when you’re inside me,” I say with an answering smile.

“Nevertheless, if you’re still smiling, we have work to do,” he growls, mostly playfully, although something dark lingers in his words. I remember why we’re doing this—what we both wanted out of the scene—and I know Ash won’t stop until he gets it.

He whispers something into Embry’s ear, and Embry nods, shooting me a mischievous look and scooting back a bit to give Ash room to help me up to my hands and knees. Still buried deep in me, he wraps an arm around my stomach and turns us over, so that he’s lying on his back with me on top of him. My back is to his chest, and he reaches around me to make sure that my head is settled comfortably and my hair is brushed out of my face. And then Embry crawls between us and I know what’s going to happen next.

“I don’t know if I can,” I breathe.

“You will,” Ash says into my ear. He finds my ankles with his feet and opens me, completely exposing my wet cunt to Embry, who’s now kneeling between our legs, his chest heaving with excitement. “You will and you’ll like it.”

He has one hand flat on my belly and the other wrapped around my throat, forcing my pelvis down and my head back over his shoulder, making my body into one long, taut arch, both holes easily accessible for my men.

“Shit, that’s hot,” Embry says, taking it all in, running fingertips along the wet petals now opened up for him, around the tender place where Ash and I are joined.

“It’s yours to fuck,” Ash says, sounding for all the world like a gracious host, like a king distributing a reward. “Yours to enjoy.”

Embry settles over us, one hand at the base of his cock and the other planted by Ash’s head. “Can I come inside her?”

I squirm in abject lust at the way they talk around me, at the way Embry asks permission of Ash but not of me; the sheer humiliation of it is almost as potent as their bodies in stirring me to climax.

“Would you like that?”

“God, yes,” Embry groans.

“Do it,” Ash orders, and Embry finally guides the huge head of his cock to my entrance, which is so wet now that I can hear the sound of him moving against me. But as he pushes inside, there’s an immediate difference from our earlier fucking, and I suck in a deep breath.

“I’ll go slow,” Embry promises. “I know it’s tight.” His voice breaks on the last word, as if even the thought of it is too much to handle, and from the way Ash’s chest moves with fast, shallow breaths beneath me, I’m guessing he feels the same.

He keeps his word, easing in, although with one thick cock already inside me, I wouldn’t exactly use the word ease for the entry of another. Rather, it’s more a slow invasion; for all that I’m wet, it’s forceful and not a little unkind, and with every cruel inch, the real Embry seems to disappear and the shadow Embry takes over. The Embry that thrives in chaos and violence, the Embry so consumed with his need that he can barely see anyone else around him.

He’s halfway in, driving waves of knifing pleasure up through my belly and into my chest. I can feel the sweat gathering under Ash’s hand on my neck, cool and damp on my forehead, misting the bare skin of my stomach. “I don’t know if I can,” I pant again.

Ash’s teeth capture my earlobe. “You’re going to,” he says in his Sir-voice. “Take it. Take all of him.”

Embry pushes in farther and I cry out, half deep pain, half rapture, and Ash’s chest rumbles with pleasure beneath me, every movement of Embry’s compressing and massaging him. And then Embry’s all the way in, looking down at me with lost eyes. I look up at him with my own lost eyes, pleading.

For mercy maybe, or for cruelty. I don’t even know what.

Embry gives an experimental thrust, and I cry out again, the pleasure-pain like hot iron in the pit of my stomach. “I’m sorry,” he manages to say through gritted teeth. “I’m so fucking sorry, but Jesus Christ, that’s so fucking tight, it’s so good—” Another thrust, and he gives a low, closed-eyes groan and I know I can expect no mercy from him. It feels too good, it’s too tight and hot and wet, too dirty.

“How are you, princess?” Ash checks in, as Embry pulls out and shoves into my tiny channel once again.

Words are beginning to slip from my mind, thoughts. Memories, intentions—I can’t even remember why I’m here now, how I ended up pinned like a butterfly between my husband and my lover. “Full,” is the only word I can summon to mind. “I feel full.”

“Full of whom?” Ash asks. The hand he kept on my stomach is now sliding to my clit, massaging it expertly.

“My Sir,” I say. “And my Embry.”

“Our Embry,” Ash corrects me, and Embry’s head drops down, as if he doesn’t want us to see what Ash’s words do to him.

I slide one hand behind me to rest under Ash’s neck, and then I reach up to cradle the back of Embry’s neck in my other hand. I pull Embry down for a kiss, and he obliges me with a groan, still forcing himself in and out of my cunt. His mouth is warm and sweet, eager and no longer gentle, and then Ash’s hand leaves my throat to fist Embry’s hair and yank him down for a kiss of his own until I impatiently pull Embry back to me. Soon, the two of us are engaged in a heaving, writhing battle for Embry’s mouth, all panting chests and rolling hips and muffled moans. Embry kisses Ash, then kisses me, then Ash kisses me, then the three of us find ourselves in a joined kiss, a breathless, teasing exercise. I begin to forget whose lips are whose, which tongue is which, which cock is taking its pleasure in my ass and which cock is taking its pleasure in my cunt.

It’s like my wedding night—our separate pairings have dissolved and there’s only the three of us, the three of us moving and kissing and breathing as one. There’s no division, no suspicion or jealousy in this moment—there’s only unity. Ecstasy. The primal need to fuck joined with the sacred soul-deep need to love another soul as fiercely as possible.

Mating. That’s what it is. A word that means both: the fucking and the sharing of one’s life.

“Give it over,” Ash murmurs. “It belongs to me, and I want it. Right now.”

I don’t have to ask what he means; he can feel just as well as I can the clench in my muscles, the fluttering pulls around the cocks inside me. I’m going to come, and when I do, it will be for him, for his pleasure.

“That’s it,” Ash says, “there it is.” He presses down on my stomach, just above my pubic bone, and the whimper I give is obscene because it feels so fucking obscene, like he’s pushing down to make things tighter for him and Embry, pushing down to see if he can feel the fullness for himself, and the effect is to press my G-spot hard against Embry’s merciless thrusts. “Yeah,” Ash says to himself as I start to implode, as he presses down harder, “there it is, princess. Make it good so we come hard inside you. Make us give you more than you can take.”

My husband is so depraved and consequently irresistible to me, and I whimper again as the final wind-up finishes winding. As the tension between those two cocks rubbing inside me hovers at a point right behind my clit for one shimmering minute. I can’t catch my breath, not quite, and the pressure is going to crush me, melt me, murder me, and I don’t realize that I’m scratching at arms and backs and bucking my hips until Embry says, “Ash, hold her still,” and I’m being restrained. And then Embry lets loose with his hips as Ash presses even harder against my stomach, and it’s as much the sight of his bunching stomach muscles and flexing hips as it is the deep, fast drag of his cock against my G-spot.

The winding stops, the shimmering tension burns, and then I’m fully imploding, contracting down on those cocks so hard it hurts, so hard I can feel my own stomach muscles bunching and jerking, electricity sparking along my scalp, sizzling across my skin.

“Fuck, I can’t stop,” Embry says as I writhe and moan underneath him. “I gotta—I have to—”

“Do it,” Ash says roughly. “Show me how much you like using my wife. Show me how grateful you are.”

Embry obliges, every muscle standing out in sharp, tense lines as he mumbles a shit holy shit and begins filling me full of his cum. “Oh Greer, oh fuck, baby, that feels so good.” He fucks through his climax, drawing it out with more deep strokes, throbbing hard enough I can feel it even as my own orgasm lingers on.

“Yeah,” he groans, pulling up a little and using the new angle to milk the last of his climax into me. “That is so good, baby. So fucking good.”

He withdraws with a noise that can only be described as wounded wonder, and then I feel what he’s left in me, the warm wet of his seed as it slowly drips out. Embry watches it with hungry eyes, watches as Ash reaches down to see what Embry was able to give me. Ash makes a growl of approval, the evidence that his friend has used me to his completion stirring up some deep animal lust in him.

“My turn,” he rasps into my ear. He moves his hips underneath me, his powerful torso and thighs hard at work to drive his cock in and out of my ass, and I’m surprised to find that it doesn’t hurt at all now. It only feels, a different kind of feel from my pussy, but just as intense, just as powerful. Maybe even more so for how much vulnerability and surrender are needed for it. With a hand on my cum-wet pussy and another hand on my arched throat, it only takes my husband ten or fifteen strokes to reach his tipping point. His body is a solid slab of sweaty, grunting muscle underneath me, his hands like the best kind of chains, and his erection so big and wedged so deep. I feel that big cock get impossibly bigger, those hard muscles even harder, and then he says in a tight voice, “Here it comes, princess. Here it comes.”

There are no words for feeling my husband come inside me. After everything I’ve been through: my abduction, fucking his prince, his discipline, his pleasure, the harmony the three of us reached together, so like our wedding night. The vulnerable and delicious noises he makes now, and the hot pulse of his ejaculating in a place no one else has been, and the close and sweaty embrace—I realize I’m crying, and it’s more than the release a good scene can give me, it’s deeper and more important than that. It’s the reassurance that nothing can rupture the love this man feels for me, no matter how far I am taken or how far I run, no matter what I’ve done with Embry. It’s the reassurance that no amount of violence or cruelty can rupture my faith in myself, my agency and ability to choose and to love.

This is marriage, I think dizzily. Joy and pain, exposed and exchanged.

Joy and pain, shared.

And as I cry, as Ash drains himself into me with long, vicious exhales, as Embry watches us both with his curious prince’s mix of torture and desire, I can still faintly taste apples in my mouth, no longer bitter but sweet. And I know that what happened won’t ever leave me—not really. Not in the way I’d like for it to. But it won’t define me, it won’t spoil me for marriage or fucking or love or forgiveness.

Ash was right—I thought I was weak. Even if I hadn’t articulated it to myself, the fear was there, that I was guilty or complicit somehow, and if not those things, then fear that I wouldn’t have strength to endure pain or roughness from the man I’d married—the man I married precisely because I wanted pain and roughness from him. Ash proved me wrong on every front.

That man.

That smart, cruel, kingly man.

And there’s a moment, after the shower, after he and Embry spend a delicious hour between my legs eating me and making out with each other, after Embry falls asleep. Ash rolls me over and slides into my pussy without preamble or permission—because when we’re in private, I’m his and he requires neither of those things. And he looks into my face and asks, “Whose pain is it?”

The answer comes without thought, without struggle.

“Yours, Mr. President. It’s all yours.”