American Queen (New Camelot Book 1)

Ten years separate me and that moment in the library. Ten years encompassing wars and illness and the entirety of my adult experience, and yet somehow it all shrinks to a pinprick point and disappears as I walk into St. Thomas Becket Church. It’s erased and there’s nothing between me and the man kneeling near the front of the sanctuary, his head bowed. There’s no air, no time, no different versions of ourselves…I could be sixteen right now, walking up this aisle, and he could be twenty-six.

Maybe it’s because of this that I hesitate as I get closer to him, my feet slowing as my pulse speeds up. When Embry suggested my church as a meeting place, I leapt at the idea. The church is where I feel safe, the church is where I feel watched over by God, and most importantly, the church is neutral territory. I can’t bear the thought of waiting in line to see him in the West Wing, a hastily penciled-in visitor, and I even less could bear the thought of being smuggled into the Residence. I understand discretion, but I also don’t want to feel like contraband. Like the living embodiment of a lie.

Stop freaking out. You still don’t know for sure why he wants to meet you. Embry had hinted—intimately—at the reason, but I’ve been burned by hope before. And besides, how could there be any room for hope at all? After Jenny, after that long sweaty night in Chicago, after ten years, for fuck’s sake. I should keep this box buried. I should save myself while I still can.

But I don’t stop walking. I send a quick prayer—a blank prayer, a silent plea, because I don’t even know what to pray for at this point—towards the tabernacle as I genuflect and slide into the pew behind the President. I carefully set down the kneeler and get to my knees, lacing my hands together and bowing my head, as if to pray, but I never get around to actually forming the words.

I study the President instead.

He’s praying as well, kneeling like me, his dark head hanging down over his hands. He’s shucked his jacket, leaving him in a white button-down shirt. His sleeves are rolled up, exposing tan, muscular forearms, and I can tell from the loose way the shirt collar lies against his neck that he’s unbuttoned his top button and loosened his tie. The shirt stretches and pulls over the wide shoulders and broad muscles of his back as he keeps his head bowed.

And because I can’t help it, I let my eyes trail down to the narrow lines of his hips. His pants are excruciatingly tailored, excruciatingly, the fabric hugging a firm ass and hard, thick thighs. Heat floods me everywhere, sending sparks and electric flashes dancing across my skin. How could I have forgotten how powerful he is in person? That there is still a soldier’s body under those dark suits and requisite flag pins?

And then when he speaks, the sparks dancing across my skin ignite into true fire as I remember the words he murmured against my lips that night a decade ago—tell me you’re eighteen and do you like my lips on your skin and God, where did you come from?

“I’ve prayed for the free world, the less-than-free world, my enemies, my allies, my staff and my mom’s favorite dog,” the President says without looking back at me, his voice rich and burred around the edges. “Am I missing anything?”

“The babies trapped in limbo, maybe.”

“How could I forget about them?” He leans his head farther down for a brief second. “And please watch over the babies trapped in limbo. In the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.”

He crosses himself, and I get a glimpse of those large, square hands that once cradled mine. “Thank you for meeting me,” Ash says. “I know it was presumptive to send Embry—especially as you haven’t ever met him—to do something so personal, but I couldn’t wait another minute after seeing you here on Sunday. And I also couldn’t get away to do it myself. I mentioned it to him and he volunteered to help right away.” He smiles. “He’s an amazing friend.”

Especially as you haven’t ever met him…

Ash doesn’t know that Embry and I know each other? A quiet worry starts tugging at my heart, but I push it aside. “Vice President Moore is a very persuasive messenger.”

“I know. That’s why I sent him. Trust me—the things he’s persuaded me to do can’t be spoken aloud in a church.” The President stands and comes around to the side of my pew, extending a hand. I take it and look up, and all worries about Embry fade into nothing. There is only Ash.

Since the night we kissed, I’ve seen thousands of pictures of Maxen Ashley Colchester, I’ve watched all his televised rallies and debates and press conferences, but it in no way prepared me for seeing him right now. Even though he’s perfection personified in any medium, no picture or video can do him justice. Nothing can compare to seeing him in person, face to face.

Still the same chiseled planes and full mouth, the bottle green eyes—still the most handsome man I’ve ever seen, aside from Embry Moore. But what the President has is more than good looks. There’s a certain nobility to his face, an honesty and openness, and even more than that, a sense of purpose. Like he knows exactly who he is and within seconds, he can tell you exactly who you are. It’s electrifying.

I allow him to help me to my feet. I’m shaking, and he notices.

“Do I scare you?” he asks, his brow furrowing. Like Embry, there are lines around his eyes and mouth that weren’t there a decade ago, and I see a few silver strands peeking through his jet-black hair. If anything, it makes him even sexier now than when we first met.

“Will you be angry if I say yes?” I manage.

His hand slides from mine up to my elbow, and I realize how close we’re standing. “Angry is not even close to the kinds of feelings you stir up, Greer.”

Oh God.

I can’t handle how intense this is, how fiercely my body is reacting to his mere proximity when all we shared was an hour a decade ago and another hour five years after that. I fumble for a way to defuse the sudden weight of the conversation. “Mr. President—”

He sighs. “Please don’t call me that. Not here. Not now.”

I try to force myself to say his name aloud—the name that I wrote a thousand times in looping cursive during my high school classes, the name that I sighed to myself in my shower with my hand between my legs—but my decorum was forged in the crucible of The Party and it’s so hard not to use the title I know I should use.

He leans in, and I smell the fire and leather smell of him. It makes me dizzy.

“You can call me ‘sir,’ if you like,” he murmurs. “But only when we’re alone.”

I have to close my eyes.

He guides me into the aisle, and then we’re walking past the altar to a door at the side of the church. We walk by stone-faced Secret Service agents and go out into the church garden, his hand moving from my arm to the small of my back, steering me where he wants us to go. The gesture is possessive, peremptory, as if he assumes he has prerogative over my body.

I want him to. I want him to have every prerogative over my body.

I don’t see any agents in the garden, even though I know they must be there, but for the moment, it feels as if we’re alone among the rustling red and gold trees and wilted fall flowers, and he stops us in the middle of a flagstone-paved clearing, next to a bleached-white statue of the Virgin.

“I won’t waste your time. God knows I have little enough of my own. But I couldn’t—” he pauses, the famously eloquent soldier at a loss for words. “I couldn’t wait any longer,” he finally says in a low voice.

He is so close, and all I can smell is leather and leaves and I force myself to take a step back. I have to think, I have to use my brain, because my body and my heart are screaming so loudly that I can’t hear anything else, and what they’re screaming is yes please yes please yes please even though a question hasn’t been asked yet.

The President—Ash, I mentally correct myself—lets me step back, but his eyes are on me like hands, still possessing me, still steering me.

“I don’t think I understand,” I say. “I don’t understand why you wanted to meet with me.”

He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture I recognize from that night. “That’s fair, I suppose,” he says, his eyes on the leaf-covered ground as he frames his next statement. “And I don’t want to scare you away by being too…direct.”

“I mean, I’m still shocked that you remember me. We met only the once.”

“Twice,” he corrects me. “Chicago, five years ago. Remember?”

Flames lick my cheeks and I take a deep breath. “I remember.” It was the night I lost my virginity, after all. Girls usually remember that sort of thing. “Twice then. We’ve talked twice.”

And then I bite my lip, remembering something I’ve managed to forget for several years, because it’s not exactly true that we’ve only talked twice. I have talked to Ash more than that, though he never talked back.

The emails.

My face flushes even hotter, this time with humiliation.

God, the emails. Why was I so young and stupid? So ready to attach meaning to the things adults do without thinking twice about it?

“They were very memorable,” he says. “Two times in ten years might not sound like a lot, but it was to me…” He trails off, and my heart squeezes.

But I breathe a silent sigh of relief that he doesn’t mention the emails. I never did get a response to any of my messages, and I had assumed for years that he’d never received them, since he had been actually fighting a war at the time. The younger Greer spent too many hours brooding in the dark about those unread messages, but now as an adult, I pray he’s never even seen them.

“Something’s wrong,” he says, reaching out to tilt my face up to his. I realize that I was staring off into nothing.

Lie. Just lie.

But I hate lying. I try to find an answer that isn’t the whole shameful truth. “I’m embarrassed. Of how I acted when I was younger.”

A smile, surprisingly tender. “Is that all this is? Why you’re acting like you don’t understand why I want to see you?”

“I just…I thought about that kiss so much,” I whisper. “But I knew there was no way you would remember it. Why would you? You were an adult, a man, and I was just a child. And you’ve gone on to live this incredible life, to be a hero and now a leader, and you had your beautiful wife—”

Fuck! I swallow the rest of my words, wishing I could swallow up my own idiocy along with them. Of all the things I shouldn’t bring up, the late Jennifer Colchester was at the top of the list. And sure enough, Ash winces at the word wife. Just the tiniest bit.

“I loved Jenny,” he says quietly, letting go of my chin. And it’s then I notice the dark smudges under his eyes, the telltale signs of exhaustion in his face. He still has trouble sleeping, even after all this time. “And I miss her. It hurts me still that she died so young and in so much pain. But Greer, I won’t pretend that I ever stopped thinking about you. I can’t pretend that.”

“It was one kiss,” I say, shaking my head. “Why would you—”

He holds up a hand to stop me, and I fall silent. “I’m not going to let you do that,” he tells me. “You’re not allowed to dismiss what happened or tell me that it wasn’t worth remembering. I did remember. I do remember. And I won’t forget any second of that night.”

“It’s just so impossible to believe. That you—Maxen Colchester—remembered me. Thought about me.”

A noise leaves him, half heavy breath, half incredulous laugh. “We are meeting after all these years,” he says, “and you believe I haven’t been thinking about you?” He takes a step closer, so close that I could lean in and press my lips against his icy blue tie if I wanted. It’s nearly the same color as Embry’s eyes.

“Look up at me, Greer,” the President orders me. I do as he says. It almost hurts to look him full in the face, he’s so perfect, but it hurts more not to look.

“All the words that men use about women—enchanted, charmed, addicted—they don’t even begin to cover what I felt for you and your handful of shattered glass. I thought about you that night, and the next and the next, and when I was deployed to Carpathia, you were all I thought about. I built these fantasies in my mind where I would come home after the war and find you at whatever university you were at. I would kiss you until you were like you were that night at the party, begging me to do whatever I wanted.” His green eyes are dark, stormy, his pupils wide. “Years later when I finally came home, all I wanted was to find you. But things happened…the war started up again and I was promoted and Merlin needed my time and then I met Jenny…” He lets out a breath. “I had just proposed to her the night before I saw you in Chicago.”

Chicago. Also known as the night I met Embry. The night I lost my virginity.

“Ash, you don’t have to—”

“I do,” he cuts me off. “Because I don’t think you believe me. And it makes me a terrible man, wanting you after all this time, through all these years. Because I did want you, even while I was married to Jenny. I sought out your grandfather every chance I could, just to listen to whatever scraps of news he had about you. Whatever academic honor you’d been given, what you decided to major in, whether you wanted to move back to America or stay in England. And late at night, while Jenny slept next to me in bed, I’d replay our kiss over and over again. What it felt like to pin you against the wall. What your voice sounded like in my ear, all breathless and full of wonder, like I’d just given you a gift. And I would hate myself for it, but I couldn’t stop.”

His eyes search mine. “So why did I want to meet you today? Because I haven’t been able to stop wanting to meet you for ten years. Because I want you. I want to kiss you again. I want to learn everything about you, everything about what you love and hate, what you study, what you want for your future.” He reaches up, his thumb brushing against my lower lip. “I want you to be mine.”

I try to hide my shiver. He can’t know, he can’t possibly know, how those words roll through me, punch through my skin and crawl into my veins.

Be mine.

Not let’s date, not be my girlfriend. This would be more than anything that trivial, and Ash knew it.

But the exhilaration is chased by a quick, cruel voice.

Remember the times you’ve been hurt before?

There’s no way this can be true.

This is crazy.

Say no.

Leave.

I shake my head, but his thumb stays against my lip. I fight the urge to bite it or lick it. Instead, I meet his eyes and say firmly, “You don’t know anything about me, other than what I kissed like once. That’s not enough to build on.”

“Does it scare you that I thought about you as much as I did?”

I think for a moment. It doesn’t, actually, especially given how much I thought about him. Much more than thought—I wrote to him. I touched myself to the memory of him.

“No. Just, it’s so unexpected. I had no idea how you felt…”

His thumb sweeps across my lip a final time and then moves to the line of my jaw. “I was at war, Greer. And then I was married. It wasn’t something I could act on.”

I nod. “I get that.” But I don’t say anything else because my mind is racing faster than my pulse, stacking what I know against what I feel.

I now know that Ash has been as preoccupied with me as I was with him—for all these years. So preoccupied he wants to be with me now, and I can’t pretend this doesn’t make me dizzy. Like my blood is carbonated, like my body is fizzing over with feelings. Excitement, lust, relief. But those ten years didn’t just sail by—they left an indelible mark on me. I fell in love with Ash, only to watch him marry another woman. I slept with a different man, only to never hear from him again.

In short, this last decade has been a harsh lesson in guarding my heart, and I have been a very, very apt pupil. I have built walls around my feelings, barriers and bridges and moats, all to protect me from the possibility of getting wounded again.

So how can I honestly be thinking about saying yes to Ash? How can I—cautious, closed-off Greer—concede to being his? What if he hurts me again? What if he’s disappointed in me or falls in love with someone else?

And, the largest question of all, how can I try to date Ash with Embry in the background?

For the first time, Ash looks uncertain. “You’re thinking of reasons to say no, aren’t you?” he asks quietly. “Did that night not mean to you what it meant to me?”

I shake my head vigorously. “No, no. That night meant absolutely everything to me. And that’s why this is a bad idea. Aside from you being the President and having no time or space for some girlfriend, I’m scared that I’ll get hurt. I’m scared that we’ll find that we don’t have anything in common, that our kiss was just a fluke, and even after all that, that it won’t matter because I’ll still fall in love with you. I’ll fall in love with you even as we find out we’re all wrong for each other and I’ll be left broken-hearted over you again—”

“Again?” he asks.

I try to look away, but he won’t let me. He keeps my face tilted towards his, lowering his own until our noses touch.

“God, if you only knew what it does to me to hear that you felt that way.” His voice is hoarse. “Tell me what I have to do to earn it back. Tell me what I have to do to make you as twisted up over me as I am over you. I’ll do anything. Anything.”

I can feel his breath against my lips. Warm and intimate. I should make him promise something, I should demand his fidelity or honesty or utmost care. But that would be too close to lying, and instead I admit the terrible truth.

“You don’t have to do anything, Ash. I’m already yours.”

He breathes out, a shudder going through him, and then he presses his lips to mine.

It’s nothing like our first kiss, and yet everything like it at the same time. I still feel soft and young and female as he pulls me close against his body. I still feel like I want to melt into him, dissolve into nothing and everything at once. And he still makes that low, quiet groan in the bottom of his throat, as if he can’t help himself, as if I’ve irrevocably weakened him by letting him touch my lips with his.

Our first kiss was impulsive, exhilarating and stunning, but unplanned, a kiss between strangers with no past or future. This time Ash kisses me with intent, with the promise of more, with the promise of a future and his affection and care. And I kiss him back as a woman, not as a girl, just as eager as I was then, but more experienced. All the more ready to surrender.

We break lips just for a moment, and I look up into his eyes. “Wow,” I whisper.

“Wow,” he laughs back at me.

“This is my first kiss in five years.” I don’t know why the confession is dragged out of me, but it is. I want him to know how much he meant to me, how much he means to me now.

I see the way his eyebrows pull together at my revelation, see the way he mentally tucks that information back to ask me about later, but for the moment, he only murmurs, “Then let’s make it count,” and lowers his mouth back down to mine. I smell the leaves and leather, feel the firm warmth of his mouth and the strength of his arms, and then I’m drowning in him. His certainty and his strength, his desire and his need. And then beyond a shadow of a doubt, I feel him drowning in me, feeling him giving over every atom of himself to my keeping. We are consumed and rebuilt all within the same moment of lips and hands fisting tightly in clothes.

A clearing throat interrupts us, and Ash reluctantly pulls away. I see a Secret Service agent waiting by the entrance to the garden.

“Mr. President, it’s time.”

Ash closes his eyes a moment and then opens them with a sigh. “I have a meeting with the Polish ambassador at four.”

“About Carpathia?” I ask. The war has been theoretically over for two years, but there’s no doubt that the region is still deeply volatile.

“Always about Carpathia,” he says with a rueful smile. “I’d rather spend the evening with you though.”

I want to ask when I can see him again—or more honestly, when I can kiss him again, but he beats me to it.

“Greer, my job—and the kind of man I am—I tend to ask a lot of the people I care for. My schedule is…well, it’s fucked. Constantly. I want to promise that I can see you right away, but that may not be the case.”

“I understand,” I say softly. “You forget that I know what it’s like for you better than most people.”

“I hate this,” he says suddenly, fiercely. “I want to take you home with me tonight, and I don’t want to wait to see you again.”

“Ash, really, I understand—”

“No,” he interjects. “No. I’ve waited ten years, and I refuse to wait any longer. If I send a car for you tonight, will you get in it?”

I think back to earlier, to my relief at not being smuggled into the White House like a mistress, like a dirty secret. Discretion is one thing, but is that what I want for myself? To be a late-night visitor? To be the hidden plaything of a man in power? I’ve stayed away from politics for years, built myself a nest in an ivory tower so I wouldn’t ever have to think about politics again, and I’m willing to surrender myself to the most famous politician in the world after one kiss?

But then I look again at Ash, at those green eyes burning down at me, and I realize that all this debating is pointless. Of course I’ll get in the car. Of course I’ll go to him. It almost feels like I don’t have a choice, like my choice was made when I was sixteen and pinned between the wall and an eager Army captain.

“Yes, of course,” I tell him. “I’ll go anywhere you want me to.”