American Queen (New Camelot Book 1)

Embry’s nowhere to be seen when we get back to the lodge, and after we shuck our coats and unwind our scarves, Ash puts a finger to my lips. I nod to show that I understand, and then he’s leading me by the hand through the lodge, back to our bedroom. It feels like sneaking, like we’re cheating on Embry somehow by creeping so quietly back to our room, but I have no idea why I feel like this. Ash and I have every right to go to bed together, and maybe hiding it from Embry is the kindest thing to do…given the circumstances.

Oh God.

The circumstances.

I have to tell Ash about Embry and me now. After his confession about Morgan, after his firm insistence that we move forward without secrets, it would be shamefully dishonest of me not to tell him. But if I’m truthful with myself, I recognize that I’m afraid. Afraid Ash will be angry…and maybe I’m a little afraid that he won’t be angry enough. I’m afraid Embry will feel betrayed that I told our secret without asking him. I’m afraid that if I admit what happened in Chicago, Ash will suspect I still have feelings for Embry, and that will be the end of any real trust between us. Because really, how can the three of us ever trust each other once the truth is laid bare?

Trust without truth isn’t actually trust, I remind myself. And if there’s any time to rectify that, it’s right now. With a ring on my finger and Ash’s confessions still echoing in my thoughts.

But when I walk into our room and Ash shuts the door behind me, he presses his finger to my lips again.

“I’ve wanted to do this since the first time we met,” he speaks, pushing close to me. His erection presses into my belly. “I’ve been fantasizing about it for ten years.”

I take a short, stilted breath beneath his finger. Is he saying what I think he’s saying?

His other hand drops down to find mine, to play idly with the new ring on my finger. “It’s not going to be easy, being my wife. There will be so much scrutiny and so much sacrifice, and I’ll forever be asking you to step between public and private roles—sometimes with no transition or warning. But right now…right now, it’s just the two of us. Right now those things are far away. And right now, I’m going to make you completely mine.”

I look up into his eyes. “Is it…are we…” I feel like I can’t catch my breath.

He grins down at me. “Yes, my impatient angel. I’m not going to torture us any longer.”

I drop to my knees. Not because he’s going to fuck me—although that’s part of it too—but because I love him so much. Because I’m so grateful. Because he’s Ash and I’m Greer, and when we’re alone, I belong on my knees.

It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

He strokes my hair, tangled and messy from the hat I wore outside, and allows me to rub my cheek against his thigh. “My beautiful angel,” he murmurs down at me. “My little princess. How have I lived so long without you?”

I don’t know, God, I don’t know, but now that we’re together, I don’t know how I lived this long either. Survived, yes. But living—how did that ever happen before I was able to sit at Ash’s feet?

Reluctantly I pull back, bowing my head and placing my palms flat on my thighs. He lets out a long breath, and his hands leave my hair. And then he kneels down in front of me, his hands covering mine, his head ducking so he can meet my eyes.

“Greer, I want to give you what you want. This first time, I want you to let me serve you, and I want you to let me take care of you. There’s no need for our first time to be…well. You know.”

I’m shaking my head before he even finishes. So fucking chivalrous. So fucking wary of himself. It’s both commendable and painfully exasperating—especially now, with my nipples pulled into aching beads and my pussy already swelling with the thought of Ash inside of me. Part of me distantly recognizes that this is a first for him too—he’s been married and he’s dominated in a club setting, but this is the first time he’s ever mingled love with kink, and he wants to make sure that I get both in equal balance.

But still.

“I want what you want. You know that you aren’t forcing me, right? You know that I’m not merely playing along? I choose this. I choose you. Every time I kneel, I know that I can stand back up, and every time you push me, I know I can say your name and make it all stop. And when you do things to me, I have just as much power over them as if I were doing them myself, because I can stop you at any time. I’m choosing what I want, and what I want is you how you are.”

He’s peering deep into my eyes now, and I hope he can see the truth there, just like he always can. A tiny flume of anger courses through me, and I give it passage through my words.

“You want to know what else I want? I want what I dreamed about ten years ago too. I want to be dragged to the edge of shame and fear and darkness, I want to not recognize myself, and I want you to be the glorious, demanding beast that you are. You want to take care of me? Then fucking own me. Wreck me. Tear me up and sew me back together the way that only you know how.”

His lips crash into mine, a kiss not meant to convey love, but a kind of deep gratitude, a sort of hot joy. “You perfect thing,” he says huskily, his voice already melting into his Other Voice, the one that haunts my sweetest dreams. “You unimaginably perfect thing.”

And with the ease and grace that comes with strength, he rises fluidly to his feet. “Take off my shoes.”

Relief, happiness, rightness, it all twines around the arousal, making it sharper and brighter.

I do as he asks, trying to hide my happy smile behind my curtain of hair as I tug at the laces, but he sees the smile anyway.

“Are you a happy angel?” he asks. “Serving me?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“I’m happy when you serve me. It pleases me to see you on your knees.” He resumes his idle caresses of my hair as I carefully lever one shoe off and start on the other. After I finish with that, he bids me to stand up and he starts undressing me, his fingers sliding between fabric and skin and lingering there before he peels the clothes from my body, his eyes hot on every new inch exposed. He strips me like you’d strip old wallpaper or faded carpet to get to the antique house underneath, utilitarian and anticipatory and disdainful and reverent all at the same time. And soon I’m completely naked, shivering in the cold room.

His fingers brush against my nipples and I squeak, my body starving for real stimulation.

He gives a chuckle. “Eager, are we?”

I don’t dare answer. Every time I play this game with Ash, it feels like the first time, like I’m peeling back a new layer of myself with every humiliation I endure, revealing a woman pink-skinned and raw and glowing underneath.

“Hands on the footboard of the bed. Legs spread.”

I obey, swallowing. I know what’s coming next, and sure enough I feel a large hand between my shoulder blades. It runs a gentle, almost exploratory, path down my spine, and then rubs circles on my ass and flanks.

“Breathe, angel.”

Crack.

The first one is never that bad. No, the first one is fun in a way, like being scared at a haunted house or jumping into a cold pool on a hot day. Startling, bracing, sending sensation sparking down your legs.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

“Breathe,” my master repeats.

I breathe in.

Crack, crack, crack.

I breathe out.

“Again.”

I breathe again.

Ash deliberately disrupts the rhythm, making sure I relax before he strikes, or that he strikes several times in quick succession so that my body has no choice but to yield to his dominance. Pain shimmers behind my sternum like a living entity, pulling at my lungs and stomach, and my hands shake as they try to grip the footboard. My whole body shakes, and there’s heat glowing in my eyes. I’ll be crying soon. Very soon.

My feet scrabble at the floor as Ash continues his assault, a leg involuntarily kicking up and trying to cover my ass with my foot. Ash pushes it back down with a noise that can only be described as evil delight, and spanks me all the harder for my resistance. Crack goes his hand, and there’s the heavy panting of his breath, and the pain in my chest like a familiar houseguest, rifling through my feelings like a pantry, tossing out fear and anger and humiliation and leaving behind a deep mindlessness that feels almost like bliss. There’s only the pain and Ash, and everything else shrinks to a pinpoint and vanishes.

Crack, crack, crack.

And then Ash is folding his body over top of mine, his jeans scratching painfully at my raw ass, his thick cock hard as steel against my flesh. He fists my hair and yanks my head back so he can kiss my cheeks.

No…so he can kiss the tears on my cheeks. The visible and undeniable proof of my submission.

In a wrenching instant, his body is gone over mine, and I actually moan a little at the loss. Only to moan again as I feel his mouth somewhere other than my cheek, somewhere much, much better.

It starts with a kiss on my pussy, an almost chaste one, if such a thing can exist. Then it blossoms into wet, warm caresses, his tongue tracing up from my clit to my entrance, firm on one stroke, flat and wide on the next. The pain where I was spanked flares around the hot point of his mouth like the corona of a sun, like the halo around a saint, the golden thing that highlights the beauty within its circle.

He rubs my back as he tongues me, pets my thighs as if I were a horse that needed gentling, and God help me, I love it. I buck into his touch, practically purring as he runs his warm hands over my abused flesh, and occasionally I hear him chuckle to himself as I get especially eager. The pain subsides, but the bliss stays, and all that nibbling and licking and sucking is stirring a twisting pressure in the cradle of my pelvis. I’m going to come soon, the delicious kind of orgasm that can only happen after pain and pain-triggered endorphins, but then something unexpected happens. Ash’s hands come to rest on my ass, and slowly, ever so slowly, they spread my cheeks apart so that I have no secrets from him. I’m completely exposed.

The twisting pressure freezes mid-twist, discomfort and embarrassment managing to gouge their way past the bliss.

“Ash, I’ve never—”

He silences me with one lick. One brush of his tongue against my darkest secret. The sensation is like nothing I’ve ever felt, too shallow, too slick, too dirty, too everything, and I squirm frantically away from him. A hundred what ifs run through my mind, only to be chased away by a fingertip and Ash’s stern voice.

“This is mine, little princess. My hole. Yes?”

The fingertip is probing. Pushing. Gradually and almost lazily breaching my most elemental barrier.

His other hand comes up to slap my ass, right on top of the spots still raw from the spanking. My leg kicks up and he impatiently pushes it back down. “I asked you a question. Is this mine?”

Oh, the invasion. How small it must look and yet how big it feels. “Yes, Sir,” I answer, my voice cracking on the last word.

“That’s right,” he says arrogantly. “This one and this one” —a finger enters my pussy — “and your mouth. Every hole belongs me, doesn’t it?”

“Y-yes, Sir.”

The finger finally tunnels past the first ring of muscle, sinking up to a knuckle. I sputter and pant and kick my legs, and all I get for my pains are more spanks.

“And this ass—this is mine to bite or to spank. And the hole there, that’s mine to lick. Mine to play with. Mine to fuck. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” I gasp.

“Mine to show off, mine to display. I could order you to display yourself in the middle of the Oval Office, to pull down whatever pretty pencil skirt you’re wearing and have you bend over for inspection, like a prize animal at a show. Would you like that?”

The thought is so degrading, so awful, that of course it triggers a wave of submissive lust.

“You don’t have to answer, Greer. Your pussy just answered for me.”

I press my face into the bed, humiliated, shaking, on the precipice of orgasm. The finger leaves, replaced by his tongue again, but this time he doesn’t stop at licking. This time he pushes the tip of his tongue into the pleated rosebud, sending a frisson of filthy electricity straight to my clit.

The pleasure is undeniable and immediate, but so is the shame, the reflexive resistance. My hands fly back instinctively to push him away, my legs trying to close, and that earns me an angry growl. Ash wrestles my wrists away from myself and kicks my legs back open with a grunt.

“I could fuck you like this,” he hisses. “Holding you down. Is that what you want?”

My answering moan fills the room.

His arm wraps around my waist like an iron bar and then I’m lifted bodily from my feet and tossed onto the bed, as if I weighed nothing more than a sack of flour. “On your stomach. Show me your face.”

Moving my limbs takes a strange kind of effort, as if the leashed-up orgasm inside my body is weighing me down, but I manage, and there’s a moment of unfiltered tenderness when I feel Ash’s fingers gently brushing my hair away from my forehead, sweeping it over my head so it won’t tickle my face. He drops a light kiss onto my jaw. “Doing okay?”

“I’d do better if you’d fuck me.”

He laughs. “I love it when you get desperate. What’s your safe word?”

“Maxen.”

“Keep it close at hand. We’re going to try something new.”

He straightens up, and from my vantage, I see his strong and certain fingers as they work his belt open and slide it from the loops. I swallow as I watch him double up the belt and run it through his palm.

My mouth parts, protests rise to my lips. I’ve never been belted before, never had anything more intense than a hairbrush, but before I can run through my options, before I can rationalize this or ask him to stop or to pause, he lets fly with the belt and a leather stripe of pain hits my upper thighs.

It’s agony. It’s unbearable. The breath leaves my body as I arch backwards and my mind goes blank. There’s nothing but pain, nothing but the sparking static of it, and when I finally draw in a breath, it comes in and back out as a choked sob.

Maxen.

For the first time ever, my safe word is there on my tongue, ready to be spoken.

“Too much?” He asks right as a shot of endorphins hits my bloodstream, right as a pulse of swollen arousal hits my cunt.

“Don’t you dare stop.”

The belt flies again, slicing through the air with a whistle, higher up on my thighs this time, on the crease between my legs and ass. A real sob comes out, an actual cry, and I’m writhing and burying my face in the bed.

“Angel.”

I sense rather than see his arm pull back, and I know—I just know—this one will be on my ass, on the skin already inflamed and welted from his hand. The moment hangs in the air like the belt, and as I draw in another shuddering breath, I realize this is my chance to say his name. My chance to end this.

But I won’t.

I press my lips closed, sucking in my crying breaths through my nose. The belt falls, and my lips open right back up in a scream.

All across my ass there’s fire, not just where the belt’s hit, but everywhere, as if the skin caught fire under the leather and the flames spread instantly everywhere else. My scream dies into a sobbing groan, the blanket underneath my face is wet with tears, and I’m rubbing my face against it without even knowing it.

I hear the belt drop to the floor. “Oh, Greer.”

His voice is as broken as I feel, as flayed raw.

“My little princess,” he murmurs, crawling onto the bed over me. His hand slides between my stomach and the bed, and then I’m turned over as gently as child so that I’m on my back. “Such a good angel. Such a sweet, obedient princess.”

Through my tears, I see his eyes like green fires in the dark.

“Ash,” I choke out.

His head bows and then his mouth is at my cunt, eating me like a man possessed. Wildly, with noises coming from his throat as he tastes me, with the passion of worship. And somehow, magically, my orgasm is fusing itself back together, ten thousand times stronger for all the pain, as if all the nerve endings singing along my skin had now all joined together to sing in pleasure.

My groans turn into moans, moans into whimpers, and I hear Ash say with his lips against my clit, “Come on, angel, take it. Take it from me.”

He slides a finger into my vagina, and then another, and then a third probes at the tight hole underneath, and I explode. Into a tornado of misery and shame and pain and sensation, into a storm of bliss and pleasure so raw and fierce that my womb cramps hard as it contracts. I think I’m screaming again, and I’m definitely crying as this climax tears through me, punches a hole straight through me like a hammer through sheetrock. I can barely see, barely hear, it’s just feel, feel, feel, as I come with my skin on fire and my muscles sizzling.

I’m not finished orgasming when Ash moves up over me, one hand working his fly open. He doesn’t bother to undress all the way, just yanks his pants down far enough to expose his cock and then finds my still-clenching hole and presses his tip to it. I’m so wet that he’s able to notch himself at my entrance with no effort, and then he pushes into my swollen pussy with a grunt that curls my toes.

Or maybe it’s his giant cock curling my toes. It’s hard to tell.

He pulls back and shoves back in—it’s a tight, tight fit—and I whimper at the stretching feeling as he buries himself to the hilt.

“Fuck, I’m so hard for this,” he pants. “Feel how hard I am. Feel how big.”

I can, I do. I’m impaled on his bigness, speared on eight throbbing inches, and I might as well be a virgin again. It’s the same kind of perfect discomfort that I felt with Embry, a pain that seems to scratch a deep, deep itch on the inside of my body, the kind of pain that draws me towards pleasure almost against my will because it’s so very, very right.

He’s still wearing his sweater over a button-down shirt, and the fabric brushes against my erect nipples every time he thrusts and moves over me, reminding me that I’m naked and he’s not, I’m vulnerable and he’s in control. Sex with Embry was wildfire, uncontrollable lust, two storm fronts colliding in an eruption of electricity and noise. But sex with Ash is different—harder and deeper, more intense and more controlled and more spiritual and more everything else possible, and it feels as though he’s everywhere inside of me, all over me. His hard body covers mine, his marks burn my ass and thighs, his mouth is hot and biting at my neck and jaw and breasts as his cock possesses me from the inside out.

“Am I bigger than him?” he rasps in my ear. “Do I make you come harder than him?”

I forget for a minute that he doesn’t know it’s Embry, that to my Sir, him is just a mysterious male-shaped silhouette from my past, and I’m nodding. I’m gasping yes. Yes, yes, it’s all true, because in this moment, there’s no man bigger or harder than Ash. There is no man other than Ash, and he makes me feel like there’s no other woman, as if his entire life and purpose is to hold me down and fuck the life out of me.

He keeps talking; he tells me how beautiful I am, how precious, how good I make him feel. How tight my sweet cunt is, how it squeezes him, how much he likes making my tits move with each shove of his hips, how he’s going to fill me up so full that I’m dripping for days.

I reach for him, for his sweater or for his hips, but my hands are wrestled back down over my head, and Ash pins both forearms there with one hand. The submissive pose unleashes something dark in him, some animal intent on ravaging and marking, a monster that saws its perfect dick in and out of me so fast and so hard that a stream of words escape my mouth, nonsense words mixed with uncontrolled noises and grunts, yes and no and oh oh oh and please more please Sir please please.

I’m being hammered, I’m completely at his mercy, and he’s so big, it hurts, it hurts. Even I can’t tell if the whine from my throat is pain or pleasure, and then he changes the angle of his hips, and the entire world flips over. Suddenly, like before but even stronger, the pain joins forces with the building orgasm, rendering me senseless. Speechless. I’m nothing, I’m everything, I’m the light and the dark and the air and the void. Strong force, weak force, gravity, electricity, magnetism are all pinning me underneath this violent, tragic soldier, and as he fucks the literal breath out of me, and as I see stars and as I squirm in abject pleasure, I know everything is true. String theory, magic, multiple lives, miracles, God, parallel universes, it’s all true and it’s all real and it’s all happening inside me right now at this very instant as my climax detonates like a dying star inside me.

It’s not a gratification, this orgasm, it’s gospel. It’s good news. It’s revelation and apocalypse. It’s joy and judgment and the answer to every question I’ve ever asked. Everything in my life has led to this one moment, this one exchange, this one feeling of my body shuddering uncontrollably under Ash’s.

“Take it,” he’s saying into my ear. “Take your pleasure. Take me.” And I do, I do, I take my pleasure and I take him and I take me, and then like the most poignant sacrifice, like the most tender death, Ash pulls me close, and his body rigid and frozen over mine, erupts inside me. He’s got one hand cradling my head and the other holding my hip down, and his mouth hovers above my mouth, so every soft grunt and needy pant is warm against my lips. I feel every throb and every pulse, every hot spurt of him, and there’s so much that he’s spilling out of me.

He keeps himself buried to the hilt until he’s finished, and then he kneels up without pulling out, stroking himself slowly with his tip still inside me, as if to milk himself of every last drop.

The act is so biological, so possessive, that my cunt gives an involuntary clench, ready to come again. He chuckles at that and pulls out, leaning down to give my pussy a reverent kiss before he climbs off the bed.

And then…and then I’m not sure what happens. He turns on a light and somehow he ends up undressed and in bed cuddling me and crooning to me, stroking my arms and hair and back, and murmuring words of gratitude and pleasure—he’s pleased with me, I think somewhere deep inside myself and the thought makes me happy. But I can’t speak. My hearing feels fuzzy, like I’m hearing everything through earmuffs, and my thoughts are nonexistent. Like I’m floating, blank and warm, but I’m also shaking, trembling like a leaf in the wind.

Bit by bit, layer by layer, I swim up towards consciousness.

“You,” I murmur to Ash. It was supposed to be I love you, but the words are so fleeting and so hard to form.

“You,” he says back to me in a voice so filled with love that I ache. He wraps his body more securely around me and pulls the blankets tighter around us. My shivering slowly, slowly stills, but I become aware of the wet pillow underneath me, my cheeks cool against the air, and realize I’ve been crying.

Ash holds me as my tears leak out, like a slow, dripping rain. “I love you,” he whispers over and over again. “I love you.”

Eventually, after a few minutes or a few hours, my tears stop and I feel warm again. I roll over so that I can nestle into him, and he lets out a satisfied growl, as if it made him happy that I sought his comfort. “My princess,” he says, holding me tight. My world is this. My world is him. “My angel.”

I nuzzle my face against his chest. “Will you hold me for a while longer?”

He kisses my hair. “As long as you want. I could hold you for the rest of my life.” He lets out a small laugh. “And anyway, I’ve never seen someone drop that far and that hard into subspace before. I’m not letting you out of my sight until you’ve got both feet back here on planet Earth.”

Subspace. It’s happened a few times after Ash and I have scened together at the Residence, but never like this. Never like a waking blackout, never to where I cry and shiver without feeling either.

But as my mind returns to my body, it also returns to my worries from earlier.

Namely to Embry.

I should have told Ash as he was proposing, before we had sex. I should have told him six weeks ago. I should have told him that day at St. Thomas Beckett. I should tell him now.

“Ash,” I say, keeping my face away from his. “There’s something I need to say.”

“Yes?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

I have no choice. It has to be done. “You know the man who I slept with before? My first time?”

He stiffens around me. “Yes.”

“It was Embry.”

The world seems to freeze, time ticking on as everything waits in bated stillness. And then Ash says in a wooden voice, “I know.”

He knows.

He knows.

Shit.

Fuck.

He kicks the blankets off his legs to climb out of bed. I feel his warmth pull away from me, watch his naked form as he pads into the ensuite bathroom and flips on the light. I hear the sink running.

Panic squeezes my throat like a sadist, choking off enough air that I feel dizzy, but keeping me conscious enough to witness the almost-certain end of my relationship with Ash.

Ash comes back out of the bathroom with a glass of cold water, which he hands to me. “Drink.”

Even though we just had the raunchiest, roughest sex imaginable, I still cover my body with a sheet as I sit up. I drink and he sits on the side of the bed, watching me with his President eyes, the ones that miss nothing. His war eyes. I can’t read his face.

I finish drinking and move to set the glass down on the end table, but he reaches forward and takes it from me. For a moment, he looks at the imprint of my lips on the rim of the glass, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

“You know?” I finally ask, my fingers knotting in the sheet.

“I guessed,” Ash admits softly.

“How did you guess?”

He pulls his lower lip into his mouth and then releases it. “Let’s start at the beginning and work our way up to that. When?”

“Chicago,” I answer.

He nods, as if this is confirmation for something he already knows. Maybe it is. Maybe Embry did tell Ash about us, and I just didn’t know about it. He rotates the glass in his hands a few times and then sets it down on the table himself.

“It didn’t mean anything,” I start, but he holds up a hand.

“Don’t lie to me. Please.”

His tone is guarded, but there’s something starkly exposed in his words. As if he wants to beg me for something, but doesn’t know how or what or even why he needs it.

I take a deep breath and start over. “It meant something to me. How could it not? It was my first time, and it was so good—” I stop and pivot, realizing Ash probably doesn’t want to hear about how good that night was. “—But Ash, he never even called me after. I left my number and everything, and I heard nothing for years, not until you sent him to me. It must have been the worst lay of his life,” I try to joke.

The joke falls flat because Ash is already frowning. “It wasn’t.”

“Well, that’s kind of you to say—”

“I’m not being kind,” he snaps. “I know it for a fact.”

I stare at him. “How?”

He runs a hand through his raven hair. “Embry called me that morning, wanted to grab coffee. He wanted to tell me all about this…angel…he had in his bed. He thought he was in love, even though it’d only been one night. If I had known that his angel was my angel, that it was you, I would have thrown myself in front of a train.”

“But you didn’t know?”

A bitter smile. “Before he could tell me about his night, I told him about mine. About how this girl I’d met four years before had shown back up in my life. About how I’d been too much of a coward to tell her about Jenny right away, and then she’d discovered it in the worst way possible. I told Embry that this was Email Girl, that those letters I’d kept in my breast pocket all those years in Carpathia had been from her, the letters he caught me reading time and time again. I told him this girl’s name.”

My mind spins. Embry had known my name too. Which meant…

“And after I finished, and tried to be a good friend and ask him about his angel, he changed the subject. And he never mentioned that night again.”

“That’s why he didn’t call, didn’t try to find me…” I trail off.

“How selfless of him.”

“Back to you guessing. How? We’ve never…we haven’t done anything other than what you wanted us to do that night of the State Dinner. We haven’t kissed, haven’t even hugged.”

“I know,” Ash says. He crawls forward on the bed and slowly pulls the sheet down, baring my breasts to him. My nipples harden the minute they touch the cool air. “It was that night that helped me see it. He was obviously attracted to you, but…well, there was something else there. Something deeper. And after that, you two were so careful around each other. Never getting too close, never talking too long. Never alone. People who aren’t in love with people they aren’t supposed to be in love with don’t do that, Greer.”

“I’m not in love with Embry.”

“I told you not to lie to me.” The sheet is all the way pulled down now, and then his hand slides up my sternum to circle my throat. He doesn’t squeeze or press, but he makes a collar of his fingers, a collar not of leather or metal, but flesh and blood. You’re mine, the hand says. You’re mine and not his.

I’m fiddling with my new engagement ring without realizing it, and then his other hand comes down on top of both of mine. “Stop,” he says. “You’re not giving that back to me. You’re not taking it off. As long as you still want it, I will be your husband.”

“Yes, Sir,” I say, relief pricking at my eyelids. He doesn’t hate me now, he doesn’t want to end our relationship. If nothing else, I can live with that.

His hand presses at my throat, forcing me to lie back.

“How did he do it?”

“Do what?”

“How did he fuck you that night?” Ash is kneeling over me right now, his cock rock-hard and angry looking. “Did he flip you over so he could see your ass? Take you up against the wall because he couldn’t wait?”

Maybe I shouldn’t answer that. But I do. “It was…like this. Him on top.”

Quick as lightning, Ash is stretching his body over mine, his cock pressed against my clit. I can’t stop the moan that I let out.

“What else?” Ash asks. His voice is rough. Rougher than I’ve ever heard it. And his eyes are so dark, no longer green but black.

“He, um, he sucked on my breasts. Bit them. Like he was nursing, but hard and kind of desperate.”

Ash lowers his head and nips at the tender curves of my breasts, sucking and teething and kissing, and within half a minute, I’m panting.

“What else?” Ash growls against my tits. “What else did he do?”

“I didn’t tell him I was a virgin until he was trying to get inside. And when I did tell him, he got…mean. Like it turned him on too much for him to control himself.”

In the here and now, there’s a wide cock pushing against my folds and then Ash stabs inside so hard I gasp. “Mean like this?” he asks, punctuating his question with several savage thrusts.

“Yes,” I cry out. “There was blood. He liked it. I liked it.”

Ash stills, his cock quivering. “There was blood?”

“A lot. It hurt, and Embry liked looking at it on his dick, seeing it smeared on his hips and my thighs. I came so hard.”

“I bet you did,” Ash says, jabbing in again. “It should have been me, my cock. That blood and pain should have been mine, but I was such a fucking idiot.”

“You have me now, Mr. President.”

“Yes, I do,” he growls, rolling his hips and grinding against my clit. I make a low keening noise. “How did he come—on you? Inside you?”

“Inside me,” I say, my voice breathless. “He wrapped his arms behind me and put his weight on me. Oh God, yes, just like that.”

Ash feels entirely different than Embry—wider, stronger, more deliberate—but in this position, I can so easily summon the memory of Embry’s body over mine. I can so easily pretend.

“I want to feel what he felt,” Ash tells me, his lips against the place where my jaw and my neck meet. “I want to pretend I’m him. Are you pretending, angel?”

“I…I don’t know.” And I don’t. One moment it’s Ash over me, the next moment it’s Embry, and the moment after that it’s both of them, and I’m the center of a hurricane of hands and mouths and eager flesh.

“I believe you,” he says, his hips rolling so perfectly in and out. This third orgasm is like a key turning in a lock; there’s a sudden shift and sudden everything in me is open and ready, and the climax rushes in, vicious and cruel, each pull so painful and bright that I can’t catch my breath. It’s my orgasm that sends Ash over the edge, and he gives a rough grunt and releases, this time fucking his way through the orgasm with those slow rolls, his entire body shaking.

And then he moves off me, disappearing into the bathroom and returning with a washcloth. He cleans me gently, meeting my eyes.

“Are you okay?”

I nod. “Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

He returns the washcloth, and to my great relief, joins me back in bed, wrapping me in his arms. “Are you mad at me? At Embry?” I ask.

He lets out a long breath, his chin resting against my head. “No.”

“But you’re feeling something.”

“Oh yes,” he answers. “Definitely that.”

“Jealousy? Because you don’t need to be jealous, I swear to you.”

“I know you believe that.” A hand sweeps up my back and strokes along my spine. “Jealousy is such a limiting word, isn’t it? Because there’s so many kinds of jealousy. There’s feeling possessive, which I do of you…but then again, I also feel possessive of Embry. There’s insecurity—that maybe Embry was able to give you something I can’t, and that you’re able to give Embry something that will change his relationship with me. And then there’s this strange kind of desire—thinking about you with him makes me hard. I don’t know why. It just does. And I know desire doesn’t always make logical sense, that it’s inherently politically incorrect, that sometimes we crave depraved things.”

The hand moves to my hair, loving and lazy and indulgent. “But even knowing all that, I couldn’t have predicted how I would actually feel knowing that he fucked you. Desperate and hard and a little angry and scared and…excited. Jealousy on its own can’t hold all of those feelings, but I don’t know what other word can. So I suppose it’s good enough for now to say that yes, I am jealous. Of both of you.”

I know how that feels, don’t I? To be jealous of Embry and Ash at the same time, jealous of them having each other in a way that I’ll never have, with their war history and fraternity and close working relationship. It’s a circle I’ll never be inside of, and it stings, stings, stings.

“Go to sleep, Greer. We have all the time in the world to think about this.”

I want to protest, want to resist him, because there’s no way I can fall asleep after our first time having sex, after he learned about Embry and me. No way at all, no matter how languid my limbs are, how thoroughly and utterly wrecked my body is, no matter how warm Ash’s arms are and how steady and reassuring his breathing is…

I wake up alone, the bed cool next to me. Ash must have gotten up to work—is it morning already? I blink at the clock on the nightstand for a moment, waiting for the numbers to make sense. 11:13 p.m. I’ve been asleep for three or four hours, and my stomach reminds me that I didn’t eat before that. I sit up and stretch, and then hunt through the room for pajamas and slippers.

I won’t bother Ash if he’s working, but I plan on bothering the shit out of some crackers and cheese. I open the door and head out towards the living area, seeing the twinkly-gold light of the Christmas tree spilling out around the corner. There’s nothing better than that light on cold winter nights. Cozy and quiet and joyful.

I turn the corner with a smile on my face and then freeze.

Ash is standing underneath the mistletoe.

Kissing someone.

My blood pounds in my ears and my throat is immediately tight with pain, but I can’t look away and I can’t interrupt. I’m as useless as a pillar of salt, doomed by my inability to look away.

Ash is wearing a thin T-shirt and low-slung pajama bottoms that highlight his flat stomach and narrow hips. His hair is tousled and even from here, with only the light of the Christmas tree, I can see the stubbled outline of a day-old beard. His hand is fisted tight in the shirt of the person he’s kissing, yanking that person close and holding them there.

And when they turn I see that the person is—inevitably, fatefully, tragically, wonderfully—Embry. Still in his sweater and jeans, barefoot and rumpled, with his hands underneath Ash’s shirt and digging into the small of his back.

The kiss is so slow and lingering and deep. They meet and explore, and then their lips pull apart and there’s fluttering eyelashes and long breaths, and then they’re kissing again. There’s both a familiarity and a hesitation there, as if they’re relearning something they used to know. Ash will come in, his lips a breath away from Embry’s, his body and face painted with longing, and then Embry will press forward, all passion and no thought, kissing hungrily until Ash slows him down, his hand going flat on Embry’s chest and his mouth pulling back just the tiniest bit until Embry cools off. And then Ash moves in again, these soft, gorgeous noises coming from his throat.

After a few minutes of this, Embry’s hand finds the waistband of Ash’s pajama pants and moves down. I can’t hear what he says to Ash, but I hear a small groan and I can guess.

And with that groan, my brain sputters back to life like a neglected engine, and I wish I could turn it back off because there’s too many thoughts, too many questions, all contradicting each other, all fighting each other.

I’m aroused.

I’m angry.

I’m curious.

I’m betrayed.

I don’t ever want this moment to stop.

And seeing this now, in this way, I realize I already knew. Not consciously maybe, but the knowledge was there like a shipwreck waiting for the sands to shift, waiting for me to finally turn my head and see what part of me has suspected from the beginning.

Suddenly what Ash said back in the bedroom makes sense. Jealousy is a word with too many meanings. It’s a TARDIS of a word, bigger on the inside, a small, mean thing on the surface, but a complicated dance of emotions and negotiations within. I’m suffering with every single meaning of the word jealous.

I’m relieved that now I’m not the only one in this engagement that kept an important secret. I’m terrified of what happens next. Because really. What could possibly happen next? This was supposed to be my fairy tale, with me as the princess and Ash as the prince, but there’s a third person here, a person we both want and who wants both of us.

None of the fairy tales I read as a girl had three people.

My thoughts are interrupted by another groan from Ash, but he’s stepping back and adjusting himself inside his pants. Both men have bee-stung lips and wide, dark eyes, both men seem a little thunderstruck with each other, awed and incredulous and as yet unsatisfied.

“Merry Christmas, Embry,” Ash says in a roughened voice.

Embry’s voice is husky too. “Merry Christmas.”

Ash turns away, his thumb at his forehead and then touching his lips, and Embry stands stock still under the mistletoe as Ash leaves and walks toward the office. He stands there for several long minutes, his eyes on the hallway where Ash disappeared, and then he finally turns around and goes to his bedroom, his hands scrubbing through his hair.

And me, I’m left alone the cold hallway. Confused, wanting, hurt.

Jealous.

In love.