American Queen

by Sierra Simone

  “Jesus, Greer.”

  The stark arousal in Embry’s voice is ragged and hungry, and I’m trying to fight off my own hungry reaction. But I can’t—not entirely. I make sure to press against Embry as the dance brings us closer, confirming what I suspected: he’s rock hard.

  He gives a soft, surprised grunt as my body grazes his erection, and his eyes are hazy once more. “You guys do that to me and it’s so confusing.”

  “Do what?”

  “You—you mix up my feelings for you and Ash. I get hard thinking about him, and then you touch me. Or I’m aching at Camp David listening to you scream for him, but then he’s the one who comes out and kisses me. I can’t keep track of what or whom I want any more. I just…want.”

  I grip his tuxedo lapel, both excited and a little frightened that he’s just articulated something I haven’t been able to articulate for myself. “That’s what’s happened to me.”

  Those aristocratic eyebrows rise in happy astonishment. “Really?”

  “Really. From the beginning, even, I couldn’t separate wanting you from wanting him. When we had sex in Chicago…well, part of the reason I did it was because I was hurting so much about Ash.”

  “Me too,” he confesses.

  I look at him in confusion, and then I remember that night on the Ferris wheel, his broken voice.

  They aren’t my someone. No matter how much I plead, no matter how much—how much I give of myself.

  “Do you think he knows?” I ask. “That we both love him so much that we ended up falling in love with each other?”

  Embry sighs. “Would it change anything if he did?”

  We move again for the dance, my hip brushing past his penis again—accidentally this time—and he hisses.

  “Sorry,” I say, knowing I don’t sound sorry at all.

  He shakes his head. “I’m just as bad as Melwas. Hard for you at a fucking diplomatic event.”

  “Yes, you’re both incurably prurient, but there’s a key difference.”

  “What’s that?”

  I lean up to his ear, using his lapel to pull myself onto the toes of my high heels. “I like it when you’re incurably prurient.”

  He grins down at me, the guilt and torment vanishing for a moment and leaving behind the rich playboy who’d charmed me on a Chicago sidewalk.

  But as we finish our dance, as we find new partners to dance with and the night grinds unbearably on, as my own betrayals and post-confessing-forbidden-love-shock wears off, something heartbreaking occurs to me.

  Ash sent Embry to get me. Ash sent Embry to get me even though he and Embry had been fucking right up until then. How cruel must that have felt to Embry? Like he was good enough to secretly fuck, at least until the right fuckable woman came along, but then he wasn’t wanted anymore? I haven’t ever thought of Ash as homophobic, as brutal in a way that went past the bedroom, but now I feel a righteous sense of anger on Embry’s behalf. All those years together, and Ash just tossed him aside for Jenny. And then picked him back up and tossed him right back aside for me.

  No wonder Embry is tormented. Ash has been savage to him. Unforgivably dismissive.

  And as I perform all the duties I came to do—charming and chatting and almost absentmindedly gathering tidbits and gossip for Ash—I slowly decide to confront him. About all those carefully worded not-lies, about his cruelty to Embry, about the three of us.

  About what the fuck happens next.

  25

  Ash hasn’t returned to the dinner by the time it comes to a close, so Embry and I are the ones to make the formal goodbyes and excuses for Ash’s absence, even though we have no idea where the hell he is. In my current mood, that makes me angrier than ever, so angry that I barely nod at Luc when he informs me that both Abilene and the President are back at the hotel and I’ll be riding there alone.

  And when I get to the hotel, Luc says, “The President has requested that you grab your things from your room and join him in his.”

  I stop right there in the lobby and glare up at the giant Quebecois man. “And what if I don’t want to sleep in his room tonight?”

  Luc looks uncomfortable. “I understand that he and Merlin are concerned that you’ll be a target for Melwas. They both feel better with you in the President’s room.”

  “And my cousin? If Melwas decides to attack my room—which won’t happen—he’d still find her. It’s okay to let her stay there but not me?”

  The agent looks like he really, really doesn’t want to have this conversation, and I sigh, taking pity on him. It’s not his fault that Ash is a controlling asshole and I mean to confront him about it. “Fine, fine. Let’s get my things.”

  When I get to my room and open the door, Abilene jolts off the bed, as if she’s been electrocuted. “Greer!” she says, her voice far too bright. “You’re back.”

  I give her a strange look, and she gives me a toothy smile—the one she learned from watching the Duchess of Cambridge tour the Commonwealth in heels with a baby on her hip.

  “Ash wants me to change rooms,” I say, a little peevishly, and start tossing things into my suitcase.

  She shifts on the bed. “Did he, uh, did he say why?”

  “Something about security and Melwas, but the reason doesn’t matter because it’s rude to just order people around like their feelings don’t matter.” I seal my mouth closed, realizing I’m perilously close to yelling or crying, and then the whole mess about Embry and Ash will spill out, the whole sordid fucking triangle.

  “Oh, just the security then? That’s not a big deal.”

  She still sounds strange, and part of me thinks I should ask her what’s wrong, that I should sit down on the bed and put my arms around her shoulders and coax her into opening up. It wouldn’t take long because Abi always wants to open up. All she needs is the faintest invitation inside your attention and then she’s wailing in your lap, like some sort of emotional vampire.

  But I’m my own emotional vampire right now, and I have to go drain Ash’s blood before I burn everything down. I zip my suitcase closed. “I’ll see you in the morning, Abi.”

  “Right,” she says faintly. “In the morning.”

  Luc holds the door for me as I give her a little wave and wheel the suitcase back out into the hallway, and then he takes it from me without asking, lifting it as effortlessly as I’d lift a bag of bread. “This way,” he says, and we walk down the hallway to the elevator to take it one floor up to Ash’s room.

  After walking past legions of Secret Service agents, Luc swipes the hotel keycard to access the presidential suite, and then we’re inside, Luc trundling off with my suitcase and me walking straight for the large armchair where Ash is sitting. I’m still in my gown, and it flutters and glints in the low golden light of the room as I stride towards him.

  I’m ready to draw blood, but then I see how tired he looks. His jacket is off and thrown carelessly over the bed, his bow tie unknotted. He’s balancing a tumbler of scotch on his knee, and something about the color in his cheeks tells me that it isn’t his first. And the weariness in his face is so profound, so deeply etched, that I can’t bear to add to it, which irritates me. How dare he be tired when I need him to be strong? When I need him calm enough to weather the storm I want to scream into existence?

  He looks up at me, green eyes nearly liquid with exhaustion. “You’re angry about something,” he comments.

  I don’t ask how he guessed, because even if it weren’t written all over my face, he’d still know. “Yes.”

  “We have a few things to talk about then.” He takes a sip of his scotch and then waves over toward the bar. “You want something to drink?”

  “Actually, I think I do.”

  As Luc leaves and we’re left alone, I make myself a small glass of single malt, walk over to the chair across from him and sit down. I don’t choose to sit at his feet, a choice he notices but doesn’t remark on.

  A choice that hurts me more than it hurts him, I think.
>
  But still, stubborn and cranky, I stay perched on the chair, refusing to give him anything until he gives me some answers.

  “I think you should go first,” he says, twirling the glass on his knee. Even slumped back in his chair, he looks powerful. Even exhausted he looks in charge. It’s both marvelous and terribly unfair.

  “Fine,” I say. “Okay.”

  And then realize I have no segue into the things we need to talk about, no warm-up. I just have to dive in. I take a deep breath and look Ash square in the face.

  “Embry told me he loves me tonight.”

  “I believe I told you he loves you tonight as well, only you didn’t believe me.”

  “I told him I love him too.”

  Ash takes this like a blow he knew was coming but still wasn’t entirely prepared for. A look of hurt—real, awful hurt—crosses his face, and he lifts his glass to his lips and drains the entire thing in a few practiced swallows. When he’s finished, he sets the glass on the table next to him and looks at me with eyes the color of pain. “So you did,” he says softly. “And then what did he say?”

  “Not much of anything, because right after I told him that, I told him that I saw you two kissing on Christmas Eve.”

  The blood drains from Ash’s face. This he hadn’t expected, he hadn’t seen coming. “Oh my God, Greer,” he says in a horrified voice, “why didn’t you say anything?”

  I nearly explode. I shoot straight to my feet, towering over him in my stupidly tall heels. “Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I say anything about my fiancé cheating on me? Why didn’t I say anything about the only men I’ve ever been with, the two men I love, being in a secret relationship for ten fucking years?”

  I don’t know what I expected Ash to do, but it wasn’t to grab my hips and yank me down onto his lap. His arm is an iron bar around my back, his hand implacable and heedless of my carefully styled up-do as he fists my hair to make sure I’m looking at his face.

  But his face isn’t angry. It’s hurt and regretful and tired, but not at all angry, and for some reason, this unlocks my own hurt and tiredness, my own regret. My anger ebbs away like the tide, leaving behind a dirty residue of confused betrayal.

  “When I saw you two under the mistletoe,” I whisper, “I thought my heart was literally breaking. Like my aorta had twisted and my valves had clamped shut. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.”

  “You have every reason to hate me,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “Every reason to be angry. I have asked you to trust me, and then I betrayed that trust in the worst way possible. I’m sorry, Greer. I’m so very, very sorry. If this…changes…things between us, I completely understand. I’m at fault, and I deserve whatever you want to do to me.”

  Normally, I’d applaud a man who apologized without excuses, without desperate defenses of himself, but right now? Tonight? I want to know what Ash was thinking that night under the mistletoe, what he was feeling. I want him to fight and rage, argue and plead, so that my own tangle of emotions won’t feel so alone and outsized compared to this graceful defeat.

  “No,” I say. “I want more. You’re not supposed to give up. You’re not supposed to submit. You’re supposed to fight for me! You’re supposed to explain all this away and make me feel better!”

  His eyes search mine. “But I can’t explain it away. I did kiss Embry. I kissed him, and I enjoyed it. I kissed him because I’d just learned about you two sleeping together, and when I saw him that night, all rumpled and lost-looking under the mistletoe, I just…” He stops and shakes his head. “I’m not going to try to justify what I’ve done. It was wrong to kiss him that night, and it was wrong not to tell you. I’m so, so sorry.”

  I want to hit him. I want to scream at him. I settle for glaring. “Stop saying you’re sorry. I don’t want your sorry.”

  His eyebrows pull together. “Then what do you want?”

  “You. Him. Us. I want it all to make sense. Do you love him?”

  He blinks, the act making him look younger, more vulnerable. “Greer…”

  “I saw you that night, Ash. You weren’t kissing him like he was a friend or an old fuck, you were kissing him like you needed it. Like you’d been waiting months for it. You were trembling, and you looked at him like…like you look at me sometimes. Like you can’t decide whether you want to eat me or be eaten.”

  He’s still blinking, those eyelashes long and dark, those bottle-green eyes bright and aching behind them. “Greer, this doesn’t need to be…what good will it do—”

  “I’m not the fucking public,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “I’m not a poll, I’m not a key demographic. Stop trying to spare my feelings and just tell me.” I pause, and then add because I think Ash needs to hear it. “Embry loves you, you know. He told me that too. He told me about the first time you were together, he told me that you were together after Jenny’s death. He thinks that you don’t love him back, and why wouldn’t he? With the awful way you’ve treated him?”

  Ash freezes, his hand still fisting my hair, his arm still anchoring me down against him. “What?”

  I’m simmering again, biting off words and not caring how they land. “You know what I’m talking about. He’s good enough until you meet a woman, right? You could fuck him until you met Jenny, and then you dropped him, and then after Jenny, you were back to using him again. Until you had me. Until you sent him to fetch me for you. How do you think that makes him feel? How could you?”

  Ash’s lips part and close and then part again. “Greer, I asked Embry to marry me. Twice.”

  I was all ready to continue with my excoriation on Embry’s behalf, but Ash’s words filter their way into my consciousness and stun me. “What?” I whisper.

  “I asked him to be my husband. Twice. And do you know how many times he said no?”

  I shake my head mutely.

  “Twice,” Ash says.

  “I can’t believe you asked him to marry you…he didn’t say anything about that…”

  Ash makes a noise that could be called derisive—if it wasn’t so wounded. “No. I suppose he didn’t.”

  “When did you propose?”

  Ash loosens his grip in my hair, and unconsciously I reach back to make him tighten it again. This draws the first smile I’ve seen from him since I came in the room. But he stays on topic and answers my question.

  “The first time was in Carpathia. We’d been dating for two years. He insisted we didn’t tell anyone, and I agreed because loved him. But I thought maybe if he saw how serious I was about him, how much I wanted to be with him, he wouldn’t be so intent on having a secret relationship. I had a buddy of mine buy a ring in Rome when he went there for leave and bring it back. I planned it so just the two of us would be out in Embry’s favorite valley by that base—you could stand at the top of this ridge and see for miles. I got down on one knee while we both had guns slung over our shoulders.”

  Ash smiles at the memory, but then his smile falters. “Embry said no. It wasn’t legal then, you see, and I think—I don’t know. Maybe he was worried about our careers or maybe what his family wanted. He didn’t give me a reason. He just said no and told me we should stop seeing each other.”

  Even now, seven or eight years later, I can hear the bitter heartache in his voice.

  “Merlin introduced me to Jenny not long after, and we gradually fell in love. She wasn’t at all like Embry, she wasn’t at all like you, and maybe that felt safe to me. She wasn’t the strange girl who coaxed my darkest self to the surface, she wasn’t the man who’d faced death with me. She was…easy. Uncomplicated. She loved like normal people loved, she desired like normal people desired. With her, I was a different kind of man, a kind that didn’t have such twisted feelings inside. After I’d been wrapped up in you so long, only to have my first real relationship end like that…well, I guess I’m just trying to explain why I fell in love with Jenny when I was still in love with both of you.”

  I turn that over in my mind
for a minute. So many networks of love and heartbreak, so many deep folds and layers to a person’s heart. But it made a strange kind of sense to me, that he could love me and Embry and Jenny all at the same time. Not very many people love like Ash loves, as fiercely and fully, and maybe one person alone could never have born the brunt of him.

  “And then you proposed to him again?” I ask, trying to figure out what happened next.

  Ash lets go of my waist and rubs his forehead with his thumb. “After Jenny died. That night Morgan took me to the club and had me flog her, I left and I went straight to Embry. He gave me so much that night, more than any person should have to give another, because I unleashed it all on him. My grief, my pain, this new sister that was also his sister whom also I’d fucked…I was a tornado. And he welcomed me.”

  I pull his hand away from his forehead so I can see his eyes. My touch stirs him; he shifts in the chair and meets my stare again. “He wanted to keep us secret again. Merlin wanted it to be secret. But it was legal now and I didn’t fucking care about the election—but I did care about him. Five months ago, I asked him to marry me again. I thought for sure this time…” He trails off and gives me a watery smile. “Well. The best laid plans and all that. And then I saw you in that church a few weeks later and it felt like fate. I wanted to see you, and the moment I told Embry about it, he volunteered to help me. I thought he wanted to make amends for rejecting my ring a second time…of course, now I know better. He wanted to see you.”

  “Oh God, Ash,” I say, my chest hurting for him. This incredible man who’d been rejected twice by the person he loves.

  “Greer, I’m—I’m not telling you this so that you feel like you were in any way a second choice. You know that I love you, that I’ve been obsessed with you for years. But I just want you to know that what I had with Embry was serious to me. It was the realest thing I’d ever felt until I finally had you. I didn’t kiss him because I wanted to hurt you, I kissed him because even though he’s broken my heart twice in ten years, I still think he looks beautiful in the winter moonlight. Because sometimes I think I might literally die from wanting to feel his lips on mine.”