American King (New Camelot #3)

by Sierra Simone

  It didn’t work. And the fight went on and on, and I couldn’t stopper my ears to it, as much as I wished I could.

  “You can’t fix it,” the loudest voice said scathingly. “Just stay away—”

  “I’m not going to do that, I can’t do that—”

  “Just leave me alone!” And then the sound of glass fracturing, a musical rain that startled me more than any gunshot. What was wrong with that girl? Who broke a glass at a fucking party?

  I heard the second, quieter girl whisper something, and then there was the brisk staccato of high heels and a slammed door. Someone had left the room, or both of them, and either way, I felt a compulsion to go clean up the mess they had left. It was the right thing to do, and while I might have done so many wrong things in Carpathia that I couldn’t sleep without sweating through my sheets, I still tried to be a good man. One who did the right things…like cleaning up a broken glass at a party.

  Except when I rounded the corner into the room, I saw that someone else had beaten me to it.

  I saw two things first, and those two things nearly brought me to my knees.

  The first was a spill of hair over her shoulder, a cascade of platinum white silk which was like nothing I’d ever seen. It promised thickness and softness and light; I had half a mind that if I touched it, I’d be struck dead. It seemed like the kind of hair mortals weren’t allowed to possess, which meant that she had to be some kind of demi-goddess. When she moved to reach for a shard of glass, the warm light of the room moved through her hair like water—or maybe it was her hair that was like water, gold and white, rippling and fluid.

  The second thing: she was kneeling.

  In a pool of broken glass.

  It was like a fantasy I’d never known enough about myself to have, but once I saw it, I knew nothing could ever be the same. I was being rewritten, reshaped, or something better—like I was being reshaped to find out that it had been my true shape all along. Some door inside me swung open, some key slid easily into an old lock, and the air sang with heavy fate.

  This beautiful creature, on her knees. Suffering for someone she loved. Pain and strength in every line of her body, in every duck of her head and stretch of her hand as she plucked splinters of glass one by one off the parquet.

  And I was drowning in it. I didn’t know her face, I didn’t know her name, but in an instant, it felt like I knew her. It felt like she slid into the empty places inside me.

  Embry was the only other time I’d felt that, and I had to take in a breath as I realized what that meant. My cock—slowly stiffening in response to the sight of this person kneeling—was hardening for a woman. My chest was tight for a woman. My mind was abuzz with ideas about every way I could make this woman my own, my little one, for always.

  There was no time to sift through the personal and cultural implications of this, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have needed to anyway. The speed at which I rearranged my beliefs about myself matched the speed in which I found myself fascinated by this girl. Matched the speed at which I made a decision.

  I stepped into the room.

  “You’ll hurt yourself if you’re not careful,” I said.

  Seventeen

  Embry

  now

  “Don’t, Dah-dee,” Galahad scolds, taking the wooden apple out of my hand and putting it back inside the suitcase lying open on the floor. “There,” he says, satisfied. “There, Dah-dee.” At less than two years old, his baby accent makes the th in there sound like a d. Dere. Dere, Da-dee. It makes my heart break with how fucking cute it is.

  He makes my heart break with how fucking cute he is. Every day. Every minute. Since that first time I held him in the hospital, wrapped up like one of those Glo-Worm toys from my childhood, just a sleepy burrito of soft cheeks and dark hair peeking out from a hospital hat. If I thought I couldn’t live without Ash and Greer, I’d been wrong, but it was only because of Galahad, the son whose name Greer ultimately chose. From the moment I first saw him, so sweet and curious, I knew he was the Grail knight my queen had described, the kind of child that would grow up to see the face of God, and I didn’t care how ridiculous the name sounded. It felt right that he should be named by Greer. Necessary. (Abilene didn’t know that, of course; she assumed I’d picked the name myself, and I didn’t bother to correct her.)

  “But if I bring the apple, then you won’t have it here to play with while I’m gone,” I explain. “Are you sure you want Daddy to take it?”

  Galahad nods with baby conviction and then turns to leave the bedroom. He stops after a step and points back to the suitcase. “There, Dah-dee,” he says sternly. The meaning is clear: keep that fucking apple where I put it.

  And then because he’s so cute toddling off with his little deck shoes and his little diaper butt under his corduroys, I run over and scoop him up, pretending to eat his belly while he laughs and laughs.

  “I’m going to be late,” Abilene says, coming out of the bathroom behind me, still fastening an earring into her lobe. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a later flight and join me?”

  I pause the noming noises I’m making against Galahad’s tummy and lift my head. “I’d rather be roasted alive,” I say cheerfully, and then resume tickling my son until he’s shrieking with delight.

  Abilene rolls her eyes. If I had held any distant hope that she might reveal a secret maternal gene after Galahad’s birth, I’d been sorely mistaken—she’s just as Abilene as ever, although she’s surprisingly self-aware where our child is concerned. While she can’t muster the kind of parental affection that comes so easily to me, she’s never been anything but safe, organized, and determined about his life. She hired the best care when he was an infant—the most sought-after nanny in the District, a woman named Enid who I cannot pay enough money for being as warm and clever as she is—and aside from her incurable coldness, she’s never endangered him, never emotionally poisoned him, never even raised her voice around him.

  It’s absolutely the least that should be asked of any parent, but yet I’m still grateful. Between Enid and me, I can harbor the faint hope that he might escape his childhood unscathed.

  “It would be a good opportunity to schmooze the RNC donors,” Abilene is saying as she finishes with the earring and moves back to her room on the other side of our shared bathroom. “A last infusion of cash can’t hurt anything.”

  “We already have too much cash,” I say, setting Galahad on his feet and watching him tear out of the door to find Enid. “And I told you, I’d like to spend the night before the debate preparing.”

  I hear her make a scoffing noise in her room.

  I walk through the bathroom to her doorway, stopping at the threshold and crossing my arms. I don’t come into her room as a rule, and she mostly stays out of mine, and her acceptance of my boundaries has been one of the reasons I’ve stayed sane over the last two years, even if she does try to push me on them every now and again.

  “By the way,” I say mildly, “I hope you go straight to hell for that press statement you released yesterday.”

  She looks up at me with a mock-innocent expression. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It doesn’t matter that you fed the Times that story anonymously. Morgan and I know—and I’m certain Ash and Greer do too—that it was you. I just got off the phone with Morgan, and she’s furious.”

  “Morgan will get over it, and so will you,” Abilene dismisses. “It will hurt Ash’s campaign far worse than ours.”

  “I’m not concerned about the campaign,” I say incredulously. “I’m concerned about my fucking sister. My nephew. You’ve just single-handedly ruined their lives, and you don’t even care?”

  “It was time,” she says, all nonchalant. “And they’ll get over it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’ve been asking you to for a long time. Are you finally changing your mind?”

  I stare at her for a moment, and she stares right back, no regret
or shame anywhere in her face. I don’t even know why I looked for it.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she tells me. “Right now you’re thinking about how good it would feel to announce that you’re going to divorce me. To take Galahad and storm out of here.”

  “It would feel very good,” I agree. I can almost taste the relief now, the sweet freedom, and I’ve daydreamed of divorcing her so often that I have an entire Rolodex filled with different fantasy scenarios. Leaving her in public or leaving her under the cover of night; having her served with divorce papers or tossing the papers myself onto her dinner plate. You name it, I’ve lived it inside my mind with unhealthy relish.

  Abilene tilts her head at me in a way that’s uncomfortably sympathetic. “But you’re also thinking about all the reasons why you can’t do that. You can’t win this campaign in the middle of a divorce, and you know that I wouldn’t make it quiet or easy for you. I’d make it so messy and public that you’d not only lose the election, you’d never hold office again. There’s no end to the lies I could tell in divorce court, Embry. Drugs and drinking…prostitutes. Teenage prostitutes. That you also gave drugs to. And paid to have abortions. It wouldn’t be as hard to fake as you’d think.”

  “Jesus, Abilene.”

  She shrugs as she turns back to her mirror and ruffles her fingers through her hair. It shakes in perfect copper waves over her shoulders. “Still want that divorce?”

  I don’t answer her, and I don’t bother telling her goodbye. I get my suitcase, cuddle Galahad for as long as he’ll let me, and tell Enid to text me if she needs anything.

  Then I catch my flight to New York.

  My aide—a young white woman named Dinah—checks us into our hotel, makes sure I have all my notes and then we go our separate ways. Her up to her room and me up to mine, and it’s as I’m holding the hotel key against the door’s RFID pad that I notice there’s someone else in the hallway.

  I don’t recognize the face, but I’d recognize that stance and suit and earpiece combination anywhere: he’s Secret Service. Which means…

  I open my door and all the air is caught in my chest, trapped and sharp and urgent.

  Greer is here.

  Greer is here in my room, standing at the window and looking into the Manhattan skyline, and I can’t breathe, can’t even think. She turns to face me with a smile, the city lights twinkling behind her as if they love her as much as I do, as if they want to touch her as much as I do.

  “This is kind of familiar,” she teases. “You walking into a hotel room, me standing at the window.”

  And like that, all the heat and urgency in my chest arrows to my groin. Because it is familiar, and the last time this happened, she ended up sitting on my face in her wedding gown, and I ended up making a mess of the inside of my tux as her husband licked the taste of her off my lips. And she’s even wearing a white dress now, a short sweater-dress with long sleeves and boots up past her knees, making her legs look a million miles long, and shit. I need them around my waist, wrapped around my head, I need that sweater dress bunched up between our stomachs, yanked up to her neck so I can bite at her breasts.

  But I stay where I am, slowly setting my suitcase against the wall and letting the door close behind me. “Why are you here?” I ask, struggling to keep my voice neutral, struggling to keep the two years of loneliness and longing hidden.

  “Ash sent me,” she says, and of course he did, and I don’t know why that fills me with equal parts excitement and disappointment. Excitement because if Ash sent her, if she came here when he asked, that means there’s only one way tonight will end.

  But then why isn’t he here too? Why not come himself, why not the three of us?

  “He’s spending the night in Seattle,” Greer says softly, reading my face. “Lyr asked him to stay, and Ash would do anything for that boy.”

  My pain deflates a little, replaced by the sharper pain of loving that man so fucking much. Of course he would want to be with Lyr right now, of course he’d be sacrificing anything he could for his son.

  Greer bites her lip as she watches me process this. “It’s been two years,” she says in a quiet voice. “If you want me to leave, say the word.”

  “And if I don’t want you to leave?” My blood is thrumming hot through my body, and my cock pushes against my zipper like it’s trying to split the metal teeth apart.

  Greer releases her lip from her teeth with a small lick and big smile. “Then my safe word is Maxen.”

  And I’m on her. It takes me several long strides to eat up the distance between us, but I’m there, I’m against her, I’m slamming her against the wall and sealing my mouth over hers.

  “I can’t wait,” I mumble against her lips.

  “Then don’t,” she says, and I spin her and push her back on the bed, and I don’t even give her time to move up to the pillows, I don’t give her time to catch her breath. I curve my body right over hers and fumble with my zipper between us, and the back of my hand touches bare wet skin as I do.

  “You’re not wearing anything under that dress,” I growl, pausing work on my zipper to shove her dress up and see for myself. “You needed to be fucked that badly?”

  She’s arching now, trying to roll her hips against me, but I pin her to the bed with a hard hand on her hip and just look. Just look at the sleek rift between her legs, the tiny parabola of her mound silhouetted against the chunky knit fabric of her dress, the bevels and curves where her cunt meets her thigh, where her thigh meets her ass. The tiny pink rosebud of her ass and the plump little berry of her clit peeking out between her lips. And she’s wet already, so wet that it’s on the outside of her, and all of her private skin is so flushed and so needy.

  “Embry,” she moans. “Put it inside me. Please. I can’t wait any longer.”

  Fuck, I can’t either. “It’s going to be fast, sweetheart,” I mutter apologetically, bracing my hand on the bed, my other hand digging my cock out of my pants. It’s going to be pointlessly fast, but I’m too ashamed to tell her that. Embry Moore, once known up and down the West Coast for his god-like prowess in bed, is going to come after a single thrust…if that. It’s been more than a year since I’ve had anything other than my hand and a silicone toy I bought in a fit of frustration while my eyes burned with stupid tears and my room was illuminated by the blue glow of my laptop screen. I’ve only had that one night with Belvedere to disrupt my celibacy, which means I’m practically a fucking monk now, and in the face of a willing, spread-open woman, I don’t even know how to make myself last. My balls are already drawn up so fucking tight, ready to pump her full.

  I push the head of my cock against her and suck in a breath. Even Greer’s slick heat at my tip feels like too much, far too much.

  “Can I go in bare?” I manage to say through gritted teeth, and the little minx laughs at my desperation, her fingers wrapping around my tie and tugging playfully.

  But then she gets serious as sin. “Make me messy,” she says, in that haughty little voice she uses sometimes, her queen voice. “I want all the cum you’ve been saving for me. I’ve been thinking about it all day, how it would feel to be full of you. Dripping with you.”

  Shit yes. None of the I just want to feel all of you stuff that lovers sometimes say about going bare, none of the pretense of delicacy. Just the raw, crude biology of it, the physical release and natural purpose of it.

  The angle is fucked, with her legs still half off the bed and my upper thighs still cinched with my flat-fronted suit pants, but I don’t even care. I yank her hips to mine, breach her wet split with the first inch of me, and then give her the other seven in a rough, grunting shove. She’s so wet that it takes almost nothing to push inside, and I press a forbidding hand to her lower belly to keep her still as I reach underneath us and tug down on my balls to stop the orgasm already strangling every muscle and vein and pipe of me.

  Despite my hand hard on her belly, she’s still arching, the raw contact after two years so fuck
ing incredible, and she’s saying, “God, I missed you, I missed you, I missed you,” as I finally let go of myself and pull out to the tip.

  “I missed you more,” I breathe as I push inside, and holy fuck, there are stars crowding the edges of my sight, actual fucking stars—supernovas and white dwarfs and goddamn pulsars shooting beams of pure energy across my field of vision—and then I’m fully inside her, hunched over her like a fucking teenager, tangled in my clothes, marveling at the press of my balls against her ass like it’s the eighth wonder of the world.

  Every muscle in my body is clenched so hard that I might snap in two, but I’d rather snap in two than miss this, than rush this gift that I didn’t expect but that I need so, so badly. I love her, I love her—

  “I love you,” I mumble, kissing her roughly on the mouth, biting at her jaw. “I love you.”

  “Embry,” she murmurs, “there’s going to be more. I’ll be here all night. Use me quick, and then I’ll use you slow, but don’t hold back. You don’t ever get to hold back with me.”

  My hands grab everywhere even as my hips and dick are so still that I could be a photograph, a sculpture. The slightest twitch will throw me over the edge, and I don’t want it yet, except I do want it, I want it to last forever at the same time that I want to blow all this pent-up pressure inside her and show her exactly how chaste I’ve been. Exactly how much I’ve missed her.

  I have to touch every part of her, press and squeeze every inch that has only known her husband’s touch over the last two years. Her slender waist, her pert breasts, even her fucking shoulders I have to clutch and rough up and clasp.

  Her shoulders.

  And then my hands are on her head, threading through her hair as I cradle her face and kiss her, kiss her, kiss her. And it’s not even her sweet pussy that sends me over the edge, it’s the slide of her tongue silky and wet against my own, just so fucking intimate and naked.