Page 33 of American Queen (New Camelot Trilogy 1)
“Sorry we’re late,” came an easy, deep voice from behind Merlin. My heart stopped.
The world bled away.
And there was only Maxen Colchester.
Four years older and painfully more good-looking, post-tour-of-duty scruff highlighting the strong lines of his cheeks and jaw, wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of low-waisted slacks that emphasized how ridiculously trim and lean his body was. He folded his soldier’s frame into a chair next to Merlin, the elegant table setting in front of him doing nothing to diminish the sense of raw power and strength radiating from his body. I’d forgotten, somehow, what that power and strength felt like in person.
It felt like drowning.
Tell me, Greer, do you like my lips on your skin?
Yes.
I believe you. That’s why you’re so dangerous.
My fingers curled around the stem of my wineglass, and I forced myself to focus on it, on the way the glass felt on my skin. Smooth and whole, not at all like the jagged shards and splinters I’d cradled in my hands the night I met Ash. All these years, I’d told myself I didn’t care about Ash, wasn’t haunted by our kiss. I’d wanted to be sophisticated, the kind of aloof girl who kissed men like Ash and then forgot all about it. I wanted to be different than Abilene with her fan forums and obsessive fantasizing, I wanted to be wise and worldly and apart from such schoolgirl crushes.
But I couldn’t pretend that any longer. Not when faced with warm-blooded, green-eyed reality of him.
Right now, I was the Greer who’d written those embarrassingly honest emails, the Greer who’d melted into his touch, who’d shivered as he licked her blood from her skin. Right now, I was a vessel of pooling want, I was ready to be whatever he wanted me to be, ready to crawl into his veins and make him mine. I was eager and humiliated and yearning and mortified, and I knew the absolute truth in that moment—I was in love with Maxen Colchester. It was foolish and silly and absurd—nothing could be more unworldly and unsophisticated—but somehow, terribly and incredibly, it was true.
“…and my granddaughter Greer.”
I lifted my gaze, realizing Grandpa Leo had been talking this whole time, introducing the others at the table to Ash and Merlin. I suddenly wished I was in something less girlish than this pink knee-length dress with its neatly folded bow at the back. I wished I had put my hair up or reapplied my lip-gloss, or anything to feel fresher and prettier and more than I was in that moment. Instead, I felt incredibly naked and young as I met Ash’s stare across the table.
He’d frozen in place—just for a second—his eyes flaring into a green fire before settling back into their usual emerald. Then he gave me a genuinely happy smile and said in that easy, confident voice, “Greer. So good to see you again.”
Again.
He remembers.
I took a breath and smiled too, a smile that felt too shaky and too excited and too hopeful. “Yes. So nice to see you too.”
And then I lifted my wineglass to my lips, hoping no one saw the trembling of my hand as I did.
The lunch went on as normal—Merlin was having a party tonight for his fortieth birthday, and everyone at the table was going—and the conversation turned back to politics, although with Merlin there, the conversation finally drifted away from the minutia of elections and numbers and into slightly more interesting territory. Merlin was asking my grandfather if he’d ever support a third party presidential candidate, and the table stirred with the natural antipathy establishment politicians have to such talk.
But even that couldn’t hold my attention when Ash was so near. He talked very little, choosing mostly to listen, but when he did speak, it was so concisely elegant and perceptive that even these people, who spent their lives talking over everyone else, had trouble finding a response that matched his insight.
Every word he said, I stored away, as if his opinions on the viability of a thir
d-party candidate were secret revelations about himself. I watched his every movement from under my eyelashes, the way his hand looked as he twirled the stem of his wineglass between his fingers, the way he held himself perfectly still as he was listening to someone else—perfectly still except for the occasional nod of understanding—a stillness not learned in a courtroom or a legislator’s chamber, but in battle. A stillness that could have been curled over a sniper’s rifle, it was so deliberate and immovable. A stillness that accounted for the movements of wind and the fluttering of leaves and careful intakes of breath. A stillness that was patient.
Predatory.
If Ash ever became a politician, he would slice through these people like a stick slices through weeds. They’d be bent and broken before they ever saw it coming.
I didn’t have that stillness. Perception, yes. Patience, no.
And so it was agony to be so close to Ash, able to soak up every lift of his shoulders, every flex of those fingers, every rich, deep word, and to know that there was nothing to be done about the tempest inside me. There was no outlet for this restless ache, this almost-pain, this fidgety, giddy feeling twisting inside my chest. At any moment, my control would break, and it would all come spilling out of me.
Do you really remember me? I would blurt, leaning forward. Do you remember our kiss? I do. I remember how you took care of my cut, I remember how you told me not to move, I remember how you pinned me against the wall. I dreamed of it for years after; I still dream of it. I thought I didn’t care, I tried to shove down that girl, I tried to be someone else, but now that I’m with you, I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can want anyone else and I don’t think I want to be any other version of myself than the girl you boss around.
I can bleed for you again.
Let me bleed for you again.
And then, as if he’d heard me, as if my thoughts had reached out to him, he turned his head and met my stare head-on. His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the wineglass, and I imagined them tightening in my hair, fisting my white-gold locks and snapping my head backward so he could bite my throat.
