Page 57 of American Queen (New Camelot Trilogy 1)
“It makes me happy to see you get along so well,” he continues. “You’re the two most important people in the world to me, besides my mother and sister, and I want us all to be close.”
You have no idea how close Embry and I are, I want to say. I should say. But the words stick in my throat.
Embry and I aren’t together and we’ll never be together now…so what difference does our past make? If I tell Ash about that night in Chicago, it will just add more tension between the three of us, and apparently there’s enough of that already.
Stop rationalizing. You know lying is wrong. Tell the truth.
But the moment has passed, and we’re spinning across the dance floor and then Ash says, “I heard you also had the pleasure of meeting Senator Leffey.”
“Yes,” I answer, a bit sourly. “She and I are not going to be fast friends, in case you were wondering.”
He laughs. “No, I didn’t think you would be. What did she say to you?”
Here, I decide to be honest. “She told me that you two used to fuck. She told me you’re a liar. And she warned me that I was in over my head with you.”
Ash blinks in surprise. “Wow. She really dove right in there, didn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
His face turns pensive. “Morgan doesn’t like me very much, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
He sighs. “Lots of reasons. Too many to name. In fact, she has so many reasons to dislike me that it almost feels like fate. We’re destined to be enemies.”
“I’m guessing those reasons weren’t around when you fucked her?”
His hand is suddenly tight and possessive on my waist, pulling me so close that I can feel my dress catching on his legs as we move. “Jealousy looks good on you,” he says, leaning his head down to speak into my ear. I shiver at the feeling of his warm breath on my skin.
“But you don’t need to be jealous,” he finishes, straightening up again. “It was a very long time ago. We haven’t had sex in fourteen years.”
I’m about to exhale with relief when he admits, “But we have been sexual together since then.”
There’s that jealousy knifing between my ribs again. “And when was the last time you were ‘sexual’ together?”
His eyes find mine in the dim light of the dining room, green and intensely apologetic. “A month ago.”
“A month ago?” I repeat. I want to rip myself out of his arms, I want to storm away, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. There are too many eyes watching, too many reputations at stake, and besides, I don’t get to have any claim on Ash’s sexual history. Any claim on what he did before we kissed at St. Thomas Becket.
Ash holds me tighter, leaning his head in close. Goddamn him for being so fucking handsome right now, all chiseled planes and full lips. It makes it impossible for me to pull away, to ignore him.
“After Jenny died,” he says in a low voice, “I was in a bad place. The cancer came on so fast—she was diagnosed and then two weeks later she was dead—and there was no time to grieve or to process and there was still this campaign to run. This campaign I didn’t even want to run any longer. After the funeral, I felt like an imposter in my own life. Like I’d woken up in another man’s body. I didn’t see myself in the mirror. I couldn’t hear my own voice. I would be fastening my cufflinks and then realize I didn’t recognize my own hands. They felt like puppet hands. Like some sort of clever wooden machine and not flesh and blood.”
It’s the first time he’s really talked about Jenny to me, and my heart is rupturing for him, for that Ash of last year who felt so alien and adrift. I squeeze his neck and he sighs into it, as if the gesture comforts him.
“Morgan and I had encountered each other countless times since that week we were together. She’s my best friend’s stepsister and a powerful senator on the Armed Services Committee…our worlds collided a lot. And a week after Jenny died, our worlds collided again. Merlin had coaxed me back on the campaign trail, a stump speech in Virginia—it should have been easy. A message I’d been touting for a year in a state that loves the military. And I fucked it up. I stumbled and stuttered, and it was fine that time—everyone was so eager to give me the grieving husband pass—but it wouldn’t be fine for long. And I knew it, I knew if I couldn’t get my shit together, I would lose, so matter how many pictures were tweeted of me laying roses on Jenny’s grave.
“I went home that night planning to get drunk. And I decided the next day I’d call Merlin and tell him it was over. I would withdraw. It had been a pipe dream anyway, to run on a third party ticket, and there was no way I could win like this. Like…a shell. A ghost.”
“But you didn’t call him,” I murmur. “What changed your mind?”
His eyes are pinned to mine. “Morgan.”
Ugh. Knife. Ribs. Ugly, ugly pain.
“She showed up at my door that night. We hadn’t exchanged civil words in fourteen years, and yet there she was. ‘I know what you need,’ she said, ‘and you need to come with me.’ I was too hollow to fight her. She said she was taking me out for a drink, but we went somewhere else. I guess you could call it a dungeon or a sex club.”
He pauses his story to smile at my stunned expression. “For a self-admitted submissive, angel, you seem pretty shocked by the idea of a sex club.”
