Page 61 of American Queen (New Camelot Trilogy 1)
I look up at him, at the man who has changed not at all over the minutes we’ve been apart even though I feel like an entirely different person. But then my eyes move past him to Embry, and I feel nothing but blind panic. Panic at being so exposed in front of him. Panic that mirrors the panic on his own face, the speed of his breathing as he looks at me and looks at me and looks at me.
“I hope you trusted me,” Ash says. “And I hope you knew that I’d keep you safe while you submitted to me. I made sure no one else came up here while you waited.”
I tear my stare away from Embry. “But you brought someone else with you. Sir,” I add at the last minute.
Ash nods. “We have a couple phone calls to make, but I can make them from here. I didn’t want to leave you alone a second longer, but I also wanted Embry close by while I talked to our people near Carpathia.”
“I can leave,” I say. I plead. “Or I can go wait somewhere else while you call.”
Don’t make me be like this in front of Embry. I’m too weak to hide how much I’ll like it.
“No,” Ash says. “I want you to stay.”
“Ash…” Embry says from behind him, his face pale. “We can call first thing tomorrow morning. There’s no need for me to intrude—” His voice breaks off as Ash runs a finger up my thigh to my pussy and carefully slides it inside of me. Despite the deep unease at Embry’s presence, my deprived body responds immediately, and I try to push myself down onto the finger, squirming for more contact and more friction.
“So wet,” Ash murmurs.
Embry makes a strangled noise from his place by the door.
Ash withdraws his finger and places it in my mouth for me to suck clean, which I do without question, lust overriding my better sense, the better sense that tells me there’s no way I can do any of this in front of Embry. It will hurt me and it will hurt him, and then Ash will see why it hurts us, and then he’ll be hurt.
Ash wipes his hand on his tuxedo jacket and stands up. “Embry, we’ll use the phone by the sofa,” he says, gesturing to the two small sofas next to the television. “If you want to have a seat.”
Embry looks at Ash and then looks to me. I feel the ghost of his hips between my thighs, the slickness of blood on my skin, his blindly passionate kisses that consumed us both with their single-minded want. My body keens for him, just as it’s keening for Ash, aching for one or both of them to the point that I can’t even identify how I actually feel any longer. There’s only the need. The want.
“Embry,” Ash says. “The sofa, please.”
Embry steps over to Ash, studiously keeping his gaze away from me on the floor. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he asks Ash quietly.
Ash gets closer to him, angling his body so that I can’t see Embry any longer, and leans in to speak in his ear. I can’t hear what he says, but I see Embry’s posture tense up, see his hand flex and clench, as if he’s keeping himself from doing something violent. Except when Ash pulls back, the look on Embry’s face isn’t violence. I don’t know what it is, but it makes me shiver and makes the memory of his body against mine all the stronger.
Without another word, Embry goes to the sofa and sits, his face unreadable, his posture strangely easy. As if he’s done this before.
Has he?
Have they?
Ash watches him, facing away from me with his hands in his pockets. His shoulders are relaxed, and his stride is full of unconscious power as he walks to the opposite sofa and sits, crossing his legs. His long, skillful fingers set to work tugging his bow tie free, and as he’s pulling at the fabric, he gives me a dismissive glance. “Crawl to me,” he says.
His voice is offhand, his expression coolly indifferent, but all I feel is swelling desperation. Thi
s is something I’ve fantasized about for years, and he knows it, he has that letter memorized. So why dangle this in front of me when I obviously can’t do it? I can’t crawl in front of Embry; the overt submission and humiliation makes the act so undeniably sexual that it feels unfaithful to do it in front of anyone else.
But if Ash is asking me to do it…then does that make it right?
“Crawl, Greer,” Ash says, impatiently this time.
I find my voice. “But Sir, Embry is here—”
“He’s Mr. Vice President to you right now,” Ash interrupts.
“Sir, Mr. Vice President is here,” I correct myself. “He’ll see me.”
“And?”
I don’t know how to answer that. It is its own explanation, there is no and. Embry is here and he’ll see me, and I’ll see him seeing me, and everything we’ve tried to keep suppressed the last week will surface.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper.
