Page 25 of American Queen (New Camelot Trilogy 1)
He smiles again at that. “You make a specious case, given how many manipulative Presidents there have been, but I want to be convinced, so I’ll allow it.” He reaches down and slips a high heel off one of my feet, repeating the action on the other foot, rubbing gently at the red lin
e left above my toes. “Why you act afraid of pain when you already wear these is a mystery to me.”
I giggle a little, and the look on his face at the sound of my laughter is electrifying. Belvedere, Embry, me…the President seems to love the laughter of others. The realization strikes me with a chord of melancholy. What loneliness and darkness does he carry in his heart that he needs such people around him?
He places my left foot on the arm of the chair he’s sitting in, and as soon as I see that he’s going to do the same with my other foot, I instinctively pull it back, since that would entail me spreading my legs in this short skirt. He doesn’t react, other than to look up at my face, and I realize that he’s waiting to see if I’ll say his name. My new safe word. I bite my lip and force my body to relax.
I place my foot back in his hands, and he sets it on the other arm of the chair. I’m grateful that our relative heights mean that he’s at eye-level with my chest and not my pelvis, but that gratitude disappears when he says, “Pull your skirt back for me.”
My hands shake when I obey, partly from excitement and partly from nervousness. I wasn’t lying when I told him it felt natural to obey him, but I’ve also never exposed myself so brazenly, so intimately and deliberately. Despite the impassive look on Ash’s face, I can see that he’s fascinated, aroused by bossing me around like this, and that bolsters me.
“I’ve never done this before,” I admit as I finish pulling my skirt up. Cool air wafts around my inner thighs and against my lace-covered pussy.
“Which part?” Ash asks, keeping his eyes on my legs, on the sliver of lace between them.
“Listening to someone. Showing myself off. I’ve only ever had sex once,” I confess.
His head snaps up. “Only once?”
I nod, swallowing. “When I was twenty.”
He groans, resting his head against my knee. “You mean I’m going to be the second man who’s ever been inside you?”
“You sound so certain that you’re going to take me to bed,” I tease, but my teasing comes out breathier than I mean for it to. It’s the way his dark head looks as it leans against my bare thigh, the way his legs are spread all strong and casual in the chair…yes, he should be certain that he’s going to take me to bed. I’ll take myself there if he doesn’t.
“It’s my job to be certain of things, Greer.” I feel the movement of his lips against my thigh as he speaks, and it makes it impossible to sit still. “Tell me—why haven’t you been with more men? Or women?”
“I’ve been asked out a lot,” I say. “Men, and yes, a couple of women. But I say no to them all.”
“Did someone hurt you the first time you had sex? Or was it otherwise unpleasant somehow?”
I think of Embry’s long, muscled body moving over mine, of his strong hands digging into my hips. “It was amazing. But it was the second time I had kissed someone and then had my heart broken, so I decided not to repeat that pattern.”
“And that’s why you haven’t kissed anyone since then,” Ash says, a question in his face. “You’re worried if you kiss a new person, that new person will also break your heart?”
“That’s right.”
“I won’t break your heart,” Ash promises.
“Again.”
Another groan. He seems to like being reminded that he had that power over me. He lifts his head. “Pull your panties aside. I want to see your pussy.”
“Okay,” I whisper, and I do as he says. It’s almost frightening how easy it is to listen to him, how easy it is to do something as unlike myself as spread my legs on a desk for a man I barely know, but dammit, it feels right. It feels good. It feels like another Greer—a Greer I put to sleep and buried in the backyard of my mind—is slowly waking up. The Greer who wrote those emails to Ash, the Greer who bit Embry’s shoulder and trailed scratches down his back as he moved between her bloody thighs. She is loving waking up to this, she wants to preen like a cat as Ash draws in a long breath once he sees the already-wet flesh of her pussy.
His hands slide up the outside of my calves, the rough skin tickling my knees and then my inner thighs as he braces his hands there and pushes me wider apart. I feel myself opening, feel his eyes on the part of me only one other man has seen. One other man who happens to be his best friend. And the Vice President of the United States.
“Beautiful,” Ash says, a hint of awe in his voice. “Just…beautiful.”
I’m chewing hard on my lip, my thighs quivering, because as excited as the old Greer is about this, I can’t help the new Greer’s litany of worries—if I look too wet or not wet enough, if he can smell me, what I’ll taste like if he wants to taste me.
“Look up at the ceiling and breathe in and out in counts of four,” Ash tells me. “It will help calm you down.”
I’m surprised he can read my body so easily, but then maybe I shouldn’t be. He can perceive the meanings behind the faces of dignitaries and the words of politicians—why not a woman’s body? I tilt my head back and breathe like he told me to, in and out.
One two three four…
one two three four…
