Page 92 of American Queen (New Camelot Trilogy 1)
But his face isn’t angry. It’s hurt and regretful and tired, but not at all angry, and for some reason, this unlocks my own hurt and tiredness, my own regret. My anger ebbs away like the tide, leaving behind a dirty residue of confused betrayal.
“When I saw you two under the mistletoe,” I whisper, “I thought my heart was literally breaking. Like my aorta had twisted and my valves had clamped shut. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.”
“You have every reason to hate me,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “Every reason to be angry. I have asked you to trust me, and then I betrayed that trust in the worst way possible. I’m sorry, Greer. I’m so very, very sorry. If this…changes…things between us, I completely understand. I’m at fault, and I deserve whatever you want to do to me.”
Normally, I’d applaud a man who apologized without excuses, without desperate defenses of himself, but right now? Tonight? I want to know what Ash was thinking that night under the mistletoe, what he was feeling. I want him to fight and rage, argue and plead, so that my own tangle of emotions won’t feel so alone and outsized compared to this graceful defeat.
“No,” I say. “I want more. You’re not supposed to give up. You’re not supposed to submit. You’re supposed to fight for me! You’re supposed to explain all this away and make me feel better!”
His eyes search mine. “But I can’t explain it away. I did kiss Embry. I kissed him, and I enjoyed it. I kissed him because I’d just learned about you two sleeping together, and when I saw him that night, all rumpled and lost-looking under the mistletoe, I just…” He stops and shakes his head. “I’m not going to try to justify what I’ve done. It was wrong to kiss him that night, and it was wrong not to tell you. I’m so, so sorry.”
I want to hit him. I want to scream at him. I settle for glaring. “Stop saying you’re sorry. I don’t want your sorry.”
His eyebrows pull together. “Then what do you want?”
“You. Him. Us. I want it all to make sense. Do you love him?”
He blinks, the act making him look younger, more vulnerable. “Greer…”
“I saw you that night, Ash. You weren’t kissing him like he was a friend or an old fuck, you were kissing him like you needed it. Like you’d been waiting months for it. You were trembling, and you looked at him like…like you look at me sometimes. Like you can’t decide whether you want to eat me or be eaten.”
He’s still blinking, those eyelashes long and dark, those bottle-green eyes bright and aching behind them. “Greer, this doesn’t need to be…what good will it do—”
“I’m not the fucking public,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “I’m not a poll, I’m not a key demographic. Stop trying to spare my feelings and just tell me.” I pause, and then add because I think Ash needs to hear it. “Embry loves you, you know. He told me that too. He told me about the first time you were together, he told me that you were together after Jenny’s death. He thinks that you don’t love him back, and why wouldn’t he? With the awful way you’ve treated him?”
Ash freezes, his hand still fisting my hair, his arm still anchoring me down against him. “What?”
I’m simmering again, biting off words and not caring how they land. “You know what I’m talking about. He’s good enough until you meet a woman, right? You could fuck him until you met Jenny, and then you dropped him, and then after Jenny, you were back to using him again. Until you had me. Until you sent him to fetch me for you. How do you think that makes him feel? How could you?”
Ash’s lips part and close and then part again. “Greer, I asked Embry to marry me. Twice.”
I was all ready to continue with my excoriation on Embry’s behalf, but Ash’s words filter their way into my consciousness and stun me. “What?” I whisper.
“I asked him to be my husband. Twice. And do you know how many times he said no?”
I shake my head mutely.
“Twice,” Ash says.
“I can’t believe you asked him to marry you…he didn’t say anything about that…”
Ash makes a noise that could be called derisive—if it wasn’t so wounded. “No. I suppose he didn’t.”
“When did you propose?”
Ash loosens his grip in my hair, and unconsciously I reach back to make him tighten it again. This draws the first smile I’ve seen from him since I came in the room. But he stays on topic and answers my question.
“The first time was in Carpathia. We’d been dating for two years. He insisted we didn’t tell anyone, and I agreed because loved him. But I thought maybe if he saw how serious I was about him, how much I wanted to be with him, he wouldn’t be so intent on having a secret relationship. I had a buddy of mine buy a ring in Rome when he went there for leave and bring it back. I planned it so just the two of us would be out in Embry’s favorite valley by that base—you could stand at the top of this ridge and see for miles. I got down on one knee while we both had guns slung over our shoulders.”
Ash smiles at the memory, but then his smile falters. “Embry said no. It wasn’t legal then, you see, and I think—I don’t know. Maybe he was worried about our careers or maybe what his family wanted. He didn’t give me a reason. He just said no and told me we should stop seeing each other.”
Even now, seven or eight years later, I can hear the bitter heartache in his voice.
“Merlin introduced me to Jenny not long after, and we gradually fell in love. She wasn’t at all like Embry, she wasn’t at all like you, and maybe that felt safe to me. She wasn’t the strange girl who coaxed my darkest self to the surface, she wasn’t the man who’d faced death with me. She was…easy. Uncomplicated. She loved like normal people loved, she desired like normal people desired. With her, I was a different kind of man, a kind that didn’t have such twisted feelings inside. After I’d been wrapped up in you so long, only to have my first real relationship end like that…well, I guess I’m just trying to explain why I fell in love with Jenny when I was still in love with both of you.”
I turn that over in my mind
for a minute. So many networks of love and heartbreak, so many deep folds and layers to a person’s heart. But it made a strange kind of sense to me, that he could love me and Embry and Jenny all at the same time. Not very many people love like Ash loves, as fiercely and fully, and maybe one person alone could never have born the brunt of him.
