Page 26 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
And so there is Greer, eyes silver like the tape on her wrists, wide-eyed and afraid, red silk draping and clinging to every perfect curve. There is Greer, her chest heaving with dread, her throat exposed, her entire body bound and vulnerable to the will of any man who passes by.
There is Greer, with my shadow written across her skin like a stamp of ownership.
And what I feel is like a shock, like touching a battery to your tongue. A metallic taste floods my mouth as a thousand awful, cruelly unspeakable things flood my mind. My heart jolts into a rapid tattoo, my fingers itch, heat pulses at the base of my spine, and fuck, I feel it.
This…urge. To take. To hurt. To keep her bound and helpless.
To feel her body open to my control, my squeezing and my penetrating and my violating. And just the idea of it, the possibilities contained in that one image of my shadow on her body…
I’m hard. I’m restless with it. My cock aches with it, for it.
What is happening to me? This isn’t the real me. I’ve long accepted that I’m a man who’s not truly dominant or submissive…even though I’m a man in love with both a dominant and a submissive. But I’ve also let Ash love me and take from me as his fullest, most powerful self, and those are the truest, best moments I have ever known. I’ve also held my body over Greer’s as she whispered to me that she was a virgin, and savored each savage moment that I fucked her, savored the blood and her whimpers of pain and the writhing orgasms I coaxed from her body over and over again.
Maybe it is me. Maybe the same way I can submit to Ash, only after defeat and struggle…maybe I can only feel dominant in the same situations.
All of these thoughts happen in the space of time it takes for Greer to recognize me. Her eyes widen, and then her tears change, transforming from molten terror into a molten relief. That breaks the spell a little, gives me the strength to go her and do nothing other than press my hand to the side of her face as I loosen the cloth gag and pull it down from her mouth. I think of Ash murmuring vy v bezpetsi—you are safe—to the people he saved during the war, but I can’t bring myself to say that to Greer. How can I when I’m still burning with lust at the sight of her not-safe?
“Are you okay?” I ask softly.
“No,” she sobs, sucking in wet breaths through dry lips. “I thought you were—he was coming back and I thought—”
Her tears reach for something deep inside me, tugging on my need to soothe her, protect her, destroy what would hurt her.
They also tug on something darker.
“Greer, it’s okay, you don’t have to cry,” I entreat. “Please, sweetheart.”
“I do have to cry,” she says, and her voice is fierce and loud and thin all at once. “I do, I do, I do. He touched me, Embry, and he wanted to…he was going to—” Her words dissolve into more tears. I try to calm her, reassure her.
“Melwas is off the grounds,” I say, moving my attention to her wrists. They’ve wrapped the tape too tightly and the tips of her fingers are a dark red. They’re cool to the touch against my palm. “And I’ve taken care of the guards here. We have people waiting for us outside the security perimeter, so all we have to do is get out of the house. You’re sa
fe now. We’re almost back home.”
She rips her hands out of mine with force, and I’m stunned by it, stunned and scared. This is my Greer, my quiet professor, my reserved, austere political princess. I’ve never seen her like this—violent and incoherent to reason. It scares me. It makes me want to castrate Melwas with my bare hands. It makes me want to fuck her.
“Greer,” I say, closing my hand over both of her smaller ones and trying to shove down that despicable part of me. “It’s over now, I’m here, we’re going to get you out of here—”
“What would he have done if you hadn’t gotten here?” she asks, still in that thin, wild voice. She looks up at me. “What would he have done to me if he could?”
The question is too dangerous, too close, and I’m grateful the dark room hides my face, my body. “It doesn’t matter, angel. He can’t do it now.”
“It does matter,” she says. “It does. He touched me and said things to me, and I can still feel him, his hands and his erection in my back and his voice in my ear.” She swallows, the following words quavering and weak. “It’s like he began casting a curse on me and it’s no less powerful for being unfinished.”
“It is finished,” I promise her. “We’re so close to safety.”
“I felt so helpless,” she continues, tears still leaking from those sweet, silver eyes. “There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say, no way I could stop him. I was going to try to fight back, before he left, but even then, even if I had fought him off, there were all those men outside…”
She’s trembling. Violently. And I hate myself for it, but those violent shivers both tear my heart in half and make my cock throb.
“How am I supposed to leave here like this? Leave here with only the things he made me feel and think?”
“We’ll talk to Ash,” I say a little wildly. Don’t make me do this, don’t make me answer these questions.
“Ash isn’t here,” she says. Her body arches the tiniest bit—agitation or frustration—and the silk pulls against the taut lines of her body.
I groan at the sight, turning away from the bed, and she reaches up with her bound hands and captures one of mine.
“Be Ash for me,” she begs, eyes wide and moon-silver in the dark. The light catches the now-drying tear streaks on her face, and for a moment I’m plunged into the past, into a moonlit Carpathian forest with my shoulder and calf torn open with bullets and Ash stalking around me like a hungry wolf.
