Page 27 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
You think you want to give that to me? Ash had asked.
No. I want you to take it from me, I’d said.
My voice is sharp when I answer Greer. “What?”
I feel her cool fingertips run up the inside of my wrist. “If you don’t want to take care of me, then pretend you’re Ash,” she says. “He would do it.”
“Do what?” My voice is still sharp but low now, and I can see her body respond.
“Show me what Melwas would have done to me.”
I hear the echoes of a long-ago Embry in her voice, remember that night where I begged Ash to wreak his violence upon my body because he’d needed the release and I’d needed the defeat; I’d needed to feel both alive and conquered. “God, Greer, that’s…that’s fucked up.”
“I know it is.” And it’s the way she says it that really gets its hooks into me, because it’s not ashamed—but it’s not cynical or devoid of emotion either. She says it like someone would ask for a kiss after a hard day, like someone would nestle into the hollow of your arms seeking comfort. It’s the woman I love sad and scared, and nearly inconsolable, when normally emotion never seems to touch her. “Please see it like I do. Melwas was going to hurt me, and there’s nothing I could have done to stop it, but if you—if you do it, then I’ll know I can stop it. I will want it and it will be mine, something I control. I get to—” she searches for the words as I search for my breath, for my self-control “—I get to rewrite it. It becomes mine,” she repeats
“You want me to pretend to—” I can’t say the words, they turn to vinegar in my mouth. I rephrase. “You want me to pretend to be Melwas?”
“Pretend to be Ash being Melwas…if it makes it easier.” She closes her eyes. “This isn’t easy to ask for, Embry, but if I leave here without—”
I pull free from her hands and go to the door.
“Embry?”
I shut the door, pressing my forehead against the cool wood for just a moment. “We have to be fast,” I say, hating how my heart hammers with excitement. How eager my body is.
“Yes,” she whispers, her voice as eager as my body. “As fast as you like.”
You’re going to hell, Embry Moore. Not just for doing this. But for liking it.
But I already knew I was a bad man, right? I was already going to hell.
I click on my shoulder mic, my forehead still against the door. “I have Mrs. Colchester. We’ll be at the rendezvous point in thirty minutes,” I tell Wu. He radios back that he heard me. I unclip the mic, take out my earpiece, and I turn around, facing her. It’s almost completely dark in the room with the door closed, the only light coming from the full moon outside. It changes things, that kind of light. Witching light, my aunt Nimue used to call it. The kind of light necessary for performing deeds that couldn’t be done in the light of day.
The red of Greer’s silk almost looks black now, dark water flowing and rippling over her body. I’m so hard it hurts, and I take a step toward her, ready, ready, ready, God help me, and then I remember. I’m Ash, right now, not Embry.
And it’s so much responsibility, having this kind of power and control. The weight of someone’s safety and catharsis. How does he do it? How does he hold that corner of his mind open for compassion and evaluation while he gives himself over to the monster inside? My monster has no corners, my monster has no compassion. He has only need.
I pull a pocketknife out of my pocket. “Before we start,” I say, fighting to keep my voice normal as I walk over. “Just one thing.”
She understands almost immediately as I reach for her wrists and holds her hands up to me. I cut one layer of the tape open, unwind it, and make her flex her hands several times until the circulation is back, and then I reapply the tape, looser this time. It’s sticky enough to hold, weak enough she could break free, if she needed.
“Can you snap your fingers when your wrists are taped?” I ask, trying to remember all the things Ash does before he claims one of us. Limits, safe words. Though with me it was never that straightforward. Never that safe. There were times I’d walk into the Oval Office and be yanked into a dark room, a silk tie shoved in my mouth, no words uttered at all…those summer nights in the Carpathian mountains with a belt between my teeth so the other soldiers thirty yards away wouldn’t hear my grunts as Ash drove my body into the dirt…
“I can snap them,” Greer answers, bringing me out of my memories.
“Show me.”
She shows me.
“I’m putting your gag back in,” I inform her. “Snap if you need me to stop.”
She shivers as I move the gag back and tighten it. I can feel the lingering teardrops on her cheeks and in the satin net of her hair, but she’s not crying anymore. Her eyes instead are large and fascinated, imploring and a little bit curious. Goose bumps cover her skin, and I run my fingers along the exposed curve of her breast to feel them under my fingertips.
And just like that, the nice playboy I thought I was disappears. The monster who’d once had Greer’s blood on his thighs is back.
I move my hand to her neck, feel the delicate inner workings of her throat as she swallows underneath my palm. I press down, relishing the give of all that soft skin, the sensation of exquisite muscles and veins relenting under my grip. A moving mosaic of panic and desire shifts on her face, rippling and interlacing the way shadows do at the bottom of a sunny pool.
I lean down, still squeezing her throat, and kiss her shadowed face. I kiss her forehead and the edges of her mouth around her gag, and then I give in
