Page 80 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
“I told you to leave. I watched you leave.”
“And maybe I was worried about you after you drank that much. Maybe I wanted to come back in and make sure you got to bed safely. And then you were so needy, Embry, so desperate. ‘Please make it feel better,’ you said. ‘Let me come inside you.’”
The clamminess has turned into real chills. My dream—my drunken dream—could I have really fucked Abilene and not known it? I’m frozen with disgust at the idea, it crawls all over me like bugs on a coffin lid. I want to scratch my skin off, I want to burn every thought out of my brain, I want—
“You spiked my scotch bottle,” I realize, another part of my mind shoving the shame and guilt aside to tell me what I should have seen. “My door was unlocked when I got home. I never get that messed up after only a few glasses. Christ, Abilene. What the fuck?”
She’s already sliding out of bed, not bothering to cover herself up. “Well, it would be impossible to prove now that the bottle is gone. A blood test might show the presence of GHB, along with a few other choice drugs—just the kind of thing to make a man semi-conscious but still able to achieve a—” she gives me a grin that makes me want to tear down the walls with my bare hands “—very impressive erection. But would you look at this?” She wanders over to the mantel of the small fireplace in my bedroom. A few orange bottles are lined up neatly along the edge. “It looks like you have prescriptions for all of them.”
She tosses a bottle to me. GHB, for night terrors related to PTSD, the label says. I’ve never been prescribed this drug and yet it has my name on it, my doctor’s name on it, and I bet if I pushed even deeper, there would be records of that prescription everywhere.
“You got to the White House doctor?”
“Let’s just say that event planning allows me to meet a broad range of people.”
“Just—” I look down at the bottle, at my hands, at my bare thighs. “Tell me the truth. Did we fuck last night?”
“I’ve been dying to fuck you since I started this. Use your head, loverboy. Why would I go to all this trouble if I wasn’t going to fuck you?”
I suppose she had a point. This required a level of forethought and blackmailing above and beyond a simple lie.
“I hate you,” I say, and my voice is calmer now, settled. “For blackmailing all of us, for tricking me, for hurting Greer. It’s unforgivable.”
“Forgiveness is overrated. Satisfaction is where it’s at.” Abilene pulls her dress over her head and slips into her heels, looking fresh and pert and not at all like the clicking metal beast she is. She pauses at the door on her way out. “And Embry, one thing I forgot to mention. I’m not on birth control.”
I let out a long breath. Of course she isn’t. Of course.
She blows me a kiss. “I’ll be in touch.”
24
Greer
after
six weeks later
When I found out I wasn’t pregnant, I didn’t tell Ash for three days.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of his reaction or that I didn’t want his support—more that I needed to process how I felt first before I shared with anyone else. It’s such a private thing, babies and the absence of them—a lonely, personal thing. My feelings were a layer cake of grief and relief and hopes dead before they could really bloom.
I had to face it: despite the questionable wisdom of it, despite the newness of our marriage, despite Embry’s treachery with Abilene, I wanted to be pregnant. I wanted the baby to belong to my men. I wanted it not because Merlin suggested it for Ash’s campaign branding, but because I loved Ash and Embry so fiercely that sometimes it seemed like that love had a life and vitality outside of myself. And that love called to pregnancy like a moon called to tides, in dark, watery ways that were slow and fast all at once.
But my period came, and life went on. It’s for the best, I told myself, and then spent every waking minute attending to First Lady duties and preparing for the upcoming fall semester at Georgetown.
Which is what I’m doing today.
My position doesn’t call for it and I don’t deserve it, but certain considerations have to be made for being a First Lady, and so even though I’m only teaching two undergraduate sections this fall, I now have my own office. It’s small but it has a window and a position in the building that Luc informs me is “strategically comfortable.”
It’s the first day of August, and there’s still plenty of time to set up my office here on campus, but I was eager to escape the White House today, eager to escape the constant scratch of obligation, the incessant appearances and meetings to rehabilitate my image as a wanton wife. And most of all, to escape that cheating, traitorous rake Embry Moore, who still works late into the night with my husband in my living room. Who still opens doors for me, who still stares at me with those melting glacier eyes.
Just the thought of him makes me slam a box of books down so hard that Gavin, my agent today, pokes his head in the doorway to make sure I’m all right. I shoo him away and then take a few deep breaths, calming myself down by thinking of all the synonyms for Embry Moore. Perfidious. False. Capricious. Deceitful.
Unfaithful.
Which is a rich word for me, Greer Galloway Colchester, to use regarding anyone else, and I recognize that. It doesn’t make it less true. And to think my reputation has been tarnished all for him—he who the press has already forgiven, he who took up with Abilene with no warning, he who broke my heart—
Slam, slam. I move more boxes, think of more synonyms.
