Page 90 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
The moment I unlocked the door, it opened with a bang and there was my running mate, soaked through with rain, not even wearing a fucking coat, the ends of his black hair clinging to his cheekbones and neck.
“Ash, what the f—”
His lips were on mine before I could finish my sentence, his body pinning mine against the wall as he kicked the door closed with his foot. His lips were hungry, his body hungrier, all of him hot and firm and soaking wet. And that body and mouth were so familiar, so achingly familiar, and yet brand new at the same time. Seven years. It had been seven years since the last time his mouth had chased mine, had pressed against it, had claimed it and invaded it.
I could taste the rain on his lips.
One hand fisted my shirt at the shoulder to keep me against the wall and the other ripped through my buttons, my belt, every barrier between my skin and his. I pulled back to see his face, expecting to see the same empty mask I’d seen this afternoon, but when his eyes met mine, they were the eyes of my king.
I stared at him in wonder. “Ash?”
“I need you,” he growled, still pulling at my belt. “Can I have you?”
My chest felt open and exposed, full of tender, unburied hopes like soft green shoots in barely-thawed soil. “You’ve always had me,” I murmured, and I had to close my eyes as I said it or else he’d see too much, and I couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear him knowing how I starved for him, how I ached down to my marrow for him. How these last seven years had scooped me out and left me a keening husk, wandering in the cold while he’d been warm and happy at Jenny’s side.
My pride refused to let him see, but also my compassion—I couldn’t bear for him to know how much pain he’d caused me for Jenny’s sake, not so soon after her death. But as always with Ash, what I wanted didn’t matter, because when I opened my eyes again, I knew he saw it all anyway. His gaze moved from my eyes to the rest of my face, and he said tenderly, “Patroclus.”
I didn’t want to hear what he might say next, and it didn’t matter anyway. I’d chosen this life, I’d chosen to put his future above ours, and so in a way, I deserved all the pain I’d felt. And I didn’t know what had caused this midnight visit, this rain-soaked vision of sex and desperation, but I was too frantic and starved to let it pass without savoring every moment of it. I leaned forward and kissed him so he couldn’t speak, and my kiss seemed to reignite whatever flame had been burning inside him when he tried to knock down my door.
Tenderness gone, he was back to yanking at my belt and devouring my mouth. “I can’t wait,” he muttered against my lips. The urgency was plain in his voice, his hands, the erection straining the front of his pants. I was dying to know what had happened between the speech and now to get him into such a state.
“I’m sorry,” he said, finally working my pants open and wrapping my cock in a fist so tight and big that I forgot how to think. “I used to think this moment…if we ever were together again…I thought it would be different, longer and sweeter, but…”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said back, breathlessly, my entire being tightening into a bowstring of tension as he tugged and pulled on me. “Please don’t be sorry.”
“Well, I can’t be that sorry.” The hidden dimple flashed, and for a moment I saw a young man standing over me in the woods wishing I would beg. And then the next moment, I was tossed over my dining room table, the centerpiece—again from Morgan’s decorator—crashing to the floor. Both of us ignored it; Ash bent over me and turned my head so I could kiss him, and then bites were trailed down my back, dulled somewhat by the thin cotton of my shirt. My pants were yanked down to my ankles, my feet kicked apart.
“Embry,” said Ash.
“Bedroom,” I panted. “Top dresser drawer.”
It only took him a second, although bent over and exposed like that, that second felt like a month, panic chasing lust all over my body. Would he change his mind? Would he decide it was too close to Jenny’s death? Would he walk into my bedroom a king and walk back out a broken shell again?
I needn’t have worried. He strode back out with all the watchful hunger of a tiger approaching his prey, running his hand down my flattened back as he came around the corner of the table, a smile curling his voice. “Have you finally learned obedience, little prince?”
“Fuck you.”
“Such a mean mouth on you. And here I thought we were friends.”
He fisted a hand in my hair to arch my back off the table. My eyes watered; my blood sang at the sight and feel and sense of him, this part of him I’d been denied so long. This part of him he’d denied himself for so long.
As I was arched, a finger entered me, probing in the perfunctory, callous way I’d grown to crave during our years in Carpathia. The lube was cold, the finger was warm, Ash’s voice was both as he whispered, “Just like I remembered. So tight and so fucking strong—” his hand left my hair so he could grab my ass, the muscles of my left thigh, squeezing and slapping my flank as if I were a prized stallion. “—so you.”
I could feel my heartbeat in my dick. I could feel my heartbeat everywhere, like my heart was outside of me and filling up the room.
Of course it was outside of me. I’d given it to the soldier behind me years ago.
“I can’t wait,” he muttered again. I felt the loss of his finger like the loss of some part of myself, and then I heard the noise of his belt, the metal hiss of his zipper. The moment his crown kissed against the sensitive skin of my anus, I started shivering uncontrollably.
“I haven’t,” I said in a shaking voice. “With anyone. Not since you.”
If I thought this would give him pause, gentle the tiger, I was wrong. If anything, this seemed to stoke a new fire inside him, flare up some dark, primal satisfaction.
“Good,” he snarled.
And he pushed inside of me as rough and fast as he would a woman, shoving the blunt head in on the first push, the rest of his cock in on the second. Grunts left his throat as he forced his way inside, and his massive hands curled around my hips to keep me in place as I squirmed underneath him.
“Fuck.” It was so big. So impossibly big, and he was
