Page 2 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
I found my voice. “They weren’t my men, Lieutenant.”
“So you were just going to let them beat the shit out of each other?”
I rolled my eyes. “They’re big boys. They can take care of themselves.”
Colchester’s face didn’t change. “It’s our job to look out for them.”
“I don’t even know who the fuck they are.”
“So when you’re out there, fighting the Carpathians, that’s how it’s going to be? You’re only going to look out for the men directly underneath you?”
“Oh, trust me, Lieutenant Colchester, I always keep both eyes on a man directly underneath me. Both hands too.”
Dag and Wu laughed, and I grinned, but in the blink of an eye I was backed against the metal wall of the barracks with Colchester’s warm forearm pressed against my throat.
“Is this all a joke to you?” he asked quietly, so quietly that the others couldn’t hear. “Are those fake mountains over there? Fake bullets in your gun? Because it’s not a joke to the Carpathians. They don’t have fake bullets, Lieutenant Moore, and it won’t be fake IEDs they plant in the roads either. You’re going to be asking these men to follow you, even when they doubt you, even when you doubt yourself, and so you better believe it matters that you take care of them. Here, there, every-fucking-where. And if you can’t accept that, I suggest you march over to the captain’s office and ask for a transfer back home.”
“Fuck you,” I growled.
He pressed his arm tighter against the side of my throat, cutting off most—but not all—of my blood flow, and his eyes swept across my face and then down my body, which he had caged against the wall with his own. His eyes looked darker in the shadow of the wall, like the cold depths of a lake, but there was nothing else cold about him right now. His body was warm against mine and I could see the pulse thrumming in his neck, and for the briefest second, his lips parted and those long eyelashes fluttered, like he meant to close his eyes but forgot how.
“Fuck you,” I repeated, but weakly this time, weak from his arm against my neck and something else I didn’t care to examine.
He leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “I’d rather it was the other way around.” And he stepped back, dropping his arm. I sucked in a ragged breath, the fresh oxygen cutting through my blood like ice.
By the time my vision cleared, Lieutenant Colchester was gone.
2
Embry
after
My life now has two parts.
Then and now.
Before and after.
I’m a married man now, in a way. In a ridiculous, insane, beautifully fucked-up way that no state or church would ever recognize. But that doesn’t make it any less real. That doesn’t make it any less true. The moment Greer, Ash, and I all held hands and promised—promised something we didn’t even entirely understand but we knew we couldn’t fight anymore—that moment was my wedding. It was all my wedding, actually, that and what came after: the sweat and the tears and the spilled semen, some kind of ancient ritual that we instinctively knew how to perform, a dance we had never learned but had already mastered.
I had thought today would be my perdition. My punishment for being a bad, selfish man, a man who made Ash suffer, who made Greer suffer, who’s made so many countless others suffer in the thirty-five years I’ve been alive. I had walked down that aisle with Greer’s cousin Abilene holding my arm, and all I could think about were the missed chances I had for this to be my own wedding. Ash would have forsaken his precious Catholic church, his career, his future, just to see me walk to him, just to see his ring on my finger, and I’d said no.
Twice.
And this was my penance. That I would walk down the aisle, and instead of standing across from him, I would stand next to him, his bite marks on my neck and his future wife’s taste still in my mouth, and I would have to watch them smile and cry and kiss. I wouldn’t get the man I loved or the woman I loved; instead, they would have each other and I would have no one.
That was what I had to endure. That was what I had to accept.
Except…I didn’t. Somehow, some way, my penance had been paid, my sins lifted from me. Ash wanted me. Greer wanted me. And they wanted to open their hours-old marriage to me—imperfect, awful me. I should have said no. For their sakes, for the sake of my soul. But I couldn’t. I just wanted it—wanted them—too fucking much.
I wanted to hope that it would work. That we could work—the three of us, somehow. Because fifteen years of knowing Ash and five of knowing Greer had shown me that I was never getting past this…this itch, this needy pain for them. I was ruined for loving anyone else, and call it fate or bad luck or genetic compatibility or psychological trauma—whatever it was, I was bound to them like rust to metal, a collision of particles and forces that changed us all irrevocably. There was no going back.
These are the thoughts stirring through my mind as my eyes flutter open in the dark. There have been times in my life when I’ve woken up in a new place, disoriented and terrified, waiting for Carpathian bullets to start raining down on me, but now I wake up in a warmth of lazy contentment. Sweet excitement. Lingering hunger.
There are no bullets here.
Instead, there’s a warm hand on my naked stomach, large and slightly rough, a familiar and unfamiliar feeling all at once. I open my eyes all the way, the light from the bathroom limning the muscular frame of the sleeping President. The sheet is partially twined around his lean hips, dipping low enough to expose the dark line of hair running down from his navel and thin enough to reveal the heavy curve of his penis. In sleep,
