Page 34 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
“Yes. I wish you belonged to me.”
Belong. It was never a word I considered sexy, never a word I considered emotionally weighted; it was a word for things, cars and guns and possessions. But God, in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be his possession, his thing. To belong to him.
I couldn’t believe I was asking this, but the words left me anyway. “What do you think about when you think about disciplining me?”
He shivered.
He actually shivered.
Much to my disappointment, he didn’t answer my question, asking instead, “Do you know the story of Achilles and Patroclus?”
“I went to an all-boys boarding school,” I reminded him. “So yes.”
“I feel a little bit like…like I’m not going to be able to fight once you’re gone,” Colchester—Ash, now—admitted. “Like Achilles after Patroclus died.”
“You?” I laughed. “You’re the best soldier here!”
“Something about you makes it easier. Knowing that if I do my part right, you might be safer when you’re out on your own missions.”
His words were pinching at my heart—too kind, too meaningful—and they couldn’t possibly mean what I wanted them to mean, but then all of a sudden I was on my back, rocks and pine needles poking through my shirt, and he was on top of me, straddling me, leaning over me with my shirt in his fist.
I couldn’t help it; I whimpered, a soft little moan from the back of my throat. His body had looked tightly muscular from afar, but actually on top of me, he was heavy and firm and so fucking powerful, all that soldier and intensity pressing my body into the rocks.
“In Aeschylus, Achilles laments Patroclus when he’s dead,” Ash whispered, leaning close enough that I could smell him—leather and fire. “He accuses Patroclus of being ungrateful for Achilles’ frequent kisses. How could he not be ungrateful if he died instead of staying with Achilles? And night after night I’ve been thinking of you leaving here, leaving me, but I wouldn’t be able to accuse you of being ungrateful for anything, unless…”
I could barely breathe; his long eyelashes swept up and down, his thighs shifted against my hips, my dick was growing hard underneath all that moving muscle. “Unless what?” I asked, desperate to break the tension.
Ash didn’t answer with words. Instead, he leaned down and kissed me.
The kiss was hard—harder than I would have expected for someone as publicly polite and orderly as Ash, but just as hard as I would expect from the man who liked standing with his boot on my wrist. I arched underneath him, needing the pressure on my cock, wanting to offer my throat, and he gave and took in return, shifting his hips so that I felt his erection against mine, moved his hand from my shirt to my neck, where he gripped me tightly. His other hand slid under my head, and I realized it was to cushion me from the rocks.
“You will be grateful for my kisses, won’t you?” he demanded, nipping at my jaw. “You won’t leave me and never come back?”
In twenty-two years, no one, no one, had ever made me feel like this. Not just claimed, but like that claim was literally staked into my flesh, anchored to my bone. We were both so young then—him only a year older than me—but he dominated and overwhel
med me so naturally, as if he’d spent years doing it.
And yet when I searched his face, I didn’t find the perfect control of someone experienced, but the desperate, possessive anger of a twenty-three-year-old about to lose someone he wanted. Those dark eyebrows were drawn together, those deep jade eyes frantic on my face.
“Embry,” he begged. “Promise me you won’t just disappear.”
I was still trying to catch up with the last thirty seconds. “I didn’t know you wanted this,” I said. “I thought…I guess I thought you wouldn’t want me.”
He kissed me again, and again, and again. He parted my lips with his and our tongues came together, and it was such a warm, wet, intimate feeling that I shuddered underneath him, which made him groan into my mouth.
“I wanted you since the first day,” he confessed, breaking our kiss. “I wanted to keep you pinned against that wall for hours.” His expression turned a little shy, something novel and quite sweet on that usually serious face. “It’s the first time I’ve ever felt this way about another man.”
“But Morgan…” I shouldn’t have said it. I don’t know why I did.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Morgan.”
And her name from his lips broke the spell.
What am I doing? Did it change anything that Ash wanted me the way I wanted him? Did I really think I could be with a man who needed to discipline and mark, who needed his lovers to belong to him? As much as my whole body screamed yes, yes we can do that, I had to think with more than my dick. All my relationships either had a completely even balance of power or I was in charge, and that didn’t even delve into the complicated realities of my emotional health. Didn’t delve into the complicated realities of our job.
He saw the shift in my face. “Say this isn’t the end, Embry. Say you’ll keep teaching me to dance. Say you’ll be my little prince. Please.”
His hand still cradled the back of my head, still protected me from all pain except what he wanted to give to me himself. I pressed my eyes closed; every single part of me wanted to say yes, and yet…little princes couldn’t play with kings. They’d be destroyed.
