Page 73 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
“Pardon,” she managed thickly and pushed past me.
Fascinated, I turned to watch her go and my shoe knocked against something. Her phone. She must have dropped it when she ran into me.
Fate at work, I decided. I wasn’t about to miss the chance to render aid to a beautiful girl like that. So I grabbed the phone off the floor and decided to go find out what could make such a pretty girl so sad.
When I was twenty-nine, I met a princess.
Her heart was broken, and so was mine. She had a raspberry dress, I had bright blue pants and deck shoes. She had tears and I had a hand to wipe them away. She had something she wanted to give me and I had something I wanted to take.
Maybe I knew it was love the moment she smiled through her tears at me on a Chicago curb. Or maybe it was in the Ferris wheel, kneeling at her feet as she pressed her hands to my face. Or maybe it was the moment I claimed a place in her body no other person had.
But the moment I knew for sure came later, after I’d fucked her for the first time, after the shower. As I brought her back to bed, eased into her tender cunt, and she arched in pain underneath me.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, worried.
“Yes.” And then a big smile in the dark. “Do it harder.”
She was like me.
It was in the way she twisted underneath me. It was in the way she scratched and shoved at me, bit me, came like a shot when I bit her. She wanted the pain, she wanted the rough, she wanted the struggle. I wouldn’t know until later that she only wanted the struggle with me, that with Ash—just as I was—she was fully submissive. I wouldn’t know until later that with each other, we found something we couldn’t find with him.
I only knew then that something in her body, her heart, was identical to my own. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t let her go.
“Where’s Jenny?” I asked as Ash slid into his seat next to me. We were at a coffee house near our hotel; I’d called him the moment I’d woken up to an empty bed, my chest full of panic that my Chicago angel had melted away in the morning sunlight. But she hadn’t—in fact, she’d even left her number and her hotel address in a note—and in my relief, I discovered something new. Something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Excitement.
I was excited about her.
And Ash was my best friend. I wanted him to know all about it, and if there was a small, spiteful part of me that also wanted him to witness my happiness without him, I didn’t admit it to myself.
Ash took a long time to answer my earlier question, looking over the pastry menu, and then he sat back. “I wanted to talk to you without Jenny here.”
For the first time, I noticed how haggard he looked, his eyes bloodshot as if he’d been drinking or up all night or both. “But I want to hear about this angel of yours,” Ash said, forcing a smile. “You wouldn’t have called me unless she’s amazing.”
Something was definitely off, something more than him being jealous of me with someone else, no matter how much I wanted that to be the case.
“Ash, is everything okay? You seem…” Hung over. Troubled. Miserable. “…off.”
He ran a hand over his face, palm and fingers passing over the scruff covering his cheeks and jaw. I shivered to remember what that scruff had felt like against the most intimate corners of my body.
“Do you remember those emails I kept with me when we were deployed in Carpathia?” he asked after a minute. “The ones I printed out?”
“The ones from the teenager?”
He looked down at the table. “I saw her yesterday.”
I saw everything I needed to see in his face. The defeat. The guilt. The shame.
The longing.
“Did you…?”
He looked up, his stare knifelike. “I didn’t fuck her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t,” I said, giving it more thought. “You’ll be faithful to Jenny until death do you two part.”
He sighed. “Don’t say that. Because I did…touch her.”
