Page 94 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
He stops pacing and unlaces his hands, staring down at his empty palms. I wonder if he’s remembering the way my jacket lapels felt bunched in his hands as he arched into me.
My chest fills with cement.
Be strong. Remember Greer’s face in Carpathia, remember her tears.
“I should have known,” he whispers to himself. “I should have known.”
“Ash.”
He turns to me, and there’s so much anger and hurt rolling off him that I take a step back. “This is always how it is, Embry. Always. I give and I give, and you hurt me. You throw it back in my face.”
“Ash.”
“No,” he says with fury. “Don’t. You do this over and over again to me. I propose and you reject me, I propose again and you reject me again. I let you into my marriage, my heart, my bed, and then you leave me. More than leave me, you’re going to try to steal something for yourself that should have been ours.”
Despite his fury, his eyes glint with tears, and I feel like I’m being skinned alive. “I love you, Ash,” I whisper. “I always loved you.”
“Really? Because I always loved you, and apparently that wasn’t enough.”
I take a deep breath, reaching for the resolve again. “You make it sound like this is easy for me. It’s not fucking easy, Ash, it’s breaking my fucking heart. It broke my heart to tell you no both those times, I hated myself for it, but I had to—just like I have to do this now. Can’t you see that?”
I’m pleading now, both my hands spread wide, as if I’m begging for him to take them in his own.
He doesn’t. He sets his jaw. “I don’t see that. Not at all. I see you being selfish the way you’ve always been selfish. You only care about yourself, and you never really—cared—about me.” His voice breaks over these last words and he turns away so I won’t see his face.
The words wreck me, seal me in pain and bury me in the mud of my own sins, but at the same time, they fucking infuriate me. How dare he accuse me of selfishness when he has no idea—no fucking idea—what I’ve done for him? The things I’m still doing for him?
I straighten up and say in as cold a voice as I can manage, “Merlin told me I couldn’t marry you.”
It takes a minute
for the words to sink in. Ash turns back to face me, one hand braced on his desk as if he needs to steady himself. “Excuse me?”
“Back in Carpathia. When I was on my way to base after rehab, he sat on the train with me and explained exactly why we couldn’t be together publicly. If you truly love him, then there’s nothing you can’t sacrifice. I knew he was right—hell, an idiot could see that you were meant to be somebody great. And if it had been now, this year, I would have told Merlin to go fuck himself. But back then…Ash, back then I didn’t know if you could do the things you were meant to do if the world knew about us. And even last year when you proposed…this country might not have re-elected you if they knew you were bisexual, and how could I have that on my conscience? You throwing away your dreams for me? I hate it, I hate it, but I made a choice with Merlin all those years ago. Your future over ours.”
He’s really leaning on his hand now, breathing hard. “I don’t…you didn’t…you really wanted to marry me?”
“Christ, Ash, I would have torn down those mountains with my teeth if it meant I could marry you. I would have moved to Canada with you or out onto a horse farm—I would have done anything, gone anywhere. There were days when it was all I could think of, having you all to myself, not hiding, just belonging to you the way we both wanted me to. But I couldn’t. I can blame Merlin all I want—and I do—but it was my choice at the end. You had to come first.”
“You should have told me,” he says.
“You would have ignored me! You were always so stupid and noble like that. If I’d told you, you would have shoved your own future aside and we would be raising horses in Montana.”
“And would that have been so awful?” he asks brokenly.
“You wouldn’t have ended the war at Badon. We wouldn’t have Greer.”
At the mention of Greer, his face clears. Even in the midst of all this, his love for her burns clean and bright like a hungry flame.
“It wasn’t your choice to make,” he says, looking up at me. “I don’t need to be protected, I never asked to be lied to. Jesus Christ, Embry, all those years I thought—I thought you didn’t love me as much as I loved you. And it hurt, God, it hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe sometimes. It was like trying to catch my breath underwater. I lived with that for years. Years.”
This is not what I ever expected upon this revelation. In the loneliest moments of the loneliest nights when I fantasized about telling him the truth of why I said no, I never imagined this.
“A thank you might be nice,” I say, a bit sullenly.
“A thank you?” he demands, rounding on me. “You want a fucking thank you for breaking my heart? For keeping me in agony for years?”
“I was in agony too!” I say, my voice edging toward anger. “It killed me to do it, but I did it for you!”
