Page 100 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I sit. I don’t care how ridiculous it looks, me sitting on the damp wooden bridge, my coat bunching around my torso as I lean my head back against the railing. I just need to sit for a minute—just sit and think.
“If Embry dies, you won’t go to war with Carpathia, and all your hard work will stay in place. But if you give your life for his and he becomes the President…then he might very well go to war over your death.”
Merlin’s right. If Embry was willing to leave me and climb his way to power just to avenge Greer’s abduction, then I can’t even imagine what he would do in the face of my death at Carpathian hands. And I give a bitter laugh, because now I’m faced with the same choice he was two years ago—a person or a nation. One soul or three hundred million.
The king in me knows the right answer.
But the man in me does not.
“Of course…” Merlin says cautiously, “there’s always the chance that Embry wouldn’t go to war. That he’s grown and changed enough over the last two years. That if he knew it was your express wish that he keep the country at peace…”
“I don’t believe any of this,” I say, perfunctorily, because a small part of me is starting to believe. I don’t know why, and I shouldn’t, because it’s clearly lunacy, but despite all that, there’s this sliver of recognition inside me that I can’t dislodge or pluck out. This feeling at my core that he’s right, and no matter how fantastical, how delusional it sounds, that I’m somehow walking steps in this life that I walked fifteen hundred years ago. “I can’t believe it.”
Merlin sits next to me. “Close your eyes,” he says, and I do it, although not before shooting him a look that’s half begging him to stop this and half desperate for him to say more.
And I feel Merlin move around me, straddling my legs in a position that feels intimate in a way that isn’t sexual, necessarily, but vulnerable. And then he presses his forehead to mine. “Breathe in,” he says. “Breathe when I do.”
I breathe with him, and then he presses his lips to mine, and it’s still not sexual, it’s not a kiss, our mouths are still as we literally share breath, in and out, in and out, and then whatever curtain separates his mind from mine is pulled back, and I see everything. Swords and guns and castles and barracks, and a coolly beautiful queen and an impetuous prince and the White House and a flat-topped hill and Vivienne Moore’s lake house, and a bright green tor soaring over a glassy, fog-shrouded lake.
I see it all.
I see myself, and I see all the people I’ve loved and all the people I’ve fought, and all the ways that our lives have doubled back in on each other’s. I see all the ways we were the first time, all the ways we are now, and the shimmering silver threads that sew us together, twines of fate that restrain and chafe and anchor every heart to the other.
I see the beginning.
And I see the end.
TWENTY-FIVE
ASH
then
“It would be polite,” Merlin said, “to visit another parish in D.C. If you’re going to make such a point about going to Mass every Sunday.”
I leaned back in my chair. We were in the Oval Office, running through damage control about some ill-advised remarks one of our New Party senators had made, and then out of nowhere, Merlin had brought up my church habits. “It’s not a point,” I said, a little amused. “It’s a faith practice. I try to go every time I can.”
Merlin waved a disinterested hand. “It’s good for business, so I’m not trying to discourage you. But Mass is the same everywhere, right? It doesn’t hurt to make another parish feel special for hosting you.”
“Okay, I’ll have Belvedere make the arrangements,” I said, ready to move on to the next thing.
Merlin gave me a small smile, and in that smile, I got the sense that I was missing something important, that Merlin knew something I didn’t. “I’ve already made the arrangements,” he said. “Tomorrow you’ll be at St. Thomas Becket.”
IT HAD BEEN three weeks since Embry had pushed a ring back into my hand, and sometimes I didn’t know if I’d survive it. Loving him. Wanting him. Knowing that he didn’t love and want me as much or in the same ways, or if he did, that I’d never know why he couldn’t bring himself to marry me. It couldn’t be the politics, it just couldn’t—the man I loved wouldn’t pick something so petty and trivial over what we had—it had to be something else, something I couldn’t see or perceive.
But knowing there was a hidden corner inside the prince I’d spent fourteen years loving…Jesus, that hurt almost as badly as his rejection. I’d kept nothing from him, nothing except my relationship with God and the memory of a girl in London—and even those I’d shared as much as he’d asked for.
So at Mass that day, I wasn’t looking for a future wife, for the girl who stared up at Jephthah’s Daughter with me. I was looking at my prince. As we prayed, as we knelt. As he parted his lips for the priest and let the priest place a wafer on his tongue. I had to subtly adjust my swelling cock against my leg as I stepped up for my own turn, the sight of that white wafer on his pink tongue too much for my broken, hungry heart to stand.
And so it wasn’t until we were both back up in the balcony, watching the rest of the parishioners shuffle through the communion line that I noticed a glimmer of familiar hair in an impossibly complicated shade of gold.
Embry noticed at the same time, his shoulders stiffening over his folded hands and his eyes going bright. Alert.
Below us, the young woman took her communion, crossed herself, went back to her pew. She wore a sweater and a pleated skirt, not a blush-pink gown, and she was no longer a shy girl burning with desires she didn’t understand. She was lonely now. Cold. Pulled in, locked away.
Watching her made me sad and excited all at once. Sad because I’d never wanted to see that curious innocence dampened, but excited because I wanted to be the one to tease it back to the surface. She needed a Sir to care for her, to make her feel safe and loved so that she could blossom again. She needed someone to tend to her darkest needs, to transform them into something real and vital, she needed to be spanked and bound and fucked, and also petted and cherished and cuddled close to a Sir’s heart.
I could see it in every step, every sigh, every careful movement she made as she lifted the risers behind the pews into place or turned the pages in her missal. The same thing I’d seen in that London room years ago as she knelt in a sparkling pool of glass, the same thing I’d seen in Chicago when I fisted my hand in her hair and she said those magic words:
