Page 122 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
My joy and awe are still so fucking real I’m throbbing with them, but for the first time, I feel a surge of vivid, gnawing hurt. “Why?” I whisper. “I thought—Ash, we thought you were dead. Embry blamed himself for months. I buried you, I—”
“Shhh,” he says softly, pressing his forehead against mine. “I know. And I’m so fucking sorry, I really am, except…I’m also not. I did it for a reason.”
“What possible reason?” I cry. “What possible reason could there be?”
“You,” he says simply. “And Embry.”
“I need more than that,” I tell him, a little fussily, which makes his eyes crinkle again. He hoists me a little tighter in his arms, holding me so easily, so gently, and even in my hurt and anger, I never want him to let me go.
“I realized the night before—” he has to close his eyes a moment before he continues. “The night before it happened. How much I loved you both…and how much I had wronged you both, however inadvertently.”
“Wronged? How could you think that?”
He sighs. “I had the privilege of meeting you and Embry at different times, having you both all to myself; I got to fall in love with you separately. But you and Embry have always had the shadow of me hanging over your love. I was present inside it even from the beginning.” He smiles sadly at me. “You never had the chance to love each other without me in between.”
I want to argue with him, I want to tell him that he’s wrong, but I think of the new, deep commitment Embry and I have hammered and forged since Ash’s absence, and how different it is from what we had before. Mature. Tailored to each other.
“If I survived, I knew that I wanted us to live forever as a three. And you and me had time as man and wife, and Embry and me had time as, well, as something anyway—but you and Embry needed that time too. And so it was my last gift to you. The time that I’ve gotten to have with the both of you, I wanted you to have with each other.”
“Your last gift to us,” I echo.
“Yes,” he says fiercely, “because I’m done giving now. I’m ready to take.” And his lips are hot and urgent on mine, setting my skin on fire and my pulse chasing through my veins. I’m suddenly terribly, squirmingly aware that I haven’t been spanked or bound or dominated in any way since my last night with Ash, and I’m going to combust without it.
Ash sets me down onto the grass so that he can kneel in front of me and press his head against our unborn child.
“Did you know?” I ask, running my hands through his thick black hair.
“Merlin told me, and it killed me to stay away. But I knew I wanted the two of you to marry first. That was very important to me. And I’m a bit of a prisoner here,” he says, looking up with a smile. “Since the world at large believes me dead and it’s better that way for all I’ve built if they keep believing it. But I didn’t want to wait a moment longer to see you again. To see this baby.”
“It’s yours,” I tell him softly.
The sunlight catches the tears glassing his eyes, and I catch them with my fingertips as they fall. “I don’t know if I can forgive you for staying away,” I say in a choked voice. “For leaving me. For the pain.”
He looks up at me through those long, perfect eyelashes, now sparkling with tears. “Just promise me that you’ll spend the rest of your life trying.”
Now I feel my own tears spilling to match his. “Deal.”
“And answer me honestly—did it work? Your new husband, do you love him as deeply as you love me?”
“Yes,” I admit, and the confession is all at once freeing and gutting. “Yes. I love him just as deeply.”
“Then I’ll take your rage and your hurt. I will gladly pay any price, because to know the two of you love each other as I love you is all I’ve wanted since the day we came together. Since that first night—Oh.”
He breaks off and I turn to see Embry standing several feet away, his hands by his sides and shell shock etched on his face.
“Achilles,” Embry says numbly.
Ash rises from his knees, and for the first time I really notice what he’s wearing, ragged jeans and a soft, tight T-shirt, and even dressed like that, even coming up from his knees, he still looks every inch a king.
“Patroclus.”
They stand there staring at each other for a minute, and then Ash crosses the distance to Embry in several long, powerful strides. There is a single second when the two of them seem to breathe in heaving, muscled tandem, and then their mouths are crashing together, Ash cradling Embry’s face, and Embry’s hands fisted violently in Ash’s shirt.
“How?” Embry keeps mumbling against Ash’s lips. “How?”
“I want to spend the rest of my life telling you,” Ash says. “Will you let me?”
And Embry nods and nods, his nodding turning into more kisses, and then the three of us are together, sharing one kiss, the same kiss
