Page 14 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“Will you say goodbye to Greer for me?” he asks, breaking the silence. “I…I don’t think she’ll want to talk to me after she finds out I’m going to run against you.”
“And that you’re marrying the woman who arranged for her abduction.”
He exhales, as if he’d forgotten. “And that.”
“No.”
“Ash—”
“I won’t talk to her for you, Embry, and here’s why: we made vows on my wedding night. The three of us. Together. We promised each other that we would try, that we wouldn’t run away.”
“I also said we had to be honest the minute it stopped working.”
“We said we would love each other as long as we could, in all the ways that we could, as best as we could. Maybe you’ve stopped loving me, but have you stopped loving Greer?”
“I haven’t—” My heart jolts hopefully, but then he interrupts himself, and I feel the meaning of his next words like a halberd through the chest. “I still love Greer.”
I rub my thumb across my forehead, counting one breath, then two. Yes, I’m still alive. Yes, I heard him make sure not to say that he loved me. And yes, I can do the right thing even though all I want is to storm over to his office right now and refuse to leave until we’re both covered in sweat and cum.
“If you still love Greer, then I don’t consider you released from your vows to her. You still owe it to her to try.”
“You’re not the keeper of my vows,” he mumbles.
“Fine. Then I’m reminding you of them. You want to be free of any promise to love me? You can be free. But I’m not freeing myself from my vow of loving you, and I doubt Greer will either, once she comes to terms with it all.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that maybe we aren’t a three right now, and maybe we’ll never be again. But you and Greer still have my blessing to love each other as fully as you used to.”
“Are you…condoning our infidelity?” He sounds so suspicious, and that almost makes me smile too, despite everything, because it’s so very Embry Moore to be suspicious. I can easily picture those blue eyes narrowed in wariness, that mouth pulling into a doubtful frown.
“I’m a jealous lover, Embry, and an even more jealous husband. I will be jealous and it will hurt, but at the end of the day I don’t consider it cheating, not really. I was there in that room too; I knew what it meant to promise what we did. And to me it means that we all still try as hard as we can to love each other.”
“So if Greer and me…?”
“Yes.”
“And you and Greer…”
“Will continue to live as man and wife.”
There’s a pause before he asks it, and I feel that pause with every cell in my body. “And us?”
I try to keep my voice steady as I ask, “What about us?”
“God, you know what I’m asking.”
“Not loving you isn’t on the table for me, Patroclus.”
Embry doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to. I didn’t say it expecting an answer, I only said it so that he would know. My cell phone buzzes in my pocket and I pull it out to check it.
Mrs. Colchester’s plane just landed, says Belvedere’s text. She’ll be at the White House in forty minutes.
Greer.
Something deep inside me unlocks for the first time since last night, clicking open walls and doors that I didn’t even know I’d slammed shut. Letting out mercies and honesties and tendernesses that I would have kept hidden out of hurt or guardedness just moments before.
But that hurt and guardedness has to stop. I’m here in this chair listening to Embry resign because I’ve taken too much for granted, his love and his faith and his loyalty, and today is the day when that changes. I'm going to do better, love him harder, prove over and over again that I deserve his devotion and trust, and I'm going to do it even if it still means he won't ever come back.
