Page 26 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
now
Her safe word.
Her escape.
Everything stops. My mouth, my hands. My heart. I lower her leg carefully and make sure she can stand, and then I drop back onto my heels, hands up and open. My stomach knotting in guilt. We have the safe word so it can be used, but the idea of having done something to force her to use it…it tears at my conscience. I’d rather eat my own liver than harm her, and normally I’m so careful about reading her body and her face when we scene, and I must have missed something, some sign—
“Ash, look at me.”
When I look up into her face, I don’t see the face of a woman who’s hurt. Instead, she looks concerned, like I’m the one hurting, and she drops her fingers to play with the hair near my right temple.
“You asked to submit,” she says softly. “But you weren’t submitting just then.”
I’m on my knees and my chin and lips are wet with her, and she’s right.
I wasn’t submitting.
“It only works if you want it to work,” she says, twining her fingers into my hair and pulling. On instinct, I turn my head and nip at the inside of her wrist. She laughs, but her face goes serious.
“Do you want it to work?”
Did I want this to work? I thought so, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s impossible for me to yield, even as some sort of twisted emotional rehearsal for yielding on a larger scale. Maybe it’s impossible to be any other man than I am.
Except even the thought of it being impossible stiffens my spine. I don’t believe anything is impossible. Not for someo
ne who is brave or disciplined or honorable or blessed, and I want desperately to be all of those things.
“I want it to work,” I whisper. I catch her hand again, not to bite this time, but to kiss each and every fingertip, lingering long with scrapes of my teeth and brushes of my lips until she’s shivering and pressing her legs together under her dress. “But you have to help me. It is hard to be anything other than what I am.”
Which is why I need to feel it, I think, peering up at her and hoping she can see the reckless anguish in my face. I have to know what it feels like, at least once. How can I rule if I don’t know what it feels like to be ruled?
Greer examines my face a moment more, her red lower lip caught between her teeth. I see the thoughts and decisions flit through her eyes like determined birds. “Okay,” she says. “Stand up and undress for me.”
I do.
It is a foreign feeling, to undress in front of her like this—at her command, at her pleasure. As I shuck off my jacket and toe off my shoes, I have to remind myself that this was what I wanted. This mirror of our normal lives, this reflection of our marriage, the one where she undresses and I watch. Now it is her standing, swathed in silk like armor, and it is me slowly laying my own armor aside. I tug my cufflinks off with practiced care, I slide the bow tie off with deliberate focus. Like a good submissive, I take enough time to put everything away neatly, but I move fast enough for my mistress’s pleasure.
And it’s her pleasure indeed that I hear as I pull off my shirt and expose my bare torso. It’s pleasure coming from her mouth as I unzip my pants and my cock pushes through the placket, still hard and dark and thick. It’s pleasure panting through her body as I straighten up to my considerable height and permit her to see almost every inch of my naked flesh.
“We’ve been married for three months, and I still feel like I’ve hardly ever seen you naked,” she says with a smile, biting that lip again. “I’ll never get bored of it.”
She steps forward and presses her hands to the tight flats of my stomach; she lets her fingertips trace the feathered lines of my oblique and serratus muscles. She drops kisses along the swoop of my collarbone and on my nipples, which tighten at her touch. She runs a teasing palm against the underside of my penis, causing it to thicken and swell and bob, which delights her. She does it again and again and again, until the tip is flared dark and dripping, and I’ve never been teased, not like this. I’m the one who does the teasing, and all I want to do is grab her arm and spin her around and kick her legs apart. Fuck the adorable impertinence right out of her.
But I don’t do those things. I hold myself perfectly still. I force myself to feel it, to surrender to the sensation of being touched without touching back. To having no say, no jurisdiction over my own body. It’s shocking how difficult that is. How worrying it feels.
“You are so handsome,” Greer tells me, her eyes and hands all over me. My hips and ass and thighs and shoulders. “You make me so proud. I’m proud that you’re mine. So strong and so—” she circles my dick and gives me a stroke that has me breathless “—virile.”
Her words help, they smooth over the awkward self-consciousness I feel at my own lack of movement, my passivity. It’s hard not to feel useless, oafish even, standing tall and mute and hulking over her as I do, but the way she handles me and speaks to me reminds me that I’m only to worry about pleasing her right now, and I’ve already done that, simply by being myself. It is a weighty blessing to feel, knowing that your very existence is enough to make someone happy, and it shouldn’t be, because I feel that way about Greer and Embry. They don’t have to do anything to earn my love and affection because my love and affection simply bubbles up for them. They’ve already earned it, just by being themselves.
I’ve never considered that anyone might feel that way about me.
“On the bench,” Greer says, after she’s done petting and purring over me. “Flat on your back.”
I move as she asks, the air strange on my skin. I’m rarely unclothed like this—in bed or in the shower—but even during a scene, I’m usually still covered, and I feel vulnerable and exposed as I walk to the low, wide bench. I feel young. I feel small. And I’m neither young nor small.
This is what you wanted. Savor it.
And somehow as I lie on that bench, the wood cool against my bare back, ass, and legs, my cock leaking onto my belly, I manage to. Find it and savor it—the freedom past the self-consciousness. I knew it was there, of course, even as a teenager I knew that was how it had to work, and as a man, I’ve seen the dazed rapture of my lovers more times than I can count. I’ve known exactly what kinds of pain and pleasure, or mixture of the two, to inflict on someone in order to peel them open and leave them shivering, and I’ve even visited this place once or twice before under Mark’s tutelage at the club, although only briefly and with the distance of a scholar.
