Page 38 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I finish my cigarette and
grind out the embers on the patio with my gleaming Fendi dress shoe. “What happens next is I win that election. I keep Greer safe. And then I’ll know all of this has been worth it.”
THE NEXT MORNING is busy for everyone but me. Abilene, being an event planner, has planned a spectacle that would shame the Royal Family, something far from the elegant and restrained affair Greer insisted Abilene plan for her. No, this wedding is showcasing money and power—something both our families have in abundance—and the attention to detail is, I have to admit, masterful.
Too bad it’s all for a farce.
When Ash and Greer married, it was one of the worst and best days of my life. The heady combination of heartbreak and fucking before the ceremony had me whirling, the fevered hour I spent with the bride, the hour afterwards with groom as he kissed and bit me. It had been almost a full year since Ash and I had fooled around, excluding our kiss under the mistletoe, and it had been six years since I’d touched Greer like that. My body threatened to explode with it all, and as Ash wrestled me up against the wall in the small church dressing room, my body did explode.
Ash, stop, stop, I’m going to—
Yes, you are, little prince, I want you to. My dress shoes had slid against the carpet in between his legs, his mouth had been everywhere, licking every last trace of his bride off my face, and his hips had been angry and forceful against mine, his massive cock impressively thick and hard even through all the layers of our tuxedos. And it was in this grinding tangle of tuxedo-clad limbs and hot mouths that I came, right there in my pants.
Ash had been delighted, keeping me pinned against the wall with his teeth and powerful hips, panting through my every moan and shudder as if it were him who was coming and not me.
I want your cock to belong to me again, he’d growled then. I don’t want to miss a single orgasm of yours ever.
I’d been dizzy, flooded with too many hormones to think clearly. Ash, you’re getting married.
Weddings are promises, he’d said cryptically, and then ordered me to clean myself up. And so I’d stood through his wedding ceremony and endured his wedding reception, certain that day had been my last taste of paradise, and I was forever banished from the garden. Little did I know that the garden had been waiting for me all along, and that night when they let me inside their honeymoon suite, when we vowed together with words and flesh that we’d be married in this more elemental, important way, I realized that all along Ash had planned on this, on finally anchoring us to him in a way that fit our world best. As always, he’d found the most generous and vulnerable way to care for the people he loved.
And here I am, about to burn all of that down.
It is funny, I think as I pull the tuxedo out of the cleaner’s bag and start dressing, that even though I know I’m butchering everything we hoped and wished for that night, I’m still resentful that I’m alone before my wedding. Ash should be here. Even if it were to scowl at me, growl at me, mark me until I bled, I’d take it, because I’m so lonely without him and Greer, and I’m scared of what I’m doing today.
This is for Greer. This is for everyone, I remind myself. I have very good reasons for doing this.
Just.
It hurts.
As I’m sitting down to pull on my shoes, the door opens without a knock, and I don’t bother looking up. Out of all the women in my life, Greer is the only one who would knock, which means that it’s either my mother or my sister or my future wife, and therefore someone I’m not really in the mood to see.
“Embry,” Vivienne Moore says, and I sigh and look up at my mother.
“Yes?”
Vivienne Moore clicks over the marble floor to sit at dressing table nearby, perfect as always in a beaded dress of silver, her rich brown hair pulled back into a severe knot. Gray threads artistically through the rich brown, and the fine wrinkles near her eyes only make her look more stately and graceful. There are no smile lines around her mouth of course, because Governor Vivienne Moore only smiles for cameras and donors.
“Mother, I’m supposed to come seat you. That’s how it works.”
My mother glances up at the clock hanging on the wall. “We have fifteen minutes. I wanted to speak to you privately before we went out.”
I finish knotting my shoelaces and stand up. “If you’re here to talk me out of this, don’t bother. Morgan already tried.”
“I wouldn’t be so foolish,” my mother says calmly. “This is the only way to clean up the mess you’ve made, and the best chance you have at protecting your future. But I need to know a few things first.”
“There’s nothing to know—”
Vivienne Moore holds up a hand and I fall silent. “Please. Firstly, I need to know that you’ll send that baby to me the moment you feel he’s unsafe. Yes, I see you bristling at that, and no, I’m not insulting your ability to protect your son. I’m reaffirming it—if that baby is in any danger at all, the safest place is across the country, with his grandmother. Understood?”
She’s right, as defensive as I feel about it. I give her curt nod.
“Second, I need to know this purely for my own curiosity. That video of you and Greer Galloway Colchester…was it real?”
I flush, hating that I’m thirty-six and my mother makes me feel like a teenager. “Mother, that’s private.”
She stares at me with blue eyes that match my own. “I suppose that’s my answer, then. It was easy enough to see that you were in love with her, but whether the consummation actually happened, I couldn’t perceive. The third question, however—the one I’ve asked myself for years—is the most important one. Are you in love with Maxen Colchester?”
