Page 42 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
Greer unhooks her legs and slides down, squeezing my hand as she steps off to the side. The look she shoots me is encouragement and lust and everything I don’t deserve, and somehow I’ve ended up in some upside-down world where it doesn’t matter. I’m here and they’re here, and that’s all there is.
I meet eyes with Ash, still standing across the room, still obviously and deliciously erect. I see the corner of his mouth twitch, just a flash of that hidden dimple, and then he lifts his chin the tiniest bit. The meaning is clear: he won’t come to me. I have to go to him.
I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t for more than one reason: I’m not the man who kneels for him any more; I told him to his face that his authority no longer held moral value for me. I shouldn’t because I know better than I did years ago, and I know now that the bedroom games we play always have power in real life.
I shouldn’t go to him. But I do.
I walk to him, the waltz music swirling gently around us and the thick carpet crushing audibly under my shoes, and when I get to him, I stop when I’m just out of reach.
“How would you like to be greeted?” I ask, not sure what I want the answer to be—not sure of anything, actually, except that I never want to leave. I want tonight to play on a loop for the rest of my life; I want to live inside it forever.
“Oh,” Ash responds, “I think a kiss would do quite nicely.”
My heart lifts, I step forward, and I’m caught immediately by a hand at my shoulder. “Not my mouth,” Ash says. “That will take some earning.”
I stare at him, not comprehending at first, half expecting him to push me down to my knees and make me unbuckle his belt. But he doesn’t do either of those things, and out of the bottom of my eye, I see the movement of his foot.
I eye it doubtfully. “You’re joking,” I say.
“Hardly.”
I look back up to him and see his hidden dimple flash. “It’s just for fun, little prince,” he says quietly. “I won’t interpret your kiss as anything other than what it is.”
“Good,” I say. “Because this changes nothing.”
“Nothing,” agrees Ash.
And I get to my knees and I bend down and I kiss his foot. The skin is warm and clean, and underneath the slight pressure of my lips, I feel the slender rods of bone and plump give of veins and rigid ropes of tendons. How can a mere foot radiate so much power? So much perfect masculine strength? And yet it does, it does, and I could kiss his foot for so much longer than a few seconds—and I have in the past—but he pulls his foot away from me.
“Thank you, I enjoyed that,” he says, walking over to the bar cart by the window. I stay where I’m at on my knees, touching my lips, not ready to give up the feeling of his skin against them.
“Do you want a drink?” he asks. “We put some champagne on ice for you, although Greer’s already taken care of the first bottle.”
“Champagne sounds nice,” I say distantly, my mind still replaying the feeling of my lips on his feet. One day, I need to figure out why the fuck I love that feeling so much.
Greer floats past me to help Ash at the bar, and I stand and lean against the back of a nearby sofa, trying to regain some measure of control over my feelings.
“Have a seat,” Ash says over his shoulder. “We’ll be right over with your champagne.”
So I sit and watch the cutely domestic tableau of Ash opening the bottle and Greer hunting under the cart for three flutes. She jumps ever so slightly when the bottle pops, and Ash laughs at her, and then she sticks her tongue out at him, and his eyes darken into a shade I know all too well. “Careful, little princess,” he murmurs. “Or you’ll get yourself into trouble.”
Judging by the smile she can’t hide, even with her eyes cast demurely down, trouble is exactly what Greer wants. And I know the feeling.
Soon, the two of them are joining me in the sitting area, Ash handing me a flute of champagne and Greer settling on the sofa at a right angle to mine—I could reach out and touch her arm if I wanted. Ash stays standing in front of me.
“We should toast,” he suggests. “What to?”
“Not my wedding,” I say, and then realizing how much that revealed, I feel the tops of my ears warm with embarrassment. “Please,” I add. “Anything else.”
“Let’s toast to tonight then. The three of us together.”
“To tonight,” Greer says, leaning forward with an extended glass.
“Tonight,” I echo. And our glasses clink together with a bright, happy sound that I don’t deserve.
Ash and I drain our glasses and Greer sips hers and sets it aside. Then Ash settles on the sofa across from me, stretching an arm along the back and crossing a long leg over the other.
“I missed you,” he says straightforwardly. “I’m glad you came.”
