Page 68 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“Ash fucked me on the floor until I screamed. Then he spanked my ass and fucked me again. We were thinking of you and Belvedere the whole time.”
I groan. “My dick hurts too much to fuck again but I’m hard.”
“I can help,” Greer says sweetly, and in an instant she’s climbing over me, settling her wet cunt over my face as she sucks my sore erection into her mouth. And I’m back to zero stamina again, but luckily she is too, and after a few pulling sucks, I’m jetting down her throat as she’s fluttering against my tongue.
And then she’s snuggling back into my arms like nothing happened, nuzzling against my chest. If I were a big cat, I’d be purring right now. Warm and sex-sleepy, with my mate all warm and sex-sleepy herself against me.
“Embry,” she says as I start to drift off. “There’s something you should know. About Abilene.”
That kills my purr instantly. “What is it?”
I can’t see Greer’s face because it’s still cradled against my chest, but I sense her hesitation. “A while ago, I met with Dr. Ninian.”
Dr. Ninian. The White House doctor who helped Abilene drug me the night Galahad was conce
ived. Ash had fired her discreetly, although he’d wanted to do much worse, but he’d stopped at termination because I asked him to. Because I couldn’t have something like that hanging over my head during the campaign.
“She’s agreed to go to the police, after I threatened to on her behalf. But I’d been stalling, because I didn’t want to drag it into the open during the election.”
“But then Abilene went public about Lyr,” I guess.
“She has to be stopped, Embry. And even if you refuse to press charges, the tampering with medical records and collusion to commit a crime might be sufficient to send her away. At the very least humiliate her enough that people stop trusting her.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell Greer. “If she goes to jail, if she’s humiliated and friendless—she will always be dangerous. Isn’t it safer to keep her satisfied for now?”
“I’m not asking your opinion on this,” Greer replies. “I’m just warning you that it’s coming. Maybe in the next couple of weeks. I don’t want to hurt your campaign, but I don’t have a choice—I don’t know what she’ll do next, and sometimes I worry that she might do something extreme. Hurt someone like she tried to hurt me through Melwas.”
My arms tighten around her. “I won’t let that happen. I have her watched, Greer, I have every possible communication line tapped and observed. She can’t hurt anyone while I’m still around.”
Greer doesn’t answer, and I know it’s because she doesn’t believe me, and I’m trying to think of something else to say to reassure her—and also to dissuade her from any scheme of going to the police—when she speaks again. “I saw the protestors outside the hotel tonight.”
I roll to my back and groan up at the ceiling. “I know.”
“Embry, please be careful. Those Carpathian extremists—they’re dangerous.”
It was Carpathian extremists who murdered her parents when she was a child; she has every right to be nervous about them. And I wish I could say something to reassure her, but what can I say? I intentionally adopted an aggressive anti-Carpathian platform. It’s what I believe in, it’s what I am running on, even though I knew it would make enemies both abroad and at home. The protestors here at home are not a real bother; they’re the usual protesting types, holding up signs about warmongering and the military-industrial complex and xenophobia and whatever else. It’s the Carpathian extremists that perhaps I should worry about.
I mean, I don’t actually worry. For one, my Secret Service protection starts tomorrow, and for another, it’s a long stretch from online threats to real danger. I spent several years with their bullets and bombs and ruined towns full of trip-wire explosives. I’m not worried about a few assholes venting on Twitter.
“Please, Embry,” she says, her fingers running along my hairline, following the topography of my temples and ears and cheeks. “You’re not invincible.”
“I know I’m not.”
She makes a noise. “I forgot. It’s not that you think you won’t get hurt, it’s that you don’t care if you get hurt.”
“Now you sound like Ash.”
I hear her temper flare in her words. “Because I have the audacity to care about you? The audacity to want you alive?”
“You’d be the only one,” I mumble, not because it’s true, but because she’s pushing buttons I don’t want pushed and so it’s easier to hide behind self-loathing.
“Oh, shut up,” she says, and she’s annoyed, but I hear amusement in her words too. “You can’t pout your way out of being loved. Not with me or Ash…or Galahad.”
I soften at the mention of my son’s name. At the sound of his name on Greer’s lips. With an urgency that’s just as heartbreaking as it is selfish, I want them to meet. I want to see her holding him, reading to him, giggling with him. I want to see if he makes her light up the way he makes me light up, I want to see if she’s just as blown away by his sweet and shy curiosity as I am.
“Have you…will you ever forgive me for him?” I ask, my mouth dry. Suddenly I need to know, need to know right away. “Will you ever be able to forgive him for his mother?”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” she says, and her voice is all clarity, all warm honesty and earnest truth. She guides my hand to her stomach, which is flat and narrow. “I wish—I mean, there aren’t enough wishes in the world for how much I want to have a child with you and Ash, but I do wish for it. I’ve lit about every candle in St. Thomas Becket, I’ve prayed to every patron saint of women and childbirth and children. I can’t say I still don’t feel a stab of jealousy when I think of him, because I do. I do feel that, but I also feel like I want to love him and there’s nothing that will ever make me stop loving you. And whatever Abilene’s done, she’s still my cousin, which means Galahad is my family too.”
