Page 47 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I can tell you need to come, I see how much it’s killing you to hold back.
Isn’t she sexy? Isn’t she beautiful? Doesn’t she feel good?
Don’t you want to come inside her? I’d let you, you know, I’d let you come as much as you needed to.
He takes over holding her wrists behind her back, which means I have a hand free to toy with her firm little clit, all full and needy for attention. It only takes a minute or two with my thumb, and the blush creeping up her stomach and down her chest ignites into a real, frenzied heat. And it only takes another minute for that heat to combust into a pure flaming delight that leaves her gasping and shuddering on top of me, and Ash says in my ear give it to her and I do, I give it all to her. I fuck up into her with three hard thrusts, and with a strangled cry and with a painful shudder deep inside my body, I throb and pulse and spill five months worth of waiting into the woman I love.
THIRTEEN
EMBRY
now
I might be dead.
There’s a moment when my vision dims and my hearing muffles and all I’m aware of is the sweet weight of a person I love slumped against me and there’s nothing, not even a heartbeat, between us. For a handful of breathless, mindless moments, there is only her.
And then I breathe and come back to life. There is me. There is Ash next to us, wearing a look that I’ve learned from long experience means the best kind of danger.
“How does that shower sound now?” he asks.
It sounds like heaven. I tell him so. And together we help shift a boneless, happy Greer off my lap and into the shamelessly lavish presidential shower (part of a renovation done by Ash’s predecessor; the ascetic Maxen Ashley Colchester would shower in a plastic box and never think to complain.)
Once we have an orgasm-drunk Greer settled under a warm spray of water, we step out and start undressing, me leaving my tuxedo in careless piles and him neatly flattening and folding each article of his clothing, even his socks. His boxer briefs are the last to go, and when he catches me staring at the firm curves of his ass and the heavy pole of his erection, he laughs. It’s a rare laugh from him, one that’s all happy memories and teasing eyes, and it hooks and yanks at my heart.
“How many times, Embry?” he asks, his hidden dimple peeking out. “Surely you’re bored of me by now.”
“If you’re asking how many times I would have to watch you undress to get bored,” I say softly, “you already know there’s no number high enough.”
His laughter fades, his dimple disappearing but his lips still curling into a bewitching smile. “All these years…I think I know every crook and edge of you. And then you go and say things like that, and it’s like I’m falling in love for the first time all over again.”
I close my eyes. I have to; I can’t look at him and hear him say words like that at the same time or I’ll dissolve. “Ash…”
“Tonight’s just pretend, little prince. Remember?”
I open my eyes. “I know better than that,” I say in a tight voice. “Everything with you has been real from the start. From the moment you pinned me against that wall, everything was real.”
His eyes flame a bright, brilliant green, and it’s a miracle that I’m not on my knees right now, it’s a miracle that I’m not running my tongue along every curve of his throat and chest. “If it’s real,” he says, taking a step toward me. “What then?”
“If it’s real,” I say, and I can’t believe I’m saying it even as I utter the words, “then it’s just for tonight.”
Stupid. I’m so fucking stupid. Just for tonight is as much of a lie as pretend.
The way I love Ash and Greer is not the kind of love that fades into a dusty memory, it’s not the kind of love that can be fenced in and patrolled. And tonight will feed it, nurse it, make a strong thing even stronger, and how we aren’t all going to be crushed to death by this, I don’t know.
“If it’s just for tonight,” says Ash quietly, “then I want you to say it to me.”
I pass a hand over my face. How, after he watched me fuck his wife, while I’m literally naked, can he make me feel more vulnerable than I already am? How? But he has and he is, and it’s the fucking truth and I want to say it to him and if we lived a different life, a life when two soldier boys could fall in love and get married and buy a horse farm, then I would tell him so often he’d beg me to stop.
“I love you,” I say.
He lets out a breath like he’s been struck. “And I love you.”
“Achilles.”
“Patroclus.”
And then he kisses me, hot and fervent, slamming me up against the outside wall of the shower.
