American Prince

“Almost.”

“Where is she?”

She. Our Greer. Once again, I feel the hollow space in the bed where she should be, and I have a brief moment of amused anxiety, because if I can’t stand to be apart from her when she’s in the restroom, how on earth are the three of us going to survive the next two and a half years? Or shit—six and a half years if Ash gets re-elected?

“She’s in the bathroom,” I say, trying to suppress this new awareness of how hard our future is going to be. “I just woke up.”

Ash makes a noise in the back of his throat, and his hand moves on my stomach again. Moves down, sliding past my navel. My dick is hard now, hard and pulsing against the cool air.

“I love it when you first wake up,” Ash tells me, his voice no longer sleepy but still graveled and rough. “Your eyes look darker with your pupils that wide, and your cheeks get flushed, and your body…” His wicked hand brushes over my crown, swollen and dusky in the dark. “Your body always looks so willing for whatever I want.”

His hand closes over my shaft and squeezes, and I moan.

“So willing,” Ash repeats in a murmur, and then I expect him to flip me over and push into me, but he doesn’t. Instead he lets go of my cock and climbs over me, lowering his heavy, hard body onto mine so that our cocks are pinned between our bare stomachs and our chests press together. His lips pass over mine, the slightest brush, and then he does it again, smiling as I tilt my face up greedily to catch his mouth in a real kiss.

He teases me once or twice more, coaxing a frustrated whimper from somewhere deep inside me, and then he puts us out of our misery and lowers his mouth to mine, parting my lips with his and licking deep into my mouth. His kiss is slow, but possessive, and he drives the pace and the depth. I can barely breathe, he kisses me so deeply, but I don’t care. I don’t want to, don’t want any air that Ash himself hasn’t given me. After a few minutes of this, he pulls back slightly and then presses his forehead to mine.

“Oh, Embry,” he says, his voice cracking. “How much I’ve missed you.”

My chest cracks open along with his voice. “Will you ever forgive me?” I whisper.

“For what?”

It’s hard to speak the words, even in the dark. “For not marrying you.”

His breath leaves him. “Embry…”

“You can be honest with me,” I say, wanting to be his brave little prince. Just this once. “I deserve it.”

His hands frame my face as he pulls back to meet my eyes. “It will always hurt, Embry. I can’t pretend that it won’t. But surely you must know by now, and I’ve told you before…I’ll take you any way I can have you. If all you’ll give me is a few stolen nights, then that’s what I’ll take.”

My throat closes and I blink away from his gentle expression. I can’t handle it. Can’t stomach all the things he doesn’t know. He’s got it so wrong, who is hurting for whom, and I almost tell him. I almost tell him what happened all those years ago, about Merlin, about the real reason I couldn’t marry him. But the words stick in my clenched throat. I’ve told the lie too long for the truth to come easily now.

He interprets my silence as confirmation of his words. “And Embry, if both of us are in love with Greer, then this would have always been the best way. Maybe it was fate that everything came together in precisely this pattern. If we’d married all those years ago, we wouldn’t have her.”

I can tell he’s trying to make me feel better, and it’s so fucked up, so terribly fucked up that I’m the one who gouged a hole in his heart and he’s trying to comfort me. I can’t stand it. He doesn’t even know all the ways the world has been so cruelly unfair to him—he who deserves it least of all.

“Stop it,” he whispers, ducking his head down to nip at my earlobe. “Stop punishing yourself.” The nip turns into a real bite and despite my misery, my cock pulses against Ash’s hard stomach.

“Let me do the punishing,” he says, and oh God, yes please. Only at Ash’s feet can I feel like I’ve atoned for everything I’ve done wrong. Only under his merciless palm can I find mercy from my own thoughts.

His bites trail fire from my earlobe to my jaw, from my jaw to my throat, and then he starts working his way down my body, bites on my chest and stomach. His eyes glitter in the dark. “Do you want Greer to see?” he asks in between bites. I squirm under his mouth, feeling precum leaking out of my tip. “Do you want her to see what it looks like when you kneel?”

“Yes,” I moan, trying to arch to him. A cruel hand pushes me back down.

I fight it.

I struggle against it. I always struggle against it, actually. And then at the very end, when I’ve been broken, I feel it. The calm. The peace. The space Ash has carved out for me where there is no guilt, no self-loathing, no agony. Just the quiet and the love, his hand on the back of my neck and my tears drying on my face.

Greer, the perfect submissive, born to lead outside the bedroom and serve inside of it…would she understood if she saw the way Ash and I are together? She submits because she feels safe that way, because she was born to submit, but I submit because I was born to suffer. Because I like suffering.

Because I like the fight and I like the defeat that follows.

“Yes,” I repeat, once Ash has clamped his bruising hands around my hips so I can’t move. “Please.”