American Queen

I turned around to see Embry Moore walking to me, my phone held in his outstretched hand. Like Ash, he wore a fitted button-down shirt, but unlike Ash, he’d layered a gray vest and gray blazer on top—both the shirt and jacket sleeves rolled up to the elbow. With the cuffed sky-blue pants and loafers, he looked like a playboy let loose from his yacht, and even in my current emotional state, I couldn’t help but appreciate his graceful and lanky male form as he strode confidently toward me.

“You dropped this,” he said in that sophisticated purr, a purr that belied money and education and privilege.

“Thanks,” I muttered, taking the phone with one hand as I tried to wipe my face with the other.

“Are you okay?” he asked, ducking his head a little so he could look into my downturned face.

“I’m fine,” I snapped, turning and starting to walk again. It was unbelievably rude to leave him like that, I knew, but I couldn’t help it. It was just a testament to how fucked up tonight had become.

After a few steps, my tears finally started to slow. I had a plan—I had my phone back—and if I could just make it back to Grandpa’s hotel, I could cry until my pain dried up and my body went limp. I just had to make it there was all, and that started with getting a cab.

I swung towards the road, and to my utter shock, Embry Moore was right behind me, his hands jammed into the pockets of his ridiculously blue pants. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, concerned. “I feel constitutionally unable to leave you alone like this.”

“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“But what is anyone’s business, really?” Embry mused philosophically. “That’s the first question man ever asked God, you know. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper’?”

I snorted, the derision somewhat undercut by the tears and snot that accompanied it. “It was a rhetorical question asked by a murderer to stall a missing persons investigation. I wouldn’t start with Cain as your entry point into the fundamentals of humanity.”

“John Steinbeck did. Are you saying Of Mice and Men is a bad book?”

“I’m saying that the parallels to be drawn from the world’s first murder to migrant farm brotherhood to us standing on a Chicago curb right now are nonexistent.” But despite myself, I found my lips tugging up into a smile.

“Well, now you’re just being deliberately uncreative,” he pouted. It was an unfairly sexy look on him.

“Also, Steinbeck once ended a book with an adult breastfeeding scene,” I pointed out, needing to say something before I started staring at his perfect, full mouth.

“To illustrate the human condition!” he exclaimed with mock frustration. “Who hasn’t breastfed a little bit to understand the dehumanizing depths of poverty and displacement?”

“Me. I haven’t done that.”

“Well, me either, but maybe if I buy you a couple drinks tonight we could change that for each other.” He waggled his eyebrows, and the whole thing was so ridiculous that I giggled.

“I’m not letting you breastfeed from me,” I said, wondering how this conversation got so strange and funny, and also wondering when I’d stopped crying, because I realized I had.

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” he said with a pitying shake of his head. “I obviously meant that you would breastfeed from me.”

I giggled again. “I didn’t peg you for the kinky type.”

“You aren’t pegging me at all. That’s our current problem.”

And it was a joke, and he said it with that crooked dimpled grin, but suddenly my mind was filled with the image of Embry underneath me, moaning and panting, and heat filled my cheeks.

He was still talking. “Can I tell you about my actual kink?”

I nodded a little uncertainly, realizing that I’d stepped away from the curb and was facing him completely now.

“Well, the kink that really gets me off is taking gorgeous strangers to get hot dogs on Navy Pier. Sometimes if I’m really kinky, we ride the Ferris wheel too.”

Was he saying that he wanted to do those things with me? “I imagine the porn for that particular kink is woefully lacking.”

“It is. I only get my fix in real life.” He stepped closer to me and offered his arm, and even through the shirt and blazer, I could see the firm swells of muscle. “What do you say? You, me, hot dogs and more Steinbeck-bashing?”

Yes.

It was incredible that as much as I wanted to hide away, as much as I wanted to cry and wail and gnash my teeth, as much as Ash filled every breath and thought with his face, I wanted to say yes. Embry was so funny and smart and effortlessly charming, and I felt better just for these last five minutes with him. Not to mention how flattering it was after everything that someone as famous and interesting as Embry wanted to spend time with me.

Also, he was so fucking hot.

But— “Don’t you have a birthday party to be at?”

His eyebrows pulled together, puzzlement sliding into understanding. “Ah. I’m guessing if you know who I am and what party I should be at, you came from there yourself?”

I looked back toward the street, not wanting to talk about it. “Yes.”

“Ah.” And then he thankfully, thankfully left it at that. “So what do you say? I mean, if you can play hooky from the party, so can I.”