American Queen
Don’t make him suffer for loving you. I don’t.
Ash knew all along. Ash always knows. And instead of reacting in any number of fair or understandable ways—with demands or denial or coldness—his reaction instead has been to be honest about his feelings. To share. To stay and not pull back. To remain in relationship with a best friend and a fiancée who secretly love each other.
All of a sudden, my heart hurts for Ash most of all. As if it weren’t enough to be President, to have to shoulder the burden of us, Embry and me, and still remain loving and honest as he did so?
Well, honest about everything except whatever exists between him and Embry.
I feel impaled with all these contradictory feelings, and I can’t fight it any more.
“Yes, I love you,” I admit brokenly. “I fell in love that night in Chicago and I couldn’t stop being in love, even after you abandoned me. I couldn’t stop being in love with you even when I started seeing Ash. Yes, I want you. All the time. I want you both, I want you and Ash, and I can’t stop myself from all this wanting, even though it’ll damn me to hell. And I almost like it when you fuck all those other women because it gives me a reason to hate you, to feel like, just for a moment, I’m free from loving you. But I’m lying to myself. I’m never really free. You could walk in smelling like another woman—tasting like her—and if I could, I’d still throw myself at your feet.”
I can see that I’m wrecking him, every word a slice across that beautiful face as we whirl across the dance floor.
“It makes me desolate, Embry, hollow and hurting and I hate myself sometimes but I can’t stop wishing for you. I feel like a liar. Like a snake or a…I don’t know, a man eater or something.”
That coaxes a faint smile to that perfect mouth. “I don’t think you can be a man eater if you only eat two men.”
I look up at him and at that smile, and my courage finds me.
Now.
Tonight.
It can’t wait any longer.
“I saw you and Ash on Christmas Eve.”
He actually stumbles as we dance, missing a step and quickly correcting himself. “What?”
“Under the mistletoe. I had been asleep, but I woke up and decided to go find something to eat…and instead I found you kissing him.”
He lets out a breath. “Greer. Wait. It’s not…”
“It’s not what I think?” I look up into those blue eyes. “The two men I love aren’t also in love with each other?”
Eyelashes down and then back up. “I don’t know if he loves me,” Embry says, as if that’s a real answer. “And it hasn’t happened since. Or before. I mean, before like when you and Ash were dating.”
“So it was the first time since Ash and I started dating. But you have kissed before that?”
“This really should be something you and Ash talk about,” Embry says, and there’s a wild discomfort in his voice, the repressed panic of a cornered animal.
“But it’s your story too,” I point out. “And now it’s mine. I deserve to know, Embry. We haven’t so much as talked about the weather without Ash in the room, but you think it’s okay for you two to sneak off and make out in the dark?”
The words are angry. Hell, I’m angry all over again.
“No,” he says wretchedly. “It’s not okay.”
“Then tell me the truth! Don’t I at least deserve that?”
He gives a ragged sigh. “What do you want to know?”
“All of it. Everything. Why you kissed that night. Your first kiss. If you’ve fucked. If you still want to fuck.”
The expression on his face is a mangle of panic and apology and lust, and on him, it looks beautiful. Sensual and haunted. Before I can stop myself, I slide my hand up to his face, my fingertips ghosting across his perfect cheekbones and chiseled jaw. He swallows.
“It started in Carpathia,” he says. “In the village of Caledonia. Do you remember it?”
“The battle where he saved you.”
“It wasn’t a battle. Not like you’d normally think of. It was almost a massacre, a complete ambush. The village was evacuated, and we thought it was empty. Our plan was to establish a presence there and then begin moving up the valley, to where we thought the Carpathians were encamped.”
“But they were there.”
“They were there,” Embry confirms, his face shadowed with the memory. “They waited until we were doing a building check, this apartment tower, and then they started picking us off. We sheltered inside to fight back, which had been their plan all along. You couldn’t walk through this place without tripping claymores left and right and they’d taken out the windows on the lower floors so they could throw in grenades.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, shaken. It’s one thing to watch war on television, to listen to the generals testify in Congress, to read articles from embedded journalists. But to hear a soldier speak about it is such a stark reminder that all those explosions and fires, all that rubble and broken glass—that happened around people. To people. Real men and women, dead or injured, exposed to the most depraved barbarity imaginable.
The music changes to a slow waltz, and Embry unconsciously changes his steps to match the music. I follow suit, and he keeps talking. “Ash saved us. He was the only one to think of the elevator shafts. Everyone wanted to go up to the roof, wait for a helicopter, but Ash insisted it was too dangerous. What if a Carpathian helicopter came first? He sent everyone down to the service floor and told them to go out the basement windows, but only if they faced the forest and only once he said so.”