God, the emails. Why was I so young and stupid? So ready to attach meaning to the things adults do without thinking twice about it?
“They were very memorable,” he says. “Two times in ten years might not sound like a lot, but it was to me…” He trails off, and my heart squeezes.
But I breathe a silent sigh of relief that he doesn’t mention the emails. I never did get a response to any of my messages, and I had assumed for years that he’d never received them, since he had been actually fighting a war at the time. The younger Greer spent too many hours brooding in the dark about those unread messages, but now as an adult, I pray he’s never even seen them.
“Something’s wrong,” he says, reaching out to tilt my face up to his. I realize that I was staring off into nothing.
Lie. Just lie.
But I hate lying. I try to find an answer that isn’t the whole shameful truth. “I’m embarrassed. Of how I acted when I was younger.”
A smile, surprisingly tender. “Is that all this is? Why you’re acting like you don’t understand why I want to see you?”
“I just…I thought about that kiss so much,” I whisper. “But I knew there was no way you would remember it. Why would you? You were an adult, a man, and I was just a child. And you’ve gone on to live this incredible life, to be a hero and now a leader, and you had your beautiful wife—”
Fuck! I swallow the rest of my words, wishing I could swallow up my own idiocy along with them. Of all the things I shouldn’t bring up, the late Jennifer Colchester was at the top of the list. And sure enough, Ash winces at the word wife. Just the tiniest bit.
“I loved Jenny,” he says quietly, letting go of my chin. And it’s then I notice the dark smudges under his eyes, the telltale signs of exhaustion in his face. He still has trouble sleeping, even after all this time. “And I miss her. It hurts me still that she died so young and in so much pain. But Greer, I won’t pretend that I ever stopped thinking about you. I can’t pretend that.”
“It was one kiss,” I say, shaking my head. “Why would you—”
He holds up a hand to stop me, and I fall silent. “I’m not going to let you do that,” he tells me. “You’re not allowed to dismiss what happened or tell me that it wasn’t worth remembering. I did remember. I do remember. And I won’t forget any second of that night.”
“It’s just so impossible to believe. That you—Maxen Colchester—remembered me. Thought about me.”
A noise leaves him, half heavy breath, half incredulous laugh. “We are meeting after all these years,” he says, “and you believe I haven’t been thinking about you?” He takes a step closer, so close that I could lean in and press my lips against his icy blue tie if I wanted. It’s nearly the same color as Embry’s eyes.
“Look up at me, Greer,” the President orders me. I do as he says. It almost hurts to look him full in the face, he’s so perfect, but it hurts more not to look.
“All the words that men use about women—enchanted, charmed, addicted—they don’t even begin to cover what I felt for you and your handful of shattered glass. I thought about you that night, and the next and the next, and when I was deployed to Carpathia, you were all I thought about. I built these fantasies in my mind where I would come home after the war and find you at whatever university you were at. I would kiss you until you were like you were that night at the party, begging me to do whatever I wanted.” His green eyes are dark, stormy, his pupils wide. “Years later when I finally came home, all I wanted was to find you. But things happened…the war started up again and I was promoted and Merlin needed my time and then I met Jenny…” He lets out a breath. “I had just proposed to her the night before I saw you in Chicago.”
Chicago. Also known as the night I met Embry. The night I lost my virginity.
“Ash, you don’t have to—”
“I do,” he cuts me off. “Because I don’t think you believe me. And it makes me a terrible man, wanting you after all this time, through all these years. Because I did want you, even while I was married to Jenny. I sought out your grandfather every chance I could, just to listen to whatever scraps of news he had about you. Whatever academic honor you’d been given, what you decided to major in, whether you wanted to move back to America or stay in England. And late at night, while Jenny slept next to me in bed, I’d replay our kiss over and over again. What it felt like to pin you against the wall. What your voice sounded like in my ear, all breathless and full of wonder, like I’d just given you a gift. And I would hate myself for it, but I couldn’t stop.”
His eyes search mine. “So why did I want to meet you today? Because I haven’t been able to stop wanting to meet you for ten years. Because I want you. I want to kiss you again. I want to learn everything about you, everything about what you love and hate, what you study, what you want for your future.” He reaches up, his thumb brushing against my lower lip. “I want you to be mine.”
I try to hide my shiver. He can’t know, he can’t possibly know, how those words roll through me, punch through my skin and crawl into my veins.
Be mine.
Not let’s date, not be my girlfriend. This would be more than anything that trivial, and Ash knew it.
But the exhilaration is chased by a quick, cruel voice.
Remember the times you’ve been hurt before?
There’s no way this can be true.
This is crazy.
Say no.
Leave.
I shake my head, but his thumb stays against my lip. I fight the urge to bite it or lick it. Instead, I meet his eyes and say firmly, “You don’t know anything about me, other than what I kissed like once. That’s not enough to build on.”
“Does it scare you that I thought about you as much as I did?”
I think for a moment. It doesn’t, actually, especially given how much I thought about him. Much more than thought—I wrote to him. I touched myself to the memory of him.
“No. Just, it’s so unexpected. I had no idea how you felt…”
His thumb sweeps across my lip a final time and then moves to the line of my jaw. “I was at war, Greer. And then I was married. It wasn’t something I could act on.”
I nod. “I get that.” But I don’t say anything else because my mind is racing faster than my pulse, stacking what I know against what I feel.
I now know that Ash has been as preoccupied with me as I was with him—for all these years. So preoccupied he wants to be with me now, and I can’t pretend this doesn’t make me dizzy. Like my blood is carbonated, like my body is fizzing over with feelings. Excitement, lust, relief. But those ten years didn’t just sail by—they left an indelible mark on me. I fell in love with Ash, only to watch him marry another woman. I slept with a different man, only to never hear from him again.
In short, this last decade has been a harsh lesson in guarding my heart, and I have been a very, very apt pupil. I have built walls around my feelings, barriers and bridges and moats, all to protect me from the possibility of getting wounded again.
So how can I honestly be thinking about saying yes to Ash? How can I—cautious, closed-off Greer—concede to being his? What if he hurts me again? What if he’s disappointed in me or falls in love with someone else?
And, the largest question of all, how can I try to date Ash with Embry in the background?
For the first time, Ash looks uncertain. “You’re thinking of reasons to say no, aren’t you?” he asks quietly. “Did that night not mean to you what it meant to me?”
I shake my head vigorously. “No, no. That night meant absolutely everything to me. And that’s why this is a bad idea. Aside from you being the President and having no time or space for some girlfriend, I’m scared that I’ll get hurt. I’m scared that we’ll find that we don’t have anything in common, that our kiss was just a fluke, and even after all that, that it won’t matter because I’ll still fall in love with you. I’ll fall in love with you even as we find out we’re all wrong for each other and I’ll be left broken-hearted over you a
gain—”
“Again?” he asks.
I try to look away, but he won’t let me. He keeps my face tilted towards his, lowering his own until our noses touch.
“God, if you only knew what it does to me to hear that you felt that way.” His voice is hoarse. “Tell me what I have to do to earn it back. Tell me what I have to do to make you as twisted up over me as I am over you. I’ll do anything. Anything.”
I can feel his breath against my lips. Warm and intimate. I should make him promise something, I should demand his fidelity or honesty or utmost care. But that would be too close to lying, and instead I admit the terrible truth.
“You don’t have to do anything, Ash. I’m already yours.”
He breathes out, a shudder going through him, and then he presses his lips to mine.
It’s nothing like our first kiss, and yet everything like it at the same time. I still feel soft and young and female as he pulls me close against his body. I still feel like I want to melt into him, dissolve into nothing and everything at once. And he still makes that low, quiet groan in the bottom of his throat, as if he can’t help himself, as if I’ve irrevocably weakened him by letting him touch my lips with his.
Our first kiss was impulsive, exhilarating and stunning, but unplanned, a kiss between strangers with no past or future. This time Ash kisses me with intent, with the promise of more, with the promise of a future and his affection and care. And I kiss him back as a woman, not as a girl, just as eager as I was then, but more experienced. All the more ready to surrender.
We break lips just for a moment, and I look up into his eyes. “Wow,” I whisper.
“Wow,” he laughs back at me.
“This is my first kiss in five years.” I don’t know why the confession is dragged out of me, but it is. I want him to know how much he meant to me, how much he means to me now.
I see the way his eyebrows pull together at my revelation, see the way he mentally tucks that information back to ask me about later, but for the moment, he only murmurs, “Then let’s make it count,” and lowers his mouth back down to mine. I smell the leaves and leather, feel the firm warmth of his mouth and the strength of his arms, and then I’m drowning in him. His certainty and his strength, his desire and his need. And then beyond a shadow of a doubt, I feel him drowning in me, feeling him giving over every atom of himself to my keeping. We are consumed and rebuilt all within the same moment of lips and hands fisting tightly in clothes.
A clearing throat interrupts us, and Ash reluctantly pulls away. I see a Secret Service agent waiting by the entrance to the garden.
“Mr. President, it’s time.”
Ash closes his eyes a moment and then opens them with a sigh. “I have a meeting with the Polish ambassador at four.”
“About Carpathia?” I ask. The war has been theoretically over for two years, but there’s no doubt that the region is still deeply volatile.
“Always about Carpathia,” he says with a rueful smile. “I’d rather spend the evening with you though.”
I want to ask when I can see him again—or more honestly, when I can kiss him again, but he beats me to it.
“Greer, my job—and the kind of man I am—I tend to ask a lot of the people I care for. My schedule is…well, it’s fucked. Constantly. I want to promise that I can see you right away, but that may not be the case.”
“I understand,” I say softly. “You forget that I know what it’s like for you better than most people.”
“I hate this,” he says suddenly, fiercely. “I want to take you home with me tonight, and I don’t want to wait to see you again.”
“Ash, really, I understand—”
“No,” he interjects. “No. I’ve waited ten years, and I refuse to wait any longer. If I send a car for you tonight, will you get in it?”
I think back to earlier, to my relief at not being smuggled into the White House like a mistress, like a dirty secret. Discretion is one thing, but is that what I want for myself? To be a late-night visitor? To be the hidden plaything of a man in power? I’ve stayed away from politics for years, built myself a nest in an ivory tower so I wouldn’t ever have to think about politics again, and I’m willing to surrender myself to the most famous politician in the world after one kiss?
But then I look again at Ash, at those green eyes burning down at me, and I realize that all this debating is pointless. Of course I’ll get in the car. Of course I’ll go to him. It almost feels like I don’t have a choice, like my choice was made when I was sixteen and pinned between the wall and an eager Army captain.
“Yes, of course,” I tell him. “I’ll go anywhere you want me to.”
Chapter Eight
The Present
When the car pulls up, I’m ready. I’m so ready that I’m trembling, part of me wanting to run and hide and the other part of me wanting to run straight to the White House so I don’t have to wait a second longer. I’ve showered, shaved my legs, put on makeup, taken off the makeup because it felt like too much, then put a little makeup back on…and still there’s so much time to kill. I change outfits at least three times, settling for a short blue dress of embroidered cotton with a flared skirt and cap sleeves. The short hemline and the nude high heels I pair with it are just sexy enough to signal how I’d like the evening to go, but the high neckline and sweet blue color are enough to claim innocence in case I’m wrong about what he wants with me.
Wants from me.
I pray with every cell in my body that I’m not wrong.
But at the same time, I find myself hoping the car doesn’t show. Because if it shows, if I get in it, then it’s all over. I’ll go from being Greer Galloway the academic to Greer Galloway, Presidential mistress. And the Beltway will smell the Galloway in me and finally suck me down into its swamp once and for all.
Headlights sweep across the living room, and for a moment, I consider locking the door from the inside and refusing to go out. Sending a message to Ash saying, “Sorry, but I can’t be part of your world.” Continuing my life of solitude and study.
But then I look around my living room—clean wood floors and loaded bookshelves, and the well-used fireplace—and I see the decades stretching out before me. The new Greer with her scars and all her reserve living lonely and empty, while the old Greer—a girl who wrote a soldier halfway across the world her darkest thoughts—suffocates silently and dies slowly under a veil of dust and term papers.
I go outside to the car.
The Secret Service agent has a faint smile on his face as he opens the door for me. “Good evening, Ms. Galloway.”
“Good evening,” I say a bit breathlessly.
And that’s the last we speak for the entire drive.
Growing up as Leo Galloway’s granddaughter, I’m not intimidated by Secret Service agents necessarily, but I do wonder what this one thinks of me, since it must be painfully obvious what’s going on. But he acts as if there’s nothing abnormal about a young blonde being summoned to the President’s side this late at night.
And then I have a terrible thought, a thought that twists my stomach. What if it’s not abnormal? What if I’m just another in a long line of women secreted into the Residence, like some kind of modern-day concubine? What if all of Ash’s talk about being mine, about wanting me, is just the game he plays to get women into his bed? He hasn’t publicly dated anyone since Jenny’s death, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been seeing women privately. I mean, how likely is it that a man like Ash—sexy and powerful—would be celibate for more than a year?
I have no right to be upset about it, but I find that I am. It was hard enough knowing he was with Jenny when she was alive, that she got to be the one next to him, the one kissing him, the one who heard his murmurs and moans late into the night. But that there might have been any number of women since then…
Suddenly feeling very lonely, I pull my legs up onto the car seat and rest my chin on my knees, an old habit from when I was a girl riding with Grandpa Leo
back and forth across Manhattan. But as much as I’d like to pretend I’m still a little girl safe with her grandfather, I can’t. Not with where I’m going. Not with who I will see when I get there. Even the city outside wants to remind me I’m not a child anymore, the sedate streets and stately parks a world away from the busy, messy capitalism of Manhattan.
It is beautiful, though, and I find myself lulled by the passing of gold and red trees, lamps wreathed by fog, sternly noble buildings rising together as we approach Pennsylvania Avenue.
And then the car is rolling through the gates, through the various security checks, and we come to a stop. I’m helped out by the taciturn agent and delivered to a young Latinx man wearing a tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses waiting by the door.
There’s something about his boyish, bookish face that makes me trust him immediately. But even though he looks kind, capable, and discreet, my stomach still clenches at yet another person being involved. Another person who thinks that I’m—what? A mistress? A whore? A weak, lonely woman?
“Ms. Galloway?” he asks.
It’s only the memory of Ash’s lips on mine that nudge me forward. “Hello,” I say. “It’s nice of you to meet me.”
He waves my words away. “I’m here all the time anyway. This is the first time I get to do something fun for the President.”
His words give me the tiniest edge of relief; maybe Ash isn’t secretly fucking his way through Washington’s eligible women after all.
“I’m Ryan Belvedere, but everyone calls me Belvedere because there’s like four Ryans on staff,” he says, his words coming out in the fast pattered rush of the chronically busy. He sticks out a hand, which I shake. “I’m President Colchester’s personal aide,” he continues. “He wanted to be the one to greet you, but his meeting with his foreign policy staff has gone late. He sends his apologies, but it was necessary business after his meeting with the ambassador, I’m afraid.”
Carpathia, I thought. He’s had serious news about Carpathia from the Polish ambassador.
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