“I completely understand,” I say.
“I knew you would. You’re Leo Galloway’s granddaughter, huh? What was that like?”
“What’s it like working here?”
Belvedere glances around the nondescript entrance we’re standing in. “Less glamorous than the brochure.”
“Then you’ve got your answer.”
He laughs and starts walking, gesturing for me to follow. “It can’t be all that bad. And it made it really easy for them to do your background check tonight—you’ve had so many already over the years.”
“I’m still not sure they didn’t do one on me before I was born,” I say and he laughs again. He seems quick to laugh…I could see why Ash would have chosen him to be his right-hand man.
We walk down a hallway, and then down another hallway, up and around a maze of stairs and doors and into a room lit with a handful of soft, low lamps and studded with sofas, end tables and bookshelves, with a desk at one end. The wall color and furniture have changed since the last time I was here with Grandpa Leo, but I know exactly where I am. My stomach twists and all my doubts rise again. Do I really want to be here in the Residence? Practically throwing myself at the mercy of the dead-eyed, forever glad-handing gods of political life?
“President Colchester has invited you to make yourself at home,” Belvedere says, interrupting my unhappy thoughts. “I would suggest in the living room here or…in his bedroom.” Belvedere’s eyes twinkle. “It’s just through those doors.”
I can’t stop the rush of blood from going to my cheeks. What am I doing? I’m inviting trouble, I’m inviting the inevitable Internet storm once it gets out that I’m here.
“I’m sorry,” Belvedere says, his eyes still sparkling. “I shouldn’t tease. It’s just, we’re all really excited.”
“Excited?” I ask warily.
“About the President having a date with you tonight. We’ve been trying to coax him into moving on for months. It’s time for him to have some sort of companionship, and frankly, he needs to get laid bad.”
I let out a shocked laugh. “You can’t talk about the President that way.”
“The hell I can’t. You haven’t seen him like I have, and I’m telling you with all the male authority I have, he needs a woman.”
I hate myself for asking such a leading question, but I can’t help it. “Surely he doesn’t need a date for that to happen? To be with someone?” Please tell me what I want to hear, please please please.
Belvedere shrugs as he walks towards the entrance to the hallway that will lead him back to the West Wing. “Maybe not, but it hasn’t happened. At least that I know of, and I’m around him constantly.”
“So I’m…the first? Since Jenny?”
Belvedere pauses and looks at me. The smile on his face is less gleeful now and more understanding. “He’s not the kind of guy who does casual sex, and it’s too risky in his position anyway. Add that to his grief over Jenny and his drive for this job…well. We all understand why he’s waited. But we’re also excited that you’re here. He needs someone for him, someone who can be there only for him, and I really hope you can be that someone. Even if it’s just for one night.”
The aide’s words touch me, and underneath all my misgivings, I find the truth. “I think I hope I can be that someone too,” I say, and I mean it.
* * *
It takes another hour for Ash to return to the Residence, an hour which I’ve spent exploring and fiddling with my phone and checking my hair in the bathroom every ten minutes. The sitting room is generously decorated in pale creams and minty greens, the antique furniture giving the room a very traditional, very postcard-from-The-White-House feel, making me think that an interior designer did most of the choosing.
But when I get brave enough to crack the bedroom door and look inside, I see only Ash’s hand. Lots of muted grays and deep charcoals, a small array of understated furniture and a rigid adherence to geometry. No soft angles, no unnecessarily decorated furniture. Everything is deeply functional, solidly built, and free of ostentation. A room for a soldier.
My eyes light on the large four-poster bed, and my breath catches. Will I lay on that bed tonight? Will I wake up there tomorrow morning? Or will I be packed off while it’s still dark, sent away under the cover of night to avoid the press?
The thought makes me anxious, and I go back to the bathroom to smooth my hair one more time, staring blankly at the woman in the mirror.
I see a slender neck and a delicate jaw. Breasts that are high and firm, a narrow waist, and slender hips. In the low light coming from the sitting room, the shallow cleft in my chin and the beauty mark on my cheek seem exotic and striking, my lips full and pink, and my eyelashes long and dark. The mass of white hair—which is slowly darkening to gold in the chilly fall weather—currently pinned back into a sleek knot.
She’s jealous of you, you know.
All those years ago, that’s what Ash had said to me. I hadn’t known what he meant, was unable to conceive of any universe where Abilene had anything to be jealous of. It took a few years for me to finally realize what everyone else saw the night of my sixteenth birthday, but even I eventually had to admit that I was no longer the ugly duckling I’d branded myself as. I’m maybe not the sensual, exuberant swan that Abilene was and still is, but I do have a beauty all my own.
To kill time, I wander to the far edge of the sitting room, looking out over the dark veldt of the South Lawn. In the distance, the Washington Monument pierces the midnight air, the squatly elegant dome of the Jefferson Memorial close by. I’ve never seen this particular view at night, and it hits me, really hits me, that I’m standing in the White House waiting a few feet away from the President’s bedroom door. Waiting for exactly what, I don’t know, but I’m so ready. So very ready.
I turn away from the window and walk a perimeter around the room, feeling my high heels press deep into the thick carpet, and I’m stopped by a large framed photograph on the wall, the subjects initially difficult to make out in the dim light. But my pulse speeds up as I realize who’s in the picture.
It’s Ash and Embry, somewhere deep in the mountains of Carpathia, wearing their Army fatigues with guns and helmets and armor. They have their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, and the way they smile at the camera makes it seem like they have some kind of secret, like they’d just gotten away with something. There’s so much friendship in the picture, so much brotherhood and trust, and I remember that it was Embry whom Ash saved that day in a Carpathian ambush, Embry that he faced down an entire squad of enemy soldiers to save. But of course there were more battles after that, four or five more, where Embry and Ash both emerged as heroes—Ash the brilliant tactician and Embry the reckless brawler who flung himself heedlessly into every storm of bullets he encountered. I may have stopped writing to Ash the year I turned seventeen, but it didn’t mean that I stopped searching for his name in the news, which meant that I also searched for Embry’s. My intense feelings for Ash never went away, but they had been joined by new feelings for the handsome, rakish face that joined his in every newscast and online article.
What girl wouldn’t have fallen in love with those two?
I touch my fingertips to the glass, as if I could touch both of those men at the same time, and even just the thought of that, of touching Embry and Ash at the same time, makes me light-headed.
Be careful, I caution myself. If you do this thing with Ash, there will be no escaping Embry either. You’ll be playing with fire.
“That was after the village of Caledonia,” Ash says from behind me. “The one where Embry was injured and I had to carry him out.”
Trying not to act startled, I drop my hand, still feeling the cool glass against my fingertips. “Were you friends before then?”
“Yes. But after that, we became much more than friends. Like brothers.”
I turn just as Ash’s hands slide up my bare arms, warm and large and slightly rough.
“I’m glad you got
in that car,” he says, ducking his head to meet my eyes. “I was a little worried you’d change your mind.”
“I was worried you’d change your mind,” I tell him. “This is still so surreal to me.”
“That I want to spend time with you?”
“That you remember me at all.”
He gives me one of his smiles, the kind where his eyes crinkle up and his face opens into an expression of unimaginable warmth and joy. I’m reminded forcefully of Embry. Maybe the pair are only brothers in the emotional sense and not the biological, but they share the same weather-beaten, mischievous smile, and that smile is enough to get me to agree to anything.
“Don’t move,” Ash says, and he disappears into his bedroom. He returns with a small wooden box. “Have a seat.” He gestures towards the end of the room.
Thinking he means the sofa by the window, I move towards it, but he corrects me, and when he does, there’s a change in his voice. It gets sterner somehow, and the effect on my body is immediate. “Sit on the desk, facing the chair.”
It’s a strange request, and there’s a moment when I want to ask why. But then I see the fire in his green eyes, the same fire I saw when I told him once upon a time that I liked the way he told me what to do with my body.
It’s a test, I realize. And what’s more, it’s a test I want to pass, a test I want to do. Listening to Ash feels as natural as breathing, and after only a breath of hesitation, I walk over to the desk and slide myself onto it, careful to keep my skirt from riding too far up my thighs.
I’m not sure what exactly I expect him to do, but when he comes and sits in the chair in front of me, it feels right. The way it’s supposed to be.
“Thank you for listening to me,” he says. He keeps his gaze on my face.
“I like listening,” I whisper.
“Do you?” he asks, setting the box in his lap and leaning back. “How much?”
“A lot,” I admit quietly. “It feels…natural…with you.”
A small smile. “I’ll tell you a secret: I like it when you listen. That feels natural to me too.”
I glance down at the box, wondering what could be inside. It’s about the right size for cigars, but Ash doesn’t strike me as much of a smoker. What else then? Something sexual? Condoms, maybe, or lube? Nipple clamps?
Ash notices my wary look. “Nothing in there will bite, I promise.”
So no nipple clamps then.
“Do you remember at the church?” he asks, changing the subject. “When I told you that I ask a lot from the people I care for?”
“I do.”
“I meant that in more ways than one. I’m busy, for one thing, often traveling and always stressed, and I—” he stops himself, searching for the right words.
I nudge his knee with my foot. “You won’t scare me away by being too direct. I promise.”
“To answer before listening is folly,” Ash quotes, shaking his head, and then sighs. “It took a long time for us to be alone in a room together. Part of me thinks I should enjoy it before I ruin it.”
“And the other part?”
His eyes darken. “The other part of me thinks you should be more nervous.”
I shiver. A good shiver, but a shiver nonetheless, and he doesn’t miss it, his eyes trailing from the pulse pounding in my throat to the goose bumps on my thighs. He looks at the wooden box a moment and then seems to make up his mind.
“We are going to have a conversation now,” he says, “among other things. And we can stop at any time.”
“I don’t want to stop.”
“It’s hard to want to stop,” he says, running his fingers along the edge of the box. “It’s even harder to say the word when you know you should. Have you ever used a safe word?”
For that one whole time I had sex? I laugh out loud. “No.”
He doesn’t seem offended by my laughter. “Perhaps we should find one for you.”
“I don’t think I need a safe word for a conversation. Even a conversation with unspecified other things. And especially not with you.”
“You especially need one when you’re with me.” He says it calmly, evenly.
And then suddenly I believe him.
Despite that open, handsome face, despite the historic building I’m standing in and the elegant antique furniture all around us, I believe him. I can’t tell if it’s something in the cool way he says it or something in the flare of light in his eyes, or if it’s the remembered shards of that night, of the way he said good girl to me when I obeyed his order, or the way he licked the blood from my fingertip…
“All those times you’ve asked me if I was scared of you, you were serious?”
“It was with good reason.” He leans forward. “I’m not trying to tease you or frighten you unnecessarily. But I’m hard on the people I love. It took me a long time to learn that, and you are too important to me for me to treat that lightly. You have to know that you can stop anything about me—my words or my body—at any time. You have to know that you can leave me at any time.”
I’ll never want to leave. The thought appears unbidden and I shove it aside. But it’s harder for me to shove aside the word love, as if I’m one of the people he loves, because to be loved by Ash…I’ve wanted that since I was sixteen.
“If you don’t have a word in mind, you can use my name—my first name.”
“Maxen?”
He nods. “You say that when we’re alone together and everything stops. For a break—if you need one—or completely, if that’s what you need instead.”
I think for a moment. The kind of pornography I watch and the kind of books I read—well, I’m definitely no stranger to this kind of thing. In fact, certain facets of this lifestyle have been the subject of my fantasies since I was old enough to have fantasies. But faced with the reality of a relationship like this, I find myself shy. Not out of fear necessarily—although there is a little fear and I’d be foolish not to be at least a little wary—but out of an acute awareness of how little I know. Of how meager my experience with any kind of romance or sexuality is. When I speak next, my voice is hesitant. “Does all this make you…the kind of person who dominates people?”
Another nod. “Yes.”
“Are you going to whip me or something?” I ask, suddenly nervous.
“Not all Dominants are sadists, Greer. I won’t always want pain or humiliation, but I will always want control.”
“But you will want pain and humiliation sometimes?”
He leans back again, his face thoughtful. “I’m approaching this wrong. You’ll have to forgive me…it’s been six years since I last initiated a relationship with someone, and I’m out of practice. And in any case,” he says, rubbing his forehead with his thumb, “I didn’t know enough about myself then to warn Jenny.”
It’s Jenny’s name that galvanizes me. It’s a sick urge, to want to show up a dead woman, to prove I’m as good as she was, but it’s an urge I can’t fight in time to control myself.
“Show me,” I say. “Show me what you need to warn me about.”
Chapter Nine
The Present
“Show me,” I repeat.
His eyes lift to mine.
“You said we were going to have a conversation among other things, right? Let’s do it. I know what to say to make you stop. I trust you.”
“You barely know me,” he points out.
“You’re a war hero and the President of the United States. If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody.”
He smiles again at that. “You make a specious case, given how many manipulative Presidents there have been, but I want to be convinced, so I’ll allow it.” He reaches down and slips a high heel off one of my feet, repeating the action on the other foot, rubbing gently at the red line left above my toes. “Why you act afraid of pain when you already wear these is a mystery to me.”
I giggle a little, and the look on his face at the sound of my laughter is electrifying. Belvedere, Embry, me�
��the President seems to love the laughter of others. The realization strikes me with a chord of melancholy. What loneliness and darkness does he carry in his heart that he needs such people around him?
He places my left foot on the arm of the chair he’s sitting in, and as soon as I see that he’s going to do the same with my other foot, I instinctively pull it back, since that would entail me spreading my legs in this short skirt. He doesn’t react, other than to look up at my face, and I realize that he’s waiting to see if I’ll say his name. My new safe word. I bite my lip and force my body to relax.
I place my foot back in his hands, and he sets it on the other arm of the chair. I’m grateful that our relative heights mean that he’s at eye-level with my chest and not my pelvis, but that gratitude disappears when he says, “Pull your skirt back for me.”
My hands shake when I obey, partly from excitement and partly from nervousness. I wasn’t lying when I told him it felt natural to obey him, but I’ve also never exposed myself so brazenly, so intimately and deliberately. Despite the impassive look on Ash’s face, I can see that he’s fascinated, aroused by bossing me around like this, and that bolsters me.
“I’ve never done this before,” I admit as I finish pulling my skirt up. Cool air wafts around my inner thighs and against my lace-covered pussy.
“Which part?” Ash asks, keeping his eyes on my legs, on the sliver of lace between them.
“Listening to someone. Showing myself off. I’ve only ever had sex once,” I confess.
His head snaps up. “Only once?”
I nod, swallowing. “When I was twenty.”
He groans, resting his head against my knee. “You mean I’m going to be the second man who’s ever been inside you?”
“You sound so certain that you’re going to take me to bed,” I tease, but my teasing comes out breathier than I mean for it to. It’s the way his dark head looks as it leans against my bare thigh, the way his legs are spread all strong and casual in the chair…yes, he should be certain that he’s going to take me to bed. I’ll take myself there if he doesn’t.
Modern Fairy Tale: Twelve Books of Breathtaking Romance Page 27