I can’t believe this is happening. That this is real life right now. The President—the Ash of my dreams for ten years—wearing tight boxer briefs and walking toward me with a hungry look in his eyes. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe I’m hallucinating.
But no. He clicks off the light and slides into the bed, his iron arm snaking around my waist and then pulling me tight into him, my back to his chest. I let out a happy sigh at the feeling of his long, big body curled protectively around mine, and then I wriggle my hips suggestively when I feel the thick rod of his erection nestle against my ass. He gives me a light pinch. “Don’t be naughty,” he breathes in my ear. “I’ve had ten years to dream up punishments for you, and I can’t wait to try them out.”
“Neither can I.”
“I think you really mean that. And it pleases me more than you can know.” He pulls me a little tighter and kisses the back of my neck. “Have you ever slept in a bed with a man before? Just slept?”
As much as he loves knowing he’s my first at things, I can’t lie. I nod my head against the pillow. “Yes. The night I lost my virginity.”
He stiffens a little, and I can practically feel his jealousy roiling through him.
“You’re not…mad…that I’m not a virgin, are you?”
“Oh, Greer, of course not. How could I be when I was married to someone else? I begrudge you nothing. But him—whoever he was—I begrudge him fucking everything.”
There’s a kind of dark bitterness to his words that thrills me, with my craving to be possessed. But they also scare me. Because for some reason, just now, it hits in a real and concrete way.
Ash doesn’t know I slept with Embry.
Ash doesn’t know that the man he wants to begrudge everything is also his best friend.
The quiet worry I pushed aside this afternoon comes back, no longer quiet but shrill and keening. I no longer feel as if Ash is holding me by the neck, forcing me to face some reckless, unknowable fate, but that I am holding him. That we are both on the precipice of some terrible and beautiful and inevitable destiny, and that if I don’t stop us, we’ll both go tumbling headlong into its welcoming teeth.
I shift, suddenly restless, at odds with my own thoughts, and Ash is there with a kiss to my shoulder. “Keep still for me, angel,” he murmurs. “Let me hold you for a few minutes longer.”
How can I deny him—or myself—that? I still my limbs and relax back into him, deciding to muffle my thoughts about Embry until tomorrow. My body folds into Ash’s as if it was made for it.
“I have to tell you that I’m still not a great sleeper,” he says after a couple of quiet minutes, and I remember noticing the smudges under his eyes this afternoon.
“I’ve heard meditation helps,” I say, a little dryly.
“You know, I’ve heard that too,” he says, just as dryly.
“I shared a bed with my cousin for years, and she kicks and grunts in her sleep. I can handle you.”
He laughs a little laugh. “I wish I could get to the point where I can sleep long enough to talk in my sleep. But probably I’ll end up going over to the office to work at some point in the night. I just don’t want you to feel abandoned or worried if you wake up and don’t find me next to you.”
I rub my ass against his cock again. “I’ve heard of something other than meditation that puts men to sleep.”
That earns me a real pinch, and I let out a little yelp.
“Go to sleep, Greer,” comes his voice in the dark.
“Yes, Sir.”
And I do.
Chapter Eleven
Five Years Ago
When I was sixteen, I lied by omission twice. Both lies landed with cats-paw softness, light and silent, and for many years I thought that both were harmless.
I thought wrong.
The first lie was to Ash. I wrote to him that the girls at my school were obsessed with him, obsessed with the fact that Abilene and I had been at the same party mere weeks before his heroic act launched him into fame. I didn’t tell him that Abilene herself was the most obsessed with this fact.
And the second lie was to Abilene.
It wasn’t abnormal for me to keep things to myself for a few days before I confided in her, and so I didn’t tell her about Ash and the kiss for a week after it happened. And then the story broke about the village of Caledonia. The news showed a formal picture of Ash in his uniform, and his face was strong and noble on the screen in our dorm common room.
Abilene, who had refused to speak to me since the night of my birthday, forgot her anger and turned to me with her dark blue eyes alight. “I remember him!” she exclaimed. “He was at the party in Chelsea!”
Which is when I should have said, I know, I made out with him in the library.
What I said instead was, “I remember seeing him there too.”
And then Abilene went and told every girl she could find about our brush with the famous.
As the news and Internet outlets began churning out detailed profiles of Ash, Abilene’s fascination only grew. She printed out his military photo and carried it in her binder. She obsessively memorized every fact about his life: his absent parents, his early life in a foster home, becoming valedictorian at his high school. She started telling anyone who would listen that she would marry him some day. She joined groups online dedicated to Colchester fan-worship. And I knew, with all the perception that Grandpa Leo had drilled into me, that the truth would wound her instantly and fracture whatever peace we’d managed to restore after the night of my birthday.
Anyway, it had only been a kiss, and as the weeks wore on and my emails to Ash went unanswered, I decided that a kiss wasn’t worth destroying our friendship over. In the heat of her adoration for the newly famous war hero, she had once again welcomed me into her confidence, and things were finally back to how they’d been before the party. I couldn’t bear to give that up. Not again.
And aside from our repaired trust, I also assumed she would get over Ash as quickly as she got over most things. Abilene wasn’t flighty by any means, but she was passionate, and one passion could easily drive out another. After a few months she would meet a new boy or start a new sport and she would forget all about Maxen Colchester.
How wrong I was.
* * *
The years passed. I turned seventeen and stopped writing to Ash, although my chest never stopped squeezing when I heard his name. I turned eighteen and graduated from Cadbury Academy. Abilene left for college back home, I applied to Cambridge and got in. I turned nineteen and picked a major that definitely wasn’t politics or business, much to Grandpa Leo’s disappointment. I turned twenty, glanced around at my barebones flat with its beat-up teakettle and air mattress, and bought a plane ticket home for the summer.
I’d been home frequently to visit Grandpa, but something about that summer felt different. Maybe it was the ten solid weeks in America looming ahead of me or maybe it was the fact that Grandpa was traveling for work and I had the Manhattan penthouse mostly to myself, but I felt displaced and lonely. So when Grandpa invited Abilene and me out to Chicago to stay with him while he worked on his latest green energy acquisition, I jumped at the chance, finding a flight the very next day.
My plane landed at the same time as Abilene’s, and when we met each other, we fairly collided into an embrace, jumping up and down.
“My God,” Abilene said, pulling back, “you finally figured out how to do your own makeup.”
“Nice to see you too,” I teased.
She smiled, her eyes flicking from my hair to my bright pink dress, but there was a new shadow in her smile.
She’s jealous of you.
I shook the thought away. She looked gorgeous in her short shorts and halter-top, hair glossy and red, and her pale shoulders smattered with freckles. That old fight couldn’t reach us here, now, not when we hadn’t seen each other in so long and had an entire week to spend together. I slung my arm around her shoulders, having to reach up as I did so since she was
a few inches taller than me, and squeezed her into my side. “I missed you, Abi,” I said. “I wish we were going to the same school.”
Abilene rolled her eyes but put her arm over my shoulders too. “If you want that, you’re going to have to come to Vanderbilt. There’s no way I can handle another rainy summer in England.”
“Girls,” Grandpa Leo greeted fondly as we walked into the penthouse suite after a sweltering drive from the airport to the hotel.
We ran to him and hugged him like we were seven years old instead of twenty, exclaiming over his bald head and bushy beard and thin face.
“You need to eat more, Grandpa!”
“You need to shave!”
He waved us off like we were fussy saleswomen. “I’m fine. And I hear that the beard thing is in for women right now. Is that not true?”
Abilene and I wrinkled our noses and he laughed. “Well, never mind then. Consider it shaved. I have to head out for lunch with some old friends—do you girls want to tag along?”
“I’m going to take a nap,” Abilene declared. She flopped dramatically onto the hotel suite’s couch, as if she’d been traveling all day instead of riding on a plane for an hour.
Grandpa looked over at me. “Well, Greer? You know I always like to have you and your eyes with me at these kinds of things.”
I was tempted to stay at the hotel too, but I knew Abilene would make good on her threat to nap, and I had no desire to knock around more empty rooms alone. It’s why I came to America for the summer, after all, for conversation and connection, and as much as I wanted to spend time with my cousin, I wanted to escape my thoughts more.
“Of course I’ll come,” I said.
Grandpa beamed at me. “I’ll grab my briefcase and then we can go.”
Abilene pretended to snore, and when I went over to give her a hug goodbye, she kept her eyes closed in fake-sleep. “Don’t get into any trouble without me,” she said. Her long dark eyelashes rested prettily on her freckled cheeks, a ginger Sleeping Beauty.
I poked at her side. “You are pretty much the only reason I’ve ever been in trouble.”
She smiled then, a cat’s smile, eyes still closed. “That’s what I’m saying—I want to be there for any trouble you find.”
“At a lunch with Grandpa? Hardly likely.”
She yawned for real, settling on her side. “Still, though. Share any cute boys you meet.”
* * *
Lunch was at a well-lit, modern cafe inside the Chicago Art Institute, and it was the usual handful of politicians and businesspeople discussing election cycles and policy. Grandpa Leo, sober for thirty years, automatically slid me the wine the waiter poured for him without asking.
I listened politely, white wine bright and crisp on my tongue, watching everyone’s faces and gauging their tones, dutifully recording mental notes to report to Grandpa later. Half my mind had already drifted back to Cambridge, back to the classes I’d enrolled in for the next session, back to the beaten, dog-eared books stacked next to my air mattress in my grimy little flat.
Until I heard Merlin’s name from someone at the table.
My head snapped up in alarm, and sure enough, Merlin Rhys himself was strolling up to the table, tall and dark-eyed and clean-shaven, his expression open and more amiable than I’d ever seen it. Until his gaze slid over to me, that is, and then the openness faded, leaving something tiredly resigned in the lines of his face. I could see it clear as day: he hadn’t known I’d be here and he didn’t want me here, for whatever reason.
I ducked my head with embarrassment, even though I’d done nothing wrong.
Why didn’t I stay at the hotel? I berated myself. If I’d known for one second that Merlin would show up…
“Sorry we’re late,” came an easy, deep voice from behind Merlin. My heart stopped.
The world bled away.
And there was only Maxen Colchester.
Four years older and painfully more good-looking, post-tour-of-duty scruff highlighting the strong lines of his cheeks and jaw, wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of low-waisted slacks that emphasized how ridiculously trim and lean his body was. He folded his soldier’s frame into a chair next to Merlin, the elegant table setting in front of him doing nothing to diminish the sense of raw power and strength radiating from his body. I’d forgotten, somehow, what that power and strength felt like in person.
It felt like drowning.
Tell me, Greer, do you like my lips on your skin?
Yes.
I believe you. That’s why you’re so dangerous.
My fingers curled around the stem of my wineglass, and I forced myself to focus on it, on the way the glass felt on my skin. Smooth and whole, not at all like the jagged shards and splinters I’d cradled in my hands the night I met Ash. All these years, I’d told myself I didn’t care about Ash, wasn’t haunted by our kiss. I’d wanted to be sophisticated, the kind of aloof girl who kissed men like Ash and then forgot all about it. I wanted to be different than Abilene with her fan forums and obsessive fantasizing, I wanted to be wise and worldly and apart from such schoolgirl crushes.
But I couldn’t pretend that any longer. Not when faced with warm-blooded, green-eyed reality of him.
Right now, I was the Greer who’d written those embarrassingly honest emails, the Greer who’d melted into his touch, who’d shivered as he licked her blood from her skin. Right now, I was a vessel of pooling want, I was ready to be whatever he wanted me to be, ready to crawl into his veins and make him mine. I was eager and humiliated and yearning and mortified, and I knew the absolute truth in that moment—I was in love with Maxen Colchester. It was foolish and silly and absurd—nothing could be more unworldly and unsophisticated—but somehow, terribly and incredibly, it was true.
“…and my granddaughter Greer.”
I lifted my gaze, realizing Grandpa Leo had been talking this whole time, introducing the others at the table to Ash and Merlin. I suddenly wished I was in something less girlish than this pink knee-length dress with its neatly folded bow at the back. I wished I had put my hair up or reapplied my lip-gloss, or anything to feel fresher and prettier and more than I was in that moment. Instead, I felt incredibly naked and young as I met Ash’s stare across the table.
He’d frozen in place—just for a second—his eyes flaring into a green fire before settling back into their usual emerald. Then he gave me a genuinely happy smile and said in that easy, confident voice, “Greer. So good to see you again.”
Again.
He remembers.
I took a breath and smiled too, a smile that felt too shaky and too excited and too hopeful. “Yes. So nice to see you too.”
And then I lifted my wineglass to my lips, hoping no one saw the trembling of my hand as I did.
The lunch went on as normal—Merlin was having a party tonight for his fortieth birthday, and everyone at the table was going—and the conversation turned back to politics, although with Merlin there, the conversation finally drifted away from the minutia of elections and numbers and into slightly more interesting territory. Merlin was asking my grandfather if he’d ever support a third party presidential candidate, and the table stirred with the natural antipathy establishment politicians have to such talk.
But even that couldn’t hold my attention when Ash was so near. He talked very little, choosing mostly to listen, but when he did speak, it was so concisely elegant and perceptive that even these people, who spent their lives talking over everyone else, had trouble finding a response that matched his insight.
Every word he said, I stored away, as if his opinions on the viability of a third-party candidate were secret revelations about himself. I watched his every movement from under my eyelashes, the way his hand looked as he twirled the stem of his wineglass between his fingers, the way he held himself perfectly still as he was listening to someone else—perfectly still except for the occasional nod of understanding—a stillness not learned in a courtroom or a legislator’s chamber,
but in battle. A stillness that could have been curled over a sniper’s rifle, it was so deliberate and immovable. A stillness that accounted for the movements of wind and the fluttering of leaves and careful intakes of breath. A stillness that was patient.
Predatory.
If Ash ever became a politician, he would slice through these people like a stick slices through weeds. They’d be bent and broken before they ever saw it coming.
I didn’t have that stillness. Perception, yes. Patience, no.
And so it was agony to be so close to Ash, able to soak up every lift of his shoulders, every flex of those fingers, every rich, deep word, and to know that there was nothing to be done about the tempest inside me. There was no outlet for this restless ache, this almost-pain, this fidgety, giddy feeling twisting inside my chest. At any moment, my control would break, and it would all come spilling out of me.
Do you really remember me? I would blurt, leaning forward. Do you remember our kiss? I do. I remember how you took care of my cut, I remember how you told me not to move, I remember how you pinned me against the wall. I dreamed of it for years after; I still dream of it. I thought I didn’t care, I tried to shove down that girl, I tried to be someone else, but now that I’m with you, I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can want anyone else and I don’t think I want to be any other version of myself than the girl you boss around.
I can bleed for you again.
Let me bleed for you again.
And then, as if he’d heard me, as if my thoughts had reached out to him, he turned his head and met my stare head-on. His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the wineglass, and I imagined them tightening in my hair, fisting my white-gold locks and snapping my head backward so he could bite my throat.
I caught my breath at the thought, tearing my gaze away from his. I had to go. I couldn’t be wet and panting and miserable at this table—not with these people, not with my grandfather, not with the source of my torture so breathtakingly close.
Modern Fairy Tale: Twelve Books of Breathtaking Romance Page 30