Modern Fairy Tale: Twelve Books of Breathtaking Romance

by Kristen Proby

“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 shoot 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.”

  “What happened?” I ask, as caught up as I would be if I didn’t know the end of the story.

  “I got shot,” Embry says with an unhappy shrug. “Ash wanted to be the last one down the shaft, and I refused to let him wait alone, and then the Carpathians began shooting their way into the building. Ash called for the troops downstairs to take their chance and escape into the forest, and then told me to get down there. I wouldn’t, not without him, and then the Carpathians appeared. I got a bullet to the calf and another in the shoulder—which meant no climbing down the elevator shaft. Ash pushed me behind him and fought off the Carpathians until I could crawl to the stairwell. And then…well, I suppose you know the rest. While I was a useless pile on the floor, Ash managed to keep the Carpathians off of us long enough to discover an outside exit on the ground floor. He carried me out and we managed to get to the forest.”

  I relax a little, and then remember my original question. “But what does this have to do with you and Ash being together?”

  Embry glances away from me, not out of avoidance or embarrassment, but as if he’s searching for the right words to explain something. “There’s kind of a…high…from fighting like that. Cheating death. It’s the adrenaline, I think. For some people, it slows them down, makes them dazed. Other people get amped up, like they can’t stop talking or laughing or moving around. But not Ash. It makes him restless in a different kind of way. It—it makes his blood hot.”

  Dark spots of color appear high on Embry’s cheekbones, and I realize that he’s blushing. He’s also gone someplace deep inside himself, remembering something that makes him tremble a little under my hands. “Embry?”

  His gaze snaps back to mine, his eyes going clear again but his cheeks still flushed. “He saved my life. I wanted to show him how grateful I was.”

  “Oh,” I say softly, feeling my own cheeks warm as I imagine the scene. Blood and torn fabric and Ash’s hard body pressing Embry’s into the ground. “Did you fuck each other?”

  “He fucked me. A few times. Once wasn’t enough to calm him down.” A harsh laugh, but the harshness isn’t only bitterness, it’s need and sarcasm and regret. “He screwed Morgan a few years before that and then he screwed me. Like Brideshead Revisited in reverse. Except we make the Marchmains look like the fucking Brady Bunch.”

  “Did you like it?” I ask a little breathlessly. I don’t know why I need to ask, why I need to know, but I do, I do. “Did you come?”

  “Would you believe I came as many times as he did? With a bullet in my shoulder and morphine burning through my blood? The first time I came almost immediately, rubbing against the rucksack he’d bent me over. And when we got to base…it kept going for a while. A couple years. And then he met Jenny…” A long breath. “And then after Jenny died…”

  My mouth goes dry. “You fucked after Jenny died?”

  “Several times. Until this fall. That’s when we stopped again.”

  “But he told me…” Tears burn at my eyelids “He lied to me. He said that he hadn’t been with anyone since Jenny died.”

  “Did he say that, or—” Embry’s voice is careful “—did he say that he hadn’t been with any women?”

  I try to find my breath again, but it’s somewhere down at my feet. “Yes. That. No women.”

  Embry searches my eyes. “Are you upset?”

  “That you slept together? Or that you guys have been on and off again for nearly a decade and I had no idea?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “I’m angry that you and Ash haven’t told me about your history. I’m torn apart with jealousy to think you two have been wanting each other while I’ve been here.” I lower my voice. “And I’m shaking with how hot it makes me to think about the two of you together. I wish I could have seen it. I wish I could have been there, taking you in my mouth while he fucked you. I wish I could have seen his face as he came.”

  “Jesus, Greer.”

  The stark ar
ousal in Embry’s voice is ragged and hungry, and I’m trying to fight off my own hungry reaction. But I can’t—not entirely. I make sure to press against Embry as the dance brings us closer, confirming what I suspected: he’s rock hard.

  He gives a soft, surprised grunt as my body grazes his erection, and his eyes are hazy once more. “You guys do that to me and it’s so confusing.”

  “Do what?”

  “You—you mix up my feelings for you and Ash. I get hard thinking about him, and then you touch me. Or I’m aching at Camp David listening to you scream for him, but then he’s the one who comes out and kisses me. I can’t keep track of what or whom I want any more. I just…want.”

  I grip his tuxedo lapel, both excited and a little frightened that he’s just articulated something I haven’t been able to articulate for myself. “That’s what’s happened to me.”

  Those aristocratic eyebrows rise in happy astonishment. “Really?”

  “Really. From the beginning, even, I couldn’t separate wanting you from wanting him. When we had sex in Chicago…well, part of the reason I did it was because I was hurting so much about Ash.”

  “Me too,” he confesses.

  I look at him in confusion, and then I remember that night on the Ferris wheel, his broken voice.

  They aren’t my someone. No matter how much I plead, no matter how much—how much I give of myself.

  “Do you think he knows?” I ask. “That we both love him so much that we ended up falling in love with each other?”

  Embry sighs. “Would it change anything if he did?”

  We move again for the dance, my hip brushing past his penis again—accidentally this time—and he hisses.

  “Sorry,” I say, knowing I don’t sound sorry at all.

  He shakes his head. “I’m just as bad as Melwas. Hard for you at a fucking diplomatic event.”

  “Yes, you’re both incurably prurient, but there’s a key difference.”

  “What’s that?”

  I lean up to his ear, using his lapel to pull myself higher. “I like it when you’re incurably prurient.”

  He grins down at me, the guilt and torment vanishing for a moment and leaving behind the rich playboy who’d charmed me on a Chicago sidewalk.

  But as we finish our dance, as we find new partners to dance with and the night grinds unbearably on, as my own betrayals and post-confessing-forbidden-love-shock wears off, something heartbreaking occurs to me.

  Ash sent Embry to get me. Ash sent Embry to get me even though he and Embry had been fucking right up until then. How cruel must that have felt to Embry? Like he was good enough to secretly fuck, at least until the right fuckable woman came along, but then he wasn’t wanted anymore? I haven’t ever thought of Ash as homophobic, as brutal in a way that went past the bedroom, but now I feel a righteous sense of anger on Embry’s behalf. All those years together, and Ash just tossed him aside for Jenny. And then picked him back up and tossed him right back aside for me.

  No wonder Embry is tormented. Ash has been savage to him. Unforgivably dismissive.

  And as I perform all the duties I came to do—charming and chatting and almost absentmindedly gathering tidbits and gossip for Ash—I slowly decide to confront him. About all those carefully worded not-lies, about his cruelty to Embry, about the three of us.

  About what the fuck happens next.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Ash hasn’t returned to the dinner by the time it comes to a close, so Embry and I are the ones to make the formal goodbyes and excuses for Ash’s absence, even though we have no idea where the hell he is. In my current mood, that makes me angrier than ever, so angry that I barely nod at Luc when he informs me that both Abilene and the President are back at the hotel and I’ll be riding there alone.

  And when I get to the hotel, Luc says, “The President has requested that you grab your things from your room and join him in his.”

  I stop right there in the lobby and glare up at the giant Quebecois man. “And what if I don’t want to sleep in his room tonight?”

  Luc looks uncomfortable. “I understand that he and Merlin are concerned that you’ll be a target for Melwas. They both feel better with you in the President’s room.”

  “And my cousin? If Melwas decides to attack my room—which won’t happen—he’d still find her. It’s okay to let her stay there but not me?”

  The agent looks like he really, really doesn’t want to have this conversation, and I sigh, taking pity on him. It’s not his fault that Ash is a controlling asshole and I mean to confront him about it. “Fine, fine. Let’s get my things.”

  When I get to my room and open the door, Abilene jolts off the bed, as if she’s been electrocuted. “Greer!” she says, her voice far too bright. “You’re back.”

  I give her a strange look, and she gives me a toothy smile—the one she learned from watching the Duchess of Cambridge tour the Commonwealth in heels with a baby on her hip.

  “Ash wants me to change rooms,” I say, a little peevishly, and start tossing things into my suitcase.

  She shifts on the bed. “Did he, uh, did he say why?”

  “Something about security and Melwas, but the reason doesn’t matter because it’s rude to just order people around like their feelings don’t matter.” I seal my mouth closed, realizing I’m perilously close to yelling or crying, and then the whole mess about Embry and Ash will spill out, the whole sordid fucking triangle.

  “Oh, just the security then? That’s not a big deal.”

  She still sounds strange, and part of me thinks I should ask her what’s wrong, that I should sit down on the bed and put my arms around her shoulders and coax her into opening up. It wouldn’t take long because Abi always wants to open up. All she needs is the faintest invitation inside your attention and then she’s wailing in your lap, like some sort of emotional vampire.

  But I’m my own emotional vampire right now, and I have to go drain Ash’s blood before I burn everything down. I zip my suitcase closed. “I’ll see you in the morning, Abi.”

  “Right,” she says faintly. “In the morning.”

  Luc holds the door for me as I give her a little wave and wheel the suitcase back out into the hallway, and then he takes it from me without asking, lifting it as effortlessly as I’d lift a bag of bread. “This way,” he says, and we walk down the hallway to the elevator to take it one floor up to Ash’s room.

  After walking past legions of Secret Service agents, Luc swipes the hotel keycard to access the presidential suite, and then we’re inside, Luc trundling off with my suitcase and me walking straight for the large armchair where Ash is sitting. I’m still in my gown, and it flutters and glints in the low golden light of the room as I stride towards him.

  I’m ready to draw blood, but then I see how tired he looks. His jacket is off and thrown carelessly over the table, his bow tie unknotted. He’s balancing a tumbler of scotch on his knee, and something about the color in his cheeks tells me that it isn’t his first. And the weariness in his face is so profound, so deeply etched, that I can’t bear to add to it, which irritates me. How dare he be tired when I need him to be strong? When I need him calm enough to weather the storm I want to scream into existence?

  He looks up at me, green eyes nearly liquid with exhaustion. “You’re angry about something,” he comments.

  I don’t ask how he guessed, because even if it weren’t written all over my face, he’d still know. “Yes.”

  “We have a few things to talk about then.” He takes a sip of his scotch and then waves over toward the bar. “You want something to drink?”

  “Actually, I think I do.”

  As Luc leaves and we’re left alone, I make myself a small glass of single malt, walk over to the chair across from him and sit down. I don’t choose to sit at his feet, a choice he notices but doesn’t remark on.

  A choice that hurts me more than it hurts him, I think.

  But still, stubborn and cranky, I stay perched on the chair,
refusing to give him anything until he gives me some answers.

  “I think you should go first,” he says, twirling the glass on his knee. Even slumped back in his chair, he looks powerful. Even exhausted he looks in charge. It’s both marvelous and terribly unfair.

  “Fine,” I say. “Okay.”

  And then realize I have no segue into the things we need to talk about, no warm-up. I just have to dive in. I take a deep breath and look Ash square in the face.

  “Embry told me he loves me tonight.”

  “I believe I told you he loves you tonight as well, only you didn’t believe me.”

  “I told him I love him too.”

  Ash takes this like a blow he knew was coming but still wasn’t entirely prepared for. A look of hurt—real, awful hurt—crosses his face, and he lifts his glass to his lips and drains the entire thing in a few practiced swallows. When he’s finished, he sets the glass on the table next to him and looks at me with eyes the color of pain. “So you did,” he says softly. “And then what did he say?”

  “Not much of anything, because right after I told him that, I told him that I saw you two kissing on Christmas Eve.”

  The blood drains from Ash’s face. This he hadn’t expected, he hadn’t seen coming. “Oh my God, Greer,” he says in a horrified voice, “why didn’t you say anything?”

  I nearly explode. I shoot straight to my feet, towering over him in my stupidly tall heels. “Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I say anything about my fiancé cheating on me? Why didn’t I say anything about the only men I’ve ever been with, the two men I love, being in a secret relationship for ten fucking years?”

  I don’t know what I expected Ash to do, but it wasn’t to grab my hips and yank me down onto his lap. His arm is an iron bar around my back, his hand implacable and heedless of my carefully styled up-do as he fists my hair to make sure I’m looking at his face.

  But his face isn’t angry. It’s hurt and regretful and tired, but not at all angry, and for some reason, this unlocks my own hurt and tiredness, my own regret. My anger ebbs away like the tide, leaving behind a dirty residue of confused betrayal.