“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.”
8
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 Hispanic 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.
“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 initiall
y 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 shoulders 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?”
American Queen Page 7