American Queen

by Sierra Simone

  Just because you want to forget who you are doesn’t mean the rest of us can forget you.

  “There’s nothing between Embry and me,” I repeat, but my response took too long and my face betrays too much. I never was a good liar.

  Abilene’s smile curls into something sharp. “Whatever you say, cousin mine. Just be careful. This city is full of wolves, and they are always hungry.”

  “There’s nothing for them to be hungry for,” I say again. “Embry isn’t a problem.”

  The smile curls sharper. “I think he’s very much a problem for you. And for the President too.”

  I frown. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just this, Greer, that men like them have secrets. You don’t get to be that powerful that young without some big skeletons in your closet, and I guarantee you that the President and Merlin Rhys would be willing to do anything to keep those secrets contained. Anything.”

  “I feel like you know something I don’t.”

  “If you’re dating the President, you’ll find out soon enough,” she says and there’s something cruelly gleeful about her voice. “And I think some women might be able to live with his past, but you’re not one of them, honey.”

  I flick my mind over my mental log, trying to scan Ash’s past for any whisper of scandal, but I come up short. Before I can say anything else, Abilene waves off my words. “Don’t worry about it. Seriously. I’d hate to scare you off of a romance you just started. Now, I have a meeting in about five minutes. You’re welcome to wait in here until I get back and then we can grab lunch or…?”

  The meaning is clear. It’s time for you to leave.

  Grateful for the exit strategy, I stand up. “I’ve got to get back to work. A new batch of projects have come in for grading.”

  Abilene stands too and comes around her desk. She gives me a hug that isn’t any lighter or shorter than any other hug she’s given me, but all the same, I can tell there’s something new between us. Something ugly. And while half of it is her jealousy, the other half is this new doubt she’s sown in my mind, this new fear.

  You’ll find out soon enough.

  I shiver as I leave her office and step out into the chilly November air.

  What does that even mean?

  And what if I don’t want to find out?

  16

  The Present

  When I open the door to my townhouse, I’m so distracted by my conversation with Abilene that I don’t even notice the tall man standing in the living room. I throw my purse onto a nearby chair and get ready to walk into the kitchen to forage for some coffee—coffee with a hefty amount of bourbon thrown in—and get the shock of my life when I see Merlin Rhys out of the corner of my eye.

  “Jesus Christ,” I gasp, stepping back and slumping against a bookshelf. He steps out of the November afternoon murk gathering in the corners of my living room, putting his hands up to indicate he means no harm.

  “Ms. Galloway,” he says, inclining his head.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” I say—well, sputter, really—trying to cover over the adrenaline with outrage.

  “I used to live here,” Merlin says calmly, producing a key from his pocket and setting it on the coffee table. “Years ago, when I was just moving to Washington, your grandfather was kind of enough to let me stay here until I found a place of my own. I promise I won’t intrude again, but I did think it was time that you and I have a talk.”

  The bookshelf presses into my back. A cloud passes over the sun. The room is cold shadows as Merlin takes a seat on the armchair, crossing his legs. The movement is graceful but not sensual, elegant but not effeminate. There is something almost asexual about the way he carries himself, just as there’s something ageless in the sharp lines of his face.

  It’s been five years since I last saw him in person, although it was impossible to avoid seeing him on television or hearing his name on the news in the time since. He was the campaign manager for Ash’s campaign, and now he’s Ash’s senior advisor—one of those roles that seems as ubiquitous as it is mysterious—and I know the timing of this encounter isn’t a coincidence.

  “A talk,” I repeat. My throat’s dry, and I clear it. “Five years ago, I came to your birthday party and you told me—again—to keep my kisses to myself. Are you going to tell me a third time? Am I in trouble?”

  And in the gloom of the shadows, the man I’ve been afraid of since I was seven laughs.

  Laughs.

  Not a sinister laugh, not a cruel laugh. A happy laugh. A friendly laugh. And through the shadows and years of fear, I see that he’s just a man. Not a wizard, not a psychic, not the kissing police. Just a well-bred, perceptive man who is capable of laughing loudly enough to fill a room.

  Ash does love to surround himself with laughter, I think, peeling myself away from the bookshelf to go sit down across from Merlin.

  “You’re not in trouble,” he says finally, a smile still on his face. There’s warmth in his eyes—real warmth—although I still detect the same wariness from our past encounters.

  But I’m not seven or sixteen or twenty any more. The wariness doesn’t upset me like it used to. “Then what do you want to talk about?”

  “I want to tell you a story,” he says, folding his hands in his lap. “It won’t take very long to tell, and you may not care that much about it, but I think it’s an important story for you to hear.”

  I consider this for a minute. I would be well within my rights to demand that he leave. I could even leave myself. I don’t have to sit here and listen to a man who’s been nothing but rude and terrifying to me since I was a child. But I can’t help it, I am intrigued by the idea of Merlin telling me a story. I teach literature, after all, stories are what I deal with, what I think in.

  “Okay,” I finally concede. “Tell me.” As if on cue, the clouds move across the sun again and the room brightens with weak sunshine.

  “Once upon a time…” Merlin starts slowly, irony twisting his mouth a little “…there was a man who fell in love with a married woman.”

  “That’s a little different than the usual beginning,” I cut in.

  “It’s more common than you’d think,” he replies. “David and Bathsheba? Tristan and Isolde? Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne?”

  “Those are not very happy stories,” I point out.

  “I never said this would be a happy story. Only a common one,” Merlin responds, leaning back a little in his chair. “Now, back to our man and woman. This is a common story, and so this man tried all the common ways of getting the woman to notice him. He flirted, he pleaded, he tried to impress her daily. They worked in the same place, you see, and so he could be relentless in wooing her, just as his own love for her felt unmercifully relentless to him. But she loved her husband, and even if she didn’t, she was the kind of person who didn’t believe in breaking marriage vows.”

  “Good for her.”

  He nods. “I agree. It was difficult to resist this man, though, especially as the years dragged on. He was handsome and powerful and he wanted her, even when she was pregnant with her husband’s child. It’s a flattering feeling to be desired by the President of the United States, which I’m sure you know.”

  I can’t hide my surprise. “The man was a president?”

  Merlin looks me straight in the face. “A president your family knows very well. President Penley Luther. Your grandfather’s running mate.”

  I must look like a mask of shock, but I can’t help it. Grandfather only had glowing things to say about President Luther—really, everyone only had glowing things to say about him. It’s hard to imagine the hero of the American economy and international diplomacy chasing after a married woman.

  “You have to remember,” Merlin says, “that Luther was a bit of a playboy. And he was divorced. To him it seemed natural that she would want him, and Luther never ignored nature for morality’s sake, at least in his personal life.”

  “So what happened?
”

  Merlin looks down at his hands for a moment. “What usually happens in these cases, although it didn’t happen in the usual way. There was an economic summit hosted by the United Kingdom at a secluded estate in Wales. Luther brought this woman along, since she was his senior advisor, just as I am to Maxen now. The summit was brief but busy, and on the last night, the people gathered there had a small party. Lots of drinks. Warm fires in the chilly spring night. You get the picture.

  “The night grew late, and everyone went to bed but Luther, who stayed up by the fireplace in the central hall, drinking and looking into the flames. He was so absorbed that he didn’t notice the caretaker and his wife clearing away the empty glasses, or their little boy helping them. Finally, the little boy walked up to him and touched his arm. ‘Do you want help back to your room?’ the boy asked.

  “‘I do want to go to bed, but not to my own,’ Luther said. He was too drunk to care that he was talking to a child. But this child was more observant than other children. ‘I can take you to her room,’ the boy offered quietly. The man didn’t answer, but it was obvious he was gripped with some kind of indecision.

  “‘I can take you around the outside and through the balcony door,’ the boy said. ‘No one would see you then.’ Luther looked up, his eyes growing clearer, and then he stood and followed the boy.”

  I find I’m leaning forward in my chair. I make myself sit back. “What happened then? Did he go to her room? Did she kick him out?”

  “No. She welcomed him inside and locked the balcony door behind him.”

  “But she resisted him for years! Why give in now?”

  Merlin shrugs. “The human heart is a mystery. Perhaps she loved him as ardently as he loved her and couldn’t bear to hold herself back any longer. Perhaps it was the alcohol or the seclusion. Perhaps he wore her down. I do know that she and her husband separated shortly after—perhaps they’d already agreed to the separation and she didn’t see her marriage as an obstacle any more. But what is certain is that they spent the night together—and several more after that. And that winter, she had a baby.”

  I search all my memories of President Luther, all of the stories I’ve heard from Grandpa. “I don’t remember Luther having any children though.”

  “No children that he claimed.” There’s a fleeting look of sadness in Merlin’s eyes. “The woman, she died in childbirth. It’s rare in this day and age, but it happened. An amniotic embolism. At the time of her death, she and her husband were in the middle of divorce proceedings and the husband knew the child wasn’t his. Luther, for all his public peccadillos, knew it would be politically dicey to claim the baby as his when the child’s conception was shrouded in a cloud of adultery and unseemliness. So the baby was absorbed into the system and put into foster care. Her husband kept their little girl—still a toddler—and Luther went on living his life, although I’ve heard he was never quite the same after her death.”

  I think of that woman, perishing before she could hold her own child. Was she alone? Was there anyone to comfort her as she labored, to hold her as she died? “This is awful.”

  “Greer, can you think of anyone you know who was raised in the foster care system? Any famous orphans that you know of?”

  It takes a second for his words to tumble over in my mind, to find purchase in what I already know. “You can’t mean…”

  “I do mean. Maxen Colchester is Penley Luther’s son. Abandoned at birth to be raised by strangers for the sake of political expediency.”

  I think of that picture in Ash’s dressing room, arms wrapped around Kay and his foster mother. “Maybe it was for the best,” I say slowly.

  “That he was raised by the Colchesters? Happy and safe, instead of growing up in the public eye? Yes, I think it was for the best. Some might even say it was meant to be. His destiny.”

  I look up at him. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  Merlin returns my gaze, kind and direct. “Because you deserve to know where Ash came from. You deserve to know his history, because it’s about to become his future.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Merlin sighs. “It means a lot of things, I’m afraid, because Luther’s lust has sown a lot of seeds that cannot be unsown, but right now, it means that someone has gotten a hold of this story, at least according to my sources, whom I trust. It may be a week before it breaks or it may be a year, but when it does break, it will be incredibly disruptive. And now that you are with Maxen, you must expect to be disrupted too.”

  I don’t ask how he knows I’m with Ash. Whether Ash told him or whether he knows it because he seems to know everything, I always knew, deep down, that Merlin learning about us was unavoidable. I do ask another question though. “When did Ash learn about it himself?”

  There’s a flash of anger in his eyes, real anger, but I recognize it’s not meant for me. “At Jennifer’s funeral. Of all the places.”

  God. Imagine not knowing anything about your birth parents until you’re thirty-five. Long after you’ve given up hope of knowing your real origins. To have your origins be so sordid and so miserable. And then to learn it in the middle of your own personal tragedy…

  “Who told him?” I ask.

  The anger settles into a hard glitter in Merlin’s dark eyes. “His half-sister.”

  “So she knew.”

  “Oh yes. Her father made sure of that. Made sure to impress upon her how their lives were ruined by Luther, and how her mother was essentially murdered by Luther’s lust. Her father nurtured a deep bitterness inside her, the way you might nurture a hothouse flower. With lots of care and attention. Who knows when she finally found the baby that killed her mother, who knows how long she bided her time to confront him about the sins of his father, but she timed her blow with killing accuracy. She couldn’t have found a more vulnerable time to tell him.”

  Jenny’s funeral was towards the end of the campaign, only a month or two before the election. “Maybe this sister of his didn’t want him to get to the White House?” And then I have another thought. “Is she the one who leaked the story now?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Oh,” I say suddenly, sitting up. “My cousin Abilene, she said something to me today. ‘You don’t get to be that powerful that young without some big skeletons in your closet…’ She said there were rumors about Ash—rumors that I might not be able to handle. She must have heard about this somehow. This must be what she meant.” Shows how well she knows me, I think irritably, if she thinks something like this would make me feel differently about Ash.

  But Merlin glances away from me when I say this, and an uncomfortable shiver works its way down my spine.

  “Merlin?”

  “There are…other…things about Maxen that I’m sure will come to light, when it’s the right time.” Merlin’s voice is unreadable, his face is a walled garden of secrecy. “And yes. I imagine they will be difficult to hear.”

  “Like what? I don’t like the idea of everyone knowing things about the man I love that I don’t.”

  At the word love, Merlin’s face softens. “I know. I’m not trying to be deliberately evasive, Ms. Galloway. If I could, I would tell you right now, because I believe that you do love Maxen. I believe that you have a right to know. But these things…well, they aren’t my secrets. They aren’t my stories to tell.”

  I run a hand over my eyes. Between Abilene and Merlin, today has been filled with too much information, too much emotion. I just want to be back with Ash again, under his body or sitting at his feet, where things feel right.

  Or with Embry…a voice whispers in my head.

  I ignore it.

  “One more thing before I go,” Merlin says, standing up and smoothing down his suit jacket. “I owe you an apology.”

  I stand up to join him, but I don’t move to stop him or encourage him, and he continues.

  “There are times that I know I must have seemed cruel or dismissive you. Times that I was cruel a
nd dismissive. That was unkind to you, and I’m sorry. I only ever had Maxen’s wellbeing as a priority, and for a long time, I was concerned that you would hurt him.”

  I’m dumbfounded by this. “Me hurt him?” I ask, thinking of all those nights I spent longing for him, my heartbreak in Chicago.

  “You see yourself and your potential much differently than the rest of us do, I assure you.”

  “Now you sound like Embry,” I mutter, and maybe that was a mistake, because it sends a frown pulling at Merlin’s mouth.

  “Indeed. Well, it’s not so irrational to believe that you had the power to hurt Maxen—one look at his face that night in London, and I knew he was lost to you. And that’s why I introduced him to Jennifer Gonzalez, and did everything I could to make sure they married.”

  “You set him up with Jenny to keep him away from me?” I have no idea how to think about this, even though I know exactly how to feel. A slow anger creeps up my body. “You wanted me away from him badly enough that you made him marry someone else?”

  “I didn’t make him do anything,” Merlin says mildly. “I introduced him to Jennifer and encouraged their affection as much as possible, but in the end, the choice was his. He chose her.”

  Why this still stings, I have no idea, but it does. I wrap my arms around my body. “I never understood,” I murmur, “why you disliked me so much.”

  “I told you,” he says, walking towards the door, “I worried you would hurt Maxen. I still worry about this, but it’s out of my hands now. Perhaps this too is destiny. All of our destinies.”

  “I won’t hurt him,” I say, following him to the door.

  “You won’t mean to. Not the way his sister wants to hurt him. But you will hurt him much worse than she ever could. My only hope is the knowledge that you’ll bring him more joy than pain.”