“That’s right,” he hisses, his head falling back once more. “Drain me. Take it, take it all. Oh fuck, angel. Here it comes.”
Hot spurts hit the back of my throat, thick and long pulses of him, a deep animal grunt leaving his mouth at the apex of his climax. He holds my head over him as he thrusts through the rest of his orgasm, making sure I’ve had every last drop of his milk, before he finally loosens his grip and lets me go. Without being asked, I lick him from root to tip, cleaning his satisfied flesh, until I feel a finger under my chin. I lift my face to his, and his face is filled with so much warmth and pride that fresh tears prick at my eyelids.
“Well done, my little princess,” the President says. “I’m so proud of you.”
Only in this world, only in this context, only with this man, does this wreck me. I have my own life and my own goals and my own power, and yet here in this room, none of that applies. Tonight was hard, tonight did seem impossible, and so Ash’s praise and the emotional fallout of having a scene in front of my former lover triggers a wave of tears I can’t fight off. I bury my face in Ash’s lap so the men won’t see me cry.
I want Ash to be proud of me in these scenes. So much.
He strokes my hair but then abruptly stops, gently but quickly moving me aside so he can jump to his feet. I look up, confused and vision blurred, and I realize that Embry has stood up and is walking to the door, fumbling his fly closed as he does. Ash strides across the room and slams his hand against the door as Embry tries to open it, closing the door again and effectively pinning Embry between his body and the wood.
Embry turns to face Ash. “Please let me go,” he says wretchedly. “Please.”
“You’re still hard,” Ash tells him. “Aren’t you?”
“I can’t stay here.”
“I’ll let you leave if you can show me you’re not erect,” Ash says, and I’ve never heard anything so soft and menacing and filthy. “Pull your dick back out and show me. Prove to me you don’t want this and you can go.”
Embry’s handsome face is twisted with delicious torment, his stubbled jaw tense with suffering. “I know what game you’re playing, and I know that I’m going to lose.”
Does he know because he’s played a game like this with Ash before? What history do the two of them share?
Embry asks again, his suffering turning into anger. “Please, Ash.”
“You and I don’t have a safe word,” Ash says. “And if we did, it wouldn’t be please. Do I need to have Greer come over here and help?”
“No!” Embry bursts out. “No. I…okay.”
There’s complete silence in the room as Embry bends to Ash’s will and unfastens his pants and slowly withdraws his penis. It’s harder than ever, swollen and dark and angry, throbbing with every beat of his heart. Even though I’ve just came moments earlier, my pussy gives a whiny little throb of its own.
“Happy?” Embry demands.
Ash doesn’t answer him but turns to me. “Go get your dress. The one you wore tonight. Bring it to me.”
I scurry up from the floor to obey, hurrying into the dressing room and returning with the pile of blue silk. Embry and Ash haven’t moved, but there’s so much precum at the tip of Embry’s cock that it glistens in the ambient light of the bedroom, and Ash has kept his hand against the door, splayed against the wood right next to Embry’s head. The posture is intimate somehow, even though they aren’t touching, and the way they’re looking at each other is suffused with the kind violence that only comes from real anger.
I hand the dress to Ash and he hands it to Embry. “Relieve yourself.”
“What?” Embry’s voice is a study in breathless incredulity.
Ash nods towards the dress. “It’s soft, isn’t it? The dress? And Greer looked so beautiful in it, didn’t she? Like a fucking princess, you said when you saw her. Did you think about fucking her in it tonight?”
I freeze. Embry’s blue eyes flare with torment.
Ash goes on. “Did you think about what it would be like to rub your bare cock against all that silk before you finally shoved inside her little pussy? About how the silk would feel fisted in your hands while you pinned her to the ground and fucked her?”
“Ash,” I choke out.
He ignores me. “She would have liked it, I think. Watching you defile that expensive dress as you defiled her. And it would have felt so good, wouldn’t it? All that blue silk and that sweet pussy. The most beautiful woman in the room a slave to your cock.”
Embry stares at him. “I know why you’re doing this.”
“I know.”
And that’s all there is to it. There’s no explanations, no defenses, no logic. It’s what he wants, and therefore in this scene, it’s law.
“Now wrap that dress around your cock and relieve yourself.” Ash’s voice turns seductive. Dark and tempting. “I bet it would only take a couple of pulls, don’t you? And it will feel so good, fucking that dress you’ve been obsessed with all night. Marking it. It will feel so good to have Greer see how big your cock gets as you pretend to fuck her, how much cum you could fill her with if she’d only let you.”
“Jesus,” Embry pants, the muscle in his arm bunching as he slowly fists his erection with the skirt of my dress. The silk slides easily over his straining flesh, whispering softly on his cock. “Oh, Jesus.” The last word breaks into a moan. His head falls back against the door as he’s lost to himself, but he can’t resist seeing his cock on my dress, and he looks back down. All three of us watch as it moves in and out of the silk, rude and male against the pretty blue flutters of fabric.
Ash was right, it doesn’t take long, and with a shuddering exhale, Embry releases. Thick ropes of cum spray my dress, spurt after spurt after thick spurt, each pulse accompanied by a savage jerk of his hips and a ragged groan. My nipples are so tight it hurts, same with my cunt, and oh God, how I wish Embry’s cock were inside me now. That those savage jerks were plowing into me. That all that cum was mine.
After a few more thrusts into the silk, he slows, slumping back against the door, dropping the dress to the floor.
“Don’t you feel better now?” Ash asks. “Didn’t it feel good to get rid of that ache?”
Embry nods wordlessly, eyes still closed, pulse still hammering in his throat.
“Greer liked it too. Didn’t you, Greer?”
My cheeks flush red with shame but I answer honestly. “Yes, Sir.”
Embry tucks himself into his pants and fastens them up, running a hand over his jaw. He looks dazed, as if he’s just woken from a long sleep, his blue eyes unfocused and his voice uncertain when he says, “I’m going home now.”
“Good night, then.”
Embry looks at me and then looks at Ash, that dazed expression more pronounced than ever. “Good night.”
Ash moves his hand so Embry can open the door, and then Embry leaves, closing the door behind him. Ash stares at the door for a minute and then faces me, his face apologetic. “I’m sorry, angel. But I need your mouth again.” His hand is already on my head, forcing me to my knees, and his other hand digging out his cock, and he’s so hard already, viciously, violently hard.
Watching Embry made him hard, I realize. And the jolt of jealousy comes concurrent with the jolt of arousal.
Ash doesn’t go easy on my mouth, but before he comes, he pulls out and reaches down for me, picking me up easily in his arms and carrying me to the bed. He spreads my legs and drapes them over his shoulders, pressing his hot, skillful mouth against my pussy and devouring me. I come with his dark head and wide shoulders between my thighs, and then he’s straddling my chest, fucking my mouth to get his cock wet and then fucking my tits. When he finally comes, his hands savage and bruising as he pushes my breasts around his cock, it’s with something almost like a roar, like the orgasm is torn from him.
And later that night, I wake out of a deep sleep to find Ash wrapping my small hand around his throbbing erection. He closes his large hand over mine, guidin
g me to jack him off with short, hard pulls, the way men do it to themselves. The way men do it to other men. He comes with a quiet grunt, and after I clean him with a warm washcloth from the bathroom, he folds me into his arms and drifts off to sleep immediately, whatever monster he awoke within himself tonight finally, finally sated.
20
Six Weeks Later
The snow is falling thick and fast outside as Embry walks into the room with a bowl of fresh popcorn. “Can you explain this to me again?” he asks, setting the bowl down on the coffee table in front of Ash and me. “Is this like a Martha Stewart thing? Is this because cranberries are disgusting and serve no other purpose?”
Ash looks up from the cranberry and popcorn garland spilling out of his lap and around his feet, a needle poised in one hand. “Did your family really never do this?” he asks skeptically.
Embry arches an eyebrow at the mess of popcorn and cranberries and thread. “No.”
Ash goes back to his work, reaching into the bowl of warm popcorn to thread another piece onto his garland. “I suppose you and Morgan had servants to decorate your family Christmas tree.”
“Actually,” Embry says, “we did. The trees were too big for us to put up ourselves, and the one in the main hall had to be decorated using scaffolding.”
“Sounds like it would have taken a lot of popcorn,” I comment, not looking up from my own garland.
“The hidden costs of wealth,” Ash remarks drily.
“We did have the mistletoe, though,” Embry says. I glance up at the doorway where our own bunch of mistletoe hangs; Ash insisted on putting it up there the minute we got to the lodge, and then kissed me for several long, sweet minutes underneath it as Embry watched with a troubled expression and his hands in his pockets.
“We need someone to kiss you under the mistletoe, Embry,” I say.
“I agree,” he replies. “Maybe one of the Secret Service agents will be lonely later tonight.”
We all laugh, but a wave of sadness goes through me for Embry. The perennial third wheel.
I’d kiss you if I could, I wish I could say. Maybe he already knows.
Embry grabs a handful of popcorn for himself and throws his body onto a low sofa nearby, and for a few minutes, there’s only the sound of the fire in the fireplace and the snow against the windows and the rustle of popcorn in the bowl. Then I ask Ash, “Have you heard from Kay about the Carpathian treaty yet?”
He shakes his head. “I told her to give it a rest tonight. There’s no point in her spending her holiday chasing down senators who are ready to enjoy theirs.”
It’s Christmas Eve, and Ash, Embry and I are at Camp David. Kay and Ash’s mother are coming for Christmas dinner tomorrow night, but for now, it’s just us and the Secret Service. Even the nation is quiet right now—there have only been a handful of texts from Kay and Belvedere since we got here this morning. Ash and his staff have been working hard to get Senatorial advice and consent for the new Carpathian treaty, in the hopes of having it inked and signed before spring comes and a land offensive from the Carpathians becomes possible. Other than the work on the treaty, it’s been a quiet December. Quiet for the three of us as well—six weeks have passed without a repeat of what happened between us the night of the State Dinner. We haven’t even talked about it.
But even without talking about it, something seems to have shifted. Embry—widely famous for having a different date for every event—still has a new woman on his arm almost every night, and there are times he comes into the Oval Office or the Residence with swollen lips and tousled hair, smelling like sex. Knowing he’s fucking other women—and lots of them—hurts a secret corner of me that I refuse to let anyone see, but it’s a secret corner that’s used to it. During the campaign especially, Embry’s playboy status was a running joke among pundits, and unlike Ash, he’s never brought up his sexual history to me, never made me any promises, and he doesn’t have to, because we aren’t together. I have no claim to his sex life, and I’ve accepted that, even though it stings.
Embry’s fucking his way through the Beltway elite aside, he’s seemed more attached to Ash and me than ever since the State Dinner. At night, he’ll leave whatever party or gala he’s at and join us at the Residence, freshly fucked and still wearing a rumpled suit or tuxedo, and watch television with us or help me sort through medieval research. On Sunday mornings, he’s there next to us in church, and on Sunday afternoons he’s stretched out on the sofa in the Residence living room, yelling about football with Ash, and teasing me about Nathaniel Hawthorne or whichever American writer we’ve decided to hate that day. In the mornings, when I’m getting ready to sneak out of the Residence without being seen, Embry is there with coffee and a newspaper, and the three of us share a quiet breakfast before the sun breaks over the horizon, sipping coffee and waking up for the day. Embry’s sewn himself into the rhythms of our days, so much so that whenever he’s gone, it feels like something’s unraveled.
And through all that, Ash and I still haven’t slept together. Something that bothers me more and more every day.
No man can take things that slow, trust me. Not unless he’s getting it from somewhere else.
Ugh.
I push Morgan’s words out of my head and try to focus on my popcorn and cranberry garland. Try to focus on how happy I am to be here, snowbound and as alone with Ash and Embry as I’ve ever been. I get to have them both to myself for an entire day and night, and I mean to enjoy every minute of it.
“Anyway,” Ash says after a minute, going back to our conversation about the treaty, “I think I mostly convinced the senators we need.”
“Convinced is a kind word for it,” I tease. He’s spent the last five weeks meeting personally with every senator on his list, wooing, cajoling, threatening, leveraging—you name it, Ash has done it in the last five weeks in order to keep the United States from going back to war. “I hear some congressmen are actually physically frightened of you right now.”
Ash shrugs, but he smiles down at his garland. “Whatever works.”
“No work talk,” Embry complains, flinging an arm over his face. His voice is muffled when he speaks again. “I hate work.”
“Says the man who read the daily briefing out loud to us in the car.”
“I did it to stop you from playing more of that awful music,” Embry says from under his arm.
“Christmas music?”
A muffled groan. “Yesssss.”
“Bah humbug,” Ash says, leaning down to bite off the string with his teeth. He makes a knot at the end of the garland and then puts his needle on the table. “Are you going to help us hang these up or what?”
“What do you think?”
But then he heaves himself off the couch and helps us anyway, criticizing our garland placement before pushing us out of the way and doing it himself. Ash laughs and pulls me back, standing behind me and wrapping his arms around my stomach. He rests his chin on my shoulder. “This should be every Christmas.”
Embry scoffs, long fingers plucking at the garland to make it drape evenly along the boughs. “Shitty decorations and the three of us bickering?”
I feel Ash smile, feel the genuine longing in his voice when he answers. “Yes.”
That afternoon, as the snow lets up and the December sunlight begins to wane over the woods, Ash asks me to go on a walk. Embry is stretched out on the floor asleep after a lazy afternoon watching A Christmas Story and drinking scotch; there’s a white puff stuck in his hair from when I threw popcorn kernels at him to try and wake him up.
“He’ll be fine,” Ash says, handing me my coat. “He never gets to nap since I forced him to run for office with me. We should let him sleep.”
I pull the coat on and wind a scarf around my neck, which Ash uses to tug me close enough to kiss. “You’re beautiful,” he murmurs. “Even all bundled up.”
I press my lips to his, letting him part my lips with his own. I taste him—all mint and scotch and a hint of popcorn—an
d sigh happily. But when we pull apart, there’s something resigned in his face.
“Ash?” I ask. “Is something wrong?”
He looks at me for a long moment, his brow creased and that gorgeous mouth turned down at the corners. He doesn’t answer my question. Instead, he says, “Let’s go on that walk.”
After a brief word to Luc, the lead agent on duty, we head out to the woods, following a narrow trail into the trees. The snow is deep and thick, untouched, and walking through it soon has our breath coming out in huge puffs of smoke. Ash looks like a model in his scarf and wool coat, belted jeans and boots. For a moment, I stop walking and just look at him as he continues ahead, long legs making easy work of the snow.
How is this my life? Stringing garlands with the President, watching the Vice President fall asleep like a teenaged boy on the floor? It feels so surreal, dreamlike, like I fell asleep in my office at Georgetown and conjured this new life for myself.
Ash notices I’m not with him and turns to me. “What is it, little princess?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head and smile. “Just thinking about how blessed I am.”
This should make Ash smile in return, make him happy, but instead there’s a new shadow in his eyes. He walks back to me and takes my hand, the leather of our gloves creaking together in the cold. “This way,” he says, pointing to an opening through the trees. “There’s a spot I like right through there.”
We move in that direction and come upon a sweet little rill, lined with ice but still running, tracing a babbling silver path through the woods. There’s a massive stump next to it, which Ash brushes the snow off of, and then we sit together, pink noses and frosty breath, listening to the narrow stream trickle past.
Ash doesn’t speak for a long time, and I don’t push him, even though his uncharacteristic unhappiness has me worried.
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