“I’ll have Belvedere get the shoes,” I tell her with a smile. “I like having you in my arms too much to put you down.”
She sighs, resting her head against my shoulder. I can smell all the sweet aromas that come with a woman—soap and perfume and the faint smell of skin and arousal underneath it all. “I love you, my Greer,” I tell her. “And do you love your Sir?”
She nods against my shoulder. “I love my Sir with all my heart.”
“Even tonight?”
“Even tonight.” A pause. “How long until you let me come again?”
I laugh and pinch her ass for her impertinence, and then I carry her out into the hallway towards the limo.
There’s something quite thrilling about fucking a woman in a ball gown. It’s like having a secret that no one else knows, a sin that no one else can see. Of course, no one else can see us in the Beast anyway, but it still feels sweetly illicit to have Greer’s skirt fluffed and bunched around us and my cock inside her underneath it all. I savor the picture she paints like this—hair coiled into perfection, makeup like art, the gorgeous gown—but she is a hot, greedy thing under her skirt, her snatch tight around me and her clit a hard, plump bud against the muscles of my groin. She’s under strict orders not to come or make a single noise, and I can tell that both are testing her discipline at the moment—her fingers are digging into my shoulders and her teeth are digging so far into her lower lip that I wonder if she can taste blood.
I’m enjoying it very much.
“…And that’s another year on the timeline, thanks to the coalition,” the new British prime minister is saying into my ear. I’m on the phone with him, ostensibly to congratulate him and his party on their victory, but it’s gone beyond congratulations into an unwelcome digression about his goals, and it’s taking more than my usual reserve of self-control to listen to him fully. Not the least because I have my wife on my lap, repeatedly impaling herself on my penis.
But listen fully I do, and when I hang up the phone, I take a moment to lift up Greer’s skirt and reward myself with the sight of us fucking, watching my thick organ disappear into that tight cunt and reappear again, the wet pink of her hugging me even as she lifts away, as if her body doesn’t want to let me go. I lean back and watch this for a few minutes, considering rather lazily if I’d like to come inside her now or wait and savor the anticipation, and then I decide that she’s been such a good wife for me today that I’ll reward her at the gala itself, whisk her off into some dark bathroom upstairs and fuck her until she screams. And that is the moment I want to come inside her, when she is completely and utterly outside of herself with release.
“Up,” I say with a stern swat to her ass. “We’ll finish this later.”
I can see a faint mist of sweat along her hairline as she nods dazedly, clambers off my lap, and reaches for her purse.
“Don’t clean yourself,” I say. “I want to know that you’re wet.”
“Yes, Sir,” she manages. I enjoy the effect of denying her very much, but I still give her the last few minutes of the ride to compose herself and let her mind clear a little—I always play to tease, sometimes even to test, but I would never actually jeopardize her ability to do her job—and by the time we reach the Luther Center itself, she is able to smile and wave calmly enough as we leave the Beast and trail past the red carpet into the crowd.
“Don’t forget,” I whisper in her ear before I go to find the event coordinator. “I want you wet and ready for me later. If I like what I find, then I’ll reward my good little girl.”
“And if you don’t like what you find?” she whispers back, a little nervously.
“Then it’s going to be long night for you,” I say with a quick kiss to her temple. And I mean it. I’m not without mercy, but I always keep my word. Always.
Greer lifts her chin a little. “You’ll like what you find.”
“My little queen is determined to please me,” I say, smiling. “And I am determined to give her everything she needs to be a happy girl.”
She stops walking and turns to straighten my tie and smooth down my jacket, the flat of her palm running teasingly over my hidden erection as she does.
I catch her wrist. “Bold, naughty girl.”
“Hurry, Mr. President,” she murmurs, looking up at me through her eyelashes. “I feel like I could come just from your command alone right now, I’m so wound up.”
My dick, still heavy and hard and wet, jolts against my zipper at her words. I’m grateful for the concealing effect of the tuxedo jacket, but I do press into her so she can feel the ramrod length of me against her belly. “I like this idea very much,” I murmur back to her. “Of you coming from my command alone.”
“I’d rather have you inside me,” she whispers plaintively.
“Mmm. Me too. Are you sure I have to go give this speech?”
She gives a sighing little laugh. “I suppose you must.” She fiddles with my bow tie once more and rises up to kiss me gently on the mouth. “You’ll knock them dead.”
I kiss her back and then leave to find the coordinator.
The speech goes well—the Luther Center probably would have preferred that I spoke mainly about the arts and sciences, but Uri and I included several sections about education as well, in anticipation of a school reform initiative I hope to push through later this year. Afterwards, there is the usual array of handshakes and pictures and conversations, there is dancing, there is the expected bevy of powerful people hoping to speak into my ear. In short, it is a typical night in Washington, and ordinarily, it would take tremendous powers of focus and memory to distinguish it from any other night afterwards.
But three things set it apart.
The first is—painfully and inevitably—Embry. While at the White House today, I kept myself busy and sequestered with my wife, and even with the few meetings I couldn’t escape, I purposefully stayed free of my phone and any chatter from my staff. But as the night goes on, it becomes clear that the rest of the political world exploded after Embry gave his official resignation speech today.
“Did you know?” people ask. “Did you want him to leave? Did you make him leave?”
No and no and fuck you if you think I would ever make that man leave me, but I can’t say those things, I can’t deliver those honest answers with all the bitter pain they deserve. I have to make polite noises and vague explanations and benign well wishes for his future, and how do they not all see? How do they not hear the trickle of my heart’s blood dripping out of my chest, how do they not see the scooped-out pain in my eyes, how can they not hear every desperate plea and every rasping sob I’ve let out in the last twenty-four hours?
Merlin rescues me eventually, inserting himself into a cloud of speculation and curiosity that no amount of calm, noncommittal statements on my part can clear, and he pulls me away on the pretense of discussing something confidential. But when we reach the edge of the room, he merely hands me a flute of champagne from a circulating tray and says, “Drink this.”
“I’m fine,” I insist.
“No,” Merlin says. “You were performing fine, and doing a wonderful job at it, but another five minutes of that and the seams would’ve started to show. Take a minute to breathe.”
“I feel like I’ve been taking a minute to breathe all day. I’m ready to stop breathing and start fixing things.”
“Well, you’ve already stopped breathing,” Merlin observes with an edged perception that makes me uncomfortable. “Perhaps you haven’t breathed properly since last night. Which is all the more reason for you to breathe now. Take comfort in your queen. We can discuss preliminary election strategy later this week.”
The casual way he says it strikes some new and horrible understanding into me. Embry is gone, and his leaving is now so permanent and acknowledged that it’s almost mundane. Business as usual. Just one more angle to fold into the strategy. Don’t worry about that hollow echo in my chest, let’s just turn to item two in the handout…
>
“Drink,” Merlin says. “Do it for me if you won’t do it for yourself.”
I have no energy left to argue. I drain the flute in one movement and set it on a nearby table. Merlin gives me a moment or two to compose myself, and then he says, “Better?”
I’m not actually, but I believe very stridently in not making my unhappiness or discomfort another person’s problem. I’m also not a liar, so I simply say, “I will be.”
“Yes, you will.”
“It embarrasses me to admit this,” I say, looking out over the dim ballroom, “but no matter how cautiously I spoke or thought about it, no matter how much I told myself I was prepared for the possibility of something different, beneath all that, I never doubted that I would win again. And I am only realizing this now as it becomes apparent that I might lose.”
Merlin makes a skeptical noise. “I hope this doubt isn’t because of Embry?”
“Why shouldn’t it be? He’s a decorated soldier, he’s become a skilled politician, he has all the right connections. He’s more charming than me, besides.”
“You’re looking at him with a lover’s eye,” Merlin says frankly. “And not looking at yourself at all. I think this reelection could be personally uncomfortable, but politically quite easy.”
“All the same,” I say, putting my hands in my pockets and scanning the room for Greer. “I want to meet with Kay and Trieste about how much of our agenda we can get accomplished this term.”
“Maxen, that agenda was calculated precisely for two terms. Even then, it’s almost certainly too ambitious. There is no way we can accomplish the rest of that list in the time we have left.”
I finally find Greer, a glint of near-white hair under the golden lights of the dance floor. The band is playing a waltz now, and the music is a shard of glass against my throat. How many times had I held Embry in my arms to music just like this? Can I number all the times I’ll never get to dance with him again? Do I even want to try?
I was even listening to Strauss when he came to me last night, when I saw him standing in the doorframe of my office, looking beautifully brooding, as only he can. God how I love him, and it took only one blue glance before I was coming toward him, pressing against that firm, flat chest of his and guiding his long, elegant fingers to the place that waited for him. One blue glance before I was completely open and undone for Embry Moore, just as I have always been, just as I have been since the first day I saw him spoiled and scornful in the mountains of a strange land. I would walk barefoot over every jagged rock of that cursed country if it would bring Embry back to me. I would crawl.
“I’d be a fool if I planned on a second term; I’m not owed it,” I finally say to Merlin. “I’m not entitled to anything more than what I’ve earned here and now. I have to get as much done as I can in case I have to leave.”
“Poverty, sexual assault, education, climate change, stability overseas—you think it’s merely a matter of willpower and focus to effect those changes? No, these are projects that require huge amounts of bipartisan leverage and cooperation and favors—not even Penley Luther himself could have done it.”
“I’m not my father,” I say with perhaps more sharpness than necessary.
“And I thank God for that every day,” Merlin responds blandly. “Nonetheless, it can’t be done. Give up this idea of cramming six years of work into two, and focus on getting elected again.”
I look over at Merlin, and I’m surprised to see something almost goading in his face, although it’s not truly goading…a challenge, maybe? A dare?
But that’s not quite right either. It’s almost less like a dare and more like he’s delivering lines from a script. There’s something mechanical in the way he insists it cannot be done. It’s cursory, an actor running through the kinds of expository lines that require little emotion or effort. Like he knows he must say these things to provoke me into saying the opposite, but when I examine his face, all of that vanishes, and he is the picture of polite and reserved calm once again.
I can’t resist the script either, if scripted this moment is, and I find myself saying exactly what would have been laid out for me on the page. “I’m doing it, Merlin. Even if it kills me.”
The second thing remarkable about tonight is my wife. Her dress—some strapless confection of gold and white—renders her into a shimmering vision of light, a drop of sunlight playing over water, and she draws people to her simply by existing as she does, sublime and sovereign. I catch glimpses of her face—kind, serious, almost tormentingly lovely—through the crowd as I make my way to her, and I’m reminded of a John Collier painting I saw once in England of Queen Guinevere gathering flowers on May Day. Like the painting, she is clad in white and gold and surrounded by a crowd; like the painting, there is something aching and lonely in her face.
I had once teased her that one man wasn’t enough—that she needed both Embry and me to feel loved—and she had shaken her head and pressed her hand flat against where my heart beat in my chest.
Don’t you see? she’d implored. It is because I love you that I love Embry. We fell in love with each other by loving you.
It was just as well. My love was—and is—implacable and cruel to those it chose. I had been glad that they could take comfort in one another, however envious the idea made me. And I feel quite the same now, although my wife’s face reminds me that she may not get any comfort from Embry any time soon. His absence has gouged a hole in our marriage just as surely as it’s gouged a hole in our three.
When I reach Greer, however, and take her wrist in my hand while she’s talking to the governor of New York, that lonely look vanishes and is replaced with something so warm and yielding that I have to kiss her on the mouth, lipstick and onlooking governor be damned.
“Mr. President,” she says, half laughing and half gasping under my mouth.
“Mrs. Colchester,” I return, lifting my head but pulling her into me. “I’m so sorry, Governor Jarrett, do you mind if I steal my wife away for a few moments?”
The governor waves an amused hand. “By all means, save me from this gorgeous, interesting woman,” she says. “It was unbearable company anyway.”
We laugh, we say goodbye, we make more excuses as we squeeze together through the crowd, and then Luc is escorting us out of the ballroom into the small art gallery off the north wing of the Luther Center.
“We’re not to be interrupted,” I tell him at the door after I send Greer inside.
“Yes, sir,” Luc says, his expression betraying nothing.
I clap him on the shoulder. “Good man,” I say, and then follow Greer through the doorway and close the door behind me.
Inside, the world is small and quiet. A wall of windows frames a spill of Georgian buildings and thick trees; beyond the rise of stone and leaves, the white finger of the Washington Monument presses into the purple-clouded night sky. Huge canvases of modern art stud the all-white walls, shadows leak from the windows onto the blond wood floors, the noise of the gala is a muffled memory.
We are alone at last.
When Greer hears my footsteps, she turns to face me and the lights from the city outside catch on the gold of her dress and in the gleam of her hair. She sinks to her knees in a cloud of tulle and silk as I approach, her neck arched as gracefully as a swan’s as she trains her eyes on the floor.
I take a minute to enjoy her, strolling around her kneeling figure with my hands in my pockets, taking in the elegant line of her neck and shoulders, her perfect posture, the delicate curve of her collarbone. The corona of white and gold silk around her knees. The excited heave of her breasts under her bodice. The ring glinting off her finger, better than any collar. A thousand possibilities scorch through me all at once—my cock down her throat; her face in the floor; the nylon tie of a stocking around her wrists. The sound of her begging voice echoing off the empty walls.
Without saying anything, I cup the back of her head with my hand as I stand beside her, and she leans her head against
my thigh. Not kittenishly rubbing or bucking as before, but merely resting, enjoying the simplicity of the contact. I enjoy it too, standing above her, looking down on her with pride and pleasure. Both of us exactly where we need to be, and how we need to be.
If only…
If only my little prince were here.
I allow myself the grief and the splintered hurt, even as I refuse to vent it on Greer. If only Embry were here. If only it were the three of us in this gallery, the only entrance guarded, our privacy secure. I’d make him watch me fuck my wife, and I’d fuck her slow, slick, grinding, so that he would see every slide of me inside of her, every quiver of her stomach, every gasping part of her pretty lips, and know that it was me doing it. I’d make him lick her clean after. I’d make him beg like a dog, I’d make him cry for me. I’d leave a bruise for every minute I loved him that he didn’t love me back.
I’d spread him out and kiss every inch of him. I’d spread Greer’s hair over his flat, muscled stomach just to see the contrast, I’d tickle the soles of his feet until he laughed, I’d press and nuzzle into every corner of him—elbows and in between toes and the hollows under his arms—until he knew that every part of me belonged to him. I’d pin Greer between us and together we would love her the way she needed to be loved, I’d spread her legs and allow him to take his pleasure there, and then when he came inside of her, I would watch and my heart would be full.
Beside me, Greer makes a small, unintentional sigh.
“What is it, pet?”
She looks up at me. “I’m missing him right now.”
“Me too, angel.”
“How are you so calm about it?” she asks. “How do you hold it all inside yourself?”
Hold what? I want to ask. My own fucking heart, torn into bloody tatters? My every foolish hope for a future with both my queen and my prince? My kingdom, which was built with Embry at my side?
Can’t she see the broken bones pushing through my skin? The garish, crimson wounds all over my body? What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven; can’t she see me crawl? Can’t she see me weep? If I could press my fingers into my veins and claw out any acceptable and worthy sacrifice, my soul, my blood, my past and my future, then by fucking God I would have done it.
American King (New Camelot #3) Page 7