after
six weeks later
When I found out I wasn’t pregnant, I didn’t tell Ash for three days.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of his reaction or that I didn’t want his support—more that I needed to process how I felt first before I shared with anyone else. It’s such a private thing, babies and the absence of them—a lonely, personal thing. My feelings were a layer cake of grief and relief and hopes dead before they could really bloom.
I had to face it: despite the questionable wisdom of it, despite the newness of our marriage, despite Embry’s treachery with Abilene, I wanted to be pregnant. I wanted the baby to belong to my men. I wanted it not because Merlin suggested it for Ash’s campaign branding, but because I loved Ash and Embry so fiercely that sometimes it seemed like that love had a life and vitality outside of myself. And that love called to pregnancy like a moon called to tides, in dark, watery ways that were slow and fast all at once.
But my period came, and life went on. It’s for the best, I told myself, and then spent every waking minute attending to First Lady duties and preparing for the upcoming fall semester at Georgetown.
Which is what I’m doing today.
My position doesn’t call for it and I don’t deserve it, but certain considerations have to be made for being a First Lady, and so even though I’m only teaching two undergraduate sections this fall, I now have my own office. It’s small but it has a window and a position in the building that Luc informs me is “strategically comfortable.”
It’s the first day of August, and there’s still plenty of time to set up my office here on campus, but I was eager to escape the White House today, eager to escape the constant scratch of obligation, the incessant appearances and meetings to rehabilitate my image as a wanton wife. And most of all, to escape that cheating, traitorous rake Embry Moore, who still works late into the night with my husband in my living room. Who still opens doors for me, who still stares at me with those melting glacier eyes.
Just the thought of him makes me slam a box of books down so hard that Gavin, my agent today, pokes his head in the doorway to make sure I’m all right. I shoo him away and then take a few deep breaths, calming myself down by thinking of all the synonyms for Embry Moore. Perfidious. False. Capricious. Deceitful.
Unfaithful.
Which is a rich word for me, Greer Galloway Colchester, to use regarding anyone else, and I recognize that. It doesn’t make it less true. And to think my reputation has been tarnished all for him—he who the press has already forgiven, he who took up with Abilene with no warning, he who broke my heart—
Slam, slam. I move more boxes, think of more synonyms.
There’s a knock on the doorframe and I assume it’s Gavin, looking up to tell him it was just more boxes, and then freezing. It’s not Gavin.
Closing the door behind him, Embry steps into my office, his expensive watch and high cheekbones making everything look cheap and dusty by comparison, the blue of his eyes drowning out all other color. He stares at me for a moment, and I’m suddenly conscious of how sweaty and flushed I am, angrily moving books around while the swamp-heat of D.C. in August leaks in through the window.
I straighten up, pushing several stray locks of hair out of my face.
Embry bites his lip for the slightest of seconds and then switches over—as Embry does when he’s uncertain—to charm. “Was it really less than a year ago that I came to you here?” He flashes a smile at me and then makes a gesture I take to mean the Georgetown Humanities Department. His watch glints in the hot sunlight.
The smile, those dimples, the tug and pull of his custom suit against his tall, slender frame—I feel myself drawn into it all, and then I have to make myself resist.
Two-faced. Treacherous. Sneaking.
Unfaithful.
“Why are you here, Embry? I know it’s not to remember the old days.”
“I wanted to talk to you. We haven’t talked since…well, you know.”
“Since you chose Abilene over us?” I ask, not bothering to dampen the hostility in my voice.
Color dusks his cheeks, but he doesn’t contradict me.
The night before Embry confessed that he and Abilene were together, Ash had pulled me into his lap and explained, in a voice so neutral and precise that I knew he was holding back rage, exactly how he believed Abilene had betrayed me to Melwas. Exactly how he believed she’d been the one to leak the video to the press so that there wouldn’t be any traceable ties linking the video to Carpathia.
“It can’t be proven, at least not yet,” he’d said. “But please be careful around her.”
It’d hurt, knowing for sure that my best friend had been the author of so much shame and horror, but I’d found it to be a dull hurt, a punch rather than a stab. Where Abilene had been concerned, my heart had too much scar tissue to feel much more than a distant ache.
But then Embry told us that he’d started dating her, and it felt like my world slid sideways. Knowing what she did, how could he look her in the face? Touch her? Kiss her? Fuck her?
That night, I crawled into Ash’s arms and pressed my face to his chest, unable to cry but desperate for the release it would bring. Where Embry was concerned, my heart didn’t have enough scar tissue. His leaving us for Abilene sliced and severed more than any knife.
Here in my office, Embry gives me a pleading look. “Greer. Please. I didn’t want it to be like this.”
“I don’t think I ever understood what you did want it to be like.”
He looks away, eyebrows drawn together in a delicate aristocratic brood. “I thought it was the best chance I had,” he says, a touch mournfully, and there’s something in the way he says it that makes me look at him more closely, to see the new doors in his expression where there used to be windows.
“The best chance for what?”
He parts his lips. In profile, with his Mr. Darcy hair and proud forehead, he looks like the paperback cover of a Regency romance. “I—”
He glances at me, and something shifts in his eyes. I recognize it for what it is—the moment he decides to change his words and avoid the truth. “I don’t love her,” he says instead, and there is some truth in that, I think, but not enough. Not enough by half.
“Love isn’t just a feeling, Embry. Love is doing, it’s sharing time and space and you’re sharing those things with her. You’re choosing her, after you promised Ash and me that you were choosing us.”
He winces. “I know it looks that way. I mean, it is that way, in a sense, but you have to believe that I love you and Ash more than ever. If there was a way—”
“There’s not,” I say in a flat voice. As flat as my heart is swollen to splitting with misery. “I can’t be with you when you’re with her. You know what she did—how she hurt me. How could you?”
“I know, I know,” he groans, passing his hand over his eyes. “I know she did. I know this is hurting you now. And if I could stop it, I would.”
I step close to him, climbing onto a box of books so that we’re the same height. “You can stop it,” I say, furious. “You can stop it at any moment, but you won’t, and why is that? Is she smarter than me? More interesting than me?”
His eyes cut blue paths down to my lips, to my neck, and then back up to my eyes. “There’s no one smarter or more interesting than you,” he says.
“Then what is it, Embry? Does she taste sweeter than me? Is she softer? Tighter?”
I’m being yanked into him so fast that I don’t know it’s happening, strong hands pressing the length of my body hard against his, my position on the box meaning that I can feel his stiffness directly against my cunt. There is the heat of him, the sound of his shallow breaths pushing in and out. I realize, almost distantly, that my entire body is filled with light and warmth and want. I’m so very agonizingly wet.
“No one tastes sweeter than you,” he growls, burying his face in my neck. “No one.”
Somehow we’re kissing then, his mouth on mine, my leg hitching around his waist so I can grind myself against him. He hitches my other leg up around him too, supporting my ass with his hands, and then we’re up against the wall, and I hate him so much, I hate him so fucking much and I can’t stop kissing him, can’t stop rubbing myself against him.
“Prove it,” I gasp against his mouth. “Prove no one tastes sweeter than me.”
My thighs slide out of his hands and as my feet touch the floor, he drops to his knees, already pushing my dress up to my waist. His fingers hook into my panties, drawing them down my legs, and then his lips are soft against my bare skin.
The barest flicker of tongue against my clit.
“Sweet,” he murmurs.
And then farther down, against the lips of my pussy.
“So sweet,” he repeats.
And then he parts those lips with his fingers, exposing my wet, pink center, and gives me one long, hard lick, his tongue taking the time to swirl around the deepest part of me.
When he’s done, he looks up at me, his mouth glistening and his eyes hooded. “So fucking sweet.”
I’m undone. I’m pulling everywhere at him, his hair and shoulders and neck, grinding my pussy against his mouth, and he is just as eager to be forced as I am to force him. His mouth moves hungrily on me, switching from kissing to sucking to tongue-fucking in seamless waves that have my fingers scrabbling against the wall behind me for support. I can’t stand it, how handsome he looks all rumpled and wet-mouthed on his knees. I can’t stand how much I hate him and I can’t stand how much I love him.
He pushes a long finger into me, then two. I wish I could resist the urge to press down onto them, I wish I could stop myself from widening my legs or tossing my head or panting so hard that I see stars at the corner of my vision. But goddammit, Embry owes me this. He owes me time on his knees, he owes me his worship and devotion.
He moans every now and then—when his tongue sweeps against a particularly sweet spot or when I buck my hips against his face. He moans as if he’s getting off, even though he has one hand hard at work inside me and the other guiding my leg over his shoulder to open me wider to him, and so I know his cock is achingly untouched right now. The mental image makes my mouth water, sends dual shocks of need and power through me. The need to fuck is strong, but his worshipping me without getting anything in return is so delicious I can’t stand it. Instead, I fist his hair harder, rock against him faster, and hiss to him through my teeth.
“That’s right, that’s where you belong,” I say. My cruel words make him moan even more, and he sends his tongue and fingers in flickering presses in all the right places. Wet and sucking over my clit, thick in my entrance, massaging deeper inside.
“Make me come,” I demand breathlessly, my hands woven deep in his hair and holding his face fast to my cunt. “Make me come.”
He does, so skillfully that every step of the way feels like the best kind of agony—the glow in my chest, the tight pull in my belly, the tension in my lower thighs. Each thing builds on top of the other and builds and builds, and I watch his head move between my legs, my betrayed feelings and my pleasure twisting so tightly together I can’t unwind them, and then it doesn’t matter because I’m coming, coming, coming. His mouth coaxes it out of me, and I’m quivering, clenching, fluttering, whimpering, his blue eyes pinned to my face the whole time.
I am lost in that gaze, lost to the waves deep inside myself, and for a moment, everything fades except the present moment. The sight of a handsome man on his knees, his willing mouth put to good use. The feeling of wet flesh and a wetter tongue. The connection between us that no amount of time and violence and loving other people has been able to destroy.
When I finish, he stands up without looking at me, gently smoothing the skirt of my dress down to my knees with the experienced hand of someone who knows good fabric. He takes his time with it, and I let him, because I know once he’s done, then the moment is over. I’m aware that my phone is vibrating on the table but I ignore it, too unwilling to let this truce end. But it must, as all things do.
He finally meets my eyes as he blots his wet lips with the back of his hand. “She’s not sweeter than you, Greer. She’s not anything more than you.”
I don’t know what I want to say or what I want to do. I want him to pull out his neglected cock and fuck me into next week. I want to scream at him until my voice is hoarse. I want to push him back down to his knees and make him swear every vow under heaven to me.
I settle on doing nothing.
Embry steps back and closes his eyes. “I didn’t come here to fight or to fool around.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I wanted to tell you something before you heard it from anyone else. I wanted to tell you before you heard it from Abilene.”
Somehow, I know. Before he says anything else, before the words even really have time to sink in. I just know.
“Abilene’s pregnant. I’m asking for a paternity test to be sure, but there’s a chance it could be mine.”
I hate it in movies and TV shows when the hysterical heroine slaps someone. It’s melodramatic and sexist and ridiculous and yet, right now, I understand the urge more than I ever had. I’m so furious that my vision threatens to double, so shocked I want to lash out. My hand shakes and itches with the urge to strike him, shove him, throw things.
With great difficulty, I keep the violence restrained. I don’t hit him or scream at him, although I see in his pained face that he wishes I would. That he believes he’s owed punishment for this, which is reason enough not to give it to him. I won’t give him the satisfaction of feeling like he’s earned his way out of any amount of guilt, that he’s paid any kind of penance.
“Get out,” I say calmly.
“Greer.” He swallows, presses his lips together. Lips that were just between my legs. Lips that were between Abilene’s. I think of her stomach, of the place where it will begin to swell, which is the place where mine is flat. I think of the pregnancy tests I took in the White House bathroom with their sad, lonely blue lines.
“Get out,” I repeat.
“This wasn’t planned,” he says. “It wasn’t even—” He looks ill as he does it, but I can tell he’s stopping himself to avoid the truth again. “It wasn’t what I wanted,” he finishes instead.
“You should have thought of that before you fucked her. Get out.”
He runs a hand through his hair, bites his lip, and then surprisingly, he does what I ask without any further protest. He leaves. With a wounded blue look and a face carved into the shape of hurt, he leaves me without another word, walks out of my office with my taste still on his lips and my tear-pricked eyes on his back as he does.
I drop into a chair after he’s gone and will myself not to cry yet. I will. I will cry. Later when it hits me how deep and long-lasting this betrayal has become, but for right now—
Buzz.
It’s my phone again. With a sigh, I flip it over and see a New York number on the screen. I accept the call and hold the phone up to my ear with one hand while I try to press the tears back into my eyes with the other.
“Is this Greer Galloway?”
“This is she.”
The voice on the other end is apologetic. “I’m Officer Murphy from the NYPD. I’m calling to tell you that your grandfather died in the early hours of this morning.”
