after
Greer left this morning to take care of her grandfather’s penthouse, and so the Residence is quiet when I walk up the stairs, save for the soft strains of a Viennese waltz drifting from Ash’s study. My heart clenches at the sound, at the memories of that first dance, the first time I held him against me. I have to pause in the hallway and force myself to forget. If I remember how we danced in those early days, I won’t have the guts to do what I need to do, and it must be done.
But I don’t account for him looking like he does when I walk in, shirtless and barefoot, stretched over his desk reaching for a folder. For a moment, I just lean against the doorframe and watch him. The taut skin, the firm swaths of muscle working in his shoulders and back. The trail of hair leading down from his navel.
“Strauss again?” I say.
He looks up, soft surprise at my presence replaced by a smile so warm and happy that I have to look away. “It reminds me of you,” he says fondly, and then I have to fight the urge to cover my face with my hands. I am so powerless in the face of it, always, the ways in which he loves me; something as innocent as him listening to a song for this reason still has the power to weaken my knees. Still.
Be strong.
He straightens up and stretches, and I stop looking away. It might be the last time I ever get to see the braided muscles of his abs working, the tempting way his pants pull against the lean lines of his hips. “You’re making it hard not to walk over there,” Ash says gruffly, “looking at me like that.”
“Why can’t you walk over here again?” I don’t know why I say it. I do know why he can’t walk over here—I know more reasons why than he does. But at the moment, we’re just two men hungry for each other, two men who happen to be alone.
“I forget why,” Ash murmurs, walking around his desk and over to me. “Something to do with you being an insufferable bastard.” He braces one hand on the doorframe next to my head, and I can smell smoke, I can feel the heat burning off all that bare, muscled skin.
“You always did know how to punish me for being a bastard.”
Ash’s eyes flare. “Is that what you want, little prince? To be punished?”
“I—” The words freeze as Ash dips his head to my neck, running the tip of his nose along my jaw.
“It occurs to me that there are still things we haven’t done, you and I,” he breathes into my neck, into my everywhere. “Things I’ve promised you.”
“Oh?” I say, like I’m so casual, but the word comes out choked with desire.
“Yeah,” he whispers against my ear, and then I feel rather than hear the pop of his trouser button through its hole. I feel the metal teeth of his zipper whirring. I feel his sigh as his heavy erection nudges free of his pants.
He grabs my hand, presses it against his heart. “Do you remember?” he asks casually, moving our hands from his solid, warm chest to his solid, warm stomach. “Do you remember what I promised?”
“I…maybe…”
“Let me refresh you, then.” His parted lips met the lobe of my ear just as he moves our hands underneath his waistband and around the side of his hip. All the way until I’m palming his bare ass.
I’m shaking.
I’ve grabbed his ass before, of course, as I’ve sucked him off or as he’s plowed into me with my knees bracketing his chest. But it’s never been like this, him guiding me there and consciously, carefully letting me explore on my own. And explore I do, before I can stop myself, kneading the firm swell of his ass, moving my other hand to mirror the first so that both of them are full of warm, muscled flesh.
Ash brings his own hands back to my face and then they drop to my neck as my explorations get deeper, rougher. He holds himself so still that I almost wonder if he doesn’t like it, me touching him like this. If it’s something he’s doing because he knows I want it, but that he won’t actually get any pleasure from himself.
Then I gently stroke my middle fingertip against the hot, pleated skin of his entrance and he lets out a noise so helpless and ragged I feel it in my teeth. He slumps against me, his hands sliding down to my chest where they fist in the lapels of my suit jacket, and his head drops even deeper into the hollow of my neck. I press my fingertip harder against that spot, the cinched heat of it opening against the calloused pad of flesh, and he rewards me with a shudder and a moan muffled by the collar of my shirt.
Never in my life did I think I’d get to have this, President Maxen Colchester shirtless and sagged against me, panting as I explored his ass.
“It’s hard not to…” he breathes and trails off, unable to make the words, but somehow I know what he means. It’s hard for him not to take control. It’s hard to keep himself still and let another person give him pleasure when he’s so used to taking it on his own terms.
But he manages, letting my finger work in soft, undemanding presses, until I’m knuckle deep and I finally graze the place deep inside that makes him cry out and push against me, and holy shit, hearing those whimpers in his gravel voice and feeling that ass like a furnace around my finger is almost too much, especially when he starts grinding his erection against my hip.
“I want you to fuck me,” he mumbles, his fists still in my jacket. “Now. Tonight.”
How long have I waited for this fucking moment? And tonight is when he chooses it, the night it can no longer be mine? I briefly consider doing it anyway as I massage his prostate and rub my own clothed cock against his groin—but I don’t even have to remind myself of how wrong it would be. I already know.
I already know.
“Ash, we can’t,” I say, regret making my voice tight as I slide my finger out of him. “Greer.”
He nods against my neck, but I can tell he’s still half gone with lust. “Can’t we though? Just a little bit?”
I almost smile at that, at the begging, because it’s so sweetly novel to see him like this, my strong king willing to make himself vulnerable for me. And by almost smile, I mean I feel tears burning at the backs of my eyes, deep in my throat. Why did tonight have to be the night I walked in on him listening to a waltz? The night he decided he wanted to give me something like this?
Why did tonight have to be the night when he reminded me of how much he loved me? Made me remember how much I loved him?
“Ash,” I say again, hoping he can’t hear the tears in my voice. “You know we can’t.”
For one testing moment, I think he’s going to push back, and if he does, then I’m gone. I’m barely able to hang on to reason and morality as it is, and if he begs for it, I’ll cave. I can’t deny myself the long lines of Ash’s thighs, the hard clench of his stomach, the whimpers and moans and the thought of him coming all over his stomach as I drive my cock deep into his welcoming ass…
“You’re right,” he says finally, heavily, and the very air seems to droop around us. “You’re right. I said we couldn’t earlier, and we shouldn’t. It would hurt Greer.” He lifts his head to look at my face, his beautiful mouth twisted into a rueful smile. “Can’t you get this thing sorted out with Abilene so you can beg forgiveness from Greer and we can all be together again?”
I don’t want to be honest.
I don’t want anything other than flesh and love and the smell of sex in the air around us.
But I do it anyway, I choose the moral path. It’s time to start being a good man. “I’m going to marry Abilene, Ash.”
He lets go of my jacket.
I take a deep breath, deciding to start at the most salient point. “I’m resigning my post as Vice President. The official resignation will come through my office tomorrow, but I wanted to talk to you first.”
Ash looks like I just slapped him. He staggers back, blinking fast, and turns away.
“Ash.”
“Give me a goddamn minute, Embry.”
I can’t, I can’t though, because that back turned to me and the pain in his voice…it scratches at me, inflames pain that I can’t bear. “You must have known that I couldn’t stand by and watch you fail to protect Greer.”
My words slam down like an iron curtain between us, and he turns around, his face blank. His pants are buttoned again and he leans back against the edge of the desk and folds his arms. No sight of the vulnerable, pleading man from just a minute ago—he is a dominant king once again.
“Watch me fail to protect Greer,” he repeats slowly, as if he isn’t sure he heard me correctly. One flick of his green eyes over my face, and he sees the entire truth. The same way he could know which outcropping of rock the separatists were behind, the way he could lead his men through the one safe path in a burning village—that’s the way he can look at me and unspool my words to their hidden truth. I still don’t know how he does it, even after all these years, but at least I know him well enough to expect it.
He lets out a long breath and then nods to himself. “As a Republican or a Democrat?”
I knew he would intuit the truth right away, but it still slices at me, that long breath, that resigned nod. “Republican.”
“I suppose Morgan will be your running mate?”
“If I make it past the primaries.”
“You will.” There’s a weary pride in his voice that guts me. I have to look away for a moment.
“So you see why I have to marry Abilene—I can’t have her pregnant with a child that’s potentially mine while I’m preparing my campaign.”
“So you’ll marry someone you don’t love all for the sake of spiting me.” His voice is the definition of blank, of tired. “You’ll hurt Greer to hurt me.”
“This isn’t about hurting you, Ash.”
He lets out an incredulous noise at that.
“I’m serious.”
He stands up all the way and takes a step closer to me. “So am I, Embry. Am I really supposed to believe that? You’re quitting your job to actively challenge mine because you don’t want to hurt me? You’re telling me that I’m failing to protect my wife, and then leaving us both for someone you loathe not to hurt me?”
I reach down for the resolve I stored away for an attack like this. “This isn’t about hurt, Ash. It’s about making choices to keep Greer safe. Someone has to stop Melwas, and you won’t do it.”
“How do you know?” he asks in a pained voice. “How do you know I won’t? Just because it doesn’t look like war and murder doesn’t mean I’m not going to do everything in my power to protect my wife and this country.”
“The difference is that I’m not afraid to do what needs to be done. And I think you are.”
“You’re leaving me. Because you think I’m a coward.”
I don’t deny it. I owe him that at least, to look him in the eye as the truth lands between us.
“Oh my God,” Ash says, running both hands through his hair and then lacing his hands behind his neck and pacing, pacing, as the truth burrows into him. He reacted before with a soldier’s impassive logic, assessing and studying the landscape, but now—now he’s reacting as a man. “Oh my God. You’re leaving me. You’re leaving me again, and I almost—I almost let you—” his voice shakes hard. “I can’t believe that I almost let you…”
He stops pacing and unlaces his hands, staring down at his empty palms. I wonder if he’s remembering the way my jacket lapels felt bunched in his hands as he arched into me.
My chest fills with cement.
Be strong. Remember Greer’s face in Carpathia, remember her tears.
“I should have known,” he whispers to himself. “I should have known.”
“Ash.”
He turns to me, and there’s so much anger and hurt rolling off him that I take a step back. “This is always how it is, Embry. Always. I give and I give, and you hurt me. You throw it back in my face.”
“Ash.”
“No,” he says with fury. “Don’t. You do this over and over again to me. I propose and you reject me, I propose again and you reject me again. I let you into my marriage, my heart, my bed, and then you leave me. More than leave me, you’re going to try to steal something for yourself that should have been ours.”
Despite his fury, his eyes glint with tears, and I feel like I’m being skinned alive. “I love you, Ash,” I whisper. “I always loved you.”
“Really? Because I always loved you, and apparently that wasn’t enough.”
I take a deep breath, reaching for the resolve again. “You make it sound like this is easy for me. It’s not fucking easy, Ash, it’s breaking my fucking heart. It broke my heart to tell you no both those times, I hated myself for it, but I had to—just like I have to do this now. Can’t you see that?”
I’m pleading now, both my hands spread wide, as if I’m begging for him to take them in his own.
He doesn’t. He sets his jaw. “I don’t see that. Not at all. I see you being selfish the way you’ve always been selfish. You only care about yourself, and you never really—cared—about me.” His voice breaks over these last words and he turns away so I won’t see his face.
The words wreck me, seal me in pain and bury me in the mud of my own sins, but at the same time, they fucking infuriate me. How dare he accuse me of selfishness when he has no idea—no fucking idea—what I’ve done for him? The things I’m still doing for him?
I straighten up and say in as cold a voice as I can manage, “Merlin told me I couldn’t marry you.”
It takes a minute for the words to sink in. Ash turns back to face me, one hand braced on his desk as if he needs to steady himself. “Excuse me?”
“Back in Carpathia. When I was on my way to base after rehab, he sat on the train with me and explained exactly why we couldn’t be together publicly. If you truly love him, then there’s nothing you can’t sacrifice. I knew he was right—hell, an idiot could see that you were meant to be somebody great. And if it had been now, this year, I would have told Merlin to go fuck himself. But back then…Ash, back then I didn’t know if you could do the things you were meant to do if the world knew about us. And even last year when you proposed…this country might not have re-elected you if they knew you were bisexual, and how could I have that on my conscience? You throwing away your dreams for me? I hate it, I hate it, but I made a choice with Merlin all those years ago. Your future over ours.”
He’s really leaning on his hand now, breathing hard. “I don’t…you didn’t…you really wanted to marry me?”
“Christ, Ash, I would have torn down those mountains with my teeth if it meant I could marry you. I would have moved to Canada with you or out onto a horse farm—I would have done anything, gone anywhere. There were days when it was all I could think of, having you all to myself, not hiding, just belonging to you the way we both wanted me to. But I couldn’t. I can blame Merlin all I want—and I do—but it was my choice at the end. You had to come first.”
“You should have told me,” he says.
“You would have ignored me! You were always so stupid and noble like that. If I’d told you, you would have shoved your own future aside and we would be raising horses in Montana.”
“And would that have been so awful?” he asks brokenly.
“You wouldn’t have ended the war at Badon. We wouldn’t have Greer.”
At the mention of Greer, his face clears. Even in the midst of all this, his love for her burns clean and bright like a hungry flame.
“It wasn’t your choice to make,” he says, looking up at me. “I don’t need to be protected, I never asked to be lied to. Jesus Christ, Embry, all those years I thought—I thought you didn’t love me as much as I loved you. And it hurt, God, it hurt so much that I couldn’t breathe sometimes. It was like trying to catch my breath underwater. I lived with that for years. Years.”
This is not what I ever expected upon this revelation. In the loneliest moments of the loneliest nights when I fantasized about telling him the truth of why I said no, I never imagined this.
“A thank you might be nice,” I say, a bit sullenly.
“A thank you?” he demands, rounding on me. “You want a fucking thank you for breaking my heart? For keeping me in agony for years?”
“I was in agony too!” I say, my voice edging toward anger. “It killed me to do it, but I did it for you!”
“I never asked you to! You can’t blame me for something I never would have wanted you to do—a secret you never should have kept!”
I stare at him, real anger swelling my veins now. “You don’t even know what kinds of secrets I’m keeping for you, President Colchester, so you should be real fucking careful.”
He stares back, a muscle jumping in that perfectly chiseled jaw. “There’s something else you haven’t told me?”
Well, what the hell? In for a penny, in for a pound, right? Abilene be damned, Morgan be damned, all the sacrifices I’ve made over the last two months be damned. It’s worth throwing it all away to hurt Ash now, to hurt him the way he’s hurt me.
“Abilene is blackmailing my sister and me—to hurt Greer—but she’s blackmailing us with a secret you don’t even know you have.”
He waits.
I don’t make him wait long. “You have a son, Ash. With Morgan. His name is Lyr, and he’s fourteen years old. He has green eyes and black hair and a pretty face—he should, shouldn’t he? Since he gets it from both sides, after all.”
Ash buckles. Actually buckles, barely catching himself with a hand on his desk. He’s hunched over the top, his eyes closed. “No, I would have known, she would have told me, there would have been something…”
I’m shaking my head even though he’s not looking at me. “She was on birth control that week in Prague, but she got sick that one night, remember? It was enough. And when she came back to Carpathia, she was coming back to tell you. She was three months pregnant when you chose to let her burn in a church. Can you blame her for not telling you afterwards? That you had almost killed your own child too?”
His breath catches on that old guilt, and I see I’ve opened a fresh wound. Good.
I continue. “My mother convinced Morgan to let our aunt Nimue raise the boy as her own, and Morgan agreed. That’s what Abilene threatened us with. She was going to go to the press with it all—that you planted a baby inside your own sister and then nearly killed them both. Morgan couldn’t bear the thought of Lyr being so publicly shamed by all this, and she begged me to help. So I accepted Abilene’s deal: her silence for my part in her quest to hurt Greer, because I knew the truth about Lyr would cause so much more damage than a few months of Greer thinking I actually liked Abilene. See, I, unlike you, am capable of making difficult decisions in order to protect her.”
Ash sits down in a nearby chair, heavily. “I have a son,” he says numbly.
“Yes.”
“With my sister.”
“Yes.”
He buries his face in his hands, and the sense of satisfaction I felt earlier ebbs away watching him. Watching those strong shoulders slumped, that proud head bowed. And suddenly I feel nothing but exhaustion. For the journey behind us and the journey ahead. For the weight of all the poisoned love and spilled secrets I’ll have to carry with me along that journey.
I walk forward and run my fingers through his hair. It’s so thick and black, his head so large and his neck so strong. His skin is warm and alive, even as his breaths grind in and out with barely contained pain. It’s been fourteen years since I met my king, but fourteen years will never be enough to learn every facet and turn of his deep love and strength. An eternity wouldn’t be enough.
I lean down and drop a kiss on the top of his head. “Goodbye, Achilles,” I whisper, and I leave Maxen Ashley Colchester alone with his head in his hands. I leave and get in my car and go back home, remembering the feel of his hair on my lips.
I will break from loving him, I think. I will split with it, burn with it.
And yet, for the first time, I know what I have to do. I know that I’m a good man, I know that I’d be a good leader. I know that I can stop Melwas and keep Greer safe. I know how to do it.
I have to become more than a prince.
I have to become a king myself.
