“Step-sister,” Morgan corrects icily.
“Step-sister,” Embry concedes cheerfully. “But we both have the same winning personality, don’t we?”
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” Morgan says, glancing away from us as if bored. “We all know you’re here to rescue the princess from the evil witch.”
Embry’s smile grows wider. “Your words, Sissy, not mine.”
Morgan actually looks mortified. “Don’t call me that here.”
“Did you know,” Embry says, as if he didn’t hear her, “that Sissy here actually requested to sit next to you once she heard you were attending the dinner? A fun fact I just learned from Belvedere, who learned it from the social secretary. Now, why would that be, Morgan? You weren’t planning on causing any trouble, were you?”
“I simply wanted to meet the soon-to-be-famous Greer Galloway for myself.” Morgan’s eyes sweep back to me, appraisingly. “See the girl that has the President so preoccupied.”
Embry’s hand curls protectively around my shoulder.
Morgan doesn’t miss that, and she raises an eyebrow. “She has you preoccupied too, then? How interesting.”
There’s a blink of something on Embry’s face—worry, maybe—and then it’s gone. “They’re starting up the dancing, Morgan, so as delightful as this little reunion is, I’m afraid Greer and I must abandon you.”
Embry helps me stand, but before we can make our escape, I feel Morgan’s cool hand on my wrist. “Don’t forget what I said to you,” she says quietly, and there’s no malice in her voice, only a kind of urgency. “You’re in over your head.”
“That’s enough, Morgan,” Embry tells her. “You’ve done your worst. Now leave us alone.”
Morgan sits back with a pretty frown, and I withdraw my wrist and let Embry lead me away, my stomach churning.
“Don’t let her upset you,” Embry says as we weave through the tables to the far corner of the dining room, where Ash stands with a circle of dignitaries talking and sipping premium vodka. “She’s jealous. She and Ash…well, there’s a history there. And it’s not a pretty one.”
“I gathered that much.” I take a deep breath. “They used to fuck?”
Embry winces at the word. “I hate such a wonderful word being applied to such a short-lived, stupid thing. They met the first year Ash was deployed, three or four years before Caledonia.”
Three or four years before he met me, I think, doing the math.
“And it wasn’t anything more than an R and R fling. Over in a week. Fourteen years ago.”
I’m not often struck by the age difference between Ash and me, but for a moment, I’m stunned by it. Stunned by the fact that he was fucking Morgan Leffey while I was an eleven-year-old skipping around my grandfather’s penthouse.
“So there hasn’t been anything between them since then?” I ask. “Because that’s not the impression I got.”
Embry’s face has a purposefully open expression, and his voice is so carefully honest and casual. “That’s the last time they fucked, I’m certain of it.”
He’s lying. Or he’s not telling the whole truth, but before I can press him further, he tucks my hand in the crook of his elbow and squeezes it. “Let’s not talk about my sister now. I just ate like thirteen pierogies in front of the Polish president in order to impress him, and I’m already about to throw up. Besides, we have much more important things to talk about, like how many times are you going to dance with me tonight?”
I smile up at him. “As many times as you’d like.”
His eyes glow. “You have to dance with Ash first. But then after that, you’re mine.”
In his words, I hear the echo of our night together, and my blood stirs to a boil.
You’re with me, not him.
That’s it. All mine.
He looks away, clearing his throat as if realizing how intense that sounded. “I mean, for dancing, of course. Hey, maybe we can convince the quartet to play Rihanna—they probably already have the sheet music for that, right?”
I give a small laugh and so does he, but it doesn’t dispel the sudden uncomfortable tension between us. It’s almost a relief when we reach Ash and the Polish dignitaries.
Embry untucks my fingers from his arm and, with exaggerated ceremony, places them in Ash’s outstretched hand. “Your lady, milord.”
Ash’s fingers tighten around my hand, and he easily pulls me into him, his other hand holding his tumbler of vodka perfectly steady.
“You must trust this man very much to allow him unfettered access to such a beauty,” the Polish president says in a thickly accented voice.
I feel Embry’s posture stiffen behind me, feel the rush of blood to my cheeks.
“I do,” Ash responds. “I trust him with my life.”
“Really, it’s that I trust the Vice President to have such unfettered access to Maxen,” I joke to cover over Embry’s and my discomfort, but Ash doesn’t laugh along with everyone else.
Neither does Embry.
I look to him and then back to Ash, catching them glancing at each other. My heart crashes against my ribs, and for no reason at all, I’m reminded of how tight and hungry my cunt feels right now. How empty.
“Greer, I don’t think you’ve formally met the president of Poland,” Ash says, picking up the thread of conservation before our guests could notice the troubled tension hanging between the three of us. “Greer, this is Andrezj Lewandowski. President Lewandowski, this is Greer Galloway, a lecturer at Georgetown and a very important woman to me.”
Lewandowski leans in to brush a quick kiss against the back of my hand before releasing it, and it’s right then that Belvedere comes up to us. “Mr. President, they’re ready for you on the dance floor.”
“I suppose that’s our cue,” Ash says. “President Lewandowski, would you and Mrs. Lewandowski care to join us?”
The foreign leader looks less than thrilled, but nevertheless he finds his wife, and the four of us take to the dance floor. The band strikes up an orchestral version of a famous Polish folk song, and then I’m in Ash’s arms, my hand curled around his warm neck and his hand on my waist. We start moving, and I giggle a little at how woodenly Ash dances.
He makes a face at me. “Don’t make fun of me. I had to work hard to be this bad; I used to be much worse, you know.”
“I don’t see how,” I laugh as I steer us clear of the Polish couple. “I think I need to have a word with your teacher someday.”
“Any time you want,” Ash says, eyes twinkling down at me. “He’s right over there.”
I glance over to where Ash tilted his head and then laugh even harder. “Embry taught you to dance?”
“There’s a lot of dead time to fill when you’re deployed,” Ash says mock-defensively. “We had to entertain ourselves somehow.”
“So he taught you how to dance?”
“We took turns being the man, if you’re wondering.” Ash says it jokingly, but I can’t help but remember his hand fisted in Embry’s tuxedo jacket, Embry’s knees on the floor between Ash’s shoes.
Ash notices my flushed cheeks before I do, reaching up and brushing my cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You’re blushing,” he remarks.
“I—” No. There’s no way I can tell him the things that are flashing through my mind. “I’m just warm.”
He looks at me for a moment, and I see him shelve this away for later. Instead he says in an offhand voice, “You and Embry seem to have become fast friends.”
Well, if I was flushed before, I’m sure my face is bloodless now. I can only manage a nod as a voice inside my head screams tell him the truth, tell him the truth!
“It makes me happy to see you get along so well,” he continues. “You’re the two most important people in the world to me, besides my mother and sister, and I want us all to be close.”
You have no idea how close Embry and I are, I want to say. I should say. But the words stick in my throat.
Embry and I aren’t together and we’ll never be together now…so what difference does our past make? If I tell Ash about that night in Chicago, it will just add more tension between the three of us, and apparently there’s enough of that already.
Stop rationalizing. You know lying is wrong. Tell the truth.
But the moment has passed, and we’re spinning across the dance floor and then Ash says, “I heard you also had the pleasure of meeting Senator Leffey.”
“Yes,” I answer, a bit sourly. “She and I are not going to be fast friends, in case you were wondering.”
He laughs. “No, I didn’t think you would be. What did she say to you?”
Here, I decide to be honest. “She told me that you two used to fuck. She told me you’re a liar. And she warned me that I was in over my head with you.”
Ash blinks in surprise. “Wow. She really dove right in there, didn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
His face turns pensive. “Morgan doesn’t like me very much, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
He sighs. “Lots of reasons. Too many to name. In fact, she has so many reasons to dislike me that it almost feels like fate. We’re destined to be enemies.”
“I’m guessing those reasons weren’t around when you fucked her?”
His hand is suddenly tight and possessive on my waist, pulling me so close that I can feel my dress catching on his legs as we move. “Jealousy looks good on you,” he says, leaning his head down to speak into my ear. I shiver at the feeling of his warm breath on my skin.
“But you don’t need to be jealous,” he finishes, straightening up again. “It was a very long time ago. We haven’t had sex in fourteen years.”
I’m about to exhale with relief when he admits, “But we have been sexual together since then.”
There’s that jealousy knifing between my ribs again. “And when was the last time you were ‘sexual’ together?”
His eyes find mine in the dim light of the dining room, green and intensely apologetic. “A month ago.”
“A month ago?” I repeat. I want to rip myself out of his arms, I want to storm away, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. There are too many eyes watching, too many reputations at stake, and besides, I don’t get to have any claim on Ash’s sexual history. Any claim on what he did before we kissed at St. Thomas Becket.
Ash holds me tighter, leaning his head in close. Goddamn him for being so fucking handsome right now, all chiseled planes and full lips. It makes it impossible for me to pull away, to ignore him.
“After Jenny died,” he says in a low voice, “I was in a bad place. The cancer came on so fast—she was diagnosed and then two weeks later she was dead—and there was no time to grieve or to process and there was still this campaign to run. This campaign I didn’t even want to run any longer. After the funeral, I felt like an imposter in my own life. Like I’d woken up in another man’s body. I didn’t see myself in the mirror. I couldn’t hear my own voice. I would be fastening my cufflinks and then realize I didn’t recognize my own hands. They felt like puppet hands. Like some sort of clever wooden machine and not flesh and blood.”
It’s the first time he’s really talked about Jenny to me, and my heart is rupturing for him, for that Ash of last year who felt so alien and adrift. I squeeze his neck and he sighs into it, as if the gesture comforts him.
“Morgan and I had encountered each other countless times since that week we were together. She’s my best friend’s stepsister and a powerful senator on the Armed Services Committee…our worlds collided a lot. And a week after Jenny died, our worlds collided again. Merlin had coaxed me back on the campaign trail, a stump speech in Virginia—it should have been easy. A message I’d been touting for a year in a state that loves the military. And I fucked it up. I stumbled and stuttered, and it was fine that time—everyone was so eager to give me the grieving husband pass—but it wouldn’t be fine for long. And I knew it, I knew if I couldn’t get my shit together, I would lose, so matter how many pictures were tweeted of me laying roses on Jenny’s grave.
“I went home that night planning to get drunk. And I decided the next day I’d call Merlin and tell him it was over. I would withdraw. It had been a pipe dream anyway, to run on a third party ticket, and there was no way I could win like this. Like…a shell. A ghost.”
“But you didn’t call him,” I murmur. “What changed your mind?”
His eyes are pinned to mine. “Morgan.”
Ugh. Knife. Ribs. Ugly, ugly pain.
“She showed up at my door that night. We hadn’t exchanged civil words in fourteen years, and yet there she was. ‘I know what you need,’ she said, ‘and you need to come with me.’ I was too hollow to fight her. She said she was taking me out for a drink, but we went somewhere else. I guess you could call it a dungeon or a sex club.”
He pauses his story to smile at my stunned expression. “For a self-admitted submissive, angel, you seem pretty shocked by the idea of a sex club.”
“No, no,” I rush to downplay my surprise. “That’s totally cool. I’m sure lots of people do that and go places like that and stuff…” I stop babbling, realizing how ridiculous I sound.
A small laugh. “It’s easy to forget,” he murmurs, “how young you are. How little experience you have. It’s okay to be shocked. It’s okay to be curious or afraid or even disturbed. I only ask that you listen with an open mind, and try to understand what I was going through then.”
He takes a deep breath to continue. “I’d known for a long time that my tastes in bed ran a little…extreme. It had always been there, I suppose, but the war—” he closes his eyes for a moment and then opens them again “—the war made it necessary. It grew and grew and became impossible to ignore, a need that felt like fire in my veins, and I couldn’t douse the flames of it. I couldn’t cut it out of me, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried. With Jenny, I tried for years. She wasn’t like you, Greer, not in the least. She loved me so much and wanted to please me, but I could see her wincing whenever I accidentally got too rough, could see how unresponsive her body was to anything other than tenderness. I loved her, Greer. I gave her tenderness, as best as I could, and then after she fell asleep at night, I’d lie awake and think of you.” A shadow crosses his face. “I’m not proud of that. But it was like the more I tried to fight it, the stronger the need became, the more elaborate the fantasies grew. I’d think about venting my frustration on you. All the things I couldn’t do to my wife—in my mind, I did a thousand times to you. Bit you, spanked you, ropes, whips, lube. And in my fantasies, you’d thank me. Covered in welts and my cum, with makeup smeared on your face, you’d thank me. And then I’d fuck you again.”
“Jesus Christ, Ash,” I say, my breath coming fast.
“Too much?” he asks, brow furrowed with concern.
“Can we leave the dinner? I want you to do all that to me right now.”
A little pinch at my waist. “Behave. I’m confessing to you what a terrible husband I was to Jenny, and if you’re smart, you’ll rethink attaching yourself to me.”
“Did you ever hurt Jenny or do anything outside her consent?”
“No.”
“Did you do your best to love her and take care of her?”
He closes his eyes. “Yes.”
“Then I’m not rethinking anything,” I assure him, stroking the side of his neck. “You should have been honest with her, and I don’t think it’s right that you fantasized about me so much while you were married to her. But given the circumstances, it’s forgivable, and not something I think will happen between us.”
“Fuck no, it won’t,” Ash says softly, and God, that word on his tongue. My nipples pull into tight buds at the sound of it.
“So what happened when Morgan brought you to this sex club? After years of denying yourself the kind of sex you needed?”
“First things first, Greer. I didn’t have sex there—or anywhere else. I haven’t had sex with a woman since Jenny died. You’ll be my first.”
A flutter of relief, of flattered excitement.
“But yes, the club was where I was able to dominate openly for the first time. Morgan introduced me to experienced Dominants who showed me how to exert control and inflict pain safely, and then I was able to meet submissives there who wanted control and pain from me. That first night though, I hadn’t met anyone else yet. We got to the club, and right there in the open, Morgan stripped naked and put a flogger in my hand.” He smiles ruefully at me. “After three strikes, I was hard. After five, I could remember the sound of my own voice. And after ten, the hands that held the flogger were my own hands again. I was back in my body. Somehow.”
“But you didn’t have sex?”
A look of fierce distaste, so fast and fleeting I almost wonder if I imagined it. “It was the dominating, not the woman, that got me hard. I didn’t touch her, and if I hadn’t been so fucked up from Jenny’s death, I never would have allowed it to get that far. I dropped the flogger and called a cab home, left her naked in that room. I called her the next day. I told her I wouldn’t touch her again, but that I needed to come back. Which suited her well enough—she’s actually a Domme, you see, she’d rather be on the other side of the pain—and I’ve been to the club many times since then with her, but never like the first time. We’ve flogged subs side by side, taken turns whipping and paddling, but we never touched again, via whips or otherwise.”
This satisfies me, but only a little. “I don’t understand how she can hate you so much, but can still be willing to be flogged by you. Especially if she’s a Domme.”
“It was a big gesture for her,” he concedes, “although all the Dominants at that club are required to submit to whippings and beatings at least once or twice as part of their training. But as for the why…Morgan and I are unfortunately connected in unique ways that we can’t help or change.” Ash shrugs. “I imagine that as much as she hates me, there was a part of her that felt compelled to offer sympathy or relief. And I think it’s the way she knew best, and she remembered enough about our time together to know it was what I needed, too. We may be enemies out here, but on neutral ground, we respect each other. We have a lot in common, after all.”
I nod. I think I’m beginning to understand Morgan’s place in Ash’s story, although the understanding does nothing to dull the jabs of envy I feel thinking about them at a club together, knowing they’ve had sex.
“So have you been flogged as part of your training?” I ask curiously. It’s hard to imagine my tall, muscular soldier bound and chained in place, submitting quietly to whips and paddles.
“I have had everything done to me that I would want to do to someone else. It’s not safe or fair to do something to another person without knowing exactly what it feels like.” He leans close to my ear. “And everything was a pretty long list, Greer. I hope you’re ready.”
“God, yes.”
He pulls back with a smile. “I knew you would be.”
“And this club—your identity is safe? Morgan can’t go to the press and tell them that you were there? There aren’t pictures floating around?”
He laughs. “My little political princess. Of course that’s where your mind goes, straight to potential scandal. Yes, my identity was—and is—safe. This club caters to congresspeople, ambassadors, and foreign dignitaries. Their non-disclosure agreements are damning; violate yours and you’ll find yourself ruined in every possible way. Trust me—the man who runs this club is more powerful than I am. And I’m not the first president who’s been a guest there.”
I make a face, thinking about the previous president, a balding, squat Democrat with wild eyebrows and rumpled suits. “Ugh.”
“Yeah.”
“Mr. President,” comes a voice from nearby. We stop dancing and turn to see a tall black woman walking towards us, a silky emerald dress clinging to her slender curves and fluttering around her ankles. The entire room seems to watch her cross the nearly empty dance floor partly because she’s beautiful—dark, dark skin, high cheekbones, natural hair several inches long that bounces as she walks—and partly it’s because she’s Kay Colchester, Ash’s foster sister and his chief of staff. She wouldn’t interrupt our dance unless it was for something crucial.
“Kay,” Ash says. “What is it?”
“There’s been military movement along the Carpathian border with Ukraine. No borders have been crossed, but there’s definitely an increase in the number of troops. Our satellite experts only just now picked up on it; it was that well camouflaged, which means this isn’t for show. They’re planning something and they don’t want anyone to know about it.”
The man I was dancing with disappears, and in his place is someone calm and detached. Coolly powerful. “Where will I be briefed?”
“The Situation Room. It will be short. Twenty minutes at most.”
He nods. “After that, I’ll need to speak to our people in Ukraine and Poland. Maybe Slovakia too. I’ll call from the Residence.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get it arranged.” Kay’s eyes slide over to me, and her businesslike expression opens up. “You must be Greer. I can’t tell you how excited I am that my brother is dating someone.”
I shake her hand as Ash lets out a huff. “Everyone keeps saying that. It’s not like I’ve been a monster to work with.”
“Well, let’s just say that I’m glad you have Embry as your whipping boy, or the rest of us would have suffered a lot more.”
“I only whip him when he asks for it,” Ash says, flashing a smile at me, and I give a shaky smile back, knowing it’s a joke but unable to stop myself from biting my lip at the thought.
“Anyway,” Kay says with a roll of her eyes at Ash’s answer, “my brother here has been a whole new man this last week. You have to understand, he’s always polite and respectful, never mean. But definitely not chatty. He’s always serious and all about work. However, since last week, I’ve caught him smiling. In front of other people. Even laughing sometimes. And the thousand-yard stare is gone.”
“Ash smiles all the time,” I say, looking up at him.
“When I’m with you,” he says, his voice warm. He leans in and I expect a kiss on the cheek, but instead he kisses my neck and I have to keep my knees from failing. I hear murmurs around us on the dance floor, and I can only imagine how many cell phone pictures were just snapped of the President with his lips on my neck.
But I can tell he doesn’t care. He presses his forehead against mine and speaks quietly so Kay can’t hear him. “I have to go to the Situation Room now. And there will be some work to do after that.”
“I can leave,” I offer. “I know you said we’d spend time together after the dinner, but—”
“Stay,” he says. “I want you to stay.”
“And wait for you?”
“God, yes.” There’s something rough around the edges of his voice. “Will you?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“I’ll have Belvedere take you back to the Residence, and I’m going to text you instructions. Have your phone ready.”
“I will.”
“That’s my good girl.” Another kiss on my neck, and he’s already turning away. He and Kay sweep out, and I see Embry’s tall frame as he follows them.
I take a deep breath, and with all the dignity I can muster among the crowd of curious onlookers, go to search for Belvedere.
