“Shall we dance?” I ask Embry, taking one of his still-fisted hands in both of mine. He still looks like he’s squaring off for a duel, and people are going to notice soon if he doesn’t stop.
“Dance?” he asks blankly, like I’ve just asked him to donate a kidney.
“We are still on a dance floor,” I point out. “And we still have to pretend that we’re here for diplomacy.”
“I guess,” he scowls.
“Come on,” I coax, sliding a hand up his shoulder to his neck. I did it to make him dance, but the second my hand touches his neck, I realize what a mistake it was. It’s the first time I’ve really touched him since he came to my office at Georgetown. Firm, deliberate touch.
And it’s the first time he and I have been mostly alone together, without Ash.
His lips part and his pupils dilate into black pools of lust. I make to drop my hand, but his hand covers mine, and he moves it back up to his neck as we slowly start dancing. Both of us are good enough dancers that we don’t need to pay attention to the steps or the music. “That feels good,” he murmurs. “Having your hand on me.”
I want my hand to be everywhere on him—his flat abs and curved ass and thick penis—I want him trembling underneath my touch as sweat springs up on his forehead, I want him so desperate for me that he can’t form words, I want to sit on his face and have him eat me while he reflexively tries to fuck the air.
The brief fantasy is so vivid and so unlike me that I have trouble catching my breath. Is it possible to be a different person with two different lovers? For a woman to be different with one man than she is with another? With Ash, I never want anything other than what we have. But for some reason when I think of Embry, I think of him moving beneath me, of blind passion without negotiation, him sometimes rough and fast and me sometimes cruel and teasing. Not a power exchange, but a power dance, back and forth, side to side, mindless and spontaneous.
“You okay?” Embry asks, eyebrows slanting together, and I snap back to reality, my cheeks warm.
“Yes,” I say, and then add quickly, to steer us away from more dangerous topics, “Where’s Abilene?”
Embry sounds weary, not sarcastic, when he answers. “You mean my date?” He tilts his head to the side, and I follow the gesture, seeing her dancing with one of the men from the Carpathian delegation. He can’t stop staring down her dress, and there’s a certain satisfaction on her face that I can’t quite read. “I hope she’s having fun,” I say. “I hope they hit it off. But I am sorry she wasn’t a very good date.”
Embry looks down at me. “I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good date either. The whole time I was wishing I was with someone else.”
My throat tightens. Does he mean me? Or Ash?
Does it matter?
“I told Ash about us,” I blurt out for no reason. Well, no reason other than the thought of him longing for Ash’s touch across the ballroom sends electricity skating across my skin, almost more than the thought of him longing for me does. Electricity quickly followed by betrayed anger.
God, what the fuck is wrong with me that I’m turned on and jealous at the same time?
Embry sighs. “I know.”
“Have you guys talked about it?” I ask. “I feel like it’s this big thing looming over us, the fact that I’ve slept with both of you.”
He looks miserable. “I feel like that too. And no, we haven’t talked about it much. He told me on Christmas Eve. He told me that he knew and that he was jealous and that…” He stops, his vision growing hazy and his skin hot under my touch, and I realize he’s remembering the kiss. My skin also gets hot as I remember it. “Anyway, we haven’t had a chance to talk since then. So I don’t know where we stand.”
“Neither do I,” I say.
“And sometimes he’ll say things—like he’s trying to needle me or test me. Or maybe torture me.”
“Like what?” I ask, puzzled.
Embry’s eyes close, his skin still impossibly hot. “Like that you’re not wearing anything underneath your dress tonight.”
My breath stutters and he opens his eyes.
“Do you know what it’s like,” he says in a hollow voice, “to have him tell me things like that? Or to be in the same building and know that, at that very moment, he’s inside you? Or to remember what you taste like and not even be able to hold your hand?”
“Embry,” I whisper.
“I couldn’t go back to you in Chicago, not after he told me about seeing you. You know he read those emails every day? Rain or snow, hot or cold, on base or sleeping on rocks and pine branches. I’d find him with his miniature flashlight in his teeth and his hand on his belt. I’d hear him grunting in the shower stall next to me and know he was thinking of you. That went on for years…and then to find out this mysterious email girl was you. The girl I’d decided to marry after less than eight hours together.”
The girl I’d decided to marry…
His words sink like anchors, finding my most vulnerable depths, but I push them aside as typical Embry hyperbole. I have to. The alternative is taking them seriously, and if I take those words seriously, I might fly apart.
“I thought you didn’t want me,” I say slowly. “It…well, it hurt a lot. For a long time. Because I gave you something, and I don’t mean my virginity necessarily, but myself; you were the first person I allowed myself to be vulnerable with. That I exposed my heart to. And then you just vanished, like it had meant nothing to you.”
He gives an empty laugh. “You thought I didn’t want you…Greer, I burned with wanting you.”
My stomach flips over.
And then his lashes lower. “I still burn with wanting you.”
“Don’t do this,” I breathe. Because if he says the words out loud, if we drag this out into the open—
“I can’t pretend any more,” he croaks. “I thought it was just an infatuation—who wouldn’t be infatuated after a night like we had? But all the time I’ve spent with you these past few months has made me realize it’s worse than that. I’m in love with you. I’m consumed with you. And I’m in hell watching you with Ash.”
I look away, fighting the pain in my throat. He’s in love with me. And I think I might still be in love with him. Which puts us both in hell.
“But all the women…all those dates…” I can’t keep the pain and jealousy out of my voice, even though I’m desperate to. I keep my eyes on the other dancers, trying to distract my mind from the endless rotation of longing and betrayal. I see Belvedere dancing with Lenka, Melwas talking with our secretary of state, no trace of Abilene, who must be off grabbing a drink with her new acquaintance. But even an entire ballroom of political leaders can’t keep my eyes from sliding back to Embry. His sharp jaw and high forehead and invitingly wicked mouth, which is currently tight with emotion. “I just didn’t think you could want me if you were fucking all those other women.”
He looks at me helplessly. “I ache with wanting you. All the time. And at the end of the day, you two get to go fuck, and I have to know about it.” His voice grows frustrated. “Don’t I get something to take the edge off?”
A childish part of me wants to stamp my foot and yell “No!” Which is ridiculous and selfish for every reason under the sun, especially if he loves Ash too, if he’s aching for two people instead only one. I don’t answer him because I can’t answer with the thing I should say, which is do what you want.
“I won’t any more,” he breathes suddenly, “if that’s what you want. I won’t see anyone else. I won’t fuck anyone else. I’ll be completely celibate so that you can know exactly how fucking lost I am to you. Oh, Greer, please. Please just tell me if you feel the same way. Tell me this is eating you alive too and that I’m not alone.”
I should lie. I should lie and tell him that I don’t love him, that I don’t want him, that being around him isn’t torture. Because I see in the flutter of those long eyelashes and the agony written on his Darcy-esque brow that despite the carefully applied veneer he’s adopted as Vice President, he’s still no more in control of his emotions than he was five years ago. His passions and urges master him, drown him, and I see now that Ash has been trying to protect him. That he tells Embry things about me not to torment him, but to share what he can of me. To help soothe the constant storm contained inside this beautiful, vulnerable soul.
Don’t make him suffer for loving you. I don’t.
Ash knew all along. Ash always knows. And instead of reacting in any number of fair or understandable ways—with demands or denial or coldness—his reaction instead has been to be honest about his feelings. To share. To stay and not pull back. To remain in relationship with a best friend and a fiancée who secretly love each other.
All of a sudden, my heart hurts for Ash most of all. As if it weren’t enough to be President, to have to shoulder the burden of us, Embry and me, and still remain loving and honest as he did so?
Well, honest about everything except whatever exists between him and Embry.
I feel impaled with all these contradictory feelings, and I can’t fight it any more.
“Yes, I love you,” I admit brokenly. “I fell in love that night in Chicago and I couldn’t stop being in love, even after you abandoned me. I couldn’t stop being in love with you even when I started seeing Ash. Yes, I want you. All the time. I want you both, I want you and Ash, and I can’t stop myself from all this wanting, even though it’ll damn me to hell. And I almost like it when you fuck all those other women because it gives me a reason to hate you, to feel like, just for a moment, I’m free from loving you. But I’m lying to myself. I’m never really free. You could walk in smelling like another woman—tasting like her—and if I could, I’d still throw myself at your feet.”
I can see that I’m wrecking him, every word a slice across that beautiful face as we whirl across the dance floor.
“It makes me desolate, Embry, hollow and hurting and I hate myself sometimes but I can’t stop wishing for you. I feel like a liar. Like a snake or a…I don’t know, a man eater or something.”
That coaxes a faint smile to that perfect mouth. “I don’t think you can be a man eater if you only eat two men.”
I look up at him and at that smile, and my courage finds me.
Now.
Tonight.
It can’t wait any longer.
“I saw you and Ash on Christmas Eve.”
He actually stumbles as we dance, missing a step and quickly correcting himself. “What?”
“Under the mistletoe. I had been asleep, but I woke up and decided to go find something to eat…and instead I found you kissing him.”
He lets out a breath. “Greer. Wait. It’s not…”
“It’s not what I think?” I look up into those blue eyes. “The two men I love aren’t also in love with each other?”
Eyelashes down and then back up. “I don’t know if he loves me,” Embry says, as if that’s a real answer. “And it hasn’t happened since. Or before. I mean, before like when you and Ash were dating.”
“So it was the first time since Ash and I started dating. But you have kissed before that?”
“This really should be something you and Ash talk about,” Embry says, and there’s a wild discomfort in his voice, the repressed panic of a cornered animal.
“But it’s your story too,” I point out. “And now it’s mine. I deserve to know, Embry. We haven’t so much as talked about the weather without Ash in the room, but you think it’s okay for you two to sneak off and make out in the dark?”
The words are angry. Hell, I’m angry all over again.
“No,” he says wretchedly. “It’s not okay.”
“Then tell me the truth! Don’t I at least deserve that?”
He gives a ragged sigh. “What do you want to know?”
“All of it. Everything. Why you kissed that night. Your first kiss. If you’ve fucked. If you still want to fuck.”
The expression on his face is a mangle of panic and apology and lust, and on him, it looks beautiful. Sensual and haunted. Before I can stop myself, I slide my hand up to his face, my fingertips ghosting across his perfect cheekbones and chiseled jaw. He swallows.
“It started in Carpathia,” he says. “In the village of Caledonia. Do you remember it?”
“The battle where he saved you.”
“It wasn’t a battle. Not like you’d normally think of. It was almost a massacre, a complete ambush. The village was evacuated, and we thought it was empty. Our plan was to establish a presence there and then begin moving up the valley, to where we thought the Carpathians were encamped.”
“But they were there.”
“They were there,” Embry confirms, his face shadowed with the memory. “They waited until we were doing a building check, this apartment tower, and then they started picking us off. We sheltered inside to fight back, which had been their plan all along. You couldn’t walk through this place without tripping claymores left and right and they’d taken out the windows on the lower floors so they could throw in grenades.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, shaken. It’s one thing to watch war on television, to listen to the generals testify in Congress, to read articles from embedded journalists. But to hear a soldier speak about it is such a stark reminder that all those explosions and fires, all that rubble and broken glass—that happened around people. To people. Real men and women, dead or injured, exposed to the most depraved barbarity imaginable.
The music changes to a slow waltz, and Embry unconsciously changes his steps to match the music. I follow suit, and he keeps talking. “Ash saved us. He was the only one to think of the elevator shafts. Everyone wanted to go up to the roof, wait for a helicopter, but Ash insisted it was too dangerous. What if a Carpathian helicopter came first? He sent everyone down to the service floor and told them to go out the basement windows, but only if they faced the forest and only once he said so.”
“What happened?” I ask, as caught up as I would be if I didn’t know the end of the story.
“I got shot,” Embry says with an unhappy shrug. “Ash wanted to be the last one down the shaft, and I refused to let him wait alone, and then the Carpathians began shooting their way into the building. Ash called for the troops downstairs to take their chance and escape into the forest, and then told me to get down there. I wouldn’t, not without him, and then the Carpathians appeared. I got a bullet to the knee and another in the shoulder—which meant no climbing down the elevator shaft. Ash pushed me behind him and fought off the Carpathians until I could crawl to the stairwell. And then…well, I suppose you know the rest. While I was a useless pile on the floor, Ash managed to keep the Carpathians off of us long enough to discover an outside exit on the ground floor. He carried me out and we managed to get to the forest.”
I relax a little, and then remember my original question. “But what does this have to do with you and Ash being together?”
Embry glances away from me, not out of avoidance or embarrassment, but as if he’s searching for the right words to explain something. “There’s kind of a…high…from fighting like that. Cheating death. It’s the adrenaline, I think. For some people, it slows them down, makes them dazed. But not Ash. It makes him restless. It—it makes his blood hot.”
Dark spots of color appear high on Embry’s cheekbones, and I realize that he’s blushing. He’s also gone someplace deep inside himself, remembering something that makes him lick his lips. “Embry?”
His gaze snaps back to mine, his eyes going clear again but his cheeks still flushed. “He saved my life. I wanted to show him how grateful I was.”
“Oh,” I say softly, feeling my own cheeks warm as I imagine the scene. Blood and torn fabric and Ash’s hard body pressing Embry’s into the ground. “Did you fuck each other?”
“He fucked me. A few times. Once wasn’t enough to calm him down.” A harsh laugh, but the harshness isn’t only bitterness, it’s need and sarcasm and regret. “He screwed Morgan a few years before that and then he screwed me. Like Brideshead Revisited in reverse. Except we make the Marchmains look like the fucking Brady Bunch.”
“Did you like it?” I ask a little breathlessly. I don’t know why I need to ask, why I need to know, but I do, I do. “Did you come?”
“Would you believe I came as many times as he did? With a shattered knee and a bullet in my shoulder and morphine burning through my blood? The first time I came almost immediately, rubbing against the rucksack he’d bent me over. And when we got to base…it kept going for a while. A couple years. And then he met Jenny…” A long breath. “And then after Jenny died…”
My mouth goes dry. “You fucked after Jenny died?”
“Several times. Until this fall. That’s when we stopped again.”
“But he told me…” Tears burn at my eyelids “He lied to me. He said that he hadn’t been with anyone since Jenny died.”
“Did he say that, or—” Embry’s voice is careful “—did he say that he hadn’t been with any women?”
I try to find my breath again, but it’s somewhere down at my feet. “Yes. That. No women.”
Embry searches my eyes. “Are you upset?”
“That you slept together? Or that you guys have been on and off again for nearly a decade and I had no idea?”
“Either. Both.”
“I’m angry that you and Ash haven’t told me about your history. I’m torn apart with jealousy to think you two have been wanting each other while I’ve been here.” I lower my voice. “And I’m shaking with how hot it makes me to think about the two of you together. I wish I could have seen it. I wish I could have been there, taking you in my mouth while he fucked you. I wish I could have seen his face as he came.”
“Jesus, Greer.”
The stark arousal in Embry’s voice is ragged and hungry, and I’m trying to fight off my own hungry reaction. But I can’t—not entirely. I make sure to press against Embry as the dance brings us closer, confirming what I suspected: he’s rock hard.
He gives a soft, surprised grunt as my body grazes his erection, and his eyes are hazy once more. “You guys do that to me and it’s so confusing.”
“Do what?”
“You—you mix up my feelings for you and Ash. I get hard thinking about him, and then you touch me. Or I’m aching at Camp David listening to you scream for him, but then he’s the one who comes out and kisses me. I can’t keep track of what or whom I want any more. I just…want.”
I grip his tuxedo lapel, both excited and a little frightened that he’s just articulated something I haven’t been able to articulate for myself. “That’s what’s happened to me.”
Those aristocratic eyebrows rise in happy astonishment. “Really?”
“Really. From the beginning, even, I couldn’t separate wanting you from wanting him. When we had sex in Chicago…well, part of the reason I did it was because I was hurting so much about Ash.”
“Me too,” he confesses.
I look at him in confusion, and then I remember that night on the Ferris wheel, his broken voice.
They aren’t my someone. No matter how much I plead, no matter how much—how much I give of myself.
“Do you think he knows?” I ask. “That we both love him so much that we ended up falling in love with each other?”
Embry sighs. “Would it change anything if he did?”
We move again for the dance, my hip brushing past his penis again—accidentally this time—and he hisses.
“Sorry,” I say, knowing I don’t sound sorry at all.
He shakes his head. “I’m just as bad as Melwas. Hard for you at a fucking diplomatic event.”
“Yes, you’re both incurably prurient, but there’s a key difference.”
“What’s that?”
I lean up to his ear, using his lapel to pull myself onto the toes of my high heels. “I like it when you’re incurably prurient.”
He grins down at me, the guilt and torment vanishing for a moment and leaving behind the rich playboy who’d charmed me on a Chicago sidewalk.
But as we finish our dance, as we find new partners to dance with and the night grinds unbearably on, as my own betrayals and post-confessing-forbidden-love-shock wears off, something heartbreaking occurs to me.
Ash sent Embry to get me. Ash sent Embry to get me even though he and Embry had been fucking right up until then. How cruel must that have felt to Embry? Like he was good enough to secretly fuck, at least until the right fuckable woman came along, but then he wasn’t wanted anymore? I haven’t ever thought of Ash as homophobic, as brutal in a way that went past the bedroom, but now I feel a righteous sense of anger on Embry’s behalf. All those years together, and Ash just tossed him aside for Jenny. And then picked him back up and tossed him right back aside for me.
No wonder Embry is tormented. Ash has been savage to him. Unforgivably dismissive.
And as I perform all the duties I came to do—charming and chatting and almost absentmindedly gathering tidbits and gossip for Ash—I slowly decide to confront him. About all those carefully worded not-lies, about his cruelty to Embry, about the three of us.
About what the fuck happens next.
