I stand up and fasten up my pants. “Thank you for my thank you,” I say, trying to give him the crooked grin that I know he can’t resist.

A little warmth comes back into his eyes and a small smile appears. “If you want to thank me for real, you can be waiting for me in the shower after I check on my wife.”

Well, I don’t have to be told twice.

17

Greer

after

It’s morning when I open my eyes. I can just tell—it’s something about the light out here, the way everything is filtered through the trees, streaming over the low Maryland mountains. I’m warm, something I register at the same moment I register why; a leanly muscled man is nestled on either side of me. I’m on my side and Embry is in front of me, sprawled on his back as usual, with covers twisted around him. One leg half-hangs off the edge of the bed, and one arm is flung up over his face, as if to block the faint light coming in from the window. His breathing is just under a snore, heavy and even, moving that delicious chest up and down. Mmm.

Speaking of chests, strong arms are wrapped around me from behind and pulling me tight into one, along with a hard abdomen and an even harder erection. I wriggle back into it on instinct, and powerful, hair-dusted legs wrap around my own, pressing my ass harder against him. I realize Ash is awake.

“Good morning, princess,” he murmurs into my ear.

“Good morning,” I breathe. There’s something pressing on the membrane of my sleepy thoughts, trying to break through, but the membrane is still too thick and Ash is so solid and warm next to me.

“How’d you sleep?” he asks.

“Deeply.” I roll over, still inside his arms to look at his face. It’s the same face I stared into when I recited my wedding vows, same high cheekbones and proud forehead, same full, firm lips. But things are different too—the sleepless bruises under his eyes that had almost completely gone away are back. His eyes are filled with reflections upon reflections of dark, unhappy feelings and I can see the line between his brows where he’s creased his face in worry.

I reach up with a thumb and try to smooth away the line. “How did you sleep?”

He gives a one-shouldered shrug. “I didn’t mostly. I watched you.”

“Must have been boring,” I remark.

He shakes his head, matching my motion and reaching up to stroke my face with his thumb. “I can sleep any time. Getting to see you safe in my arms…I needed that more than I needed a few hours of sleep.”

Safe.

The terrible something presses through, tearing into my mind with claws and teeth, and I stiffen. I can still feel Melwas’s hands on me, taste apples in my mouth. Feel his hand hard on my pussy, grinding against my public bone.

I push away from my husband, breathing hard, and he lets me push away, but he rolls on top of me as I do, keeping his weight on his elbows and knees so that it’s not actually pressing against me, but I’m still caged by him. He presses a hand to my forehead, his green eyes the only color in a world that’s suddenly lost all vibrancy and depth. I can’t bear to see them, not right now when I can feel the ghost of Melwas’s grabbing touch, taste those awful apples in my mouth.

“Greer,” Ash says quietly. “Look at me.”

Reluctantly, and with extreme effort, I do.

“I’m here for your rage and your fear and your shame. Vent it on me, Greer. Strike me with it, burn me with it, scratch it into my skin. Cry it, whisper it, scream it. I want it all. I’ll take it all, because I promised to care for your pain and your pleasure, did I not? And isn’t this pain?” I give him the smallest of nods, and he continues, “So then doesn’t it belong to me?”

He can’t know, he doesn’t know, what a mess this is. My feelings are a hall of mirrors, warped and stretched and grotesque, and yet when I spin to look at one closely, I see all the cheap tricks in the glass that make it so. I understand that my feelings come from this place or that place, I can even name them to myself in an oddly detached sort of way if I try. And yet the moment I lift my concentration, the warped images come back, a hollow mockery of real feelings, real reactions.

I don’t want this—how the fuck can he?

I struggle to put this in words, and I can’t. “This isn’t your problem,” I tell him, glancing away from his face to see Embry, who’s still deeply asleep and snoring.

Ash gently turns my head back to his, but there’s an inevitability in his gentleness, the way that the ocean or the wind is inevitable. I could resist, I could refuse, but he’d win in the end. Not through force or coercion, or maybe some of those things, but it is his will, his singular, unrelenting will, that will overwhelm me eventually, no matter how hard I try. “Let it be my problem,” he says.

I let him turn my head again, let him scorch the inside of my soul with that king’s gaze that misses nothing. “Oh princess,” he says with real sorrow in his voice.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” I hiss. I don’t know why this should make me angry, why his kindness should upset me, but it does.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he says. “You think I pity you? You think that I think you’re weak?” He rises up on his knees, and something about his posture makes my heart beat a little faster. It’s the studied relaxation of his shoulders, the way his hands are carefully open by his thighs. He’s naked, his cock half-hard against one thigh, but it doesn’t make him seem any less dangerous. In fact, it makes him more dangerous somehow, as if all semblance of civilized behavior has been stripped away.