“Ash, is everything okay? You seem…” Hung over. Troubled. Miserable. “…off.”

He ran a hand over his face, palm and fingers passing over the scruff covering his cheeks and jaw. I shivered to remember what that scruff had felt like against the most intimate corners of my body.

“Do you remember those emails I kept with me when we were deployed in Carpathia?” he asked after a minute. “The ones I printed out?”

“The ones from the teenager?”

He looked down at the table. “I saw her yesterday.”

I saw everything I needed to see in his face. The defeat. The guilt. The shame.

The longing.

“Did you…?”

He looked up, his stare knifelike. “I didn’t fuck her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, I suppose you didn’t,” I said, giving it more thought. “You’ll be faithful to Jenny until death do you two part.”

He sighed. “Don’t say that. Because I did…touch her.”

I raised my eyebrows and he held up an unhappy hand. “Not like that. She was at the lunch Merlin brought me to. Seeing her was—it was a shock. Like touching a live wire. She’s twenty now, you know, and so much more beautiful than I remembered. I followed her out of the lunch and we talked. She’s fucking smart on top of being so fucking sweet and sub—” he stopped himself.

“Submissive?” I finished for him.

He closed his eyes. “In a public place, I wrapped her hair around my fist and yanked her head back. I shoved my cock into her belly. And she said, yes please.”

With his eyes closed, I could see it even more clearly. He wasn’t just stricken with the shame of wanting someone else, he was stricken with the real physical want of it, the keening deprivation of coming so close to something he needed so fundamentally and yet couldn’t have.

“The things she wrote to me, Embry,” he continued. “I knew she’d say yes, please. It always felt like she was made for me somehow. The way I used to feel about you.”

His eyes were closed, so he couldn’t see the way I flinched at that. The lacerations it left across my face.

It was because of those lacerations that I said it. “So you saw her and you’re all worked up. Get Jenny in bed and get it out of your system.”

His eyes opened, and he regarded me with a steady look. “That would be wrong.”

“Is it worse to be sitting here without her, squirming and hard over a twenty-year-old?”

“I’m not hard—”

I reached under the table and palmed his cock, which was thick and rigid down the left leg of his pants. We’d fucked for nearly three years—I knew when the man was hard—knew it the moment he closed his eyes and relived their meeting. Our table was in a corner and our seats were next to each other, so it was easy to do it discreetly.

When I wrapped my fingers around it through the thin fabric of his trousers, I could press my fingers against the underside and squeeze. He let out a soft hiss.

“Fuck, Embry,” he managed, but he didn’t try to shift away from my touch. Instead his eyes met mine and he opened his legs ever so slightly.

That was enough for me. It had been two years since I’d touched him like this, since I’d gotten to see the way his pulse thrummed in his throat and his pupils widened into black pools of lust.

“Don’t lie to me,” I said, all calm and polite above the table and all squeeze and shift below. “You feel something you haven’t felt since you last fucked me, and now you don’t know what to do. You thought you could live without it, but now you know you can’t. You can’t starve it out, Ash. It’ll always be there, hungry, waiting.” I began to move my hand back and forth, the pads of two fingers pressed against his frenulum, a small movement that no one in the coffee shop would notice.

He noticed, drawing in a sharp breath and opening his legs even wider.

“So why don’t you let me feed it?” I crooned quietly. “Why don’t you let me feed it just this once?”

I squeezed and his eyes fluttered closed. “I don’t—it’s not right—” He was mumbling now, his coherence gone, the beast in him too hungry.

“Tell me more about her,” I said, and I didn’t know if I was trying to help him or destroy him. “Tell me what she looked like. What you would have done to her if you could.”

“Blond hair,” he mumbled, eyes still closed. “Silver eyes. Long throat. A small cleft in her chin that I want to bite. I would have done everything to her.”

The coffee shop noise bled away, leaving only his voice and a small alarm in the back of my mind.

“What’s her name?” I asked as casually as I could, still rubbing his cock through his pants.

“Greer,” he managed. “Greer Galloway.”

Time didn’t stop, my blood didn’t freeze. In a way, I realized I should’ve known—maybe I already knew. Her tears as she rushed through the lobby and ran into me. Her words in the Ferris wheel, we weren’t together in any real sense. But I still had feelings…no normal person would have feelings for four years with no encouragement…

It was fate, obviously, even though I didn’t believe in fate. But it felt fated: there could be nothing in my life that wasn’t connected to Ash.

The truth tumbled together with my anger. It welded and fused itself into a solid lead block. All these years Ash had been secretly in love with her, my angel, my Greer. She’d been the one to capture that corner of his heart that he’d refused to surrender to me; she’d been the one to enslave him with a handful of well-chosen words. And now that I’d met her, I understood. I understood why he couldn’t let her go.