For one terrible moment, I thought about telling him. I thought about making him know that I’d been the first person to be inside her, I’d been the one to wash the blood from her thighs afterward. I’d been the one to make her smile and sigh and squeal for more, I’d been the first one in the world to taste her and to hold her after an orgasm.
Me. It had been fucking me and not him, and I was still hurt enough by his engagement to Jenny to tell him that, and I’m a terrible man, remember? Selfish and mean. This wouldn’t be beneath my level.
But I didn’t tell him.
I couldn’t.
Not because I was righteously overcoming my worst impulses but because I loved him too fucking much to hurt him on purpose. Still.
And I couldn’t hurt him by seeing her again. Even as her number burned a hole in my pocket and all those might-have-been fantasies of being her boyfriend danced in my head, I knew I couldn’t do it. I was too noble or too weak, and I didn’t know which.
I let go of Ash’s cock.
He groaned, dropping his head. “I don’t want you to stop,” he admitted.
“I don’t have to,” I said, pushing back the coffee I never touched and standing up. “You can tell me to go into that bathroom and wait for you on my knees, and I would. You could go find your submissive girl and blow your load all over her pretty blond hair, and she’d love it.”
His lips pulled into one of those things he thought was a frown but was really a pout. “There’s a ‘but’ coming?”
“But you won’t. You want to fuck my face. You want it so badly that I could finish you under this table with just another couple of strokes. You want that girl too. But you love Jenny and you’re too faithful to break off an engagement for the mere reason that she is the wrong person for you.”
The frown-pout deepened. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not, I promise.” I dropped a couple bills on the table and made to leave.
“Embry,” Ash said before I could go. “What about you? What about your angel? Your night with her?”
“It’s not important,” I said and walked away from the table. Walked right into a lie that would torment me for years to come.
After all, I’d given up everything else for Ash. Why not her too?
23
Embry
after
“You’re not doing enough.”
Ash turns to face me on his way over to his desk. “Enough is exactly what I’m doing, and frankly, exactly what you’ve already done.”
We’re in the Oval Office after a long morning in the Residence hammering out our media defense for the video. The defense was easy enough to plan—deny, deny, deny—although we all knew that denial would only get us so far. It was too good of a story, too salacious a video. With all the eagerness that the nation had welcomed Greer as its queen, they had already started eviscerating her. Online, on television, in the papers and soon in the magazines too. Trieste begged Greer not to go anywhere near the Internet until it blew over; Merlin already had Linette blocking off chunks of Greer’s schedule so that she’d be less visible for the next two weeks.
Greer took it all in stride, looking composed and contained in a knee-length skirt and boat-neck top, crossing her oxford-clad feet at the ankles as she listened to a room of people discuss a video of her fucking a man who wasn’t her husband. She calmly voiced her opinions, calmly responded to questions, calmly made it clear what she would and wouldn’t do to pander to the press.
She was born for it, I remembered after the second grueling hour talking over strategy and implications for the re-election campaign. She knew better than anyone else how the game was played, and she was playing it now. With cool dignity and impressive reserve.
And she commanded respect for it. Kay, Belvedere, Merlin, and Trieste all knew—and surely Linette could guess—that the video was real, but one cold look from Greer at the opening of the meeting when Trieste started to ask if it really was us in the video had silenced the room on the subject. Trieste had flushed and mumbled an apology and quickly moved on to the topic of defense, and no one else had dared to voice the obvious truth.
And if her eyes were slightly red-rimmed, if her concealer didn’t completely cover the bite mark on her neck, if she winced whenever she adjusted herself on the love seat she shared with Ash, then the room pretended not to notice. For his part, Ash sat back and mostly let the room talk around him, rubbing Greer’s hand with his thumb and occasionally leaning in to whisper in her ear.
It wasn’t fair that it was Greer’s reputation that would need the most defending; I would have chained myself to a rock and had my liver pecked out if it meant I could bear the brunt of this. It was my fault this video even existed—I should have known there would be cameras, I shouldn’t have fucked her there at all, I should have known Melwas wouldn’t have given up so easily. It wasn’t fair that the people in the room barely glanced at me as they stared hard at her; it wasn’t fair that she was already being excoriated publicly as a faithless whore when next to nothing was being said about me.
But as hard as it was, it was easy enough. The issue was that I’d flown to D.C. with a different problem than Melwas’s video.
A problem I needed to talk to Ash about as soon as possible, except we also had to deal with this video and then the topic of Melwas in general. And by the time the meeting about the video had ended and we were walking into the Oval Office, I was distracted.