American Prince (American Queen #2) Read online

  American Prince

  Sierra Simone

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Ready for American King?

  Coming Soon!

  Also by Sierra Simone

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by Sierra Simone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Hang Le

  Cover Image: ThinkStock

  Editing: Nancy Smay, Evident Ink

  To Ashley, Serena and Melissa—

  who protect the tortoise enclosure

  1

  Embry

  before

  I met a king when I was twenty-one years old.

  But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  First, about me, Embry Moore, son of the terrifying Lieutenant Governor Vivienne Moore. To the outside world, I must have looked like a prince. I grew up with horses and boats and my own fucking lake, went to the most exclusive schools, graduated college early, and went off to play war because it sounded like fun.

  It was before the war had actually started, back when people thought the Carpathian separatists would settle down like they always had, and it seemed like the best kind of adventure to have: spend some time in the mountains, play soldier for a while, build a resume toward my inevitable future in politics.

  Princes do it all the time.

  Easy.

  And it was easy…until my second month on base.

  I wanted cigarettes, I think. That’s why I missed the beginning of the fight. Evening had fallen, a rosy gloaming that masked the squat ugliness of the base, and as I grabbed the silver cigarette case off my bed and trotted back down to the yard, I remember thinking that the world couldn’t get more beautiful than it was in that moment. The smears of orange and red and purple off to the west, the dark spurs of the mountains to the east, the brisk, clean air, and the promise of stars twinkling overhead. What could be lovelier than this? What else could stop my thoughts, stop my breathing, stop everything that wasn’t simply awe and unbelieving gratitude?

  It shows how differently I used to think then, asking what instead of who.

  I turned the corner into the yard, already pulling out a cigarette to light, when a blur of gray-brown-green crashed past me, making contact with another blur of gray-brown-green. I jumped back, the cigarette knocked from my hand and trampled underfoot, and I narrowly missed getting sucked into the tornado of fists and boots that was now drawing a crowd from everywhere nearby.

  “That was my last cigarette, asshole,” I said to no one in particular.

  A big guy called Dag—everyone had forgotten his real name by that point—was staring at the fight with his arms crossed and a keen expression of disgust. “Idiots.”

  I grunted in agreement. The commissary had recently stopped carrying cigarettes as part of some new health initiative, and I really, really didn’t want to have to walk the mile down to the little Ukrainian village to get a new pack of smokes tonight. But now it looked like I had to.

  “You going to step in?” Dag asked me, tilting his head toward the fracas in front of us.

  “After they made me drop my cigarette? They deserve a few black eyes.” I said it jokingly, but Dag didn’t crack a smile. I added, “They’re not my guys anyway.” It was a big fucking base, after all, and I wasn’t about to exert all my energy for two idiots fighting over God knew what.

  “You are the only officer around though,” Dag pointed out.

  “Like you care one way or the other.” But I glanced around the yard, and sure enough, I was the highest-ranking soldier there.

  With a long-suffering sigh for Dag’s benefit and after muttering something about not being a fucking babysitter, I walked forward to break up the boys and make it clear that one of them owed me a new cigarette.

  But someone beat me to it.

  A wide-shouldered man strode into the center of the fight, as calmly as you might walk along a beach, grabbed one soldier by the back of his shirt and yanked him back. He moved fast to restrain the other fighter, so fast that my mind only registered slivers of him. Flashing eyes, a full mouth. Dark hair. The kind of olive skin you were born with, the kind that stayed warm and bronze through the winter. Italian maybe, or Greek.

  “Holy shit,” Dag said. He sounded impressed. Or maybe not. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Dag.

  Percival Wu, one of our translators for the locals, came up behind us from the barracks. “That’s Colchester,” he told Dag and me in a low voice. “He just got here yesterday.”

  In that moment, I didn’t care who he was. I was just relieved I didn’t have to step in. To be honest, I’d only left OCS a few months ago, and it still felt strange to be in charge of other people.

  I grew up around power, around the kind of people who exercised authority with effortless ease, but I myself had spent most of my life dodging any and all responsibility. Consequences were something to be charmed and flirted out of, other people were worth only how much fun they could give me. I had next to no practice taking care of other people…I could barely keep myself out of trouble.

  In fact, I rarely bothered to—why would I, when trouble was usually so much fun for everyone involved?

  I know this all makes me sound selfish, and I was. I was a bad, selfish child who grew into a bad, selfish man…but don’t mistake selfishness for obliviousness. I knew how bad I was. I knew how sinful, even though I told myself I didn’t believe in sin. In the late hours of the night, after I’d drank or fucked or fought, depending on the circumstances, I’d lie in bed and watch the stars wheel through the sky outside and know—just know—that I was unnatural somehow. That some people were born wrong, born all warped and empty inside, that I was born without the parts that made people brave or pure or good. I knew that I was born without a conscience, or maybe a heart or a soul. I would think about this, then I would twist my body into the sheets and shove my face into the pillow. And as the air left my body, I would think about every awful thing I’d done that day. Every awful thing I’d ever done. And I’d hate myself for all of it. Hate myself for how selfish I could be, how thoughtless. I knew better than to chase anger or lust or escapism to their inevitable bleeding, sticky, intoxicated ends, but every single time, I did it anyway.

  Every. Single. Time.

  But it was only dusk then, and night hadn’t come yet and neither had the self-loathing. In that moment, I only felt relief and a vague kind of gratitude, and the desire to go find another cigarette.

  “Show’s over, I guess,” I told Dag, as I turned away to go down to the village. And then I felt a presence behind me. A presence that wasn’t the slender form of Wu or the hulking stone-faced Dag, and I stopped walking. But I didn’t turn.

  Not
at first.

  “You want to tell me why your cigarette was more important than your men, Lieutenant?”

  The voice was the kind that made you pause. It was deep, yes, and held this interesting mix of husk and melody, like a song whose notes had been burned around the edges.

  But it wasn’t the sound itself that stopped you…it was its purity. The strength of it. And not the kind of strength men my age pretended to have, all unearned swagger, but actual strength.

  Calm, clear, honest.

  Unequivocal.

  It was the voice of someone who didn’t lie in bed at night and wish he’d never been born.

  I turned to face him, already thrown by the sound of that voice, and then I felt completely knocked down by the sight of his face. Dark eyebrows above eyes such a complicated shade of green that I couldn’t decide if they were truly pale or truly dark. A serious mouth and high cheekbones, and a square jaw shadowed by stubble. Given his hyper-fucking-regulation haircut and gleaming boots, I guessed that Colchester was not the kind of man to miss his morning shave. Just the kind of man who couldn’t keep a smooth face for more than a few hours.

  But it was more than his features that struck you. It was his expression, his gaze. He looked to be my age, and yet there was something in his face that seemed older than his years. It wasn’t even about age, now that I think about it. It was about time. He looked like a man from a different era, a man who should have been riding horses through thick forests, rescuing damsels and slaying dragons.

  Noble.

  Heroic.

  Kingly.

  All of this I thought in an instant. And in the next instant I had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that he had just seen all he needed to know about me, that he’d seen my selfishness and my empty carnality and my dissolute laziness. That he’d seen every night I’d pressed a pillow over my face and wished I had the courage to snuff out my own worthless existence.

  And I felt a sudden flush of shame. For being me. For being Embry Moore—Second Fucking Worthless Lieutenant Embry Moore—and that pissed me off. Who was this pretty asshole to make me feel ashamed of myself? Only I got to make myself feel that way.

  I took a step closer to him, squaring off so that our chests were only a hand’s span apart. With some satisfaction, I realized I had an inch or so on him, although he probably had a good thirty pounds of pure muscle on me. And with even more satisfaction, I realized his uniform had a gold bar on it. A second lieutenant like me.

  I found my voice. “They weren’t my men, Lieutenant.”

  “So you were just going to let them beat the shit out of each other?”

  I rolled my eyes. “They’re big boys. They can take care of themselves.”

  Colchester’s face didn’t change. “It’s our job to look out for them.”

  “I don’t even know who the fuck they are.”

  “So when you’re out there, fighting the Carpathians, that’s how it’s going to be? You’re only going to look out for the men directly underneath you?”

  “Oh, trust me, Lieutenant Colchester, I always keep both eyes on a man directly underneath me. Both hands too.”

  Dag and Wu laughed, and I grinned, but in the blink of an eye I was backed against the metal wall of the barracks with Colchester’s warm forearm pressed against my throat.

  “Is this all a joke to you?” he asked quietly, so quietly that the others couldn’t hear. “Are those fake mountains over there? Fake bullets in your gun? Because it’s not a joke to the Carpathians. They don’t have fake bullets, Lieutenant Moore, and it won’t be fake IEDs they plant in the roads either. You’re going to be asking these men to follow you, even when they doubt you, even when you doubt yourself, and so you better believe it matters that you take care of them. Here, there, every-fucking-where. And if you can’t accept that, I suggest you march over to the captain’s office and ask for a transfer back home.”

  “Fuck you,” I growled.

  He pressed his arm tighter against the side of my throat, cutting off most—but not all—of my blood flow, and his eyes swept across my face and then down my body, which he had caged against the wall with his own. His eyes looked darker in the shadow of the wall, like the cold depths of a lake, but there was nothing else cold about him right now. His body was warm against mine and I could see the pulse thrumming in his neck, and for the briefest second, his lips parted and those long eyelashes fluttered, like he meant to close his eyes but forgot how.

  “Fuck you,” I repeated, but weakly this time, weak from his arm against my neck and something else I didn’t care to examine.

  He leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “I’d rather it was the other way around.” And he stepped back, dropping his arm. I sucked in a ragged breath, the fresh oxygen cutting through my blood like ice.

  By the time my vision cleared, Lieutenant Colchester was gone.

  2

  Embry

  after

  My life now has two parts.

  Then and now.

  Before and after.

  I’m a married man now, in a way. In a ridiculous, insane, beautifully fucked-up way that no state or church would ever recognize. But that doesn’t make it any less real. That doesn’t make it any less true. The moment Greer, Ash, and I all held hands and promised—promised something we didn’t even entirely understand but we knew we couldn’t fight anymore—that moment was my wedding. It was all my wedding, actually, that and what came after: the sweat and the tears and the spilled semen, some kind of ancient ritual that we instinctively knew how to perform, a dance we had never learned but had already mastered.

  I had thought today would be my perdition. My punishment for being a bad, selfish man, a man who made Ash suffer, who made Greer suffer, who’s made so many countless others suffer in the thirty-five years I’ve been alive. I had walked down that aisle with Greer’s cousin Abilene holding my arm, and all I could think about were the missed chances I had for this to be my own wedding. Ash would have forsaken his precious Catholic church, his career, his future, just to see me walk to him, just to see his ring on my finger, and I’d said no.

  Twice.

  And this was my penance. That I would walk down the aisle, and instead of standing across from him, I would stand next to him, his bite marks on my neck and his future wife’s taste still in my mouth, and I would have to watch them smile and cry and kiss. I wouldn’t get the man I loved or the woman I loved; instead, they would have each other and I would have no one.

  That was what I had to endure. That was what I had to accept.

  Except…I didn’t. Somehow, some way, my penance had been paid, my sins lifted from me. Ash wanted me. Greer wanted me. And they wanted to open their hours-old marriage to me—imperfect, awful me. I should have said no. For their sakes, for the sake of my soul. But I couldn’t. I just wanted it—wanted them—too fucking much.

  I wanted to hope that it would work. That we could work—the three of us, somehow. Because fifteen years of knowing Ash and five of knowing Greer had shown me that I was never getting past this…this itch, this needy pain for them. I was ruined for loving anyone else, and call it fate or bad luck or genetic compatibility or psychological trauma—whatever it was, I was bound to them like rust to metal, a collision of particles and forces that changed us all irrevocably. There was no going back.

  These are the thoughts stirring through my mind as my eyes flutter open in the dark. There have been times in my life when I’ve woken up in a new place, disoriented and terrified, waiting for Carpathian bullets to start raining down on me, but now I wake up in a warmth of lazy contentment. Sweet excitement. Lingering hunger.

  There are no bullets here.

  Instead, there’s a warm hand on my naked stomach, large and slightly rough, a familiar and unfamiliar feeling all at once. I open my eyes all the way, the light from the bathroom limning the muscular frame of the sleeping President. The sheet is partially twined around his lean hips, dipping low enough to expose the dark
line of hair running down from his navel and thin enough to reveal the heavy curve of his penis. In sleep, his full lips are parted ever so slightly and his long eyelashes rest against his cheeks, and the solemnity that usually clings to the corners of his mouth and eyes is erased. He looks younger, almost like that angry young man that once pinned me to a wall on an Army base. Younger and more vulnerable.

  My heart twists. Because I love him, because he’s beautiful, and because I can’t remember the last time I saw him truly, actually sleeping. There’ve been catnaps on planes, the occasional doze in the car, but as for deep-breathing, relaxed, limbs-sprawling sleep…not since that first tour of duty in Carpathia. Greer has been good for him.

  I try not to feel jealous about that.

  Speaking of Greer, I realize that she’s not in bed between us any longer, and she’s not nestled behind me or Ash. I stretch and blink more clearly at the light spilling in from the crack in the bathroom door. Ash and I rode her hard last night…I’m not sure exactly what kinds of things women do to take care of themselves after sex, but Ash has abused my willing body more than enough times for me to have an idea. I decide to give her privacy, although the bed feels strange without her. The rightness of the three of us, the way we fit and breathe together… Even after only a few hours, her absence makes the weight of the air uncomfortable on my skin, makes the bed feel hollow and cold.

  My stretching stirs Ash, and he stretches too, the sheet pulling down to reveal his hip and the top of one hard thigh. His hand flexes against my stomach, and the feeling is shocking, the intimacy both new and not new. Despite all the rounds we went tonight—or technically last night, judging from the faint blue light peeping in from behind the curtains—my cock jumps at his touch, stiffening and hardening from nothing more than the graze of his palm across my stomach.

  Ash opens his eyes and gives me a sleepy smile. It’s such an unfamiliar look on him, both the openness of it and the happiness, and I stare into his face, drinking it in like a man dying of thirst. After Carpathia, after Morgan, after me, after Jenny—I never could have believed that I would see Ash breathe and smile without all that torment suffocating him. Seeing it, if only for a few minutes, feels like some kind of gift, an unearned blessing. I reach out and trace his jaw, predictably already rough with stubble, and then run the pads of my fingers over his sleepy smile.