American Queen

Love is kind.

Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.

until the ceremony, he wanted this

“I don’t care. Anything—I’ll let you do anything to me.”

“I believe you. That’s why you’re so dangerous.”

“Tell me you’re eighteen,” he whispered.

“I’m not.”

“Damn you.”

And then he tilted my face back up to his, and his mouth came down over mine anyway.

“You’re trembling. Are you scared of me?”

“You’ll cut yourself if you’re not careful,” an unfamiliar voice said from the patio door.

I look down at my hand, still held tightly by Embry’s. How did I end up tangled with these two men? The two most powerful men in the free world?

“You don’t?”

I glance down at my hands. On my right pointer finger, there is the world’s smallest scar—so small it can’t be seen. It can only be discerned in the way it disrupts the looping whorls of my fingerprint, a tiny white notch in a tiny white ridge.

A needle of a scar, a hot knife of a memory.

The smell of fire and leather.

Firm lips on my skin.

The warm crimson of blood.

“I don’t,”

“I hear not all priests are that chaste these days.”

“Chaste as a nun then.”

Because, of course, Embry had once been very good at forgetting me.