Griffin stopped moving, forcing her to stop, too. She instantly balanced evenly on her feet, before it occurred to her that perhaps she should be feeble in gait as well. So she made a small production of tripping into him, which accomplished what she wanted.
He caught her. Easily and swiftly. Then held her up with an arm wrapped carefully around her back.
Melody told herself she should have laughed at that. Or wanted to laugh.
Instead, she could feel her whole body hum in response to that coiled, whipcord strength of his. To the heat of his body making her feel overly warm, everywhere. To the fascinatingly foreign and relentlessly male length of his torso pressed against her.
Oh, my.
“You will not be locked away ever again,” Griffin told her fiercely. “You are a royal princess of Idylla, Melody. And more important still, my wife. If any accommodations need to be made, I promise you, it will be the world who accommodates you this time.”
And all she could do was stand there with her face tilted up to his, her mouth slightly ajar in astonishment. Possibly in more than astonishment, though she couldn’t say she fully knew what more was.
She could feel the flush that started deep and low in her belly flood through her, heating her up everywhere else. She could even feel it splashed all over her face when she’d spent long years learning to control her expressions.
But however she looked—no doubt flustered beyond repair—it clearly worked for Griffin. Melody told herself that was all that mattered.
Because he took her hands in his, solicitously.
She assured herself that what she felt was delight that her display of feminine weakness was doing its good work. And not...a different sort of feminine weakness altogether.
“You are safe now,” he told her. “I promise.”
And the oddest thing happened.
Melody, who had not felt truly unsafe in too many years to count—no matter what her sister thought about her prospects—felt a warm and happy sort of glow burst into bloom inside her.
As if she had needed saving.
And more, as if the promises of a strange prince who had been as forced into this marriage as she was meant anything to her. When...how could they?
Griffin stood there for a moment, his big, hard hands making her infinitely capable ones feel small and delicate. Something that should have appalled her—but it didn’t. It really didn’t.
While she was still trying to sort that out, he led her down the hall, murmuring his greetings to various staff members and royal guards as he passed. All while Melody clung to him, told herself she wasn’t shivering slightly in reaction, and tried to sort out what was happening inside of her.
There was something about Prince Griffin. He was so...male. So big, so strong. So determined to protect her whether she needed his protection or not.
Melody liked it.
She more than liked it.
Because not only was she filled with that marvelous sense of warmth again, there was that other heat again. That electric invitation winding itself around and around inside of her, part of that shivering thing and more, too. It sank low in her belly and set up a kind of pulse, and she knew that was all about him. It was because of him.
Melody was used to cataloging every stray feeling that moved through her body. She had a highly developed sense of where she was in space and knew how to find her feet and her balance. She also knew how to connect to herself, and knew from discussions with her sister and Fen that this was a skill the sighted often ignored because they took visual cues as gospel. Melody preferred using all the senses available to her, not just one.
And still, she had never felt quite like this.
Her thighs seemed to whisper to each other as she walked. Between her legs she felt...heavy. Damp. There was an odd kind of prickling sensation working its way all over her skin. Her breasts—packaged into what her staff had assured her was a charming royal blue something or other that brought out her eyes, oh, joy—felt swollen.
Even her own palm seemed to generate more heat than it should, there where she clung to his elbow.
Whatever this was, Melody thought, she wanted more of it.
And then, with no little pomp and circumstance on the part of the palace staff, they were ushered into the presence of the King and Queen of Idylla.
Melody would have charged straight in to Calista, but she felt her husband pause. And understood what he was about even as he did it. She heard his heels come together, and felt it as he began to execute the quick bow that protocol demanded upon greeting the monarch for the first time in a day.
Accordingly, she snapped out her own curtsy.
And would have felt deeply silly had she not heard her sister huff out what sounded a lot like a laugh.
“Congratulations, Griffin,” Calista said. “You’ve changed my sister overnight when I would have said that was impossible. Apparently all it took was a quick royal marriage to make her the proper Idyllian aristocrat we always hoped was lurking in there.”
“You know you prefer it when I’m feral,” Melody replied airily. The way she would have if they were alone. But, of course, they were not alone, so she forced herself to make a simpering little noise as punctuation. “I only hope that I am not too embarrassingly improper now that our circumstances have changed so much.”
Her sister laughed again at that, even as Griffin murmured something soothing, and then there were more staff members everywhere. An endless amount of arranging and rearranging of the two royal couples on this or that bit of furniture in what Griffin told her—without her asking, as if he was attempting to be attuned to her needs—was the King’s private parlor.
Approximately twelve thousand supposedly candid photographs later, the staff retreated, tables of food were wheeled in and their real Boxing Day could commence.
But
