But he dismissed that odd, poking feeling, because he was far more consumed with Melody.
“The staff who dressed me claimed that you’d said it was casual, but I don’t know what casual means in a royal palace—”
“You look beautiful, Melody,” Griffin assured her.
It was a throwaway remark. He would have said it to anyone so jittery and overwhelmed in his presence.
But in her case, he found he meant it.
Profoundly.
Gone was the pretty dress she’d worn earlier and the careful hair, fixed just so to look splendidly effortless in photos. Tonight, she wore what passed for casual in his circles. What looked like a whisper soft cashmere sweater over elegant trousers in a lustrous black. Her hair was down, but not in the wild way he’d seen it once before. It looked silky and smooth, and he had the near ungovernable urge to get his hands in it. To hold all that sunshine and gold in his palms and watch it slip through his fingers.
He tried to shove that unhelpful urge away.
“Do you require your aide’s assistance to eat?” he asked.
Courteously, he thought. And yet he could have sworn that both of the women’s expressions...changed. Tightened, almost.
“She can manage,” the older woman said.
A bit forbiddingly, to Griffin’s mind. Then, not waiting to be dismissed as she technically should have, she bowed her way out of his presence. And the room.
When the door closed behind her aide, Melody took a step—
And Griffin cursed himself for not moving sooner as he sprang across the room to take hold of her arm.
“We don’t want you to trip, Melody,” he said, as gently as he could.
“You are too kind,” she replied.
Sweetly.
Too sweetly, something in him muttered, but he ignored that, too. How could his frail and breakable bride be too sweet when she could barely function without assistance?
He steered her, not to the table waiting for them, but out to the balcony where torches flickered against the December darkness.
“I thought it would be nice to sit outside tonight,” he said stiffly. Because his wife was the only woman he’d ever met who he didn’t instinctively know how to charm, and that was a prickly sort of realization. He didn’t care for it. “We can have a glass of wine before we eat, if that appeals.”
“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” Melody said in her soft, gentle way. “I love torches.”
Griffin paused in the act of helping her to the balcony’s casual, comfortable seating area. “How do you...?”
And then watched, thunderstruck, as she laughed.
Silvery, like the moon. Like starlight.
“I can smell them,” she told him. “And if you listen closely, you can hear the flames flicker in the wind.”
But he was too busy questioning why his heart was galloping around his chest when all she’d done was laugh. At him.
He busied himself pouring out two glasses of the wine he’d requested from his cellars, then he went back to sit with her. There on the same comfortable bench near the torches that it had never occurred to him to listen to. Or smell.
Though he did then. And imagined he always would, now.
“I want to ask you a favor,” his wife said after a moment, during which time he absolutely did not study the way she pressed her wineglass to that full lower lip of hers, slow and sensual.
“Anything,” he said.
Hoping he sounded gallant instead of...obsessed.
Melody smiled, looking pleased. “My sister described you to me a long time ago. Your features, I mean. Calista told me all the girls swooned over the Royal Princes and she made sure I knew what you two looked like so I could swoon along with the best of them.”
“And did you?” Once again, he found that when he was close to her it was difficult to recall why, exactly, he couldn’t treat her the way he would any other beautiful woman. “Swoon. Over me. If you swooned over Orion, you’re welcome to keep that to yourself.”
“I was never one for swooning.” She smiled after she said it, and he instantly forgot that oddly brisk note in her voice he’d thought he heard. “That was a very long time ago, though. And now we’re married.”
“Indeed we are.”
“This time,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. So soft he had to angle himself closer to her to make sure he heard her. “This time I want to see you for myself.”
She leaned in as she spoke, making him wonder why he’d chosen to torture himself like this, by sitting in close range. And then forgetting he’d ever questioned such a thing, because the scent of her swirled around him...and bludgeoned him.
Melody smelled sharp and sweet. Tart apples and brown sugar. And it took more self-control than Griffin thought he’d ever employed in his life to keep his hands to himself.
Though he couldn’t seem to do much about his body’s reaction.
“You can do anything you like,” he managed to say when he was reasonably certain he could sound like something other than a slavering beast. “But I’ll confess I don’t know quite what you mean.”
She smiled, her eyes so blue, that it was hard to believe she couldn’t see him already. When he felt so obvious. He, who had never been any such thing in his life. He, who had made a career out of sampling any morsel that crossed his path, always letting them down so easily that they tended to trail about after him ever after. He, who had never been obvious because, it occurred to him, he hadn’t really felt much one way or the other.
Before.
Who could have guessed that wanting something he couldn’t have would burn like this? Brighter than the dancing flames that surrounded them?
And he tried to ignore the deeply male part of him that, because she was burned so brightly into his head, wanted to be the same for her.
God, the way he wanted the one woman he should have desired only to place behind protective glass.
Griffin was forced to
