“I can’t imagine what it is to be blind,” he said then. Formally. Because he thought he ought to say something, if only to cover his reaction to her. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what it is to see,” Melody replied, smiling. “I can’t accept your apology when I never lost my sight. I suppose I could sit about mourning something I never had, but what would be the point?”
“That sounds very healthy, Melody. I admire you.”
“Do you? Why?”
It was possible that all that unfamiliar longing and need charging around inside of him was making him see things that weren’t there, but for a bizarre moment, Griffin could have sworn that she was...issuing him a challenge.
There was something in the way she was sitting there, holding herself so still. There was something about the way her face tipped toward his, an expression he couldn’t possibly be reading correctly on her lovely, innocent, guileless face.
Almost as if she was preparing herself to take some kind of swing—
But that was absurd.
This women needed his protection. She couldn’t challenge a stray summer breeze, much less a man who still trained at military fitness levels to keep himself in fighting shape.
What Griffin needed to do, he acknowledged with a certain grimness, was accept the fact that his body was a lustful thing that wanted to drag his bride down to his level so he need not keep all the promises he’d made.
Accept it, get rid of it, and move on.
“I admire any person who handles adversity with such equanimity,” he said after a moment.
He needed to get a grip on himself.
Now.
This was not an opponent of some kind. This was his fragile, virtuous, helpless bride. Who had not touched him because she’d wanted to set him on fire.
That was an unfortunate side effect.
One that should have embarrassed him, as it highlighted that despite the trappings of his overtly civilized life, at heart he was nothing but a beast. Nothing but greed straight through, a slave to his own passions, like the father he despised.
She had been trying to see him, not seduce him. He should have been disgusted at his own response.
No more, Griffin vowed to himself. Again.
And made himself go and take his seat once more because he, by God, would be the master of his own flesh.
Melody inclined her head, demurely enough to make him question ever seeing anything but that in the way she held herself. “And I admire you.”
He laughed, lounging back because this felt like familiar ground. “What is there to admire? I’m afraid I’m concocted of silver spoons, hereditary fortunes, and an entire lifestyle I did nothing to earn.”
“Yes, but who would truly wish to be a royal?” Her smile was so gentle there was no reason he should feel the sharp edge of it rake over him. “It might be a pretty prison cell, or so I hear. But it’s still a prison cell, isn’t it?”
“It is an honor to represent Idylla and support my brother in all his works,” Griffin said by rote.
It wasn’t that he didn’t mean it. He did.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t...textures to the words that formed the boundaries of his life. The simplest words, he’d found, always had the greatest complications lurking right there in plain sight.
“Of course you do,” Melody said. Still with that smile. “I was lucky to avoid the bulk of my father’s attention, if Calista’s experiences are anything to go by. Being his favorite came with its own price tag, there’s no denying it. It’s not hard to imagine what being Crown Prince to King Max must have entailed.”
“Heavy lies the crown,” Griffin replied, lightly enough. “Which is one reason I have always preferred to keep my own marvelous princely brow smooth and unencumbered.”
Next to him, Melody shifted. And leaned in.
And Griffin was a connoisseur of women. They flocked about him and he had long taken pride in the fact that while he frequently and enthusiastically indulged, he truly enjoyed those indulgences. He didn’t have a type. He didn’t have hierarchies. He wasn’t attempting to put notches on his bedpost or prove anything to anyone. He simply loved women and loved being with them, whatever that looked like.
Yet here, now, as Melody swayed closer to him as if she planned to kiss him at last, Griffin felt like an untried innocent. A chaste virgin without a shred of control.
He wanted his hands on her.
He wanted and he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with it.
Inside him, storms and fires swept this way and that. It was cataclysmic. It was too much—
Griffin was somehow out of his depth when he would have said that was impossible. And all Melody did was sway ever closer...
Her scent, her warmth, wrapped around him like a fist.
He could remember, too intensely, the perfunctory kiss he’d delivered at the altar. It had been little more than a brush of lips and yet it burned in him—
God help him, but he wanted a proper taste.
But when she was so close that not kissing her seemed like an offense, what Melody did instead of put him out of his misery was...lift her hand.
Then, unerringly, find his forehead.
She traced her way down his to the furrow between his brows.
“Not so smooth and unencumbered, I think,” she murmured.
It took some thousand years or so for her words to penetrate the wild drumming of his heart, the matching beat in his sex. The wildfire inside him, wicked and raging.
Melody’s smile was cool. Almost as if she knew. “Maybe all lives have their hardships, Griffin. Maybe crowns aren’t required.”
CHAPTER FIVE
MELODY WOKE UP the next morning in a confused, grumpy rush, because there were voices and commotion and she could tell from the state of her own sleepiness that it was much too early.
Much too early.
She had never been a morning person. One of the benefits of having spent most of her life shut away from the sort of people her father wished to impress—meaning, everyone—was that she
