“No time to waste!” came a voice that reminded her entirely too much of the governesses she and Calista had suffered through when they were young. Brisk and self-important, every last one of them. “There are already too many appointments for one day!”
Melody lay face down, enveloped in the deep embrace of the glorious featherbed piled high with soft linens and fluffy down, as befit a royal princess’s bedchamber. She had never felt quite so pampered in her life and intended to lie about, enjoying it, for as long as she could.
She had not, as she sometimes liked to pretend on the few occasions she was allowed to interact with people outside her immediate family, been forced to sleep on a pallet on the floor in her parents’ dungeon. Her father was cruel, her mother weak, certainly. But on the off chance that Melody might ever compare notes with any other member of the Idyllian aristocracy, they’d made certain that while her rooms were far away from the rest in the sprawling Skyros villa—lest her father find himself forced to come face-to-face with Melody against his will, which was to say, ever—the rooms were appropriately outfitted.
Also, they did not have a dungeon. Aristotle preferred to imprison his daughters in a more lasting cage of disdain, rage, and insult.
Melody’s ascension to the palace was not exactly the rags-to-riches story all the papers were claiming it was. She’d laughed over all the local articles that had called her Cinderella after her sudden Christmas wedding, making her screen reader repeat it again and again. Still, fairy tale or not, Melody found the accommodations of her new life as a princess nothing short of splendid.
She did not want to crawl out of her bed. She did not even wish to turn over. Particularly not when she was—despite the enduring embrace of the glorious featherbed—not nearly as well rested as she would have liked.
That was what happened when a person went and played seduction games with Prince Griffin, ate entirely too much rich food, pretended that it was all in aid of celebrating the holiday—and then was forced to allow him to escort her back to her rooms when even she could feel that the hour was too late and the tension between them too intense.
She hadn’t expected the intensity, she could admit.
And when she had finally made it into her rooms, she’d been forced to endure a lecture from Fen about her deficiencies as a seductress.
I could have seduced him ten times already, for all you know, she’d told the older woman.
If you had seduced him even once, you would be in his bed, not yours, Fen had retorted, her voice as pointed as one of her lightning-fast jabs.
“I am still sleeping,” Melody announced now, more to her pillow than to the new voice still bustling around her room. Slinging open the curtains and stoking the fire, if the obnoxious noises being made were any indication.
“I’m afraid not, Your Royal Highness.” And it was amazing how the voice made Melody’s new title into the sharp lash of something unpleasant, like a whip. “A private citizen might enjoy these days off between Boxing Day and the new year, but that is not the way of the palace.”
Melody burrowed deeper into her covers, and did not offer to introduce the intruder to the way of the fist as she wanted to do with every cell in her body.
“No, thank you,” she said, again, with her face half-buried in the pillow. “Go away.”
She was drifting back into blessed sleep within seconds, settling even deeper into the sweet clutch of her marvelous bed—
Until the covers, impossibly, were ripped off of her body, exposing her to the still chilly air of the bedchamber.
Melody felt murderous.
She flipped over, prepared to leap up and attack the woman that she could sense hovering there at the end of the bed, clearly overly impressed with herself—as any fool might be when they did not understand the consequences of their actions—
But she remembered herself just in time.
Melody was not herself. Not here. Back at her parents’ house, she’d been taking care of herself for years and was accordingly left alone. Here she was a fragile, cringing, trembling little thing who would not, for example, catapult herself out of the bed and kick the person standing at the foot of it in the face.
She made herself breathe until the urge to attack faded. Then she shoved the great mass of her hair back and tried to school her expression into something appropriately deferential.
“I don’t know who you are,” she said quietly, yet with perhaps too much fury lingering there in her voice. She cleared her throat. “But you should know that I take my sleep very seriously.”
“I am Madame Constantinople Dupree,” came the voice once again, redolent with self-satisfaction. “I’m the foremost expert on courtly manners in the whole of Europe and have been gifted to you, Your Royal Highness, by His Royal Majesty King Orion himself.”
“A gift for the girl who has everything,” Melody murmured.
Not as nicely as she should have.
“I am led to understand that your manners are above reproach, which I will take the liberty to doubt, as I have never taught you.”
“I did manage to marry a prince,” Melody countered, and had to order herself to release the tension in her body, because this was no time to be wound like a spring, ready to attack. It would get her nowhere.
No matter how satisfying it might have been.
Madame Constantinople Dupree sniffed with pointed disdain. “A prince is but a man, Your Royal Highness. And it is not the men of society you need concern yourself with on your first day of social calls. You should be so lucky! Alas, it is the aristocratic women who will be coming to vet you today, I am afraid.”
“Are you?” Melody shrugged before she thought better of it, and tried to pull off a bit of a cringe at
