“An insult that will be addressed,” Griffin found himself saying, low and dark. “I promise you that.”
He had the impression she was studying him, in her way. She sat so still. She seemed to be listening so intently he was sure she could hear that wild heartbeat of his.
“I imagine it’s as easy to feel alone when your public life is relentless as it is when you are confined to solitude,” she said after a moment. “It’s just that no one thinks of it that way.”
Griffin wanted to laugh that off. The way he would have at any other time.
But there was something about the way the air felt tight between them. There was the memory of her fingers moving over his face, making him feel naked. Still. The way she saw him, here and now, in a way that had nothing to do with the masks he wore for the world. The roles he played. The Prince Griffin he’d made into a performance.
“I grew accustomed to the contours and duties of my life long ago,” he said. Stiffly. “I do not require sympathy for that. I’m well aware that my life is made up of great privilege. It should come as no surprise there are prices to pay for an accident of birth.”
“You have gone to such lengths to pretend otherwise.”
It wasn’t an accusation. Griffin could have handled an accusation. He could have dealt with an undercurrent of dry wit or an arched brow. That would have put them back onto familiar ground. He would have known what to do.
Instead, he sat forward, and somehow managed not to reach across the narrow little table between them to take her hand. To toy with the ring he’d slid there himself.
“It is not that I was pretending,” he told her, though she was a virtual stranger and no matter that he was married to her. “It was that Orion’s role was always so clear. And I...had no wish to compete with him. It seemed easier not to try.”
He had never said something like that before. Not out loud. Not to someone else.
Across from him, Melody leaned forward and put her tea back onto the table before her with a decisive click. She stayed like that, leaning forward. Closing the distance between them enough that if he’d only reached out, he could touch her at last.
He didn’t.
Griffin had no idea how, but he didn’t.
Even though the look on her face was so intense it made him imagine what it would be like to slide deep inside her. To claim her.
To know her the way she seemed, too easily, to know the parts of him he’d never let out in the light.
“What would happen if neither one of us pretended to be anything we were not?” Melody asked.
And the things Griffin yearned for then didn’t make sense to him. It was as if they were someone else’s dreams, but they starred him, and her, and not only in his bed. She made him want more than her body. She made him want her. And a whole life filled with the things other men deserved, but he never had. It was a violent, clattering thing inside him, loud and discordant.
That was what he told himself.
Because he hadn’t been lying to her when he’d told her he’d never considered the issue of heirs. He’d never wanted any part of that mess, being a product of it himself.
Griffin didn’t understand why, looking at this woman who should have been nothing to him but a kept promise, all those things that had never appealed to him before suddenly seemed...beautiful.
But in the next moment, he shook it off.
And laughed.
Loud enough to chase the clatter away.
“That seems a little one-sided,” he said, relaxing into his seat as if it was comfortable. Because that was one of his talents—he could make himself relaxed and boneless anywhere. He excelled at it, in fact. “What could you possibly have to hide?”
And it wasn’t until later that he would realize he recognized the look on her face then. It wasn’t until later that he would put it into context.
She laughed, too, but only after a moment.
Only after she looked—for the briefest moment—as if he’d slapped her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE SO-CALLED INTIMATE dinner party was both boring and thrilling, which didn’t surprise Melody in the least. Not after a lifetime of hearing Calista’s stories about such gatherings. All that hostile gentility over the soup course, animosity disguised in airy chatter about nothing, and blood feuds concealed in manners so fine they squeaked.
“You appear to be enjoying yourself far too much,” her sister murmured when the women repaired en masse to one of the salons, an archaic custom Calista had always claimed to enjoy as it permitted a glimpse at the real faces of women who preferred to act out characters in the presence of men.
“Enjoy is a strong word,” Melody replied. She sat with her sister on one of the salon’s many couches, thereby giving the rest of the women tacit permission to sit as well. “It’s informative, isn’t it, these awkward gatherings of so many soft creatures.”
Calista made a reproving sort of sound. “They only appear soft, Melody. When it suits them. Beware the talons beneath.”
Melody knew that she and her sister had very different definitions of softness. But as Calista shifted into her queenly hostess duties, Melody settled back against her seat and tried to exude it. She tried to look shy and fragile and all the rest of the things she was supposed to be—soft chief among them. She had already met most of the women who were now fluttering around Calista, jockeying for position and pretending their only goals were sudden, bosom friendships with the brand-new Queen. And while she found a measure of enjoyment in pretending she really hadn’t noticed all the slings and arrows these same women had thrown at her in their private audiences earlier—and continued to throw out in their usual understated ways—she spent
