At herself.
She didn’t know what had come over her this afternoon. She blamed it on back-to-back tea skirmishes with Idylla’s viper class, which would surely make anyone loopy. That was the only reason she could think of to explain why she’d actually tried to build a bridge with Prince Griffin.
And had basically admitted to him that she was hiding things, though he hadn’t picked up on it.
That didn’t mean he wouldn’t.
Melody could not pretend she knew her husband very well. How could she when she was acting a part herself? But she knew already that whatever else Griffin was, and whatever he might like to pretend in public, he was nowhere near as foolish as the tabloids liked to claim.
He was far too self-aware, for one thing.
And tonight, as she sat about attempting to look overset and trembly while surrounded by so many high-placed members of society—all of them chattering about nothing in particular while political and powerful undercurrents flowed as freely as the wine—Melody was forced to conclude that he was a whole lot more than that, too.
The way she had the day of their wedding when she’d first noticed that leashed power in him, such a surprise in a man who acted as if all he was, ever, was charming.
“You seem subdued,” Griffin said when the dinner party finally ended and he was once again walking her slowly back through the palace. Guiding her as if, left to her own devices, she might topple over, hit the marble floors, and stay there until discovered. “I hope you didn’t find the night too taxing.”
Melody fought back a flash of irritation. No, she wanted to snap at him, I do not feel overtaxed. I feel bored out of my skull.
As anyone would, should they find themselves called upon to play a hapless ninny.
But she didn’t say any of that, and not only because she had been asked to keep him in the dark—to keep him like this. The unlikely champion of the most inadvertently scandalous heiress in the kingdom.
“I was thinking about you, actually,” Melody said instead.
Her hand gripped his elbow, so she could feel the kind of shock that went through him. It rippled in him, there beneath her fingers. She wanted, more than anything, to...lean in. To follow that shock, that reaction, and see where it went.
That was how she’d learned the shape of the world. She touched it. Traced it. Felt the heat of a thing, or its coldness. If it was hard or soft, pliable or unyielding. Fen had spent years guiding these explorations, explaining what figures of speech meant, and giving Melody touchstones.
But that wasn’t how she wanted to touch Griffin. Not exactly.
She wanted to touch him to learn, certainly. Melody had not had the opportunity to touch many men. There was a novelty factor.
Still, she knew that mostly, she wanted to put her hands on him because touching him made her feel things. She wanted to explore it. She wanted all those things she’d read about and more, the opportunity to practice them the way she did her forms and strikes. Until there were no mysteries, only sensation.
But she supposed that even if she wasn’t pretending to be someone she wasn’t, that sort of thing would almost surely be frowned upon out in the halls of the palace. There was always protocol to consider—that and all the other things Madame Constantinople Dupree had banged on about this morning.
“You were thinking about me?” Griffin laughed, another thing Melody could feel vibrate through him. And through her. “That’s a shallow pool, I think you’ll find.”
“That’s what’s so fascinating.” He opened the door to the courtyard and led her through it, and something about the cool air on her face made her distinctly aware of how overheated she was. As if her body was taking in all those vibrations and sensations between them, charging her up, and making her glow with it. The way the lightbulbs she’d cupped as a child had, buzzing faintly until they grew too hot to hold. “I think everyone sitting at that table tonight actually believes that about you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He slowed, which shouldn’t have been possible. As they were already nearly crawling. But for once, Melody didn’t mind his deliberate, overly careful steps. She could feel the expanse of the courtyard all around them. And the density of the December air, pressing in. It made her feel as if the night was wrapped tight around them, threaded through with intermittent bursts of heat.
Not all of that from the evenly spaced heaters.
“I have no idea what they see, of course,” she told him. “I assume you laugh and smile and do all the usual things with your face.”
“The usual things...” he repeated, as if she’d said something shocking. “Forgive me, but how do you know what things people do with their faces?”
“How do you think?”
Melody laughed, but not because she was amused. Not really. It was more like there was a steam rising in her and she had to let it out as if she was a kettle set to boil. And her own laugh, the faint and tinkling one she was allowed while she stayed true to her character, should have reminded her what was at stake here.
But she still lifted her free hand. And without questioning her motives—because she already knew perfectly well they were not the least bit pure, because she was not the character she was playing—she slid her palm over his mouth.
That sensual, firm mouth of his that made her whole body shiver into a kind of tight, hot awareness.
“Say my name,” she told him.
A soft order, but an order all the same. After she said it, it occurred to her that perhaps this frail, wispy creature she was pretending she was would not be standing about issuing orders to a prince. But it was too late.
“Melody,” Griffin said.
And she couldn’t tell which made her feel
