His hands moved to grip her upper arms, and Melody knew well the language of grips. Holds and releases. The way that bodies moved together and apart, in an endless dance of forms that could be meditation in practice and violence on the street. She knew how to fall. How to fight. How to use every inch of her body as a weapon.
But this was...something else.
This was a melting, a melding.
She felt as if she was dissolving, as if the hard heat in his palms was changing the very composition of her body. As if it was streaking inside, and making her something different. Something new.
Something better, a new voice inside her whispered.
She could feel it—him—everywhere.
“Why do you feel you must hide?” she asked him.
He made a low sort of noise, as if she’d landed a gut punch. “I don’t consider it hiding. Light and dark, day and night—these aren’t insults. And it has always been easier, where there is already a bright sun, to become the moon instead.”
“Does your brother know?” It was difficult to concentrate already. And when he began to move his thumbs up and down over her upper arms, almost absently... Well. Melody couldn’t stop the goose bumps that rose everywhere he touched. Or the shiver that wound around and around inside her, showing no signs of stopping. “Or does he think what everyone else does—that his only brother is a committed degenerate like your father? Only, somehow, more popular than King Max ever was. As if by magic.”
She should not be speaking to him like this. Melody knew she shouldn’t. She owed her sister her loyalty, and by extension, her sister’s husband. Calista wanted this marriage for Melody’s sake, to keep her safe. Just as Melody wanted her own situation to be stable and her person protected well enough—not because she felt unsafe, but because it made Calista feel better. She understood all this.
More, she had agreed to all this.
But nothing had prepared her for the heat. Griffin’s thumbs moved almost convulsively against her arms and that was the only thing she could seem to keep in her head.
“Do not mistake the matter.” Griffin’s voice was almost indistinguishable, then, from the night air that moved around them. But inside her, every word was almost too hot to bear. “I was reckless and heedless by choice. Hedonistic and no doubt remarkably asinine. I enjoyed my youth, Melody. And as long as my father was alive, there was no possibility that I could ever catch up to his level of seedy, irresponsible behavior. Just as there was no possibility that I could ever compete for Orion’s halo.”
“Why must there be catching up or competing?”
“I did not pretend to be badly behaved, Melody,” Griffin told her, as if the words stuck in his throat. “I enjoyed being badly behaved.”
“Yes, yes,” she said quietly. “You cut a swathe through the female population, sampling supermodels like candy. I know.”
His grip tightened almost imperceptibly, but she felt it. And thrilled to it.
“I am beginning to find it concerning that you are the only citizen in the kingdom who has no problem whatsoever with my...appetites.”
“Perhaps because I appear to be the only citizen in the country who also knows the rest of the story,” Melody threw back at him, perhaps a bit recklessly. “However you might have fed those appetites, it was never at the expense of the palace. You never made yourself a liability—not even to your father, who certainly wouldn’t have noticed.”
She couldn’t seem to think with his hands on her, skin to skin. It was too...encroaching. It seemed to get into everything, leaving nothing but flames behind.
“A happy accident,” Griffin said, his voice a quiet warning. “Nothing more.”
“I don’t think so. I think you are far more in control of yourself and this reputation of yours than you wish to admit.”
“That would be a true Idyllian scandal.” Griffin’s face was closer to hers, then. And the way he was gripping her, she had no option but to rise up on her toes. No option and no desire whatsoever to do anything but that. “And that cannot happen, Melody. No more scandals. My brother has decreed it.”
He was so close, now, that she couldn’t seem to keep herself from touching him. She ran her hands lightly over his chest, finding the lapels of the coat he wore, and better yet, his hard pectoral muscles beneath.
And inside herself, felt nothing but fire.
“Everybody knows that you married a charity case like me to make yourself look like a good man,” she said. “To medicate against the possibility of any scandal, ever. They took pleasure in telling me so today, over and over again.”
“If I can give you any piece of advice, Princess, it would be this. Never listen to the opinions of snakes. Especially when you have not solicited them.”
“But that’s not the real truth, is it?” Her voice was a whisper, at odds with the crash and burn inside her, her pounding heart, the giddy rush of her blood. “The real truth is that, deep down, you’ve always been a good man.”
“You are sweet and naive,” he growled at her, and she could feel his words against her own lips. “Innocent and almost unimaginably vulnerable. Especially here, in this palace of games and pretenses.”
Melody wanted to show him exactly how wrong he was about that, but somehow, she couldn’t seem to move. As if he was in control of her body, not her.
Something that should have alarmed her. When instead it made her...lightheaded.
“But beyond all of that,” Griffin kept on, his voice laced with heat just like she was, and something like greed, “you’re also wrong. You have no idea the things I want to do to you.”
“Then do them,” Melody managed to say. “I dare you.”
“Careful what you wish for, wife.”
There was too much heat and noise inside her, making her limbs feel heavy.
