Orion was a different order of man than Melody’s father. Or his own father, come to that, or the country could never have embraced him. Not after the things Terrible King Max had done and laughed about when they’d turned up in the tabloids, as they inevitably did. That Orion was fully in control of himself—and therefore everything else—was palpable. Comforting in a king.
As someone who’d spent her entire life learning how to control herself in various ways, physical and mental and more, Melody was forced to admire him.
“Your sister has regaled me with tales of your abilities,” Orion had said then. Melody had felt the astonishing urge to offer him the appropriate obeisance. Not that she could with so many people around her, pinning and prodding and demanding she remain still. She was surprised she even had the urge to drop a curtsy, but there it was. The first time in her whole life she’d actually felt decidedly patriotic. “And I’m delighted that my brother will take such a remarkable woman as his bride. But you must understand something about Griffin.”
Melody had felt certain that she understood Prince Griffin all too well. The spare had not followed in the footsteps of the heir. Griffin had always preferred gambling halls, the beds of unsuitable women, and any other form of debauchery available to him. And as a royal prince, there was very little that was not available to him. He was not the sort of man who would require work to figure out. Melody had been bored of him and his high-profile antics long before she’d ever met him.
This was something she would have said happily to her sister. But Orion was not only the King, he was Griffin’s brother. So, uncharacteristically, she’d remained politely silent.
“He has always played a certain role, particularly with women,” said the King, and somehow, Melody had kept herself from letting out an inelegant snort. A certain role was one way to describe an unrepentant libertine who had spent the better part of his life knee-deep in conquests. “But with you, he is...different.”
This was true, but not for the reasons Orion likely imagined. It had always amused Melody to cringe about and act as if she might crumble to dust if someone paid attention to her. It gave her great satisfaction to allow people she could easily have maimed to fawn all over her and treat her as if she was too damaged to sit without assistance,
In other words, she’d long enjoyed acting the part of damaged goods.
The first time she’d met Prince Griffin, it had been second nature to act as if his mere presence was enough to give her the vapors. As if her blindness made her timid and she could do nothing but quail and cower.
Melody did so enjoy being underestimated.
Until now.
“I would take it as a personal favor if you would allow my brother to imagine that he can, in fact, protect you. Not because you need protection, but because I believe it would do him good to indulge that feeling.” Orion sighed. “I ask you this, not as your King, but as his brother.”
What could Melody do with that but acquiesce?
She had not knifed Prince Griffin at the altar, though it had caused her pain to refrain. She had even smiled—if tremulously, the way the person the Prince thought she was would smile, surely—though that was something she usually avoided doing in public. Her father always raged at her that she should smile more, so, naturally, she had taken it upon herself to smile as seldomly as possible. When Prince Griffin had finally led her into the ballroom, it was as his supposedly submissive and overwhelmed wife. His charity case.
It had been the longest, strangest Christmas of Melody’s life.
So long and so strange that she found herself almost nostalgic for the usual Skyros family Christmases past. Idyllians tended to reserve the gift-giving for Boxing Day and then again in January on Epiphany, the feast of the three wise men. Christmas was for the traditional breads, walnuts, and pork or lamb, depending on the family. In her own family, Christmas was one of the few occasions Melody’s mother insisted her father acknowledge that Melody existed, which made for a long, fraught, unpleasant meal that likely gave everyone indigestion, reliably left at least one member of the family in tears, and inevitably ended with smashed china and threats.
That sounded like a lovely Christmas carol in comparison to this, she thought as she was introduced to the King, the palace, and then the watching nation as the kingdom’s newest Princess.
Then came the interminable dancing.
“You are remarkably good at this,” the Prince told her, as he waltzed them both around and around and around.
Melody was entirely too aware of the pressure of so many pairs of eyes on them. The weight of it all. And the murmuring and whispering and muffled laughter, snaking about beneath the music, as all the gathered Idyllian nobles attempted to come to terms with what shouldn’t have been possible.
Everybody’s favorite prince, married to the damaged, discarded, scandalous-by-virtue-of-her-notable-imperfections daughter of the already highly questionable Skyros family. Yes, Calista had done well for herself. But Aristotle was a stain on the kingdom. Everyone agreed—until they wanted to do business with him.
Well. Not any longer, perhaps. There was that silver lining to hold on to.
Melody found dancing silly. It was so much more pleasurable—and effective—to fight. But the simpering creature, fragile and overwhelmed, that she was playing tonight would never think such a thing.
Nor have the tools to fight in the first place, she reminded herself.
She shivered dramatically, hoping Prince Griffin would imagine it was fear.
“I hope I don’t embarrass you,” she said, in a quavering sort of voice. The kind of voice she liked to use around her father, mostly because it always made her sister laugh. And usually also made her father choke with rage that such a daughter had been inflicted upon him.
