“Your marriage was meant to settle you,” Orion said, sounding entirely too amused, when Griffin presented himself in his office. “I must tell you that you do not look particularly settled.”
“On the contrary, brother.” Griffin stalked to his preferred chair before the fire and draped himself across it like the libertine he’d been for years. And ignored how little he wished to lounge about bonelessly these days when everything inside him was so...fraught. “I have never been more at ease.”
Orion’s lips twitched. “Clearly.”
“And what of your marriage?” Griffin asked. Demanded, really—taking advantage of the relationship only he had with Idylla’s moral, upstanding, remote new King. “You’ve only been married one week. Most newlyweds would be off on a honeymoon somewhere, reveling in their new commitments in the time-honored fashion. Instead, you must host the traditional banquet and ball tonight and, as ever, ransom yourself to the demands of your duty.”
“Is that an inquiry into my well-being?” His brother eyed him, seeing far too much, Griffin was afraid. “Or a complaint about your own situation? I didn’t realize you and Melody enjoyed the sort of relationship that would require what a honeymoon normally delivers.”
And the dark look Orion threw his way, as if Griffin’s reputation swirled around him like a thick winter cloak...rankled.
Despite himself, Griffin could hear Melody’s voice from that night in the courtyard that he was trying so desperately to forget.
Why must there be catching up or competing? she’d asked.
Why indeed.
And suddenly, on this final day of a strange year, it seemed important to him to find out—once and for all—if Orion was aware that Griffin chose to be dark to his light. That it wasn’t who he was, it was who he had become. Deliberately.
Certainly, he had been exuberant in his youth. He had also had a decorated military career, something that would have been impossible had he spent even half as much time whoring about as it was reputed he had. And he had gone out of his way to downplay his military experience in all the interviews he gave, because that wasn’t what the kingdom wanted from the second royal son. They had Orion for sober responsibility and the hope of a brighter future.
They wanted the spare to be fun.
“Do you imagine that I’m incapable of controlling myself if I wish it?” he asked.
Not nearly as lightly as he should have done.
His brother laughed. “I have no doubt that you could control yourself, Griffin. I do wonder whether or not you will.”
“You asked me to marry a sheltered innocent who knows little of the world and even less of men, unless you count her loathsome father, which I do not,” Griffin growled. “No, Orion, I do not require an extended honeymoon to slake my lust all over her fragile body. But thank you for thinking the best of me.”
Orion lifted his head and fixed that particular stare on him that usually encouraged his underlings to...rethink.
But he had already committed himself to this ill-considered course, so Griffin stayed as he was, lounged out in a chair before his brother’s fire. The very picture of careless indolence and self-indulgence.
He was good at that.
“I don’t believe I accused you of anything,” Orion said after a moment. The offended monarch in his gaze, if not in his voice. Not quite. “Is that a guilty conscience talking?”
Griffin had been about to apologize. But now...he thought again. “I’m astonished you think I have a conscience. Surely not. After all, the whole of Europe knows I am little more than a cardboard cutout replacement of our late, unlamented father.”
Orion only eyed him. And then, after a moment far more tense than it should have been, sighed. “I know you’ll keep your promise to me, Griffin. As you have kept every promise you ever made to me. It is the Queen who is less certain.”
“Perhaps if she had spent less time writing tabloid stories about my exploits across the years she would have less to worry about now.”
He expected his brother to bristle at that, but Orion only smiled. He stood from his desk, and came over to the fire. Then he took the seat opposite as if settling in for a cozy chat, and all of this was so unlike his usually grim, workaholic brother that Griffin found himself...thrown.
A sensation he ought to have been used to, after all the time he’d spent with his bride lately.
Because unless he was mistaken, his brother, the uptight King, looked...relaxed.
“I told her something similar myself,” Orion was saying, still smiling. “But you’ve met Calista, of course. She can’t be told something.”
But Griffin noticed that his brother sounded affectionate when he said that. As if that was not a flaw in his Queen, but a virtue.
He couldn’t take that on board. Not from Orion, who had made a great many sweeping statements about the obedience he would expect from the woman he’d been required to marry, thanks to a deal their father had made. Threats of imprisonment on remote islands and so on, should Calista fail to fall in line. Griffin hardly knew what to do with evidence of affection.
He returned instead to the matter at hand. “Does Calista truly believe I will harm her sister?”
“Of course not,” Orion said, so easily and so swiftly—so matter-of-factly—that something inside Griffin twisted in on itself.
He understood that if his brother had answered in any other way, or taken time to think it over, it would have irreparably damaged something in him. And that understanding landed in him with the full force of a blow.
It took him a moment to realize Orion was studying him. “It is the habit of a lifetime, nothing more, to concern herself with her sister’s affairs. Calista has always seen herself as Melody’s champion. And how do you find her? Your wife, I mean. Not mine.” His smile took on a different sheen. “How is she adapting?”
“She’s been blind
