Not only because he’d made a promise to his brother to avoid scandal.
It was her. It was Melody.
She’d kissed him, out there in the dark. She’d put her hand over his mouth. She made him ache, she disturbed his sleep, and he did not understand how this woman who could quite literally not see him...saw him best of all.
Griffin was a man with so many acquaintances, so many so-called friends. He had famously never met a stranger.
But he had always felt like one.
Until the least likely person in all the world...recognized him, somehow.
He didn’t understand it.
But Griffin accepted the fact that left with nothing ahead of him tonight but empty hours, the ceaseless rain, and the dawning of a new year whether the world was ready or not, the only thing he was at all interested in doing was finding his wife. And that somehow, this thing that should have been anathema to him—his arranged marriage to a woman he should have had no interest in at all—in no way felt like a downgrade from his usual activities.
He decided he might as well embrace it.
He wouldn’t touch her, Griffin assured himself as he found himself prowling through the halls of this sprawling, empty house. He didn’t need to be led about by his desires after all these years of pretending he was a slave to them. He had no intention of allowing such a thing. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t...talk to her.
The simple truth was that he’d never met another person like Melody.
Because there was no other person like Melody.
As he walked, the rain beat against the windows as if it was washing off the year. And Griffin thought of how he’d wanted nothing more than to take apart his brother for suggesting that Melody was in some way impaired.
When Griffin knew better.
He had been sitting at pompous, tedious dinner tables like the one the other night his whole life. Not once had anyone seen the faintest shred of anything in him he did not wish them to see. But she had.
She had seen him.
Then he’d tasted her. Barely.
But one taste of Melody, and Griffin was changed. Rocked. Reduced to cold showers and long runs, neither of which helped at all.
It was as if he’d never kissed a woman before.
He was not focusing on that, he told himself sternly as he found his way to her wing of the house. He would go to her, that was all. Ask her if she wished to join him for a drink. Tea, perhaps, if that was what she fancied on a gloomy evening like this one.
They would talk. She would once again prove herself far more mysterious than she ought to have been. And if, deep down, he acknowledged that the prospect of having tea with his almost completely untouched bride was far more appealing to him than any of the parties he knew were raging across the island right now—or would be, should he call and indicate an interest in attending one—
Well. That was no one’s business but his.
He was headed toward her bedchamber when he paused. A strange noise reached his ears, rising now and again over the sound of the rain outside. A curious thump. Then another. A kind of...gasp.
Following the sound, he walked farther down the hall toward what had once been a conservatory for a long-ago princess who had preferred to secrete herself amongst her plants and herbs rather than spend her days ingratiating herself at court. Griffin had always felt a bond with his ancestress, though he had no affinity for plants and hadn’t been inside the conservatory in years.
But there was no mistaking the fact that the noises he heard came from within.
An exhalation. A grunt. Something that sounded heavy, hitting the floor.
He eased open the door, wondering if his aide had been mistaken and there were still staff about the place, engaged in renovations of some kind. Not that he could recall authorizing any—but then, sometimes his staff took matters in their own hands rather than bother him with minutiae.
The door opened soundlessly, though it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d slammed it open. And shouted while he was at it.
Because what was happening inside did not stop.
Griffin stood there, dumbfounded, as he attempted to make sense of what he saw. What was occurring right in front of him.
He couldn’t.
It simply wouldn’t penetrate.
Because it was impossible that his sweet, fragile, occasionally mischievous but clearly trembling and terrified wife, who also happened to be blind was...
Fighting.
There was no other word to describe it, inconceivable as it should have been.
Melody and that aide of hers were engaged in a lethal hand-to-hand battle, and Griffin might have hurled himself forth, thinking Melody under attack—
But she was landing her fair share of blows. She was attacking whenever she had an opening. With precision and clear intent.
It looked almost like an elegant dance. They threw each other, grappled on the floor, punched and kicked and never took their attention off of each other.
His bride, who clung to his arm as if an ocean breeze might carry her off, flipped in the air. She aimed her kick at the other woman’s face, and when her opponent ducked, corrected in midair and then took them both down.
Punch, block, kick.
There was not one part of Melody that trembled.
And all the things Griffin had been blocking out seemed to flood in on him then. The way she’d seemed to challenge him, then cowered in the next moment. How lithe she was, how deceptively lean. How remarkably at ease with herself, as after her day of tea with society’s worst, when any truly fragile creature would have crumbled. The muscles in her arms he’d felt and then dismissed, telling himself that was likely part of some or other therapeutic thing he’d assumed she must do.
This did not look therapeutic. It looked like art.
Melody not only didn’t tremble, she was magnificent. Every kick, every
