Or you could press yourself against him and kiss his neck, and see how quickly you find yourself beneath him, she argued.
But it was one thing to find herself so sensually overwhelmed that her skin felt too sensitive. It was something else to deliberately avoid a topic because she’d grown accustomed to sensitive skin, and wanted only more of it.
“Is something the matter?” she made herself ask.
“Go back to sleep, Melody,” Griffin ordered her, his voice low.
She sat up instead, dropping her hand from his back, which felt like a grievous loss. “If that was meant to be soothing, it failed.”
“Heaven forfend that I fail you in some way. Can the foundations of our marriage based on lies survive? Unless, of course, I make you come again.”
Something inside Melody twisted at that, a sharp and unpleasant flash too close to actual pain. He sounded darker than usual. Forbidding, even.
She began to count back. And as she turned over these past weeks in her head, she realized with some shock that he had changed completely on New Year’s Eve. Night and day, in fact, while she’d trailed around after him, desperate for more.
It was like when she’d learned to read Braille. It had opened up a whole new world, and she’d wanted to do absolutely nothing else but explore.
Possibly that made her something less than the ideal wife. She sat straighter and decided she would make up for that now. Since Griffin had obviously done all these things before, it stood to reason he hadn’t been quite so drunk with the joy of it.
Though she would have sworn he had been.
“What if, for a change, we had a conversation?” she suggested.
And a cold sort of flush washed over her when she heard his short, bitter laugh.
“What is there to discuss?” Griffin’s voice was even darker and more forbidding than before. “You lied to me. That’s the beginning and the end of everything.”
Melody wished she had paid a little more attention over the years to her sister and the relationships Calista had spent so much time building, buttressing, or fixing. But she hadn’t. She’d had no expectation that she would ever have those things, and besides, she’d always found Calista’s friendships, contacts, and endless talk of networking...silly, at best. It was nothing but games and misdirection.
Melody preferred the simple eloquence of a fist. A kick.
But now there was a heaviness in the room, his words felt like a bruise, and she had no idea what she was doing.
“I have already told you why.” Or she had tried. She had not told him that his brother had personally asked her to pretend she was fragile, as even she with her inadequate grasp of relationships had concluded that would not help anyone. “I had no idea what kind of man you were. Or how you would treat me. Of course I kept a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“I would not call what you did ‘a few tricks,’ Melody. What you did—everything you did—was a carefully calibrated misrepresentation of who you are. There’s not one fragile bone in your body.”
He had turned while he spoke and now he crawled over her. Melody fell back, though she could have fought to stay upright, because her body wanted nothing more than to surrender to him. To whatever he threw at her. Again and again and again.
She could feel the cage of his arms, and then the weight of him, pressing her down into the mattress. And surely there was nothing wrong with this. With them. Maybe this was how relationships were built—using whatever common language was available, and this was theirs.
Melody had long since become fluent.
Between them, she could feel the heavy weight of his arousal that she was beginning to think filled him with despair even as it made her shiver with delight.
“Aren’t you pleased?” she whispered then, her lips near his. “Isn’t it more fun to make each other shake instead of worrying that I might shatter without warning?”
“I detest liars,” he said, a growl against her mouth. “There is not a single member of my family who did not lie to me. And now you, too. The woman I will be tied to for the rest of my days.”
She shifted her hips, smiling at his sharp intake of breath.
“And you, of course, are a beacon of honesty at all times,” she murmured. “Even when, for example, you pretended for years to be dissolute and shallow when you are neither of those things. Not entirely.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Griffin—” she began, and this time without the complication of her hips, or her soft heat against the steel of him.
But he didn’t allow it.
He kissed her fiercely, wildly. And despite herself and her notion that she ought to do something more the way a wife surely did, Melody thrilled to it.
The way she always did.
Griffin flipped her over, muttering dark demands into her ear as the huge, hard heat of him slid home. Melody groaned.
And he took her that way, a ferocious claiming, without another word.
The next time she woke up, the morning light was pouring in. It danced over her skin, spreading its warmth wherever it touched, but Griffin was nowhere to be found.
Melody wanted to go and find him, to demand that he explain to her what was happening. What she’d missed. Her heart was pounding too hard, as if she was exercising when all she was doing was lying in a bed, alone.
But she made herself breathe. She made herself think.
And reminded herself that strategy won far more fights than brute force ever did.
So instead of forcing the issue, she would train. And wait.
That night, her staff dressed her in yet another one of the ensembles that, in all likelihood, the Idyllian press would fawn over tomorrow. It was another thing Melody had come to accept as these weeks rolled along.
Because while Melody had lost herself completely in carnal delights,
