Still.
Melody herself was considered fragile, certainly. But the public loved her. For every aristocratic woman who delivered backhanded compliments, Melody was seen as being that much closer to full-on sainthood. An angel of redemption, the papers cried.
Her staff had taken to dressing her accordingly.
“What am I wearing?” she asked Fen on her way out.
“A halo,” her friend replied, laughter in her voice. “As always.”
“I am your redemption, apparently,” Melody told Griffin later, in yet another car on the way to yet another engagement.
A moment she had chosen precisely because he could not silence her the way he normally did. Not if he wanted to parade her into the dinner looking like an angel. Smudged lips and wild hair would not give quite the same impression.
She could tell from the tension in the car that he knew it.
Griffin was sprawled out across his side of the plush back seat, taking up far too much of the available space and brooding so loudly Melody was surprised the driver couldn’t hear it through the glass.
“It’s a nice story,” he said. Eventually and with ill grace. “But I think we both know the truth.”
Melody found she was growing weary of this. There were so many more enjoyable things they could be discussing. Like what he did to keep his body in such delicious shape. Or what else he could teach her. She found it an endless delight that she’d married a man who had quite literally done it all, and could show her.
“What does it matter if I am less breakable than you imagined?” She had to remind herself to keep her impatience out of her voice. Somehow she knew he would not appreciate it. That, in turn, might possibly lead to less sex, and she couldn’t have that. Focus, she ordered herself. “You were famous for how much sex you had. Quality and quantity, apparently. Surely you cannot have imagined that you would spend the rest of your life as a monk?”
“I wanted to,” he bit out, shocking Melody so deeply that her half-formed decision to interrogate him...disappeared.
“But why? Why would anyone want that?”
“Not all of us are granted the opportunity to pretend that we are holy, clean, and pure.” Something dark and painful was between them then, and laced through his voice. The car felt hot with it. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“But I do.” She reached out a hand, meaning to touch him. His face, or his chest—but he grabbed her hand in midair, stopping her. Melody curled her fingers over his, then, and held on. “Do you know what it’s like to be held up as a symbol for others when all you really want is the luxury to be a person like anyone else?”
“Do I? You forget who I am. Do you, Melody?”
“I have always been my father’s excuse,” Melody shot back at him, still holding his hand in the space between them, gripping his fingers tightly. “His embarrassment or his curse, depending on the year. Meanwhile, my sister watched me train for years and knew full well that I have always been capable of defending myself. More, she knew I enjoyed doing it. Yet somehow, my life became her burden to bear. A problem she was required to solve, whether I felt I required a solution or not.”
“You cannot possibly compare our experiences.” His words were like bullets. “My life has been a public spectacle outside my control since my mother showed me to the world from the palace balcony two days after my birth.”
“You think I don’t know what it’s like to forever live according to others’ expectations?” Melody laughed. “I don’t consider myself disfigured, disabled, or any of the other words people use to describe things they don’t understand. I am me. And still, I was asked to hide that. To play up what everyone else thinks is a liability. To make sure that everyone around me, especially you, would treat me as an object of pity instead of a woman. What else do you think a saint is?”
His hand tightened against hers. She could feel his pulse, hard and hot.
“These past weeks, I thought that finally I’d been given the opportunity to be everything I am to a person who isn’t Fen,” Melody continued, her voice a little more intense than it should have been. A little too intense to pretend she wasn’t emotionally involved in this, like it or not. “I like to play games, I’ll admit. But I thought we stopped. Yet we didn’t, did we? You called me a liar, and ever since, you’ve cut what we could be in half. If you can’t protect me, you deflect with sex. If you no longer think I might fall apart, you take me apart, but only in one way. There’s a name for this, you know.”
“You can call it what it is. Consequences,” he gritted out. “The consequences of your actions and nothing more.”
“Or, possibly, something like a madonna/whore complex. Just throwing that out there.”
“I don’t have a complex,” Griffin growled. “What I have is a fake marriage.”
He dropped her hand.
Melody wanted to reach out again, but she didn’t. And it hurt.
Try some strategy, she snapped at herself. Unless you want him to keep treating you like this.
“But you have always had a fake marriage and you have always known that it would be exactly that,” she said. Reasonably, in her opinion. “You married a perfect stranger by order of the King himself, on scant notice and with no opportunity for argument. How did you think that would play out?”
“I married a half-feral waif who had been locked away in a basement and needed rescuing. I made her a princess.” Griffin’s voice was darker than she’d ever
