And he found her in her reception rooms, tending to the daily work of the social calls he suspected she found as tedious as he always had. He nodded curtly at the guards outside her door, then stepped inside without making a sound.
His wife—his secret ninja princess, as she called herself, and he should not find that so charming—was sitting on her usual settee, bathed in all that golden light. Griffin told himself that her inescapable beauty, her sheer perfection, shouldn’t make such a racket inside him. He told himself he wanted it to go away.
It is only sadness, he told himself.
Because he knew the truth. Because it was lies. Because she was.
But when he looked at her, all he saw was her radiance.
As bright and as beautiful as any truth.
And it did not seem to matter how many sins Griffin taught her or how many times he practiced them upon her. It did not seem to matter how many times she broke apart in his hands, or screamed out his name, or rode him to a wild finish as if she was the one teaching him each and every one of the carnal delights he’d thought he’d mastered.
None of it touched her.
Melody was holding a cup and saucer before her in a crisp, elegant manner that made the two women sitting across from her seem almost embarrassingly gauche in comparison. And all she was doing was sitting there. Listening.
“I beg your pardon,” she said softly when the woman who had been speaking paused to take a bite of one of her tea biscuits. “But I believe my husband has need of me.”
When Griffin would have said she could not possibly know he was there.
And then it was all exclamations and fluttering as the two women—who he was certain he knew, though he found he could not focus long enough to identify them—scurried from the room in clouds of overexcited tittering.
“You do not normally show your face at these calls,” Melody said when they were gone. Griffin indicated with a nod of his head that the remaining staff should leave, too. “Lady Marisol and her sister will dine out on your appearance for weeks.”
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he ground out when they were alone.
Against his will.
Melody rose, then, nimbly moving around the furniture and making for him, unerringly.
Griffin still wasn’t used to it. There was still something inside him that expected her to trip. To fall. Or to at least look as if she wasn’t quite so sure of herself.
To need you, something in him suggested.
“There’s nothing I can do about the fact I deceived you, Griffin,” Melody said softly when she came to a stop before him. “I would apologize, but I’m afraid I’m not as sorry as you might wish me to be. In my position, I suspect you would have done the same thing.”
Griffin didn’t want to hear that. And he didn’t want to think about it too closely, either, because he was afraid she was right. Arranged marriages weren’t particularly out of the ordinary in his world. It was a widely accepted practice not only in Idylla, but in many royal and aristocratic circles around the globe. But it was different to walk into one as a woman.
Of course it was. Especially if that woman was blind.
“It had nothing to do with you,” Melody continued as if she’d read his mind. “For all I knew, I was jumping from one fire to another. I don’t regret protecting myself. I would do it again.”
“Thank you for your honesty,” he managed to say. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, “Even if it is a bit late in the game.”
And something in him seemed to shatter, even as he stood there. It was her scent, crisp and sweet at once. It was the smile he’d failed to keep on his face before the crowds. It was her, all of it, and now he knew her too well. The warmth of her skin. That smooth, glorious curve of her hip that could cause war and peace alike, and often did. The crushed velvet of her nipples and the strength in her thighs, particularly when she gripped him tight.
He knew too much.
And still Melody stood before him, something almost like a smile shaping her lips, her eyes so wide and the endless blue of the sea.
Griffin wanted things he shouldn’t. Things he couldn’t understand.
It never got better, that wanting. It only grew more intense. She was doing this to him, and still, she looked like an angel.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” she said softly. “Does it? Can’t we make it what we want it to be?”
“You don’t understand.”
Griffin expected her to sigh at that, the way she often did. Argue, maybe.
He could have handled that much better.
What she did instead was to reach over and slide her hand over his heart, as if she could hear the way it beat, jagged and painful.
“I want to understand, Griffin,” she said softly. “But I can’t unless you tell me.”
“It was my mother,” he said, when he was certain he had no intention of speaking. It was as if the words were torn from him, and once spoken, he couldn’t seem to stop.
He put his hand over hers, there against his chest, intending to peel hers away.
But he didn’t.
Before him, Melody simply waited. Still and yet engaged. No longer pretending to cower or shake, and that seemed to punch in him. He would never have told this story to a fragile creature. It would never have occurred to him.
Melody was anything but.
“She used to tell me I was her favorite,” he heard himself say, his voice as rusty as the words seemed when he’d kept them inside so long. “My brother had belonged to the crown since birth, but I was her friend. Her buddy.”
God, how he’d always hated that word.
“As the years went by, she became more pale. Brittle, almost, the longer she stayed married to
