Melody made a soft sound of distress. “That seems like an unfair burden to place on a child.”
“Whether it was or was not, it was the only thing that kept her with us.” Griffin ran his free hand over his face. “Everybody knows that my mother took her own life. But they act as if that was out of the ordinary for her. As if it was a one-time mistake gone too far.” He shook his head, his throat suddenly thick. “It wasn’t.”
Melody only murmured his name. And he suddenly felt that her palm, lying there and holding his heart in place, was the only reason he was still standing upright. Telling this story he’d never told. The story he’d vowed he would never tell.
“She tried again and again,” Griffin said, unable to stop himself. “And sooner or later, if someone wishes to go, they will. No matter how carefully guarded. No matter how loved.”
“It’s not your fault, Griffin,” Melody whispered.
He looked at her, fiercely glad she couldn’t see the emotion he feared was far too obvious, all over his face. Even as he was convinced that somehow, she knew anyway.
“I’m afraid you’re wrong about that,” he said, his voice steady with the conviction of all these years. The scar of it. What it had meant to him. What it made him. “My brother found her. But I left her. She promised me she would not do it, and fool that I was, I believed her. And I left her.”
Somehow, it seemed as if Melody’s palm against his chest grew harder. Hotter. And there was something about the expression she wore that made a low sort of shudder move in him. Protective, something in him whispered.
But he thrust that aside.
“The only other person I have actively tried to care for in my life is you,” Griffin told her, because what did it matter now? Why not lay all of this out, this grief and betrayal, so that at last what was between them would be clear?
Unmistakable.
And then, maybe, he could go about the business of putting himself back together when he still didn’t quite understand how he came to be so broken in the first place.
“You’re focused on the fact that I am not as weak as you expected me to be,” Melody said, a faint crease appearing between her brows, making her look fierce. “But you made me feel safe. Me, Griffin. When I have never felt such a thing, anywhere. Or with anyone.”
He wanted to hold on to that. He wanted it to mean something. When would he stop with all this fruitless wanting?
She blew out a breath. “No one fights the way I do, consistently and with years of intense practice, because they already feel safe. I thought the only way I could ever feel like that was if I was actively attacking someone. If I was winning a real fight. But all you had to do was treat me as if I was fragile. As if I might be precious. And there it was.”
This was excruciating.
“It was a lie,” he gritted out.
“But don’t you see?” She shook her head, that hand on him seeming to pin him to the wall when he wasn’t touching it. “What would it really mean if you had saved a weak and fragile creature, more breakable than glass? Anyone could save such a girl. I could save twenty with my hands tied behind my back. Surely the victory is greater when the need is less.”
He reached out to touch her, but only to grip her shoulders so he could set her away from him. Because he wanted, God how he wanted, and he knew better than that.
Telling Melody the story of his mother reminded him, forcefully, of the one inescapable truth he never should have let himself forget.
He had left his own mother to die.
What he had left was a promise to his brother and a wife he was sworn to protect, no matter what. He deserved nothing more.
And that meant, no matter who he blamed or how he felt about it, that first and foremost he needed to protect Melody from himself.
Especially if she was foolish enough to feel safe in his presence.
“I never should have touched you,” he told her, almost formally. “I betrayed both you and myself when I allowed the truth of who you are to cloud my judgment.”
“That did not feel like a cloud to me, Griffin. It felt like clarity.”
He ignored that. This was about keeping his promise to himself—the one he’d made the morning his mother had been found. That never again would he let anyone too close to him. Not when it was so clear that he couldn’t be trusted.
“We will return to our initial arrangement. Wiser, I hope.”
“We can’t return to me cowering and cringing and you imagining that’s real,” Melody replied, matter-of-factly. And it kicked about inside him, the way she said such things. With total conviction and absolutely no fear. “So what is there to return to?”
“Something more civil than this,” he blurted out. “The way marriages between people like us have always been.”
Melody considered him for a moment that seemed to stretch out. And ache.
“If you make yourself a priest, riddled with the glory of your abstinence, would that make up for it, do you think?”
He stiffened as if she’d shot him. Some part of him would have preferred it if she had. He thought of the knife he’d carried in his boot since his soldier days, and how easy it would be to simply take it out, hand it to her, and let her do her worst. How much quicker and more elegant.
At least then there would be no waiting. No quiet tyranny of day after day of wanting all these things he couldn’t have.
No more of this, he ordered himself. It was time to retreat into duty. Into the ascetic life he’d planned
