Her flush deepened. She told herself it was outrage that he would even mention marital rights in the twenty-first century. But she knew better.
If she was outraged at anything, it was that he’d apparently decided his own wife didn’t merit the same sexual attention he was literally famous for flinging about like it was confetti. Without even asking if, perhaps, she might like to partake of the one thing he was widely held to be any good at.
“Why not?” Melody demanded. Then remembered herself. She tried to exude innocence and fragility, and only hoped she didn’t look constipated in the process. “Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding the situation we find ourselves in here. But I thought the entire purpose of these royal weddings with all the protocol and the carrying on about bloodlines and history was the sex?”
CHAPTER TWO
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS, Prince Griffin of Idylla, could not possibly have heard his frail and fragile new bride correctly.
He stared down at her, trying to make sense of the question that was, as far as he could tell, still hanging in the air between them. Filling up his private study, stealing all the air out of the room, and most disconcertingly by far, centering itself between his legs.
Where, it appeared, his body had already decided that he was attracted to his wife.
Wildly attracted.
Griffin was appalled.
At himself for proving, as ever, he was more monster than man.
Lady Melody Skyros was not only a gently reared noblewoman, deserving of his respect and care. She was not merely one of Idylla’s sweet young things whose mothers plotted exquisite marriages like something out of a period film while their fathers vied for power and influence. She was also blind. His choosing to marry her was, as he was well aware, an act of largesse that palace insiders believed would redeem him in one fell swoop in the eyes of the populace.
She was his redemption, in other words.
Griffin did not want to think about sex. Not with her. Not near her.
His tawdry exploits were in the past. Melody was his future.
The past was dirty, just as he’d liked it, but the future—as he’d promised his brother—would be squeaky clean.
Griffin was many things and pretended to be many more, but his word was his bond. Always.
And when he slipped and thought about sex in the presence of this woman he barely knew who was now his for all time, it became entirely too difficult to keep ignoring the fact that she was beautiful.
Inarguably, impossibly, shockingly beautiful.
The kind of beautiful that could, if he let it, lead straight to very bad decisions on Griffin’s part. The sort of decisions he absolutely could not permit himself to make any longer. He’d promised Orion those days were behind him.
Because they were, he assured himself. Sternly. This was Orion’s squeaky-clean new future and Griffin had vowed he would do his part.
Even if his part meant living like a monk in the presence of an angel.
“I cannot have heard you correctly,” he managed to say, clenching his tumbler of whiskey tight in his hand.
Too tight.
“Sex leading to the required royal heirs, of course,” Melody said in that same sweet voice that matched her name and seemed to get tangled up inside him. “I am given to understand that every person on the island of Idylla with even the faintest trace of noble blood thinks of nothing but heirs.”
Griffin coughed. He forced himself to look away. He even went and sat down in the chair across from her to put some more distance between them, but that was not an improvement.
The view was still the same.
Lady Melody was widely held to be the embarrassment of her family. The Skyros Scandal—though it was not so much that she was personally scandalous as that her obvious imperfections had so clearly and deeply offended her father. Because heaven forfend any creature on this island be anything less than physically perfect. Especially if that creature happened to be related to a bottom-feeder like Aristotle Skyros who trafficked in the mythic beauty of the Idyllian population.
A myth his own media outlets perpetuated, naturally.
And all the while he’d had his own blind daughter locked away, out of view unless absolutely unavoidable.
Rumors had always swirled about the younger, lesser Skyros daughter. Was she misshapen? Incapable of human interaction? One salacious story had claimed, for years, that the ironically named youngest child of well-known snob Aristotle was, in fact, a monster he kept chained up in his basement. Her sister had been in the public eye from a young age, following in her father’s footsteps and rising in the Skyros family empire. And then, of course, her father and the former King had arranged to marry Calista to Orion in a seedy little conspiracy of force.
It was as if Calista had to shine all the brighter—all the way to the throne—to divert attention from the whispers of deformities and insanities and monstrous rampages in the dark of night.
Even when Melody had appeared at the series of balls leading up to her sister’s wedding on Christmas Eve—notably neither deformed nor monstrous—the gossip had continued.
All absurd, of course, but Idylla was a relatively small island. Where larger kingdoms had cities, the people here had their stories.
Griffin had expected that perhaps Melody would not have the polish of her older sister. Who could? Calista was in so many ways a sharpened blade. Anyone would seem rough around the edges in comparison.
But today there was no escaping the truth.
Melody was a vision.
He had seen her from across a ballroom, once or twice, as a distant curiosity. And up close only once before. That time her blond hair had cascaded all around her while huddled in a chair, trying to make herself invisible while her sister prepared to become Queen. His memory of her at that brief meeting—a bit like an urchin, Eponine to the gills—had stayed with
