And it had been that memory that made him feel...not resigned, exactly, to this plan of his brother’s that he’d vowed to support. Griffin had no wish to marry. But if it turned out that he must do so anyway, he found he could see his way clear to marrying a woebegone creature like the one he’d seen that day. A victim to her overbearing father, the subject of idle gossip and absurd stories. Blind, ignored, possibly even abused.
He would elevate her, he had told himself grandly even last night. He would take care of her. There would be no lies like the ones that had shaped his life—not in his marriage. And perhaps, somewhere deep inside himself, he would find something soft after all these years of bitterness and hardness. Something that might bloom instead of wither.
Something good, even in him.
A thing he’d lost so long ago that he’d begun to think it, too, was nothing more than a myth. But then his bride had appeared down at the other end of the long aisle of the Grand Cathedral. And she had walked the length of it on his brother’s arm, far too graceful for a charity case. Far too...frothy.
Beneath her veil, he’d expected to find the sad, cringing waif he’d met so briefly once before.
But instead, there had been...this.
Her.
Melody, something in him whispered.
All that blond hair gleamed gold, piled on top of her head and fixed into place with gleaming precious stones set on elegant combs that gave the impression of a tiara without actually using one. A tiara could make an ordinary face exciting, simply by adding all that light and sparkle, but Melody’s face was already exquisite. Heart-shaped, with eyes that he had half expected—based on what, he didn’t know—to be clouded over. Strange in some way. But instead, they gleamed like his beloved sea. And her neck was a graceful, aristocratic line, signposting the rest of her slender, supple form beneath the dress she wore that was more like spun sugar than fabric.
She looked like a fairy tale.
And Griffin did not believe in fairy tales.
Eyes like the ocean, lips like rubies—and what the hell was he doing?
“I have no particular need of heirs,” he managed to say, recollecting himself. And more important, the vows he’d made to protect this woman from harm—and himself. “And therefore no need to marry to procure them.”
Much less to procure access to the mechanism by which heirs were produced.
Did Melody not know who he was?
If there had been witnesses to this conversation, which there mercifully were not, they would not have believed it. The Prince Griffin, reduced to this state? After his years in the military alone, when he had faced far greater challenges than a beautiful woman who wished to talk about sex he would not be having with her.
To say nothing of his dedication to sampling as many women as possible, and not to talk.
About heirs.
Until tonight, he would have said that there was no way a woman could surprise him. No chance.
And yet here he was.
“That can’t be true, Your Royal Highness.”
His bride managed to sound as if the gently chiding statement was actually a question. Her face was tilted toward the tumbler she held in her delicate hands, where a ring that had once been his mother’s dwarfed her slender finger. It was not the ring his despised father had given his poor mother on the occasion of their traditionally arranged royal wedding. This ring, she had told him long before her sad end, had been handed down through her own aristocratic family. It had once belonged to his great-great-grandmother, herself a great favorite of a long-gone Idyllian prince.
It felt like a talisman. When Orion had announced Griffin’s time was up, he’d gone and found the ring, pleased with its weight, its heft. It was a recognizable gift of his esteem that he could bestow upon this charity case of his, bedecking her and marking her as his own.
Last night, his final evening as a free man, he had rather liked imagining it on her finger. It had felt like an internal settling within him. A quiet reckoning. He had felt ready—almost eager—to begin this next chapter.
In which he would play a new role. That of a good man like his brother, rather than the kingdom’s favorite scoundrel.
Griffin had been alight with his own nascent virtue.
Yet something about this woman and that ring here, in his private study where she spoke of sex and not gratitude, moved through him...differently.
And felt too much like heat.
Griffin shoved that aside as best he could. “I am many things, Lady Melody. There is no pretending otherwise. But I am not a liar.”
A curious sort of smile curved her lips, though she kept her face tilted toward the glass she held. Angled so he could not quite read her expression.
“And I am not a lady.” Her smile looked innocent again. Very nearly tremulous. He found himself frowning, as if something about her wasn’t quite tracking. “As of tonight I am Her Royal Highness, Princess Melody of Idylla. Your brother said so himself.”
“Indeed you are.”
“I will confess to you that I did not harbor secret dreams of becoming a princess. I am told most girls do, but then, I was never much like most girls.”
Griffin thought of monsters and dark basements, images that did not fit with the elegant creature before him, all gold and ivory and that mysterious curve to her mouth besides. “I should hope not. I doubt I could bring myself to marry most girls.”
He expected her to flush with pleasure. For her smile to tip over into something...more recognizable, maybe. Certainly more pleased with her circumstances. Or him. Or even herself.
But it stayed as it was. Innocent and yet...not.
And that ring on her hand like a harbinger.
Griffin was no doubt overwrought. He tossed back the healthy measure of the
