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“Thank you,” she said, her voice that soft wisp of sound.
He barely heard it over the thundering inside of him. The clenching, near-unmanageable need.
“Melody...” Griffin began, though he had no idea what he planned to say.
Or if instead he might beg.
He, who had never begged because there had never been a need. Because he had never, in all his life, had occasion to want.
Not when everything was provided to him on a procession of silver platters. Not when any need or desire was met before he bothered to express it.
Griffin couldn’t identify, at first, the thing that swelled in him when she dropped her hand. Then sat back, moving away from him, letting the December night back in between them.
Longing, he thought.This islonging.
In something that might have been astonishment, had it been less... bright.
Her smile made the stars seem like diamonds made of paste. “Now we see each other.”
“You can see me anytime you like,” he told her, and he was appalled by the sound of his own voice. His need so naked, so unmistakable, that he was surprised his shy and sheltered bride didn’t recoil.
Griffin pressed her wineglass back into her hand, waited until she gripped it, then stood.
Deeply glad she couldn’t see him wince as the heaviness of his sex...protested.
He moved to the balcony rail, entirely too aware that he was reacting as if she’d attacked him.
How he wished she would.
“I can’t imagine what it is to be blind,” he said then. Formally. Because he thought he ought to say something, if only to cover his reaction to her. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what it is to see,” Melody replied, smiling. “I can’t accept your apology when I never lost my sight. I suppose I could sit about mourning something I never had, but what would be the point?”
“That sounds very healthy, Melody. I admire you.”
“Do you? Why?”
It was possible that all that unfamiliar longing and need charging around inside of him was making him see things that weren’t there, but for a bizarre moment, Griffin could have sworn that she was...issuing him a challenge.
There was something in the way she was sitting there, holding herself so still. There was something about the way her face tipped toward his, an expression he couldn’t possibly be reading correctly on her lovely, innocent, guileless face.
Almost as if she was preparing herself to take some kind of swing—
But that was absurd.
This women needed his protection. She couldn’t challenge a stray summer breeze, much less a man who still trained at military fitness levels to keep himself in fighting shape.
What Griffin needed to do, he acknowledged with a certain grimness, was accept the fact that his body was a lustful thing that wanted to drag his bride down to his level so he need not keep all the promises he’d made.
Accept it, get rid of it, and move on.
“I admire any person who handles adversity with such equanimity,” he said after a moment.
He needed to get a grip on himself.
Now.
This was not an opponent of some kind. This was his fragile, virtuous, helpless bride. Who had not touched him because she’dwantedto set him on fire.
