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She should have been soft. Yielding. In tears.
That she was not seemed to lick its way beneath his skin. It...bothered him.
“I cannot tell if this is all a mask for your rage or if you truly are as unbothered as you seem,” he said instead of addressing all those half-notions he was sure would sound like so much wishful thinking if he said them out loud.
His wife—his Princess, chosen for her fragility—smiled. And did not look in any way fragile. “I’m an open book.”
“Perhaps. But not in any language I speak.”
Her head tilted to one side. “Do you speak many languages, then?”
Was he relieved that she was changing the subject? Shouldn’t he have been?
“I speak a great number of languages.” Griffin shrugged that off even as he said it, because it was second nature to live down to any and all expectations. “I spend half my time conversing with dignitaries from various countries. It’s easy to pick up a few things.”
“And here I thought that conversing was not exactly your most notable people skill.”
He thought he ought to apologize. But he’d already done that.
Her smile changed yet again. He found he was becoming obsessed with it. Soft and innocent when everything in him was wicked.
Or, like now, as if he entertained her.
“I don’t begrudge you your past,” Melody said. “Surely we can indulge each other in that.”
“Do you have a great many lovers in your past, then?” he asked before he thought better of it.
Because the truth was, he was surprised to discover, that he did not feel indulgent on that topic.
At all.
Her smile seemed edgier, though he could have sworn nothing about it had changed. “It would be a sad life indeed without a few great loves scattered about.”
Griffin opened his mouth to reply to that, but then stopped. He reminded himself that he was meant to be charming, for god’s sake. “A great love could be a book. I think, somehow, that you would be less...whatever you are had you been faced with my library today.”
“Is your library digitized? Because if not, I’m afraid, Your Royal Highness, that it’s only a room to me.”
“It is not digitized, no.” Griffin was ashamed to realize he hadn’t even thought about that. He pulled out his mobile and fired off a message to his chief aide. “But it will be.”
“Wonderful,” Melody said.
When he looked up from his mobile, she was lifting the teapot and pouring out tea for both of them, then replacing it, all with an ease of movement that would have convinced him that she couldn’t possibly be blind if he didn’t know otherwise. She picked up her tea, and sat back in her chair, sipping at it.
“Never fear,” she said. Calmly. Softly. Because he was making things up in his head to cater to his sex. He knew that. “Whether you make your library accessible for me or not, I have no intention of parading a selection of lovers in front of you. I think we both know that would be frowned upon by every last citizen of the kingdom.”
Innocent. Pleasantly intelligent. In no way the sort of wicked, fallen woman that he considered his real type. She deserved better than him, better than the man he really was. He had vowed to give her the Prince he ought to have been instead.
And he would do that, even if it killed him.
He would.
“I am a man with a rich and complicated past,” Griffin told her, because she ought to hear that from him as well as in the form of a thousand inevitable barbs from others. “If your past is also rich and complicated, I can hardly complain.”
Something he had always believed in, as a matter of fact. Fervently.
But saying those words...hurt. It was like the syllables curdled his mouth.
“You are so progressive, so open-minded and modern,” she murmured. And if it had been anyone but Melody, he would have been sure that note he heard in her voice was sarcasm. But she smiled at him, beatifically, and he tried to shake it off and accept that she was who she was supposed to be—not who hewantedher to be. “My great loves are not men. You have nothing to fear. I come before you untouched and virginal, because nothing will please the crowds more than a man of great experience with a woman of none. Is that not so?”
