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He expected his brother to bristle at that, but Orion only smiled. He stood from his desk, and came over to the fire. Then he took the seat opposite as if settling in for a cozy chat, and all of this was so unlike his usually grim, workaholic brother that Griffin found himself...thrown.
A sensation he ought to have been used to, after all the time he’d spent with his bride lately.
Because unless he was mistaken, his brother, the uptight King, looked...relaxed.
“I told her something similar myself,” Orion was saying, still smiling. “But you’ve met Calista, of course. She can’t betoldsomething.”
But Griffin noticed that his brother sounded affectionate when he said that. As if that was not a flaw in his Queen, but a virtue.
He couldn’t take that on board. Not from Orion, who had made a great many sweeping statements about the obedience he would expect from the woman he’d been required to marry, thanks to a deal their father had made. Threats of imprisonment on remote islands and so on, should Calista fail to fall in line. Griffin hardly knew what to do with evidence ofaffection.
He returned instead to the matter at hand. “Does Calista truly believe I will harm her sister?”
“Of course not,” Orion said, so easily and so swiftly—so matter-of-factly—that something inside Griffin twisted in on itself.
He understood that if his brother had answered in any other way, or taken time to think it over, it would have irreparably damaged something in him. And that understanding landed in him with the full force of a blow.
It took him a moment to realize Orion was studying him. “It is the habit of a lifetime, nothing more, to concern herself with her sister’s affairs. Calista has always seen herself as Melody’s champion. And how do you find her? Your wife, I mean. Not mine.” His smile took on a different sheen. “How is she adapting?”
“She’s been blind since birth, Orion,” Griffin said gruffly. “There was noadaption, only her life. She has never had to find something that was lost.”
And he bit back what he’d been about to say—which was that Melody was perfect to him as she was. Maddening, yes. Shockingly uninterested in his notable good works on her behalf and not at all what he’d expected. But there was not one thingwrongwith her.
Not a single, solitary deficiency.
He tasted copper and made himself smile instead. “I think she’s doing beautifully.”
“I am pleased to hear it. Calista will also be pleased.”
“I live to serve.”
As this was, in fact, true, Griffin could see no reason why it all seemed liked a collar around his neck just then. He told himself it was the constraints of duty, that was all. He would happily kill for his brother. But that was a different thing entirely than day in, day out, dutiful appearances.
Or marriages.
“I will see you later tonight,” he said stiffly to Orion, unwinding himself from his chair and standing as if he meant to leave.
The stranger who now inhabited his brother’s body, relaxed and at his ease, only lifted a brow. “You cannot be serious. Why on earth would you attend the New Year’s ball?”
Griffin stopped on his way to the door, surprised. “Do I not always attend the New Year’s ball?”
“Because you could have nothing better to do than dance attendance on your family when you were single. You are no longer single.” His smile shifted and his gaze sharpened. “Perhaps you and your new wife can continue to...not have your honeymoon.”
And Griffin did not precisely bare his teeth at his brother, his liege and King. But he wouldn’t call it a smile, either.
He took his time heading back across the wet, cold courtyard to his house, where his staff was no doubt fluttering about, forever in the process of attempting to corral him into attending some or other dull function he wished to avoid.
The thought of it, in fact, made him move a little quicker, because he couldn’t think of anything he would like better just then. A bit of corralling. Duties he was forced against his will to perform—it all sounded like bliss because it wasn’t mooning about over his wife like a lovesick calf.
God help him, he’d become the very thing he hated. Soft and sentimental.
Too much like his mother.
When Griffin knew better than to allow such weakness in him. The former Queen had been no match for horrid King Max. He had been neither faithful to her nor particularly solicitous where she was concerned, and she had wilted in such conditions. Griffin’s earliest memories were of her tears.
And then of the sad, lonely way she’d escaped her fate—taking her own life.
Whatever Griffin had become, he had chosen it. He had embraced it. Unlike his mother, so incapable of rising to the challenge of her tumultuous marriage, Griffin had met his role and made it his own. He was not and never had been a victim of circumstance.
