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She was exultantly naked, stretched out in Prince Griffin’s bed, the wildfire within her sated. For the moment. A state she’d found herself in almost constantly as the first weeks of the new year wore on.
It was already the best year of her life.
Melody reached out with her hand across the rumpled sheets, searching for that glorious indentation that was Griffin’s spine. She had come to a deep appreciation of a man’s back.Hisback, to be more precise. She had clung to that back, dug her nails into it, drummed her heels against it. She had kissed her way across one side, then the other.
Thinking about the things she’d done made her want to do them all over again.
Griffin sat on the edge of his bed as he often did, and though she could feel that same dark, brooding force field of his all around them, she found it difficult to hold onto much of anything but joy. Until these weeks, she’d had no idea that joy could be a physical thing. It could surge in her veins, flood her whole body. It could sing in her chest and set fire to her limbs.
Oh, yes. This was a marvelous year, indeed.
She found him, and felt that humming electricity arc between them, the way it always did. Melody blew out a soft little breath at the buzz of it. Then she traced a lazy pattern over those powerful, hard muscles, down to the place where his hard, honed body met the surface of his wide mattress. A body so different from her own. She thought she could spend a lifetime reveling in their differences and never tire of it.
It was convenient that a lifetime was what they’d both signed up for, then.
Tonight had been like any other night in her new life as a royal princess. They had gone out to yet another engagement, the way they did most nights of the week. One thing that had changed, though Melody was not entirely certain what it meant, was that when home they no longer had their meals together. Griffin no longer doted on her, gallant and courteous, or walked her places at his snail’s pace.
Which was not to say he was rude. But if she was to look for him, then find him in the house of an evening, Griffin no longer wasted time talking.
At first that had suited her. Having discovered the astonishing truth about sex, and how endlessly magnificent it was, all she wanted to do was drown herself in it.
Her new husband had been only too happy to oblige, despite his initial talk of lies and taking her apart. She chalked that up to the intensity of it all. All these weeks of it and she still didn’tquitebelieve that she could really live through it, until she did.
It was like suddenly learning, after all this time, that she had access to a brand-new sense. All that sensuality, all that heat and greed and fire, worked together to make her feel like the four she already used were... different with him. Better when they were naked and he was inside her.
She almost felt she had never known her body until now.
As January wore on, however, Melody had begun to notice things other than screaming his name and exploding into sensation—though slowly, she could admit. The fact he no longer seemed interested in conversation, for example, when before it had been as if her every word had fascinated him.
Tonight she’d spent the long evening out at another formal dinner, paying attention to the interesting undercurrents swirling all around them. But when she’d tried to describe them to Griffin on their drive back to the palace, he had instead pulled her over his lap, got his hands beneath her skirts, and had her sobbing out his name instead.
Once inside their home, he had carried her upstairs to his rooms. He had stripped her naked and had taken her once more, hard and fast against the wall of his overlarge shower while the water beat at them, enveloping them in a slick embrace of steam.
She hardly remembered how they had gotten back to his bed, where she knew she’d slept for a time, only to wake when he pulled her close once more, surging into her before she was fully awake the way they’d discovered she liked a little too much.
A person could cry out so much and so long that it no longer left her voice husky in the mornings, it turned out. Melody couldn’t think of another way she might have learned that. And now she couldn’t really imagine her life if shehadn’tdiscovered that.
It was still the middle of the night. Griffin’s royal bedchamber, where Melody spent most of her time these days, had walls of windowed doors on three sides and no curtains. The morning sun poured in, warming and waking her each day, usually to discover him gone and the bed cold.
There was no warmth on her face now. And he was still there.
And when he did not respond to her hand on him, it occurred to Melody that perhaps it was finally time to pay attention to more than the things they could do to each other’s bodies.
Or you could press yourself against him and kiss his neck, and see how quickly you find yourself beneath him,she argued.
But it was one thing to find herself so sensually overwhelmed that her skin felt too sensitive. It was something else to deliberately avoid a topic because she’d grown accustomed to sensitive skin, and wanted only more of it.
“Is something the matter?” she made herself ask.
“Go back to sleep, Melody,” Griffin ordered her, his voice low.
She sat up instead, dropping her hand from his back, which felt like a grievous loss. “If that was meant to be soothing, it failed.”
“Heaven forfend that I fail you in some way. Can the foundations of our marriage based on lies survive? Unless, of course, I make you come again.”
Something inside Melody twisted at that, a sharp and unpleasant flash too close to actual pain. He sounded darker than usual. Forbidding, even.
She began to count back. And as she turned over these past weeks in her head, she realized with some shock that he had changed completely on New Year’s Eve. Night and day, in fact, while she’d trailed around after him, desperate for more.
