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Try some strategy, she snapped at herself.Unless youwanthim to keep treating you like this.
“But you have always had a fake marriage and you have always known that it would be exactly that,” she said. Reasonably, in her opinion. “You married a perfect stranger by order of the King himself, on scant notice and with no opportunity for argument. How did you think that would play out?”
“I married a half-feral waif who had been locked away in a basement and needed rescuing. I made her a princess.” Griffin’s voice was darker than she’d ever heard it, and still it hummed in her, bright the way she thought light should be. “Only to discover she was neither of those things, never was, and never will be.”
“Then what am I?” she asked as the car slowed. She could feel Griffin gathering himself, putting his public mask back into place, and she wanted to rip off whatever halo she was meant to be wearing and toss it. At him. “Because I would have thought that a secret ninja princess would be the perfect companion for the kingdom’s favorite Prince, who covers what good he does with all that charm and too many playboy antics. A secret saint all his own.”
“Secrets are nothing more and nothing less than a sickness waiting to claim its casualties,” came Griffin’s reply, as if it was torn from him. “And there is no time for ninjas tonight, Melody, secret or otherwise. The ambassador wants nothing more than to tell happy stories of hope and redemption, just as my brother does. Our only obligation is to embody those stories in public, lies or no lies.”
“You do know that it is possible to do both,” Melody said. The car stopped. She heard the driver open his door. And told herself the drumming of her pulse was something other than a strange panic at these things he was saying. “Surely you and I decide what our marriage is in private, no matter what show we must put on for the world. I don’t believe you need redemption, Griffin. And if you do, why must it only come with abstinence? Why can you only be a good man if you’re denying yourself—”
“Because there are consequences for actions,” he threw at her, and he sounded so...stark. “There is always a price to be paid, Melody. Maybe your life has been sheltered in such a way that you have never had to learn this lesson. But you will now. You should never have lied to me. But you did. We are whatyoumade us.”
“I’m not the one who put me on a pedestal in the first place,” Melody said softly. “You did. You wanted me to be a saint so you could be, too. Now you blame me for falling when I am who I ever was.”
“A lie,” he growled. He leaned closer, and she thought she felt his lips at her temple, a brush of heat that made her think of loss and fire, need and grief. “What you are, Melody, is a lie.”
She knew she had his attention now, electric and intense. Melody could feel the full impact of it on her, like hands pressed tight to her skin, seeing things she would have preferred to keep hidden.
“Maybe I am.” She shook her head. “But Griffin... If you don’t have someone to blame, who are you?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HERQUESTIONHAUNTEDhim.
Griffin felt he should have been used to that by now. Everything involving Melody was a haunting of one form or another. First he’d wanted nothing but to put his hands on her. Wanting had kept him awake, made his days an exquisite torture, and taught him precisely what kind of man he was. Now he wished only that he could lose himself in the madness and heat they generated between them. He told himself it was better that way. That it was all there was and ever had been.
He should have been happy.
Griffin was an unlikely monk, and well he knew it. It was a role that could never have fit well, and he’d found it almost unbearably suffocating in the course of a single week.One single week, he growled at himself, lest he was tempted to forget.
To make up for it, he’d spent these weeks since discovering Melody’s perfidy doing little more than teaching her one sin after the next.
But it turned out that wasn’t enough, either.
He had taken her home from the ambassador’s house that night, forestalling any further commentary or haunting questions on her part the same way he always did. Because he called her a liar, he knew full well she was one—but their bodies fit together like magic.
And despite himself, Griffin knew full well there was no greater honesty, no sweeter truth, than the spells they cast together. Over and over again.
Until he was having trouble remembering why it was he couldn’t let himself trust what he felt. When they were naked, fused into one. Slick and hot and so perfect together it sometimes hurt.
“Your marriage has been even more successful than we dreamed,” his brother told him one pretty day. “I must congratulate you on a job well done.”
It was the end of January and the brothers stood out on the palace balcony, which had long been used for any number of official appearances from the royal family. His parents had stood right here and presented each of their sons, the heir and the spare in turn, to the nation with all attendant fanfare. Griffin liked to tell himself it was his earliest memory when, in truth, he suspected he’d seen the photographs and newsreel and had incorporated them as a personal recollection he could not possibly have had at two days old. But a grand presentation to an adoring crowd was as good an origin story as any for the kingdom’s charming rogue of a prince, he’d always thought.
Though it seemed to scrape at him today.
“I’m delighted, as ever, that my personal life can serve the crown,” Griffin replied to his brother.
And though he’d intended that to come out with a certain dark humor, he could tell he missed the mark. Orion’s gaze slid to him, then returned to the crowd. They both stood at attention, waving, while below the crowds chanted and cheered. Griffin kept his usual public smile plastered to his face and, today, found it a chore.
“Is there trouble in your personal life?” Orion asked mildly.The Kingasked, Griffin corrected himself. “Anything I should know?”
“I suspect you already know,” Griffin retorted. Again, more harshly than necessary. And certainly more harshly than was wise out here in public, where there were always telephoto lenses.
He remembered Melody’s words in the car that night.What do you think a saint is?she’d demanded, throwing the question at him with the first real spark of temper he’d seen in her. Something he should have celebrated, because wasn’t that what he’d claimed he wanted? Honesty no matter the cost?
Today it felt like a price too steep to pay. All of it.
