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Notquiteapplying pressure.
Melody’s hair had fallen down around her, and he was reminded once again of the first glimpse he’d had of her. His Eponine, and why was it he had forgotten that Eponine was more feral than sweet?
It was only as his heart thundered in his chest and the breath came back to him that he understood what must have happened.
“Did you...throwme?” he demanded, feeling tautly stretched between temper and astonishment, there on his back on the floor at her feet. And a host of other things he dared not name.
“You might be bigger than me, Your Royal Highness,” Melody said, cool and calm as if she tossed men of his size this way and that all day long. “But might is only right if it actually works. Otherwise it’s little more than ballast and can only make a hard fall hurt more. As perhaps you’ve discovered.”
His head was spinning, and he wanted to blame the fall he’d taken, but he suspected it was her. Just her. “Melody—”
This time, astonishment warred with sheer outrage as she applied pressure, lowering her foot as if to cut off his airway.
And the look on her face told him she just might do it.
“Enough talking, Griffin,” she said, like a queen commanding the peasants. “It’s my turn.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“IFIWEREYOU,” Griffin seethed at her, simmering there beneath her foot in all of his male glory, “I would think very carefully about your next move.”
Melody could feel a different kind of electricity in him. A kind of shock, climbing up her leg and fanning out to take over the whole of her body. It had been something like instinct to reach for him, to throw him.
To show him that unlike everyone else in his life,shewould not be so easily dismissed by the kingdom’s favorite Prince.
They were his press, his adoring public, even his brother. She was his wife.
Maybe it was time to show him what that meant. What she wanted it to mean, anyway.
“What makes you think I haven’t already thought through my next move?” she asked, taking pleasure in the mildness of her voice. In the fact she wasn’t breathing heavily after that throw, while his chest was still rising and falling rapidly. “If I wereyou,I might issue fewer threats after finding myself on my back, clearly no match for a woman one third my size.”
“Is this the romantic poetry that you hope will change my mind and lure me back to your bed?” Griffin asked acidly. “It leaves something to be desired.”
“Not all of us had access to your educational opportunities,” Melody said, and even laughed. A real laugh, for a change, because they were alone and she’d thrown him and what point was there in wearing masks at this point? “While you were comparing and contrasting sonnets in fine universities, I was learning the poetry of movement. And of stillness. Better still, how to make myself unseen—especially when standing in full view.”
He vibrated beneath her, temper and steel, and it moved through her like a caress. “You are not the only person who had to learn such things. And if you do not remove your foot from my throat, I cannot be held accountable for my actions.”
Melody did not remove her foot. If anything, she applied more pressure.
“I am not the one dead set on pretending we are so different that we must exist in a monastic marriage for the rest of our days,” she threw at him, fiercely. “Do you really think I don’t understand grief? Do you imagine I didn’t spend my youth tearing myself apart, wondering why it was I had been born with an affliction I couldn’t hide? How hard do you suppose it was to choose to love my sister when it would have been so much easier to hate her, simply for being all that I am not?”
His hard fingers laced around her ankle, but she still didn’t move her foot. “I hope you’re not suggesting I’m jealous of my brother. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Melody was so used to hiding. To pretending to be less than she was.
But Griffin had taught her that there was no level of intensity he couldn’t meet. And that was the Griffin she believed—the man who was as wrecked as she was, but still reached for more. The man who held her so close she felt as if she was inside him, too. The real Prince, dark and stirring and, most of all, hers.
She was tired of hiding. Of fighting on mats, with Fen, and never for herself.
Never for what mattered the most.
That ended here.
“What I’m suggesting is that each and every one of us is filled with the same dark mazes, Griffin,” she said then, the intensity of her feelings making her voice shake. “It doesn’t make us special. It doesn’t make us different or unique. What makes a person is what they do with the darkness inside of them. Because you can dress it up in any pretty words you like. You can blame your mother. You can claim you blame yourself. But at the end of the day, you and I both know that the real reason you want to keep us in these boxes of yours is because you’re afraid. Ofus,Griffin.”
“If you do not remove your foot,” he bit out, sounding far more vicious than before, “I will stop treating you with the courtesy my wife deserves and instead treat you to the sorts of things I learned when I was a soldier. You do not want that.”
“I welcome it,” Melody shot right back. “You speak of honesty? Then fight me.Me, the person who’s right here in this room with you. Don’t hide behind old promises and ancient guilt when you know as well as I do that what is between us is extraordinary.”
