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“Close your eyes.” And then she checked that he’d obeyed her, lifting her hands and sliding them over his eyes. She pulled in a breath, holding them there. “Stop worrying about the darkness. Think about your heart. Listen to your breath. To the sea outside, far below. To me, Griffin.”
“Melody...”
But this time her name was more like a song.
She shifted up on her toes, closer to him, glorying as ever in the way their bodies fit so perfectly together. Whether they were dancing, fighting, or exploring each other on his wide bed, it was always like this.
As if they had always been meant to find each other.
“Feel this,” she whispered, and then she kissed him.
And Melody knew how to kiss him now. How to tease him, how to tempt him. How to make them both shudder.
How to turn want into need, heat into fire.
She kissed him again and again, and she wasn’t surprised when Griffin shifted, kissing her back. Taking control.
His hands moved into her hair, sinking in to hold her where he wanted her.
“This is not darkness,” she said, tearing her mouth from his. “This is love, Griffin. I suspect it always has been.”
He dropped his head closer to hers, but he did not open his eyes beneath her palms.
“I wanted to give you the Prince, not the dissipated lout,” he told her, there against her mouth. “And maybe it was easier to pretend it was the lie that made the difference. But it’sme, Melody. I don’t know how to be whole. I am one or the other, never both, and you deserve more than that. You deserve a real life. You deserve love.”
“I deserve the life I’ve chosen. With the only man I will ever love.” He tried to pull away but she slid her hands down to grip his neck, and held on. “You don’t scare me. Your dark, your light, they are allGriffinto me. You speak pretty words and you make the crowds laugh, but all I hear is your heart. I always have. I always will.”
She felt that cracking thing inside her, or maybe he was the one who shook.
Or perhaps this was the earthquake they’d generated, a tsunami not far behind, and as long as they were together like this—still that perfect fit—she couldn’t say she minded.
“I couldn’t live with myself,” Griffin managed to say, “if I lost you too.”
And the cracking, the shaking, intensified, but she wasn’t afraid of it any longer.
“There is a simple solution to that,” Melody told him. “Live with me without any rules. Love me without any boundaries. Forever, Griffin, so neither one of us ever loses.”
And for a long moment, she didn’t know if she’d reached him. She could feel the fight in him. The battle. Earthquakes and tsunamis, tornadoes and storms.
But he didn’t pull away.
“You have no idea how much I want to believe that I might be capable of such things,” he said as if each word cost him. As if they hurt. “How much I wish that somehow, I could even pretend to give you what you deserve.”
“You have already made the scandalous Skyros sister a royal princess,” Melody said, smiling against his mouth. “It seems to me there is no magic you can’t perform.”
She felt the fight in him...shift. Like the tide going out. His arms moved, but only to hold her.
“What am I to do with you?” he asked quietly.
And Melody’s smile was so wide then, it threatened to split open her face. “I’ve already told you. No monasteries. No lies. We will do what we must outside these doors, but in here, when it’s just you and me, why can’t we be only and always who we are?”
“Why not indeed?”
Then Griffin was kissing her again, over and over. And when he shifted, lifting her into his arms, she thought he would carry her to one of the couches—but he didn’t.
He shouldered his way through the doors, and carried her through the halls of their home, taking her to his bedroom.
“I’ve been playing a role my whole life,” he told her as he set her down beside his massive bed. “I don’t want to play it with you any longer. But I warn you, once I start this thing with you, I fear I will never stop.”
