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Griffin did not want to think about sex. Not with her. Not near her.
His tawdry exploits were in the past. Melody was his future.
The past was dirty, just as he’d liked it, but the future—as he’d promised his brother—would be squeaky clean.
Griffin was many things and pretended to be many more, but his word was his bond. Always.
And when he slipped and thought about sex in the presence of this woman he barely knew who was now his for all time, it became entirely too difficult to keep ignoring the fact that she was beautiful.
Inarguably, impossibly, shockingly beautiful.
The kind of beautiful that could, if he let it, lead straight to very bad decisions on Griffin’s part. The sort of decisions he absolutely could not permit himself to make any longer. He’d promised Orion those days were behind him.
Because they were, he assured himself. Sternly. This was Orion’s squeaky-clean new future and Griffin had vowed he would do his part.
Even if his part meant living like a monk in the presence of an angel.
“I cannot have heard you correctly,” he managed to say, clenching his tumbler of whiskey tight in his hand.
Too tight.
“Sex leading to the required royal heirs, of course,” Melody said in that same sweet voice that matched her name and seemed to get tangled up inside him. “I am given to understand that every person on the island of Idylla with even the faintest trace of noble blood thinks of nothingbutheirs.”
Griffin coughed. He forced himself to look away. He even went and sat down in the chair across from her to put some more distance between them, but that was not an improvement.
The view was still the same.
Lady Melody was widely held to be the embarrassment of her family. The Skyros Scandal—though it was not so much that she was personally scandalous as that her obvious imperfections had so clearly and deeply offended her father. Because heaven forfend any creature on this island be anything less than physically perfect. Especially if that creature happened to be related to a bottom-feeder like Aristotle Skyros who trafficked in the mythic beauty of the Idyllian population.
A myth his own media outlets perpetuated, naturally.
And all the while he’d had his own blind daughter locked away, out of view unless absolutely unavoidable.
Rumors had always swirled about the younger, lesser Skyros daughter. Was she misshapen? Incapable of human interaction? One salacious story had claimed, for years, that the ironically named youngest child of well-known snob Aristotle was, in fact, a monster he kept chained up in his basement. Her sister had been in the public eye from a young age, following in her father’s footsteps and rising in the Skyros family empire. And then, of course, her father and the former King had arranged to marry Calista to Orion in a seedy little conspiracy of force.
It was as if Calista had to shine all the brighter—all the way to the throne—to divert attention from the whispers of deformities and insanities and monstrous rampages in the dark of night.
Even when Melody had appeared at the series of balls leading up to her sister’s wedding on Christmas Eve—notably neither deformed nor monstrous—the gossip had continued.
All absurd, of course, but Idylla was a relatively small island. Where larger kingdoms had cities, the people here had their stories.
Griffin had expected that perhaps Melody would not have the polishof her older sister. Who could? Calista was in so many ways a sharpened blade. Anyone would seem rough around the edges in comparison.
But today there was no escaping the truth.
Melody was a vision.
He had seen her from across a ballroom, once or twice, as a distant curiosity. And up close only once before. That time her blond hair had cascaded all around her while huddled in a chair, trying to make herself invisible while her sister prepared to become Queen. His memory of her at that brief meeting—a bit like an urchin, Eponine to the gills—had stayed with him over this last, strange week, when it became clear that he could no longer put off doing his duty.
And it had been that memory that made him feel...not resigned, exactly, to this plan of his brother’s that he’d vowed to support. Griffin had no wish to marry. But if it turned out that he must do so anyway, he found he could see his way clear to marrying a woebegone creature like the one he’d seen that day. A victim to her overbearing father, the subject of idle gossip and absurd stories. Blind, ignored, possibly even abused.
He wouldelevateher, he had told himself grandly even last night. He wouldtake careof her. There would be no lies like the ones that had shaped his life—not in his marriage. And perhaps, somewhere deep inside himself, he would find something soft after all these years of bitterness and hardness. Something that might bloom instead of wither.
Something good, even in him.
A thing he’d lost so long ago that he’d begun to think it, too, was nothing more than a myth. But then his bride had appeared down at the other end of the long aisle of the Grand Cathedral. And she had walked the length of it on his brother’s arm, far too graceful for a charity case. Far too...frothy.
Beneath her veil, he’d expected to find the sad, cringing waif he’d met so briefly once before.
