He lifted a shoulder, then lowered it, looking entirely unconcerned. “I apologize if this upsets you in some way.”
“Upsets me?” She felt a deep, shuddering thing, rattling through her. As if her bones were coming apart. As if your heart is breaking, something in her whispered. “Of course it doesn’t upset me, I just don’t believe it.”
She didn’t know what she imagined a virgin ought to look like—or someone who had so recently been a virgin—but she was sure it wasn’t this. Orion, every inch of him majestic in all ways, lounging back in the bath they shared. An enigmatic look on his face and not a single shred of anything like insecurity about his performance or her reaction anywhere.
Not that he should have been insecure. But surely there should have been fumbling. Mistakes or even misfires. Not...all that fierce possession that made her clench with need all over again, just thinking of it.
“Why would a man lie about such a thing?” he asked idly. “Surely it is more likely that the lies go in the other direction. Men do like to spin tales of their prowess, do they not?”
The gleam in his dark gaze suggested that he knew full well that he did not need to brag about his prowess or anything else. That, too, made a shiver snake its way down her spine.
“But you... But that...” She ordered herself to stop stammering. To get a hold of herself. “How?”
There was the faintest curve in the corner of Orion’s mouth, then. He kept his dark gold gaze on her. “It was clear to me from a very young age that one of the primary ways in which my father was weak was his complete inability to avoid the sexual invitations that came his way. He did nothing to hide them. Indeed, he flaunted his various conquests in magazines like your father’s or right here in the palace. And at the age when I might have started experimenting with such things, I was too busy engaged in what was already my life’s work. Cleaning up his messes.” His eyes glittered. “I decided I had no need to clean up mine, as well. It started as a rash decision when I was no more than thirteen. But it became a vow, and I kept it.”
“How did you possibly...?”
Calista couldn’t finish the sentence. She was terribly afraid that her heart was going to claw its way out of her chest, right there in the tub. She felt weak, somehow. And more profoundly thrown than she ever had before.
Or maybe, a voice inside her that sounded suspiciously like her sister whispered, what you actually feel is vulnerable.
Because he had given her something he had kept to himself all this time. He had made this thing between them real, and it made her want to sob. She wanted to lean forward, take his hands in hers, or his face, and tell him to be careful. That she could not be trusted and would only betray him in the end. How could he not know that already?
“Do you imagine that men cannot control themselves?” Orion sounded amused again. “I will note that no one thinks anything of it if a woman chooses to hold on to her virtue. But there must be something wrong with a man if he does the same.”
“You did this to stay virtuous?”
“My brother would tell you that I’m ill-suited to be a king, because the monastic life suits me so much better.” Again, the hint of a smile played with his mouth. Not as if he couldn’t understand her reaction. But as if he found it entertaining. “I have always been intensely physical. I have merely restricted myself to other expressions of it. Until now.” He inclined his head. “Until you.”
That same emotion walloped her again. Was she going to surrender to it and sob? Or was she going to let it wrench her apart? Was she mad to imagine she could choose when it felt as if she might burst where she sat?
“All that waiting and you just thought, Enough’s enough, after a night at a ball.”
“With the woman I am to marry,” Orion said, with tremendous patience and another hint of laughter. “When if not now? It wasn’t marriage I was saving myself for, Calista. I’m not a young girl with a hope chest. I simply wished to make certain that I would not repeat my father’s mistakes.”
“But—”
He moved then, hooking his hand around her neck and tugging her gently to him, so she fell against his chest. And the curse of it was, she liked it there. She fit him too well, and she had to close her eyes against the surge of unfortunate sensation that stirred up in her.
“This is an arranged marriage,” she said crossly. “This is supposed to be distant and remote and chilly. Not...this.”
“I think we’ll muddle through, Calista. Somehow.”
There was something about the way he said her name, then. It had changed. Or she had changed. There was that dark richness to it, now. There were levels of meaning in it, shades and complications.
Or maybe that was just her poor, battered, traitorous heart.
She didn’t argue with him any further. She didn’t tell him that of course she worried, and he should worry, too. That nothing good could come of this. That whatever she might feel, she was still her father’s daughter.
That her father would destroy them both, and her sister, without a second thought, and neither one of them could prevent it—or they already would have, surely.
That they were doomed.
But it was as if he heard her arguments all the same. He smoothed a hand over her hair, and that stern mouth of his even softened in the corners.
“Don’t worry,” Orion said, but to her, it sounded like a curse. And then he made it worse. “I trust you.”
CHAPTER NINE
DECEMBER WORE ON, drawing ever closer to the twenty-third and the board meeting Calista still had every intention of disrupting.
Her father might have removed her from the office, but that didn’t change all the things she’d spent years putting into motion. She told herself it was better that she was away from the company these last, critical days—because she was sure it would have been impossible to keep herself under control and seemingly subservient, the way she needed to do until it was done.
Calista spent these weeks in the palace rather than directly under her father’s thumb. Not that she felt free of him, with the daily messages and calls demanding she provide him with dirt on Orion. Instead of spending her days at Skyros Media, fighting tooth and nail in meetings and building up her position behind her father’s back, she found herself at the mercy of the king’s private secretaries. She got a crash course in the Idyllian Crown and the duties of the king’s consort, and spent hour after hour learning all the various facts they thought she needed to know—and they thought she needed to know just about everything.
In many ways, it reminded her of being back at university in Paris, sitting in endless lectures. But instead of producing essays out of café nights and too much red wine, she had to sit there and prove to them that she’d internalized their teachings on everything from international diplomacy to proper correspondence, all while fending off her father’s demands.
Hour after hour after hour. Until she thought that if the whole queen thing didn’t work out, she could easily become a professional historian. With a focus on Idyllian royals throughout the ages.
She should have been crawling out of her skin. She should have been beside herself, and she...wasn’t. Or not in the way she’d expected she ought to have been, anyway.
Her days were spent immersed in history. But her nights... Her nights were filled with Orion, and she almost couldn’t bear to let herself think about what that meant.
“I don’t understand how you never...” she’d whispered one night when they both lay panting before the fire in her bedchamber. “I don’t understand anything about you.”
“I made a vow,” he’d replied lazily, turning her over on her belly and applying himself to the line of her back, turning her to jelly.
“You broke that vow, then.”
She’d felt his smile against her skin and had shuddered. “I vowed I would only indulge in the pleasure
s of the flesh with my queen, Calista. I have broken no vows. Nor shall I.”
And even now, weeks later, she almost couldn’t bear to think about such moments, because thinking about them would mean analyzing them. Making decisions. And inevitably ruining these oddly bright weeks carved out in the darkest part of the year—and her life.
These weeks that made no sense. These weeks that made her doubt herself, her purpose, and everything she’d ever known.
All lit up and threaded through with Orion, as if the king was his own holiday light and she glowed straight through. With him.
“Maybe you just like him,” her sister said drily, a week before Christmas Eve. “Maybe he’s likable. Maybe someday I’ll actually get to meet him and decide for myself.”
“You’ve met him.”
“I was presented to him with half the kingdom in attendance at your engagement ball. Not the same thing.”
Calista wasn’t deliberately keeping Melody and Orion apart. But she also wasn’t going out of her way to introduce them, either. She told herself there was no point. There were only six days remaining before the board meeting and seven days before her supposed wedding. Why pretend that her sister and Orion would ever need to interact?
Then again, here she was standing in one of the many palace salons, being pinned and sewed and otherwise fitted into a sweeping white gown she had no intention of ever really wearing. And certainly not for the ceremony it was being made for.
The palace advisers had decided, with very little input from Calista, that what was needed here was a fairy tale. The full Cinderella treatment, they called it, complete with a dress boasting skirts so wide she could have fit half the island beneath them, a tiny waist that stole her breath, and gold embroidered everywhere.
Just in case there was any doubt that she was marrying a king.
God help her, she was marrying the king.
No, she reminded herself. You’re only pretending you might.
She seemed to keep forgetting that part.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Melody said then, snapping her back to the salon. The dress. The disaster that was her life. “You do like him.”
“I can’t think of anything that matters less than liking someone,” she replied, perhaps a bit grumpily. “Much less a person I’m being forced to spend time with.”
The fleet of brisk seamstresses had left the room en masse ten minutes before, forced to contend with some or other textile disaster. They had spared Calista the details. She was left standing on a raised dais, surrounded by a portable wall of mirrors. Melody was there in the midst of it all, looking feral and entertained in the antique chair she’d claimed, and somehow more at home in this palace than Calista was.
“I would personally consider it a good thing that I liked a man I was going to have to marry even if he was a monster I detested,” Melody said mildly. “But you do you, Calista.”
Calista’s hands were in fists, and she was glad her sister couldn’t see it. Though the expression on Melody’s face made her think that she knew, anyway. The way she always did.
“I have a plan,” she began, trying to keep her voice even.
“It’s not the end of the world if you change your plans,” Melody interrupted her, quietly. “Maybe it’s even for the best. There are opportunities everywhere, if you know how to look for them.”
Calista opened her mouth to snap something back at her, but then paused. She frowned. “Are you talking about you or me?”
Melody smiled with a certain edge. “Father has been talking to me about alternate living opportunities.”
Such a simple sentence, yet it sent cold water straight down Calista’s back.
She knew she should have found something to feed to her father. Some bit of palace dirt. Some terrible rumor. How had she imagined that she could keep fobbing him off? Ignoring his messages and acting as if she was too busy with the wedding he’d demanded to give him what he wanted?
The truth was, she’d been pretending—hoping maybe, or wishing—that if she ignored the mess she was in, it might go away.
This was their father’s way of reminding Calista what he was prepared to do.
What he had every intention of doing.
How could she have been so stupid?
“I knew this would happen.” And suddenly the enormous dress she wore felt like a cage. A prison, and she couldn’t breathe, and Calista didn’t know what would happen if she simply clawed the fabric off her body—
Breathe, she ordered herself.
But she couldn’t. Not really. Not with any depth.
“I think it will be fine, actually,” Melody said, sounding philosophical. “I’ve never been around any other blind people. I might like them. At the very least, I can learn...blind things. Whatever those are.”
Calista tried to breathe. She really did try. “This is all my fault.”
“I think you know it’s not, Calista. I think you know that the only reason I wasn’t shunted off into one of these schools at birth is because of you.”
Her sister sounded calm. Resigned.
Calista was anything but. “I’ve been so wrapped up in what was going on here.” In sex, she thought, ashamed of herself. In glowing. “I should have known that they would make their move. I’m surprised they haven’t done it already.”
Calista wanted to tear down the walls. Shatter all the mirrors—but she was still trapped in her damned fairy-tale dress.
“Melody—” she began, her voice hot with guilt and shame.
But she stopped herself, because the door swung open.
And instead of the officious seamstresses who liked to stream in and out, issuing instructions, measuring things, and clucking around as if they really were all that wildlife in a Cinderella film, a man stood there.
Calista’s heart kicked at her, but it wasn’t Orion.
Why did she want it to be Orion?
In her chair, Melody shifted in that way she always did, instinctively hiding the truth about herself. Not the fact that she couldn’t see, but that she wasn’t helpless. She was good at it. She instantly looked smaller. Fragile and pathetic, even.
“Prince Griffin,” Calista said, and it cost her something to sound calm. To pretend that she wasn’t about to explode into pieces, right where she stood.
“Lady Calista,” Griffin replied in that smooth way of his that Calista normally objected to, on principle. It was too pat. Too practiced. But he was shifting, looking over to where Melody made a pretty little picture of a damsel in distress in the corner.
It would have been laughable, really, if any of this had been something to laugh about.
“Your Royal Highness,” Calista said, because she knew her etiquette now, backward and forward, whether she wanted to or not, “may I present to you my sister, Lady Melody.”
Melody did not rise from her chair and sink into the appropriate curtsy, but she did bow her head in such a way that she gave the impression of doing it.
While Calista watched her soon-to-be brother-in-law as he did a set of rapid calculations, clearly recalling that this was the so-called “imperfect” Skyros sister.
“I am enchanted,” he murmured, executing a perfect bow that Melody couldn’t see. Though she likely heard it.
“Have you come to aid with the dress fitting?” Calista asked, glaring at him, because she could see him just fine. “In all the tales of your exploits, I’ve never heard anyone mention that you were good at dressing women. More the opposite.”
“Not at all,” Griffin said, and when he shifted that gaze of his back to her, Calista straightened. Because he looked lazy enough, with that half smile and the languid way he held himself. But that dark look in his eyes was anything but. “I came to warn you.”
“Warn me?” Calista asked lightly.
She watched her sister in
the mirrors. Melody was basically a parody of herself at this point, managing to look like the Little Match Girl. When she was perched on a brocaded chair that might as well have been a throne, here in the middle of the palace. Not out in a cold gutter.
It was quite a performance. It always was.
“The standard warning, really,” Griffin said, sounding jovial. “We are all of us adults. And we understand the ways of our world, I assume. But I must tell you that if you wound my brother in any way, he will be the least of your concerns.”
He sounded so polite. Almost apologetic. It took a moment for the words to penetrate.
“I can’t wait for Melody to warn off the king in the same fashion,” Calista replied.
“That’s between your sister and the king.” Griffin smiled wider. “If she wishes to threaten him, that is. Most people might avoid taking that route. As it is against the law.”
“No need to worry about what I might do,” Melody said, in a frail, tremulous sort of voice that made that tight vise around Calista’s chest lighten a bit and she fought to keep herself from laughing. “I would never dare speak in the exalted presence of His Majesty.”
Calista expected Griffin to smile in that strained, pitying way people usually did. To fail to see Melody as anything more than a bit of furniture, and more drab than the average chair.
This was Idylla’s Playboy Prince, who was spared the hatred aimed at his father because he was always so charming. Not because he was any different.
But instead of dismissing and demeaning the version of herself Melody was offering him, Griffin...changed. He stood a little straighter. He stopped smirking. He looked at Melody, tiny and pathetic, and the expression on his face was almost...
Surely not, Calista thought.
“He is only a man,” he said. “Flesh and blood, Lady Melody. No more and no less, no matter what manner of crown adorns his head.”
Melody quailed as if the idea floored her. “If you say so, Your Royal Highness.”
“Call me Griffin,” he said, his attention on her younger sister in a way Calista could not say she liked. At all. It made the tiny waist of her gown seem even tighter. Especially when he kept going in that silken voice of his. “After all, we are practically family, are we not?”
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