A Bride For His Majesty's Pleasure. PENNY JORDAN

light-headed, removed from everything about herself she considered ‘normal’. She had become, instead, a woman who hungered for something unknown and forbidden.

      Was this how her sister had felt with those men, those strangers, she had delighted in taking to her bed? Hungering for something she knew she should not want? It was a disturbing thought. She had always prided herself on being different from Eloise, on having different values from the sister, whose behaviour she had never been able to relate to and had privately abhorred.

      It was because her heart was racing so fast that his own had started to pound heavily, Max told himself. It was because the walls either side of the steps enclosed them that he was so conscious of the scent of her hair and her skin. It was because he was a man and she was a woman that his body was flooded with an unwanted surge of physical arousal that had him tightening his hold on her.

      He wanted her, Max knew. The knowledge rushed over him and through him, possessing him as he ached to possess her, threatening to carry with it every moral barrier and code that should have held it back. Why? It was illogical, unfathomable, the opposite of so much about himself he had believed unchangeable. He felt as though he had stepped outside his own skin and become a hostage to his own need in a way that filled him with mental distaste and rejection. Yet at the same time his body renewed its assault on those feelings as though it was determined to have its way.

      To travel so far and in such an unfamiliar direction so unexpectedly and in so short a space of time had robbed him of the ability to think logically, Max decided.

      An aeon could have passed, or merely a few seconds. She was quite unable to judge the difference, Ionanthe admitted, because she was too caught up in the maelstrom of sensations and emotions that had somehow been created out of nothing and which were still controlling her. And would probably continue to control her for as long as Max was holding her. She was quite literally spellbound, and he was the one who had cast that spell, binding her senses to his will, forcing from them a response she would never willingly have given him, stirring up within her a dark mystery of maddening longing that had seized and held captive her ability to think or reason.

      All she knew was that his lips were only a sigh away from her own. All she wanted to know was the possession of them on her own. There was nothing else in this moment but him.

      The normal Ionanthe—the Ionanthe she knew—would never have closed her eyes and swayed closer to Max, exhaling on a breath that was a siren’s call. But this Ionanthe was not her normal self. This Ionanthe was not prepared to listen to any objections from its alter ego.

      He should resist. Max knew that. This trick of pretended longing and faked intimacy had been one of Eloise’s favourites, and it had been a ploy he had found easy enough to withstand when she’d used it against him. Somehow, though, with Ionanthe things were different. Her lips, soft and warm with natural colour, were surely shaped for kisses and sensuality. They pillowed the touch of his own, igniting within him a need that roared through him like a forest fire.

      Extreme danger. How often had she heard those words and dismissed them and those who lived to experience it, those who holidayed in places that offered it? Now she could only marvel that they should go to such lengths when all the time it was here, so close at hand, in a man’s arms and beneath the hard pressure of his lips.