He dismissed the warning note being struck within him—he had been too long without a woman. But, since he was thirty-four years old, and not twenty-four, he was perfectly capable of subsuming his sexual desire and channelling his energies into other less dangerous responses.
Unexpectedly, irrationally and surely foolishly a small thrill of excitement surged through Ionanthe. She had the power to give Fortenegro a prince—a leader who would truly lead its people to freedom.
She looked at Max. He exuded power and confidence. His features were strongly drawn into lines of raw masculinity, his cheekbones and jaw carved and sculpted and then clothed in flesh in a way that drew the female eye. Yes, he was very good-looking—if one liked that particular brand of hard-edged arrogant male sexuality and darkly brooding looks. He carried within his genes the history of all those who had ruled Fortenegro: Moorish warriors, Crusaders, Norman knights, and long before them Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. He wore his pride like an invisible cloak that swung from his shoulders as surely as a real one had swung from the shoulders of those who had come here and stamped their will on the island—just as he was now trying to stamp his will on her.
But she had her own power—the power of giving the island a ruler who would truly be an honourable man and a wise and just prince—her son by this man who had brought her here to be a flesh-and-blood sacrifice—a destiny that belonged in reality to another age. But she was a woman of this modern age, a twenty-first-century woman with strong beliefs and values. She was no helpless victim but a woman with the strength of mind and of purpose to shape events to match her own goals.
She was no young, foolish girl with a head and a heart filled with silly dreams. Yes, once she had yearned to find love, a man who would share her crusading need to right the wrongs of the past and to work for the good of her people. She had known that she would never find him on the island, governed by men like her grandfather, who adhered to the old ways, but she had not found him in Brussels either, where she had quickly learned that a sincere smile could easily mask a liar and a cheat. Powerful men had desired her—powerful married men. She had refused them, whilst the men she had accepted had ultimately turned out to be weak and incapable of matching her hunger for equality and justice for those denied those things. She was twenty-seven now, and she couldn’t remember whether it was five or six years since she had last slept with a man—either way, it didn’t matter. She was not her sister, greedy and amoral, craving the shallow satisfaction of the excitement of sex with strangers.
Her sister—to whom the man now waiting for her response had been married. She was surprised that Eloise had cheated on him. She would have thought that he was just Eloise’s type: good-looking, sexy, rich, and in a position to give her the status she and their grandfather had always craved.
Ionanthe might have acknowledged that she would never fulfil her dream of meeting a man who could be her true partner in life and in love, but she still had that same teenage longing to change the world—and for the better. That goal could now be within her reach. Through her son—the son this man would demand from her in payment of her family’s debt to him—she could change the lives of her people for the better. Was that perhaps not just her fate but more importantly her destiny? That she should provide the people with a ruler who would be worthy of them?
The sun was dying into the sea, burnishing it dark gold. Ionanthe shook back her hair, the action tightening her throat, the last of the light carving her profile into a perfect cameo.
There was a pride about her, a wildness, an energy, a challenge about her, that unleashed within him an unfamiliar need to respond. Max frowned, not liking his own reaction and not really understanding it. Eloise had been sexually provocative and had left him cold. But Ionanthe challenged him with her pride, not her body or her sexuality, and for some reason his body had reacted to that. He shrugged, mentally dismissing what he did not want to dwell on. Ionanthe was a beautiful woman, and he was a man who had been without sex for almost a year.
Ionanthe turned away from the window and looked at Max.
‘And if I refuse?’ she demanded, her head held high, pride in every line of her body.
‘You already know the answer to that. I cannot force you to marry me, but, according to my ministers and courtiers, if I do not show myself to the people as a worthy ruler by taking you, and if you do not submit to me in blood payment for the dishonour and shame your sister has brought on both our houses, then the people may very well take it upon themselves to exact payment from you.’
The starkness of his warning hung between them in the stern watching silence of the tower—a place that had held and held again against the enemies of the rulers of Fortenegro, protecting their lives and their honour.
The blood left Ionanthe’s face, but she didn’t weaken. Just the merest whisper of an exhaled breath and the movement of her throat as she swallowed betrayed what she felt.
She was as spoiled and arrogant as her sister, of course. They shared the same blood and the same upbringing, after all, and like her sister and her grandfather she would despise his plans for her country. But she had courage, Max admitted.
‘I expect that it was Count Petronius who suggested that you bully me into agreeing by threatening to hand me over to the people,’ she said scornfully. ‘He and my grandfather were bitter enemies, who vied to have the most control over whoever sat on the throne.’
‘It was Count Petronius who told me that in some of the more remote parts of the island the people have been known to stone adulterous wives,’ Max agreed.
They looked at one another.
She was not going to weaken or show him any fear, Ionanthe told herself.
‘I am not an adulterous wife. And I am not a possession to be used to pay off my family’s supposed debt to you to save your pride and your honour.’ Her voice dripped acid contempt.
‘This isn’t about my pride or my honour,’ Max corrected her coldly.
Ionanthe gave a small shrug, the action revealing the smooth golden flesh of one bare shoulder as the wide boat neckline of her top slipped to one side. She felt its movement but disdained to adjust the neckline. She wasn’t going to have him thinking that the thought of him looking at her bare flesh made her feel uncomfortable.
She was an outstandingly alluring woman, Max acknowledged, and yet for all her obvious sensuality she seemed unaware of its power, wearing what to other women would be the equivalent of a priceless haute couture garment as carelessly as though it were no more than a pair of chainstore jeans.
If she was oblivious to her effect on his sex, he was not, Max admitted. There had been women who had shared his life and his bed—beautiful, enticing women from whom he had always parted without any regret, having enjoyed a mutual satisfying sexual relationship. But none of them had ever aroused him by the sight of a bared shoulder. Merely feasting his gaze on her naked shoulder felt as erotic as though he had actually touched her skin, stroked his hand over it, absorbing its texture and its warmth.
Angered by his own momentary weakness, Max looked away from her. His life was complicated enough already, without him adding any further complications to it. Certainly it would be easier and would make more sense to let her think that he expected her to provide him with a son than to try to tell her the truth, Max acknowledged.
‘The people are anxious for me to secure the succession,’ he told her, his voice clipped.
The succession. Her son. The key that would unlock the medieval prison in which the people were trapped.
‘My grandfather would say that