succession. Her son. The key that would unlock the medieval prison in which the people were trapped.
‘My grandfather would say that it is my duty to do as you ask and take my sister’s place.’
‘And what do you say?’ Max prompted.
‘I say that a man who tricks and traps a woman into marriage and threatens her with death by stoning if she refuses is not a man I could either respect or honour. But you are not merely a man, are you? You are Fortenegro’s ruler—its Prince.’
Even as she spoke a powerful sense of destiny was filling her. A demand. And her own answer to it rose up inside her and would not be denied. A sacrifice was being demanded of her, but the thought of the potential benefit for her people was so filled with hope and joy that her own heart filled with them as well.
She took a deep breath, and told Max calmly, ‘I will marry you. But I will live my own life within that marriage. No, before you make any accusation, I do not wish to copy my sister and crawl into the beds of an endless succession of men. But there is a life I wish to live of my own, and I shall live it.’
‘What kind of life?’ Max demanded. But she refused to answer him, simply shaking her head instead.
As Max’s wife, as Crown Princess, she could surely begin to do some of those things she had argued so passionately for her grandfather to do, which he had told her so angrily he would never do nor allow her to do either. She could start on their own estates; she would have the money. Her grandfather had been a wealthy man, and had had power. Education for the children, better working conditions for their parents—there was so much she wanted to do. But she must move carefully; she could, after all, do nothing until they were married.
Why was he standing here feeling such a sense of loss, such a sense of a darkness within himself? Ionanthe had given him the answer he needed.
Yes, she had given him that—but he sensed that there was something she was concealing from him, some sense of purpose, something that might affect his own plans to their detriment.
Max shrugged aside his doubts. Their marriage was as necessary to him for his purpose as it was to her for her safety. They would both gain something from it—just as they would both lose something.
‘So we are agreed, then?’ he asked her. ‘You understand that you are to take your late sister’s place in my life and in my bed, as my wife and the mother of my heir?’
They were stark and dispassionate words, cold words that described an equally cold marriage, Max acknowledged. But they were words that had to be said. There must be no misunderstanding on her part as to what would be expected of her.
Ionanthe lifted her chin, and told him firmly, ‘Yes. I do.’
‘Very well, then,’ he acknowledged.
They looked at one another: two people who neither trusted nor liked one another but who understood that their future lay together and that they were trapped in it together.
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