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 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.
CHAPTER THREE
‘ASIIEEE —how cruel it is that your poor mother did not live to see this day. Her daughter marrying our Prince and being crowned Princess.’
‘I too wish that my mother was still alive, Maria,’ Ionanthe told the old lady who had been part of her grandfather’s household for as long as Ionanthe could remember.
She had the happiest of memories of her parents, who had died in a skiing accident in Italy when she had been thirteen. She had missed them desperately then and she still missed them now. Especially at times like this. She felt very alone, standing here in what had once been her grandfather’s state apartment. The weight of the fabric of the cloth-of-gold overdress—a priceless royal heirloom in which all Fortenegro brides were supposed to be married but which apparently her sister had refused point-blank to wear—was heavy, and felt all the more so because of the old scents of rose and lavender that clung to it, reminding her of previous brides who had worn it. But its weight was easier to bear right now than the weight of the responsibility she was about to take on—for her country and its people, she told herself fiercely, for them and for the son she would give them, who would transform their lives with the light of true democracy.
There was a heavy knock on the closed double doors, which were flung open to reveal the Lord Chamberlain in his formal regalia, flanked by heralds wearing the Prince’s livery and supported by the island’s highest ranking dignitaries, also wearing their ancient formal regalia.
The gold dress, worn over a rich cream lace gown that matched her veil, no longer seemed so garishly rich now that she was surrounded by her bridal escort in their scarlet, and gold.
Since she had no male relative it was the Lord Chamberlain who escorted her. The heavy weight of her skirt and his cloak combined to make a surging sound as they walked ceremoniously through the open doors of the staterooms.
Max looked down at the bent head of his bride as she kneeled before him in the traditional symbolic gesture that was part of the royal marriage service whilst the Archbishop married them.
It made her blood boil to have to kneel to her new husband like this, but she must think of the greater good and not her own
