Christmas Nights: A Bride for His Majesty's Pleasure / Her Christmas Fantasy / Figgy Pudding
in the way that Ionanthe could, despite the fact that he had known her only a matter of days. She seemed to delight in pushing him—punishing him for their current situation, no doubt, he reminded himself as his anger subsided. It was completely out of character for him to let anyone get under his skin enough to make him react emotionally to them when his response should be purely cerebral.
‘Far from wishing to force you to do anything, I merely wanted to suggest that we use the side entrance to the palace. That way we will attract less attention.’
He had a point, Ionanthe admitted grudgingly, but she wasn’t going to say so. Instead she started to walk towards the door set in one of the original castle turrets, both of them slipping through the shadows the building now threw across the square, hidden from the view of the people crowding the palace steps. She welcomed the peace of its stone interior after the busyness of the square. Her dress had become uncomfortably heavy and her head had started to ache. The reality of what she had done had begun to set in, filling her with a mixture of despair and panic. But she mustn’t think of herself and her immediate future, she told herself as she started to climb the stone steps that she knew from memory led to a corridor that connected the old castle to the more modern palace.
She had almost reached the last step when somehow or other she stepped onto the hem of her gown, the accidental movement unbalancing her and causing her to stumble. Max, who was several steps below her, heard the small startled sound she made and raced up the stairs, catching her as she fell.
If she was trembling with the fragility of new spring buds in the wind then it was because of her shock. If she felt weak and her heart was pounding with dangerous speed then it was because of the weight of her gown. If she couldn’t move then it was because of the arms that imprisoned her.
She had to make him release her. It was dangerous to be in his arms. She looked up at him, her gaze travelling the distance from his chin to his mouth and then refusing to move any further. What had been a mere tremor of shock had now become a fiercely violent shudder that came from deep within her and ached through her. She felt dizzy, 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.
Extreme danger and extreme desire went hand in hand, producing between them an extreme pleasure that was an almost unbearable delight. A delight that was merely a foretaste of what the night that lay before them would hold for her. How could Eloise have wanted someone else when she’d had a husband who could give her this kind of pleasure?
Eloise! Abruptly Ionanthe pulled back from Max before he could stop her, telling him in a voice designed to conceal the shaky vulnerability she was really feeling, ‘My sister may have welcomed being treated like a sex object, but I don’t.’
Her angry contempt coming hard on the heels of her earlier eagerness rasped against Max’s already dangerously charged emotions. How the hell had he managed to lose control of himself so easily and so quickly?
‘You could have fooled me,’ he responded grimly. ‘In fact I’d have gone as far as to say you were positively…’
‘What? Asking for it? Is that what you were going to say?’ Ionanthe rounded on him angrily. ‘How typical of a man like you—but then I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything else. Cosmo was a sexist bully, and you are obviously cut from the same cloth.’
Her accusation cooled Max’s own anger to sharp-edged ice.
‘What I was going to say was that you seemed to be positively enjoying it. But if we’re talking about shared family flaws, then perhaps I should have remembered that your sister also had a taste for playing the tease, blowing hot when she wanted something and then blowing cold when it suited her.’
I am not Eloise, Ionanthe wanted to say. But she remembered how often her grandfather had distanced himself from her and withheld his love from her with the words, ‘You are not Eloise.’ Instead she picked up her heavy skirts and turned her back on Max as she headed down the empty corridor.
CHAPTER FOUR
SHE was free now of the presence of the stiffly correct lady’s maid she had needed to help her out of the heavy formality of her wedding gown, alone in the bedroom she would be sharing with her new husband.
Over the handful of days that had elapsed between Max presenting her with his ultimatum and their marriage Ionanthe had told both Max and the Count that she did not want to be surrounded by ladies-in-waiting or a large staff, and it had eventually been agreed that two ladies-in-waiting would attend her on only the most formal occasions, and that she would have only one personal maid who would attend her only when she needed her.
It was a relief to be wearing her own clothes again—even if the maid had eyed them with disdain.
The suite of rooms she was to share with Max had surprised her. She had assumed that he would be occupying the Royal State Apartments,