Christmas Nights. Penny Jordan

her fertility across the night sky. Ionanthe touched her flat stomach. There was a season for all things, for all life, a time of planting and growing. An ache sprang to life inside her, urgent and demanding: the desire for a seed that would create the most precious gift Mother Nature could give.

      Tears came out of nowhere to burn the backs of her eyes, accompanied by a helpless yearning and longing. Her body was waiting to conceive this son she wanted so very much. She was ready to give herself over to the sacrifice she must make for the future of the people. More than anything else right now she wanted to feel that necessary male movement within her, giving her the spark of life she ached so physically for. It must be her longing for the conception of their child that was driving into her, possessing her, filling her with restless longing. It couldn’t possibly be anything else.

      Where was he?

      CHAPTER FIVE

      ‘I UNDERSTAND that you wanted to speak to me?’

      It would have been wiser for him to accede to Ionanthe’s formal request to his aide by seeing her somewhere other than in this bedroom. All the more so when he had spent the last eight nights avoiding coming anywhere near it—because he couldn’t trust his own self-control to prevent him from reacting to the dangerous mix of fierce anger and equally fierce sexual desire she aroused in him, Max recognized. But it was too late for him to regret that error now. He could hardly have ignored it, after all—not when she had delivered it so very publically, via his aide de camp.

      What did she want? he wondered. Money? Jewellery? Her sister had asked for both those things and more. He thought angrily of the obvious and pitiful poverty of that group of men who had been prepared to risk their lives, if necessary, for the sake of Ionanthe’s honour.

      ‘Yes,’ Ionanthe confirmed. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Max. She didn’t trust herself to do so. They had been married for just over a week—eight days, in fact, and eight long, humiliating nights. All of which she had spent alone in a bed that was obviously designed to accommodate two people—the bed that she was determined not to look at now, even though its presence in the room dominated her thoughts almost as much as Max’s absence from it had dominated them during these last eight days of a marriage that was in effect no marriage at all.

      Because she was not her sister? The pain of her childhood, with its lack of love and her grandfather’s rejection, must not be allowed to affect her now. She must not allow herself to appear vulnerable or needy. She must demand what was her right—not for her own sake, of course. She had no desire to share the intimacy of sex with a man who, having forced her into marriage, now chose to ignore her. After all, she had never been the kind of woman who was driven by her own sexual need—far from it. In fact, going without sex had, if anything, become her preferred way of life, and one she had been happy with. No. It was for the sake of the people that she was forcing herself to put aside her own personal feelings. Alone, she could not change things for them. She knew that. The island’s society was one rooted in the past, in which the male head of the family held absolute control. It would take a man to change that—a very strong, very aware, very courageous man. A son. Her son. A man who would be enlightened enough to change things for his people.

      Despite her own lack of any need to be a sexually desired woman, there was still the undeniable fact that Max’s very public rejection of her had left her feeling humiliated. Theirs was not, after all, a ‘normal’ marriage. As the island’s ruler Max had to live very much in the public eye, and as his wife so did she. It would have been easy enough to bear if only she had known about her husband’s sexual rejection of her, but of course the rest of the court was bound to know. Ionanthe hadn’t missed the sympathetic looks her maid had been giving her every morning for the last eight mornings. The fact that everyone knew that Max had married her because he needed a son, and yet had not consummated their marriage shamed and insulted her, turning her into a laughing stock. She was not prepared to tolerate the situation any longer.

      Max could feel his muscles, in fact his whole body, tensing against Ionanthe’s presence, whilst at the same time his senses strained to absorb as much of it and her as they could. The room smelled of her, of the scent she always wore, which somehow he had learned to search for in the rooms from which she herself was absent. In the long, aching reaches of the empty nights it had tormented him, conjuring up for him images of it cloaking her skin and scenting the darkness until he’d felt he was being driven close to madness by the folly of his own savage hunger for her. How had it come to this? How was it possible for him to want her so deeply and so compulsively?

      Max didn’t have the answer to that question. The manner in which his physical hunger for her suspended all that was rational and normal for him was something he couldn’t analyse to any satisfactory conclusion. Not that he hadn’t tried; he had. And in the end all he’d been able to tell himself was that the desire that burned inside him was simply the result of some primitive male instinct within himself that had been unleashed by her behaviour towards him.

      He had been with his personal aide, the son of one of the island’s barons when Ionanthe’s lady-in-waiting had brought the message that Ionanthe wished to speak with him, so it had been impossible for him to ignore it.

      Ionanthe took a deep breath and, still keeping her back to the bed, began. ‘Your absence from our marital bed has humiliated me and made me the subject of court gossip.’

      Max fought to control his body’s reaction to her words. Only he knew how hard it had been for him to keep to his decision not to give in to his growing desire for her. He would not partner her in the kind of cold and clinical intercourse she had described to him as the manner in which she wished to consummate their marriage. He would not, or did he fear that he could not? Max was forced to ask himself. Wasn’t it true that he was staying away from the bed they should have shared because he was afraid that if he did share it with her he would not be able to control the desire she aroused in him? The fact that she should arouse that desire was difficult enough for him to come to terms with, without having to add his concern that he would not be able to control it. It had, after all, come out of nowhere, with such speed and power that it had left him punch-drunk, reeling and, worst of all, feeling that he could no longer trust his own carefully set inner controls. No woman had ever affected him as Ionanthe did. No woman had ever aroused him to such a pitch of aching need combined with furious anger—

      severing him from the man he had always thought himself to be when it came to sexual needs. That man had been willing to follow his partner’s wishes, been very careful to keep the emotional temperature on merely warm. That man had certainly never had to deal with the kind of raw, demanding need he was experiencing now.

      Why? He had barely registered the fact that Ionanthe even existed before he had met her, and yet now here he was…

      Here he was what? Here he was wanting her so desperately and so passionately that he barely recognised himself any more?

      Max’s mouth hardened—the only outwardly visible sign of his inner demons and one that Ionanthe registered as antagonism towards her.

      Max was trying to force her to back down. Well, she wasn’t going to.

      The proud arching of her neck as she lifted her chin to confront him brought a sharp shock of physical reaction to Max’s senses. He wanted to cover the distance between them—to cover her in the most basic and intimate way. He wanted to slide his hand and then his mouth down the tormenting oh-so-proud and yet vulnerable arch of her creamy-fleshed neck. He wanted to pushed aside the neat fawn cashmere sweater she was wearing and explore the curve of her shoulder, tasting her, knowing her, feeling her breast swell into his hand and her nipple harden and tighten in his palm.

      Oblivious to Max’s reaction to her, Ionanthe pressed on. ‘Either you bring that humiliation to an end by consummating our marriage,’ she told him determinedly, ‘or…’

      Her words were like the worst kind of sharp blows against already dangerously raw and open wounds, overloading his self-control, inflaming him, driving him into an unfamiliar place where the red mist that came down over him obliterated everything else, Max acknowledged.