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Dear Reader,

Christmas is a particularly poignant time of year for me as I was privileged to be able to spend part of Christmas day with Penny, one of my dearest friends, before for this courageous, witty, dignified lady passed away just a few days later.

I will never forget Penny, or how we met.

I have a very special envelope on my desk. On the front it says: Lot 4. Be An Author For A Day. Your chance to work with local author Penny Jordan.

Author for a day? A friend for life, as it turned out.

My husband bought this lot for me at a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ charity auction, which we attended in full costume—ate the food and danced the dances of those long-ago times.

After the ball I was in awe at the thought of meeting one of my favourite authors, though less so when Penny opened the door and her four dogs bounded out to greet me, as I had three dogs of my own. Our friendship was cemented the moment we noticed matching dog slobber on our identical trousers.

Grace, elegance, kindness, thoughtfulness—none of these could do sufficient credit to a woman who brought reading pleasure into so many people’s lives. I was with Penny shortly before she died and her most urgent request was that I tell you, her readers, how much you meant to her. You were Penny’s inspiration, and her only regret was that she couldn’t finish all the books she wanted to write for you. But as, I told Penny, however many books she wrote we, her loyal readers, would always want more.

I know you will enjoy this collection of wonderful stories as much as I have.

With my warmest wishes to you all,

Susan Stephens

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan: ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Christmas Nights
A Bride for His Majesty’s Pleasure
Her Christmas Fantasy
Figgy Pudding
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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A Bride for His Majesty’s Pleasure

PROLOGUE

‘AND if I refuse to marry you?’ Although she did her best not to allow her feelings to show, she was conscious of the fact that her voice trembled slightly.

Max looked at her.

‘I think you already know the answer to your own question.’

The dying sun streaming in through the tower window warmed the darkness of her hair and revealed the classical beauty of her facial bone structure, before stroking golden fingers along the exposed column of her throat.

A twenty-first-century woman, caught in an ancient and powerful trap of savagery and custom, Max acknowledged wryly, if only to himself.

The intensity of the powerful and unwanted emotional and physical reaction that punched through him caught him off guard. It was a dangerous mix of sympathy and desire, neither of which he should be feeling. But most especially not the desire. Immediately Max turned away from her—like a schoolboy desperate to conceal the over-enthusiastic and inappropriate reaction of his developing maleness, he derided himself. But he was not a schoolboy, and furthermore he was perfectly capable of controlling both his emotions and his physical desire. So his own body had momentarily caught him off guard? It would not happen again.

What he was doing wasn’t something he wanted to do, nor was it in any way for his own benefit. It was a duty, and she was the doorway via which he could access what he needed to help those who needed it so desperately. It was a loathsome situation; either he sacrificed her, and in a sense himself, or he risked sacrificing his people. He did not have the luxury of indulging in personal and private emotional needs. His duty now obliged him to channel his thoughts and feelings towards those to whom he had given his commitment when he had accepted the crown and become the ruling Prince of Fortenegro. His people. This woman’s people.

He turned back towards her. So much was at stake; the future of a whole country lay in this woman’s hands. He would have preferred to be honest with her—but how could he, given her family background? She was a rich man’s grandchild. Her grandfather a man, he knew now, who had alternated between both over-indulging his grandchildren and over-controlling them—to the extent that they had become adept at deceit and were motivated only by self interest.

Ionanthe looked at the man facing her—a man who represented so much that she hated.

‘You mean that I’ll be thrown to the wolves, so to speak? In the form of the people? Forced to pay my family’s debt of honour to you?’

When he gave no reply she laughed bitterly.

‘And you dare to call yourself civilized?’

‘I own neither the crime nor its punishment. I am as impotent in this situation as you are yourself,’ Max defended himself caustically.

Impotent. It was a deliberately telling choice of word, surely, given that he had just told her that she must marry him and give him a son as recompense for her sister’s crimes against him. Or be handed over to the people to be tried by a feudal form of justice that was no justice at all.

As he waited for her response Max thought back over the events that had led them both to this unwanted impasse.

CHAPTER ONE

‘THERE must be vengeance, Highness.’ The courtier was emphatic and determined as he addressed Max.

The Count no doubt considered him ill fitted for his role of ruler of the island of Fortenegro—the black fort, so named originally because of the sheer dark cliffs that protected the mainland facing side of the island.

‘Justice must be seen to be done,’ Count Petronius continued forcefully.

The Count, like most of the courtiers, was in his late sixties. Fortenegro’s society was fiercely patriarchal, and its laws harsh and even cruel, reflecting its refusal to move with the times. A refusal which Max fully intended to change. The only reason he had not flatly refused to step into his late cousin’s shoes and become the new ruler of the principality was because of his determination to do what he knew his late father had longed to do—and that was to bring Fortenegro, and more importantly its people, out of the Dark Ages and into the light of the twenty-first century. That, though, was going to take time and patience, and first he must win the respect of his people and, just as importantly, their trust.

Fortenegrans were constitutionally opposed to change—especially, according to his courtiers, any kind of change that threatened their way of life and the beliefs that went with that way of life: beliefs such as the need to take revenge for insults and slights both real and imagined.

‘An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth—that is the law of our people,’ the Count continued enthusiastically. ‘And they will expect you to uphold it. In their eyes a prince and a ruler who cannot protect his own honour cannot be trusted to protect theirs. That is their way and the way they live.’

And not just them, Max reflected grimly as he looked one by one at the group of elderly courtiers who had been his late cousin’s advisers and who, in many ways, despite the fact that he was now ruler of the island, were still reluctant to cede to him the power they had taken for themselves during his late cousin’s reign. But then Cosmo had been a playboy, unashamedly hedonistic and not in the least bit interested in the island he ruled or its people—only the wealth with which it had provided him.

Cosmo, though, was dead—dying at thirty-two of the damage inflicted by the so-called ‘recreational’ drugs to which he had become addicted. He’d been without a son to succeed him, leaving the title to pass to Max.

Justice must indeed be seen to be done, Max knew, but it would be his justice, not theirs, done in his way and according to his judgement and his beliefs.

The most senior of his late cousin’s advisers was speaking again.

‘The people will expect you to revenge yourself on the family of your late wife because of her betrayal of you.’

Max knew that the Count and Eloise’s grandfather had been sworn enemies, united only by their shared adherence to a moral code that was primitive and arcane. Now, with Eloise and her grandfather dead, he was being urged to take revenge on the sole remaining member of the family—his late wife’s sister—for Eloise’s betrayal of their marriage and her failure to provide him with the promised heir.

In the eyes of his people it was not merely his right but his duty to them as their ruler to carry out full vengeance according to the ancient laws relating to any damage done to a man’s honour. His late wife’s family must make full restitution for the shame she had brought on them and on him. Traditionally, that meant that the dishonoured husband could set aside the wife who had betrayed him and take in her place one of her sisters or cousins, who must then provide him with the son his wife’s betrayal had denied him.

These were ancient laws, passed down by word of mouth, and Max was appalled at the thought of giving in to them and to those who clung so fiercely to them. But he had no choice. Not if he wanted to win the trust of his people. Without that trust he knew that he could not hope to change things, to bring the island and those who lived there into the modern world. He had already sacrificed his personal beliefs once by marrying Eloise in the first place. Did he really want to do so a second time? Especially when it meant involving someone else? And if so, why?

The status and wealth of being the island’s ruler meant little to him. He was already wealthy, and the very idea of one person ‘ruling’ others went against his strongest beliefs.

But he was the island’s ruler, whether he wanted to be or not, and as such he owed its people—his people—a duty of care. He might never succeed in bringing change to the older generation, but for the sake of their children and their children’s children he had to win the trust of the leaders and the elders so that those changes could be slowly put in place.

Refusing to accept their way of life and ignoring the laws that meant so much to them would only create hostility. Max knew all these things, but still the whole idea of honour and vengeance was repugnant to him.

A year ago he would have laughed in disbelief at the very idea that he might find himself the ruler of an island in the Aegean off the coast of Croatia.

He had known about the island and its history, of course. His father had spoken often of it, and the older brother with whom he had quarrelled as a young man—because his brother had refused to acknowledge that for the sake of the island’s people it was necessary to spend some of his vast fortune on improving the quality of their lives and their education.

Max’s father had explained to him that the island was locked in its own past, and that the men who had advised his grandfather and then his own father were hostile to modernisation, fearing for their wealth and status.

His father, with his astute brain and compassion for the human race, had proved that being wealthy and being a philanthropist were far from mutually exclusive, and after the death of his parents Max had continued with their charitable work as head of the foundation his father had started. Under Max’s financial guidance both his own personal wealth and that of the foundation had grown, and Max had joined the exclusive ranks of that small and discreet group of billionaires who used their wealth for the benefit of others. Anonymity was a prized virtue of this group of generous benefactors. Max was as different from his late cousin as it was possible to be.

Physically, Max had inherited through his father’s genes the tall, broad-shouldered physique of the warrior princes who had coveted and conquered the island many generations ago, along with thick dark hair and a profile that could sometimes look as though it had been hewn from the rock that protected the island from its enemies, so little did his expression give away.

Only his slate-blue eyes came from his English mother; the rest of him was, as his father had often said, ‘pure Fortenegro and its royal house.’ The evidence of the truth of that statement could be seen in the profile stamped into the island’s ancient coinage, but whilst outwardly he might resemble his ancestors, inwardly Max was his own man—a man who fully intended to remove from the people of the island the heavy yoke of custom and oppression under which they lived.

When he had first come to the island to take up the reins of ruling he had promised himself that he would bring the people out of the darkness of poverty and lack of opportunity into the light. But it was proving a far harder task than he had anticipated.

The men who formed his ‘court’, instead of supporting him, were completely antagonistic towards any kind of modernisation, and continually warned him of the risk of riots and worse from the people if their way of life were to be challenged.

In an attempt to do the right thing Max had married the granddaughter of one of his nobles—a marriage of mutual convenience, which Eloise had assured him she wanted, saying that she would be proud to provide the island with its next ruler. What she had not told him was that whilst she was happy to become his Princess, she had no intention of giving up her regular pasttime of taking a lover whenever she felt like it—foreigners, normally, who had come to the island for one reason or another.

Within hours of the deaths of Eloise and her current lover, when their car had plunged over one of Fortenegro’s steep cliffs, gossip about her relationship with the man she had been with had begun. A maid at the castle had seen Eloise in bed in her grandfather’s apartment with her lover, and before too long the whole island had known.

Now, six months after her death and following the death of her grandfather, his barons were pressing him to exact revenge on her family for her betrayal.

‘It is your duty,’ his courtiers had insisted. ‘Your late wife’s sister must make restitution. She must provide you with the son your wife denied you. That is the way of our people. Your wife shamed you. Only by taking her sister can that shame be expunged and both your honour and the honour of her family be restored.’

‘I doubt that Eloise’s sister would agree with you.’

Neither his wife nor her grandfather had ever spoken much about Eloise’s sister. All Max knew about her, other than the fact that she existed, was that, having trained as an economist, she now lived and worked in Europe.

‘She no longer lives here,’ Max had pointed out. ‘And if she is as intelligent as she seems she will not return, knowing what awaits her.’

‘She is already on her way back,’ Max had been told by Count Petronius, who had continued smoothly, ‘I have taken it upon myself to summon her on your behalf.’

Max had been furious.

‘So that she can be threatened into paying her family’s supposed debt of honour?’ he had demanded angrily.

The Count had shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have told her that the apartment in the palace occupied by her late grandfather must be cleared of his possessions. Since he occupied the apartment for many years she will naturally wish to remove from it those things that may be of value.’

Max hadn’t been able to conceal his loathing for the Count’s underhanded behaviour.

‘You have tricked and trapped her.’

‘It is your own fate you should be considering, not hers,’ the Count had pointed out. ‘The people will not tolerate being shamed by a ruler who allows his wife to cuckold him. They will expect you to demand a blood payment.’

And if I do not? Max had wanted to demand. But he had known the answer.

‘We live in troubled times,’ the Count had told him. ‘There are those on the mainland who look at this island and covet it for their own reasons. If the islanders were to rise up against you because they felt you had let them down then such people would be pleased. They would be quick to seize the advantage you will have given them.’

Max had frowned. The Count might have spoken theatrically, but Max knew that there was indeed a cadre of very very rich and unscrupulous businessmen who would like very much indeed to take over the island and use it for their own purposes. The island was rich in minerals, and it would be a perfect tax haven. And so much more than that. With its natural scenic beauty—its snow in winter on the high ridge of its mountains, and its sea facing beaches that basked in summer sunshine—it would make a perfect tourist destination, providing year-round enjoyment.

Max was already aware of the benefits that tourism could bring to the people of the island—handled properly—but he was equally aware of the billions it could make for the unscrupulous, and the destruction and damage they would cause if they were allowed to gain control of the island. He had a duty to ensure that did not happen.

‘Your late wife’s sister is on her way here, and once she is here you must show the people the power of your vengeance. Only then will you have their respect and their trust,’ the Count had continued.

And now he must wait for the woman standing opposite him to give him her answer—and he must hope, for her sake and the sake of his people, that she gave him the right one, even whilst he abhorred the way she had been tricked into coming to the island, and the nature of the threats against her personal safety.

If nothing else, he told himself grimly, when she married him he would at least be able to protect her from the appalling situation the Count had outlined to him—even if that protection did come at the cost of her personal freedom.

Certain aspects of his current position were never going to sit comfortably with his personal moral code, Max acknowledged grimly. It was all very well for him. He was making the decision to sacrifice his freedom of choice for the sake of his people. Ionanthe did not have that choice. She was being forced to sacrifice hers.

CHAPTER TWO

THE sun was sinking swiftly into the Aegean sea whilst the man who had been her sister’s husband—who now wanted her to take Eloise’s place—stood in silence by the window. The evening breeze ruffled the thick darkness of his hair. With that carved, hawkish over-proud profile he could easily have belonged to another age. He did belong to another age—one that should no longer be allowed to exist. An age in which some men were born to grind others beneath their heels and impose their will on them without mercy or restraint.

Well, she wasn’t going to give in—no matter how much he threatened her. She had been a fool to let herself be tricked into coming here, especially when she knew what the old guard of the island were like. That was why she had left in the first place. Was it really only a handful of hours ago that she had been promising herself that finally, with her grandfather’s death and the money she would inherit, she would be free to do what she had wanted to do for so long. Offer her services as an economist to what she considered to be the most forward-thinking and socially responsible charitable organisation in the world—The Veritas Foundation.

Ionanthe had first heard about Veritas when she had been working in Brussels. A male colleague to whom she had taken a dislike had complained about the charity, saying that its aims of alleviating poverty and oppression by offering education and the hope of democracy to the oppressed was just a crazy idealist fantasy. Ionanthe had been curious enough about the organisation to want to find out more, and what she had learned had filled her with an ambition to one day be part of the dedicated team of professionals who worked for the charity. The Foundation was about doing things for others, not self-aggrandisement, and she approved of that as much as she did not approve of her homeland’s new ruler.

As far as she was concerned, the island’s new Prince was every bit as bad as those who had gone before him. He expected her to take Eloise’s place and wipe out the shame staining both his reputation and that of her family—to give him the son Eloise had not. A son who would one day rule in his place.

A son, an heir. A future ruler.

All of a sudden a sense of prescient awareness so powerful that it reached deep down into the most secret places of her heart shuddered through her, warning her that she stood at a crossroads that would affect not just her own life but more importantly the lives of others—not for one generation, but for the whole future of her people.

She might originally have studied law and gone to Brussels hoping to make changes that would benefit the lives of others, but she had gradually become disillusioned and the bright hopes of her dreams had become tarnished. Now she could do something for others—something just as important in its way as the work she might have been able to do via the Veritas Foundation.

The man confronting her needed an heir. A son. Her son. A son born of her who, with her love and guidance, would surely become a ruler who would be everything a good ruler should be—a ruler who would honour and love his people, who would guide them to a better future, who would understand the importance of providing them with proper education. A ruler who would build hospitals and schools, who would give his people pride in themselves and their future instead of tethering them to the past.

Hope and determination gathered force inside her like a tidal wave, surging up from the depths of her being, refusing to allow anything to stand in its way. Her breath caught in her throat, lifting her breasts. The movement caught Max’s attention. His late wife had considered herself to be a beauty, a femme fatale whom no man could resist, but her sister had a darker, deeper female magic that owed nothing to the expensive beauty treatments and designer clothes Eloise had loved. The promise of true sensuality surrounded her like an invisible aura. Max frowned. The last thing he wanted was another wife whose sex drive might take her into the arms and the beds of other men. But against his will, against logic and wisdom, he could feel the magnetic pull of her sensuality on his own senses.

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 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 humiliation, Ionanthe told herself as one of the other two officiating bishops wafted the sacred scented incense over her and the other dropped gold-painted rose petals on her.

‘Let the doors be thrown open and the news be carried to the furtherest part of his kingdom that the Prince is married,’ the Archbishop intoned. ‘Let the trumpets sound and great joy be amongst the people.’

From her kneeling position Ionanthe couldn’t see the doors being opened, but she could see the light that poured into the cathedral.

Max reached down and took hold of Ionanthe’s hands, which were still folded in front of her.

Ionanthe looked up at him, ignoring the warning she had been given that it was forbidden by tradition for her to look at her new husband until he gave her permission to do so.

Also according to tradition she was now supposed to kiss his foot in gratitude for being married to him. Ionanthe’s lips compressed as she deliberately stood up so that they were standing facing one another. The triumph she had been feeling at breaking with tradition and showing her own strength of character and will was lost in the Archbishop’s hissed gasp of shocked breath when Max stepped forward, clasping her shoulders and holding her imprisoned as he bent his head towards her.

When she realised what he intended to do Ionanthe stiffened in rejection and hissed, ‘No—you must not kiss me. It is not the tradition.’

‘Then we will make our own new tradition,’ Max told her equably.

His lips felt warm against her own, warm and firm and knowingly confident in a way that her own were not. They were alternately trembling and then parting, in helpless disarray. He had undermined her attempt to establish her independence far too effectively for her to be able to rally and fight back. His lips left hers and then returned, brushing them softly.

If she hadn’t known better she might even have thought that his touch was meant to be reassuring—but that couldn’t possibly be so, since he was the one who had mocked her with his kiss in the first place. Had he perhaps confused her with Eloise, assuming that she was like her sister and would welcome this promise of future intimacy between them? If so he was going to be in for a shock when he discovered that she did not have her sister’s breadth of sexual experience. It was too late now to regret not taking advantage of the ample opportunities over the years when she had preferred her studies and her dreams to the intimacies she had been offered.

‘It is not the custom for the Crown Prince’s bride to stand at his side as his equal until she has asked for permission to do so,’ the Archbishop was saying, with disapproval.

‘Sometimes custom has to give way to a more modern way of doing things,’ Ionanthe heard Max saying, before she could react herself and refuse to kneel. ‘And this is one of those occasions.’

‘It is our custom,’ the Archbishop was insisting stubbornly.

‘Then it must be changed for a new custom—one that is based on equality.’

Ionanthe knew that she was probably looking as shocked as the Archbishop, although for a different reason. The last thing she had expected was to hear her new husband talking about equality.

The Archbishop looked crestfallen and upset. ‘But, sire….’

Max frowned as he listened to the quaver in the older man’s voice. He had told himself that he would take things slowly and not risk offending his people, but the sight of Ionanthe kneeling at his feet had filled him with so much revulsion that he hadn’t been able to stop himself from saying something.

The Archbishop’s pride had been hurt, though, and he must salve that wound, Max recognised. In a more gentle voice he told him, ‘I do not believe that it is fitting for the mother of my heir to kneel at any man’s feet.’

The Archbishop nodded his head and looked appeased.

The new Prince was a dangerously clever man, Ionanthe decided as Max took her arm, so that together they walked down the aisle towards the open doors of the cathedral and the state carriage waiting to take them back to the palace.

An hour later they stood on the main balcony of the palace, looking down into the square where people had gathered to see them.

‘At least the people are pleased to see us married. Listen to them cheering,’ said Max.

‘Are they cheering as loudly as they did when you married Eloise?’ Ionanthe couldn’t resist asking cynically. She regretted the words as soon as they had been uttered. They reminded her too sharply of the way she had felt as a child, knowing that their grandfather favoured her sister and always trying and failing to claim some of his attention and approval—some of his love—for herself. Her words had been a foolish mistake. After all, she didn’t want anything from this man who had been her sister’s husband.

‘That was different,’ he answered her quietly.

Different? Different in what way? Different because he had actually loved her wayward sister?

The feeling exploding inside her couldn’t possibly be pain, Ionanthe denied to herself. Why should it be?

The scene down below them was one of pageantry and excitement. The square was busy with dancers in national dress, the Royal Guard in their uniforms—sentries in dark blue, gunners in dark green coats with gold braid standing by their cannons, whilst the cavalry were wearing scarlet. The rich colours stood out against the icing-white glare of the eighteenth-century baroque frontage that had been put on the old castle.

The church clock on the opposite side of the square, which had fascinated her as a child, was still drawing crowds of children to stand at the bottom, waiting for midday to strike and set off the mechanical scenes that took place one after the other. Eloise had always been far more interested in watching the changing of the guard than looking at the clock.

Ionanthe closed her eyes. She and her sister had never been close, but that did not mean she did not feel any discomfort at all at the thought of taking what had been her place. Tonight, when she lay in Max’s arms fulfilling her sacrificial role, would he be thinking of Eloise? Would he be comparing her to her sister and finding her wanting? They would have been well matched in bed, her sister and this man who somehow remained very sensual and male despite the formality of the dress uniform he was wearing. It caused her a sharp spike of disquiet to know that it was his sensuality, his sexuality, that was somehow foremost in her mind, and not far more relevant aspects of his personality.

Max watched the crowd down below them, laughing happily and enjoying themselves as they celebrated their marriage—the same crowd that, according to the Count, would have threatened to depose him if he had not followed the island’s tradition and accepted its cruel ancient laws. Once again he had a wife—this time one who had been blackmailed and forced into marrying him. Max wished he knew Ionanthe better. Eloise had never talked about her sister or to her, as far as Max knew, other than to say that Ionanthe had always been jealous of her because their grandfather had loved her more than he did Ionanthe.

Had he known her better, had he been able to trust her, then he might have talked openly and honestly to her. He might have told her that he loathed the way she had been forced into marriage with him as much as she did herself. Told her that as soon as it was within his power to do so he would set her free. And, had he thought there was the remotest chance that she would understand them, he might have revealed his dreams and hopes for their people to her. But he did not know her, and he could not trust her, so he could say nothing. It was too much of a risk. After all, he had already made one mistake in thinking he could trust her sister.

In the early days of their marriage, when he had still been foolish enough to think that they could work together to create a marriage based on mutual respect and a shared goal, he had talked to Eloise about his plans. She had sulked and complained that he was being boring, telling him that she thought he should let her grandfather and the other barons deal with the people, because all she wanted to do was have fun. Eloise had quickly grown bored with their marriage once she’d realised that he was not prepared to accede to her demands that they become part of the spoiled wealthy and well-born European social circle she loved.

Max had soon come to understand that there was no point in blaming Eloise for his own disillusionment at her shallowness and her adultery. The blame lay with their very different assumptions and beliefs, and the fact that they had each assumed that the other felt as they did about key issues.

Eloise and Ionanthe had been brought up in the same household, and whilst Ionanthe might seem to have very different values from those of her sister, that did not mean that he could trust her. As he had already discovered, the elite of the island—of which Ionanthe was a member—were fiercely opposed to the changes Max wanted to make. Given that, it made sense for him not to say anything to her.

Count Petronius appeared at Max’s elbow. ‘The people are waiting for you to walk amongst them to present your bride to them and receive their congratulations,’ he informed them both.

Max frowned, and told him curtly, ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

Ionanthe drew in a sharp breath on another fierce stab of angry pride. Before she could stop herself she was demanding, ‘I presume that you followed the custom when you married Eloise? That you were happy to present her to the people?’

How many times as a child had she been forced into the shadows whilst her grandfather proudly showed off Eloise? How many times had she been hurt by his preference for her sister? Those he had appointed to care for them had pursed their lips and shaken their heads, telling her that she was ‘difficult’ and that it was no wonder her grandfather preferred her prettier and ‘nicer’ sister. The feelings she had experienced then surged through her now, overwhelming adult logic and understanding. For a handful of seconds her new husband’s unwillingness to present her to the people with pride in their relationship became her grandfather’s cruel rejection of her, and she was filled with the same hurting pain as she had been then.

But analysing logically just why she should feel this angry rush of painful emotion would have to wait until she was calmer. Right now what she wanted more than anything else was recognition of her right to be respected as her sister had been.

Max’s clipped ‘That was different’ only inflamed rather than soothed her anger.

Gritting her teeth, Ionanthe told him fiercely, ‘I will not be humiliated and shamed before the people by being bundled out of sight. I may not be the bride—the wife—of your free choice, but you are the one who has forced this marriage on both of us. In marrying you I have paid my family’s debt to you and to the people. I am now their Princess. They have a right to welcome me as such, and I have a right to that welcome.’

She spoke well and with pride, Max recognised, and maybe the fears he had for her safety amongst a crowd who not so very long ago might have turned on her in fury and revenge were unnecessary. She, after all, would know the people, the way they thought and felt, far better than he.

‘The Princess is right, Highness. The people will expect you both to walk amongst them.’

‘Very well, then,’ Max agreed.

The square was crowded, the air warm from the many food stalls offering hot food. The heavy weight of the gold overdress added to Ionanthe’s growing discomfort as they made their slow and stately progress through the crowd.

Initially, when they had set out from the palace steps, they had been surrounded by uniformed palace guards, but the square was packed with people and gradually they had broken through the ranks of the guards. The people might be enjoying themselves, but Ionanthe couldn’t help contrasting their general air of shabbiness and poverty with the extreme richness of the appearance of those connected with the court—including, of course, herself. Here and there amongst the sea of faces, Ionanthe recognised people from her grandfather’s estate, and a wave of self-revulsion washed over her as she acknowledged that her family was responsible for their poverty. That must change. She was determined on that.