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“I am not your bride! I have made no vows, nor will I,” she thawed instantly, stamping her foot in a hot rage.
Mountbane laughed while she remained nearly in tears from frustration.
When he finally calmed, his voice had lost its mockery and was quite courteous, “I’m afraid you’ve been mislead. Once you left your homeland and crossed our borders, an agreement that was signed days after your birth became fully executed. That agreement between your father and mine was signed with blood, binding you and me in a political marriage.”
“That is not true!” she exclaimed unhappily.
“You may check the documents, you know your father’s signature?”
“I do.”
“Then you can inspect them yourself.”
“Why would my father do such a thing?”
“To save himself,” Mountbane’s speech turned disdainful.
She closed her eyes to close him out, while he remained before her, the two wrapped inside a breathless quiet. Not even the mice inside the castle scurried the floors at this thorny moment. When Charlotte’s eyes popped open, she stared into Mountbane’s in perplexed wonder. “Why would you agree to such a marriage, sir?”
He smiled. “Because, Charlotte Castile, my spies have been gazing on you for several years, and finding you a pleasing female specimen, they suggested that I would enjoy your flesh.”
“My flesh and nothing more? Is that all there is to marriage in Ilusia—locked loins and fornication?”
“Hardly. It is gracious servitude for its women and contentment for its men.”
“And you would seek some contentment from me?”
He caught her joke, grinning, though his expression quickly turned grim. “Properly trained, daughter of Castile, you will serve me.”
“Never,” she turned her back on him.
“All this was written years ago,” he spoke plainly. “You can accept it now, or later. If you’re determined to fight me, so be it. But I am determined to win, and so I will. I like you. And even more, I fancy what my metal harness hides between your thighs—the warm fresh dew, the grasping muscle of your channel—and indeed, the puckering rear entrance that will soon gape with desire and drip with my seed.”
“Oh, how you disgust me,” she pulled back horrified.
“Disgust is only a creature of desire, my dear bride.”
“I will not desire you! And I am not your bride!” She turned around to make her point face to face.
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. You already are my bride. Women do not consent, allow, or agree to anything in Ilusia. They submissively accept their status and obey.”
“And if I don’t?”
He shrugged. “Then they are trained to do so.”
“And if not then?”
“There is no alternative,” he replied. Charlotte fixed her eye on him, unwilling to bend, while Mountbane for just a moment seemed truly perplexed. “Am I so ugly that you’re repulsed?” he asked.
“Nay. You aren’t ugly at all. Some women might find you genuinely handsome. But trust me, Lord Mountbane, I cannot look on you with lust, and there will be no love in my heart! I shall never love you!” She was distraught and unwilling to give an inch in her battle.
He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips as though this was some great dilemma for the man. “Perhaps not love. I never expected that. But you will serve me.”
“Hah!”
He snickered and turned away saying to no one, “I fear Caius will have his work ahead of him with my snappish shrew.”
She recalled Tristan’s words, advising her to guard against her shrewishness. But that advice seemed to sway her little now.
