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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.
