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Ionanthe looked at him, her expression anguished. She desperately wanted to win his trust, but lying was an anathema to her. She hesitated, and then admitted, ‘I did have an ulterior motive, yes. But—’
Max didn’t want to hear any more. He had been a fool to hope that he might be wrong. He turned back towards the door, but Ionanthe moved faster.
‘You will listen to me,’ she told him. ‘Because for the sake of my people I cannot allow you to think what you are thinking. I did have an ulterior motive, yes, but it was not the one of which you are trying to accuse me. This island has a long history of rulers who have abused their position, and its people have suffered as a result. As you have said yourself, they are set in their ways and bound by ancient customs and laws which imprison them in a feudal system that denies their children so very much. I grew up witnessing that. I saw my parents’ attempts to change things, and I saw the power of those who opposed those changes—including my own grandfather. I saw greed and pride and a lack of compassion. And I saw too that what this island needed more than anything else was a ruler strong enough and courageous enough to lead his people to freedom.
‘When I heard that Fortenegro had a new ruler in you, I hoped so much that you would be that man—but then you married my sister, a woman I knew to be rapacious and selfish. Had you married her because you shared her belief that the island existed merely to fund her expensive lifestyle? I wondered. Or did you love her without sharing her views? I knew she did not love you. She wrote to me and said so. But then Eloise loved only herself, and the blame for that lay with our grandfather. I watched to see what changes you might make to benefit the people of Fortenegro, but I could find none. So I compared you with the man I admire more than any other man who walks this earth and I found you wanting.’
Max was shocked by the violent surge of savage male jealousy that gripped him to hear Ionanthe speaking of admiring another man.
In a manner that was completely out of character for him, he demanded contemptuously, ‘And who is this paragon you so admire? Some Brussels eurocrat who makes laws he himself will never have to obey and plays God with other people’s lives?’
Ionanthe’s breath hissed out in furious denial.
‘No. He is not. He is a man who works selflessly for the benefit of others. Through the auspices of the foundation which he heads he has heard and answered the cries of the poor and the sick. He has viewed them with compassion and understood their need. He has provided money for wells for clean water, for schools to educate, for hospitals to heal, for crops to grow and for peace, so that all those who use what he has given them can flourish.’
The passion in her voice showed how she felt, and Max had to look away from her. What she had just told him changed everything—but he could not tell her that.
Ionanthe’s throat hurt, and her eyes ached with the tears she was not going to let Max see.
‘Once it was my dream and my hope that I might work for the Veritas Foundation and learn from such a master. That was not to be, but there is something I can do for the people of Fortenegro, even if it is merely a small shadow of what he has done. Just as he educates the children of today so that they can grow to be to the leaders of tomorrow, I thought that as your wife I could provide Fortenegro with the ruler it so desperately needs.’
‘You planned to convert me to follow the teaching of this…this man you admire so much?’ he suggested.
Ionanthe shook her head.
‘No. I hoped to conceive and raise a son who would be all the things that he will need to be to help this island. That was my hidden agenda in marrying you. No scheming to sell off the minerals that lie beneath the mountains,’ Ionanthe told him on a slightly shaky breath.
She had wanted those last words to sound proud and scornful, but she was miserably aware that in reality they sounded closer to tearful and upset.
Battling through the complex mass of emotions Ionanthe’s speech had aroused in him, for the first time in his life Max simply did not know what to say or do to make things right. He knew what he wanted to say; he knew what he wanted to do. But he also knew that the very last thing Ionanthe would want to hear from him right now was that her hero—the man she admired more than any other, the man she had placed on a pedestal and at whose feet she had openly and proudly confessed she yearned to sit and learn—was no other than himself.
Giving her that news now would hurt her dreadfully. Fiercely Max blinked away the telltale moisture that would have betrayed how much the thought of her pain hurt him.
It wasn’t that he had deliberately set out to deceive her. No, it was simply that it had never occurred to him that it might be necessary for him to tell her about the foundation and his role in it.
He breathed in, and then exhaled.
‘So you agreed to marry me hoping that I would give you a child—a son who, with your guidance, would in time become the ruler you believe the island needs?’
He sounded remarkably accepting of her plan, Ionanthe acknowledged, but instead of reassuring her that only served to increase her hostility and pain.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed.
‘And those times when you lay in my arms, when my body possessed yours, for you it was only because you wanted me to give you my child?’
Ionanthe’s heart bumped treacherously into her ribs. She looked at Max, and then wished she hadn’t.
‘Yes…of course.’ Something about the way in which Max was looking back at her drove her into adding recklessly, ‘What other reason could there be?’
Max’s silence made her nerve-endings prickle with tension.
Please God, don’t let him tell her mercilessly and truthfully that he knew from the minute he had touched her she had had no thoughts in her head for anyone or anything but him and the need he aroused in her.
‘And now—if I have? If you are carrying my child?’
The question
slipped under her guard and made her eyes widen and her heart thud.
