Christmas Nights: A Bride for His Majesty's Pleasure / Her Christmas Fantasy / Figgy Pudding

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. All he could think, all he knew, was that she was tormenting him to the point where he had to put some distance between them or risk them both facing the consequences.

‘This isn’t a discussion I want to pursue,’ he told her flatly, turning his back on her and heading for the door.

For a second Ionanthe was too frozen with anger and disbelief to say or do anything. But then desperation drove her, and she ran for the door, reaching it ahead of Max and flattening her back against it, her arms outspread as she told him fiercely, ‘That’s not good enough. I won’t be treated like that. I want an answer from you, and I am not going to let you leave this room until I get one.’

Max was so close to her that he could feel the sweet warmth of her breath against his skin. He wanted to close his eyes to blot out her image, but he couldn’t. How ironic it was that, whilst all Ionanthe wanted from him was a clinical and detached act of consummation, her sister had actively wanted to reduce him to wanting her, with all her wiles and coquettish well-used tricks. But she had never once come anywhere near arousing him to one tenth of the desire rampaging through him right now—for Ionanthe. A desire he had to control.

‘Stand aside,’ he commanded Ionanthe, stepping up to her and reaching out to grasp the handle of the door.

‘No,’ Ionanthe refused.

Her denial was all the spark the dry tinderbox of tensions within him needed. Max’s self-control snapped. With one swift movement he imprisoned her against the door, the hand he had previously curled round the door handle now gripping her hip, whilst his other hand pinioned her shoulder.

‘You want an answer? Very well then—let this be your answer,’ Max told her, crushing his mouth down on hers, imprinting the shape and taste of it on her lips just as the weight of his body was imprinting itself against her flesh, forcing her to accept his domination.

This wasn’t what she had wanted—so why was she allowing him to impose the bruising pressure of his kiss on her? How had she moved so quickly from holding the high ground with justifiable anger to this place where she was now, where her whole body was awash with a flood of sensations she didn’t want and he was the one in control?

Somehow she managed to break the kiss, straining back from him, her heart racing from the exertion—the exertion or the excitement? The exertion, of course. He didn’t excite her. How could he? She tried to pull away from him, and for a second, as his hands lifted from her body, she thought she had succeeded. But he didn’t let her get very far.

His hands closed on her shoulders as he swung her round, so that he was the one leaning on the door and somehow or other she was leaning on him—on him and into him—her whole body pressed into his, making her aware of her own flesh and its sexuality in a way that shocked through her like lightning. Why had she never known before that the pressure of a man’s hard muscular chest against her breasts could turn their rounded softness into a mass of sensually receptive nerve-endings? Or that the pump of a male heartbeat lifting its owner’s chest against her could translate into something that her breasts interpreted as a caress, and to which they responded with a fierce ache that tore at her flesh?

That ache sent images into her head that were visually and sensually erotic—images of Max’s dark head bent over her naked body, his lips capturing the flaunting demand of her puckered nipples and drawing on them until her pleasure reached a crescendo that made her want to moan out loud—she could hardly believe that she was experiencing them.

But she was. And she was experiencing too the heavy low drag of need that was filling her lower body as it rested against his, making her want to press closer to him, making her want to grind her hips eagerly against him, making her want. A shudder of wild delight gripped her when Max’s hands slid down to her hips, pulling her even more intimately against him whilst his lips pillaged the vulnerable flesh of her throat.

Something unfamiliar and dangerous slid through her veins, like a heady, intoxicating potion that stripped her of her will to deal in the factual and logical. It carried her with it on a tide that reacted to Max’s maleness with the same kind of magnetic pull that the moon had on the oceans of the world.

He should have stopped before this, Max knew, whilst he had still been able to stop. Now it was too late. He swept Ionanthe up into his arms and carried her towards the bed.

As he placed her on it Ionanthe tried to listen to the inner voice warning her that she was in danger—tried to draw back from him as he started to undress her.

‘You were the one who wanted this,’ Max reminded her as he leaned over her, removed her skirt and then her sweater.

‘Not like this,’ Ionanthe protested.

Not like what?

He was kissing her again, nuzzling her throat, stringing kisses against it so delicate and yet so sensual that they dizzied her senses and robbed her of any ability to verbalise her true feelings. Instead she was arching her throat, offering it up to him and then shuddering in mute pleasure when the heat of his mouth became more possessive.

His hands on her bra had somehow become an aid, an ally, understanding her need to be clothed only by his touch. But Max seemed more disposed to linger over the silky underwear that was her one concession to the demands of her femininity rather than remove it speedily. Her frustration grew.

Through the fine silk of her underwear Max could see the dark thrust of Ionanthe’s nipples, and the even darker softness of the hair covering her sex. She dressed so primly on the outside that to see her clothed in such a way underneath was somehow unbearably erotic. Was it possible that her outwardly cold manner could conceal a passionate heat? Desire kicked fiercely through him at the thought of her meeting and matching him in the white-hot conflagration of shared need. He kissed the exposed upper slope of her breast, savouring the sweetness of her flesh, slowly easing away the silk until he could stroke his tongue-tip against her nipple.

Ionanthe cried out sharply, the sound torn from her in response to the shockingly intense stab of pleasure that pierced her, lifting her from the bed to arch against Max’s mouth. Her hand rose to cup the back of his head, her fingers curling into the thickness of his hair as she gave herself up to the hot pleasure his mouth was spilling through her. In response his hand covered her sex, probing the barrier of fragile silk and lace that was no barrier at all, slipping beyond it to find the warm wetness that waited for him.

The late afternoon light slipped away into darkness without Ionanthe being aware of the passage of time. She was capable only of measuring time by the acceleration of the growing ache of need that had possessed her. The whole purpose of her life, what she had been born for, had become distilled into this concentration of her entire being, so that it could be given up to the moment that would create life even while everything she had thought she was fell away and burned, dying in the conflagration of creating that spark of new life.

These thoughts and many others whirled inside her head kaleidoscope-like, meaning nothing. Her thoughts were incapable of doing anything to bring to a halt what she herself had set in motion, and nor did she want them to.

But this was not a time for thinking. It was a time for feeling, for knowing, for believing, for giving herself up to the sensation of Max’s hands and lips on her body. Every part of her pulsated with the urge for completion that was driving her. Every nerve-ending within her was so sensitised to and by his caresses that she felt that he could take her no higher, that the moment of culmination was there, a mere tantalising half a breath out of reach.

But Max would not allow her that culmination. By some alchemic force and power surely only he alone possessed he drew the fine skein of thread linking her to her desire higher and tighter, to her gasped litany of pleas and protests. Ignoring her plea to him not to torment her any further, he continued to prove to her that she was wrong and that he could. With the deliberate and lingering stroke of his tongue-tip against the pulsing thrust of flesh that was her sex and the intimate caress of his fingers within her he brought her time and time again to the point where the release she wanted was within reach—only to change his caresses to a gentler pace, brushing butterfly wing kisses against her inner thighs whilst he stroked the soft flesh there, keeping her at an unbearable pitch of need whilst refusing to satisfy it.

He couldn’t hold out much longer, Max acknowledged as he tried to separate his body from his mind and ignore the furious clamour and the almost physical pain of his self-denial. He ached with every cell he possessed to slide himself fully and deeply into the warm eager wetness Ionanthe was so eagerly offering him and take them both to orgasm. But he couldn’t; not yet. Not until he was sure she was ready to give him what he had to have.

The winter sunlight had long ago given way to the silvery light of the rising moon, painting Ionanthe’s body in silver and charcoal. She would make a magnificent subject for an artist’s eye, he thought. Her hair a dark tumbling mass around her shoulders, the bone structure beneath her skin delineated by the stardust silver brush on her shoulder, her hip, her thigh, whilst her flesh itself was moonlight-pale, her nipples charcoal-rose and the secret places of her body an inviting velvety night-sky-dark.

He wanted to lose himself completely with her and within her. No woman had ever made him feel like this, want like this, need like this—but no other woman had made him question her purpose and her beliefs either. Because no other woman had been important enough for him to have such feelings.

The sensual intimacy he was using against Ionanthe was a two-edged sword, Max recognised. He might be breaking down her contemptuous claim that for her sex between them could only be a cold, clinical matter, but in doing so he was creating within himself an emotional awareness of her, a closeness to her that could run totally counter to his determination to put his people and their needs before anything else.

He was creating problems where none needed to exist, Max told himself. This was a one-off—a response to the challenge Ionanthe had thrown at him.

He bent his head and painted slow, sensual circles of erotic delight on Ionanthe’s inner thigh, drawing the thread of her desire even tighter. Helpless to stop herself, Ionanthe reached down between her parted thighs to cup the back of Max’s head, unable to tell whether she wanted to keep him where he was or urge him to return and repeat the earlier, previously unknown intimacy he had shown her. She knew only that she could not bear it if he withdrew from her.

But he did, lifting his head to look at her through the moonlit darkness to demand softly, ‘So tell me now, Ionanthe, whilst you are still capable of saying the words and I am rational enough to hear them, how do you really prefer your sex? Cold and clinical? Or like this? Which is best?’

His touch stroked slowly, warmly, wetly the length of her, and then rested firmly against her clitoris before once more he lifted his head for her answer.

He hadn’t said that this would be the end—an end that would be no end at all since it would leave her gripped by agonising need—but the fear that that was what he had in mind was enough for her body to command her brain.

‘This is best,’ she admitted, closing her eyes as her body forced aside her pride, making her lips form words she had never thought she would utter. ‘You are the best,’ she added helplessly. “I have nev—’ She gasped and cried out—a low, guttural sound of aching pleasure as Max responded to her initial admission with the slow, powerful, deep thrust of his body within her own.

How could something so primitive, so basic, designed by nature and not the human mind, meet so perfectly the needs of flesh and the senses? Ionanthe wondered dizzily, instinctively tightening her muscles around the slick, hot male flesh that was not just filling her but stroking into her, receiving back from her a growing urgency. But then whilst nature might have provided the ingredients for her pleasure, it was Max who had taken them and honed them.

The climb grew steeper, making demands on her she had never known existed. Ionanthe fought for breath, for the strength to endure—and for purchase, so as not to lose her place on the sharp incline.

The summit was there, within reach—so dazzlingly beautiful, so immortal, so achingly needed that its promise brought the sting of tears to her eyes. And somehow he knew, even through his own journey. Just for a beat of time she wavered, half afraid of reaching the pinnacle, knowing that once she did she must fling herself headlong into its glory and give up all her sense of self. And then Max was there, whispering to her. ‘Now…’ His hand reached for hers, his fingers entwining with hers, holding her safe as the moment came and together they defied time and mortality. Together…

As the force of the moment shook her body, the knowledge burned into Ionanthe’s spirit that in those final seconds, with the peak so close and yet not reached, all she had wanted—all she had ached and yearned for—was to reach it with Max. Not one thought had she had for the son for whom she had married Max and begun the journey they had just completed. Not one thought had she given to the people. Her sacrifice of self had not been for them but instead for the need that had burned in her for the man who was now holding her.

‘Max?’

The sound of his name, spoken in a voice drenched with a heart-aching mix of emotions, had Max drawing Ionanthe closer to him, covering her body with the protective warmth and strength of his own in the same way that he suddenly longed to cloak her emotions and keep her from pain. He had driven her hard, fuelled by anger to punish her for the damage she had done to his pride, but now, rather than flaunt his triumph to her, he wanted instead to protect her.

As he held her Max felt Ionanthe slip into sleep, her breathing becoming even and soft against his skin. Very carefully and gently he detached himself from her, stilling when in her sleep she frowned, as though reluctant to let him go. He continued when she didn’t wake. There were things he had to do, duties he had to perform, responsibilities he could not and should not evade.

CHAPTER SIX

SOMETHING sweetly juicy was moistening her dry lips, causing her to part them the better to taste it. The pleasurable sensation woke Ionanthe from her sleep.

Fresh peach! A luxury in December, and grown, she remembered, in the hothouses of the summer palace, built in the eighteenth century on the site where centuries before the Moorish rulers of the island had also taken advantage of the most southerly facing coastline of Fortenegro to cultivate dates and grow peaches.

A more concerned and less selfish ruler would have used that fertile and protected land for the good of his people, rather than himself, ordering that the land be turned over to the production of fruit and vegetables for the export markets of Northern Europe. It was equally selfish of her to enjoy the taste of something grown only for the pleasure of one selfish man. But her mouth was dry, and the scent of the fruit as well as its taste was tormenting her senses. Slowly, Ionanthe opened her eyes.

Beyond the windows the sky was still night-dark, but now in the room beyond the bedroom a fire burned in the modern central fireplace, throwing out from its flames soft colour and warmth.