Free Christmas Nights by Penny Jordan

rooted in the past, in which the male head of the family held absolute control. It would take a man to change that—a very strong, very aware, very courageous man. A son.
Her
son. A man who would be enlightened enough to change things for his people.
    Despite her own lack of any need to be a sexually desired woman, there was still the undeniable fact that Max’s very public rejection of her had left her feeling humiliated. Theirs was not, after all, a ‘normal’marriage. As the island’s ruler Max had to live very much in the public eye, and as his wife so did she. It would have been easy enough to bear if only
she
had known about her husband’s sexual rejection of her, but of course the rest of the court was bound to know. Ionanthe hadn’t missed the sympathetic looks her maid had been giving her every morning for the last eight mornings. The fact that everyone knew that Max had married her because he needed a son, and yet had not consummated their marriage shamed and insulted her, turning her into a laughing stock. She was not prepared to tolerate the situation any longer.
    Max could feel his muscles, in fact his whole body, tensing against Ionanthe’s presence, whilst at the same time his senses strained to absorb as much of it and her as they could. The room smelled of her, of the scent she always wore, which somehow he had learned to search for in the rooms from which she herself was absent. In the long, aching reaches of the empty nights it had tormented him, conjuring up for him images of it cloaking her skin and scenting the darkness until he’d felt he was being driven close to madness by the folly of his own savage hunger for her. How had it come to this? How was it possible for him to want her so deeply and so compulsively?
    Max didn’t have the answer to that question. The manner in which his physical hunger for her suspended all that was rational and normal for him was something he couldn’t analyse to any satisfactory conclusion. Not that he hadn’t tried; he had. And in the end all he’d been able to tell himself was that the desire that burned insidehim was simply the result of some primitive male instinct within himself that had been unleashed by her behaviour towards him.
    He had been with his personal aide, the son of one of the island’s barons when Ionanthe’s lady-in-waiting had brought the message that Ionanthe wished to speak with him, so it had been impossible for him to ignore it.
    Ionanthe took a deep breath and, still keeping her back to the bed, began. ‘Your absence from our marital bed has humiliated me and made me the subject of court gossip.’
    Max fought to control his body’s reaction to her words. Only he knew how hard it had been for him to keep to his decision not to give in to his growing desire for her. He would not partner her in the kind of cold and clinical intercourse she had described to him as the manner in which she wished to consummate their marriage. He would not, or did he fear that he
could
not? Max was forced to ask himself. Wasn’t it true that he was staying away from the bed they should have shared because he was afraid that if he did share it with her he would not be able to control the desire she aroused in him? The fact that she should arouse that desire was difficult enough for him to come to terms with, without having to add his concern that he would not be able to control it. It had, after all, come out of nowhere, with such speed and power that it had left him punch-drunk, reeling and, worst of all, feeling that he could no longer trust his own carefully set inner controls. No woman had ever affected him as Ionanthe did. No woman had ever aroused him to such a pitch of aching need combined with furious anger—
    severing him from the man he had always thought himself to be when it came to sexual needs. That man had been willing to follow his partner’s wishes, been very careful to keep the emotional temperature on merely warm. That man had