All the more so when he had spent the last eight nights avoiding coming anywhere near it—because he couldn’t trust his own self-control to prevent him from reacting to the dangerous mix of fierce anger and equally fierce sexual desire she aroused in him, Max recognized. But it was too late for him to regret that error now. He could hardly have ignored it, after all—not when she had delivered it so very publically, via his aide de camp. What did she want? he wondered. Money? Jewellery? Her sister had asked for both those things and more. He thought angrily of the obvious and pitiful poverty of that group of men who had been prepared to risk their lives, if necessary, for the sake of Ionanthe’s honour. ‘Yes,’ Ionanthe confirmed. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Max. She didn’t trust herself to do so. They had been married for just over a week—eight days, in fact, and eight long, humiliating nights. All of which she had spent alone in a bed that was obviously designed to accommodate two people—the bed that she was determined not to look at now, even though its presence in the room dominated her thoughts almost as much as Max’s absence from it had dominated them during these last eight days of a marriage that was in effect no marriage at all.
