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palace steps. She welcomed the peace of its stone interior after the busyness of the square. Her dress had become uncomfortably heavy and her head had started to ache. The reality of what she had done had begun to set in, filling her with a mixture of despair and panic. But she mustn’t think of herself and her immediate future, she told herself as she started to climb the stone steps that she knew from memory led to a corridor that connected the old castle to the more modern palace.
    She had almost reached the last step when somehow or other she stepped onto the hem of her gown, the accidental movement unbalancing her and causing her to stumble. Max, who was several steps below her, heard the small startled sound she made and raced up the stairs, catching her as she fell.
    If she was trembling with the fragility of new spring buds in the wind then it was because of her shock. If she felt weak and her heart was pounding with dangerous speed then it was because of the weight of her gown. If she couldn’t move then it was because of the arms that imprisoned her.
    She had to make him release her. It was dangerous to be in his arms. She looked up at him, her gaze travelling the distance from his chin to his mouth and then refusing to move any further. What had been a mere tremor of shock had now become a fiercely violentshudder that came from deep within her and ached through her. She felt dizzy, light-headed, removed from everything about herself she considered ‘normal’. She had become, instead, a woman who hungered for something unknown and forbidden.
    Was this how her sister had felt with those men, those strangers, she had delighted in taking to her bed? Hungering for something she knew she should not want? It was a disturbing thought. She had always prided herself on being different from Eloise, on having different values from the sister, whose behaviour she had never been able to relate to and had privately abhorred.
    It was because her heart was racing so fast that his own had started to pound heavily, Max told himself. It was because the walls either side of the steps enclosed them that he was so conscious of the scent of her hair and her skin. It was because he was a man and she was a woman that his body was flooded with an unwanted surge of physical arousal that had him tightening his hold on her.
    He wanted her, Max knew. The knowledge rushed over him and through him, possessing him as he ached to possess her, threatening to carry with it every moral barrier and code that should have held it back. Why? It was illogical, unfathomable, the opposite of so much about himself he had believed unchangeable. He felt as though he had stepped outside his own skin and become a hostage to his own need in a way that filled him with mental distaste and rejection. Yet at the same time his body renewed its assault on those feelings as though it was determined to have its way.
    To travel so far and in such an unfamiliar direction so unexpectedly and in so short a space of time had robbed him of the ability to think logically, Max decided.
    An aeon could have passed, or merely a few seconds. She was quite unable to judge the difference, Ionanthe admitted, because she was too caught up in the maelstrom of sensations and emotions that had somehow been created out of nothing and which were still controlling her. And would probably continue to control her for as long as Max was holding her. She was quite literally spellbound, and he was the one who had cast that spell, binding her senses to his will, forcing from them a response she would never willingly have given him, stirring up within her a dark mystery of maddening longing that had seized and held captive her ability to think or reason.
    All she knew was that his lips were only a sigh away from her own. All she wanted to know was the possession of them on her own. There was nothing else in this moment but him.
    The normal Ionanthe—the Ionanthe she knew—would never have closed