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her eyes and swayed closer to Max, exhaling on a breath that was a siren’s call. But this Ionanthe was not her normal self. This Ionanthe was not prepared to listen to any objections from its alter ego.
    He should resist. Max knew that. This trick of pretended longing and faked intimacy had been one of Eloise’s favourites, and it had been a ploy he had found easy enough to withstand when she’d used it against him. Somehow, though, with Ionanthe things were different. Her lips, soft and warm with natural colour, weresurely shaped for kisses and sensuality. They pillowed the touch of his own, igniting within him a need that roared through him like a forest fire.
    Extreme danger. How often had she heard those words and dismissed them and those who lived to experience it, those who holidayed in places that offered it? Now she could only marvel that they should go to such lengths when all the time it was here, so close at hand, in a man’s arms and beneath the hard pressure of his lips.
    Extreme danger and extreme desire went hand in hand, producing between them an extreme pleasure that was an almost unbearable delight. A delight that was merely a foretaste of what the night that lay before them would hold for her. How could Eloise have wanted someone else when she’d had a husband who could give her this kind of pleasure?
    Eloise! Abruptly Ionanthe pulled back from Max before he could stop her, telling him in a voice designed to conceal the shaky vulnerability she was really feeling, ‘My sister may have welcomed being treated like a sex object, but I don’t.’
    Her angry contempt coming hard on the heels of her earlier eagerness rasped against Max’s already dangerously charged emotions. How the hell had he managed to lose control of himself so easily and so quickly?
    ‘You could have fooled me,’ he responded grimly. ‘In fact I’d have gone as far as to say you were positively…’
    ‘What? Asking for it? Is that what you were going to say?’ Ionanthe rounded on him angrily. ‘How typical of a man like you—but then I suppose I shouldn’t haveexpected anything else. Cosmo was a sexist bully, and you are obviously cut from the same cloth.’
    Her accusation cooled Max’s own anger to sharp-edged ice.
    ‘What I was going to say was that you seemed to be positively enjoying it. But if we’re talking about shared family flaws, then perhaps
I
should have remembered that your sister also had a taste for playing the tease, blowing hot when she wanted something and then blowing cold when it suited her.’
    I am not Eloise
, Ionanthe wanted to say. But she remembered how often her grandfather had distanced himself from her and withheld his love from her with the words, ‘You are not Eloise.’ Instead she picked up her heavy skirts and turned her back on Max as she headed down the empty corridor.

CHAPTER FOUR
    S HE was free now of the presence of the stiffly correct lady’s maid she had needed to help her out of the heavy formality of her wedding gown, alone in the bedroom she would be sharing with her new husband.
    Over the handful of days that had elapsed between Max presenting her with his ultimatum and their marriage Ionanthe had told both Max and the Count that she did not want to be surrounded by ladies-in-waiting or a large staff, and it had eventually been agreed that two ladies-in-waiting would attend her on only the most formal occasions, and that she would have only one personal maid who would attend her only when she needed her.
    It was a relief to be wearing her own clothes again—even if the maid had eyed them with disdain.
    The suite of rooms she was to share with Max had surprised her. She had assumed that he would be occupying the Royal State Apartments, which she remembered from her childhood, but Max had created his own far more modern living quarters in the older part of the building—the castle itself—rather than opting to live inthe seventeenth-century addition of the palace. The