A Bride for His Majesty s Pleasure

‘Quarrel all you want with him in the privacy of your bedroom,’ Ariadne continued bluntly. ‘There you and him can be just like everyone else. But don’t you go forgetting that he’s our Prince and you’re his wife. The people have expectations of you.’

Ionanthe gave in. ‘What is it you’re trying to say, Ariadne?’

‘I’m saying that your place isn’t here in this kitchen, sulking like a child—those days are gone. You should be up on that mountainside, showing yourself as our Princess. It’s what the people expect, even if His Highness himself doesn’t.’

Ariadne had a point. Her people wouldn’t understand why she wasn’t there. Her absence would hurt them, and she had neither the wish nor the right to do that.

She looked at her watch, and as though Ariadne had read her mind the cook told her, ‘You’ve still got time. Tomas won’t start the race without you being there.’

Ionanthe gave her a grim look, recognising that she had been manipulated and outmanoeuvred.

It was crisp and fresh on the snowy ridge above the steep slope down which the home-made sleds would race. In his teens Max had been a keen winter sportsman, so he was no stranger to the cold and the snow. No stranger to that, but a stranger here nonetheless. An outsider, a man obliged to stand alone, without the woman he loved. Instinctively he looked towards the castle. Only he knew how alone he felt, and how painful that feeling was. How much he wished things were different and he could be free to give all his time and energy to showing Ionanthe how much he loved her.

Ionanthe spotted Max immediately, in a group of men clustered together at the starting point.

‘It was lucky I had your father’s ski suit stored away,’ Ariadne had told Ionanthe earlier. ‘The Prince is taller than your father, though.’

Her father’s old black racing suit now outlined the breadth of Max’s shoulders. Ionanthe knew that there hadn’t been a single heart’s breath of a second when she had looked at the men from a distance and not known exactly which one he was long before she’d recognised the suit.

She started to walk faster as she climbed the last few yards of the incline.

Those planning to take part in the race had already claimed their sleds from the waiting pile, and the children were watching excitedly as their fathers and elder brothers prepared themselves. The race should have started already, and the children were getting impatient.

One father was smiling at the baby held tight in its mother’s arms. An unfamiliar feeling tugged at Ionanthe’s heart. The father looked so proud, the mother so lovingly indulgent. It was a matter of great pride and respect to these people that the head of the family showed his bravery and skill on an occasion like this one.

Something made her lift her head and look again to where Max was standing. When she saw he was looking back at her, that he must have been watching her, her heart rolled over inside her chest as fiercely as though it was about to start an avalanche.

She loved him so much.

Her breath made small puffs of white vapour on the cold air as she climbed.

She had almost reached him when a sudden anxious cry went up, and a small boy—no more than five or six years old, Ionanthe guessed, who must have been sitting on his father’s sled—suddenly somehow dislodged the sled, which began to rush down the mountainside with him clinging to it.

The course was fast and dangerous, and for that reason the race was forbidden to children. A wave of horror gripped them all for a split second, and then, before anyone else could react, Max dropped down onto his sled and kicked off in pursuit of the little boy.

Ionanthe had watched the race many times, and always admired the skill of the contestants, but never with her heart in her mouth like this, or her partisanship for one man’s skill so strong.

Max steered the sled more skilfully than she had ever seen anyone do, Ionanthe acknowledged as she joined in the concerted gasp the onlookers gave as he raced downhill in pursuit of the child. The boy was clinging precariously to his own sled, heading right for the darkly dangerous outcrop of rocks that lay outside the formal lines of the run.

Max would never catch the boy in time, and he too would end up crashing into the rocks. Ionanthe felt sick with dread for them both. What woman watching the man she loved risk his life in such a fashion would not feel as she did now? Her heart leapt into her throat as somehow Max expertly spun his sled sideways across the snow.

He was going to try to cut off the other sled—put himself between it and the rocks. He would never be able to do it—and if he did then the extra weight of the little boy would take Max crashing right into them, the child’s life spared at the cost of his own.

‘No!’ Her denial was torn from her lungs on an agonised cry, and then, just when she feared the worst, somehow Max managed to intercept the other sled and turn it so that it was running alongside his own.

The rocks were so dreadfully close, and getting closer. Max was reaching for the little boy, pulling him off his sled and into his arms, then rolling off his own sled so that he became a human snowball.

Other men were racing down the hill towards them. Ionanthe wanted not to have to watch, not to have to see Max’s beautiful body lying still and unmoving in the snow. But she couldn’t not look—just as she couldn’t stop herself from following the men’s headlong flight down the steep slope, falling herself a couple of times, only to pick herself up and then wade knee-deep through the snow in her desperation to get to Max.

Incredibly, when she did get there, when she flung herself down in the snow next to his inert body, Ionanthe realised that she was in fact the first to reach him.

Whilst her tears fell unheeded on his snow-frosted face and eyelashes, the small boy he was still holding wriggled out of his grip, wide-eyed and unbelievably unharmed, to be snatched up in the arms of his father who had reached them within seconds of Ionanthe.

A firm strong hand—Max’s hand—grasped Ionanthe’s and held it. Max’s eyes opened and he smiled at her. The voices of the men gathering round them faded as Ioanthe clung to Max’s hand, Max’s gaze. She was only able to say tremulously, ‘You’re alive. I thought…’ The weight of what she had thought brought fresh tears.

Max lifted his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding hers, and brushed them away, telling her tenderly, ‘You mustn’t cry. Your teardrops will freeze.’

‘I thought you were going to be killed.’