Page 13 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Still, that felt a lot like the wrong question to ask herself just now. Here on a rapidly disappearing tarmac, surrounded by shifting sand on all sides.
And the man who called himselflordof this alien place.
She didn’t look at him. Not yet. She scoured the horizon instead, desperate to find something that whispered of civilizationsomewhere.
But there was nothing.
The endless, pitiless blue sky above. White sands in every direction, rising and falling like hills. Like waves.
Like the end of her, something in her whispered.
Yet that whisper didn’t feeltoo much.It felt something much more likeright.
Which might have been the most frightening thing of all, had she allowed herself to focus on it.
“Beautiful, is it not?” Cyrus intoned in that way of his, as if he was proclaiming it to the skies and sand. Imprinting them with his will.
“I can see how someone might find it beautiful,” Hope hedged. Her lips were already dry and she truly couldn’t tell if that was the desert air or her own mounting panic. “It’s not what I’m used to, I can tell you that. So much sky. And all thatsand.One expects a desert to besandy, of course, but I still feel entirely unprepared for theimmensity—”
She realized she was babbling and stopped herself in the next moment.
Even though it made her throat hurt.
She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, hard, and made herself turn to face Cyrus. To squint at him through all thislight.So much light that the glare of it felt like another source of heat, all on its own and apart from the temperature, scalding her eyes in their sockets.
That seemed as good a reason to feel faintly teary as any.
And looking at the man before her was notsoothing, exactly. Nothing about him wassoothing.He was his own immensity. He stood there, a dark slash of color against all that blue and white. His gaze was near black. His face seemed even more bronze, set against the landscape that pressed in on all sides.
He merely regarded her as if she was the curiosity here. As if she didn’t fit, and she believed it. Because even though he wore a suit, she could tell that he belonged right here in this overwhelming place. That the desert had made him, no matter how many years he’d spent in England.
That he was made of the lonely sands, rolling on forever. That he was too expansive to fit beneath the gray clouds of England, the manicured fields, the old stone walls cutting the land into digestible parcels for too many centuries to count.
He looked like the desert, she thought, and then felt herself flush. Because she was being fanciful and that wasn’t like her at all.
“I think I’m dehydrating as we speak,” she told him, attempting to sound something close enough to cheerful. “In another moment I’ll be a crumbling husk and the breeze will scatter me all over this tarmac until I’m indistinguishable from the sand.”
For a moment Cyrus did not respond, and she thought he wouldn’t. That he would stand here and watch as she blew away before him like dust.
“I do not expect you to appreciate the desert,” he told her, and though his tone was bland enough she could see the faint disapproval all over him. A different sort of disapproval than the kind he’d been aiming at her since they’d met. This was less about vague promises he’d claimed had been made and more abouther.What he clearly saw as the deficiencies in her character, immediately evident in the fact that she was notinstantly in lovewith this stark, terrifyingly empty place. “I expected nothing else.”
“Did you love it at first sight?” she dared to toss right back at him. Maybe it really was the dehydration setting in and collapse was imminent. “When you found yourself here again as a twelve-year-old, was your first reactionjoy?”
His face seemed to harden, becoming more a part of that glare. “My first and only reaction was gratitude that my father saw fit to return me to myself.”
“Really. Not even the briefest moment—”
“But you will have ample time to get used to the sky and the sand,” he continued, something cutting and ruthless in the way he said it. “As you will never leave this desert again.”
That was clearly meant to land like a blow. And maybe it would have, if Hope had been anyone else.
But she had taken far too many blows in her time. Too many to even bother counting. This one didn’t even feel like a blow. It was more like a kiss—
Not that she wanted to think aboutkissingwhen this close to him. In all his...state.
She didn’tquitelaugh, squinting off toward one or other impossible horizon. “Neveris a long time.”
“I told you. You are become my wife, Hope.”
