Page 22 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Cyrus Ashkan did not strike her as a man who wished to soften his senses. For any reason. Because he was clearly a man who gloried in his control over himself and everything around him.
Not because he feared that others might use his dulled senses to take advantage—which was why Hope never touched alcohol. She couldn’t imagine what might have become of her over the past few years if she’d indulged.
Cyrus did not look at her when he spoke. “I cannot think why you would trouble yourself with fruitless worries about your mother. I’m not certain that she has ever thought of anyone but herself in the whole of her life.”
And Hope was still living her way through a very long, very strange day. It was hard to fathom that just this morning, she’d been close to tearing out her hair over her mother in a villa in Lake Como, as ever.
But she had spent hours upon hours since in the most outrageously decadent spa of all time. If this was what harems were like, she kept thinking as she was handed from one marvelous treatment to the next, then it was clear that she’d been sold a pack of lies her entire life. Because this harem was delightful.
She’d been massaged until her muscles felt like butter. She been fussed over at every turn. The little sting of this or that treatment had been quickly soothed away. She been bathed and then oiled, her hair brushed and styled, and when all that was finished they’d topped off the experience by wrapping her in the finest silk she’d ever felt against her skin.
Hope had never felt so nurtured in her life.
And maybe that was why she found herself thinking about her mother with all her usual sympathy, but now mixed in with an instant desire to defend her. Becauseshemight think any number of things about her mother’s failings.Shemight spend all the time she liked totting up Mignon’s shortcomings, because she did all of that with love.
Hope really didn’t want to hear these things from anyone else.
Especially not a kidnapper.
“My mother was raised to be a trinket,” she told him, feeling less languid. More serious. Maybe even something like vulnerable, though she was sure that wasn’t wise. “My grandparents were very old-school, by all accounts, and they taught her that her job, her single purpose on this earth, was to be pretty. To make everyone around her gaze upon her like she was a lovely piece of art and expect nothing of her except that she should sit on her shelf and be looked upon. So that was what she did.”
She felt as if her voice filled the night around them, calling down the tangle of stars above. Making the desert night feel like an embrace shot through with just enough starlight, like inverted candles, so everything was a part of that same fire.
And Cyrus was looking at her intently—maybe too intently—so she continued. “My father adored her. He loved her at first sight and every time he looked at her thereafter, he loved her more. Or so he told everyone he encountered.” She swallowed then, because this part was harder. More complicated. “And when he died, she didn’t know what to do. On an epic scale. She has spent the years since trying to find someone else who understands her particular provenance. And who will want to treat her as my father did. But the trouble is, she can’t tell the difference between a man who only wants to look at a pretty thing for an evening or two and the kind of man who will make her the centerpiece of his world. His first, best collection, if you will. So it’s been one heartbreak after the next.”
“Heartbreak is one word for it, yes,” he said, his voice colder than should have been possible for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that they were in the desert. “I know a little something about women who are considered nothing more than adornments. I cannot say that there is much to them behind the scenes. My own mother was hardly an exemplary human, so determined was she to keep me away from my birthright. She would have done better to pay more attention to the sort of trinket she was meant to be, I think.”
Hope did not follow that up the way she wanted to, by pointing out that he had an entire other birthright he chose to ignore, back there in England with that mother he seemed to loathe so much. Somehow she understood that he would not be open to the subject.
“You can call it whatever you want. Heartbreak or otherwise, it doesn’t change anything. She is who she is. But she still isn’t any good on her own, you see, and she needs me to take care of her. That’s the only promise I made my father before he died. It was part of my agreement with Lionel.” She looked for some softening on Cyrus’s face of sheer, impassive bronze, but there was nothing. She might as well have turned her face the other way entirely, so she could stare out into the desert. It was about as soft and inviting. “I was prepared to act the part of his wife to cater to his grandmother’s wishes if he made sure that my mother was taken care of for the rest of her life. It was an easy exchange.”
And it seemed easier now, so far away from having to enact it. So far away from that little chapel and the man who had glowered with annoyance as she’d drawn near. And who had still been the best of all the options available to her.
She’d considered that wedding, that man, hertriumph.
And Hope wasn’t sure that she would call this any sort of victory, this odd so-called wedding she’d had on a sandy tarmac today. But at least the way Cyrus looked at her did not suggest that he wasannoyed.“That is not what I will require from you,omri,” he said.
Again, there was that sardonic inflection when he said that word.Omri.She had said it herself in the baths earlier and one of the women had sighed as if it was romantic, then whispered,my life.
Hope had not had the heart to tell her that she thought the King meant it a bit more like a life sentence.
“I cannot abide acting,” he was saying. “Or falsehoods of any kind.”
“And according to you, you’ve already announced that I am your wife and that makes it as legal as any contract I could sign.”
He looked as close to amused as she’d seen him so far. “More legal than any such document, for I am certainly considered a far more trustworthy source than your average barrister.”
But marrying a man had always been her leverage. The worry for Mignon that had been kicking around inside her—if tamped down by an unexpected spa afternoon—seemed to intensify, then. It bloomed throughout her like a new rash altogether.
“Tell me what I need to do to make sure that my mother has what she needs,” she said, and tried to force a smile. Not well, if his expression was any guide. “You’ve already gone ahead and kidnapped me. You’ve already carried me off to your lair, conveniently located in the middle of a desert. Tell me what it is I can give you. What it is that youwantfrom me.”
And for what seemed like a small eternity, there was only the starlight. The matching intensity in his midnight gaze.
Thegiftshe’d mentioned earlier seeming to simmer there between them.
“You must realize that I can take anything and everything I want, if I so wish,” he said, very quietly.
But she didn’t tense up at that, or get scared. Mostly because shewasn’tscared, she realized in the next moment, the way she would have been upon hearing similar statements from other men—and it was because he wasn’t other men.
