Page 11 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
It was almost funny. Truly, she almost laughed, because if she’d had the faintest notion that there was someone she could have run to she would have done it ages ago.
But Cyrus Ashkan was far tooelementalto appreciate a bit of helpless laughter, she was betting. Particularly if it was at his own expense.
“If you believe that I betrayed you, then I don’t understand why you would go to the trouble of ruining my wedding today,” she pointed out. Very reasonably, to her mind. “You’re well shot of me, I would have thought.”
“This is your response?” He looked relaxed in the seat across from her, though that fire in his dark gaze told a different tale. “This is another inappropriate attempt at humor, I can only assume. Do you believe that this kind of defiance will be tolerated?”
“Until about ten minutes ago, I didn’t even know who you were,” she reminded him, gently enough. “I haven’t given a lot of thought to what it is you will or won’t tolerate.” She shrugged—partially because the last time she had done it, his eyes had widened. As if he’d never seen such a thing in all his days. “Anyway, I can’t be responsible for a promise or a contract or a handshake I didn’t know anything about. My father never mentioned it or you. So, I’m sorry? I guess?”
And there was something about the way he stared at her then. Some level of unholy fury though he sat perfectly still.
Too still, something in her whispered.
As if his was the stillness of a great predator, a scant moment before it attacked. All that focus. All thatintensity.And the scope of what was about to happen already visible in that dark gaze, if she dared look close enough—
Hope found herself holding her breath, wanting things she could not name, but he did not come for her.
Not then.
She told herself she was relieved, not disappointed, when instead he rose from his seat. Then stepped away, moving toward the back of the plane to speak in a language she didn’t understand with his ever-watchful men.
The men she could admit she’d forgotten were even here.
Hope assured herself that her stomach wasfine, not madly flipping this way or thatat all, and settled further into her seat. Because she still couldn’t think what, exactly, she should do otherwise. Despite the amount of action films she’d watched in her time, she doubted very much that a person who didn’t have the slightest idea how a plane worked could land one.
And Hope needed to make sure she did not crash, nor get too caught up in the palm of Cyrus’s hand or whatever he’d been going on about, because she still needed to save her mother.
As always, there was that...grief and helpless adoration inside her every time she thought about Mignon. Every time she thought about the past few years and how she’d been so sure her wedding would make it so they were both happy again—
But then, maybe that was why she wasn’t reacting to this abduction the way she should have been. The way anyone else would have been, surely. This was the first time since her father had died that Hope could say, with complete honesty, that there was absolutely nothing she could do to solve this or fix this or make it better.
She couldn’twork harderand come up with any sort of solution here. She couldn’tthink out of the boxand make something happen. There was nothing todo.Sooner or later the plane would land. And maybe then she would feel slightly less relieved than she did now. Maybe she would feel fear. Or the stirrings of temper to paper it over. Maybe then she would once again take up the great worry she always usually felt about Mignon.
Maybe then she would ask herself how, precisely, this controlling man would let her care for her mother when he famously liked his own so little.
But her stomach was pleasantly full, no matter how he might have looked at her like a great bigthingabout to pounce. And the drone of the plane’s engines was like white noise, lulling her as she sat there, letting the adrenaline drain right out of her.
And for once, there was literally nothing she could do for her mother except love her as she always did.
She would have to come up with something a bit more concrete once they landed.
Her eyelids grew heavier and heavier, or maybe it was that she could hear Cyrus’s raspy growl of a voice from the back of the plane, so commanding, so intense, even using words she couldn’t comprehend.
Either way, before she knew it, she had fallen asleep.
And then came awake again in a jolting hurry some time later—
Only to realize that it wasn’t reallyjolting, it was the plane bumping along a deserted runway as it came in for a landing. Controlled jolting, anyway.
Hope was aware of too many things at once. The light, pouring in through the plane’s windows, so much brighter and hotter than anything she’d ever seen. She squinted out the windows to get a sense of where she was, but there was...nothing.
At first she thought it was an optical illusion, but then she realized. This was the desert. The blue sky above, the endless, undulating sand like some kind of sea, and nothing else.
In all directions, that samenothing.
And then there was Cyrus besides, standing in the aisle above her seat and looking at her with an expression she could not pretend to read.
“Oh,” Hope murmured, scrubbing at her face with the heels of her hands. “I guess I fell asleep. That tracks. I haven’t been doing much of that lately either.”
