Page 9 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
He didn’t like how rational that was. “And so instead you simply...accept your lot? I had no idea you were so meek, Hope. I find myself even more deeply amazed that you took it upon yourself to break the contract between your family and mine.”
She took a moment to study him then, and he should have found that satisfying. Surely, at any moment, he would see a dawning awareness break over her features. Then it would begin, he told himself. She would beg him for mercy. He would give it, though he did not intend to forgive her.
“Forgiveness is for the weak,”his father had thundered at him, again and again.
Which was not to say Cyrus did not wish to hear her excuses, for he did.
But instead she only lifted a shoulder, a gesture so disrespectful that she was lucky that his men were not here to see it.
“I know of no contract between your family and mine,” she told him. Dismissively, if his ears did not deceive him. “But then again, I don’t know who your family is. Still, if there were contracts lying about, I would have seen them. Assuming when you saymy familyyou mean my father.” Then she laughed. “What I’m certain of is that no one attempted to make a contract with my mother. For anything. Might as well throw stones at the moon, and between you and me, you’d getter better results that way.”
Though she sounded almost...indulgent, to his ears.
“I have told you who I am.” And there was something in Cyrus then, far more wintry and frozen than a man of the desert should have been capable of. “My father was Lord of the Aminabad Desert before me, though I believe he was more commonly known as King Hades in your gutter press.”
“King Hades.” She repeated the name, then blinked. And then, as he had known she would, she sat up straighter, her head cocking to one side. “You don’t mean that you...? That you are...?”
“The one and only,” Cyrus replied coldly, though he could admit there was a certain satisfaction that, at last, she knew him.
“But you had a different name. You were not calledCyrus Ashkan. You were known instead as—”
“I am, according to some, Justin Arthur Cyrus George. Then a viscount. Now an earl, or so I am told.”
She was already nodding along, looking more animated than she had since he’d stormed down that aisle in an Italian church and removed her from that wedding that should never have taken place.
“Viscount Highborough,” Hope breathed. “Earl Alcott. I know that story. Everyone knows that story.” But she seemed to think she should tell it to the person who knew it best, sitting up and leaning forward. “Your mother was one of the great supermodels of her time and also happened to be from the British aristocracy. Her face was everywhere—until she met your father at some event and they fell madly and instantly in love. He swept her off into his desert kingdom, and everyone expected them to live happily ever after. But they didn’t. She only stayed there for a little while. A year? Two?”
“Five,” Cyrus corrected her softly.
“And then, when they were back in England visiting her family, she ran off with the King’s baby.” Hope blinked, presumably because she recalled who she was speaking to. “You.”
“Me,” he agreed.
“I don’t really know what happened then. But it was years, wasn’t it?”
“I was four,” Cyrus told her, his voice as even as he could make it, though he could not imagine why revisiting these memories should affect him. Why those old songs should move in him again, when he would have told himself he’d long since forgot the melodies. “For the first year after my mother left him, running off under cover of night, my father attempted to fight her out in the open. But she came from a very old family. She was the only child of the old Earl and thanks to him, there was no relief to be found in an English court.”
“What did he do?”
“He waited. Because what my mother did not understand is that the people of the desert do not recognize time. There is only sand. Sun. And stone that is slowly and inexorably washed away by the exposure. I was twelve when my father and his men liberated me from captivity.”
“That’s not quite how I heard the story told,” she said, and Cyrus could not place her tone. It sounded almost... But no. Who would pity a king? “They kidnapped you. It became an international incident.”
“There were those who wished for to become such a thing, yes,” Cyrus agreed. “But it is one thing to sit in the concrete streets of London and declare this or that to stir up the British populace. It is something else again to find one’s way through the treacherous Aminabad sands. No one managed to do so. My father kept me hidden for six more years so that my mother could enjoy being without her child the way that he had been forced to do.”
“That sounds difficult.” But there was something about the way she said that, as if her sympathies were not where they should have been.
“It was just,” he told her. “And when I was of age, I could do as I pleased without worrying about being kidnapped by my mother. I returned to that cold island so that I too could enjoy this education that men must have to convince other, lesser men that they are equals.”
“I saw a documentary about it,” she said quietly. “Your mother’s position is that your father poisoned you against her.”
“She is the poison,” Cyrus retorted, mildly enough. “As I told her myself before I started university in England, the better to disabuse her of any fantasies that we might enjoy some sort of reunion. But as long as she poisons only herself with it, what should I care? I know the truth of things. But my mother’s deficiencies are not the point of telling this tale, Hope. I require neither your sympathy nor your concern.”
“Noted,” she said, but her expression was nothing but smooth when he frowned at her.
He pushed on. “While I was at Oxford, my father and I agreed that it would be a work of strategic importance to put to rest, once and for all, the notion that my father’s quarrel with my mother was my country’s quarrel with England.”
“That makes sense.” She shrugged, and he thought her deeply unserious, which he would have told her if he’d imagined she’d take it as the insult it was. But she was too languid, waving that hand as she did. “Nobody likes a quarrel.”
