Page 12 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
“None of that matters,” he intoned from on high.
Hope found herself sitting up a bit straighter, though she couldn’t have said why she thoughther posturewould help here. It was something about the way he looked down the length of his body at her, as if looking down from some immense altar. Or mountaintop.
Or some impossible desert sky.
“It matters to me,” she pointed out, because she couldn’t seem to help herself. “The importance of good sleep habits can’t be exaggerated, Cyrus.”
“We have landed on Aminabad soil,” he told her, and again, there was a certain cadence to the way he spoke. As if he was issuing proclamations. It was notably different from the way he had been speaking to her before. This was not...speaking.This was nota conversation. She understood that instinctively. “Allow me to welcome you to your new life, Hope Cartwright.Hayati. Rohi. Omri.” He intoned those words in such a way that she knew at once that they were endearments—and more, that he was making certain she heard the ironic way he was saying them. “You have been honored immeasurably, little though you deserve it, and are become my wife.”
She wanted to laugh. But she couldn’t, quite.
Not quite.
It all felt too fraught, somehow.
There was something in the way he studied her, with a suppressed sort of intensity—though she could see the gleam of it clearly enough, there in his dark gaze. She could see the way he held himself too still once more. She could feel the difference in the air between them. And there was something, too, in the way her body responded to that difference. It was as if she’d been plunged into a cold pool and was even now standing at the edge, shivering.
God—was she actuallyshivering?
Hope made herself stand up, though that put her perilously close to him. Too close, by far, to this intense and compelling stranger who spoke of promises broken. Of her as his wife, of all things.
Now that the plane had landed and there was nothing outside that she could see in any direction, save an endless expanse of waiting desert, she found she possessed far less equanimity than she’d felt in the air. When all she’d been able to concentrate on was the fact that she was not even now married to Lionel Asensio.
She couldn’t really access the wild relief she’d felt then any longer. Mostly because, if she wasn’t married to Lionel, that meant she still needed to sort out a way to take care of her mother. And herself.
At the same time, she didn’t want Cyrus to know that. Not really. She didn’t want him to guess that she didn’t feel the same way she had since he’d swooped in and rescued her—and who cared how or why he’d come to do that? He’d done it all the same.
She would prefer it if he continued to think she was relatively unaffected by all of this.
Hope opted not to question herself on that.
“Did I sleep through our wedding?” she asked instead, aiming for the dry, amused tone that had come so naturally to her before. “I feel certain I would have woken up for a whole wedding ceremony. Given I’m already dressed for it.”
Something she would not call a smile moved over his hard face and echoed inside her like a tuning fork. “There is no need for a wedding ceremony,omri. My word is law.”
He stepped back then, and curtly indicated that she should step past him to walk toward the blazing light that it took her long, stupid moments to realize was the door to the outside. Hope cleared her throat and told herself it was the desert air that was even now drying out sinuses that had been born and bred in England’s greenest, most humid hills.
It didn’t occur to her not to obey him. She had not the faintest shred of a defiant thought. And when she realized that, she rationalized it away. Because what did she plan to do instead? Stage a sit-in on the plane? She’d bet that would end pretty quickly once they turned off the air-conditioning and she began to broil.
There was nothing for it but to march outside into all that blinding light, so that was what Hope did.
Because that was what she always did.
No matter how overwhelming a thing looked, she charged straight for it, because the only thing worse than an overwhelming thing was dreading it.
She made her way down the jet’s stairs, finding her darling wedding slippers a rather poor match for the tarmac. And the wholedesertsituation. There was sand swirling this way and that every time the faint and inconstant breeze felt like moving it along. The heat was oppressive. It seemed toglowinto her. It wasn’t like a face full of sunshine. It was like the heat startedwithin herand was setting her alight from the inside out.
Hope felt as if she was burning alive already and she hadn’t even had time to sweat.
She felt Cyrus come down the stairs behind her, then stop—close enough that she had the panicked notion that she could actually differentiate desert heat all around her from the heat he gave off, and both heat sources were far too much for her—
Though thinking things like that could not possibly help her here.
The plane’s door folded back in on itself and the plane began to move again, bumping slowly along the tarmac at first, then picking up speed. Then, too quickly for Hope’s taste, hurtling itself off into the cloudless sky that seemed to press down upon them like a great blue fist.
She watched the plane fly away until it was a small dot on the horizon and her eyes hurt from the glare.
Or possibly also because she was trying her very best to keep tears at bay. When she never cried. Not since the night her father had died—because what was the point? It didn’t bring him back. It didn’t change a thing.
