Page 14 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Hope opened her mouth to argue that point, but stopped herself. Because thewayhe kept saying that finally registered. It was...almost archaic, really.
Like another proclamation.
Like a law might sound in a place like this.
She was too hot toshiver, surely. “You keep saying that.”
“I am anxious for you to hear me, Hope.”
Yet she could not make herself believe, for so much as an instant, that this man was anxious about anything, nor ever had been. “I hear you. But I don’t understand.”
“This is the Aminabad Desert and I am its lord,” he told her, a certain satisfaction in his tone. In his gaze. All over him, in fact. “What I declare becomes fact, and then is made law. That is the way of things here.” When she only squinted back at him, he relented. Slightly. “If I say you are my wife, we are married. It is done.”
Hope still thought she might topple over—and would have, probably, if she didn’t think she’d sizzle like a proper English fry-up right there on the tarmac, and her here without a hangover that needed that kind of indulgent mopping up—but sighed instead.
“Felicitations to us both, then. I guess?” She found her hands on her hips, somehow. “I think you’d better tell me what that means to you, Cyrus.”
Was that the first time she’d said his actual name? It felt illicit. Like stolen chocolate, melting on her tongue. She was sure she could feel the way his eyes blazed. As sure as she was that he felt it too, that melting.
Heatstroke,she told herself. That was all.
His dark brows arched high, command and condemnation at once, and no sign whatever of any reaction to the heat. “I don’t actually know you. I don’t know what you want in a wife. I don’t know your feelings about marriage at all, much less what it means in a cultural sense in a country I’ve never visited before.”
Hope really did laugh then, because it was that or give herself over to the heat. Her dry lips. That urge to cry, collapse, or both. That terrifyingmeltingthat felt worse than all of those combined.
She hurried on. “This might come as a shock to you, but I am something of an expert when it comes to various takes on the institution of marriage. I’ve discussed it at length, with all manner of people, and I can tell you that none of them agree. On anything, really. So when you tell me, in all your state, that I ambecome your wife—you’re going to have to tell me what you mean by that. In detail, so there can be no mistake.”
“You have already made the last mistake you will make,” Cyrus told her, his voice a low and dangerous thread that she could hear all too well above the breeze. Above the sound of her own heart, pounding much too hard. “Your indifference to the promises made in your name has showed me your character, but I have chosen to marry you anyway. In time, I am certain you will thank me for this gift.”
“Why would yougiftsomeone you hated on sight?” Hope asked, and that was when the laughter she’d been holding at bay—possibly because it was a touch hysterical—bubbled up. “Surely it would have been easier to leave me to it. I certainly wouldn’t have known any different.”
“But I would have. And regardless of what you do or do not do,Ikeep my promises.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a foundation for a marriage,” she managed to say, not laughing any longer.
“And what was the foundation for the marriage you intended to embark upon today?” he asked, his brows high and his dark gaze intent on hers. “You could not wait to tell me it was no love match. That you were as happy to marry him, or me, as any other. By your own rationale, why should you care why I have chosen to elevate you in this manner?”
She wanted to tell him she didn’t care. She wanted to sweep everything he’d said aside and focus on the things she did care about, like making sure her mother was cared for. She wanted to defend herself, though she wasn’t even sure what accusations he was making—because he was right. Wasn’t he? Why should she care who she married?
The again, she’d never encountered a man who got beneath her skin like this.
And maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was sunstroke. But she had the strangest, fairy-tale-like notion that it was possible she did the same to him.
That maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t the only one feeling all this. That if she dared reach over and put her hand on his chest, his heart would roar as hers did.
“Fair enough,” she whispered.
He nodded, as if it was done. As if they were set in stone now, her and him. That, too, should have terrified her. “There is nothing left to you now but a life of quiet obedience, locked away from the world as if you were never here at all.”
“You say that like it’s a punishment,” she managed to say, even producing a slightly less hysterical little laugh. “But it sounds like a holiday.”
“It will be no holiday.” There, before her, he seemed to grow in size. He was an immensity on par with the desert that surrounded them. His dark eyes flashed, the darkest midnight she had ever beheld. “It will be an exercise in humility.”
“Cyrus...” she murmured, not certain what she wished to say to him. What shecouldsay.
“I kept waiting for you to remember yourself,” he told her. “To remember that you were promised to one who waited for you to come to him, but this never occurred. Right up to this farce of a wedding, which you should have known I would never allow to take place.”
Hope could only listen to this in a kind of awe. Aware, on some level, that deep inside there was a trembling. Maybe even a yearning—to imagine that someone, anyone, had looked out for her these last years.
