Page 16 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
But he wanted her to give herself to him, this woman who would marry another so cold-bloodedly.
He wanted her wild with wanting him.
She was fair, which would do her no good in the desert heat. And so he had taken the time to wrap scarves around her as they’d started their ride, covering her hair and the skin that already looked flushed from the sun’s merciless rays.
But even though he knew those scarves protected her, he resented them.
For he could not see that delectable curve of her chin. Or the way she held her mouth, giving herself away in a thousand different small expressions he was not certain she even knew she made.
Yet he did. He knew far too much after an afternoon’s observation of her. In person.
He could have headed to the south, where the heart of his country’s wealth was arrayed around the oil fields that brought in the Western businessmen to try their wheeling and dealing and imagine they were cannier than the tribe who had been living off the bounty of this desert forever. There in the southern oases lay the commercial center of his country. The marketplaces, the businesses, and the many dwellings of those in his tribe who did not wish to follow the seasons north and south the way their ancestors had. He supposed they were cities, in truth, though he did not like that word.
But in any case, that was not where he was headed. He turned to the north instead, and made haste across the shifting sands for the fortress that had once been all that protected his people from their enemies.
He meant for it to do so again.
They rode hard, for the sands seemed restless today, and wise men never tested the will of the sands. They knew too well that if they did, they would lose—and usually more than any one man could bear.
It was a solid hour’s ride, flat out, from the northern tarmac they only used regularly. For it was too easily swallowed whole by the dunes and was often lost, no matter how many men were dispatched to keep it clear.
The sands did ever as they wished.
That was one of the first things Cyrus had learned when his father’s men had brought him here.
Today, like then, he saw the fortress first. He only rode faster at the sight, but he still knew the very moment that the woman in his arms saw it too. He felt something like an electric shock go through her body and he thought she might say something, but she did not.
And he wondered if she was having the same experience that he’d had as that twelve-year-old boy who had barely remembered the desert from his youth. His father had expected that. He had anticipated and had brought Cyrus here for the same reasons that Cyrus was bringing Hope here today.
Because there was nothing like a medieval fortress, plunked down in the middle of an inhospitable desert stretching out to the horizon on all sides, to encourage a person to get right with themselves. And the desert itself.
Though as a child, what he had felt was...overwhelmed.
His father had seemed cruel to him then, overbearing and ferocious, and he missed the mother he’d loved, then.
These things seemed impossible to him now, but riding up to the fortress again, like this, brought it all back.
First, Cyrus remembered, he hadn’t believed what he saw before him. He’d been certain that he’d gotten something in his eyes at first—presumably sand. That would explain the smudge he saw, off the distance.
The closer they got, the more he had blinked and blinked, because there was nothing. There was nothing but the dance of the sand, the whisper of the wind, the movement of the horse beneath him. And only the endless, cloudless sky above.
As a twelve-year-old boy, he hadn’t known how to explain to himself what was happening. Why his mind kept filling in the vast expanses when there was only desert—until he’d realized that he couldn’t blink what he was seeing away. That it was a great wall rising from the desert floor—and they were riding straight for it.
That the cruel man who had taken him from his home and hauled him here intended to keep him in what had looked, to him, like a prison.
When you found yourself here again as a twelve-year-old, was your first reaction joy?Hope had asked him.
Inexplicably, he heard his mother’s singing in his head once more.
And before him, he could feel the way Hope shook his grip, and more, how she fought to repress it.
He knew exactly what battle she was fighting.
And he told himself that he was glad. That he should congratulate himself, for this was all going precisely as planned. She was his now, as had been promised long ago. He had kept his vows.
Now all that remained was making sure she regretted what she’d done while he’d been waiting for her to take her place at his side.
The pack of horses, Cyrus at the front and twelve of his men arrayed around him, rode toward the steep, forbidding walls of the fortress and did not slow their steeds as they approached.
