Page 1 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
CHAPTER ONE
HOPECARTWRIGHTWALKEDdown the aisle toward her groom, dressed in the requisite white gown and filled with nothing but a sense of relief.
God knew she’d earned it.
Everything is fine, she told herself as she walked.Everything will be perfectly fine.
Just as soon as she made it to the altar and said her vows. That was all it would take.
She blew out a breath, not surprised to find it was a bit shaky. And she kept her eyes focused up ahead on the man who stood at the head of the shockingly long aisle in this picturesque Italian wedding chapel, looking as grimly impatient as ever. He wanted this done as much as she did, Hope knew. Because this was the business arrangement they’d both wanted, as cold and calculated as it could get.
She could have been walking into something far more unpleasant, given her options and her desperate situation, and well did she know it. She doubted she’d thought of anything else in any serious way for the past two years.
Hope walked alone because her mother had, in her typical fashion, become so overset by the fact that Hope was actually marrying—because everyone gets a happy ending except me, she had sobbed in her childish way, quick to forget the last few years when she could nurse her feelings instead—that she’d drunk herself into something close enough to a stupor.
Except Mignon never lapsed off into anactualstupor. That was the trouble. Stupors suggested some measure of silence, and that was not her style. She was a storm, always. Sometimes wild with joy, sometimes distraught, but always and ever a storm. Accordingly, there had been scenes all morning as Mignon had turned Hope’s preparations for this ceremony into a saga about Mignon’s own choices.
This arrangement was as close to happy as either one of them was likely to get, Hope had tried to tell her. First Mignon had been mad with glee. Then the champagne had gone to her head and she’d simply been mad. Then had come the tears, the French love songs all sung off-key in honor of Hope’s late father—Mignon’s one true love—and last Hope had looked, Mignon had been passed out in a pile of butter-yellow chiffon, snoring off the bubbly.
Maybe that was as much of a happy ending as Hope could wish for.
She tried to remember what her severe groom had told her the night before when they’d indulged in a rehearsal right here in this ancient chapel that sat up above the sparkling waters of the famed Lake Como in Italy.
It will not do to race down the aisle in an unseemly haste, he had said in his usual repressive tones after she’d sprinted toward him from the antechamber.
Even if I feel an unseemly haste?she had asked, smiling.
Her husband-to-be was no love match for Hope.Lovehad not entered into the discussions. As such, he was not particularly interested in her smiles. He did not find her amusing, either, as he had made clear on numerous occasions already. Hope was a means to an end for him, that was all.
This was a good thing. Hope liked the fact that he required a service of her. So that she was not the only one selling herself here.
It also helped that he was not repulsive, like so many of the men who had auditioned for this particular role. Hope had wanted an honorable benefactor in the classic style. Someone she could rely upon and even feel safe with. Maybe there would even be some affection, in time.
Maybe it wasn’t the charming fairy-tale prince she’d dreamed of when she was small, but if she’d learned anything since her father died, it was that life was not kind to childish dreams. Looking for a more businesslike arrangement that benefited her as well as the man in question seemed a practical and even lovely alternative, in its way.
Instead she had discovered that entirely too many men out there were nothing short of horrible.
Like the one who had called what she was doing avirginity auction.She had been at some pains to tell him that there was noauction, thank you. That such a notion was unpleasant and, anyway, not true.
Whatwastrue was that Hope was, indeed, a virgin. That, like so many things in her life, had been an accident, not any sort of morality crusade on her part. It was a twist of fate, nothing more. If her father had not died when Hope was barely turned fourteen, she imagined she would have had the same kind of adolescence her old friends at school had enjoyed. Silly parties and boys to giggle over instead of having to act as the adult she wasn’t. Because Mignon, as delightful as she was most of the time, was sadly incapable of behaving like the adult she actually was with any regularity.
It had been down to Hope to sort out the funeral, then all the bills that followed. To do the best she could with the money her father had left and her mother’s seeming determination to blow through it all at an alarming rate as she dealt with her terrible grief. Hope had been the one who’d sold off the family estate, sorrowfully parting with her father’s staff, who had all been there longer than her, because she could not afford to keep them on. It had been Hope who had found the two of them a flat in London that Mignon wailed about on some maudlin evenings, because the neighborhood was questionable—Hope liked to think of it asup-and-coming—and what would peoplethink, and what was next, thepoorhouse?
Mignon kept clinging to the hope that even one of the men who partied with her, took advantage of her, or used her as they wished might love her if she let them do as they pleased.
They never did.
And so it was Hope who had to save them.
That was how she’d come to the attention of far too many obnoxiously wealthy and self-involved men since she’d turned eighteen. Her birthday present to herself, such as it was, had been leaving Mignon singing into her wine to meet her first potential contender. Hope had used her father’s connections to put herself forward, but only to a very specific sort of individual. He needed to be rich, first and foremost, because while she felt that she might quite like to make her own way in the world, what mattered was that Mignon would want for nothing.
That was what Hope’s dad would have wanted. No matter what flights of fancy her mother might commit herself to. No matter what Hope did or didn’t do.
That was what Hope wanted too, because she loved her mother. And she understood, somewhere deep inside, that she had a certain grit her mother lacked. She had a fortitude while Mignon was made of pretty smiles and too much air. She had no head for reality.
Reality had been Hope’s father’s job.
Mignon needed looking after, that was the beginning and end of it. In return, Hope was prepared to sign anything. Any prenuptial agreement, any contract, anything at all. After two years out there on what only an optimist like her mother would call “a dating scene,” Hope hadalmostconvinced herself that she was well and truly prepared to be the virgin sacrifice she had learned a certain kind of man dreamed of finding.
