Page 23 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
He was Cyrus Ashkan and he was not threatening her. He was making a statement of fact.
A simple statement of undeniable fact that was, in its starkness and his quiet restraint, a demonstration of the power she’d felt emanate from him even down the length of that long chapel aisle.
A power he could have used against her already, but hadn’t. Oddly enough, that made her feel as close to safe as she had since her father died.
It hummed in her like a new heat all its own.
Cyrus inclined his head slightly, as if he could read in her precisely what he wished to see there. She didn’t know why she hoped he could. “Yet all I want from you is a kiss, Hope. Just one kiss.”
“A kiss?” She couldn’t breathe, suddenly. She told herself it was the dry air. “But...why?”
It was as if he knew she would ask that. His harsh face altered as his stern mouth...curved. Just slightly. “To see the truth of who we are, you and me. That’s why.”
Hope was not at all certain she wanted to know who she was, just then. Not when it felt like this—like a sudden rush of heat inside of her, so overwhelming that she wasn’t sure if she would actually manage to remain sitting up straight. Or as close to straight as she was managing, propped up on all these pillows.
She had been so busy gorging herself, again, that she’d been able to tell herself she’d missed the sensuality that seemed to hang in the air between them. That desire she hadn’t known was in her until today that she’d managed, somehow, to tuck back in its place again while she was buffed to a shine. And though she knew that there were guards and staff spread out all over this fortress, up here on the top of this tower it was only them. The nearest other people were the lone guards who walked the segments of the battlements down below.
Otherwise it was only the two of them, alone in the silken night. The two of them, cast in the light of so many flickering candles. The two of them splayed out on the floor beneath a ceiling of careless stars, no matter how many bright pillows were festooned about here and there.
No matter if Hope could breathe or not.
“I make it a personal policy not to kiss men who dislike me,” she told him, trying to summon some kind of authority as she spoke. But she didn’t think she got there. Not in the face of all the power he managed to generate simply by...staying where he was, seemingly at his ease as he lounged there opposite her.
Though that hard gleam in his dark eyes and that sense of hovering danger all around him suggested otherwise.
“Do you indeed?” he asked her, without the slightest indication that he was even attempting to conceal the fact he was challenging her.
This is who you are, he had said to her in a different country today, as if she had betrayed him when she still hadn’t known his name. And he hadn’t stopped there.You do not even care what man claims you, do you? You flit from one to the next as if it is nothing.
And she couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel more offended. Why she hadn’t then. Why she didn’t now. Surely it said something about her that his accusations didn’t seem to land like the blow she knew they should be.
Then again, maybe she was more like her mother that she’d ever imagined possible.
Hope couldn’t say she particularly likedthatline of thought. Had she really gone through all of this—all the struggle of the past years—to be no more than a man’s bauble, in the end? Perhaps loved in her time, but in the end, as disposable as any other bit of tat a man collected over the course of his life and left behind when he was gone?
To be tossed out or packed away as it suited whoever came next?
Imagining such a future made her feel cold.
Hope made herself sit up straighter, as if that could somehow draw attention away from the pillows strewn about. Suggesting that in this place, the lines between things were blurred in advance. No need to worry about how a person got from point A to point B when all the points were mashed together like this. If there was no differentiation between eating dinner and rolling on the floor, it was all part and parcel of the same sensuous experience—
But she didn’t like the way her body was responding to that line of thought. She didn’t care for the way a sweet sort of shiver, like its own sort of honey, snaked along her arms. Or the way her nipples seemed to join in, hardening against the silk that barely covered them and making that, too, feel like a caress.
Shereallydidn’t like the fact that all of that melting heat that she could feel inside her wound its way down the length of her, spiraling around and around until it became a bright, hot problem between her legs.
And Hope knew a whole lot about men. More than anyone should know, to her mind. All of her interactions with men had been inside out—she understood that now. There was her father, who she had loved beyond reason, and on the other side there were... all the other men. All the ones Mignon had brought home, who had leered at Hope when she should have been too young for them to notice her. All the men she had taken it upon herself to interview over the past few years, who had shown not the slightest shame in sharing with her every last bit of the depravity that animated them. They had all been soproud, in fact.
All of them.
She understood now, when it already felt too late, that she was missing a crucial bit of her education.
Because never before had a man looked at her and made her feel likethis.
Her father had looked at her with fondness and adoration, and she had bloomed in his regard. Then missed him when he was gone. Other men looked at her and she cringed. She had flushed with disgust on more occasions than she could count. Her heartbeat had always kicked into high gear, usually because she was worried for her safety in one way or another.
She had thought of Lionel Asensio as a savior because he had looked at her as if he was examining produce at a market. That had felt much colder and therefore safer than anything she’d experienced before him.
Coldwas not how she would describe the way this man looked at her.
