Page 24 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
“I think you’re trying to intimidate me,” she said quietly.
“Omri, please. Do not mistake the matter. I do not need to try.” That should have been even more intimidating, and yet somehow, it was the opposite. Because she knew by now that the bullies didn’t sit around playing games ortalkingabout these things. They bullied. That was exactly what they did, always. “We are here, in a fortress so impregnable that its very name makes my enemies weep. For they know that whatever it is that waits here, they can do nothing. And have you not been treated well, Hope?” Was it her imagination that he seemed suddenly...closer than before? “Why is it that you imagine I would go to the trouble of tending to you if I planned now to tear you apart?”
She did not think he intended to do that. Exactly. But she was caught up in the way the light danced over his bronze features and she could not begin to explain why it was thatlookingat him made her ache. In ways she couldn’t make sense of, even to herself.
“Is that not what men do?” she asked softly. “I thought the purpose of all of this was to punish me. To make me pay for breaking a promise I can’t even remember.”
“Can’t you?”
She laughed at that, though she felt significantly less amusement than before. “You have no idea what I’ve been through these past years. If I’d had the slightest idea that there was some Prince Charming hanging around, waiting to rescue me—”
But she stopped, suddenly.
Maybe it was thePrince Charmingbit, reminding her of all the daydreams she’d been thrusting aside on her way down the aisle today in Italy. Maybe it was because her full stomach and the soft light had lulled her into sense of security, the first she’d felt in a long, long while.
Hope couldn’t tell what it was, but all of a sudden, memories of her father swept through her. When she’d been a little girl and would find him in the evenings after her bath in that cozy study of his, lined with books, smelling of cigars he loved, and, in her memories at least, always sporting a happy fire in the grate. He had always welcomed her with that jolly laugh of his, opening up his arms so she could run into them.
Then she snuggled against him, sitting there in that cozy armchair before the fire.
When she was older and thought of herself as far too old for sitting in laps she would tuck herself into the chair across from his, so he could look at her with his kind, wise eyes as he listened to her prattle on about her prosaic days as if worlds hung in the balance.
Sometimes, even now, she would think of that study and his obvious, open love for her as she drifted off to sleep. Sometimes she thought she could almost catch his scent, or feel his arms around her, or hear his laughter in her ears again.
But tonight she found herself remembering the stories he would tell her when she complained that her life was boring or sad, for reasons she couldn’t fathom now. The stories were bright and happy, about the life she would lead, joyful and sweet.
They were usually some or other take on how she might not have been a princess herself in the eyes of the world, but was her papa’s princess, all the same.
And a princess like my Hope deserves to have a fine prince of her own.She could hear her father’s voice so clearly now, so distinctly.Wouldn’t that be nice?
After he died, she had remembered those stories, but had thought nothing of them. They were just stories, after all. Just fairy tales a lovely man had told his daughter. There was no harm in them—and no truth, either.
For she had learned quickly enough that there was no point believing in fairy tales. Not the kind that people told these days, anyway. Real fairy tales were different, of course. They were dark and grim, and there was nothing cozy or safe about them at all.
Hope had learned that the hard way.
It had never occurred to her, until this moment, that there could possibly be a kernel of truth in those stories her father had told her.
That there could possibly be a prince after all.
She pushed back from the low table, then onto her feet, before she realized that she meant to move. Hope looked wildly around as if she might find an explanation for this in the candlelight, on the table itself, or even on the uncompromising face of the man who only watched her, his gaze hooded.
But with an unmistakable satisfaction stamped all over him.
“Perhaps your memory is not so faulty after all?” he asked softly.
Dangerously.
As if he could read her so easily when he remained a mystery to her.
And as she watched—not sure if she was taken aback or something far more complicated—he unfolded himself from that lounging position and rose to his feet with a breathtaking grace, fluid and athletic at once.
“My father used to tell me stories,” she said, maybe too quickly, though without any real idea why she should find herself confessing anything. “But I never thought...”
“There are contracts, Hope.”
“There were no contracts in his office.” She shook her head, thinking of all the papers she’d gone through, the folders upon folders she’d thrown away. Could she have missed something? After all, it was unlikely to have been markedPrince Charming Is Not a Fairy Tale. Had her escape been in her reach from the start? Hope could barely cope with that idea. “Who could possibly think that princes in foreign lands and kingdoms I’d never heard of were anything but stories?”
He studied her for what felt, to her, like a lifetime.
