Page 26 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
So well and with such delirious heat that she could feel a kind of throbbing in the core of her, as if her body was readying itself for that most intimate invasion.
And perhaps the true magic was, after failing to understand why her mother let all those men get close enough to break her heart, Hope finally got it.
She finally understood completely.
Because she thought in these wildly hot moments, with all the careening sensations setting her alight, that she had never wanted anything more than to tear off her clothes and his and do whatever was necessary to wrap herself all over him, take him inside her, and follow the sweet hunger wherever it led.
And it took her too long to understand that he was laughing, a dark and rude and yet stirring sound, when he set her away from him.
“I don’t...” she began, shaking her head, though that failed to clear it. There was too much sensation still kicking around inside her, and for some reason she wanted to cry, and yet all the while there was an ache that only seem to grow and grow—
But then there was the way he was looking at her. That made her want to curl up into a ball. And cry for different reasons altogether.
“Cyrus?” she whispered.
He moved past her, still laughing in that way that made the back of her neck prickle.
“I will give you this,omri,” he said, his voice much too dark and that word like a gut punch. “I can certainly see why you are so popular.”
And then, without a backward glance, he left her there.
There on top of that tower, alone in the desert night—and it took Hope far too long to understand what had happened.
First she stayed where she was, her breath coming so fast and so hard that it made the silks she wore move against her, which didn’t help her oversensitized skin.
She thought he would return, but instead the women came, murmuring things in low voices she found she was happy she didn’t understand. They led her back down into the fortress, down the stone stairs that wound away from the seductive night, the watching stars.
They took the same route through Cyrus’s bedchamber, though he was nowhere to be found. And they did not stop at his towering bed, leading her instead into the harem, lit up with soft lanterns and the sound of tumbling water.
It was there, tucked up in the little alcove of a room they’d told her was hers in her soft and welcoming bed, that she pulled the airy blankets over her and let herself understand at last what that look Cyrus had given her meant.
Because it had been so scathing. Almost disgusted.
“He thinks that’s how I am with every man,” Hope whispered out loud, into the feathers of her pillow.
And there was still that part of her that wanted to curl up into the fetal position, rock herself the way she always did when her heart felt bruised, and soothe herself to sleep.
But she didn’t.
Instead, Hope laughed.
And she kept on laughing for a long while, her whole body shaking with it and the faintest hint of moisture appearing in the corners of her eyes.
She laughed and she laughed, until the laughter turned into all that heat and aching that coursed through her body and she couldn’t seem to keep herself from running her hands over her own desperate skin. She found the hard pebbles her nipples had become and imagined her hands were Cyrus’s, testing the weight of her against his palms and then slowly making their way over her ribs, her belly, until he reached that heat between her legs. She thought of the way his tongue had thrust between her lips, and even thinking about it made her shiver all over.
Hope followed that delicious shivering, dipping her own hands into the heat of her core and imagining that things had ended in a different way entirely up there in that tower. That Cyrus had taken her down into all those pillows, pushed her silks aside, and kept right on kissing her like that even as he thundered between her legs.
For surely he was a man who would always feel like thunder.
She was still laughing as the glory of it took her over, there alone in her harem bed, so she pressed her face into her own pillow and kept what magic there was to herself.
The next day, she woke to find the light streaming into the courtyard, making everything gleam like new. And she hadn’t bothered to change out of the silks they’d given her when she’d fallen into bed, so she wore them as she padded out of her room to find herself alone with the great fountain as it babbled and burbled, making its own song into the morning. The courtyard was filled with trees that shouldn’t grow in a place like this, ripe with fruit and covered in green, and there were even songbirds in their branches.
Hope supposed she should have felt scared, but she didn’t. Instead, it was the first morning in a long, long while that she didn’t feel the usual grinding panic of what she would do, how she would do it,ifshecoulddo what she must to keep herself and her mother safe.
Because there was nothing she could do here but...be here.
And there was a liberty in having no choices. Even if, deep down, she knew that eventually the panic would return to her—because Mignon was still out there, doing God only knew what in Hope’s absence.
