Page 28 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
“I believe that you didn’t know,” he said, as if the words cost him something—but not enough, Hope thought. Not quite enough. “What’s done is done,omri.The choice you need to make is what kind of marriage this will be now we are in it.”
She went as if to knock his hand away from her face, but something in the way his eyes glittered kept her from it. “I’m not sure what my impetus for that is, either. Didn’t you tell me that the goal of all of this is to make me yearn endlessly for you while you parade about, impregnating other woman? Not exactly the lure you seem to think it is, Cyrus.”
“And yet you yearn for me already,” he said quietly. “Do you not?”
It was not a question. He knew.
She could see it all over him.
And it was not until she was back in the harem courtyard that Hope understood that it had been deliberate, on his part, to keep from kissing her then. He had gone out of his way to avoid it, in fact.
Because hewantedher to spend the rest of that afternoon and eveninglit upwith yearning for him.
He wanted her to lie in her bed just as she did that night, unable to sleep and thinking that there was nothing he did that didn’t have a good reason—and that reason wasn’t only making heryearn.The battlements themselves, for example. He had wanted her to see exactly how remote their location was. How there was nothing in any direction but sand and space, just as she’d feared when they’d first landed. She was well and truly trapped here, locked up tight until and unless he relented and let her go. Or didn’t.
What he didn’t understand was that Hope was resourceful. Maybe she couldn’t extinguish that burning flame that flickered only for him, but she could play with it.
Especially if it helped her sleep.
“I don’t think you really understand what’s happening here,” she told him a day or two later, sitting across from him at yet another low table. This one was in one of the numerous rooms that made up his expansive apartments. “England can rain on forever without me. I don’t care if I ever go back. I certainly don’t care that my wedding carried on with a different bride. It wasn’t the groom or the ceremony I cared about. But I do need to know how my mother is faring. If I wasn’t worried about her, I wouldn’t mind in the least how long you plan to keep me here.”
“You expend a great deal of energy on her,” Cyrus observed, leaning back against another set of bright pillows, propping himself up on one elbow and looking like some kind of avenging angel.
Hope told herself that shouldn’t make her feel like squirming where she sat. “She’s my mother.”
He only shrugged. “Everyone has a mother, Hope. Not everyone ties themselves into unnecessary tangles in service of their mothers. Quite the opposite, I would say.”
“You say that as if it’s perfectly normal to treat a mother the way you treat yours,” she said, careful to keep her voice even. So he could not possibly take what she was saying as some kind of attack.
But she should have known better. When it came to the topic of his mother, he viewed everything as an attack. If she so much as mentioned his father, on the other hand, he was prepared to wax rhapsodic about the man’s greatness ad nauseam. As if it was not possible to elevate one in his esteem without crushing the other.
Someday, she thought she might ask him why that was.
“I treat my mother as she deserves, no more and no less,” he told her in that dark way that suggested she should not pursue the issue further. “And far better than some would do.”
“It has always sounded to me as if she loves you beyond reason,” Hope dared say, and then held her breath.
Because he looked at her as if she’d picked up the nearest statue and bashed him over the head with it. As if she’d said something horrid and vicious, and her heart thumped painfully in her chest as he stared back at her, letting her know that her emotions were far more engaged here than they should have been.
“That,” Cyrus said when the silence between them grew so loud that Hope worried she might choke on it, “is not a word I would use when discussing my mother.”
“You mean your father,” Hope said, though she knew better, truly she did. “He was all harsh edges and ranting on about property rights, wasn’t he? While your mother was wracked with anguish and only wondered how you were. It was in the documentary—”
And if he had been anyone else, she would have said that the look in his dark eyes then was something like fear.
But that was impossible. This was Cyrus Ashkan, Lord of the Aminabad Desert and all he surveyed besides.
“You are mistaking the matter,” he told her, flatly. “My mother has always played well to a camera. And I think a great many people on this planet feel exactly about their mothers as I do about mine. I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, too. The only difference is that I am not afraid to say so.”
“I love my mother,” Hope said quietly. “Neither one of us is to blame for who we became because we lost my dad.”
She thought that might shake something loose in Cyrus, remembering how shaken he’d looked for a swift moment there. Just that moment. As if he might open up about what had actually happened to him here. And for a beat, then another, of her heart, she thought he might.
Or better still, kiss her again in that stern and stirring way of his, all confidence and certainty and enough fire to set the world alight—
But he only lifted a hand and crooked her finger in her direction.
“I will let you call her, if you truly wish it,” he told her, with great magnanimity. “But there is a price.”
