Page 33 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Then Cyrus found himself waiting for her arrival like some kind of moonfaced swain. A notion that made him so tense, his jaw hurt.
This must end, he growled at himself.
And there was only one way he could think to make that happen. An exorcism of sorts, though he intended for it to be far more pleasurable.
He turned when he heard a faint sound behind him and nodded curtly at the guards who bowed to him from the antechamber.
But his eyes were on the woman who came in when they stepped aside.
Hope looked far less anxious than he thought she should. Not a hint of worry marred her brow. If anything, she looked happier every time he saw her.
Happy, healthy and sporting a sort of glow he found enraging, because he liked it.
She looked far more beautiful than she had when he’d taken her from that chapel. As if she was blooming here in his desert, and more by the day.
“You look even more ferocious than usual,” she told him as she moved toward him, her hips a mesmerizing roll. One more thing she had learned down in the harem, he knew. And this thing, she was good at. Too good, perhaps. “A bit too grizzly for your own good, I’d say.”
“It occurs to me that you’re entirely too happy.” He sounded dark and mean to his own ears. Worse, he sounded perilously close to out of control. “This is meant to be punishment, Hope. Not summer camp.”
If he needed any further indication that things had gone astray, she didn’t cower at that. She didn’t seem to hear what he did in his voice. She didn’t fling herself prostrate before him so that she might press her lips to the toe of his shoe, as he had seen his father’s other wives do on many occasions. Not Hope.
Hope laughed.
And kept walking toward him, so that he almost thought she meant to do something—
But instead she passed him entirely, then flung herself down onto the pillows as if this was her chamber and he the interloper.
As if she had been the one to summon him here tonight.
As if the Lord of the desert could besummoned.
“The time has come to begin selecting other wives,” he told her, realizing as he did that there was a part of him that wanted that information to...wound her, somehow.
In case he needed an unwelcome reminder that he was not as free in his ideas as he liked to think. Because if he had been raised here the way his father had intended and without the corrosive influence of his mother and his formative years abroad, surely such a notion would never have occurred to him.
Men in his position took as many wives as they pleased and women vied for the honor. When she expressed her hurt, he would view it as an outrage, because it was.
“Wonderful!” Hope cried instead. “Do I get to help you choose?”
And Cyrus found that this was the greater outrage by far.
Because she was not a woman of the Aminabad Desert. She should have reacted the way he’d expected her to react. With tears, at the very least. His memory of his mother’s reaction to each new wife his father took had been smashed crockery, anguished wailing and screaming threats—even years after she had left him and taken Cyrus with her.
Until this moment, he had not understood that he wanted that from Hope. And that what he wanted from this woman was some kind of indication that she—
But he stopped himself. That she...what?
Cared about him?
When he knew very well she did not. When he should not want her to in the first place. Nothing about this had anything to do withcaring.
One of the things Cyrus had long enjoyed about his life and his position was the clarity of purpose it provided. He knew what his job was. He knew how he was meant to rule.
Cyrus had known exactly who he was since he was an adolescent.
His father had made sure that the things that were expected of Cyrus were etched deep into his bones.
He did not like this murkiness. He despised the way it sat upon him, a mess of something too dark and far too edgy for comfort.
