Page 3 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
While she was at it, she planned to pay off the last of her mother’s creditors and set up pensions for the loyal staff she had been forced to let go when she’d sold the family estate. She had promised them that if it was ever within her power, she would do exactly that. She’d been flattered back then that they’d pretended to believe she might when she hadn’t believed it herself.
Now she could prove, at last, that she was more her father’s daughter than her mother’s. She loved them both, she truly did, but she did not want to think of how scared her mother had been these past few years. She did not like remembering how Mignon had sobbed and sobbed, too aware that her attempts to help only made things worse.
Hope had no intention of letting circumstances wreck her like that. Ever.
And she was imagining how good it would feel, to take care of the people who had always taken care of her—and walking slower than a snail, God help her, because it made political sense to obey her almost-husband’s instructions as soon as she could—when there was a sudden great noise from the back.
Hope froze, her eyes closing of their own accord.
That would be her mother, no doubt. And there was no way Mignon could have slept off all that champagne and sobbing, so she would be wilder than usual—
Up at the head of the aisle, she saw the way her groom’s jaw tensed, and she couldn’t have that. Not until they were well and truly married, and all of this was done.
Never had she wanted to break into an impolite sprint for the altar more than she did just then, but Hope turned instead. She expected to find Mignon staggering toward her in some or other questionable state. Or dancing down the aisle, singing French lullabies.
She opened her mouth as she turned, prepared to try to redirect her mother, but Hope found herself unable to speak at all because it wasn’t her mother who strode toward her.
It was a vision.
Her first impression was of light and heat. A kind of mad explosion that seemed to take place entirely within her.
It took her long, jarring moments while her heart clawed its way out of her chest to understand that what she was looking at was a man.
But he was like no man she had ever beheld.
And she had spent these past two years becoming something of a reluctant expert on the species. This man was...not like the others.
This man walked as if his footsteps upon the ground were a favor he was doing for the stone floor beneath him and, perhaps, the earth itself. He was very tall, and though he was dressed in the sort of exquisite suit that could have made any form look perfect, she had an immediate and innate understanding that there was no sleight of hand here. His shoulders were truly that wide. He wasactuallymade of all that muscle, lean and hard, and every step he took made it clear that unlike the sorts of men that Hope was used to, he used his body for hard, physical things.
Hard, physical things, she whispered to herself, a hot little echo that seemed to send a kind of too-bright, glittering burst straight through her.
But more than all of that—thoughall of thatwas a lot—he was dangerous.
She could feel that danger like a new, intense heat, like flames breaking out from the nave and taking over the whole of the church. And the strangest sensation swept over her, like her own skin had simply burst out all over into that same kind of fire. She would not have been at all surprised to find flames dancing up and down her arms, part of that fire that climbed and climbed, hotter and higher, the longer she looked at him.
Hope had some odd thought that perhaps he was a guest who had merely come late, that perhaps he knew Lionel somehow—
But even as she thought it, she realized that he was focused on her.
Only on her.
That meant she could do nothing at all but stare at him in return.
This was not a hardship, but her body reacted as if it was ahard, physical thingall its own. He had eyes of an unholy midnight in a face sculpted from bronze. He had a blade of a nose, dark brows, and a mouth so stark it made something inside her feel hollow, as if overwhelmed with the austerity she saw there.
So overwhelmed it made her shiver, and not because she was cold.
He bore down upon her and Hope knew on some level that it could only have taken a few seconds. His strides were so long, so deliberate. It could only have been one breath, maybe two, but it felt like an eternity.
An eternity of gazing at this man, this apparition, and all of that light and heat. An eternity of a kind of wonder as one explosion fed into the next inside her, making new and strange sensations burst into life all over her skin and then reach deep in her core.
An eternity that felt like fate.
Like a deep recognition when she was more certain than she had ever been of anything that she had never laid eyes on this man before.
An eternity—
But then he wasright therebefore her.
