Page 5 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
“You are mine,” the man beside her told her then. “You will spend what remains of your life in the palm of my hand. And your behavior alone will dictate whether my hand remains open or closed up tight, like a fist. But hear me now that this will be the only choice remaining to you.”
Hope nodded along, the way she’d learned to do when powerful men spoke, only realizing when he frowned at her that this was probably not the correct response. Not when he was very clearly issuing a threat.
Because it was most certainly a threat, she had no doubt about that.
What this man did not seem to understand was that she had creditors whose threats were far more concrete.
“I can see that I’m supposed to cower,” she said then, helpfully. “But if I can be honest here, is there any way we could just skip this part and get to what you actually want from me? It’s only that I had a very dramatic morning. And as much as I appreciate being carried off from a wedding I wasn’t exactly thrilled with in the first place, I really am going to have to go back. There is my mother to consider.”
The frown on the man’s beautiful, arrogant face had turned into an open scowl that deepened with every word. “You are never going back. Was I unclear?”
“You were perfectly clear. It’s just that it won’t work,” Hope told him, matter-of-factly. “It’s not you. This is really a wonderful kidnap. Very overwhelming, I promise you. It’s only that I’m pretty much dead inside, so I’m afraid that mustering up tears and caterwauling and whatever else you might have been expecting is beyond me. And again, there is my mother to consider. There is always my mother, you see. I love her. And I promised.”
She thought of the fond way her father had gazed at Mignon and how he’d said, his voice so affectionate, that one day he hoped that Hope would love her and care for her when he couldn’t.I always will, Hope had assured him, because she had always wanted to do anything and everything her father wanted. And because she’d loved her delightful, always happy and usually silly mother beyond reason.
Beside her, the man was silent for a moment—but in a way that she could only think of asthunderstruck.And not in a good way.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked, his voice a bare ribbon of sound.
“I don’t think anyone asks that question and expects the answer to be no,” Hope said apologetically, “but no. I don’t know who you are. Should I?”
“My name should ring inside you like a bell,” he told her, his voice seeming to fill the whole car. “I should be the only thing you see when you close your own eyes. The barest hint of my approval should be the sun your whole earth moves around.”
Hope blinked at that. “Goodness. That’s...specific indeed.” She tilted her head to one side. “I didn’t even think to ask. Were you just wandering around local chapels today or did you specifically come for me? I’m Hope Cartwright, if that helps. And I don’t want to be rude, but I think you have me confused for someone else.”
He lounged in the seat beside her and she had the stray thought that no man she’d ever met could have seemed as brutally elegant as this one did. He was dressed like any of them, so it wasn’t his clothes. It was something about him. He was wrapped up in a kind of ferocity that made all of her nerve endings seem tosing out.
And keep right on singing.
“You are Hope Cartwright,” he said, not as if he was sounding out the name. But as if he was confirming her identity.As if, something in her thought then,he is speaking me into existence.When it was her mother who lived by the Lewis Carroll rule to think of at least six impossible things before breakfast, not Hope. “The woman who was promised to me at her birth and who has instead spent these last years making a mockery of that promise.”
She could not seem to breathe. He only shook his head. “Did you really believe that I would allow you to marry another? I am Cyrus Ashkan, Lord of the Aminabad Desert, and what I have claimed will never belong to another. This I promise you.”
And despite herself, Hope felt those words inside her.
Very much like a single bell ringing, low and deep.
But she shoved that aside, because there was nothing in her life that left any space forbells. Or this man with eyes like midnight and the way he looked at her, as if he had yanked her out of the life she knew and into some solar system where there was only him.
What did it say about her that she found the notion...oddly comforting?
Hope didn’t know, because everything always came back to the same place. Some people got to spend their twenties wafting about in search of various identities to try on and discard. They got to take the geographic tour, moving from one place to another, one job to another, one party to the next. Always betting that by process of elimination alone, they might figure out what todowith their lives.
Yet Hope had never had that option.
So she smiled at the impossible blade of a man beside her as if nothing could touch her or bother her—not even her own abduction.
“You can claim me all you like,” she told him calmly enough, even as the car raced away from Lake Como. “That sounds great, actually. But I will require that we carve out certain concessions in any contracts we sign. That’s as a baseline.” He seemed to stare at her without comprehension, and somehow, it seemed perilous to keep going. But she did. “Mostly it involves allowances for my mother. Nothing too onerous, I assure you.”
The car had been careening through the narrow roads of the Italian countryside, but it stopped now, in the middle of a field where a huge helicopter sat. Hope didn’t have to ask if it was his. She knew it was.
She waved a hand at the sleek machine as if she didn’t know or care that it would fly her away from Italy and there was precious little she could do about it. Part of her was glad of it, if she was honest. She even smiled a bit wider. “Especially not for man who has one of these on call.”
And Hope wasn’t at all prepared for what happened inside her when all Cyrus Ashkan, Lord of some desert, did was laugh.
As if she belonged to him after all.
CHAPTER TWO
