Page 40 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Hope wanted nothing more than this.
For as long asthismight last.
And, unbidden, she felt a well of understanding for her sweet, silly mother wash over her then, there in the starlight. Was this what Mignon had always been after? This sense that she was finally complete?
Because Hope was tempted to believe that nothing truly bad could ever happen when there was this connection, this quiet joy.
That this was the beginning and the end of everything.
“You should have told me,” Cyrus said some long while later, there in the quiet dark, lit only by the stars far above. “You should have told me from the first.”
She didn’t pretend not to understand what he meant. “Would you have believed me if I had?”
Hope felt more than heard him sigh at that. And then his hands were on her, shifting her around so that she knelt up over him, there in the thick, soft water.
Hope’s eyes had long since adjusted to the dark. And sitting this way was better, because that bronze face of his was covered in stars and it was as if all of that shine blurred the sharp, cruelly beautiful edges.
So that he looked the way he always did when she imagined him, alone in her bed.
She followed an urge she might have restrained in the daytime, tracing the shape of his cheekbones and then that stark, hard line of his mouth.
“You should have told me,” he said again, but his voice was darker then.
Hope thought it sounded more like a condemnation of himself than of her.
“If I’m honest,” she told him, “I quite preferred the moral high ground.”
She’d meant that to lighten the mood, somehow. She even smiled, but he only looked at her as if she was some kind of ghost.
“As well you should,” he told her then, in that voice of his that sounded like a proclamation. “But I have always held myself to higher standards of behavior than others. When I am wrong I say it, and I have wronged you,omri.”
And then there was nothing light in Hope, either. Only the weight of his gaze and the way he looked at her, straight on, so there could be no hiding from this. From the apology he made so fully and matter-of-factly.
“Allow me to compensate you for any suffering I might have caused,” he said in a low voice. “An apology, if you will.”
“I don’t want your apologies,” she told him, though she would treasure his all the same. I want—”
“Hope.” And she stilled as he held her there, still kneeling over him. “I know what you want, if nothing else.”
And she thought she should argue about that, but he was huge and hard between them and she was already shivery with delight.
Then his hands were on her bottom, shifting her up and over him, so he could work his way inside her, slick and hot. Until he was settled in deep, nudging the very depths of her once more.
Where he stayed, his gaze as hard on her as he was deep inside her, watching her work to accommodate him. Because he filled her so completely and slightly more than was comfortable.
And she had never imagined that he could feel like this. It was as if she had never been more herself than when he was deep inside her, connecting them like this. Changing everything.
Changing her most of all.
And Hope didn’t need him to tell her what to do, just like she didn’t need all of that research she had done before. Her mind was a perfect blank of everything but this.
There was nothing for her but him.
Nothing but Cyrus, forever.
And then her body’s insistence that she roll her hips and teach herself how to rock back and forth against that deep shaft of pure male fire deep inside.
She did it again and again.
