Page 42 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
There was also that part of him that knew too well that he had already felt lost in her long before he knew of her innocence. He had already wanted her too much.
He had already married her and had already been entirely too consumed with kissing her—but he did not choose to focus on those uncomfortable truths. Not now.
He frowned at her instead. “I still cannot understand what you thought you were doing. Surely there were better options available to you than looking for a potential husband in such an unseemly way.”
She eyed him lazily, almost insolently, from her pillows. “How did you set about looking for a wife?” she asked. “I was under the impression your grandmother made arrangements and you signed papers, sight unseen. Would that have been better? Moreseemly, somehow, than going out to dinner the way people have been doing for ages?”
He regretted telling her the details of how the contract she’d never seen had come to be, not that he planned to admit such a thing. Because Cyrus had the lowering suspicion that once he started making more admissions, the fortress would crumble all around him like so much dust.
And he wasn’t sure if he meant the actual fortress they sat in or...himself.
“Better than letting it look as if you were dating half the men in London? Yes.”
“It only looked that way if you were spying on me when you could have helped me,” she said reprovingly, though her eyes were gleaming. “But even if I had been dating merrily, so what? That’s another thing people do, you know.”
And he knew the cheeky look she got about her when she was poking at him, deliberately, because he usually answered in the way that pleased them both the most. Cyrus could not say he minded it.
Still, today, he ignored his body’s immediate reaction to that sparkle in her gaze. “People might,” he agreed. “But not you. Not an innocent who hardly knew what her body was for when I met her.”
He stated that as fact. And knew it was one when she flushed.
“I know what my body is for now,” she said, her voice soft.
Cyrus no longer sat across from her, because that was too far away after whole days apart. And because if there was a table between them, he could not do what he did now and simply pull her close so he could get his mouth on her. So he could pull her over him, or beneath him, or like now, simply flush against the side of his body, because he always preferred to feel her.
“Hope.” He said her name, there against her mouth. “Why?”
She breathed something that sounded like his name, and then she sat back, pushing her golden hair back as she moved. And there was something almost helpless in her bright gaze when she looked at him. “My mother.”
“Your mother made you date these men?” he asked, astonished—and instantly deciding to cut the older woman off entirely.
“Of course not.” Hope sat back from him, and frowned down at the place where her hands rested on her own thighs as she knelt there beside him. “She would have loved to save us herself. She tried. Oh, how she tried. But she wasn’t made for hard things.”
“Softness is an indulgence,” Cyrus told her, not sure why his chest felt tight. “If you do not indulge it, it cannot rule you.”
“And a dandelion is unlikely to turn into a loaded gun simply because it stops coddling itself,” Hope replied, with a laugh. But the laugh ended quickly, and now she was looking at him with that helpless gaze that made that tightness in his chest...worse. “But I wasn’t made to be a pretty flower. It made sense that it was me.”
“You were the child.” Cyrus scowled at her. “It was her responsibility to care for you, not the other way around.”
And he heard himself say that. He heard it, and he felt it, too. The way it made his own bones seem to shift their places inside him.
Worse, he saw that helpless look on Hope’s face shift too, into something like compassion. “If she could have, she would have. But I love her too, you see. So I did what needed doing and regretted that I couldn’t do more. That there were...limits to what I could stomach doing. She didn’t hold that against me. She isn’t like that. She’s like a hummingbird, dancing from one sweet thing to the next. That’s where she’s best.”
“She should have tried parenting,” Cyrus said, because he couldn’t seem to stop. Not even when the words made his bones feel as if they were breaking themselves inside him. Not even when he couldn’t decide if he was betraying the memory of the man who’d made him or finally speaking the one terrible truth he’d been avoiding since he’d been brought to this place when he was twelve.
But if he chose, if he acknowledged what this was, he didn’t know what would happen to him. He didn’t know what would become of him.
If so many of the pillars he’d built his life on were wrong, ifhewas wrong, then who was he?
And somehow, Hope seemed to know that, too. Because she leaned in and slid her hand over his jaw. “I don’t hold that against her, either. Do you know why?”
Cyrus was terribly afraid he did.
But he couldn’t seem to stop her from saying it anyway. He couldn’t seem to move.
“Because that’s what love is,” Hope told him with a quiet certainty and that look in her eyes. “It forgives and loves on, no matter what. There’s nothing soft about that.”
And Cyrus wanted to shout his own battlements down, but he could not let himself do such things. He was the King.
