Page 43 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
So instead he hauled her to him. And then he showed her precisely how he felt about the things she’d said to him tonight, right there on the tower floor, bathing them both in starlight, as if that could chase away that ache in his bones.
As if that could hold off the storm Cyrus was terrified was coming for him, no matter how clear the skies looked as the sands shifted all around him. Whispering of a reckoning to come.
Whispering words he had never allowed to be spoken in his hearing.
Singing old songs he kept imagining he could scrub from his mind entirely, only to wake up with those same old melodies on his tongue.
More days passed, turning into weeks. Summer settled in. And even though Cyrus knew it was long past time that he got back to his usual travels, staying in each of the desert’s four separate regions for a season so that his people could know him and follow him because they knew he understood them, too—he was loathe to do it.
Just as he found himself curiously uninterested in adding to his harem as originally planned. No matter how many times his man discreetly placed the tablet back in the center of his desk, he set it aside and focused on other matters.
He told himself he was merely indulging this strange desire for Hope that had overtaken him, but that he would soon grow bored. For nothing could last, this he knew. That was one of the desert’s finest lessons. Nothing was truly permanent, save change itself.
Certainly nothing this intense, this all-consuming.
Storms were not made for longevity. His father had taught him that long ago, right here in the fortress. They had watched sandstorms—sometimes from the safety of these walls and sometimes out in them with only a makeshift cave for shelter—and no matter how terrifying, they always blew themselves out. And no matter the new formations, the dunes knocked down here and raised again there, it was still the desert.
The desert always remained.
And so too would Cyrus once this particular storm blew itself out.
He held on to that.
He told himself that it was no catastrophe that all he thought about was Hope. It was simply the nature of a storm—who thought of other things while sand whirled about like rain? So too during all of his calls, all of his tedious video conferences, all the short trips that felt like an imposition instead of a part of his sworn duty—he found that he could not give the whole of his attention as he usually did because part of it was always with her.
The summer wore on and he told himself that even though this madness between them seemed to grow in intensity by the day, it would stop. It would end.
As all things ended.
But in the meantime, he was like a man possessed.
It didn’t matter how many times he told himself that she was only a woman, and surely no woman was that much different from another.
Because it seemed to him in those hours when he moved inside of her—when they came together again and again so that it seemed there was no end or beginning to the shapes they made or the things they felt—he knew deep inside of him that if asked, he would be unable to remember if he had ever touched another.
He could hardly remember it away from her, either.
One night, while waiting for his guards to bring her to him so they could enact that formal handoff that he knew pleased them both with its archaic formality, he found himself thinking that all his ancestors who’d stood here before him were to be pitied. For surely none of them had found a woman like this. A woman like Hope. If they had, he knew, there would have been no need for a harem in the first place.
But even as he thought such a thing, it infuriated him.
Or rather, what infuriated him was that he thought the notion ought to enrage him—but it didn’t.
As if his particular storm was here to stay.
And when he heard her feet behind him, he was scowling as he turned to look at her.
She did not pause. Not Hope. She came straight to him anyway, her fingers finding that furrow between his brows and smoothing it away.
More damning, he let her.
“Do I displease you tonight?” she asked, but not as if she had the slightest worry that she might. “It’s my dancing, isn’t it? You’ve finally accepted what I told you all along. I really am utterly dreadful.”
Cyrus should have hated that she made him want to laugh. But he didn’t hate it. He didn’t hate a single thing about her and that was the trouble. He could even feel his mouth betray him with the slightest curve.
It was an outrage.
“You are truly dreadful,” he agreed, but he found that outrage couldn’t quite take hold. “But I like it.”
