Page 44 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
He could not wait for the ritual of a meal. He took her then in a swift glut of what he told himself was fury, tossing her over the edge of the bed and kicking her legs aside. He tugged her silks out of his way so he could slam himself inside her, lifting her hips up to meet him as he took her in a hurry from behind.
As if he thought that if he gave himself over to the madness of it all, she would not join him in the glorious, plummeting fall from such heights. That if she didn’t, that might put him right at last.
But she did. She always did.
Even if, like tonight, she dared to reach down herself and make certain of it.
No other woman would dare, Cyrus knew. No other woman would dream of taking pleasure he didn’t give her. It would be seen as an insult.
He did not understand why it was that he loved it when this one did as she pleased.
Cyrus could not even manage to pretend to feel it as some kind of insult, because he liked it when she shattered all around him, her tight sheath gripping him, tugging him, taking him with her when she took flight.
Later, after they’d showered together—and he’d spent some time using her sweetness an appetizer, kneeling before her as the water beat down and licking that sweet honey from between her legs that he found he craved far more than anything served from his kitchens—they settled in for a meal before the windows that let in the desert.
It was starting to get darker sooner. It was full dark now, when, back when he’d first brought her here, they had watched the last of the sunset over their meals.
Cyrus had to acknowledge that the coming change of seasons made him restless. As if the turning of the earth would force him into making the decisions he been putting off, if not facing the storms he knew were coming for him.
“If I am your wife because you said so when we arrived, does that make me your queen as well?” Hope asked, drawing his attention back to her from the great desert outside.
Another woman would have asked that question in a voice filled with court intrigue and politics, but this was Hope. She seemed far more focused on the savory dishes in pots before her. He could not imagine that she was suddenly showing any real interest in the Aminabad throne.
Perhaps that was why it seemed no particular hardship to answer her in a way he would not have done if he’d imagined she was angling for a crown, like too many of the women he’d met in his lifetime—blurry as they all seemed to him now.
“They are not the same,” he told her. “In order to be known as my queen, I would need to pronounce you such. My father was renowned for having many queens, one after the next. It was a gift he gave each new wife when he thought they might be the one to give him another son. It was not a gift he ever extended to my mother.”
“Because he was punishing her.” And it was only when he had been silent some while, glaring at her, that Hope looked up. She blinked, looking baffled. “Did I say something wrong?”
“My mother kidnapped the heir to this kingdom, Hope. You seem to forget that.”
“Yes, but he kidnapped you right back. If it was wrong when she did it, why was it right when he did it in return?”
Her eyes were clear gold and there was no reason he should feel as if they pierced him straight through.
“The issue of whether or not she was a queen was before all of that,” he heard himself say.
Hope tilted her head to one side, holding a piece of the flatbread she preferred in her fingers. “But she’d already given him a son. You.”
And it struck without warning, the storm he’d been hoping he might avoid after all. The last remaining pillar seemed to crumble into dust between them, and without the howl and thunder he had been expecting.
It was such a quiet thing, in the end.
His father had punished his mother after she’d given him a son, but before she’d taken Cyrus away from him. He had refused to make her his queen. The scenes that Cyrus remembered, of shouting and weeping and smashing crockery, must have occurred between those two things, though his father had always made it sound as if his treatment of Cyrus’s mother was predicated entirely on her betrayal.
But what if that wasn’t the truth? What if the things his father had always told him were as wrong as everything else?
What if it had all been a lie for a cruel man to not only justify his treatment of his wife, but of his son?
What if Cyrus’s entire life was the lie?
He felt the floor beneath him seem to buckle. He focused on the frown on Hope’s lovely face.
“You are not my queen,” he told her, as if it was a confession. His voice felt gritty in his own mouth. “Unless I choose to make you my queen. The kingdom is always mine—you would be Queen only at my pleasure.”
And he understood as he said it that this, too, was a cruelty his father had visited first upon his mother, then upon him. He had given every other wife the designation, purely to rub salt in the wound. But then, after beating it into Cyrus that he was to hate the woman who had stolen him from a man Cyrus knew full well was barbaric, he had seen to it that Cyrus would repeat the cycle.
“It is easy to take a wife,” he made himself say, because she was still watching him, still frowning at him, as if she sensed the storm yet could not see it. “It is slightly more complicated to make that wife a queen, as it requires more people. So yes, there is a ceremony of sorts. The woman in question does not need to be present, though she can be. It is typically a conversation between a king and his men, asking them to offer fealty to the new Queen.”
