Page 45 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
“Naturally.” Hope eyed him. “Why should the woman be involved at all? You might as well make the nearest chair your queen, by that logic.”
He was surprised that hadn’t been suggested. Instead, his father had seen to it that Cyrus would marry an Englishwoman because it was tradition and hate her, too, because he’d spent so many years being primed to find her every move suspect. It would not surprise him in the least if the old King was somehow responsible for that missing contract, too.
If he had somehow made certain that Cyrus would come into his marriage filled with exactly the sort of deep, cruel fury his father had claimed was a family trait.
Cyrus had always seen himself as more rational than his father, though he had wisely kept that to himself. He had always assumed that when tested, he would never behave as the old man had.
And yet he had kidnapped this woman with his own two hands. He had thrown her over his shoulder and carried her away, and it was only by the greatest luck—luck he did not deserve—that she happened to bethiswoman, who had laughed in his face, danced in his harem, and ruined him completely.
But the nights were growing colder. It was impossible to pretend that summer was not coming to a close. A whole season that he had spent here, with her, instead of doing what he had long held to be the most critical part of his duty.
He knew that was on him.
Just as he knew that he could not be around this woman again until he looked himself full in the mirror and undertook his own reckoning.
Until he found out who he really was, not simply who his father had made him.
“It is unacceptable that the Lord of the Aminabad Desert should be beholden to anyone,” he decreed then, making her eyes go wide. “Much less a woman. You must see that this can’t go on, Hope. Not like this. It is time to return to reality.”
“It was the talk of queens, wasn’t it,” Hope said, staring back at him. Though she didn’t look at all concerned. “It wound you right up.”
“I am notwound up.” But he wasn’t going to argue with her. He was going to do what he should have done a long time ago and act like the King he’d been born to be, not the man who had been made in the fire of old cruelties and too many poisons to name. “I will leave you here. You can carry on as you like. You might even get the hang of dancing.”
“Dancing,” she repeated, as if he’d said something shocking.
“I will return to you next summer,” he told her and this time, he meant it as the decree it was. “My men will let me know how you are faring.”
“Oh, good,” Hope said, though her eyes were dark. “They’ve always been so good at that.”
“We had a summer,” he said, though he was afraid he could feel his own body crumbling where he stood. As if he was one more pillar rendered unto dust by these terrible truths he still didn’t want to face. But he would. “We will have another one.”
It felt like a concession. Yet as his words hung there in the bedchamber between them, Cyrus reflected on the fact that, really, he could have chosen his moment with more care.
This announcement would likely have gone over better if he had not been seized with his usual hunger for her when she’d arrived tonight. If he had not blurted it out like that.
If he could find a way to stop looking at her as if she was the only safety from the storm he’d ever known while she looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses.
Still, he had not expected her laughter.
Particularly because it did not sound the way it normally did.
Tonight he thought it seemed tinged with a little bit of that hysteria that he remembered from long ago.
He found he liked it a lot less now.
“That sounds like a great plan.” Hope did not sound as if she thought it sounded anything like great. But she was smoothing her silks back into place, so only the way her hair swung indicated that she was more agitated than she wished to show him. “There are only two problems, as far as I can see.”
He stepped away from her, because he could not seem to think straight when she was near. “There are no problems. It will go as I have said it will. For so I have decreed it.”
“You can decree it all you like,” Hope said, her voice more clipped than he was used to hearing it. Even the gold of her gaze looked far darker. “Your first problem, though I’m sure you’ll consider it a minor and inconsequential one, is that I’m in love with you, Cyrus. For my sins.”
“That is nothing to do with me,” he growled out at her, because it should have been exactly that. Nothing. Air. Forgotten as soon as it was said.
He certainly shouldn’t feel a kind of roaring triumph deep within him. This was what he had wanted at the start though he had nearly forgotten it, somehow, over the course of these months. She wasmeantto be in love with him.
This was the whole point. He’d wanted her to feel sick with it. To suffer for it.
He had always assumed that when she told him it had happened, as it inevitably would, he would laugh. Because his revenge would be complete.
