Page 46 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Tonight, he did not feel like laughing.
Because if he did, wouldn’t that mean it was his father’s revenge that had won the day? It would mean he had made Cyrus exactly like him. The kind of man who would take a woman away from everything she knew, love her until she loved him back, then tell her it had all been a bit of seduction and he would never feel the same.
Wasn’t that the trajectory of his parents’ relationship?
How could he ever have imagined he could behave this way? Cyrus couldn’t access the man of fury who had so coldly told this woman that he would hold her life in his hand—when all along, it had been the opposite.
He had been wrong about her in every possible way.
And anyway, she did not appear to have heard him.
“But you have a bigger problem,” she was saying instead. “And I’m certain you won’t think it inconsequential in the least.”
She smiled, and he had an inkling that he was not going to like whatever she had to say at all.
Or, something in him whispered, in a voice he told himself he did not recognize as he had not heard it in so long, not unless it was a song,you might well like it too much, Cyrus. And then what will become of you?
But he could not entertain his mother now, not even in his own head.
He thought he might explode.
“Hope,” he began. “Omri—”
But she would not be silenced.
Not even by that endearment that he had not said sardonically in quite some time.
“Congratulations, Cyrus,” she said instead, with that steel beneath her soft tone that always told the truth about who she was. How had he let himself forget that, too? “I’m pregnant.”
And that was when Cyrus understood that Hope had been the real storm all along, delivering him straight into his doom.
CHAPTER TEN
HOPEDIDN’TEXPECTCyrus to throw her a baby shower. She wasn’tcompletelydelusional.
But she also hadn’t expected that she would end the night in the dungeons.
Or that she would be the one to march down into the bowels of the fortress and lock herself in.
It had seemed liked a good idea at the time.
“You can come out of there any time you like,” Cyrus growled from the other side of the bars. “This stunt of yours has gone far enough.”
“When you say you’re going to throw someone in your dungeons, I bet you mean it,” she observed, then beamed a smile in Cyrus’s direction. “So do I.”
“You cannot throw yourself in a dungeon, Hope.”
“I just did.”
And there were other things she could have said to him then. Like the things she’d said a little too hotly upstairs, thinking she could poke at him the way she always did and he would explode the wayhealways did, and everything would end the way it normally did—with him so deep inside her there would be no telling who was who.
But Cyrus had not imploded.
If anything he had looked as close to defeated as she’d ever seen him, and that had made her want to sob as nothing else could have. She’d felt her eyes well with tears, when she hadn’t cried since her father died.
I would have locked myself away in the fortress dungeons if I had ever imagined these things could be possibilities, he had told her.
That was the first she’d heard of dungeons.
