Page 50 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
She had already fallen. And hard.
It was possible she had been half in love with him ever since he’d carted her out of that wedding chapel.
And the next time he turned up on the other side of her cell’s bars, she regarded him solemnly.
From the freestanding copper bath where she had been soaking for some while, with bubbles in a foamy riot all around her and a bit of music playing in the background, too. For texture.
“How long do you plan to stay down here?” Cyrus asked.
More stiffly than the bars that stood between them.
“As long as it takes,” she said. And when he only sighed, and did not ask to explain what she meant, she didn’t know if she should be pleased. Or worried.
“I did not intend to get you pregnant, Hope,” he told her, his voice still gruff—but laced through with that formality that never heralded anything she wanted to hear. She braced herself where she sat. “I understand I did not prevent it. I cannot account for my lapse. But you must see that this ruins everything.”
She supposed he meant his plans. Her life in his palm and all the rest of it. The mighty desert and sand in all directions. The other women he told he would marry, though he had brought no others here.
Maybe all men were fools, as the old woman had said.
Or maybe it was that he thought love was a ruin all its own.
“That sounds like a you problem, Cyrus,” she replied. She considered him and how he stood straighter at her tone. At, no doubt, the disrespect in her words—but she knew him. She knew he liked it when she talked like that. So maybe everything wasn’t quite as ruined as he pretended. “And while we’re talking about these things, I want my mother.”
“Your mother?”
He sounded as if she’d requested a pit of poisonous snakes be thrown into her bathwater.
“My mother,” she repeated, enunciating each syllable. “I’m pregnant. I’m going to become a mother myself and I’d like to take what solace I can in mine. And honestly? That you don’t understand why that might be the case is everything that’s wrong with you.”
Something sparked in his dark gaze. “There is nothing wrong with me. As a matter of law. I am the Lord and—”
She waved a hand, dismissing him from behind iron bars in her cozy cell. “I’m a prisoner, Cyrus. You might not have put me in this cell, but you had every intention of jailing me in this fortress. Not only this summer, but for the nextyear. A prison is a prison no matter how big it is. All I did was make it obvious.”
Then she tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and pretended to be asleep.
When she opened up her eyes again, he was gone.
Another few days passed. Hope assumed that he was off having a very kinglike temper tantrum somewhere else. Though usually when he took his trips, someone told her so. As if his staff was invested in her thinking well of him.
When what she’d thought was that their investment was what spoke highly of him.
Whatever he’d been off doing, he appeared in the dungeon on the fifth day, ordered the cell door flung open, and then bore her with great ceremony back up out of the dungeons and into the harem again.
“What’s going on?” she asked him as the doors were opened and Cyrus himself actually walked her into the harem courtyard.
He didn’t answer. He merely extended out his arm toward the center of the of the pretty square. And took her some moments to stop blinking in all the bright and dazzling light that poured down from above. From the glare of the blue sky and the scent of all the flowers.
It took her a moment to accept that she had missed this place.
And another moment to make sense of the figure that stood there next to the fountain, not dressed like the other women at all.
Mignon. It was Mignon, who was already crying—leaving Hope to work very hard not to do the same.
They threw themselves into each other’s arms, murmuring in a long stream about the time they’d spent apart, and so many apologies, and any other number of inanities that all meant the same thing.
I love you.
I missed you.
