Page 49 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
But he only shook his head, looking at her as if despaired of her.
“This should not have happened,” he said, in that same low voice that sounded like grief.
“You don’t like that I’m in love with you,” she said then, holding his gaze. “I understand that. But Cyrus. Have you asked yourself why?”
“This is the desert.” He sounded almost astonished that she would question that. “It erodes everything it touches, especially love.”
“Is that what you feel?” she asked him, too aware that the key to the cell was tucked under her pillow and she could go to him. Right now. She could let herself out and touch him, hold him, kiss that broken expression off his face. “Or what you were told?”
Cyrus did not reply. But he did not have to. She could see the truth all over his face, making that deep bronze face of his seem something like pale around the edges.
“Or is it worse than that?” she asked, almost too softly to hear. “Is that what he did to you here?”
“Enough,” he muttered.
She didn’t see him for two days after that. But that was good, in a way. It meant she had time to think.
Her life in the harem not only meant toiletries were provided—and usually applied by someone else—it meant that she was rarely on her own at all. Only when they left her to sleep for the night did she have a measure of solitude, though there was no door on her alcove. If she wasn’t under her covers, there were always eyes on her.
The women and the guards were always, always watching, and even if she accepted that the watching was mostly benevolent—as her current situation suggested, since they’d outdone themselves making the cell into a luxurious retreat—it was still a lot for someone who’d spent most of her life feeling entirely alone.
Feeling it and usually actually experiencing it, too.
Now it all snuck up on her at once.
She’d found that she was pregnant, and instead of feeling terrified and overwhelmed, she’d been very much afraid that the overwhelming feeling that had raced around inside of her and threatened to swell up and burst free...was joy.
As foolish as that seemed, even then, when she hadn’t known what Cyrus’s reaction would be. Because she already knew she loved him. It had been a gradual dawning of awareness, and the way they made each other come apart only added it to it.
At first she’d thought she was simply addled by endorphins.
But shelikedhim. She liked how seriously he took his role here, so unlike so many of the men she’d met, who shrugged off responsibilities because theirs were inherited fortunes and needed no input from them. She liked how kind he was to his staff, always, no matter what they might have found him doing.
She liked the man his people thought he was, the man she learned about every day in the stories the women told her. About the time he had strode into an accident scene and took a child out of the line of danger. About how scared he had clearly been as a young boy, brought back here by his remote and rather terrifying-sounding father, but had shown such courage and bravery every day.
And if the women had sometimes heard the sound of muffled sobs at night, a lost boy missing his mother, they had never told the old King.
When the women had come to take her through her usual preparations for an evening with Cyrus that night, Hope had been happy to let them talk all around her, their voices rising and falling, as she considered the fact that she was carryinglifeinside her.
She had felt that only hours after taking that test, she was changed. Something in her had opened wide. No matter what happened, she knew what this felt like, now. She understood an entire new world ofpossibilities.
It had been easy to talk about things like this in an academic sense with men she was delighted she hadn’t had to marry.
But now there wasa lifeinside her, and Cyrus was the father. She had made love to him so many times that even thinking about him made her body warm. They had loved each other and the result was a life inside her, changing her even then. Changing her already.
She’d thought she’d understood a bit more about her own mother then, in a way she never had before. Not her fragility, her hummingbird flits and fancies, but those odd moments of power.
Like a mother tiger lives in her too, she’d thought that night.Somewhere.
Now, lying in her cell after having not seen Cyrus in two days, Hope found she understood Mignon even more.
Because her mother was not resilient. Not the way that Hope had been forced to become. Mignon’s father had taken care of her. Then Hope’s father had done the same and Mignon might have drowned her sorrows in too much wine and too many pills that were supposed to make her happy, or supposed to make her sleep, but in the end she had been loved.
She had been so loved. And she had been in love. Was it so terrible that she wanted to be loved again?
Hope had already been pretty certain that she was falling in love with Cyrus. How else could she explain how greedy she was for him? What else would make sense of the way she could not get enough, ever?
Knowing that she carried his child, and that she was fairly certain that he would not take kindly to that fact—but she was happy all the same—let her know there was nofallinginvolved.
