Page 52 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Because their baby curled up right there, inside of her. The baby they had made in love, though he might call it something else.
She knew better.
He glanced up, his midnight gaze finding hers and holding with such intensity that she caught her breath. Her stomach flipped over. Butterflies when they’d had each other already, too many times to count.
“I think this can work,” he told her, his voice almost excruciatingly solemn. It made her ache. “You will have my child.”
“I will,” she agreed.
Because she might have locked herself in that cell, but he hadn’t only sent furnishings and feasts. He had also sent in his doctors. She knew that everything was moving along as it should. As she was certain he did, too.
“You will have my sons, if the fates permit,” Cyrus intoned, the way he did when what he was saying wasimportant. In case she hadn’t already been hanging on his every word. “I will make you my queen, Hope. There is no denying this passion between us and I have decided that I do not wish to deny it.” He nodded then, though his gaze never shifted from hers. “I will allow it, Hope. And in so doing, it will perhaps become like any other duty.”
And then he waited, as if he had offered her the world on a platter.
Or even a few sweet words.
“This is not the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, Cyrus.” Hope considered. “Then again, maybe it is. You haven’t mentioned any dreary contracts yet. Or questionable activities. I’ll give you points for that.”
He frowned at her, then he withdrew his hand from her belly. He rolled up, moving so he could sit with his back to her and his legs over the side of the bed.
And that did not bode well.
Hope wanted to reach for him, but something about how straight he held his spine, then, made her think better of it. She crawled to the far edge of the bed, then stood. Then she went around to the foot of the bed to see if she could find her clothes.
And she had only just finished smoothing her silks back into place when he spoke again.
“All of these things are possible between us,” he told her, his voice dark. Foreboding, she could not help but think. If not actively forbidding, too. He turned to look at her then, and there was something about those midnight eyes, so dark across the stirrings of the brand-new dawn outside the windows. It was suddenly difficult to breathe and it was nothing like butterflies at all. “But for this to work, Hope, you must never mention love again.”
And Hope had really never felt more like her mother than she did at that moment.
Because everything in her wanted to say yes.Neededto say yes. She wanted to scream it out loud, because surely if he gave her all these things she wanted, himself most of all, love would come.
That was what she believed, in truth. That love made its own rules. That Cyrus did not need to believe in it. He did not need to feel it, though she didn’t believe he didn’t. That was the thing—love didn’t require belief.
There was already a softening deep inside of her and a little voice—her mother’s, she knew that, but then again, it was hers too—whispered,Tell him whatever he needs to hear. Then love him enough for the both of you.
And maybe she would have done exactly that, in a different life. If her father had lived long enough to tell her about the marriage he’d arranged for her and she had met Cyrus the way, perhaps, she’d been meant to all along. If all she’d known was that boundless love that had filled up and patched over every hole, and made certain each night that the day would come.
But she had lived through those other years, too. She had watched as her mother had tried her best to make men love her when they did not. She had watched her mother dash herself against those rocks again and again and again.
Still, everything inside her told her that this would be different. Thatshewas different. That he was certainly like no other man she’d ever met, and surely all of that had to count for something.
She almost said yes.
God, how she wanted to say yes.
But instead she shook her head. “No.”
His head tilted slightly to one side, as if he could not understand the syllable he had just heard. “What did you just say to me?”
“No, Cyrus.”
Hope made herself breathe, then she made herself stand tall. She had been looking for a job her whole life, hadn’t she? And now she had one. She would be a mother to this child inside her. She would be a daughter to the mother she had.
And she would be a queen to this man, but only if he was the King she needed.
Hope had taken on the wisdom of the desert in the course of her summer here, because the desert was everywhere. Its lessons were unavoidable.
