Page 54 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Being England, it wasn’t even a proper storm. It was just rain.
And it tore into him all the same.
He’d had his driver drop him a good mile or so down the drive, because he needed to clear his head. He needed to make sense of what was happening.
He needed to do this without all thosesongsin his head.
Because he, Cyrus Ashkan, Lord of the Aminabad Desert, had returned to this benighted country to see the one woman he despised above all others because his wife—who he should also despise, but did not—had demanded it.
Even though he was still sorting through all those revelations he’d had about his father. Even though he was still reeling.
Hope had told him to come here and so he had, to this house where he had been held prisoner for so many years.
Although, a voice inside him whispered as he walked along the lane that became more familiar with each step,how much of a prisoner were you really?
Because he remembered his time here all too well, now he was here again. He had learned to say otherwise. And he had eventually said it so many times that he had come to believe it was true, in its way. That those dreams he sometimes had—of swimming in these ponds and rowing boats across the lake, running along the wooded paths and climbing the trees, as free as he liked—were just silly fantasies out of storybooks.
Instead of real memories of the way he had spent the bulk of his days here.
Not that any of that mattered now, he told himself grimly, and marched on.
The house sat on the little knoll it always had. But he was bigger now, and could only look at the small incline and remember how he thrown himself down it so he could roll and roll, laughing riotously because his mother had always joined him.
He had not thought of that in years.
He did notwantto think of any of this, just as he had notwantedto face the terrible truths he’d finally understood about his father.
Because it was one thing to acknowledge that, secretly, he had always known that she was not quite the horror his father had claimed she was while he was still far away. It was one thing to accept all the ways his father had been cruel to her as well as to Cyrus himself.
He had found that contract, tucked away in the office here, like a final taunt.
While Hope conducted her dungeon sit-in, Cyrus had stood with his feet in the sand, allowing himself his own reckoning with a man who had been dead for years.
A man who had never deserved Cyrus’s obedience, much less his respect and admiration. He’d won those one beating at a time.
He sighed as he walked, climbing up the old stone steps. He remembered that his mother might have worried about the state of her figure, as many women did and as she personally had to do for her job, but he had never seen her abuse herself as his father had claimed. Nor had he ever seen her use any substances harder than the same alcohol he knew his father had liked to drink, though his father liked to tell a different tale, making her out to be a monster.
Cyrus had never considered her a monster. Not while he’d lived here, and not after, when he visited her for the express purpose of breaking her heart.
It was that visit that sat heavily on him as he walked up to the great front door, feeling cold and damp and furious straight through.
But this time, not at his mother. He wanted to say that he was mad at a golden-eyed woman who was even now eating her way through his kitchens while reclining at her leisure in an overly luxurious dungeon but he knew better.
The person he was angry at, always and forever, was himself.
Cyrus took his time at the door before he reminded himself that he was a king, not a boy, and rang the bell.
He had loved ringing it as a child. And it was funny, the things a man could carry around inside himself without knowing. The exact sound of that bell. The way it echoed through the grand old house. The sound of footsteps in the hall and the way the great old door opened with a stout, deep sound.
He remembered all of that. It sounded inside him, like words to those melodies he’d tried so hard to make himself forget.
And then he found himself staring at the same butler who had been here when he was a child. The old man had to be halfway to the crypt, but he still managed to give the impression that he was looking down at Cyrus from a great height.
Even though he had shrunk to half his size.
“Master Justin,” he said, which was not the impeccable courtesy Cyrus recalled. But then, why bother with the faultless address he surely knew when he could remind them both that he had known the boy Cyrus had once been. “I must tell you, sir, that no one in this house will take kindly to it if you are here to further abuse your mother’s kindness.”
“If you could take me to her, please,” Cyrus replied.
