Page 56 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
As if, he thought now, he’d had no choice but to hate his mother—for if he didn’t, he would have to face what his father had done by stealing him away from her.
Cyrus was older now. His father had died a bitter man, with too many daughters for his liking and talk of a curse hanging over him. And he certainly would not have approved of this.
Of Cyrus coming back here of his own volition, a clear sign of weakness so great it might have killed his father if he had not already died.
But what Cyrus had learned from Hope was that he was not afraid of his weaknesses. On the contrary, he liked to indulge in them.
He understood more than he thought his father would like, if he were still here.
No man would react the way his father had unless, at heart, he was more afraid of what love could do to him than he was of what power would.
Because power was easy. It required nothing except greed, if you liked.
But love asked for everything.
Cyrus could not say he liked being asked. He had not reacted well.
Maybe he was more of a coward than he’d imagined.
And in the end, it came down to what he wanted more. The life his father had handed to him, wrapped up in a bow, but with entirely too many strings. Or the life that he saw in Hope’s bright gaze.
A life where he was treated like magic and also a man. Where she saw who he was and all his many faults of arrogance and willful blindness, and forgave him anyway. Loved him anyway. Where there was always laughter and never that cringing, terrified awe that women had exhibited around his father. Where she not only made him smile, she made him imagine that he was not the creature of stone and silence he had long imagined he was. That he could make her laugh, too. These small, happy gifts lit up even an austere fortress in the desert. Even him.
And they made the harder parts of life seem brighter.
She did that. Hope did.
“Mother,” he started again.
“I loved him,” his mother told him in her same deliberate way, as if these were words she’d practiced in the hope of saying them someday. “And I know he told you a thousand stories of how that wasn’t true, but I did. I would have loved him forever, but he wouldn’t allow it.”
Cyrus let out a breath, but he did not try to speak over her. He did not try to take control of this conversation. He let her speak.
And she straightened, there before him, as if she had been prepared to wilt instead.
He didn’t like how that sat in him.
“And I might have accepted that, for your sake, but it became clear to me that he could not love anything,” his mother told him. “He could not allow even the faintest hint of it into his dreadful little kingdom because I believed you deserved more than sand and stone. I wanted you to have a heart. I wanted you to love something, anything.”
He wanted to tell her that he had, that he did, that he wasn’t that furious youth who had come back here to denounce her. That he knew, now, that he had done that because it was the only kind of love his father recognized. That twisted inversion of it.
And because he had needed to believe what his father had told him, or he would have had to face what he’d lost.
God, what he’d lost.
And she moved closer, still holding his gaze intently. “And I don’t care if you don’t love me, Just—Cyrus. I don’t care if you break my heart in a thousand pieces again and again. I’m your mother. I will love you enough for the both of us. I do.”
As Hope would, Cyrus understood then in a rush and he hated it. For Hope. For his mother. For the creature he’d become that both of them thought it necessary.
When he was the one who had something to prove here, not them.
His mother stopped then, her eyes too bright, and seemed to recollect herself. Cyrus found his chest working overtime, as if he had done something more active than simply stand here, listening.
At last.
She inclined her head, looking almost perfectly composed. “I don’t know what you have come to bludgeon me with today, my son. But you may go ahead. I only ask that you do so fully aware that I will love you all the same, whatever you say. Whatever your father told you, whatever you believe, I have always loved you. I will always love you. And nothing either he or you did or could do will ever change that.”
And there were so many things that Cyrus could have said to that. So many ways he could have responded.
