Page 7 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
Though she had not been meant to come to him until she was either of age or out of university, he had imagined that once her father died she would reach out to the man she been given to and ask for his aid. She had not.
And then, when she had finally turned eighteen, she had embarked on an enterprise he could only assume had been directed right at him.
She had delivered insult upon insult. A lesser man might very well have taken personally the stain upon his name, but Cyrus was a benevolent lord. That didn’t mean this woman who had been promised to him might not wish for a great many different avenues of deliverance all the same.
Because he was owed a debt and he was calling it in.
Her eyes remained closed beside him, but Cyrus stared down at the land below him as the helicopter flew north, low over the mountains and across parts of Switzerland and Liechtenstein before making its way into Germany.
He wanted no part of this place.
He preferred the stark honesty of the desert sands, as he had been well taught. The simplicity of the life that could, at any moment, be snatched back by the elements. A life where softness was nothing short of deadly. His father had hammered this point into him, again and again.
A place where kings had always ruled and always would.
Cyrus had taken the sins of his mother, each and every one trotted out before him by his father who claimed she had betrayed him, and used them as a cautionary tale. He had allowed the tumult of his early life to teach him and he never took the lessons he had learned at his ruthless father’s side for granted.
Indeed, those lessons had always been and would always be his guide in all things.
To this day, he counted himself grateful that he had been saved. That his had not been a destiny of betrayal and boredom like the too-soft woman who had dared attempt to steal him from his father when he was still a boy.
Even if it astonished him that the woman beside him now, the Englishwoman he would never have looked at twice had it not been tradition that he honor his grandmother’s promises, did not seem to know that vows in his part of the world were like iron. They did not, could not bend.
But he would show her.
Whether she liked it or not, she would learn.
Just as he had, long ago.
In Germany, the weather was wet and much colder than in Italy. He spoke to his men in a low voice as he climbed out onto the tarmac and ushered his stolen bride toward the jet that waited for him there.
“Gassed and ready to take you home, sire,” his man told him in their language.
“Not soon enough,” Cyrus growled in reply.
Once again, he expected her to cry foul. To put up some kind of fight or offer some measure of defiance. But she didn’t.
Hope simply let him tug her along, almost as if she didn’t care where she was going or with whom.
He laughed at that, too, though it was a sound devoid of amusement—because she would learn. There were any number of so-called men littering the cobblestone streets of these European cities. There were men everywhere, all of them making their claims to some power or another, as men always did.
But there was only one Lord of the Aminabad Desert. There was only one Cyrus Ashkan.
And well would this woman come to know what it cost to defy him.
He had not expected to want her at all, though he’d intended to do his duty, as always. He’d expected that her offenses would mark her unattractive in his eyes no matter how pretty she was, but that did not appear to be the case.
It was not that she didn’t offend him, of course. She did. She wore a wedding gown, had been walking down an aisle in a chapel to marry another man. How could he be anything but offended?
The trial was that he still wanted a taste. And the fact that she was not behaving the way he’d expected she would only made it worse.
“Sit and prepare yourself for takeoff,” he ordered her curtly once they boarded. “We will not stop until we reach the desert.”
He did not specifywhichdesert as, to him, there was only and ever one.
“How delightful,” she chirped as she swept to the seat he indicated. “I’ve only ever been to Marrakesh, where one is always going on about the desert without ever actually sticking a toe in the sand.”
And if she noticed his scowl at her temerity, she ignored it.
