The desert kings kidnapp.., p.5
The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin, page 5
Though thinking things like that could not possibly help her here.
The plane’s door folded back in on itself and the plane began to move again, bumping slowly along the tarmac at first, then picking up speed. Then, too quickly for Hope’s taste, hurtling itself off into the cloudless sky that seemed to press down upon them like a great blue fist.
She watched the plane fly away until it was a small dot on the horizon and her eyes hurt from the glare.
Or possibly also because she was trying her very best to keep tears at bay. When she never cried. Not since the night her father had died—because what was the point? It didn’t bring him back. It didn’t change a thing.
Still, that felt a lot like the wrong question to ask herself just now. Here on a rapidly disappearing tarmac, surrounded by shifting sand on all sides.
And the man who called himself lord of this alien place.
She didn’t look at him. Not yet. She scoured the horizon instead, desperate to find something that whispered of civilization somewhere.
But there was nothing.
The endless, pitiless blue sky above. White sands in every direction, rising and falling like hills. Like waves.
Like the end of her, something in her whispered.
Yet that whisper didn’t feel too much. It felt something much more like right.
Which might have been the most frightening thing of all, had she allowed herself to focus on it.
“Beautiful, is it not?” Cyrus intoned in that way of his, as if he was proclaiming it to the skies and sand. Imprinting them with his will.
“I can see how someone might find it beautiful,” Hope hedged. Her lips were already dry and she truly couldn’t tell if that was the desert air or her own mounting panic. “It’s not what I’m used to, I can tell you that. So much sky. And all that sand. One expects a desert to be sandy, of course, but I still feel entirely unprepared for the immensity—”
She realized she was babbling and stopped herself in the next moment.
Even though it made her throat hurt.
She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, hard, and made herself turn to face Cyrus. To squint at him through all this light. So much light that the glare of it felt like another source of heat, all on its own and apart from the temperature, scalding her eyes in their sockets.
That seemed as good a reason to feel faintly teary as any.
And looking at the man before her was not soothing, exactly. Nothing about him was soothing. He was his own immensity. He stood there, a dark slash of color against all that blue and white. His gaze was near black. His face seemed even more bronze, set against the landscape that pressed in on all sides.
He merely regarded her as if she was the curiosity here. As if she didn’t fit, and she believed it. Because even though he wore a suit, she could tell that he belonged right here in this overwhelming place. That the desert had made him, no matter how many years he’d spent in England.
That he was made of the lonely sands, rolling on forever. That he was too expansive to fit beneath the gray clouds of England, the manicured fields, the old stone walls cutting the land into digestible parcels for too many centuries to count.
He looked like the desert, she thought, and then felt herself flush. Because she was being fanciful and that wasn’t like her at all.
“I think I’m dehydrating as we speak,” she told him, attempting to sound something close enough to cheerful. “In another moment I’ll be a crumbling husk and the breeze will scatter me all over this tarmac until I’m indistinguishable from the sand.”
For a moment Cyrus did not respond, and she thought he wouldn’t. That he would stand here and watch as she blew away before him like dust.
“I do not expect you to appreciate the desert,” he told her, and though his tone was bland enough she could see the faint disapproval all over him. A different sort of disapproval than the kind he’d been aiming at her since they’d met. This was less about vague promises he’d claimed had been made and more about her. What he clearly saw as the deficiencies in her character, immediately evident in the fact that she was not instantly in love with this stark, terrifyingly empty place. “I expected nothing else.”
“Did you love it at first sight?” she dared to toss right back at him. Maybe it really was the dehydration setting in and collapse was imminent. “When you found yourself here again as a twelve-year-old, was your first reaction joy?”
His face seemed to harden, becoming more a part of that glare. “My first and only reaction was gratitude that my father saw fit to return me to myself.”
“Really. Not even the briefest moment—”
“But you will have ample time to get used to the sky and the sand,” he continued, something cutting and ruthless in the way he said it. “As you will never leave this desert again.”
That was clearly meant to land like a blow. And maybe it would have, if Hope had been anyone else.
But she had taken far too many blows in her time. Too many to even bother counting. This one didn’t even feel like a blow. It was more like a kiss—
Not that she wanted to think about kissing when this close to him. In all his...state.
She didn’t quite laugh, squinting off toward one or other impossible horizon. “Never is a long time.”
“I told you. You are become my wife, Hope.”
Hope opened her mouth to argue that point, but stopped herself. Because the way he kept saying that finally registered. It was...almost archaic, really.
Like another proclamation.
Like a law might sound in a place like this.
She was too hot to shiver, surely. “You keep saying that.”
“I am anxious for you to hear me, Hope.”
Yet she could not make herself believe, for so much as an instant, that this man was anxious about anything, nor ever had been. “I hear you. But I don’t understand.”
“This is the Aminabad Desert and I am its lord,” he told her, a certain satisfaction in his tone. In his gaze. All over him, in fact. “What I declare becomes fact, and then is made law. That is the way of things here.” When she only squinted back at him, he relented. Slightly. “If I say you are my wife, we are married. It is done.”
Hope still thought she might topple over—and would have, probably, if she didn’t think she’d sizzle like a proper English fry-up right there on the tarmac, and her here without a hangover that needed that kind of indulgent mopping up—but sighed instead.
“Felicitations to us both, then. I guess?” She found her hands on her hips, somehow. “I think you’d better tell me what that means to you, Cyrus.”
Was that the first time she’d said his actual name? It felt illicit. Like stolen chocolate, melting on her tongue. She was sure she could feel the way his eyes blazed. As sure as she was that he felt it too, that melting.
Heatstroke, she told herself. That was all.
His dark brows arched high, command and condemnation at once, and no sign whatever of any reaction to the heat. “I don’t actually know you. I don’t know what you want in a wife. I don’t know your feelings about marriage at all, much less what it means in a cultural sense in a country I’ve never visited before.”
Hope really did laugh then, because it was that or give herself over to the heat. Her dry lips. That urge to cry, collapse, or both. That terrifying melting that felt worse than all of those combined.
She hurried on. “This might come as a shock to you, but I am something of an expert when it comes to various takes on the institution of marriage. I’ve discussed it at length, with all manner of people, and I can tell you that none of them agree. On anything, really. So when you tell me, in all your state, that I am become your wife—you’re going to have to tell me what you mean by that. In detail, so there can be no mistake.”
“You have already made the last mistake you will make,” Cyrus told her, his voice a low and dangerous thread that she could hear all too well above the breeze. Above the sound of her own heart, pounding much too hard. “Your indifference to the promises made in your name has showed me your character, but I have chosen to marry you anyway. In time, I am certain you will thank me for this gift.”
“Why would you gift someone you hated on sight?” Hope asked, and that was when the laughter she’d been holding at bay—possibly because it was a touch hysterical—bubbled up. “Surely it would have been easier to leave me to it. I certainly wouldn’t have known any different.”
“But I would have. And regardless of what you do or do not do, I keep my promises.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a foundation for a marriage,” she managed to say, not laughing any longer.
“And what was the foundation for the marriage you intended to embark upon today?” he asked, his brows high and his dark gaze intent on hers. “You could not wait to tell me it was no love match. That you were as happy to marry him, or me, as any other. By your own rationale, why should you care why I have chosen to elevate you in this manner?”
She wanted to tell him she didn’t care. She wanted to sweep everything he’d said aside and focus on the things she did care about, like making sure her mother was cared for. She wanted to defend herself, though she wasn’t even sure what accusations he was making—because he was right. Wasn’t he? Why should she care who she married?
The again, she’d never encountered a man who got beneath her skin like this.
And maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was sunstroke. But she had the strangest, fairy-tale-like notion that it was possible she did the same to him.
That maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t the only one feeling all this. That if she dared reach over and put her hand on his chest, his heart would roar as hers did.
“Fair enough,” she whispered.
He nodded, as if it was done. As if they were set in stone now, her and him. That, too, should have terrified her. “There is nothing left to you now but a life of quiet obedience, locked away from the world as if you were never here at all.”
“You say that like it’s a punishment,” she managed to say, even producing a slightly less hysterical little laugh. “But it sounds like a holiday.”
“It will be no holiday.” There, before her, he seemed to grow in size. He was an immensity on par with the desert that surrounded them. His dark eyes flashed, the darkest midnight she had ever beheld. “It will be an exercise in humility.”
“Cyrus...” she murmured, not certain what she wished to say to him. What she could say.
“I kept waiting for you to remember yourself,” he told her. “To remember that you were promised to one who waited for you to come to him, but this never occurred. Right up to this farce of a wedding, which you should have known I would never allow to take place.”
Hope could only listen to this in a kind of awe. Aware, on some level, that deep inside there was a trembling. Maybe even a yearning—to imagine that someone, anyone, had looked out for her these last years.
Though perhaps that was temper, not longing, that he had watched her over these past years and failed to intervene. Either way, she was completely unable to tear her gaze from his.
“It is lucky for you that you appeal to me, omri,” he told her, and the strangest thing was that she really did feel lucky for a long, dizzying sort of moment. Then he kept talking. “I did not expect that you would, but I am happy to accept the gift of your body in return for the mercy I have shown you already, and the incalculable honor I bestow upon you by marrying you.”
“Will my body truly be a gift in this marriage of yours?” She made herself ask the question, somehow not giving in to the trembling thing deep inside her that she was terribly afraid was not fear at all, but desire. Another thing she had never felt before. “Will it be mine to give—or not give? Notably unlike this kidnap?”
“You will beg to bestow this gift of yours upon me,” he assured her, as if he knew. As if he could see the future. And the look on his face was so intense that she thought for a moment that she could see it too. Because the mad whirl deep inside her was unlike anything she had ever felt before in her life. Almost as if it really was a gift, these things he thundered at her so sternly in all this wild heat. “But you may be certain that I will never give you the gift of my sons.”
Hope blinked at that, and maybe it was a welcome break from all those vast things inside her, changing her where she stood. “No gifts in the form of sons I didn’t ask for. Got it.”
Cyrus took a step closer, making her catch her breath. Then he reached out and took her chin between his fingers.
That was all. A minor touch, really. Nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.
But she could feel the strength of him, the heat. She knew without having to ask that he was a man who took pride in the fact he used his own hands. There was nothing soft on him. The was not so much as the faintest hint.
“I will enslave you with passion,” he informed her, and even though the way he said that was almost remote, the look in his gaze was nothing short of a forest fire. And here in a place where there were no trees, the only thing that could burn was her. “There are few women on this earth who can resist the Supreme Ruler of the Great Sands, and I doubt very much you are one of them.”
“Thanks for that,” Hope managed to reply, though she felt dizzy again. And on fire. “That’s something to look forward to, then. Supreme and sandy passion on command.”
“I will use you and then cast you aside,” he told her, almost tenderly. A new promise. “I will sentence you to a life of fruitless yearning in my harem, a drudge of a wife with no standing while the other wives I will marry give me many, many sons. This is the life you have earned, and you will thank me for it.”
She heard him. On some level, she even understood what he was saying. Drudgery, yearning, unlikely expressions of gratitude on her end. But his hand was on her chin, his fingers pressing into her flesh. And all she could seem to do was tip her head back and gaze up at him, as if he really was as powerful as the desert sun.
Maybe more.
“R-right,” she managed to stammer out. “Used and cast aside, no standing. With the passion.”
It was the passion as punishment part she couldn’t really get past.
The part that made something deeply feminine and knowing, tucked away in a place she’d never encountered within herself before, turn over and stretch. Like it was waking up after a long sleep.
Like it had been waiting there, just beyond desire, all the while.
But there was no time to worry about such things, knowing or passion or the kind of punishment that Cyrus still seemed to think sounded like something other than a luxury retreat. There was no time left.
He dropped his fingers from her chin. He raised his arm, up over his head in a grand sort of slashing motion, as if he meant to slice the sky above in two.
Bringing with it a pack of horses from behind the hills, descending upon them like riders on a storm.
Like fate.
And there was a part of her that was rightly overwhelmed. More than overwhelmed, as Cyrus swung her up into the saddle of a horse, then held her up in front of him, like the spoils of war.
But inside, in that part of her that was newly awake, she was smiling.
CHAPTER FOUR
CYRUS RODE AT the head of the pack of fine Aminabad horses, as befit him as the Lord and King.
And he was not certain he had ever felt more like a desert king of yore than he did now. The merciless sun above, the sand below. His men at his back and a woman caught up before him, in that great white dress that billowed around them as his cavalry galloped with him over the dunes.
It was almost enough to make him wish his father was still alive, that the old man might see that he had achieved what he had always set out to achieve. He had made his only son over into an appropriate heir to this ancient, dusty kingdom, despite the best attempts of the mother who had stolen Cyrus away.
Yet as he rode, he found that he thought less of what he must do as King and more of the needs that rose in him—as a man. Because he had claimed this woman as his wife. Not merely some bit of sweet flesh for an evening’s entertainment. And she sat before him, as wives and captives alike had done for centuries on horses like his, the lush curves of her bottom nestled up tight against his sex.
Making sure that ache in him only grew as the miles passed.
An ache he intended that she would soothe, though he had not lied to her. He wanted her, yes. That wanting had astonished and outraged him—that was also true.
But he wanted her to give herself to him, this woman who would marry another so cold-bloodedly.
He wanted her wild with wanting him.
She was fair, which would do her no good in the desert heat. And so he had taken the time to wrap scarves around her as they’d started their ride, covering her hair and the skin that already looked flushed from the sun’s merciless rays.
But even though he knew those scarves protected her, he resented them.
For he could not see that delectable curve of her chin. Or the way she held her mouth, giving herself away in a thousand different small expressions he was not certain she even knew she made.
Yet he did. He knew far too much after an afternoon’s observation of her. In person.
He could have headed to the south, where the heart of his country’s wealth was arrayed around the oil fields that brought in the Western businessmen to try their wheeling and dealing and imagine they were cannier than the tribe who had been living off the bounty of this desert forever. There in the southern oases lay the commercial center of his country. The marketplaces, the businesses, and the many dwellings of those in his tribe who did not wish to follow the seasons north and south the way their ancestors had. He supposed they were cities, in truth, though he did not like that word.
