Page 21 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
He saw her shoulders shake slightly and felt a stab of something that very nearly felt like guilt—but could not be, for what had he to feel the least bit guilty about? He was not the one who had broken promises. That she was here at all indicated that he alone had kept them.
Still, something in him turned over too quickly, because he hadn’t imagined shecouldweep, this shockingly unbothered girl who did not seem to apprehend her own peril—
And when she raised her face toward his again, he could see that her eyes were bright, indeed.
But not with tears.
With laughter.
She waslaughing.
“The thing is, you actually did me a great favor, Cyrus,” she told him. And laughed more at his expression. Then harder when he began to scowl. “I’m sorry if you thought I might throw a fit of some kind. I won’t. All Icando is thank you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
EVENIFSHEhadn’t meant what she said, Hope probably would have found a way to say it anyway if she’d known that doing so would leave that stunned expression on Cyrus’s absurdly handsome face.
She was only human, after all. And she hadn’t had anything much in the way of fun since before her father died. This was the closest she was likely to get.
The upside was, it really did feel like fun just now—though she supposed that could be all the sweets she’d inhaled.
“I beg your pardon?” Cyrus asked, his voice still in that growly register that seemed to burrow deep into her veins, crawling all over her from the inside out.
Speaking of things that were also fun, in one way or another.
“Lionel and I had an arrangement,” she told him when his scowl began to tip over into fully thunderous. “It was business, not pleasure.”
Hope could admit that she was enjoying herself, even if what she should have been doing was worrying about her poor mother, on her own for the first time. Maybe it was just that her belly was full again. That she’d lost herself in tasting the sweetest honey she’d ever encountered, and it was impossible not to feel delighted by even the memory of that. Not to mention the sheer number of happy little candles flickering in the desert night atop this little tower, as if doing their best to hold on to that faint hint of remaining sunlight out there on the distant horizon like a few inside out smudges, quiet suggestions of the day that would not dawn for hours.
Or maybe it was as simple as the dark, consuming way that this man who claimed she was his wife looked at her, as if he intended to eat her whole. Possibly tonight.
That was enough to make anyone giddy.
“He had no interest in sharing a life with me.” Hope waved a hand in Cyrus’s general direction, which felt unwise. Perhaps that was why she did it. Twice. “Or even a bed. He comes from a very old family in Spain, you see, and his grandmother has a lot of opinions about what he should do and how he should present her with grandchildren at the first opportunity. He does not wish to do this. And as she is quite old, he intended to present me as his bride instead and tell her we planned to try to come up with a few grandchildren. In five years, if his grandmother was still with us, we agreed that we would address ourselves to the issue of creating an heir, likely still not in a bed. But it was his fervent hope—and mine—that none of that would ever come to pass.”
“You cannot possibly expect me to believe this...fiction.” Cyrus’s voice was the barest scrape of sound and yet still it seemed to scrape like a knife’s sharp edge against her nerves.
And other parts of her.
“Why would it be fiction?” She was still replete from all the food she’d eaten and the honey still in her tongue. She was still tempting fate by lying there dressed in very little silk, waving her handlanguidlyas if she imagined she might be safe. “Why would I bother to tell stories in the first place?”
“Why does anyone lie?” He made one of those faces that he was so good at, she knew already. It managed to suggest that hecould havedelivered a dissertation onherlies, but was holding himself back by sheer force of will. “I cannot answer this for you, because I have always prided myself on telling the truth, no matter how unpalatable.”
And she was already living dangerously. There seemed to be no particular reason to stop now.
“Have you ever noticed that the people who say things like thatmostlyjust want an excuse to be rude?” She smiled when he flashed that particular affronted look at her, as if no one dared say such things to him. Why did she think that meant she ought to be the one who did? When it wasn’t clear that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life in some kind of prison? “I’ll take that to mean you hadn’t noticed. But I’m betting you will now.”
“I’m glad that you find this as amusing as you do everything else.” Cyrus neither looked nor sounded the slightest bitglad. Much less amused. “I hope you may always find it so. But I doubt very much that it will be possible.”
“Yes, because of harems and not being allowed to have your sons, and all the rest of it.” She almost laughed again, but checked herself when his dark eyes gleamed in a manner that felt a good deal like retribution. Hope made herself frown instead. “That all sounds terrible. But really, what I’m most worried about is my mother.”
That part was not only not really a laughing matter, it was true. The fact that she had no idea what messes Mignon was makingeven nowcould, if she let it, become like a kind of rash that would sweep over her and make her start...prickling.
She did not need to startpricklingin front of this man.
What she needed was Mignon safe.
And Hope knew that Cyrus knew all about her mother by the way he sighed. He reached over to pick up his drink, then took a moment to swirl the liquid around in its glass. Juice, not alcohol—and that made perfect sense to her.
