Page 59 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
But she said it all in that dry, amused tone that flooded him with relief.
And joy.
Cyrus let himself smile at her, heedlessly, and then rose to his feet. “But of course,” he said. “I am a man of great power and might, lest you are tempted to forget.”
And what he wanted most was that smile of hers that took over her face now, and the way it made the bright desert day seem dim.
He wanted to talk to her forever. He wanted to fence words, and learn how to laugh as she did. He wanted to sink into each and every moment as she liked to do, so that all of it, all of life, was a sensual act.
But first, here and now, he needed more than that.
He moved forward and took her face between his hands.
“Hope,” he managed to get out, to the only audience that mattered, “I love you. And I may not know how, but I can tell you this. There is nothing I cannot learn, and nothing I cannot do. My father made me a king. You made me husband. And I will make myself the man you deserve. I will make certain that I am worthy of the love you gave me so openly. When I could not even recognize it for the gift it was.”
“And yet it is yours,” she said simply. Truly. As openly as she ever had, because this was who she was. “It has always been yours.”
“I will never deserve you,” he whispered fiercely, bending his face to hers. “But I promise you this,omri, my beautiful life and my only Hope. I will never stop trying.”
“I won’t let you,” she whispered back.
“Then it will be so, you and me,” he told her, in the way he made all the proclamations in the land. “It will be love, as long as we live.”
For he was a man of stone, fashioned by the desert sands and subject only to the whim of the winds that shaped them—and the woman who loved him and made him whole.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ANDSOITwas that the mighty Lord of the Aminabad Desert became a great legend, hailed forever after as the King who changed everything.
For in this modern age, it was not war his people craved. Not the kind of wars he had been trained to fight by a man made of bitterness and bile.
What they wanted was joy, if they dared reach for it across the chasms of tradition and superstition.
Cyrus showed them how.
Hope gave him a daughter. Then a son a year later.
Then one more of each.
“Not an army, I know,” Hope liked to say. “Because we wanted a family.”
And they raised them together, in ways men and women in Cyrus’s country did not often do—especially when they were of royal blood. Cyrus sang them all the songs his mother hand sung to him when he was small. He played with them as his father never had with him.
He loved them, that was the thing, and they did everything together. The King and Queen did not like to be without each other, and so they traveled from region to region as a family. They spent a season in each, so that the whole of the country could know them.
And love them.
And learn from them that it was possible to live the way they did—in a marriage where love came first, vulnerability was championed, and brutality was never tolerated.
Not even when Cyrus turned over a stone and found such things in himself.
The children were raised by the whole of the land, so that there could never be any doubt that the great desert kingdom was ruled first by love, and only then by the power and might of its people, who knew exactly the character of those who would lead them.
Some even began to think that the eldest daughter might be their first ruling queen, in time.
Cyrus’s mother came back to Aminabad, hesitant at first. But as she was not there to have her heart broken again and again, she found many things to admire about the kingdom. And, in time, to love.
She and Mignon struck up an unlikely friendship, and it was through her connections that Mignon met her second husband at last. A man who felt strongly that he had married above himself. A man who loved her, not as a trinket, but as a treasure, and cared for her all the rest of their days.
