The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin, page 1
“My name should ring inside you like a bell.”
Hope blinked at that. “I didn’t even think to ask. Were you just wandering around local chapels today or did you specifically come for me? I’m Hope Cartwright, if that helps. And I don’t want to be rude, but I think you have me confused for someone else.”
He lounged in the seat beside her and she had the stray thought that no man she’d ever met could have seemed as brutally elegant as this one did.
“You are Hope Cartwright,” he said, not as if he was sounding out the name, but as if he was confirming her identity. As if, something in her thought then, he is speaking me into existence. “The woman who was promised to me at her birth and who has instead spent these last years making a mockery of that promise.”
She could not seem to breathe. He only shook his head. “Did you really believe that I would allow you to marry another? I am Cyrus Ashkan, Lord of the Aminabad Desert, and what I have claimed will never belong to another. This I promise you.”
Innocent Stolen Brides
Married by convenient demand, awakened by passion!
Overlooking the shores of Lake Como, a seemingly perfect high-society wedding is about to take a dramatic and unexpected turn...
As Hope makes her way down the aisle towards her convenient husband-to-be, she finds herself picked up and unceremoniously carried out of the church by a stranger, whose claim on her goes back decades! Once the storm clears, will Hope be able to resist the desert king who stole her away?
Find out in
The Desert King’s Kidnapped Virgin
Available now!
Being jilted at the altar is an inconvenience Lionel just won’t tolerate. So, the commanding billionaire plucks a replacement bride out of the astounded congregation and demands that she marries him instead!
Read on in
The Spaniard’s Last-Minute Wife
Coming next month!
Caitlin Crews
The Desert King’s Kidnapped Virgin
USA TODAY bestselling, RITA®-nominated and critically-acclaimed author Caitlin Crews has written more than a hundred and thirty books and counting. She has a masters and PhD in English Literature, thinks Everyone should read more category romance and is always available to discuss her beloved alpha heroes—just ask. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her comic book–artist husband, is always planning her next trip and will never, ever read all the books in her to-be-read pile. Thank goodness.
Books by Caitlin Crews
Harlequin Presents
Willed to Wed Him
A Secret Heir to Secure His Throne
What Her Sicilian Husband Desires
The Lost Princess Scandal
Crowning His Lost Princess
Reclaiming His Ruined Princess
The Outrageous Accardi Brothers
The Christmas He Claimed the Secretary
The Accidental Accardi Heir
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EXCERPT FROM A SON HIDDEN FROM THE SICILIAN BY LORRAINE HALL
CHAPTER ONE
HOPE CARTWRIGHT WALKED down the aisle toward her groom, dressed in the requisite white gown and filled with nothing but a sense of relief.
God knew she’d earned it.
Everything is fine, she told herself as she walked. Everything will be perfectly fine.
Just as soon as she made it to the altar and said her vows. That was all it would take.
She blew out a breath, not surprised to find it was a bit shaky. And she kept her eyes focused up ahead on the man who stood at the head of the shockingly long aisle in this picturesque Italian wedding chapel, looking as grimly impatient as ever. He wanted this done as much as she did, Hope knew. Because this was the business arrangement they’d both wanted, as cold and calculated as it could get.
She could have been walking into something far more unpleasant, given her options and her desperate situation, and well did she know it. She doubted she’d thought of anything else in any serious way for the past two years.
Hope walked alone because her mother had, in her typical fashion, become so overset by the fact that Hope was actually marrying—because everyone gets a happy ending except me, she had sobbed in her childish way, quick to forget the last few years when she could nurse her feelings instead—that she’d drunk herself into something close enough to a stupor.
Except Mignon never lapsed off into an actual stupor. That was the trouble. Stupors suggested some measure of silence, and that was not her style. She was a storm, always. Sometimes wild with joy, sometimes distraught, but always and ever a storm. Accordingly, there had been scenes all morning as Mignon had turned Hope’s preparations for this ceremony into a saga about Mignon’s own choices.
This arrangement was as close to happy as either one of them was likely to get, Hope had tried to tell her. First Mignon had been mad with glee. Then the champagne had gone to her head and she’d simply been mad. Then had come the tears, the French love songs all sung off-key in honor of Hope’s late father—Mignon’s one true love—and last Hope had looked, Mignon had been passed out in a pile of butter-yellow chiffon, snoring off the bubbly.
Maybe that was as much of a happy ending as Hope could wish for.
She tried to remember what her severe groom had told her the night before when they’d indulged in a rehearsal right here in this ancient chapel that sat up above the sparkling waters of the famed Lake Como in Italy.
It will not do to race down the aisle in an unseemly haste, he had said in his usual repressive tones after she’d sprinted toward him from the antechamber.
Even if I feel an unseemly haste? she had asked, smiling.
Her husband-to-be was no love match for Hope. Love had not entered into the discussions. As such, he was not particularly interested in her smiles. He did not find her amusing, either, as he had made clear on numerous occasions already. Hope was a means to an end for him, that was all.
This was a good thing. Hope liked the fact that he required a service of her. So that she was not the only one selling herself here.
It also helped that he was not repulsive, like so many of the men who had auditioned for this particular role. Hope had wanted an honorable benefactor in the classic style. Someone she could rely upon and even feel safe with. Maybe there would even be some affection, in time.
Maybe it wasn’t the charming fairy-tale prince she’d dreamed of when she was small, but if she’d learned anything since her father died, it was that life was not kind to childish dreams. Looking for a more businesslike arrangement that benefited her as well as the man in question seemed a practical and even lovely alternative, in its way.
Instead she had discovered that entirely too many men out there were nothing short of horrible.
Like the one who had called what she was doing a virginity auction. She had been at some pains to tell him that there was no auction, thank you. That such a notion was unpleasant and, anyway, not true.
What was true was that Hope was, indeed, a virgin. That, like so many things in her life, had been an accident, not any sort of morality crusade on her part. It was a twist of fate, nothing more. If her father had not died when Hope was barely turned fourteen, she imagined she would have had the same kind of adolescence her old friends at school had enjoyed. Silly parties and boys to giggle over instead of having to act as the adult she wasn’t. Because Mignon, as delightful as she was most of the time, was sadly incapable of behaving like the adult she actually was with any regularity.
It had been down to Hope to sort out the funeral, then all the bills that followed. To do the best she could with the money her father had left and her mother’s seeming determination to blow through it all at an alarming rate as she dealt with her terrible grief. Hope had been the one who’d sold off the family estate, sorrowfully parting with her father’s staff, who had all been there longer than her, because she could not afford to keep them on. It had been Hope who had found the two of them a flat in London that Mignon wailed about on some maudlin evenings, because the neighborhood was questionable—Hope liked to think of it as up-and-coming—and what would people think, and what was next, the poorhouse?
Mignon kept clinging to the hope that even one of the men who partied with her, took advantage of her, or used her as they wished might love her if she let them do as they pleased.
They never did.
And so it was Hope who had to save them.
That was how she’d come to the attention of far too many obnoxiously wealthy and self-involved men since she’d turned eighteen. Her birthday present to herself, such as it was, had been leaving Mignon singing into her wine to meet her first potential contender. Hope had used her father’s connections to put herself forward, but only to a very specific sort of individual. He needed to be rich, first and foremost, because while she felt that she might quite like to make her
That was what Hope’s dad would have wanted. No matter what flights of fancy her mother might commit herself to. No matter what Hope did or didn’t do.
That was what Hope wanted too, because she loved her mother. And she understood, somewhere deep inside, that she had a certain grit her mother lacked. She had a fortitude while Mignon was made of pretty smiles and too much air. She had no head for reality.
Reality had been Hope’s father’s job.
Mignon needed looking after, that was the beginning and end of it. In return, Hope was prepared to sign anything. Any prenuptial agreement, any contract, anything at all. After two years out there on what only an optimist like her mother would call “a dating scene,” Hope had almost convinced herself that she was well and truly prepared to be the virgin sacrifice she had learned a certain kind of man dreamed of finding.
After all, she had but two things that she could use to her advantage, according to far too many of the unpleasant men she’d encountered, having had to forgo any A levels to leave school at sixteen to take care of her mother as best she could: her father’s august pedigree and the fact that Hope herself was entirely untouched.
Sometimes she almost thought it was funny, that the thing her friends had teased her about in the years since her father’s death had become the only weapon Hope had, it seemed. The only possible way she could get both herself and her mother out of this mess.
Though she had taken her time coming to that conclusion, because it was so medieval.
Because she could always get a job, she’d told herself at first, the way normal people did. She sometimes thought about a glorious career the way she imagined some people dreamed of beach vacations in the Spanish sun. But the trouble was, Mignon could not do the same. Several attempts on her part had proved that, until Mignon had been forced to confess that she thought she was, perhaps, an idiot missing its village. Which had broken Hope’s heart.
In my dreams I am a fierce warrior for you, Mignon had whispered, working hard to keep a tremulous smile on her lovely, tearstained face. While in reality I am a mess. Beyond redemption, I fear.
No. Hope had been certain. Fierce. Never that.
That had left Hope to set aside any lingering Prince Charming fantasies—as well as any notions of a career, for that matter—and attempt to find a decent job that could support her and her mother when Hope had no work experience as well as no advanced education. But that was fine. She was scrappy. And while she had feelings, she was not buffeted this way and that by them, like Mignon.
She viewed this as a superpower, really.
But regardless of her feelings, and whether or not they ruled her, it had been a grueling two years of “dating” the sort of men who she found increasingly and almost unbearably unpleasant as time went on. Which was deeply unfortunate, as her dwindling funds made her more and more desperate to find someone—anyone—to help them, and running out of money meant she was running out of options.
Because one after another, the terrible men who took her out to such seemingly elegant dinners confessed their darkest and most furtive fantasies to her as if she’d asked for such intimate details, making it impossible for Hope to agree to any terms they might put to her.
One after the next, they made it impossible to do the thing she knew she had to do to save her mother.
And when she refused them, they took great pleasure in making it clear that her virginity was her only currency, and her pedigree a mere gloss to go with it.
She began to fear that sooner or later, she would have to marry one of them and do whatever their vile imaginations conjured up, somehow.
Two years ago, Hope had foolishly believed that she would find the perfect solution to all her problems, and quickly.
After all, she’d started her search for the proper benefactor by aiming straight for men her father’s age, many of whom she’d met when she’d been a little girl. The men who she’d known had precious little in the way of scruples. Because she knew precisely which ones had taken it upon themselves to offer her mother what they called comfort, while drooling, after the funeral.
Instead, she’d had two years of exploring precisely how twisted and appalling some men really were.
A lesson she would have preferred not to learn at all, though she supposed it was good she had. Since there were so many of them.
Lionel Asensio had been a breath of fresh air, she thought now, because it was good to remind herself of reality. And the fact she’d survived those two years without succumbing to those revolting suggestions she had found so impossible to imagine, much less imagine doing. She kept her eyes trained on him as she continued down the aisle, reminding herself further that this was an escape today. A victory. Because his notice of her had been a solution.
Finally, the kind—if cold—benefactor she’d been seeking all along.
Lionel Asensio had his own reasons for marrying in cold blood and in such haste. Hope did not care what those reasons were—she was merely delighted that he had them. She’d felt nothing but relief when he had actually wanted the gilt and gloss of her father’s spotless pedigree. That the fact that the Cartwrights stretched back through the ages ever since the original cart-making owner of the name had been elevated from his humble origins by a long-dead queen had intrigued him the most. Even her mother had helped in that respect, for Mignon had been raised in a family that seemed unaware that there was no longer the sort of French aristocracy that had once led to any number of revolutions. She had been made to shine brightly, that was all, and that was what she did. From her still-pretty face straight down into her thoroughbred bones.
All of this had impressed Lionel Asensio.
Her innocence had not been part of the initial discussions at all.
And none of that mattered today. Today was a day to walk very, very slowly down this aisle and congratulate herself on her own grit, not worry overmuch about terrible men or once noble blood. Mignon was even now sleeping off the morning’s excesses and would no doubt rise to dance again later this afternoon, flushed and happy that her daughter had wrangled the only thing Mignon had ever wanted in life—a husband.
As she walked without any undue haste, Hope was actually entertaining the notion of getting some kind of job after all. The wife of a billionaire like Lionel Asensio could create charities with a wave of her hand. She wouldn’t have to worry about not having the proper qualifications to work in the nearest chip shop.
Hope could hardly wait to see what she was actually good at. Not what she was forced to do instead.
All it would take were a few vows. A few signatures on the contracts she’d already read over and agreed to verbally. So little, in the end, to be free at last. Really, her stone-faced husband-to-be was lucky she hadn’t sprinted down the narrow stone aisle to get on with things more quickly, which she suspected he would find unseemly in every regard.
There weren’t many people here today, which Hope was happy about, because this wasn’t exactly an all-out celebration of whatever a wedding usually celebrated. Fairy tales, she thought, but not wistfully. She’d learned her lesson there. Wistfulness was about as useful as childhood fantasies about far-off princes and castles made of stone. She thought the entirety of the congregation, sparse as it was, were members of Lionel’s staff—with the exception of one woman in the back, who was scowling from behind big glasses and looked like a library was missing its fearless leader. She entertained herself for a few slow steps by imagining that was a special guest of the groom, who might very well have hidden bookish depths that required a personal librarian on call, for all Hope knew.
What she did know for certain was that Lionel himself was a man of some renown, as most people in his tax bracket were. Wealth created its own legends, she had discovered over the past two years. She had been subjected to a great number of meetings with his PR team once she and Lionel had come to an agreement. They had decided how to fashion this strange wedding into a palatable romantic tale that could sell newspapers, appease the ever-nosy public, and serve Lionel’s own ulterior motives.
