Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish (16 page)

Mutinously she snatched the straw hat from her head.

He tried not to let his shock show. In those few unsupervised minutes while he had talked to Gray on the phone, she had gone to the washroom, all right, but not for the reason he had thought or she had led him to believe. Where had she gotten her hands on a pair of scissors? Or maybe, given the raggedness of the cut, she had used a knife.

She was no hairdresser, either. Little chunks of her black hair stood straight up on her head, going every which way. The bangs were crooked. Her ears were tufted. There wasn’t a place where her hair was more than an inch and a half long. Her head looked like a newly hatched chicken, covered in dark dandelion fluff. It should have looked tragic.

Instead, she looked adorable, carefree and elfish, a rebel, completely at odds with the conservative outfit he had picked for her. Without the distraction of her gorgeous hair, it was apparent that her bone structure was absolutely exquisite, her eyes huge, her lips full and puffy.

“Where’s your hair?” he asked, fighting hard not to let his shock show. He shoved the helmet on her head quickly, before she had any idea how disconcerting he found her new look. His fingers fumbled on the strap buckle, he was way too aware of her, and not at all pleased with his awareness. The perfume he’d caught a whiff of at the wedding tickled his nostrils.

“I cut it.”

“I can clearly see that.” Thankfully, the mysteries of the helmet buckle unraveled, he tightened the strap, let his hands fall away. He was relieved the adorable mess of her hair was covered. “What did you do with it after you cut it?”

Her contrite expression told him she had left it where it had fallen.

“So, you did it for nothing,” he said sternly. “Now, when we’re traced this far, and we will be, they’ll find out you cut your hair. And they’ll be looking for a bald girl, easier to spot than you were before.”

“I’m not bald,” she protested.

“I’ve seen better haircuts on new recruits,” he said. She looked crestfallen, he told himself he didn’t care. But he was aware he did, just a little bit.

“I’ll go back and pick up my hair,” she said.

“Never mind. Hopefully no one is going to see you.”

“Does it look that bad?”

He could reassure her it didn’t, but that was something Prince Charming might do. “It looks terrible.”

He hoped she wasn’t going to cry. She put her sunglasses back on a little too rapidly. Her shoulders trembled tellingly.

Don’t be a jerk, he told himself. But then he realized he might be a lot safer in this situation if she did think he was a jerk.

When had his focus switched from her safety to his own?

Rattled, he pushed ahead. “I need you to think very carefully,” he said. “Is there a place on this island we can go where no one would find us for a week?”

He tried not to close his eyes after he said it. A week with her, her new haircut and her new green bikini stuffed in the backpack. Not to mention the shorty-shorts, and a halter top that had somehow been among her purchases.

He could see in her eyes she yearned for things that were forbidden to her, things she might not even be totally aware of, things that went far beyond riding on motorcycles and cutting her hair.

Things her husband should be teaching her. Right this minute. He had no right to be feeling grateful that she had not been delivered into the hands of a man she’d dreaded discovering those things with.

Instead she’d been delivered into his hands. One mission: keep her safe. Even from himself.

Still, he was aware he was a warrior, not a saint. The universe was asking way too much of him.

He turned from her swiftly, got on the motorcycle, persuaded it to life. He patted the seat behind him, not even looking at her.

But not looking at her didn’t help. She slid onto the seat behind him. The skirt hiked way up. Out of his peripheral vision he could see the nakedness of her knee. He glanced back. The skirt was riding high up her thigh.

It was a princess like no one had ever seen, of that he was certain. On the other hand, no one would be likely to recognize her looking like this, either.

“Hang on tight,” he said.

And then he felt her sweet curves pull hard against him. Oh, sure. For once she was going to listen!

“I know a place,” she called into his ear. “I know the perfect place.”

His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He slowed, checked the caller ID. His mother. He wrestled an impulse to answer, to yell at her, Don’t do it! Instead he listened to her leave yet another voice mail.

“Ronan, call me. It’s so exciting.”

They were crossing over a bridge, rushing water below, and he took the phone and flung it into the water.

He was in the protection business; sometimes it felt as if the whole world was his responsibility. But the truth was he could not now, and never had been able to, protect his own mother from what she most needed protecting from.

Herself.

* * *

Shoshauna pressed her cheek up against the delicious hardness of Ronan’s shoulder. His scent, soapy and masculine, was stronger than the scent of the new shirt.

Alone with him for a week. In a place where no one could find them. It felt dangerous and exciting and terribly frightening, too. She pressed into him, feeling far more endangered than she had when the gun had gone off in the chapel.

Some kind of trembling had started inside her, and it was not totally because he had hurt her feelings telling her her hair looked terrible. It wasn’t totally because of the vibration of the motorbike, either!

“Go faster,” she cried.

He glanced over his shoulder at her.

“It doesn’t go any faster,” he shouted back at her, but he gave it a hit of gas and the little bike surged forward.

Her stomach dropped, and she squealed with delight.

He glanced back again. His lips were twitching. He was trying not to smile. But he did, and his smile was like the sun coming out on the grayest of days. That glimpse of a smile made her forget she had only a short time to squeeze many dreams into, though a week was more than she could have hoped for.

Still, it was as if his smile hypnotized her and made her realize maybe there was one dream he could help make come true. A dream more important than wearing shorts or riding astride or touching snow. A dream that scorned people who pretended all the time.

She had only a few days, and she wanted to be with someone who was real, not kowtowing. Not anxious to please. Not afraid of her position. Someone who would tell her the truth, even if it hurt to hear it.

I’m not going to be more responsible for you than you are willing to be for yourself, he had told her. She shivered. In that simple statement, as much as it had pained her to hear it, was the truth about how her life had gone off track so badly. Could Ronan somehow lead her back to what was real about herself?

When she was younger, there’d been a place she had been allowed to go where she had felt real. Relaxed. As if it was okay to be herself.

Herself—something more and more lost behind the royal mask, the essential facades of good manners, of duty. Something that might be lost forever when she was returned to Prince Mahail as his bride.

“There’s an island,” she called over the putter of the engine. “My grandparents have a summer place on a small island just north of the mainland. No one is ever there at this time of year.”

“No one? No security? No groundskeeper?”

“It’s a private island, but not the posh kind. You’d have to know my grandfather to understand. He hates all the royal fuss-fuss as he calls it. He likes simplicity.

“The island is almost primitive. There’s no electricity, the house is like a cottage, it even has a thatched roof.”

“Fresh water, or do we have to bring our own?”

“There’s a stream.” Ronan thought like a soldier, she realized. All she could think about was it would be such a good place to try on her new bikini, such a wonderful place to rediscover who she really was! But, given the strange trembling inside her, how wise would that be? Given the reality of his smile, the pure sexiness of it, was it possible she was headed into a worse danger zone than the one she was leaving?

“Bedding? Blankets?”

His mind, thankfully, a million miles from bikinis, on the more practical considerations. “I think so.”

“How do you get to it?”

“My grandfather keeps a boat at the dock across the bay from it.”

“Perfect,” he said. “Show me the fastest way to the boat dock.”

But she didn’t tell him the shortest way. She directed him the longest way possible, because who knew if she would ever ride a motorcycle again, her arms wrapped so intimately around a man with such an incredible, sexy smile?

She loved the motorcycle, even if she had been deprived of feeling the fingers of the wind playing with her hair. She could still feel the island breeze on her face, playing with the hem of her skirt, touching her legs. She could feel the kiss of warm sunshine. She had a lovely sensation of being connected to everything around her. The air was perfumed, birds and monkeys chattered in the trees. She didn’t feel separate from it, she felt like a part of it.

And she could feel the exquisite sensation of being connected to him—her arms wrapped around the hard-muscled bands of his stomach, her cheek resting on the solid expanse of his back, her legs forming a rather intimate vee around him.

Her mother, she knew, would have an absolute fit. And her father wouldn’t be too happy with her, either. She could only imagine how Mahail would feel if he saw her now!

Which only added to the delectable sense of dancing with danger that Princess Shoshauna was feeling: free, adventurous, as if anything at all could happen.

Just this morning her whole life had seemed to be mapped out in front of her, her fate inescapable. Now she had hair that Prince Mahail would hate, and she didn’t think he’d like it very much that she had spent a week alone with a strange man, either!

“Can you go faster?’ she called to Ronan over the wind.

The slightest hesitation, and then he did, opening the bike up so that they were roaring down the twisting highway, until tears formed in her eyes and she could feel the thrill to the bottom of her belly.

She refused to dwell on how long it would last, or if this was the only time she would ever do this.

Instead she threw back her head and laughed out loud for the sheer joy of the moment, at her unexpected encounter with the most heady drug of all—freedom.

CHAPTER THREE

R
ONAN
CUT
THE
engine
of the motorboat, letting it drift in to the deserted beach. He glanced at the princess, asleep in the bottom of the boat, exhausted from the day, and decided there was no need for both of them to get wet. He stood up, stepped off the hull into a gentle surf. The seawater was warm on his legs as he dragged the boat up onto the sand.

It was night, but the sky was breathtaking, star-studded. A full moon frosted each softly lapping wave in white and painted the fine beach sand a bewitching shade of silver.

From a soldier’s perspective, the island was perfect. Looking back across the water, he could barely make out the dark outline of the main island of B’Ranasha. He could see the odd light flickering on that distant shore.

He had circled this island once in the boat, a rough reconnaissance. It was only about eight kilometers all the way around it. Better yet, it had only this one protected bay, and only the one beach suitable for landing a boat.

Everywhere else the thick tropical growth, or rocky cliffs, came right to the water’s edge. The island was too small and bushed in to land a plane on. It would be a nightmare to parachute in to, and it would be a challenge to land a helicopter here. Planes and helicopters gave plenty of warning they were arriving, anyway.

It was a highly defensible position. Perfect from a soldier’s perspective.

But from a personal point of view, from a man’s perspective, it couldn’t be much worse. It was a deserted island more amazing than a movie set. The sand was white, fine and flawless, exotic birds filled the night air with music, a tantalizing perfume rode the gentle night breeze. Palm trees swayed in the wind, ferns and flowers abounded.

At the head of the beach was a cottage, palm-frond roof, screened porch looking out to the sea. It was the kind of retreat people came to on holidays and honeymoons, not to hide out. Which was a good thing. He highly doubted anyone would think to look for the princess here.

He gave the rope attached to the boat another pull, hauled it further up on the sand until he was satisfied it would be safe, even from the tide, which, according to the tide charts he had purchased at a small seaside village, would come up during the night.

Only then did he peer back at Aurora, his very own Sleeping Beauty. The princess, worn down from all the unscheduled excitement of her wedding day, was curled up in the bottom of the boat, fast asleep on a bed of life jackets.

The silver of the moon washed her in magic, though he felt the shock of her shorn head again, followed by a jolt of a different kind—the short hair did nothing but accentuate her loveliness. Right now he was astonished by the length and fullness of her lashes, casting sooty shadows on the roundness of her cheeks. Her lips moved, forming words in her sleep, something in her own language, ret-nuh.

He’d insisted on a life jacket, but the skirt was riding high up her legs, he caught a glimpse of bridal white panties so pure he could feel a certain dryness in his mouth. He reached out and gave the skirt a tug down, whether to save her embarrassment or to save himself he wasn’t quite sure.

A deserted island. A beautiful woman. A week. He was no math whiz, but he knew a bad equation when he came across it.

He’d done plenty of protection duty, and though it wasn’t his favorite assignment, Ronan prided himself on doing his work well. He’d protected heads of states and their families, politicians, royalty, CEOs.

The person being protected was known amongst the team as the “principal.” The team didn’t even use personal names when they discussed strategy, formulated plans. The cardinal rule, the constant in protection work, was maintaining a completely professional, arm’s-length relationship. Emotional engagement compromised the mission, period.

But the very circumstances of those other assignments made maintaining professionalism easy. The idea of forming any kind of deeper relationship or even a friendship, with the principal had been unthinkable. There was always a team, never just one person. There was always an environment conducive to maintaining preordained boundaries.

Ronan was in brand-new territory, and he didn’t like it. So, before he woke her up, he looked to the stars, gathered his strength, reminded himself of the mission, the boundaries, the rules.

“Hey,” he called softly, finally, “wake up.”

She stirred but didn’t wake, and he leaned into the boat and nudged her shoulder with his hand. She was slender as a reed, the roundness of her shoulder the epitome of feminine softness.

“Princess.” It would be infinitely easy to reach in and scoop her up, to carry her across the sand to that cottage, but that brief contact with her shoulder was fair warning it would be better not to add one little bit of physical contact to the already volatile combination.

A bad time to think of her lips on his cheek earlier in the day, her slight curves pressed hard against him on that motorcycle.

“Wake up,” he said louder, more roughly.

She did, blinked—that blank look of one who couldn’t quite place where they were. And then she focused on him and smiled in a way that could melt even the most professional soldier’s dedication to absolute duty.

She sat up, looked around and then sighed with contentment. She liked being here. She had liked the entire day way too much! He had not been nearly as immune to her laughter and her arms wrapped around him as he had wanted to be, but thankfully she didn’t have to know that!

She shrugged out of the life jacket and then stretched, pressing the full sensuous roundness of her breasts into the thin fabric of the ill-fitting blouse. Then she stood up. The boat rocked on the sand, and the physical contact he wanted so badly not to happen, happened anyway. He caught her, steadied her as the boat rocked on the uneven ground. She took one more step, the boat pitched, and she would have gone to her knees.

Except his hands encircled her waist nearly completely, the thumb and index finger of his right hand nearly touching those of his left. He lifted her from the boat, swung her onto the sand, amazed by her slightness. She didn’t weigh any more than a fully loaded combat pack.

“You’re strong!” she said.

He withdrew from her swiftly, not allowing himself to preen under her admiration. A week. They had to make it a week.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, hugging herself, apparently oblivious to his discomfort. “I love it here. My grandfather called it Naidina Karobin—it means something like my heart is home.”

Great.

“Isn’t that pretty?”

“Yeah, sure.” Real men didn’t use words like pretty. Except maybe in secret, when they looked at a face like hers, washed in moonlight, alive with discovery. Mission.

He reached into the boat and grabbed the knapsack. As he followed her across the sand toward the cottage, he noted that the trees in the grove around it were loaded with edible fruits, coconuts, bananas, mangos.

He’d landed in the Garden of Eden. He only hoped he could resist the apple. Boundaries.

As they got closer, the princess jacked her skirt up and ran, danced really, across the sand. She looked like some kind of moonlit nymph, her slender legs painted in silver. Rules, duty, professionalism.

He followed her more slowly, as if he could put off the moment when they set up housekeeping together and everything intensified yet more.

Becoming part of Excalibur, Ronan’s endurance, physical strength, intellectual assets, ability to cope with stress had all been tested beyond normal limits. One man in twenty who was recruited for that unit made it through the selection process. Membership meant being stronger, faster, tougher in mind and spirit than the average man.

And yet to share the space of that cottage on this island with a real-live sleeping beauty seemed as if it would test him in ways he had never been tested before.

Ronan had been in possession of the princess for less than twenty-four hours and he already felt plenty tested!

He drew a deep breath as he followed her up wide steps to the screen door that he thought had been a screened-in veranda. As his eyes adjusted to the lack of moonlight inside, he saw he had been mistaken.

It was not a screened porch, but a screened-in house. A summer house, she’d said, obviously designed so that it caught the breeze from every angle on hot summer nights. The huge overhang of the roof would protect it from the rare days of inclement weather these islands experienced.

White, sheer curtains lifted and fell in the breeze, making the inside of the house enchanting and exotic. The main room had dark, beautiful wooden floors, worn smooth from years of use, moonlight spilling across them. Deeply cushioned, colorful rattan furniture was grouped casually around a coffee table, a space that invited conversation, relaxation.

Intimacy.

At the other end of the room was a dining area, the furniture old, dark, exquisitely carved and obviously valuable. That such good furniture would be left out in an unlocked cottage should have reassured him how safe the island was. But Ronan was a little too aware that the dangers here could come from within, not without.

The screens as walls gave a magnificent illusion of there being no separation between the indoor living space and the outdoors.

He spied a hurricane lamp and lit it, hoping the light would chase away the feeling of enchantment, but instead, in the flickering golden light, the great room became downright romantic, soft, sultry, sensual.

The light was soft on her face, too, her expression rapt as she looked around, her eyes glowing with the happiness of memories.

Ronan would have liked it a lot better if she was spoiled rotten, complaining about spiderwebs and the lack of electricity.

To distance himself from the unwanted whoosh of attraction he felt, Ronan went hurriedly across the room to investigate a door at the back of it. It led to an outdoor kitchen, and he went out. The outdoor cooking space was complete with a huge wood-fired oven and a grill. Open shelves were lined with canned goods. A person could camp out here, on this island, comfortably, for a year.

Beyond that, in a flower- and fern-encircled grove was an open-air shower, and the whoosh he’d been trying to outrun came back.

He reentered the house reluctantly, thankful he didn’t see her right away. He finished his inventory of the main house: there were two rooms off the great room, and he entered the first. It was the main bedroom, almost entirely taken up by a huge bed framed with soaring rough timbers, dark with age, more sheer white curtains flowing around the bed, surrounding it. Again the screens acting as outer walls made the bed seem to be set right amongst the palms and mango trees. The perfume of a thousand different flowers tickled his nose. There was no barrier to sound, either. The sea whispered poetry. He backed hastily out of there.

Princess Shoshauna was in the smaller of the bedrooms, looking around and hugging herself.

“This is where I always stayed when I was a child! Look how it feels as if you are right outside! My grandfather designed this house. He was an architect. That’s how he came to be on B’Ranasha. I’ll have this room.”

He would have much preferred she take the bigger room, act snotty and entitled so he could kill the whoosh in his stomach.

“I think you should take the bigger room,” he suggested. “You are the princess.”

“Not this week I’m not.” She smiled, delighted to have declared herself not a princess.

If she wasn’t a princess, if she was just an ordinary girl...he cut off the train of his thought. It didn’t matter if she was a wandering gypsy. She was still the principal, and it was still his mission to protect her.

He reached into his pocket, took out a pocketknife and cut the cord that kept the mattress rolled up. He found the bedding in a tightly closed trunk under the bed. A floral sachet had been packed with it, and the white linen sheets smelled exotic.

He laid them quickly on the bed, then watched, bemused, when she eyed the pile of bedding as though it were an interesting but baffling jigsaw puzzle.

“You don’t know how to make a bed,” he guessed, incredulous, then wondered why it would surprise him that a princess had no idea how to make a bed.

The truth was, it would be way too easy to forget she was a princess, especially with her standing there with shorn hair, and in a badly rumpled and ill-fitting dress.

But that was exactly what he had to remember, to keep his boundaries clear, his professionalism unsullied, his duty foremost in his mind. She was a princess, a real one. He was a soldier. Their stations in life were millions of miles apart. And they were going to stay that way.

“My mother would never have allowed it,” she said, sadly. “She had this idea that to do things that could be done by servants was common. Of course, she was a commoner, and she never quite overcame her insecurity about it.”

She didn’t know how to make a bed.

Every soldier had been tormented, at one time or another, with making a bed that could satisfy a drill sergeant who had no intention of being satisfied. Ronan could make a bed—perfectly—anywhere, anytime.

To focus on the differences between them would strengthen his will. To perceive her as pampered and useless would go a long way in erasing the memory of her slender curves pressed into his back as they rode that motorcycle together.

“I’d be happy to make it for you, Princess,” he said.

She glared at him. “I don’t want you to make it for me! I want you to show me how to make it.”

He was tired. He had not had the benefit of a two hour nap in the bottom of the boat. She had slept for an hour or so before that, as well, while they had waited, hidden, for it to get dark enough to take her grandfather’s boat from the dock and cross the water without being seen.

It would be easier for him to make the bed himself, but he had to get through a full week, and that wasn’t going to be easy if he argued with her over little things.

His eyes went to the full puffiness of her lips, and he felt his own weariness, his resolve flickering.