Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish (19 page)

It was also unfortunately charming how much fun she was having doing the dishes. She had fun doing everything, going after life as if she had been a prisoner in a cell, marveling at the smallest things.

Hard as it was to maintain complete professionalism in the face of her joie de vivre, he was glad her mood was upbeat. There had been no more emotional outbursts after that single time she had burst into tears at the very mention of her fiancé, her husband-to-be.

Ronan could handle a lot of things, up to and including a mad mamma grizzly clicking her teeth at him and rearing to her full seven-foot height on her hind legs. But he could not handle a woman in tears!

Still he found himself contemplating that one time, in quiet moments, in the evenings when he was by himself and she had tumbled into bed, exhausted and happy. How could Shoshauna not even know if her future life partner liked traveling, or if he shared her desire to touch snow, to toboggan? The princess was, obviously, marrying a stranger. And just as obviously, and very understandably, she was terrified of it.

But all that fell clearly into the none-of-his-business category. The sense that swept over him, when he saw her shinny up a tree, grinning down at him like the cheeky little monkey she was, of being protective, almost furiously so, of wanting to rescue her from her life was inappropriate. He was a soldier. She was a princess. His life involved doing things he didn’t want to do, and so did hers.

But marrying someone she didn’t even really know? Glancing at her now, bubbles from head to toe, it seemed like a terrible shame. She was adorable—fun, curious, bratty, sexy as all get-out—she was the kind of girl some guy could fall head over heels in love with. And she deserved to know what that felt like.

Not, he told himself sternly, that he was in any kind of position to decide what she did or didn’t deserve. That wasn’t part of the mission.

He’d never had a mission that made him feel curiously weak instead of strong, as if things were spinning out of his control. He’d come to like being with her, so much so that even doing dishes with her was weakness, pure and simple.

It had been bad enough when she waltzed out in shorts every morning, her legs golden and flawless, looking like they went all the way to her belly button. Which showed today, her T-shirt a touch too small. Every time she moved her arms, he saw a flash of slender tummy.

It was bad enough that when he’d glanced over at her, hacking away at the poor defenseless mango or pricking her fingers with a needle, he felt an absurd desire to touch her hair because it had looked spiky, sticking up all over the place like tufts of grass but he was willing to bet it was soft as duck down.

It was bad enough that she was determined to have a friendship, and that even though he knew it was taboo, sympathy had made him actually engage with her instead of discouraging her.

I had a lousy home life as a kid. That was the most personal information he’d said to anyone about himself in years. He hated that he’d said it, even if he’d said it to try and make her realize good things could come from bad.

He hated that sharing with her that one stupid, small sentence had made him realize a loneliness resided in him that he had managed to outrun for a long, long time. He’d said he didn’t have a girlfriend because of his work, but that was only a part truth. The truth was he didn’t want anyone to know him so well that they could coax information out of him that made him feel vulnerable and not very strong at all.

He was a man who loved danger, who rose to the thrill of a risk. He lived by his unit’s motto, Go Hard or Go Home, and he did it with enthusiasm. His life was about intensely masculine things: strength, discipline, guts, toughness.

After his mother’s great love of all things frilly and froufrou, he had not just accepted his rough barracks existence, he had embraced it. He had, consciously or not, rejected the feminine, the demands of being around the female of the species. He had no desire to be kind, polite, gentle or accommodating.

But in revealing that one small vulnerability to Shoshauna, he recognized he had never taken the greatest risk of all.

Part of the reason he was a soldier—or maybe most of the reason—was he could keep his heart in armor. He’d been building that armor, piece by meticulous piece, since the death of his dad. But when he’d asked her, that first day together, “Who knows what love is?” he’d had a flash of memory, a realization that a place in him thought it knew exactly what love was.

There was a part of him that he most wanted to deny, that he had been very successfully denying until a few short days ago, but now it nibbled around the edges of his mind. Ronan secretly hoped there was a place a man could lay his armor down, a place he could be soft, a place where there was room to love another.

Shoshauna, without half trying, was bringing his secrets to the surface. She was way too curious and way too engaging. Luckily for him, he had developed that gift of men who did dangerous and shadowy work. He was taciturn, wary of any interest in him.

In his experience, civilians thought they wanted to know, thought a life of danger was like adventure movies, but it wasn’t and they didn’t.

But Shoshauna’s desire to know seemed genuine, and even though she had led the most sheltered of lives, he had a feeling she could handle who he really was. More than handle it—embrace it.

But these were the most dangerous thoughts—the thoughts that jeopardized his mission, his sense of professionalism and his sense of himself.

But what had his choices been? To totally ignore her for the week? Set up a tent out back here? Pretend she didn’t exist?

He was no expert on women, but he knew they liked to talk. It was in his own best interests to keep the princess moderately happy with their stay here. Hell, part of him, an unfortunately large part, wanted to make her happy before he returned her to a fate that he would not have wished on anyone.

Marriage seemed like a hard enough proposition without marrying someone you didn’t know. Ask his mother. She’d made it her hobby to marry people she didn’t really know.

A renegade thought blasted through his mind: if he was Shoshauna’s prince, he’d take her to that mountaintop just because she wanted to go, just to see the delight in her face when she looked down over those sweeping valleys, to see her inhale the crispness of the air. He’d build snowmen with her and race toboggans down breathtakingly steep slopes just to hear the sound of her laughter.

If he was her prince? Cripes, he was getting in bigger trouble by the minute.

There had been mistakes made over the past few days. One of them had been asking her about the most exciting thing in her life. Because it had been so pathetically evident it had probably been that motorcycle ride and all of this.

From the few words she’d said about passion he’d known instantly that she regretted the directions of her own life, yearned for more. And he’d been taken by her wisdom, too, when he’d told her that the dangerous parts of his job kept him from a relationship.

Was there really a woman out there who understood that caring about someone meant encouraging her partner to pursue what made him whole and alive? Not in his experience there wasn’t! Beginning with his mother, it was always about how she felt, what she needed to feel safe, secure, loved. Not that it had ever worked for her, that strangling kind of love that wanted to control and own.

The last thing he wanted to be thinking about was his mother! Even the bathing suit would be better than that. He was aware the thought of his mother had appeared because he had opened the door a crack when he admitted he had a lousy childhood. That was the whole problem with admissions like that.

He was here, on this island, with the princess, to do a simple job. To protect her. And that meant he did not—thank God—have the luxury of looking at himself right now.

Still, he knew he had to be very, very careful because he was treading a fine line. He’d already felt the uncomfortable wriggle of emotion for her. He didn’t want to be rude, but he had to make it very clear, to himself and to her, this was his job. He wasn’t on vacation, he wasn’t supposed to be having fun.

He couldn’t even allow himself to think the thoughts of a normal, healthy man when he saw her in that bathing suit every day.

But now he was wondering if he’d overrated that danger and underrated this one. Because in the bathing suit she was sexy. Untouchable and sexy, like a runway model or a film actress. He could watch her from a safe distance, up the beach somewhere, sunglasses covering his eyes so she would never read his expression.

With soap bubbles all over her from washing dishes, she was still sexy. But cute, too. He was not quite sure how she had managed to get soap bubbles all over the long length of her naked legs, but she had.

She put bubbles on her face, a bubble beard and moustache. “Look!”

“How old are you?” he asked, putting duty first, pretending pure irritation when in fact her enjoyment of very small things was increasingly enchanting.

“Twenty-one.”

“Well, quit acting like you’re six,” he said.

Then he felt bad, because she looked so crestfallen. Boundaries, yes, but he was not going to do that again: try to erect them by hurting her feelings. He’d crossed the fine line between being rude and erecting professional barriers. Ronan simply expected himself to be a better man than that.

Against his better judgment, but by way of apology, he scooped up a handful of suds and tossed them at her. She tossed some back. A few minutes later they were both drenched in suds and laughing.

Great. The barriers were down almost completely, when he had vowed to get them back up—when he knew her survival depended on it. And perhaps his own, too.

Still, despite the fact he knew he was dancing with the kind of danger that put meeting a grizzly bear to shame, it occurred to him, probably because of the seriousness of most of his work, he’d forgotten how to be young.

He was only twenty-seven, but he’d done work that had aged him beyond that, stolen his laughter. The kind of dark, gallows humor he shared with his comrades didn’t count.

Even when the guys played together, they played rough, body-bruising sports, the harder hitting the better. He had come to respect strength and guts, and his world was now almost exclusively about those things. There was no room in it for softness, not physical, certainly not emotional.

His work often required him to be mature way beyond his years, required him to shoulder responsibility that would have crippled any but the strongest of men. Life was so often serious, decisions so often involved life and death, that he had forgotten how to be playful, had forgotten how good it could feel to laugh like this.

The rewards of his kind of work were many: he felt a deep sense of honor; he felt as if he made a real difference in a troubled world; he was proud of his commitment to be of service to his fellow man; the bonds he had with his brothers in arms were stronger than steel. Ronan had never questioned the price he paid to do the work before, and he absolutely knew now was not the time to start!

Sharing a deserted island with a gorgeous princess who was eager to try on her new bikini, was absolutely the wrong time to decide to rediscover those things!

But just being around her made him so aware of softness, filled him with a treacherous yearning. The full meltdown could probably start with something as simple as wanting to touch her hair.

“Okay,” he said, serious, trying to be very serious, something light still lingering in his heart, “you want to learn how to make my secret biscuit recipe?”

Ronan had done many different survival schools. All the members of Excalibur prided themselves in their ability to produce really good food from limited ingredients, to use what they could find around them. He was actually more comfortable cooking over a fire than he was using an oven.

An hour later with flour now deeply stuck on her damp skin, she pulled her biscuit attempt from the wood-fired oven.

Ronan tried to keep a straight face. Every biscuit was a different size. Some were burned and some were raw.

“Try one,” she insisted.

Since he’d already hurt her feelings once today and decided that wasn’t the way to keep his professional distance, he sucked it up and took one of the better-looking biscuits.

He took a big bite. “Hey,” he lied, “not bad for a first try.”

She helped herself to one, wrinkled her nose, set it down. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”

He hoped she wouldn’t. He hoped she’d tire soon of the novelty of working together, because it was fun, way more fun than he wanted to have with her.

“Let’s go swimming now,” she said. “Could you come with me today? I thought I saw a shark yesterday.”

Was that pure devilment dancing in the turquoise of those eyes? Of course it was. She’d figured out he didn’t want to swim with her, figured out her softness was piercing his armor in ways no bullet ever had. She’d figured out how badly he didn’t want to be anywhere near her when she was in that bathing suit.

In other words, she had figured out his weakness.

He could not let her see that. One thing he’d learned as a soldier was you never ran away from the thing that scared you the most. Never. You ran straight toward it.

“Sure,” he said, with a careless shrug. “Let’s go.”

He said it with the bravado of a man who had just been assigned to dismantle a bomb and didn’t want a single soul to know how scared he was.

But when he looked into her eyes, dancing with absolute mischief, he was pretty sure he had not pulled it off.

She was not going to be fooled by him, and it was a little disconcerting to feel she could see through him so completely when he had become such an expert at hiding every weakness he ever felt.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
HOSHAUNA
STARED
AT
herself
in the mirror in her bedroom and gulped. The bathing suit was really quite revealing. It hadn’t seemed to matter so much when Ronan was way down the shoreline, spearfishing, picking up driftwood, but today he was going to swim with her! Finally.

She could almost hear her mother reacting to her attire. “Common.” Her father would be none to pleased with this outfit, either, especially since she was in the company of a man, completely unchaperoned.

But wasn’t that the whole problem with her life? She had been far to anxious to please others and not nearly anxious enough to please herself. She had always dreamed of being bold, of being the adventurer, but in the end she had always backed away.

She remembered the exhilarating sense of power she had felt when she realized Ronan didn’t want to see this bathing suit, when she’d realized, despite all his determination not to, he found her attractive. Suddenly she wanted to feel that power again. She was so aware of the clock ticking. They had been here four days. There was three left, and then it would be over.

Suddenly nothing could have kept her from the sea, and Ronan.

At the last minute, though, as always, she wrapped a huge bath towel around herself before she stepped out of the house.

Ronan waited outside the door, glanced at her, his expression deadpan, but she was sure she saw a glint of amusement in his eyes, as if he knew she was really too shy to wear that bikini with confidence, with delight in her own power when there was a man in such close quarters.

“Look what I found under the porch,” he said.

Two sets of snorkels and fins! No one could look sexy or feel powerful in a snorkel and fins! Still, she had not snorkeled since the last time she had been here, and she remembered the experience with wonder.

“Was the surfboard there?”

“Yeah, an old longboard. You want me to grab it? You could paddle around on it.”

“No, thank you,” she said. Paddle around on it, as if she was a little kid at the wading pool. She wanted to surf on it—to capture the power of the sea—or nothing at all. Just to prove to him she was not a little kid, at all, she yanked the towel away.

He dropped his sunglasses down over his eyes rapidly, took a sudden interest in the two sets of snorkels and fins, but she could see his Adam’s apple jerk each time he swallowed.

She marched down the sand to the surf, trying to pretend she was confident as could be but entirely aware she was nearly naked and in way over her head without even touching the water. She plunged into the sea as quickly as she could.

Once covered by the blanket of the ocean, she turned back, pretending complete confidence.

“The water is wonderful,” she called. “Come in.” It was true, the water was wonderful, warm, a delight she had been discovering all week was even better against almost-naked skin.

Suddenly she was glad she’d found the courage to wear the bikini, glad she’d left the towel behind, glad she was experiencing how sensuous it was to be in the water with hardly anything between it and her, not even fabric. Her new haircut was perfect for swimming, too! Not heavy with wetness, it dried almost instantly in the sun.

She looked again at the beach. Ronan was watching her, arms folded over his chest, like a lifeguard at the kiddy park.

She was going to get that kiddy-park look off his face if it killed her!

“Come in,” she called again, and then pressed the button she somehow knew, by instinct, he could not stand to have pressed. “Unless you’re scared.”

Not of the water, either, but of her. She felt a little swell of that feeling, power, delicious, seductive, pure feminine power. She had been holding off with it, waiting, uncertain, but now the time felt right.

She watched as Ronan dropped the snorkeling gear in the sand, pulled his shirt over his head. She felt her mouth go dry. This was how she had hoped he would react to her. A nameless yearning engulfed her as she stared at the utter magnificence of his build.

He was pure and utter male perfection. Every fluid inch of him was about masculine strength, a body honed to the perfection of a hard fighting tool.

Shoshauna had thought she would feel like the powerful one if they swam together, but now she could see the power was in the chemistry itself, not in her, not in him.

There was a universal force that called when a certain woman looked at a certain man, when a certain man looked at a certain woman. It pulled them together, an ancient law of attraction, metal to magnet, a law irresistible, as integral as gravity to the earth.

Shoshauna became aware that the “power” she had so wanted to experiment with, to play with, was out of her control. She felt a kind of helpless thrill, like a child who had played with matches and was now having to deal with a renegade spark that had flared to flame.

Impossible to put this particular fire out. Ronan was all sleek muscle and hard lines, not an ounce of superfluous fat or flesh on his powerful male body. His chest was deep, his stomach flat, ridged with ab muscles, his shoulders impossibly broad. His legs were long, rippling with muscle.

He dove cleanly into the water, cutting it with his body. Two powerful strokes carried him to her, another beyond her. She watched, mesmerized, as his strong crawl carried him effortlessly out into the bay. He stopped twenty or thirty yards from her, trod water, shook diamond droplets of the sea from his hair.

Watching him, she realized what she had been doing could not even really be called swimming. She was paddling. No wonder he treated her as if she belonged in the kiddy pool! Bathing suit aside, in the water she was an elephant trying to keep pace with a cheetah!

Ronan flipped over on his back, spread his arms like a star and floated. It looked so comfortable, so relaxing that she tried it and nearly drowned. She came up sputtering for air.

“Are you okay?”

And what if she wasn’t? Would he swim over here, gather her in his arms, maybe give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

“I’m fine,” she squeaked.

He did swim back over, but did not come too close. “You’re about as deep as you should go,” he told her. “I’ve noticed over the past few days you are not a very strong swimmer.”

“In my mother’s mind swimming in the ocean was an activity for the sons and daughters of fishermen.”

“It seems a shame to live in a place like this, surrounded by water and not know how to swim. It seems foolish to me, unnecessarily risky, because with this much water you’re eventually going to have an encounter with it.” Hastily he added, “Not that I’m calling your mother foolish.”

“Plus, she has this thing about showing skin.” And that was with a regular bathing suit.

Ronan eyed her. “I take it she wouldn’t approve of the bathing suit.”

He had noticed.

“She’d have a heart attack,” Shoshauna admitted.

“It’s having just about the same effect on me,” he said with a rueful grin, taking all her power away by admitting he’d noticed, a man incapable of pretense, real, just as she’d known he was.

“That’s why your mom doesn’t want you wearing stuff like that. Men are evil creatures, given to drawing conclusions from visual clues that aren’t necessarily correct.”

Back to the kiddy pool! He was going to turn this into a lecture. But he didn’t. He left it at that, yet she felt a little chastened anyway.

As if he sensed that, he quickly changed the subject. “So, I’ve got you out here in the water. Want to—”

Was she actually hoping he was going to propose something a little evil?

“Want to learn how to swim a little better?”

She nodded, both relieved and annoyed by his ability to treat her like a kid, his charge, nothing more.

“You won’t be ready to enter the Olympics after one lesson, but if you fall out of a boat, you’ll be able to survive.”

* * *

It had probably been foolish to suggest teaching Shoshauna to swim. But the fact of the matter was she lived on an island. She was around water all the time. It seemed an unbelievable oversight to him that her education had not included swimming lessons.

On the other hand, what did he know about what skills a princess needed? Still, he felt he could leave here a better man knowing that if she did fall off a boat, she could tread water until she was rescued.

Probably he was kidding himself that he was teaching her something important. If a princess fell overboard, surely ten underlings jumped in the water after her.

But somehow it was increasingly important to him that she know how to save herself. And maybe not just if she fell off a boat. All these things he had been teaching her this week were skills that made no sense for a princess.

But for a woman coming into herself, learning the power of self-reliance seemed vital. It felt important that if he gave her nothing else, he gave her a taste of that: what her potential was, what she was capable of doing and learning if she set her mind to it.

Because Ronan was Australian and had grown up around beaches and heavy surf, he had quite often been chosen to instruct other members of Excalibur in survival swimming.

Thankfully, he could teach just about anybody to swim without ever laying a hand on them.

She was a surprisingly eager student, more willing to try things in the water than many a seasoned soldier. Like the things she had been doing on land, he soon realized she had no fear, and she learned very quickly. By the end of a half hour, she could tread water for a few minutes, had the beginnings of a not bad front crawl and could do exactly two strokes of a backstroke before she sank and came up sputtering.

And then disaster struck, the kind, from teaching soldiers, he was totally unprepared for.

She was treading water, when her mouth formed a startled little O. She forgot to sweep the water, wrapped her arms around herself and promptly sank.

His mind screamed shark even though he had evaluated the risks of swimming in the bay and decided they were minimal.

When she didn’t bob right back to the surface, he was at her in a second, dove, wrapped his arm around her waist, dragged her up. No sign of a shark, though her arms were still tightly wrapped around her chest.

Details. Part of him was trying to register what was wrong, when she sputtered something incomprehensible and her face turned bright, bright red.

“My top,” she sputtered.

For a second he didn’t comprehend what she was saying, and when he did he was pretty sure the heart attack he’d teased her about earlier was going to happen for real. He had his arms around a nearly naked princess.

He let go of her so fast she started to sink again, unwilling to unwrap her arms from around her naked bosom.

Somehow her flimsy top had gone missing!

“Swim in to where you can stand up,” he ordered her sharply.

He knew exactly what tone to use on a frightened soldier to ensure instant obedience, and it worked on her. She headed for shore, doing a clumsy one-armed crawl—her other arm still firmly clamped over her chest—that he might have found funny if it was anyone but her. As soon as he made sure she was standing up on the ocean bottom, he looked around.

The missing article was floating several yards away. He swam over and grabbed it, knew it was the wrong time to think how delicate it felt, how fragile in his big, rough hands, what a flimsy piece of material to be given so much responsibility.

He came up behind her. She was standing up to her shoulder blades in water and still had a tight wrap on herself, but there was no hiding the naked line of her back, the absolute feminine perfection of her.

“I’ll look away,” he said, trying to make her feel as if it was no big deal. “You put it back on.”

Within minutes she had the bathing suit back on, but she wouldn’t look at him. And he was finding it very difficult to look at her.

Wordlessly she left the water, spread out her towel and lay down on her stomach. She still wouldn’t even look at him and he figured maybe that was a good thing. He put on the snorkeling gear and headed back out into the bay.

He began to see school after school of butterfly fish, many that he recognized as the same as he would see in the reefs off Australia: the distinctive yellow, white and black stripes of the threadfin, the black splash of color that identified the teardrop.

Suddenly, Ronan didn’t want her to stay embarrassed all day, just so that he could be protected from his own vulnerability around her. He didn’t want her to miss the enchantment of the reef fish.

Her embarrassment over the incident was a good reminder to him that she had grown up very sheltered. She had sensed the bikini would get his attention, but she hadn’t known what to do with it when she succeeded.

In his world, girls were fast and flirty and knew exactly what to do with male attention. Her innocence in a bold world made him want to share the snorkeling experience with her even more.

They would focus on the fish, the snorkeling, not each other.

“Shoshauna! Put on a snorkel and fins. You have to see this.”

He realized he’d called her by her first name, as if they were friends, as if it was okay for them to snorkel together, to share these moments.

Too late to back out, though. She joined him in the water, but not before tugging on her bathing suit strings about a hundred times to make sure they were secure.

And then she was beside him, and the magic happened. They swam into a world of such beauty it was almost incomprehensible. Fish in psychedelic colors that ranged from brilliant orange to electric blue swam around them. They saw every variety of damselfish, puffer fish, triggerfish, surgeonfish.

He tapped her shoulder. “Watch those ones,” he said, pointing at an orange band. “It’s a type of surgeonfish, they’re called that because their spines are scalpel sharp.”

Her wonder was palpable when a Moorish idol investigated her with at least as much interest as she was giving it! A school of the normally shy neon-green and blue palenose parrot fishes swam around her as if she was part of the sea.