now and going swimming. Are you coming?”
He looked pained. “No. I’ll look after the dishes.”
“We can do the dishes later. Together. You can show me how.”
He said another nice word under his breath.
She repeated it, and when he gave her that look, the stern, forbidding, don’t-mess-with-me look, she said it again!
When he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, a man marshaling his every resource, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was dreading this week every bit as much as she was looking forward to it.
“How about if we do the dishes now?” he said. “In this climate I don’t think you want to leave things out to attract bugs. And then,” he added, resigned, “if you really want, I’ll show you how to make biscuits.”
She eyed him suspiciously. He didn’t look like a man who would be the least bothered by a few bugs. He’d probably eaten them on occasion! And he certainly did not look like a man who wanted to give out cooking lessons.
So that left her with one conclusion. He didn’t like the water. No, that wasn’t it. And then, for some reason, she remembered the look on his face when he’d put that pink bikini back on the rack in the store yesterday.
And she understood perfectly!
Ronan did not want to see her in a bikini. Which meant, as much as he didn’t want to, he found her attractive.
A shiver went up and down her spine, and she felt something she had not felt for a very long time, if she had ever felt it at all.
Without knowing it, Ronan had given her a very special gift. Princess Shoshauna felt the exquisite discovery of her own power.
“I’d love to learn to make biscuits instead of going swimming,” she said meekly, the perfect B’Ranasha princess. Then she smiled to herself at the relief he was unable to mask in his features. She had a secret weapon. And she would decide when and where to use it.
“Hey,” Ronan snapped, “cut it out.”
The princess ignored him, took another handful of soap bubbles and blew them at him. Princess Shoshauna had developed a gift for knowing when it was okay to ignore his instructions and when it wasn’t, and it troubled him that she read him so easily after four days of being together.
He had not managed to keep her out of the bathing suit, hard as he had tried. He’d taken her at her word that she wanted to learn things and had her collecting fruit and firewood. He’d taught her how to start a decent fire, showed her edible plants, a few rudimentary survival skills.
Ronan had really thought she would lose interest in all these things, but she had not. Her fingers were covered in tiny pinpricks from her attempts to handle a needle and thread, she was sporting a bruise on one of her legs from trying to climb up a coconut tree, she gathered firewood every morning with enthusiasm and without being asked. Even her bed making was improving!
He was reluctantly aware that the princess had that quality that soldiers admired more than any other. They called it “try.” It was a never-say-die, never-quit determination that was worth more in many situations than other attributes like strength and smarts, though in fact the princess had both of those, too, her strength surprising, given her physical size.
Still, busy as he’d tried to keep her, he’d failed to keep her from swimming, though he’d developed his own survival technique for when she donned the lime-green handkerchief she called a bathing suit.
The bathing suit was absolutely astonishing on her. He knew as soon as he saw it that he had been wrong thinking the pink one he’d made her put back would look better, because nothing could look better.
She was pure, one-hundred-percent-female menace in that bathing suit, slenderness and curves in a head-spinning mix. Mercifully, for him, she was shy about wearing it, and got herself to the water’s edge each day before dropping the towel she wrapped herself in.
His survival technique: he went way down the beach and spearfished for dinner while she swam. He kept an eye on her, listened for sounds of distress, kept his distance.
He was quite pleased with his plan, because she was so gorgeous in a bathing suit it could steal a man’s strength as surely as Delilah had stolen Sampson’s by cutting off his hair.
Shoshauna blew some more bubbles at him.
“Cut it out,” he warned her again.
She chuckled, unfortunately, not the least intimidated by him anymore.
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
