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
