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.
SHOSHAUNA 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
