the sheet off her back.
“Hold that up for me.”
He laid the first of the milk-soaked rags flat on her naked back, smoothed it on with his hands. She seemed unbelievably delicate. Her skin was hot beneath the dressing. And, for now anyway, before the inevitable peeling, it felt incredibly smooth, flawless beneath his fingertips. He didn’t know of any other way to bring her comfort, but touching her like this was intimate enough to make him feel faintly crazy, a purely primitive longing welling up within him.
He thought she might flinch, but instead she gave a little moan of pleasure and relief as the first cool, milk-soaked dressing adhered to her back, a sound that could have easily been made in another context.
“Oh,” she breathed. “That feels so good. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything that good.”
His wicked male mind wondered just how innocent that made her. Plenty innocent. And it was his job to keep it that way.
He thought about a man he had never seen, whom he knew nothing about, becoming her husband, being trusted with her delicacy, and he felt another unwanted stab of strong emotion.
Not jealousy, he told himself, God forbid, not jealousy, just an extension of his job. Protectiveness.
But he knew it wasn’t exactly a part of his job to wonder, was that man whom she had almost married, worthy of her? Would her prince be able to make her pleasure as important as his own when the time came? Would he be tender and considerate? Would he stoke the fire that burned in her eyes, or would he put it out?
Ronan, he reprimanded himself. Stop it! By her own admission, she was not being forced into anything. It was her problem not his.
Still, the feeling of craziness intensified, he felt a sudden primitive need to show her what it should feel like, all heat and passion, tenderness and exquisite pleasure. If she’d ever experienced what was real between a man and a woman she wouldn’t accept a substitute, no matter how much pressure she thought she felt.
She was seriously going to pay with her life to relieve a little temporary pressure from her folks?
He gave himself a fierce mental shake. His thinking was ludicrous, totally unacceptable, completely corrupted by emotion. He had known her less than a full week, which really meant he did not know her at all!
He was not dating her, he was protecting her. Imagining his lips on her lips was not a part of the mission.
Who would have thought he would end up having to protect the princess from himself?
“Leave those dressings on there for twenty minutes,” he said, his voice absolutely flat, not revealing one little bit of his inner struggle, the madness that was threatening to envelope him. “Unfortunately in this heat the residue of the milk will start to sour if you leave it on overnight. You’re going to have to rinse off in the shower before you go back to bed.” He passed her some aspirin and a glass of water.
“This will take the sting out.” He sounded as if he was reading from a first-aid manual. “Drink all the water, too, just in case you’re a bit dehydrated. I think you’ll sleep like a baby after all this.”
She probably would, too, but he was wondering if he was ever going to sleep again!
Fixing her up had taken way too long, even with him trying to balance a gentle touch with his urgency to get this new form of torture over with.
“I’ll head back to bed, I’ll leave this lamp for you. You can peel those dressings off by yourself in twenty minutes or so. Don’t forget to shower.”
“All right.”
“You should be okay for a few hours. If the pain comes back, starts bugging you, wake me up. We’ll do it all again.” He had to suck it up to even make that offer. He didn’t want to touch her back again, have her naked under a sheet, the two of them alone in a place just a little too much like paradise.
No wonder Adam and Eve had gone for the apple!
“Ronan?” Her voice was husky. She touched his arm.
He froze, aware he was holding his breath, scared of what could happen next, if she asked him to stay with her. Scared of the physical attraction, scared of the thoughts he had had earlier.
“What?” He growled.
“Thank you so much.”
What was he expecting? She was burned to a crisp. The last thing on her mind was, well, the thing that was on his mind. Which was her lips, soft and pliable, and how they would feel underneath his, how they would taste.
“Just doing my job.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes met his. There was no mistaking the heat and the hunger that changed their color from turquoise to a shade of indigo. He realized it wasn’t the last thing on her mind after all. That one small push from the universe and they’d be all over each other, burn or no burn. The awareness that sizzled in the air between them put that burn on her back to shame.
He sucked in a deep breath, then ducked his head, turned abruptly and walked quickly away from her.
It took more discipline to do that than to do two hundred push-ups at the whim of a aggravated sergeant, to make a bed perfectly for the thousandth time, to jump out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet in the dead of the night. Way more.
He glanced at his watch to check the date. He had to get control over this situation before it deteriorated any more.
But when he thought of her shaking droplets of water from the jagged tips of her hair, laughing, the tenderness of her back underneath the largeness of his hands, he felt a dip in the bottom of his belly.
He focused on it, but it wasn’t that familiar warning, his sideways feeling. It was a warmth as familiar as the sun and as necessary to life.
What had happened to his warning system? Had it become dismantled? Ronan wondered if he had lost some part of himself that he needed in the turquoise depths of her eyes.
Isn’t that what he’d learned about love from his mother? That relationships equaled the surrender of power?
“You are not having a relationship with her,” he told himself sternly, but the words were hollow, and he knew he had already crossed lines he didn’t want to cross.
But tomorrow was a new day, a new battle. He was a warrior and he fully intended to recapture his lost power.
SHOSHAUNA took a deep breath, slid a look at Ronan. He was intense this morning, highly focused, but not on her. She could not look at him—at the dark, neat hair, his face freshly shaven, the soft gold brown of his eyes, the sheer male beauty of the way he carried himself—without feeling a shiver, remembering his hands on her back last night.
“Are you mad at me?”
“Princess?” he asked, his voice flat, as if he had no idea what she was talking about.
