about the cat. I don’t want you telling me about your personal life. Nothing. No cat. No marriage. Not what is on or off your mother’s approval list, though we both know that what isn’t on it is cavorting in the ocean in a bathing suit top that is unstable with a man you barely know.”
“I do know you,” she protested.
“No you don’t. We can’t be friends,” he said quietly. “Do you get that?”
She had thought they were past that, that they were already well on their way to being friends, and possibly even something more than friends. These last few days she had shared more with him than she could remember sharing with anyone. She had felt herself opening around him, like a flower opening to sunshine.
He made her discover things about herself that she hadn’t known. Being around him made her feel strong and competent. And alive. It was easy to be herself with him. How could he say they could not be friends?
“No,” she said stubbornly. “I don’t get it.”
“Actually,” he said tersely, “it doesn’t really matter if you get it or not, just as long as I get it.”
She felt desperate. It was as if he was on a raft and she was on shore, and the distance between them was growing. She needed to bring him back, any way she could. “Okay, I won’t tell you anything about me. Nothing.”
He looked skeptical, so she rushed on, desperate. “I’ll put a piece of tape over my mouth. But I can’t go out in the sun today. I was hoping you’d teach me how to play chess. My mother felt chess was a very masculine game, that girls should not play it.”
Even though he’d specifically told her not to mention her mother to him, she took a chance and believed she had been right to do so, because something flickered in his eyes.
He knew she’d be a good chess player if she got the chance, but if he’d realized that, he doused the thought as quickly as his smile of moments ago. He was silent, refusing the bait.
“Do you know how to play chess?” If she could just get him to sit down with her, spend time with her, soon it would be easy again and fun. She wanted to know so much about him. She wanted him to know so much about her. They only had a few days left! He couldn’t spoil it. He just couldn’t.
He took up the ax and put another piece of wood on the stump he was using as a chopping block. He hit it with such furious strength she winced.
“Are you going to ignore me?”
“I’m sure as hell going to try.”
Shoshauna was a princess. She was not used to being ignored. She was used to people doing what she wanted them to do.
But this felt different. It felt as if she would die if he ignored her, if they could not get back to that place they had been at yesterday, swimming in the magical world of a turquoise sea and rainbow-hued fish, his hands on her back strong, cool, filled with confidence, the hands of a man who knew how to touch a woman in ways that could steal her breath, her heart, her soul.
Her sense of desperation grew. He was holding the key to something locked inside of her. How could he refuse to open that secret door? The place where she would, finally, know who she was.
“If I told my father you had done something inappropriate,” she said coolly, “you’d spend the rest of your life in jail.”
He gave her a look so fearless and so loaded with scorn it made her feel about six inches high. And that was when she knew he was immovable in his resolve. She knew it did not matter what she did—she could threaten him, try to manipulate him with sweetness—he was not going to do as she wanted. He had drawn his line in the sand.
And over such a ridiculously simple thing. She only wanted him to play chess with her!
Only, it wasn’t really that simple, and he knew it, even if she was trying to deny it. Getting to know each other better would have complications and repercussions that could resound through both their lives.
But why worry about that today? They had so little time left. Couldn’t they just go on as they had been? Couldn’t they just pretend they were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances?
But even as she thought it, she knew he would never like pretending. He was too real for that. And when she slid another look his way, she could tell by the determined set of his jaw that he intended to worry about that today, and she could tell something else by the set of his jaw.
She was completely powerless over him.
“I’m sorry I said that,” she said, feeling utterly defeated, “about my father putting you in prison. It was a stupid thing to say, very childish.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” As if he expected her to say things like that, to act spoiled and rotten if she didn’t get her own way. She had not done one thing—not one—to lead him to believe such things of her.
Unless you included saying yes to marrying a man she did not love.
That would speak volumes about her character to a man like Ronan, who wore his honor and his integrity as part of the armor around him.
“I would never do something so horrible as tell lies about you. I’m not a liar.” But hadn’t she lied to herself all along, about Mahail, her marriage, her life?
“I said it didn’t matter,” he said sharply.
“Now you really are mad at me.”
He sighed heavily.
Shoshauna, looking at herself with the brutal assessment she saw in his eyes, burst into tears, ran into the house, slammed her bedroom door and cried until she had no tears left.
Shoot, Ronan thought, was she ever going to stop crying? Bastard. How hard would it have been to teach her to play chess?
It wasn’t about teaching her how to play chess, he told himself sternly. It was about the fact that things were already complicated so much that she was in there crying over something as tiny as the fact he’d refused to teach her to play chess.
Though, dammit, when she had said her mother didn’t want her to play chess, that it was masculine, something in him had just itched to give her the rudiments of the game. She had such a good mind. He bet she’d be a better-than-average player once she got the fundamentals down, probably a downright formidable one.
She didn’t come out of that room for the rest of the day. When he told her he had lunch ready, she answered through the closed door, her voice muffled, that she wasn’t hungry.
Now it was the same answer for supper. He should have been relieved. This was exactly what he needed to keep his vows. Distance. Space. Instead he felt worried about her, guilty about the pain he’d caused.
“Come on,” he said, from the other side of the door, “you have to eat.”
“Why? To make you feel like you’ve fulfilled your obligation to look after me? Is providing a nutritious menu part of protecting me? Go away!”
He opened the door a crack. She was sitting on her bed cross-legged in those shorty-shorts that
