back down. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Her short, boyish hair was every which way. She’d taken her bra straps off her burned shoulders, and they hung out the arms of her T-shirt.
“I told you to go away.”
“You should eat something.” He stepped inside the door a bit.
“You know what? I’m not a little kid. You don’t have to tell me to eat.”
He was already way too aware she was not a little kid. He’d seen the damned bikini once too often! He’d seen what was under the bikini, too.
He was also aware this was becoming a failure of major proportions. He was going to take her back safe from threat but damaged nonetheless: hair chopped off, sunburned, starving, puffy-eyed from crying. Though they still had two days and a couple of hours to get through before he could cross back over that water with her, deliver her to Gray. She couldn’t possibly cry that long.
His stomach knotted at the thought. Could she? He studied her to see if she was all done crying.
She’d found a magazine somewhere, and she was avoiding his eyes. The magazine looked as if it had been printed in about 1957, but she was studying it as intently as if she could read her future on the pages. Her eyes sparkled suspiciously. More tears gathering?
“Look,” he said uncomfortably, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “I’m not trying to be mean to you. I’m just telling you the way things have to be.”
“Is that right?” she snapped, and threw down the magazine. She regarded him with spitting eyes, and he could see clearly it was fury in them, not tears. “As it happens, I’m sick and tired of people telling me how it’s going to be. Why are you the one who decides how it’s going to be? Because you’re a man?”
She had him there.
“Because I’m the one with the job to do,” he said, but he heard the wavering of his own conviction. If ever a woman was born to be his equal it was this one.
She hopped off the bed. Instinct told him to get away from her. A stronger instinct told him to stay.
She stopped in front of him, regarded him with challenge. He, foolishly, held his ground.
She reached up on tiptoe, and she took his lips with her own.
He was enveloped in pure and sweet sensation. Her kiss was as refreshing and clean as rainwater. Her lips told him abut the polarities within her: innocence and passion, enthusiasm and hesitancy, desire and doubt.
He had heard there were drugs so strong a man could be made helpless by them after one taste.
He had never believed it until this moment. He willed himself not to respond, but he did not have enough will to move away from her, from the sweetness of her quest.
The hesitancy and the doubt suddenly dissolved. Her arms reached out, tangled themselves around his neck, drew him closer to her. Her scent wrapped around him, feminine, clean, intoxicating. Through the thinness of her shirt he could feel the warmth radiating off her skin. Her curves, soft, sensual, womanly, pressed into him.
Temptation was furious within him. Pure feeling tried to swamp rational thought. But the soldier in him, highly disciplined, did the clean divide between the emotion he was feeling and what he needed to do.
If he continued this, if he accepted the invitation of her lips, the growing urgency of her kiss, if he allowed it to go where it wanted to go, it would be like a wild horse that had broken free, allowed to run. There would be no bringing it back under rein once it had gone too far.
The soldier wanted control; the man wanted to lose control.
The soldier insisted on inserting one more fact. If this carried to its natural conclusion, Princess Shoshauna would be compromised. The wedding would be off. Her wedding. Again, she wouldn’t have made a choice, just allowed herself to be carried along by forces she considered out of her control.
It was not what Ronan wanted for her.
He didn’t want her to get married to anyone but—
But who?
Him? A soldier. A soldier who didn’t believe in marriage? Who hated it? This must be a genetic flaw in his family, the ability to convince oneself over a very short period of time, before reality had a chance to kick in, that a marriage could work. He yanked himself away from her.
This was the difference between him and his mother: he didn’t have to follow the fantasy all the way through to the end. He already knew the end of every love story.
The soldier won—fact over fiction, practical analysis over emotion, discipline over the wayward leanings of a man’s heart.
But he was aware it was a slim victory at best. And he was aware that aggravating word, love, had popped up again, banished from his vocabulary since around his thirteenth birthday. It was suddenly presenting itself in his life with annoying frequency.
Ronan made himself hold Shoshauna’s gaze, fiery with passion, soft with surrender. He tried to force all emotion from his tone. But the magnitude of his failure to do so—the cold fury of his voice—even took him by surprise. Of course, he really wasn’t angry at her, but at himself, at his own vulnerability, his own weakness, his sudden crippling wistfulness.
Hope—a sudden ridiculous wish to regain his own innocence, a desire to be able to believe in things he had long since lost faith in.
“Are you using me to buy your freedom?”
She reeled back from him. If he was not mistaken the tears were back in her eyes, all the proof he needed that insanity had grabbed him momentarily, that moment when he had contemplated her and himself and marriage in the same single thought.
The truth was much more simple. He was a soldier, rough around the edges, hardened, not suitable for the company of a princess or anyone sensitive or fragile.
But there was nothing the least bit fragile about Shoshauna when she planted both her little hands on his chest and shoved him with such amazing strength that it knocked him completely off balance. He stumbled backward, two steps, through her bedroom doorway, and she rushed forward and slammed the door behind him with the force of a hurricane.
As he contemplated the slammed door, he had the politically incorrect thought that it was a mistake that hurricanes weren’t still named exclusively after women: volatile, completely unpredictable, even the strongest man could not hope to hold his balance in the fury.
“Just go straight to hell!” she yelled at him through the door. She followed that with a curse that was common among working men and soldiers, a curse so common her mother surely would have had heart failure hearing it come from her princess daughter’s refined lips.
So he was returning Shoshauna a changed woman. No hair, sunburned, starved and she was going to be able to hold her own in a vocabulary contest with a construction crew.
He turned away, muttering to himself, “Well, that didn’t go particularly well.”
But outside, contemplating a star-studded night, black-velvet sky meeting inky-black ocean, he rethought his conclusions.
Maybe
