“You were cruel and thoughtless to Mirassa. She didn’t deserve that, and she retaliated. I’m not excusing what she did, but I am saying I understand it.”
The prince was beginning to look annoyed, not used to anyone speaking their mind around him, especially a woman. What kind of prison would that be? Not being able to be honest with the man you shared the most intimate things in the world with?
“And that man, whom others might see as having put a smirch on my character, was absolutely devoted to protecting me. He was willing to put my well-being ahead of his own.” To refuse everything I offered him, if he felt it wasn’t in my best interests.
“How noble,” the prince said, but he was watching her cautiously. She wasn’t supposed to speak her mind, after all, just toss her hair and blink prettily.
“Yes,” she agreed, “noble.” Ronan, her prince, so much more so than this man who stood in front of her in his silk and jewels, the aroma of his expensive cologne filling the room.
What would he say if she said she would rather smell Ronan’s sweat? She smiled at the thought, and Mahail mistook the smile for a change in mood, for coy invitation.
“Are you well enough, then, to reschedule the day of our marriage?” he asked formally.
So, despite the hair, the skin, her new outspokenness, he was not going to call it off, and suddenly she was glad, because that made it her choice, rather than his—that made it her power that had to be utilized.
She needed to choose.
“I’ve decided not to marry,” she said firmly, with no fear, no doubt, no hesitation. A bird within her took wing.
“Excuse me?” Prince Mahail was genuinely astonished.
“I don’t want to get married. I have so many things I want to achieve first. When I marry I want it to be for love, not for convenience. I’m sorry.”
He glared at her, put out. “Have you consulted your father about this?”
Of all the maddening things he could have said, that about topped her list!
“It’s my choice,” she said dangerously, “not his.”
Prince Mahail looked at her, confused, irritated, annoyed. “Perhaps it is for the best,” he decided. “I think I might like your cousin, Mirassa, better than you after all.”
“You would,” Shoshauna muttered as he marched from the room.
And yet the next day, when she met with her father, she felt terrible trepidation, aware her legs were shaking under her long skirt.
Meetings with him always had a stilted quality, formal, as if his children were more his subjects than his blood.
“I understand,” he said, without preamble, “that you have told Prince Mahail there will be no wedding.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Without consulting me?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
Shoshauna took a deep breath and told him who she was. She did not tell him she was the girl he wanted her to be, meek, docile, pliable, but she told him of longing for education and adventure…and love.
“And so you see,” she finished bravely, “I cannot marry Mahail. I am prepared to go to the dungeon first.”
Her father’s lips twitched, and then he laughed. “Come here,” he said.
As she stepped toward him, he stood up and embraced her. “I want for you what every father wants for his daughter—your happiness. A father thinks he knows best, but you have always been a strong-spirited girl, able, I think, to find your own way. Do you want to go to school?”
“Yes, Father!”
“Then it will be arranged, with my blessing.”
As she turned to go, he called her back.
“Daughter,” he said, laughing, “we don’t have a dungeon. If we did I suspect your poor mother would have locked you away in it a long time ago. I will explain this, er, latest development to her.”
“Thank you.”
Funny, she thought walking away, her whole life she had sought her father’s love and approval. And she had gotten it, finally, not when she had tried to please him, but when she had been brave enough to please herself, brave enough to be herself.
This was news she had to share with Ronan. She asked Colonel Peterson where he was.
He looked at her carefully. “He’s been deployed,” he said, “even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”
And then she realized that was the truth Ronan had tried to tell her about his life.
And she recognized another truth: if you were going to be with a man like that, you had to have a life—satisfying and fulfilling—completely separate from his. If Ronan was going to be a part of her life, she had to come to him absolutely whole, certainly able to function when his work called him to be away.
She renewed her application for school and was accepted. In two months she would be living one more dream. She would be going to study in Great Britain.
And until then?
She was going to learn to surf! There was no room in a world like Ronan’s for a woman who was needy or clingy. She needed to go to him a woman confident in her ability to make her own life.
And then she would be a woman who could make a life with him.
An alarm was going off, and men were pouring through the doors of an abandoned warehouse, men in black, their faces covered, machine guns at the ready. Ronan was with Shoshauna, his body between her and the onslaught, but he felt things no soldier ever wanted to feel—outnumbered, hopeless, helpless. He couldn’t protect her. He was only one man…
Ronan came awake, drenched in sweat, grateful it wasn’t real, perturbed that after six months he was still having that dream, was unable to shake his sense of failure.
Slowly he became aware that the alarm from his dream was really his phone ringing. He’d picked up the phone, along with a whole pile of other things he needed, when he’d moved off base a few months ago. Next time he bought a phone, he’d know to test the damned ringer first. This one announced callers with the urgency of an alarm system announcing a break-in at the Louvre.
He got up on one elbow and looked at the caller ID window.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Are you sleeping? It’s the middle of the day.”
“We’re just back from a deployment. I’m a little turned around.”
Six months ago he wouldn’t have imagined voluntarily giving his mother that information, but then, six months ago she would have been asking all kinds of questions about what he’d been up to, trying to get him to quit
