the way he once had. He recognized that adrenaline had become his fix, his drug, it had filled something in him.
It didn’t work anymore. Not since B’Ranasha. He’d felt something else then, softer, kinder, ultimately more real.
Adrenaline had been a substitute, a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Loneliness. Yearning.
He’d been asked if he would consider taking an instructor’s position with Excalibur. Maybe he was just getting older, but the idea appealed.
Now his mother didn’t even ask a single detail about the deployment, which was good. Even though she now had her own life and it had made her so much more accepting of his, Ronan thought it might set their growing trust in each other back a bit if he told her he’d just been behind the lines in a country where a military coup was in full swing rescuing the deposed prime minister.
Or, he thought, listening to the happiness in her voice, maybe not.
The big news that she had been trying to reach him about when he’d taken the wedding security position on B’Ranasha, amazingly, had nothing to do with another wedding, or at least not for her. No, she’d had an idea.
She’d wanted to know if he would invest in her new company.
But of course, that wasn’t really what she had been asking. Sometime, probably in that week with Shoshauna, Ronan had developed the sensitivity to know this.
She was really asking for an investment in her. She was asking him, fearfully, painfully, courageously, to believe in her. One last time, despite it all, please.
And isn’t that what love did? Believed? Held the faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence that to believe was naive?
The truth was he had all kinds of money. He’d had a regular paycheck since leaving high school. Renting this apartment was really the first time he’d spent any significant amount of it. His lifestyle had left him with little time and less inclination to spend his money.
Why not gamble it? His mother wanted to start a wedding-planning service and a specialized bridal boutique. Who, after all, was more of an expert on weddings than his mother? There was no sideways feeling in his stomach—not that he was at all certain it worked anymore—so he’d invested. When she’d told him she’d decided on a name for their new company, he’d expected the worst.
“‘Princess,’” she said, “the princess part in teeny letters. That’s important. And then in big letters ‘Bliss.’”
Into his telling silence she had said, “You hate it.”
That was putting it mildly. “I guess I just don’t understand it.”
“No, you wouldn’t, but Ronan, trust me, every woman dreams of being a princess, if only for a day. Especially on that day.”
And then Ronan had been pleasantly surprised and then downright astounded at his mother’s overwhelming success. Within a few months of opening, Princess Bliss had been named by Aussie Business as one of the top-ten new businesses in the country. His mother had been approached about franchising. She was arranging weddings around the globe.
“Kay Harden just called,” his mother told him breathlessly. “She and Henry Hopkins are getting married again.”
“Uh-huh,” Ronan said.
“Do you even know who they are, Jacob?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me that! Jacob, you’re hopeless. Movie stars. They’re both movie stars.”
He didn’t care about that, he’d protected enough important people to know the truth. One important person in particular had let him know the truth.
All people, inside, were the very same.
Even soldiers.
“We’re going to have a million-dollar year!” his mother said.
Life was full of cruel ironies: Jake Ronan the man who hated weddings more than any other was going to get rich from them. He’d told his mother he would be happy just to have his initial investment back, but she was having none of it. He was a full, if silent, partner in Princess Bliss, if he liked it or not. And when he saw how happy his mother was, for the first time in his memory since his father had died, he liked it just fine.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m proud of you. I really am. Please, don’t cry.”
But she cried, and talked about her business, and he just listened, glancing around his small apartment while she talked. This was another change he’d made since coming home from B’Ranasha.
After a month back at work he had decided to give up barrack life and get his own place. The brotherhood of his comrades was no longer as comfortable as it once had been. After he’d gotten back from B’Ranasha he had felt an overwhelming desire to be alone, to create his own space, a life separate from his career.
If the apartment was any indication, he hadn’t really succeeded. Try as he might to make it homey, it just never was.
Try as he might to never think about her or that week on the island, he never quite could. He was changed. He was lonely. He hurt.
The apartment was just an indication of something else, wanting more, wanting to have more to life than his work.
And all that money piling up in his bank account, thanks to his partnership in Bliss, was an indication that something more wasn’t about money, either.
He’d contacted Gray Peterson once, a couple of days after leaving B’Ranasha. He’d been in a country so small it didn’t appear on the map, in the middle of a civil war. Trying to sound casual, which was ridiculous given the lengths he’d gone to, to get his hands on a phone, and hard to do with gunfire exploding in the background, he’d asked if she was all right.
And found out the only thing he needed to know: the marriage of Prince Mahail and Princess Shoshauna had been called off. Ronan had wanted to press for details, called off for what reason, by whom, but he’d already known that the phone call was inappropriate, that a soldier asking after a princess was not acceptable in any world that he moved in.
Ronan heard a knock on his door, got up and answered it. “Mom, gotta go. Someone’s at the door.”
Was it Halloween? A child dressed as a motorcycle rider stood on his outside step, all black leather, a helmet, sunglasses.
And then the sunglasses came off, and he recognized eyes as turquoise as the sunlit bay of his boyhood. His mouth fell open.
And then she undid the motorcycle helmet strap, and struggled to get the snug-fitting helmet from her head.
He had to stuff his hands in his pockets to keep from helping her. Finally she had it off.
He studied her hair. Possibly, her hair looked even worse than it had on the island, grown out considerably but flattened by the helmet.
“What are you doing here?” he asked gruffly, as if his heart was not nearly pounding out of his chest, as if he did not want to lift her into his arms and swing her
