tool.
Shoshauna had thought she would feel like the powerful one if they swam together, but now she could see the power was in the chemistry itself, not in her, not in him.
There was a universal force that called when a certain woman looked at a certain man, when a certain man looked at a certain woman. It pulled them together, an ancient law of attraction, metal to magnet, a law irresistible, as integral as gravity to the earth.
Shoshauna became aware that the “power” she had so wanted to experiment with, to play with, was out of her control. She felt a kind of helpless thrill, like a child who had played with matches and was now having to deal with a renegade spark that had flared to flame.
Impossible to put this particular fire out. Ronan was all sleek muscle and hard lines, not an ounce of superfluous fat or flesh on his powerful male body. His chest was deep, his stomach flat, ridged with ab muscles, his shoulders impossibly broad. His legs were long, rippling with muscle.
He dove cleanly into the water, cutting it with his body. Two powerful strokes carried him to her, another beyond her. She watched, mesmerized, as his strong crawl carried him effortlessly out into the bay. He stopped twenty or thirty yards from her, trod water, shook diamond droplets of the sea from his hair.
Watching him, she realized what she had been doing could not even really be called swimming. She was paddling. No wonder he treated her as if she belonged in the kiddy pool! Bathing suit aside, in the water she was an elephant trying to keep pace with a cheetah!
Ronan flipped over on his back, spread his arms like a star and floated. It looked so comfortable, so relaxing that she tried it and nearly drowned. She came up sputtering for air.
“Are you okay?”
And what if she wasn’t? Would he swim over here, gather her in his arms, maybe give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?
“I’m fine,” she squeaked.
He did swim back over, but did not come too close. “You’re about as deep as you should go,” he told her. “I’ve noticed over the past few days you are not a very strong swimmer.”
“In my mother’s mind swimming in the ocean was an activity for the sons and daughters of fishermen.”
“It seems a shame to live in a place like this, surrounded by water and not know how to swim. It seems foolish to me, unnecessarily risky, because with this much water you’re eventually going to have an encounter with it.” Hastily he added, “Not that I’m calling your mother foolish.”
“Plus, she has this thing about showing skin.” And that was with a regular bathing suit.
Ronan eyed her. “I take it she wouldn’t approve of the bathing suit.”
He had noticed.
“She’d have a heart attack,” Shoshauna admitted.
“It’s having just about the same effect on me,” he said with a rueful grin, taking all her power away by admitting he’d noticed, a man incapable of pretense, real, just as she’d known he was.
“That’s why your mom doesn’t want you wearing stuff like that. Men are evil creatures, given to drawing conclusions from visual clues that aren’t necessarily correct.”
Back to the kiddy pool! He was going to turn this into a lecture. But he didn’t. He left it at that, yet she felt a little chastened anyway.
As if he sensed that, he quickly changed the subject. “So, I’ve got you out here in the water. Want to—”
Was she actually hoping he was going to propose something a little evil?
“Want to learn how to swim a little better?”
She nodded, both relieved and annoyed by his ability to treat her like a kid, his charge, nothing more.
“You won’t be ready to enter the Olympics after one lesson, but if you fall out of a boat, you’ll be able to survive.”
It had probably been foolish to suggest teaching Shoshauna to swim. But the fact of the matter was she lived on an island. She was around water all the time. It seemed an unbelievable oversight to him that her education had not included swimming lessons.
On the other hand, what did he know about what skills a princess needed? Still, he felt he could leave here a better man knowing that if she did fall off a boat, she could tread water until she was rescued.
Probably he was kidding himself that he was teaching her something important. If a princess fell overboard, surely ten underlings jumped in the water after her.
But somehow it was increasingly important to him that she know how to save herself. And maybe not just if she fell off a boat. All these things he had been teaching her this week were skills that made no sense for a princess.
But for a woman coming into herself, learning the power of self-reliance seemed vital. It felt important that if he gave her nothing else, he gave her a taste of that: what her potential was, what she was capable of doing and learning if she set her mind to it.
Because Ronan was Australian and had grown up around beaches and heavy surf, he had quite often been chosen to instruct other members of Excalibur in survival swimming.
Thankfully, he could teach just about anybody to swim without ever laying a hand on them.
She was a surprisingly eager student, more willing to try things in the water than many a seasoned soldier. Like the things she had been doing on land, he soon realized she had no fear, and she learned very quickly. By the end of a half hour, she could tread water for a few minutes, had the beginnings of a not bad front crawl and could do exactly two strokes of a backstroke before she sank and came up sputtering.
And then disaster struck, the kind, from teaching soldiers, he was totally unprepared for.
She was treading water, when her mouth formed a startled little O. She forgot to sweep the water, wrapped her arms around herself and promptly sank.
His mind screamed shark even though he had evaluated the risks of swimming in the bay and decided they were minimal.
When she didn’t bob right back to the surface, he was at her in a second, dove, wrapped his arm around her waist, dragged her up. No sign of a shark, though her arms were still tightly wrapped around her chest.
Details. Part of him was trying to register what was wrong, when she sputtered something incomprehensible and her face turned bright, bright red.
“My top,” she sputtered.
For a second he didn’t comprehend what she was saying, and when he did he was pretty sure the heart attack he’d teased her about earlier was going to happen for real. He had his arms around a nearly naked princess.
He let go of her so fast she started to sink again, unwilling to unwrap her arms from around her naked bosom.
Somehow her flimsy top had gone missing!
“Swim in to where you can stand up,” he ordered her sharply.
He knew exactly what tone
