his lips, but he had a feeling what had been left there was not going to be that easy to erase.
After a long time he looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Just under forty-eight hours to go, and then they were leaving this island, meeting Gray.
What if her life was still in danger?
Well, if it was, if the situation was still not resolved, Gray had to have come up with a protection plan for her that did not involve Ronan.
But was he going to trust anyone else with her protection if she was still in danger? Would he have a choice? If he was ordered back to Excalibur, he was going to have to go, whether she was in danger or not.
He hoped it was a choice he was never going to have to make. Which would he obey? The call of duty or the call of his own heart?
Jake Ronan had never had to ask himself a question like that before, and he didn’t like it one little bit that he had asked it now.
The fact that he had asked it meant something had shifted in him, changed. He cared about someone else as much as he cared about duty. Once you had done that, could you ever go back to the way you were before?
That’s what he felt over the next twenty-four hours. That he was a man trying desperately to be what he had been before: cool, calm, professional, a man notorious for being able to control emotion in situations gone wild.
He almost succeeded, too.
It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t easy, that he was managing to keep the barriers up between them. She was using the kitchen at different times than him. She refused to eat what he left out for her. He found her burnt offerings all over the kitchen, along with mashed fruit. He didn’t know if she was trying to torment him by washing her underthings and stringing them on a line by the outdoor shower, but torment him it did, especially since she had managed to turn her bra from pure white to a funny shade of pink.
Of course, he could show her how to do laundry. He wanted to, but to what end? Nothing about her life included needing an ability to do laundry without turning her whites to pink.
And nothing about his life needed the complication of inviting her back into it.
No, this might be painful: these silences, the nose tilted upward every time she had to pass him, the hurt she was trying to hide with pride and seething silence, but in the end it was for the best. Even when he found an aloe vera plant and knew how it would soothe her sunburn, bring moisture and coolness and healing to her now badly peeling skin, he would not allow himself to make the offer.
When he saw her sitting at the dining room table by herself, moving chess pieces wistfully, he would not allow himself to give in to the sudden weakness of wanting to teach her how to play.
It only led to other wantings: wanting to make her laugh, wanting to see her succeed, wanting to see her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration, wanting to touch her hair.
Wanting desperately to taste her lips again, just one more time, as if he could memorize how it felt and carry it inside him forever.
But he didn’t give in to any of that. He applied every bit of discipline he had ever learned as a soldier to do what was right instead of what he wanted to do.
And he would have made it.
He would have made it right until the end, except that the wind came up.
The surf was up in the bay. And Princess Shoshauna, clad in a T-shirt to cover her burns, was running toward it, laughing with exhilaration and anticipation, the old surfboard they’d uncovered tucked under her arm.
“Hey,” he yelled from the steps of the cottage, “you aren’t a good enough swimmer for that water.”
She glanced back. If he was not mistaken she stuck out her tongue at him. And then she ran even faster, kicking up the sand in her bare feet.
With a sigh of resignation and surrender, Ronan went after her.
SHOSHAUNA found the waves extraordinarily beautiful, rolling four feet high out in the water where they began their curl, breaking on the beach with a thunderous explosion of white foam and fury.
Her foot actually touched the hard pack of wave-pounded sand, when his hand clamped down on her shoulder with such strength it spun her.
Even though she had spent way too much time imagining his touch, it was not satisfactory in that context! She faced him, glaring. “What?” she demanded.
“You’re not a strong enough swimmer for that surf.”
“Well, you don’t know everything! You said the surf would never even come up in this bay and you were wrong about that!”
“I’m not wrong about this. I’m not letting you go in the water by yourself.”
He had that look on his face, fierce; the warrior not to be challenged.
But Shoshauna had been counting days and hours. She knew this time of freedom was nearly over for her. Tomorrow they would be gone from here. And she knew something else. She was responsible for her own life and her own decisions.
She stood her ground, lifted her chin to him.
“I have a lifelong dream of doing this, and I’m doing it.”
He looked totally unimpressed with her newfound resolve, indifferent to her discovery of her own power, immune to the sway of her life dreams. He folded his arms over his chest, set his legs, a man getting ready to throw her over his shoulder if he had to.
As delicious as it might be to be carried by him kicking and screaming up to the cottage, this was important to her, and she suddenly had to make him see that.
“It’s my lifelong dream, and the waves came. Don’t you think you have to regard that as a gift from the gods?”
“No.”
“Ronan, all my life people have made my decisions for me. And I’ve let them. Starting right here and right now, I’m not letting them anymore. Not even you.”
Something in him faltered. He looked at the waves and he looked at her. She could see the struggle in his face.
“Ronan, its not that I want to. I have to. I have to know what it feels like to ride that kind of power, to leash it. I feel if I can do that, conquer those waves, it’s just the beginning for me. If I can do that, I can do anything.”
And suddenly she knew she had never spoken truer words. Suddenly she realized she had made a crucial error the other night when she had thought he held the key to the secrets locked away within her.
When they had started this adventure, she remembered saying she didn’t know how to find what she was looking for because she didn’t know where to look.
But suddenly she knew exactly where to look.
Every answer she had ever needed was
