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 his job, do something safer.
Interestingly, Ronan found he wasn’t enjoying the emergency call-outs 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.
