stamp her foot or slap him.
“I didn’t get married,” she announced in a soft, husky purr.
“Yeah, I heard.” No sense telling her he had celebrated as best he could, with a warm soda in one hand and his rifle in the other, watching the sand blow over a hostile land, wishing he had someone, something more to go home to. Feeling guilty for being distracted, wondering if he was just like his mother. Did all relationships equal a surrender of power? Wasn’t that his fear of love?
“But I have dated all kinds of boys.”
“Really.” It was a statement, not a question. He tried not to feel irritated, his sense of having given her way too much power over him confirmed! Seeing her after all this time, all he wanted to do was taste her lips, and he had to hear she was dating guys? Boys. Not men. Why did he feel faintly relieved by that distinction?
“I thought I should. You know, go out with a few of them.”
“And you stopped by to tell me that?” He folded his arms more firmly over his chest, but something twinkled in her eyes, and he had a feeling his defensive posture was not fooling her one little bit. She knew she had stormed his bastions, taken down his defenses long ago.
“Mmm-hmm. And to tell you that they were all very boring.”
“Sorry.”
“And childish.”
“Males are slow-maturing creatures,” he said. Had she kissed any of them, those boys she had dated? Of course she had. That was the way things worked these days. He remembered all too well the sweetness of her kiss, felt something both possessive and protective when he thought of another man—especially a childish one—tasting her.
“I didn’t kiss anyone, though,” she said, and the twinkle in her eyes deepened. Why was it she seemed to find him so transparent? She had always insisted on seeing who he really was, not what he wanted her to see.
He wanted to tell her he didn’t care, but he had the feeling she’d see right through that, too, so he kept his mouth shut.
“I learned to surf last summer. And I can ride a motorcycle now. By myself.”
“So I can see.”
“Ronan,” she said softly, “are you happy to see me?”
He closed his eyes, marshaled himself, opened them again. “Why are you here, Shoshauna?”
Not princess, a lapse in protocol that she noticed, too. She beamed at him.
“I want to play you a game of chess.”
He didn’t move from the doorway. A game of chess. He tried not to look at her lips. A game of chess was about the furthest thing from his poor, beleaguered male mind. “Why?” he croaked.
“If I win,” she said softly, “you have to take me on a date.”
He could have gotten her killed back there on that island. She apparently didn’t know or didn’t care, but he was not sure he’d ever be able to forgive himself or trust himself either.
“I can’t take you on a date,” he said.
“Why not? You aren’t in charge of protecting me now.”
If he was, she sure as hell wouldn’t be riding a motorcycle around by herself. But he only said, “Good thing, since I did such a crack-up job of it the first time.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t you ever think what could have happened if those boats that arrived that day hadn’t been the colonel and your grandfather? Don’t you ever think of what might have happened if it hadn’t been your cousin, if it had been a well-organized terror cell instead?”
There it was out, and he was glad it was out. He felt as if he had been waiting months to make this confession. Why was it always so damned easy to show her who he really was? Flawed, vulnerable, an ordinary man under his warrior armor.
“No,” she said, regarding him thoughtfully, seeing him, “I don’t. Do you?”
“I think of the possibilities all the time. I didn’t do my job, Shoshauna, I just got lucky.”
“The boys at school use that term sometimes,” she said, her voice sultry.
“Would you be serious? I’m trying to tell you something. I can’t be trusted with you. I’ve never been able to protect the people I love the most.” The look wouldn’t leave her face, as if she thought he was adorable, and so he rushed on, needing to convince her, very sorry the word love had slipped out, somehow. “I have this thing, this sideways feeling, that tells me what to do, an instinct, that warns of danger.”
“What’s it doing right now?” she asked.
“That’s just it. It doesn’t work around you!”
She touched his arm, looked up at him, her eyes so full of acceptance of him that something in him stilled. Completely.
“You know why it doesn’t work around me, Ronan? Because nothing is wrong. Nothing was wrong on the island. You were exactly where you needed to be, doing exactly what you needed to do. And so was I.”
“I forgot what I was there to do and, Shoshauna, that bugs the hell out of me. I didn’t do a good job of protecting you. I didn’t do my job, period.”
“I seem to still be here, alive and kicking.”
“Not because of anything I did,” he said stubbornly.
She regarded him with infinite patience. “Ronan, there are some things that are bigger than even you. Some things you just have to surrender to.”
“That’s the part you don’t get! Surrender is not in any soldier’s vocabulary!”
She sighed as if he was being impossible and childish just like those boys she had dated. “Thank you for the kitten, by the way. I was able to bring him with me. He’s a monster. I called him Hope.”
He wasn’t really done discussing his failures with her, but he said reluctantly, “That sounds like a girl’s name.” The name said it all, named the thing within him that he had not been able to outrun, kill, alter.
He hoped. He hoped for the life he saw promised in her eyes: a life of connection, companionship, laughter, love.
“You know what I think, Ronan?”
“You’re going to tell me if I want to know or not,” he said.
“Just like I want someone to see me for who I am, someone I don’t have to put on the princess costume for, you want someone to see you without your armor. You want someone to know there is a place where you are not all strength and sternness. You want someone to see you are not all warrior.”
“No, I don’t!”
“Now,” she said, casually, as if she had not ripped off his mask and left him feeling trembling and vulnerable
