if I win?” he asked.
She smiled at him, and he saw just how completely she had come into herself, how confident she was.
“Ronan,” she said softly, her smile melting him, “why on earth would you want to win?”
“I CAN’T believe you’d ever accept anything but my very best effort,” he said, though the truth was he already knew he was lost.
She contemplated him. “That’s true. So if you win?”
“I haven’t even agreed to play yet!”
“Well, we’ve stood at this point before, haven’t we, Ronan? Where you have to decide whether or not to let me in.”
They had stood at this point before. On the island he’d refused to play chess with her, and he’d made her cry. But then he had only been doing his job, and in the end that barrier had not been enough to keep him from caring about her.
Without that barrier where would it go?
A single word entered his mind. And oddly enough, it was not surrender. Bliss.
He stood back from his door, an admission in his heart. He was powerless against her; he had been from the very beginning. Princess Shoshauna of B’Ranasha walked into his humble apartment, took off the black jacket and tossed it on his couch as if she belonged here.
The form-fitting white silk shirt and black leather pants were at least as sexy as that bikini she had nearly driven him crazy in, and his feeling of powerlessness increased.
She looked around his place with interest. He shoved a pair of socks under the couch with his foot. She looked at him.
“I want to live in a cute little place just like this, one day.”
His mother had claimed that every girl wanted to be a princess, but somehow, someway he had lucked into something very different. A girl who had already been a princess and who wanted to be ordinary.
He got his chess set out of a cabinet, set it up at the small kitchen table.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked, sitting down, taking a black and a white chess piece and holding them out to him, closed fist.
He chose. Black, then. Let her lead the way.
He snorted. “Call you? You’re a princess. You’re not exactly listed in the local directory.”
“You knew how to get ahold of me, though, if you’d wanted to.”
“Yes.”
“So you didn’t want to?”
He was silent, contemplating her first move, her opening gambit. He made a defensive move.
“I couldn’t. I still dream about what could have happened on that island. I failed you. There I was snorkeling and surfing, when really I should have been setting up defenses.”
“I’d been protected all my life. You didn’t fail me. You gave me what I needed far more than safety. A wake-up call. A call to live. To be myself. You gave me a gift, Ronan. Even when you didn’t call it that, it was a gift.”
He waited.
“I needed to choose and I have. I’ve chosen.”
“To play chess with a soldier?”
“No, Ronan,” she said gently. “It was never about the chess.”
“So I see.” He was surrendering to her, just as he had on the island, even though he didn’t want to, even though he knew better. Bliss. It unfolded in him like a sail that had finally caught the wind, it filled him, it carried him forward into a brand-new land.
She beat him soundly at chess, though he might have been slightly distracted by the scent of her, by the pure heaven of having her in the same room again, by the sound of her voice, the light in her eyes, the way she ran her hand through the disaster that was her hair.
“Do you know why I dated those other boys?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“So that you wouldn’t have one single excuse to say no to me. So that you couldn’t say, ‘You only think you love me. You don’t know anyone else.’”
“Love?” he said.
She sighed. “Ronan, I made it perfectly clear it wasn’t about the chess game.”
That was true, she had.
“So,” he said, “what do you want to do for that date?”
What would a princess want to do? The opera? Live theater? Was he going to have to get a new wardrobe?
“Oh,” she said, “I want to go to a pub for fish and chips and then to a movie after. Just like an ordinary girl.”
His mother had been so wrong. Not every girl wanted to be a princess, not at all. Still, when he looked at her and smiled, he knew there was no hope she would ever be an ordinary girl, either.
And suddenly it came to him, a truth that was at the very core of humanity. A truth that was humbling and reassuring at the very same time.
Love was more powerful than he was.
He got up from his chair, came around to hers and tugged her out of it. Shoshauna came into his arms as if she was coming home.
“I guess,” he whispered against her hair, “it’s time for you to start calling me Jake.”
He picked her up for their first official date three nights later. He felt like a teenager getting ready. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, trying for just the right note of casual.
As he approached her address, he was aware that for a man who had done the most dangerous things in the world with absolute icy calm, his heart was beating faster, and his palms were sweat-slicked.
She lived on campus in what looked to be a very ordinary house until he went to the front door, rang the bell and was let in.
There were girls everywhere, short girls, tall girls, skinny girls, heavy girls. There were girls dressed to go to nightclubs and girls in their pajamas. There were girls with their hair in rollers and girls hidden behind frightening facial masks of green creams and white creams. And it seemed when he stood in that front foyer, every single one of them stopped and looked at him. Really looked.
“Sexy beast,” one of them called out. “Who are you here for?”
The last time he had blushed was when Shoshauna had kissed him on the cheek and called him Charming in that little market in B’Ranasha. She was determined to put him in predicaments that stretched him! At least now he knew a little blush
