get out of bed! Not for the whole two weeks. That she could touch him until she had her fill of the feel of his skin under her fingertips, until she had her fill of the taste of his lips, and she already knew she was never going to get her fill of that!
Shoshauna was still blushing from the audacity of her own thoughts when her mother and her father came up beside her, not a king and a queen today but proud parents. Each of them kissed her on the cheek and then took their seats.
Her father in particular was very taken with Jake. Her mother had been more slow to come around, but no one who truly got to know Jake could do anything but love him.
Her mother had also been appalled by the simplicity of the wedding plans, but she and Bev had managed to console each other and had become quite good friends as they planned the wedding of their children.
Her grandfather came to her side, linked his arm through hers, smiled at her, though his eyes were wet with tears of joy.
And then Shoshauna was moving across the sand toward her beloved, toward Jake Ronan, and she could see the whole future in his eyes. Her grandfather let her go, and she walked the last few steps to him on her own, a woman who had chosen exactly the life she wanted for herself.
Jake watched Shoshauna move toward him across the fineness of the pure white sand.
She had chosen the simplest of dresses, her feet were bare, but when you were as beautiful as she was, even his mother had agreed that simplicity was the best way to let her true beauty shine through.
His mother and his wife-to-be, here together.
And in him the most wonderful surrender. He would protect them with his life, if he ever had to, and they both knew that.
Someday he would have children with Shoshauna, and he could feel the fierce protectiveness within himself extend to them, but something new was there, too.
A trust, that he would do whatever he could do, but when his strength ran dry, then there would be something else there to step in, something that seemed to have a better plan for him than anything he could have ever planned for himself, if the woman walking over the sand toward him was any indication.
He knew that something went by a great many names. Some called it the Universe, the life force, God.
He had come to call it Love, and to recognize it had been running the show long before he’d come along, and would be running it long after.
There came a point when a man had to realize that there were things he did not control, and that he would only exhaust himself, drain away his strength and his soul, if he continued to think the whole world would fall apart if he was not running it.
Ronan had come to believe that he could trust the protection and care of a force larger than himself.
It was the same force that brought a certain man and a certain woman together, against impossible odds, across cultural and social differences, the force that made one heart recognize another.
And it was that force that would protect them and see their children into the world.
Once upon a time Jake Ronan had thought if he ever had to stand where he was standing today, he would probably faint.
And yet the truth was, he had never felt so calm, so strong, so right. And the strangest thing of all was that, even as Ronan admitted he was powerless in the face of this thing called love, with each day of his surrender he felt more powerful, more alive and more relaxed, more grateful, more everything.
This was the something more he had longed for all his life: to be a part of the magnificent mystery that flowed around him and in him as surely as it flowed through the waves on the sea. He longed to ride that incredible energy with the ease and joy with which he could ride the most powerful of waves. Not to conquer but to feel connected.
He watched Shoshauna move toward him, and he almost laughed out loud.
For one thing he had come to know that this thing he chose to call Love had the most delicious sense of humor.
And for the longest time he had thought it was his job to rescue the princess.
But now he saw that wasn’t it at all.
That she had come to rescue him. And that allowing himself to be rescued had not made him a weaker man but a better one.
She reached him, looked him in the face, his equal, the woman who would be the mother of his children, his companion, his friend, his lover through all the days of his life.
“Beloved,” she said, her voice hushed with reverence of what they stood in the presence of, that Force greater than all things. “Retnuh.”
And he said to her, his eyes never leaving her face, in her own language, a greeting and a vow, “My heart is home.”
Jessica Hart
For my dear niece, Suzy,
with love on her engagement.
WAVING her hands around her head in a futile attempt to bat the midges away, Lotty paused for breath at the crest of the track. Below her, an austere granite house was planted between a forbidding sweep of hillside and a loch so still it mirrored the clouds and the trees clustered along the water’s edge.
Loch Mhoraigh House. It looked isolated and unfriendly and, according to all reports in the village, its owner was the same.
‘He’s the worst boss I’ve ever had.’ Gary had been drowning his sorrows in the Mhoraigh Hotel bar all afternoon and his words were more than a little slurred. ‘Not a smile, not a good morning, just straight to work! I told him if I’d wanted to work in a labour camp, I’d have signed up for one. It’s not as if he’s paying more than slave wages either, and he won’t get anyone else. I told him what he could do with his job!’
‘Quite right too.’ Elsie, the barmaid, polished glasses vindictively and warned Lotty against making the trek out to Loch Mhoraigh House. ‘We don’t want Corran McKenna around here. The Mhoraigh estate should have gone to his brother, we all know that,’ she said, hinting darkly at some family feud that Lotty didn’t quite follow. ‘Nobody from the village will work for him. You go on up to Fort William,’ she told Lotty. ‘You’ll find a job there.’
But Lotty couldn’t afford to go any further. Without her purse, she was penniless, and when you needed money, you got yourself a job, right?
Or so she had heard. The truth was that until an hour earlier, when she had realised that her purse was missing, Lotty had never in her life had to think about money at all.
Now she did.
It was Lotty’s first challenge, and she was determined to rise to it. Her life was so luxurious, so protected. She understood why, of course, but it
