he said cautiously, not giving away his identity.
“Peterson.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“How did Aurora take the news that she’s going to have to go into hiding?”
“Happily waiting for her prince to come,” he said dryly, though he thought a less-true statement had probably never been spoken.
“Can you keep her that way for Neptune?”
Neptune was an exercise that Excalibur went on once a year. It was a week-long training in sea operations. Ronan drew in his breath sharply. A week? Even with the cleverness of the disguise she was in, that was going to be tough on so many levels. He didn’t know the island. Still, Gray would never ask a week of him if he didn’t absolutely need the time.
Surely the princess would know enough about the island to help him figure out a nice quiet place where they could hole up for a week?
Which brought him to how tough it was going to be on another level: a man and a woman holed up alone for a week. A gorgeous woman, despite the disguise, a healthy man, despite all his discipline.
“Can do.” He let none of the doubt he was feeling creep into his tone. He hoped the colonel would at least suggest where, but then realized it would be better if he didn’t, considering the possibility Gray’s team was not secure.
“We’ll meet at Harry’s. Neptune swim.”
Harry’s was a fish-and-chips-style pub the guys had frequented near Excalibur headquarters. The colonel was wisely using references no one but a member of the unit would understand. The Neptune swim was a grueling session in ocean swimming that happened at precisely 1500 hours every single day of the Neptune exercise. So, Ronan would meet Gray in one week, at a British-style pub, or a place that sold fish and chips, presumably close to the palace headquarters at 3 p.m.
“Gotcha.” He deliberately did not use communication protocol. “By the way, you need to check out a cousin. Mirassa.”
“Thanks. Destroy the phone,” the Colonel said.
Every cell phone had a global positioning device in it. Better to get rid of it, something Ronan had known all along he was going to have to do.
“Will do.”
He hung up the phone and peered in the market. The princess had emerged from the back, and was now going through racks of tourist clothing, in a leisurely manner, hangers of clothing already tossed over one arm. Thankfully, despite the darkness of the shop, she still had on the sunglasses.
He went into the shop, moved through the cluttered aisles toward her. If he was not mistaken, the top item of the clothing she had strung over her arm was a bikini, bright neon green, not enough material in it to make a handkerchief.
A week with that? He was disciplined, yes, a miracle worker, no. This was going to be a challenging enough assignment if he managed to keep her dressed like a refrigerator box!
He went up beside her, plucked the bikini off her arm, hung it up on the closest rack. “We’re not supposed to attract attention, Aurora. That doesn’t exactly fit the bill.”
“Aurora?”
“Your code name,” he said in an undertone.
“A code name,” she breathed. “I like it. Does it mean something?”
“It’s the name of the princess in ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”
“Well, I’m not waiting for my prince!”
“I gathered that,” he said dryly. He didn’t want to feel interested in what was wrong with her prince. It didn’t have anything to do with getting the job done. He told himself not to ask her why she dreaded marriage so much, and succeeded, for the moment. But he was aware he had a whole week with her to try to keep his curiosity at bay.
“Do you have a code name?” she asked.
He tried to think of the name of a celibate priest, but he wasn’t really up on his priests. “No. Let’s go.”
She glanced at him—hard to read her eyes through the sunglasses—but her chin tilted in a manner that did not bode well for him being the boss. She took the bikini back off the rack, tossed it back over her arm.
“I don’t have to wear it,” she said mulishly. “I just have to have it. Touch it again, and I’ll make a scene.” She smiled.
He glanced around uneasily. No other customers in the store, the single clerk, thankfully, far more interested in the daily racing form he was studying than he was in them.
“Let’s go,” he said in a low voice. “You have enough stuff there to last a year.”
“Maybe it will be a year,” she said, just a trifle too hopefully, confirming what he already knew—this was one princess not too eager to be kissed by a prince.
“I’ve had some instructions. A week. We need to disappear for a week.”
She grabbed a pair of shorty-shorts.
“We have to go.”
“I’m not finished.”
He took her elbow, glanced again at the clerk, guided her further back in the room. “Look, Princess, you have a decision to make.”
She spotted a bikini on the rack by his head. “I know!” she said, deliberately missing his point. “Pink or green?”
Definitely pink, but he forced himself to remain absolutely expressionless, pretended he was capable of ignoring the scrap of material she was waving in front of his face. Unfortunately, it was just a little too easy to imagine her in that, how the pink would set off the golden tones of her skin and the color of her eyes, how her long black hair would shimmer against it.
He took a deep breath.
“This is about your life,” he told her quietly. “Not mine. I’m not going to be more responsible for you than you are willing to be for yourself. So, if you want to take chances with your life, if you want to make my life difficult instead of cooperating, I’ll take you back to the palace right now.”
Despite the sunglasses, he could tell by the tightening of her mouth that she didn’t want to go back to the palace, so he pressed on.
“That would work better for me, actually,” he said. “I kind of fell into this. I signed up for wedding security, not to be your bodyguard. I have a commanding officer who’s going to be very unhappy with me if I don’t report back to work on Tuesday.”
He was bluffing. He wasn’t taking her back to the palace until Gray had sorted out who was responsible for the attack at the church. And Gray would look after getting word back to his unit that he had been detained due to circumstances beyond his control.
But she didn’t have to know that. And if he’d read her correctly, she’d been relieved that her wedding had been interrupted, delirious almost. The last thing she wanted to do was go back to
