The Royal Collection

If even one person had expressed doubt about her upcoming wedding would she have found the courage to call it off? Instead, she’d been swept along by all that gushing about how wonderful she would look in the dress, how handsome Prince Mahail was, what an excellent menu choice she had made, how exquisite the flowers she had personally picked out.

“There’s the market,” she said coldly.

He pulled over, stopped her as she reached for the handle. “You are staying right here.”

Her arm tingled where his hand rested on it. Unless she was mistaken, he felt a little jolt, too. He certainly pulled away as though he had. “Do you understand? Stay here. Duck down if anyone comes down the road.”

She nodded, but perhaps not sincerely enough.

“It’s not a game,” he said again.

“All right!” she said. “I get it.”

“I hope so,” he muttered, gave her one long, hard, assessing look, then dashed across the street.

“Don’t forget scissors,” she called as he went into the market. He glared back at her, annoyed. He hadn’t said to be quiet! Besides, she didn’t want him to forget the scissors.

She had wanted to cut her hair since she was thirteen. It was too long and a terrible nuisance. It took two servants to wash it and forever to dry.

“Princesses,” her mother had informed her, astounded at her request, “do not cut their hair.”

Princesses didn’t do a great many things. People who thought it was fun should try it for a day or two. They should try sitting nicely through concerts, building openings, ceremonies for visiting dignitaries. They should try shaking hands with every single person in a receiving line and smiling for hours without stopping. They should try sitting through speeches at formal dinners, being the royal representative at the carefully selected weddings and funerals and baptisms and graduations of the important people. They should try meeting a million people and never really getting to know a single one of them.

Shoshauna had dreams that were not princess dreams at all. They were not even big dreams by the standards of the rest of the world, but they were her dreams. And if Ronan thought she wasn’t taking what had happened at the chapel seriously, he just didn’t get it.

She had given up on her dreams, felt as if they were being crushed like glass under her slippers with every step closer to the altar that she had taken.

But for some reason—maybe she had wished hard enough after all, maybe Retnuh was her protector from another world—she had been given this reprieve, and she felt as if she had to try and squeeze everything she had ever wanted into this tiny window of freedom.

She wanted to wear pants and shorts. She wanted to ride a motorcycle! She wanted to try surfing and a real bathing suit, not the swimming costume she was forced to wear at the palace. A person could drown if they ever got in real water, not a shallow swimming pool, in that getup.

There were other dreams that were surely never going to happen once she was married to the crown prince of an island country every bit as old-fashioned and traditional as B’Ranasha.

Decorum would be everything. She would wear the finest gowns, the best jewels, her manners would have to be forever impeccable, she would never be able to say what she really wanted. In short order she would be expected to stay home and begin producing babies.

But she wanted so desperately to sample life before she was condemned to that. Shoshauna wanted to taste snow. She wanted to go on a toboggan. She felt she had missed something essential: a boyfriend, like she had seen in movies. A boyfriend would be fun—someone to hold her hand, take her to movies, romance her. A husband was a totally different thing!

For a moment she had hoped she could talk Ronan into a least pretending, but she now saw that was unlikely.

Most of her dreams were unlikely.

Still, a miracle had happened. Here she was beside a handsome stranger in a stolen taxicab, when she should have been married to Prince Mahail by now. She’d known the prince since childhood and did not find him the least romantic, though many others did, including her silly cousin, Mirassa.

Mahail was absurdly arrogant, sure in his position of male superiority. Worse, he did not believe in her greatest dream of all.

Most of all, Shoshauna wanted to be educated, to learn glorious things, and not be restricted in what she was allowed to select for course material. She wanted to sit in classrooms with males and openly challenge the stupidity of their opinions. She wanted to learn to play chess, a game her mother said was for men only.

She knew herself to be a princess of very little consequence, the only daughter of a lesser wife, flying well under the radar of the royal watchdogs. She had spent a great deal of time, especially in her younger years, with her English grandfather and had thought one day she would study at a university in Great Britain.

With freedom that close, with her dreams so near she could taste them, Prince Mahail had spoiled it all, by choosing her as his bride. Why had he chosen her?

Mirassa had told her he’d been captivated by her hair! Suddenly she remembered how Mirassa had looked at her hair in that moment, how her eyes had darkened to black, and Shoshauna felt a shiver of apprehension.

Before Mahail had proposed to Shoshauna, rumor had flown that Mirassa was his chosen bride. He had flirted openly with her on several occasions, which on these islands was akin to publishing banns. Shoshauna had heard, again through the rumor mill, that Mirassa had asked to see him after he had proposed to Shoshauna and he had humiliated her by refusing her an appointment. Given that he had encouraged Mirassa’s affection in the first place, he certainly could have been more sensitive. Just how angry had Mirassa been?

Trust your instincts.

If she managed to cut her hair off before her return maybe Prince Mahail would lose interest in her as quickly as he had gained it and Mirassa would stop being jealous.

Being chosen for her hair was insulting, like being a head of livestock chosen for the way it looked: not for its heart or mind or soul!

The prince had taken his interest to her father, and she had felt as if her father had noticed her, really seen her for the very first time. His approval had been drugging. It had made her say yes when she had needed to say no!

Ronan came back to the car, dropped a bag on her lap, reached in and stowed a few more on the backseat. She noticed he had purchased clothing for himself and had changed out of the suit he’d worn. He was now wearing an open-throated shirt that showed his arms: rippling with well-defined muscle, peppered with hairs turned golden by the sun. And he was wearing shorts. She was not sure she had ever seen such a length of appealing male leg in all her life!

Faintly flustered, Shoshauna focused on the bag he’d given her. It held clothing. A large pair of very ugly sunglasses, a hideous hat, a blouse and skirt that looked like a British schoolmarm would be happy to wear.

No shorts. She felt like crying as reality collided with her fantasy.

“Where are the scissors?” she asked.

“Forgot,” he said brusquely, and she knew she could not count on him to make any of her dreams come true, to help her make the best use of this time she had been given.

He had a totally different agenda than her. To keep her safe. The last thing she wanted was to be safe. She wanted to be alive but in the best sense of that word.

She opened her car door.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“I’m going the hell in those bushes, changing into this outfit, as hideous as it is.”

“I don’t think princesses are supposed to change their clothes in the bushes,” he said. “Or say hell, for that matter. Just get in the car and I’ll find—”

“I’m changing now.” And then I’m going into that market and buying some things I want to wear. “And then I’m going into that market and finding the restroom.”

“Maybe since you’re in the bushes anyway, you could just—”

She stopped him with a look. His mouth snapped shut. He scowled at her, but even he, as unimpressed with her status as he apparently was, was not going to suggest she go to the bathroom in the bushes.

“Don’t peek,” she said, ducking into the thick shrubbery at the side of the road.

“Lord have mercy,” he muttered, whatever that meant.

CHAPTER TWO

RESIGNED, Ronan hovered in front of the bushes while she changed, trying to ignore the rustling sound of falling silk.

When she emerged, even he was impressed with how good his choices had been. Princess Shoshauna no longer looked like a member of the royal family, or even like a native to the island.

The women of B’Ranasha had gorgeous hair, their crowning glory. It swung straight and long, black and impossibly shiny past their shoulder blades, and was sometimes ornamented with fresh flowers, but never hidden.

The princess had managed to tuck her abundant locks up under that straw hat, the sunglasses covered the distinctive turquoise of those eyes, and she’d been entirely correct about his fashion sense.

The outfit he’d picked for her looked hideous in exactly the nondescript way he had hoped it would. The blouse was too big, the skirt was shapeless and dowdy, hanging a nice inch or so past her shapely knees. Except for the delicate slippers that showed off the daintiness of her tiny feet, she could have passed for an overweight British nanny on vacation.

As a disguise it was perfect: it hid who she really was very effectively. It worked for him, too. He had effectively covered her curves, made her look about as sexy as a refrigerator box. He knew the last thing he needed was to be too aware of her as a woman, and a beautiful one at that.

He accompanied her across the street, thankful for the sleepiness of the market at this time of day. “Try not to talk to anyone. The washrooms are at the back.”

His cell phone vibrated. “Five minutes,” he told her, checked the caller ID, felt relieved it was not his mother, though not a number he recognized, either. He watched through the open market door as she went straight to the back, then, certain of her safety, turned his attention to the phone.

“Yeah,” 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 her life, pick up where she’d left off.

He kept talking. “I’m sure your betrothed is very worried about you, anxious to make you his wife, so that he can keep you safe. He’s probably way more qualified to do that than I am.”

He could see, clearly, that he had her full attention, and that she was about as eager to get back to her prince as to swim with crocodiles.

So he said, “Maybe that’s the best idea. Head back, a quick secret ceremony, you and your prince can get off the island, have your honeymoon together, and this whole mess will be cleared up by the time you get home.”

His alertness to detail paid off now, because her body language radiated sudden tension. He actually felt a little bit sorry for her. She obviously didn’t want to get married, and if she had feelings for her fiancé they were not positive ones. But again he had to shut down any sense of curiosity or compassion that he felt. That wasn’t his problem, and in protection work, that was the priority: to remember his business—the very narrow perimeters of keeping her safe—and to not care anything about what was her business.

Whether she was gorgeous, ugly, unhappy at love, frustrated with her life, none of that mattered to him. Or should matter to him.

Still, he did feel the tiniest little shiver of unwanted sympathy as he watched her getting paler before his eyes. He was glad for her sunglasses, because he didn’t want to see her eyes just now. She put the pink bikini back, thankfully, but turned and marched to the counter as if she was still the one in charge, as if he was her servant left to trail behind her—and pay the bills.

Apparently paying had not occurred to her. She had probably never had to handle money or even a credit card in her whole life. She would put it on account, or some member of her staff would look after the details for her.

She seemed to realize that at the counter, and he could have embarrassed her, but there was no point, and he certainly did not want the clerk to find anything memorable about this transaction.

“I got it, sweetheart,” he said easily.

Though playing sweethearts had been her idea, she was flustered by it. She looked everywhere but at him. Then, without warning, she reached up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

“Thanks, Charming,” she said huskily, obviously deciding he needed a code name that matched hers.

But a less-likely prince had never been born, and he knew it.

He hoped the clerk wouldn’t look up, because there might be something memorable about seeing a man blushing because his supposed lady friend had kissed him and used an odd endearment on him.

Ronan didn’t make it worse by looking at her, but he felt a little stunned by the sweetness of her lips on his cheek, by the utter softness, the sensuality of a butterfly’s wings.

“Oh, look,” she said softly, suddenly breathless. She was tapping a worn sign underneath the glass on the counter.

“Motorcycles for rent. Hour, day, week.”

It would be the last time he’d be able to use this credit card, so maybe, despite his earlier rejection of the idea, now was the time to change vehicles. Was it a genuinely good idea or had that spontaneous kiss on the cheek rattled him?

He’d already nixed the motorcycle idea in his own mind. Why was he revisiting the decision?

Was he losing his edge? Finding her just too distracting? He had to do his job, to make decisions based solely on what was most likely to bring him to mission success, which was keeping her safe. Getting stopped in a stolen car was not going to do that. Blending in with the thousands of tourists that scootered around this island made more sense.

Since talking to Gray, he wondered if the whole point of the threats against the princess had been to stop the wedding, not harm her personally.

But he knew he couldn’t let his guard down because of that. He had to treat the threat to her safety as real, or there would be too many temptations to treat it lightly, to let his guard down, to let her get away with things.

“Please?” she said softly, and then she tilted her sunglasses down and looked at him over the rims.

Her eyes were stunning, the color and depth of tropical waters, filled at this moment with very real pleading, as if she felt her life depended on getting on that motorcycle.

Half an hour later, he had a backpack filled with their belongings, he had moved the car off the road into the thick shrubs beside it and he was studying the motorcycle. It was more like a scooter than a true motorcycle.

He took a helmet from a rack beside the motorcycles.

“Come here.”

“I don’t want to wear that! I want to feel the wind in my hair.”

He had noticed hardly anyone on the island did wear motorcycle helmets, probably because the top speed of these little scooters would be about eighty kilometers an hour. Still, acquiring the motorcycle felt a bit like giving in, and he was done with that. His job was to keep her safe in every situation. Life could be cruelly ironic, he knew. It would be terrible to protect her from an assassin and then get her injured on a motorbike.

“Please, Charming?” she said.

That had worked so well last time, she was already trying it again! It served him right for allowing himself to be manipulated by her considerable charm.

She took off her sunglasses and blinked at him. He could see the genuine yearning in her eyes, but knew he couldn’t cave in. This was a girl who was, no doubt, very accustomed to people jumping to make her happy, to wrapping the whole world around her pinky finger.

“Charming isn’t a good code name for me,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not. Charming. And I’m certainly not a prince.” To prove both, he added, sternly, “Now, come here and put on the helmet.”

“Are you wearing one?”

He didn’t answer, just lifted his eyebrow at her, the message clear. She could put on the helmet or she could go home.

Mutinously she snatched the straw hat from her head.

He tried not to let his shock show. In those few unsupervised minutes while he had talked to Gray on the phone, she had gone to the washroom, all right, but not for the reason he had thought or she had led him to believe. Where had she gotten her hands on a pair of scissors? Or maybe, given the raggedness of the cut, she had used a knife.

She was no hairdresser, either. Little chunks of her black hair stood straight up on her head, going every which way. The bangs were crooked. Her ears were tufted. There wasn’t a place where her hair was more than an inch and a half long. Her head looked like a newly hatched chicken, covered in dark dandelion fluff. It should have looked tragic.

Instead, she looked adorable, carefree and elfish, a rebel, completely at odds with the conservative outfit he had picked for her. Without the distraction of her gorgeous hair, it was apparent that her bone structure was absolutely exquisite, her eyes huge, her lips full and puffy.

“Where’s your hair?” he asked, fighting hard not to let his shock show. He shoved the helmet on her head quickly, before she had any idea how disconcerting he found her new look. His fingers fumbled on the strap buckle, he was way too aware of her, and not at all pleased with his awareness. The perfume he’d caught a whiff of at the wedding tickled his nostrils.

“I cut it.”

“I can clearly see that.” Thankfully, the mysteries of the helmet buckle unraveled, he tightened the strap, let his hands fall away. He was relieved the adorable mess of her hair was covered. “What did you do with it after you cut it?”

Her contrite expression told him she had left it where it had fallen.

“So, you did it for nothing,” he said sternly. “Now, when we’re traced this far, and we will be, they’ll find out you cut your hair. And they’ll be looking for a bald girl, easier to spot than you were before.”

“I’m not bald,” she protested.

“I’ve seen better haircuts on new recruits,” he said. She looked crestfallen, he told himself he didn’t care. But he was aware he did, just a little bit.

“I’ll go back and pick up my hair,” she said.

“Never mind. Hopefully no one is going to see you.”

“Does it look that bad?”

He could reassure her it didn’t, but that was something Prince Charming might do. “It looks terrible.”

He hoped she wasn’t going to cry. She put her sunglasses back on a little too rapidly. Her shoulders trembled tellingly.

Don’t be a jerk, he told himself. But then he realized he might be a lot safer in this situation if she did think he was a jerk.

When had his focus switched from her safety to his own?

Rattled, he pushed ahead. “I need you to think very carefully,” he said. “Is there a place on this island we can go where no one would find us for a week?”

He tried not to close his eyes after he said it. A week with her, her new haircut and her new green bikini stuffed in the backpack. Not to mention the shorty-shorts, and a halter top that had somehow been among her purchases.

He could see in her eyes she yearned for things that were forbidden to her, things she might not even be totally aware of, things that went far beyond riding on motorcycles and cutting her hair.

Things her husband should be teaching her. Right this minute. He had no right to be feeling grateful that she had not been delivered into the hands of a man she’d dreaded discovering those things with.

Instead she’d been delivered into his hands. One mission: keep her safe. Even from himself.

Still, he was aware he was a warrior, not a saint. The universe was asking way too much of him.

He turned from her swiftly, got on the motorcycle, persuaded it to life. He patted the seat behind him, not even looking at her.

But not looking at her didn’t help. She slid onto the seat behind him. The skirt hiked way up. Out of his peripheral vision he could see the nakedness of her knee. He glanced back. The skirt was riding high up her thigh.

It was a princess like no one had ever seen, of that he was certain. On the other hand, no one would be likely to recognize her looking like this, either.

“Hang on tight,” he said.

And then he felt her sweet curves pull hard against him. Oh, sure. For once she was going to listen!

“I know a place,” she called into his ear. “I know the perfect place.”

His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He slowed, checked the caller ID. His mother. He wrestled an impulse to answer, to yell at her, Don’t do it! Instead he listened to her leave yet another voice mail.

“Ronan, call me. It’s so exciting.”

They were crossing over a bridge, rushing water below, and he took the phone and flung it into the water.

He was in the protection business; sometimes it felt as if the whole world was his responsibility. But the truth was he could not now, and never had been able to, protect his own mother from what she most needed protecting from.

Herself.

Shoshauna pressed her cheek up against the delicious hardness of Ronan’s shoulder. His scent, soapy and masculine, was stronger than the scent of the new shirt.

Alone with him for a week. In a place where no one could find them. It felt dangerous and exciting and terribly frightening, too. She pressed into him, feeling far more endangered than she had when the gun had gone off in the chapel.

Some kind of trembling had started inside her, and it was not totally because he had hurt her feelings telling her her hair looked terrible. It wasn’t totally because of the vibration of the motorbike, either!

“Go faster,” she cried.

He glanced over his shoulder at her.

“It doesn’t go any faster,” he shouted back at her, but he gave it a hit of gas and the little bike surged forward.

Her stomach dropped, and she squealed with delight.

He glanced back again. His lips were twitching. He was trying not to smile. But he did, and his smile was like the sun coming out on the grayest of days. That glimpse of a smile made her forget she had only a short time to squeeze many dreams into, though a week was more than she could have hoped for.

Still, it was as if his smile hypnotized her and made her realize maybe there was one dream he could help make come true. A dream more important than wearing shorts or riding astride or touching snow. A dream that scorned people who pretended all the time.

She had only a few days, and she wanted to be with someone who was real, not kowtowing. Not anxious to please. Not afraid of her position. Someone who would tell her the truth, even if it hurt to hear it.

I’m not going to be more responsible for you than you are willing to be for yourself, he had told her. She shivered. In that simple statement, as much as it had pained her to hear it, was the truth about how her life had gone off track so badly. Could Ronan somehow lead her back to what was real about herself?

When she was younger, there’d been a place she had been allowed to go where she had felt real. Relaxed. As if it was okay to be herself.