The Royal Collection

It took more discipline to do that than to do two hundred push-ups at the whim of a aggravated sergeant, to make a bed perfectly for the thousandth time, to jump out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet in the dead of the night. Way more.

He glanced at his watch to check the date. He had to get control over this situation before it deteriorated any more.

But when he thought of her shaking droplets of water from the jagged tips of her hair, laughing, the tenderness of her back underneath the largeness of his hands, he felt a dip in the bottom of his belly.

He focused on it, but it wasn’t that familiar warning, his sideways feeling. It was a warmth as familiar as the sun and as necessary to life.

What had happened to his warning system? Had it become dismantled? Ronan wondered if he had lost some part of himself that he needed in the turquoise depths of her eyes.

Isn’t that what he’d learned about love from his mother? That relationships equaled the surrender of power?

“You are not having a relationship with her,” he told himself sternly, but the words were hollow, and he knew he had already crossed lines he didn’t want to cross.

But tomorrow was a new day, a new battle. He was a warrior and he fully intended to recapture his lost power.

CHAPTER SIX

SHOSHAUNA took a deep breath, slid a look at Ronan. He was intense this morning, highly focused, but not on her. She could not look at him—at the dark, neat hair, his face freshly shaven, the soft gold brown of his eyes, the sheer male beauty of the way he carried himself—without feeling a shiver, remembering his hands on her back last night.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Princess?” he asked, his voice flat, as if he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Yesterday you called me Shoshauna,” she said.

He said nothing; he did not look at her. He had barely spoken to her all morning. She’d gotten up and managed to get dressed, a painful process given the sunburn. Still, she had been more aware of something hammering in her heart, a desire to see him again, to be with him, than of the pain of that burn.

But Ronan had been nowhere to be found when she had come out of her bedroom. He’d left a breakfast of fresh biscuits and cut fruit for her, not outside on the bench where she had grown accustomed to sharing casual meals with him, but at the dining room table, at a place perfectly set for one.

Shoshauna had rebelled against the formality of it and taken a plate outside. As she ate she could hear the thunk of an ax biting into wood in the distance. Just as she was finishing the last of the biscuits, he dragged a tree into their kitchen clearing.

Watching him work, hauling that tree, straining against it, that awareness tingled through her, the same as she had felt yesterday when she had watched him strip off his shirt before swimming. She felt as if she was vibrating from it. Ronan was so one hundred percent man, all easy strength and formidable will.

Even to her inexperienced eye it looked as if he was bringing in enough wood to keep the stove fired up for about five years.

“Good morning, Ronan.” Good grief, she could hear the awareness in her voice, a husky breathlessness.

She knew how much she had come to live for his smile when he withheld it. Instead, he’d barely said good morning, biting it out as if it hurt him to be polite. Then he was focusing on the wood he’d brought in. After using a handsaw to reduce the tree to blocks, he set a chunk on a stump chopping block, swung the ax over his head, and down into the wood.

The whole exercise of reducing the tree to firewood was a demonstration—entirely unconscious on his part—of pure masculine strength, and she could feel her heart skip a beat every time he lifted the ax with easy, thoughtless grace. She remembered again the strength in those hands, tempered last night, and shivered.

But today his strength was not tempered at all. He certainly seemed angry, the wood splintering into a thousand pieces with each mighty whack of the ax blade, tension bunching his muscles, his face smooth with a total lack of expression.

He had not even asked her how her sunburn felt, and it felt terrible. Could she be bold enough to ask him to dress it again? She felt as if she was still trembling inside from the way his hands had felt pressing those soothing cloths onto her back last night. But he looked angry this morning, remote, not the same man who had been so tender last night.

“Ronan?” she pressed, even though it was obvious he didn’t want to talk. “Are you angry about something?”

Actually, something in him seemed to have shifted last night when he had questioned her about her marriage. He had gone very quiet after she had admitted she wasn’t being forced to marry anyone.

“No, ma’am, I’m not angry. What’s to be angry about?”

“Stop it!”

He set down the ax, wiped the sweat off his forehead with a quick lift of his shirt collar, then folded his arms over his chest, looked askance at her.

“I didn’t mean chopping the wood,” she said, knowing he had misunderstood her deliberately.

“What did you mean then, Princess?”

“Why are you being so formal? You weren’t like this yesterday.”

“Yesterday,” he said tightly, “was a mistake. I forgot myself, and it’s not going to happen again.”

“Having fun, going snorkeling was forgetting yourself?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If you call me ma’am one more time, I’m going to throw this coconut right at your large, overweight head!”

“I think you might mean my big, fat head.”

“That’s exactly what I meant!”

He actually looked as though he might smile, but if he was amused he doused it quickly.

“Princess,” he said, his patience elaborate and annoying, “I’m at work. I’m on the clock. I’m not here to have fun. I’m not here to teach you to swim or to identify yellow tangs for you. My job is to protect you, to keep you safe until I can get you back to your home.”

“I could have been assassinated while you were out there chopping down the jungle,” she said, aware her tone was growing snippy with impatience. How could he possibly not want more of what they’d had yesterday?

Not just the physical touch, though that had filled her with a hunger that felt ravenous, a tiger that needed to be fed, but the laughter, the easy camaraderie between them. It was that she found herself craving even more. How could it be that he did not want the same things?

“I think,” he said dryly, “if assassins had arrived on the island, I would have heard a boat. Or a helicopter. I was only a few seconds away.”

He was deliberately missing the point! “Bitten by a snake, then!”

He didn’t answer, and she hated that he was treating her like a precocious child, though for some reason his attitude was making her act like one.

“Eaten by a tiger,” she muttered. “Attacked by a monkey.”

He sent her one irritated look, went back to the wood.

“I’m making a point! There is no danger here. None. No assassins, no snakes, no tigers, no mad monkeys. It would be perfectly fine for you to relax your vigilance.”

Crash. The wood splintered. He gathered the splinters, tossed them in a pile, wouldn’t look at her. “I relaxed yesterday. You got a large, overweight sunburn because of it.”

“You are not feeling responsible for that, are you?” His lack of a response was all the answer she needed. “Ronan, it wasn’t your fault. It’s not as if it was life threatening, anyway. A little sunburn. I can hardly feel it today.” Which was a lie, but if it got rid of that look from his face—a look of cool professional detachment—it would be a lie worth telling.

He said nothing, and she knew this was about more than a sunburn.

“Are you mad because I agreed to get married?”

Bull’s-eye. Something hard and cold in his face shook her. “That falls squarely in the none-of-my-business category.”

“That’s not true. We’re friends. I want to talk to you about it.” And suddenly she did. She felt that if she talked to Ronan, all the chaos and uncertainty inside her would subside. She felt that the terrible loneliness that had eaten at her ever since she said yes to Prince Mahail would finally go away.

She felt as if she would know what to do.

“My cat died,” she blurted out. “That’s why I agreed to marry him.”

It felt good to say it out loud, though she could tell by the look on his face he now thought she was certifiably insane.

“But you have to understand about the cat,” she said in a rush.

“No,” he said, holding up his hand, a clear stop signal. “No, I don’t have to understand about the cat. I don’t want you telling me about your personal life. Nothing. No cat. No marriage. Not what is on or off your mother’s approval list, though we both know that what isn’t on it is cavorting in the ocean in a bathing suit top that is unstable with a man you barely know.”

“I do know you,” she protested.

“No you don’t. We can’t be friends,” he said quietly. “Do you get that?”

She had thought they were past that, that they were already well on their way to being friends, and possibly even something more than friends. These last few days she had shared more with him than she could remember sharing with anyone. She had felt herself opening around him, like a flower opening to sunshine.

He made her discover things about herself that she hadn’t known. Being around him made her feel strong and competent. And alive. It was easy to be herself with him. How could he say they could not be friends?

“No,” she said stubbornly. “I don’t get it.”

“Actually,” he said tersely, “it doesn’t really matter if you get it or not, just as long as I get it.”

She felt desperate. It was as if he was on a raft and she was on shore, and the distance between them was growing. She needed to bring him back, any way she could. “Okay, I won’t tell you anything about me. Nothing.”

He looked skeptical, so she rushed on, desperate. “I’ll put a piece of tape over my mouth. But I can’t go out in the sun today. I was hoping you’d teach me how to play chess. My mother felt chess was a very masculine game, that girls should not play it.”

Even though he’d specifically told her not to mention her mother to him, she took a chance and believed she had been right to do so, because something flickered in his eyes.

He knew she’d be a good chess player if she got the chance, but if he’d realized that, he doused the thought as quickly as his smile of moments ago. He was silent, refusing the bait.

“Do you know how to play chess?” If she could just get him to sit down with her, spend time with her, soon it would be easy again and fun. She wanted to know so much about him. She wanted him to know so much about her. They only had a few days left! He couldn’t spoil it. He just couldn’t.

He took up the ax and put another piece of wood on the stump he was using as a chopping block. He hit it with such furious strength she winced.

“Are you going to ignore me?”

“I’m sure as hell going to try.”

Shoshauna was a princess. She was not used to being ignored. She was used to people doing what she wanted them to do.

But this felt different. It felt as if she would die if he ignored her, if they could not get back to that place they had been at yesterday, swimming in the magical world of a turquoise sea and rainbow-hued fish, his hands on her back strong, cool, filled with confidence, the hands of a man who knew how to touch a woman in ways that could steal her breath, her heart, her soul.

Her sense of desperation grew. He was holding the key to something locked inside of her. How could he refuse to open that secret door? The place where she would, finally, know who she was.

“If I told my father you had done something inappropriate,” she said coolly, “you’d spend the rest of your life in jail.”

He gave her a look so fearless and so loaded with scorn it made her feel about six inches high. And that was when she knew he was immovable in his resolve. She knew it did not matter what she did—she could threaten him, try to manipulate him with sweetness—he was not going to do as she wanted. He had drawn his line in the sand.

And over such a ridiculously simple thing. She only wanted him to play chess with her!

Only, it wasn’t really that simple, and he knew it, even if she was trying to deny it. Getting to know each other better would have complications and repercussions that could resound through both their lives.

But why worry about that today? They had so little time left. Couldn’t they just go on as they had been? Couldn’t they just pretend they were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances?

But even as she thought it, she knew he would never like pretending. He was too real for that. And when she slid another look his way, she could tell by the determined set of his jaw that he intended to worry about that today, and she could tell something else by the set of his jaw.

She was completely powerless over him.

“I’m sorry I said that,” she said, feeling utterly defeated, “about my father putting you in prison. It was a stupid thing to say, very childish.”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” As if he expected her to say things like that, to act spoiled and rotten if she didn’t get her own way. She had not done one thing—not one—to lead him to believe such things of her.

Unless you included saying yes to marrying a man she did not love.

That would speak volumes about her character to a man like Ronan, who wore his honor and his integrity as part of the armor around him.

“I would never do something so horrible as tell lies about you. I’m not a liar.” But hadn’t she lied to herself all along, about Mahail, her marriage, her life?

“I said it didn’t matter,” he said sharply.

“Now you really are mad at me.”

He sighed heavily.

Shoshauna, looking at herself with the brutal assessment she saw in his eyes, burst into tears, ran into the house, slammed her bedroom door and cried until she had no tears left.

Shoot, Ronan thought, was she ever going to stop crying? Bastard. How hard would it have been to teach her to play chess?

It wasn’t about teaching her how to play chess, he told himself sternly. It was about the fact that things were already complicated so much that she was in there crying over something as tiny as the fact he’d refused to teach her to play chess.

Though, dammit, when she had said her mother didn’t want her to play chess, that it was masculine, something in him had just itched to give her the rudiments of the game. She had such a good mind. He bet she’d be a better-than-average player once she got the fundamentals down, probably a downright formidable one.

She didn’t come out of that room for the rest of the day. When he told her he had lunch ready, she answered through the closed door, her voice muffled, that she wasn’t hungry.

Now it was the same answer for supper. He should have been relieved. This was exactly what he needed to keep his vows. Distance. Space. Instead he felt worried about her, guilty about the pain he’d caused.

“Come on,” he said, from the other side of the door, “you have to eat.”

“Why? To make you feel like you’ve fulfilled your obligation to look after me? Is providing a nutritious menu part of protecting me? Go away!”

He opened the door a crack. She was sitting on her bed cross-legged in those shorty-shorts that showed way too much of her gorgeous copper-toned legs. She looked up when he came in, looked swiftly back down. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Her short, boyish hair was every which way. She’d taken her bra straps off her burned shoulders, and they hung out the arms of her T-shirt.

“I told you to go away.”

“You should eat something.” He stepped inside the door a bit.

“You know what? I’m not a little kid. You don’t have to tell me to eat.”

He was already way too aware she was not a little kid. He’d seen the damned bikini once too often! He’d seen what was under the bikini, too.

He was also aware this was becoming a failure of major proportions. He was going to take her back safe from threat but damaged nonetheless: hair chopped off, sunburned, starving, puffy-eyed from crying. Though they still had two days and a couple of hours to get through before he could cross back over that water with her, deliver her to Gray. She couldn’t possibly cry that long.

His stomach knotted at the thought. Could she? He studied her to see if she was all done crying.

She’d found a magazine somewhere, and she was avoiding his eyes. The magazine looked as if it had been printed in about 1957, but she was studying it as intently as if she could read her future on the pages. Her eyes sparkled suspiciously. More tears gathering?

“Look,” he said uncomfortably, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “I’m not trying to be mean to you. I’m just telling you the way things have to be.”

“Is that right?” she snapped, and threw down the magazine. She regarded him with spitting eyes, and he could see clearly it was fury in them, not tears. “As it happens, I’m sick and tired of people telling me how it’s going to be. Why are you the one who decides how it’s going to be? Because you’re a man?”

She had him there.

“Because I’m the one with the job to do,” he said, but he heard the wavering of his own conviction. If ever a woman was born to be his equal it was this one.

She hopped off the bed. Instinct told him to get away from her. A stronger instinct told him to stay.

She stopped in front of him, regarded him with challenge. He, foolishly, held his ground.

She reached up on tiptoe, and she took his lips with her own.

He was enveloped in pure and sweet sensation. Her kiss was as refreshing and clean as rainwater. Her lips told him abut the polarities within her: innocence and passion, enthusiasm and hesitancy, desire and doubt.

He had heard there were drugs so strong a man could be made helpless by them after one taste.

He had never believed it until this moment. He willed himself not to respond, but he did not have enough will to move away from her, from the sweetness of her quest.

The hesitancy and the doubt suddenly dissolved. Her arms reached out, tangled themselves around his neck, drew him closer to her. Her scent wrapped around him, feminine, clean, intoxicating. Through the thinness of her shirt he could feel the warmth radiating off her skin. Her curves, soft, sensual, womanly, pressed into him.

Temptation was furious within him. Pure feeling tried to swamp rational thought. But the soldier in him, highly disciplined, did the clean divide between the emotion he was feeling and what he needed to do.

If he continued this, if he accepted the invitation of her lips, the growing urgency of her kiss, if he allowed it to go where it wanted to go, it would be like a wild horse that had broken free, allowed to run. There would be no bringing it back under rein once it had gone too far.

The soldier wanted control; the man wanted to lose control.

The soldier insisted on inserting one more fact. If this carried to its natural conclusion, Princess Shoshauna would be compromised. The wedding would be off. Her wedding. Again, she wouldn’t have made a choice, just allowed herself to be carried along by forces she considered out of her control.

It was not what Ronan wanted for her.

He didn’t want her to get married to anyone but—

But who?

Him? A soldier. A soldier who didn’t believe in marriage? Who hated it? This must be a genetic flaw in his family, the ability to convince oneself over a very short period of time, before reality had a chance to kick in, that a marriage could work. He yanked himself away from her.

This was the difference between him and his mother: he didn’t have to follow the fantasy all the way through to the end. He already knew the end of every love story.

The soldier won—fact over fiction, practical analysis over emotion, discipline over the wayward leanings of a man’s heart.

But he was aware it was a slim victory at best. And he was aware that aggravating word, love, had popped up again, banished from his vocabulary since around his thirteenth birthday. It was suddenly presenting itself in his life with annoying frequency.

Ronan made himself hold Shoshauna’s gaze, fiery with passion, soft with surrender. He tried to force all emotion from his tone. But the magnitude of his failure to do so—the cold fury of his voice—even took him by surprise. Of course, he really wasn’t angry at her, but at himself, at his own vulnerability, his own weakness, his sudden crippling wistfulness.

Hope—a sudden ridiculous wish to regain his own innocence, a desire to be able to believe in things he had long since lost faith in.

“Are you using me to buy your freedom?”

She reeled back from him. If he was not mistaken the tears were back in her eyes, all the proof he needed that insanity had grabbed him momentarily, that moment when he had contemplated her and himself and marriage in the same single thought.

The truth was much more simple. He was a soldier, rough around the edges, hardened, not suitable for the company of a princess or anyone sensitive or fragile.

But there was nothing the least bit fragile about Shoshauna when she planted both her little hands on his chest and shoved him with such amazing strength that it knocked him completely off balance. He stumbled backward, two steps, through her bedroom doorway, and she rushed forward and slammed the door behind him with the force of a hurricane.

As he contemplated the slammed door, he had the politically incorrect thought that it was a mistake that hurricanes weren’t still named exclusively after women: volatile, completely unpredictable, even the strongest man could not hope to hold his balance in the fury.

“Just go straight to hell!” she yelled at him through the door. She followed that with a curse that was common among working men and soldiers, a curse so common her mother surely would have had heart failure hearing it come from her princess daughter’s refined lips.

So he was returning Shoshauna a changed woman. No hair, sunburned, starved and she was going to be able to hold her own in a vocabulary contest with a construction crew.

He turned away, muttering to himself, “Well, that didn’t go particularly well.”

But outside, contemplating a star-studded night, black-velvet sky meeting inky-black ocean, he rethought his conclusions.

Maybe it had gone well. Shoshauna was a woman who needed to discover the depths of her own power, who needed to know how to utilize the hurricane forces within her, so she would not be so easily buffeted by the forces outside of her. In the past it seemed that every shift of wind had made her change direction.

She’d made the decision to get married because her cat died? Only his mother could come up with a fruitier reason than that!

But from the way Shoshauna had shoved him and slammed that door, she was nearly there. Could she hold on to what she was discovering about herself enough to refuse a marriage to a man she did not love? Could she understand she had within her the strength to choose the life she wanted for herself?

Despite the peaceful serenity of the night, contemplating such issues made his head hurt. One of the things he appreciated most about his military lifestyle was that it was a cut-and-dried world, regulated, no room for contemplation, few complexities. You did what you were trained to do, you followed orders: no question, no thought, no introspection.

He scrubbed his hand across his lips, but he had a feeling what had been left there was not going to be that easy to erase.

After a long time he looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Just under forty-eight hours to go, and then they were leaving this island, meeting Gray.

What if her life was still in danger?

Well, if it was, if the situation was still not resolved, Gray had to have come up with a protection plan for her that did not involve Ronan.

But was he going to trust anyone else with her protection if she was still in danger? Would he have a choice? If he was ordered back to Excalibur, he was going to have to go, whether she was in danger or not.

He hoped it was a choice he was never going to have to make. Which would he obey? The call of duty or the call of his own heart?

Jake Ronan had never had to ask himself a question like that before, and he didn’t like it one little bit that he had asked it now.

The fact that he had asked it meant something had shifted in him, changed. He cared about someone else as much as he cared about duty. Once you had done that, could you ever go back to the way you were before?

That’s what he felt over the next twenty-four hours. That he was a man trying desperately to be what he had been before: cool, calm, professional, a man notorious for being able to control emotion in situations gone wild.

He almost succeeded, too.

It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t easy, that he was managing to keep the barriers up between them. She was using the kitchen at different times than him. She refused to eat what he left out for her. He found her burnt offerings all over the kitchen, along with mashed fruit. He didn’t know if she was trying to torment him by washing her underthings and stringing them on a line by the outdoor shower, but torment him it did, especially since she had managed to turn her bra from pure white to a funny shade of pink.

Of course, he could show her how to do laundry. He wanted to, but to what end? Nothing about her life included needing an ability to do laundry without turning her whites to pink.

And nothing about his life needed the complication of inviting her back into it.

No, this might be painful: these silences, the nose tilted upward every time she had to pass him, the hurt she was trying to hide with pride and seething silence, but in the end it was for the best. Even when he found an aloe vera plant and knew how it would soothe her sunburn, bring moisture and coolness and healing to her now badly peeling skin, he would not allow himself to make the offer.

When he saw her sitting at the dining room table by herself, moving chess pieces wistfully, he would not allow himself to give in to the sudden weakness of wanting to teach her how to play.

It only led to other wantings: wanting to make her laugh, wanting to see her succeed, wanting to see her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration, wanting to touch her hair.

Wanting desperately to taste her lips again, just one more time, as if he could memorize how it felt and carry it inside him forever.

But he didn’t give in to any of that. He applied every bit of discipline he had ever learned as a soldier to do what was right instead of what he wanted to do.

And he would have made it.

He would have made it right until the end, except that the wind came up.

The surf was up in the bay. And Princess Shoshauna, clad in a T-shirt to cover her burns, was running toward it, laughing with exhilaration and anticipation, the old surfboard they’d uncovered tucked under her arm.

“Hey,” he yelled from the steps of the cottage, “you aren’t a good enough swimmer for that water.”

She glanced back. If he was not mistaken she stuck out her tongue at him. And then she ran even faster, kicking up the sand in her bare feet.

With a sigh of resignation and surrender, Ronan went after her.