The Royal Collection

“I’ll do that,” she said, moving up beside him. Did he move a careful step away from her? She moved closer. He moved away again and without looking at her, passed her a little tiny knife and a mango.

“Don’t cut your fingers off,” he said dryly.

She watched for a moment as his own fingers handled the knife, removed a fine coil of peel from the fruit. He caught her watching him, again, put down the knife and turned away from her to put wood in the oven.

“What are we going to make in there?” she asked eagerly.

“I’m going to make biscuits.”

“I want to learn!”

“What for?”

“It seems like it would be a useful skill,” she said stubbornly.

“It is a useful skill. For someone like me, who frequently finds himself trying to make the best of rough circumstances. But for a princess?” He shook his head.

“I want to know useful things!”

“What is useful in your world and what is useful in mine are two very different things,” he said almost gently.

Rebelliously she attacked the mango with her knife. Ten minutes later as she looked at the sliver of fruit in front of her, what was left of her mango, she realized he was probably right. Domestication at this late date was probably hopeless. She felt sticky to the elbow, and had managed to get juice in her eye. The mango was mangled beyond recognition.

She cast him a look. Ronan was taking golden-brown biscuits off a griddle above the stove. The scent of them made her mouth water.

“Here,” she said, handing him the remnants of her mango. He took it wordlessly, his face a careful blank, and added it to the plate of fruit he had prepared.

She thought they’d take the food inside to the dining table, but he motioned her over to a little stone bench, set the plate down between them, lifted his face to the morning sun as he picked up a piece of fruit.

She followed his example and picked up a slice of fruit and a biscuit with her fingers.

Shoshauna had dined on the finest foods in the world. She had eaten at the fanciest tables of B’Ranasha, using the most exquisite china and cutlery. But she felt as if she had never tasted food this fine or enjoyed flavor so much.

She decided she loved everything, absolutely everything, about being an ordinary girl. And she hadn’t given up on herself in the domestic department yet, either!

CHAPTER FOUR

AFTER a few minutes Shoshauna couldn’t help but notice that her pleasure in the simplicity of the breakfast feast seemed to be entirely one-sided.

Ronan, while obviously enjoying the sunshine and eating with male appetite, seemed pensive, turned in on himself, as anxious not to connect with her as she was to connect with him.

“Are you enjoying breakfast?” she asked, craving conversation, curious about this man who had become her protector.

He nodded curtly.

She realized she was going to have to be more direct! “Tell me about yourself,” she invited.

He shot her a look, looked away. “There’s nothing to tell. I’m a soldier. That means my life is ninety-nine percent pure unadulterated boredom.”

She supposed you didn’t learn to make a bed like that if you led a life of continuous excitement, but she knew he was fudging the truth. She could tell, from the way he carried himself, from the calm with which he had handled things yesterday that he dealt with danger as comfortably as most men dealt with the reading of the morning paper.

“And one percent what?” she asked when it became apparent he was going to add nothing voluntarily.

“All hell breaking loose.”

“Oh!” she said genuinely intrigued. “All hell breaking loose! That sounds exciting.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that word,” he said, ignoring her implied invitation to share some of his most exciting experiences with her.

“Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell,” she said, and found it very liberating both to say the word and to defy him. Her society prized meekness in women, but she had made the discovery she was not eager to be anyone’s prize!

He shot her a stern look. She smiled back. He wasn’t her father! He didn’t look more than a few years older than she was. He couldn’t tell her how to behave!

He sighed, resigned, she hoped, to the fact he was not going to control her. She’d been controlled quite enough. This was her week to do whatever she wanted, including say hell to her heart’s content.

“What’s the most exciting thing that ever happened to you?” she pressed, when he actually shut his eyes, lifted his chin a bit higher to the sun, took a bite of biscuit, apparently intent on pretending he was dining alone and ignoring her questions.

He thought about it for a minute, but his reluctance to engage in this conversation was palpable. Finally he said, without even opening his eyes, “I ran into a grizzly bear while in Canada on a mountain survival exercise.”

“Really?” she breathed. “What happened?” It was better than she could have hoped. Better than a movie! She waited for him to tell her what she could picture so vividly—Ronan wrestling the primitive animal to the ground with his bare hands…

“It ran one way and I ran the other.”

She frowned, sharply disappointed at his lack of heroics. “That doesn’t sound very exciting!”

“I guess you had to be there.”

“I think I would like to go to the mountains in Canada.” Yes, even with bears, or maybe because of bears, it sounded like an adventure she’d enjoy very much. “Are the mountains beautiful? Is there snow?”

“Yes, to both.”

“What’s snow like?” she asked wistfully.

“Cold.”

“No, what does it feel like.” Again, he was trying to disengage, but he was the only person she’d ever met who had experienced snow, and she had to know.

“It’s different all the time,” he said, giving in a little, as if he sensed her needing to know. “If it’s very cold the snow is light and powdery, like frozen dust. If it’s warmer it’s heavy and wet and sticks together. You can build things with it when it’s like that.”

“Like a snowman?”

“Yeah, I suppose. I built a snow cave out of it.”

“Which kind is better for sledding?”

“The cold, dry kind. What do you know about that?”

“Nothing. I’ve seen it on television. I’ve always had a secret desire to try it, a secret desire to see different things than here, more beautiful.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything more beautiful than this,” he said. “It’s a different kind of beauty. More rugged. The landscape there is powerful rather than gentle. It reminds a person of how small they are and how big nature is.” He suddenly seemed to think he was talking too much. “I’m sure your husband will take you there if you want to go,” he said abruptly.

It was her turn to glare at him. She didn’t want to be reminded, at this moment, that her life was soon going to involve a husband.

“I’m fairly certain Prince Mahail,” she said, “is about as interested in tobogganing in snow as he is in training a water buffalo to tap dance.”

“He doesn’t like traveling? Trying new things?” He did open his eyes then, lower his chin. He was regarding her now with way too much interest.

She felt a sensation in her stomach like panic. “I don’t know what he likes,” she said, her voice strangled. She felt suddenly like crying, looked down at her plate and blinked back the tears.

Her life had come within seconds of being linked forever to a man who was a stranger to her. And despite the fact the heavens had taken pity on her and granted her a reprieve, there was no guarantee that linking would not still happen.

“Hey,” Ronan said, “hey, don’t cry.”

After all the events of yesterday, including being shot at, this was the first time she’d heard even the smallest hint of panic in that calm voice!

“I’m not crying,” she said. But she was. She scrubbed furiously at the tear that worked its way down her cheek. She didn’t want Ronan to be looking at her like that because he felt sorry for her!

She reminded herself she was supposed to be finding out about Ronan, not the other way around!

“What made you want to be a soldier?” she asked, trying desperately for an even tone of voice, to change the subject, to not waste one precious second contemplating all the adventures she was not going to have once she was married to Mahail.

Something flickered in his eyes. Sympathy? Compassion? Whatever it was, he opened up to her just the tiniest little bit.

“I had a lousy home life as a kid. I wanted routine. Stability. Rules. I found what I was looking for.” He regarded her intently, hesitated and then said softly, “And you will, too. Trust me.”

He would be such an easy man to trust, to believe that he had answers.

“Isn’t it a hard life you’ve chosen?” she asked him, even though what she really wanted to say was how? How will I ever find what I’m looking for? I don’t even know where to look!

He shrugged, tilted his chin back toward the sun. “Our unit’s unofficial motto is Go Hard or Go Home. Some would see it as hard. I see it as challenging.”

Was there any subtle way to ask what she most wanted to ask, besides How will I ever find what I’m looking for? It was inappropriate to ask him, and too soon. But still, she was not going to find herself alone on a deserted island with an extremely handsome man ever again.

She had to know. She had to know if he was available. Even though she herself, of course, was not. Not even close.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” She hoped she wasn’t blushing.

He opened his eyes, shot her a look, closed them again. “No.”

“Why not?”

His openness came to an abrupt end. That firm line appeared again around his mouth. “What is this? Twenty questions at the high school cafeteria?”

“What’s a high school caff-a-ter-ee-a?”

“Never mind. I don’t have a girlfriend because my lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to having a girlfriend.”

“Why?”

He sighed, but she was not going to be discouraged. Her option was to spend the week talking to him or talking to herself. At the moment she felt her survival depended on focusing on his life, rather than her own.

Maybe her desperation was apparent because he caved slightly. “I travel a lot. I can be called away from home for months at a time. I dismantle the odd bomb. I jump from airplanes.”

“Meeting the grizzly bear wasn’t the most exciting thing that ever happened to you!” she accused.

“Well, it was the most exciting thing that I’m allowed to talk about. Most of what I do is highly classified.”

“And dangerous.”

He shrugged. “Dangerous enough that it doesn’t seem fair to have a girlfriend or a family.”

“I’m not sure,” she said, thoughtfully, “what is unfair about being yourself?”

He looked at her curiously and she explained what she meant. “The best thing is to be passionate about life. That’s what makes people really seem alive, whole, isn’t it? If they aren’t afraid to live the way they want to live and to live fully? That’s what a girlfriend should want for you. For a life that makes you whole. And happy. Even if it is dangerous.”

She was a little embarrassed that she, who had never had a boyfriend, felt so certain about what qualifications his girlfriend should have. And she was sadly aware that passion, the ability to be alive and whole, were the very qualities she herself had lost somewhere a long the way.

As if to underscore how much she had lost or never discovered, he asked her, suddenly deciding to have a conversation after all, “So, what’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done?”

Been shot at. Cut my hair. Ridden a motorcycle.

All the most exciting events of her life had happened yesterday! It seemed way too pathetic to admit that, though it increased her sense of urgency, this was her week to live.

“I’m afraid that’s classified,” she said, and was rewarded when he smiled, ever so slightly, but spoiled the effect entirely by chucking her under her chin as if she was a precocious child, gathered their plates and stood up.

Shoshauna realized, that panicky sensation suddenly back, that she had to squeeze as much into the next week as she possibly could. “I’m putting on my bathing suit now and going swimming. Are you coming?”

He looked pained. “No. I’ll look after the dishes.”

“We can do the dishes later. Together. You can show me how.”

He said another nice word under his breath.

She repeated it, and when he gave her that look, the stern, forbidding, don’t-mess-with-me look, she said it again!

When he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, a man marshaling his every resource, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was dreading this week every bit as much as she was looking forward to it.

“How about if we do the dishes now?” he said. “In this climate I don’t think you want to leave things out to attract bugs. And then,” he added, resigned, “if you really want, I’ll show you how to make biscuits.”

She eyed him suspiciously. He didn’t look like a man who would be the least bothered by a few bugs. He’d probably eaten them on occasion! And he certainly did not look like a man who wanted to give out cooking lessons.

So that left her with one conclusion. He didn’t like the water. No, that wasn’t it. And then, for some reason, she remembered the look on his face when he’d put that pink bikini back on the rack in the store yesterday.

And she understood perfectly!

Ronan did not want to see her in a bikini. Which meant, as much as he didn’t want to, he found her attractive.

A shiver went up and down her spine, and she felt something she had not felt for a very long time, if she had ever felt it at all.

Without knowing it, Ronan had given her a very special gift. Princess Shoshauna felt the exquisite discovery of her own power.

“I’d love to learn to make biscuits instead of going swimming,” she said meekly, the perfect B’Ranasha princess. Then she smiled to herself at the relief he was unable to mask in his features. She had a secret weapon. And she would decide when and where to use it.

“Hey,” Ronan snapped, “cut it out.”

The princess ignored him, took another handful of soap bubbles and blew them at him. Princess Shoshauna had developed a gift for knowing when it was okay to ignore his instructions and when it wasn’t, and it troubled him that she read him so easily after four days of being together.

He had not managed to keep her out of the bathing suit, hard as he had tried. He’d taken her at her word that she wanted to learn things and had her collecting fruit and firewood. He’d taught her how to start a decent fire, showed her edible plants, a few rudimentary survival skills.

Ronan had really thought she would lose interest in all these things, but she had not. Her fingers were covered in tiny pinpricks from her attempts to handle a needle and thread, she was sporting a bruise on one of her legs from trying to climb up a coconut tree, she gathered firewood every morning with enthusiasm and without being asked. Even her bed making was improving!

He was reluctantly aware that the princess had that quality that soldiers admired more than any other. They called it “try.” It was a never-say-die, never-quit determination that was worth more in many situations than other attributes like strength and smarts, though in fact the princess had both of those, too, her strength surprising, given her physical size.

Still, busy as he’d tried to keep her, he’d failed to keep her from swimming, though he’d developed his own survival technique for when she donned the lime-green handkerchief she called a bathing suit.

The bathing suit was absolutely astonishing on her. He knew as soon as he saw it that he had been wrong thinking the pink one he’d made her put back would look better, because nothing could look better.

She was pure, one-hundred-percent-female menace in that bathing suit, slenderness and curves in a head-spinning mix. Mercifully, for him, she was shy about wearing it, and got herself to the water’s edge each day before dropping the towel she wrapped herself in.

His survival technique: he went way down the beach and spearfished for dinner while she swam. He kept an eye on her, listened for sounds of distress, kept his distance.

He was quite pleased with his plan, because she was so gorgeous in a bathing suit it could steal a man’s strength as surely as Delilah had stolen Sampson’s by cutting off his hair.

Shoshauna blew some more bubbles at him.

“Cut it out,” he warned her again.

She chuckled, unfortunately, not the least intimidated by him anymore.

It was also unfortunately charming how much fun she was having doing the dishes. She had fun doing everything, going after life as if she had been a prisoner in a cell, marveling at the smallest things.

Hard as it was to maintain complete professionalism in the face of her joie de vivre, he was glad her mood was upbeat. There had been no more emotional outbursts after that single time she had burst into tears at the very mention of her fiancé, her husband-to-be.

Ronan could handle a lot of things, up to and including a mad mamma grizzly clicking her teeth at him and rearing to her full seven-foot height on her hind legs. But he could not handle a woman in tears!

Still he found himself contemplating that one time, in quiet moments, in the evenings when he was by himself and she had tumbled into bed, exhausted and happy. How could Shoshauna not even know if her future life partner liked traveling, or if he shared her desire to touch snow, to toboggan? The princess was, obviously, marrying a stranger. And just as obviously, and very understandably, she was terrified of it.

But all that fell clearly into the none-of-his-business category. The sense that swept over him, when he saw her shinny up a tree, grinning down at him like the cheeky little monkey she was, of being protective, almost furiously so, of wanting to rescue her from her life was inappropriate. He was a soldier. She was a princess. His life involved doing things he didn’t want to do, and so did hers.

But marrying someone she didn’t even really know? Glancing at her now, bubbles from head to toe, it seemed like a terrible shame. She was adorable—fun, curious, bratty, sexy as all get-out—she was the kind of girl some guy could fall head over heels in love with. And she deserved to know what that felt like.

Not, he told himself sternly, that he was in any kind of position to decide what she did or didn’t deserve. That wasn’t part of the mission.

He’d never had a mission that made him feel curiously weak instead of strong, as if things were spinning out of his control. He’d come to like being with her, so much so that even doing dishes with her was weakness, pure and simple.

It had been bad enough when she waltzed out in shorts every morning, her legs golden and flawless, looking like they went all the way to her belly button. Which showed today, her T-shirt a touch too small. Every time she moved her arms, he saw a flash of slender tummy.

It was bad enough that when he’d glanced over at her, hacking away at the poor defenseless mango or pricking her fingers with a needle, he felt an absurd desire to touch her hair because it had looked spiky, sticking up all over the place like tufts of grass but he was willing to bet it was soft as duck down.

It was bad enough that she was determined to have a friendship, and that even though he knew it was taboo, sympathy had made him actually engage with her instead of discouraging her.

I had a lousy home life as a kid. That was the most personal information he’d said to anyone about himself in years. He hated that he’d said it, even if he’d said it to try and make her realize good things could come from bad.

He hated that sharing with her that one stupid, small sentence had made him realize a loneliness resided in him that he had managed to outrun for a long, long time. He’d said he didn’t have a girlfriend because of his work, but that was only a part truth. The truth was he didn’t want anyone to know him so well that they could coax information out of him that made him feel vulnerable and not very strong at all.

He was a man who loved danger, who rose to the thrill of a risk. He lived by his unit’s motto, Go Hard or Go Home, and he did it with enthusiasm. His life was about intensely masculine things: strength, discipline, guts, toughness.

After his mother’s great love of all things frilly and froufrou, he had not just accepted his rough barracks existence, he had embraced it. He had, consciously or not, rejected the feminine, the demands of being around the female of the species. He had no desire to be kind, polite, gentle or accommodating.

But in revealing that one small vulnerability to Shoshauna, he recognized he had never taken the greatest risk of all.

Part of the reason he was a soldier—or maybe most of the reason—was he could keep his heart in armor. He’d been building that armor, piece by meticulous piece, since the death of his dad. But when he’d asked her, that first day together, “Who knows what love is?” he’d had a flash of memory, a realization that a place in him thought it knew exactly what love was.

There was a part of him that he most wanted to deny, that he had been very successfully denying until a few short days ago, but now it nibbled around the edges of his mind. Ronan secretly hoped there was a place a man could lay his armor down, a place he could be soft, a place where there was room to love another.

Shoshauna, without half trying, was bringing his secrets to the surface. She was way too curious and way too engaging. Luckily for him, he had developed that gift of men who did dangerous and shadowy work. He was taciturn, wary of any interest in him.

In his experience, civilians thought they wanted to know, thought a life of danger was like adventure movies, but it wasn’t and they didn’t.

But Shoshauna’s desire to know seemed genuine, and even though she had led the most sheltered of lives, he had a feeling she could handle who he really was. More than handle it—embrace it.

But these were the most dangerous thoughts—the thoughts that jeopardized his mission, his sense of professionalism and his sense of himself.

But what had his choices been? To totally ignore her for the week? Set up a tent out back here? Pretend she didn’t exist?

He was no expert on women, but he knew they liked to talk. It was in his own best interests to keep the princess moderately happy with their stay here. Hell, part of him, an unfortunately large part, wanted to make her happy before he returned her to a fate that he would not have wished on anyone.

Marriage seemed like a hard enough proposition without marrying someone you didn’t know. Ask his mother. She’d made it her hobby to marry people she didn’t really know.

A renegade thought blasted through his mind: if he was Shoshauna’s prince, he’d take her to that mountaintop just because she wanted to go, just to see the delight in her face when she looked down over those sweeping valleys, to see her inhale the crispness of the air. He’d build snowmen with her and race toboggans down breathtakingly steep slopes just to hear the sound of her laughter.

If he was her prince? Cripes, he was getting in bigger trouble by the minute.

There had been mistakes made over the past few days. One of them had been asking her about the most exciting thing in her life. Because it had been so pathetically evident it had probably been that motorcycle ride and all of this.

From the few words she’d said about passion he’d known instantly that she regretted the directions of her own life, yearned for more. And he’d been taken by her wisdom, too, when he’d told her that the dangerous parts of his job kept him from a relationship.

Was there really a woman out there who understood that caring about someone meant encouraging her partner to pursue what made him whole and alive? Not in his experience there wasn’t! Beginning with his mother, it was always about how she felt, what she needed to feel safe, secure, loved. Not that it had ever worked for her, that strangling kind of love that wanted to control and own.

The last thing he wanted to be thinking about was his mother! Even the bathing suit would be better than that. He was aware the thought of his mother had appeared because he had opened the door a crack when he admitted he had a lousy childhood. That was the whole problem with admissions like that.

He was here, on this island, with the princess, to do a simple job. To protect her. And that meant he did not—thank God—have the luxury of looking at himself right now.

Still, he knew he had to be very, very careful because he was treading a fine line. He’d already felt the uncomfortable wriggle of emotion for her. He didn’t want to be rude, but he had to make it very clear, to himself and to her, this was his job. He wasn’t on vacation, he wasn’t supposed to be having fun.

He couldn’t even allow himself to think the thoughts of a normal, healthy man when he saw her in that bathing suit every day.

But now he was wondering if he’d overrated that danger and underrated this one. Because in the bathing suit she was sexy. Untouchable and sexy, like a runway model or a film actress. He could watch her from a safe distance, up the beach somewhere, sunglasses covering his eyes so she would never read his expression.

With soap bubbles all over her from washing dishes, she was still sexy. But cute, too. He was not quite sure how she had managed to get soap bubbles all over the long length of her naked legs, but she had.

She put bubbles on her face, a bubble beard and moustache. “Look!”

“How old are you?” he asked, putting duty first, pretending pure irritation when in fact her enjoyment of very small things was increasingly enchanting.

“Twenty-one.”

“Well, quit acting like you’re six,” he said.

Then he felt bad, because she looked so crestfallen. Boundaries, yes, but he was not going to do that again: try to erect them by hurting her feelings. He’d crossed the fine line between being rude and erecting professional barriers. Ronan simply expected himself to be a better man than that.

Against his better judgment, but by way of apology, he scooped up a handful of suds and tossed them at her. She tossed some back. A few minutes later they were both drenched in suds and laughing.

Great. The barriers were down almost completely, when he had vowed to get them back up—when he knew her survival depended on it. And perhaps his own, too.

Still, despite the fact he knew he was dancing with the kind of danger that put meeting a grizzly bear to shame, it occurred to him, probably because of the seriousness of most of his work, he’d forgotten how to be young.

He was only twenty-seven, but he’d done work that had aged him beyond that, stolen his laughter. The kind of dark, gallows humor he shared with his comrades didn’t count.

Even when the guys played together, they played rough, body-bruising sports, the harder hitting the better. He had come to respect strength and guts, and his world was now almost exclusively about those things. There was no room in it for softness, not physical, certainly not emotional.

His work often required him to be mature way beyond his years, required him to shoulder responsibility that would have crippled any but the strongest of men. Life was so often serious, decisions so often involved life and death, that he had forgotten how to be playful, had forgotten how good it could feel to laugh like this.

The rewards of his kind of work were many: he felt a deep sense of honor; he felt as if he made a real difference in a troubled world; he was proud of his commitment to be of service to his fellow man; the bonds he had with his brothers in arms were stronger than steel. Ronan had never questioned the price he paid to do the work before, and he absolutely knew now was not the time to start!

Sharing a deserted island with a gorgeous princess who was eager to try on her new bikini, was absolutely the wrong time to decide to rediscover those things!

But just being around her made him so aware of softness, filled him with a treacherous yearning. The full meltdown could probably start with something as simple as wanting to touch her hair.

“Okay,” he said, serious, trying to be very serious, something light still lingering in his heart, “you want to learn how to make my secret biscuit recipe?”

Ronan had done many different survival schools. All the members of Excalibur prided themselves in their ability to produce really good food from limited ingredients, to use what they could find around them. He was actually more comfortable cooking over a fire than he was using an oven.

An hour later with flour now deeply stuck on her damp skin, she pulled her biscuit attempt from the wood-fired oven.

Ronan tried to keep a straight face. Every biscuit was a different size. Some were burned and some were raw.

“Try one,” she insisted.

Since he’d already hurt her feelings once today and decided that wasn’t the way to keep his professional distance, he sucked it up and took one of the better-looking biscuits.

He took a big bite. “Hey,” he lied, “not bad for a first try.”

She helped herself to one, wrinkled her nose, set it down. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”

He hoped she wouldn’t. He hoped she’d tire soon of the novelty of working together, because it was fun, way more fun than he wanted to have with her.

“Let’s go swimming now,” she said. “Could you come with me today? I thought I saw a shark yesterday.”

Was that pure devilment dancing in the turquoise of those eyes? Of course it was. She’d figured out he didn’t want to swim with her, figured out her softness was piercing his armor in ways no bullet ever had. She’d figured out how badly he didn’t want to be anywhere near her when she was in that bathing suit.