by Cara Colter
She did not know how long this reprieve could possibly last, but despite Ronan telling her so sternly this was not a game, Shoshauna intended to make the very most of it. Whether she had been given a few hours or a few days, she intended to be what she might never be again. Free. To be what she had always wanted most to be.
An ordinary girl. With an ordinary life.
She was determined to get a conversation going, to find out as much about this intriguing foreigner as she could. She glanced at his lips and shivered. Would making the most of the gift the universe had handed her include tasting the lips of the intriguing foreigner?
She knew how wrong those thoughts were, but her heart beat faster at the thought. How was it that imagining kissing Ronan, a stranger, could fill her with such delirious curiosity, when the thought of what was supposed to have happened tonight, between her and the man who should have become her husband, Prince Mahail, filled her with nothing but dread?
“What nationality are you?”
“Does it matter? You don’t have to know anything about me. You just have to listen to me.”
His tone, hard and cold, did not sound promising in the kiss department! Miffed, she wondered how he couldn’t know that when a princess asked you something, you did not have the option of not answering. Even though she desperately wanted to try life as an ordinary girl, old habit made her give him her most autocratic stare, the one reserved for misbehaving servants.
“Australian,” he snapped.
That explained the accent, surely as delicious sounding as the foreign phrase he had uttered so emphatically when dodging the chicken bicycle. She said the word herself, out loud, using the same inflection he had.
The car swerved, but he regained control instantly. “Don’t say that word!” he snapped at her, and then added, a reluctant afterthought at best, “Your Highness.”
“I’m trying to improve my English!”
“What you’re trying to do is get me a one-way ticket to a whipping post for teaching the princess curse words. Do they still whip people here?”
“Of course,” she lied sweetly. His expression darkened to thunder, but then he looked hard at her, read the lie, knew she was having a little fun at his expense. He made a cynical sound deep in his throat.
“Are women in Australia ever forced to marry men they don’t love?” she asked. But the truth was, she had not been forced. Not technically. Her father had given her a choice, but it had not been a real choice. The weight of his expectation, her own desperate desire to please him, to be of value to him had influenced her decision.
Plus, Prince Mahail’s surprise proposal had been presented at a low point in her life, just days after her cat, Retnuh, had died.
People said it was just a cat, had been shocked at her level of despair, but she’d had Retnuh since he was a kitten, since she’d been a little girl of eight. He’d been her friend, her companion, her confidante, in a royal household that was too busy to address the needs of one insignificant and lonely little princess.
“Turn here, there’s a market down this road.”
He took the right, hard, then looked straight ahead.
“Well?” she asked, when it seemed he planned to ignore her.
“People get married all over the world, for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “Love is no guarantee of success. Who even knows what love is?”
“I do,” she said stubbornly. It seemed her vision of what it was had crystallized after she’d agreed to marry the completely wrong man. But by then it had been too late. In her eagerness to outrun how terrible she felt about her cat, Shoshauna had allowed herself to get totally caught up in the excitement—preparations underway, two islands celebrating, tailors in overtime preparing gowns for all members of both wedding parties, caterers in overdrive, gifts arriving from all over the world—of getting ready for a royal wedding.
She could just picture the look of abject disappointment on her father’s face if she had gone to him and asked to back out.
“Sure you do, Princess.”
His tone insinuated she thought love was a storybook notion, a schoolgirl’s dream.
“You think I’m silly and immature because I believe in love,” she said, annoyed.
“I don’t know the first thing about you, what you believe or don’t believe. And I don’t want to. I have a job to do. A mission. It’s to keep you safe. The less I know about you personally the better.”
Shoshauna felt stunned by that. She was used to interest. Fawning. She could count on no one to tell her what they really thought. Of course, it was all that patently insincere admiration that had made her curl up with her cat at night, listen to his deep purring and feel as if he was the only one who truly got her, who truly loved her for exactly what she was.
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 pri
ncess 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!