Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish

by Cara Colter

  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.

  In other words, she had figured out his weakness.

  He could not let her see that. One thing he’d learned as a soldier was you never ran away from the thing that scared you the most. Never. You ran straight toward it.

  “Sure,” he said, with a careless shrug. “Let’s go.”

  He said it with the bravado of a man who had just been assigned to dismantle a bomb and didn’t want a single soul to know how scared he was.

  But when he looked into her eyes, dancing with absolute mischief, he was pretty sure he had not pulled it off.

  She was not going to be fooled by him, and it was a little disconcerting to feel she could see through him so completely when he had become such an expert at hiding every weakness he ever felt.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHOSHAUNA STARED AT herself in the mirror in her bedroom and gulped. The bathing suit was really quite revealing. It hadn’t seemed to matter so much when Ronan was way down the shoreline, spearfishing, picking up driftwood, but today he was going to swim with her! Finally.

  She could almost hear her mother reacting to her attire. “Common.” Her father would be none to pleased with this outfit, either, especially since she was in the company of a man, completely unchaperoned.

  But wasn’t that the whole problem with her life? She had been far to anxious to please others and not nearly anxious enough to please herself. She had always dreamed of being bold, of being the adventurer, but in the end she had always backed away.

  She remembered the exhilarating sense of power she had felt when she realized Ronan didn’t want to see this bathing suit, when she’d realized, despite all his determination not to, he found her attractive. Suddenly she wanted to feel that power again. She was so aware of the clock ticking. They had been here four days. There was three left, and then it would be over.

  Suddenly nothing could have kept her from the sea, and Ronan.

  At the last minute, though, as always, she wrapped a huge bath towel around herself before she stepped out of the house.

  Ronan waited outside the door, glanced at her, his expression deadpan, but she was sure she saw a glint of amusement in his eyes, as if he knew she was really too shy to wear that bikini with confidence, with delight in her own power when there was a man in such close quarters.

  “Look what I found under the porch,” he said.

  Two sets of snorkels and fins! No one could look sexy or feel powerful in a snorkel and fins! Still, she had not snorkeled since the last time she had been here, and she remembered the experience with wonder.

  “Was the surfboard there?”

  “Yeah, an old longboard. You want me to grab it? You could paddle around on it.”

  “No, thank you,” she said. Paddle around on it, as if she was a little kid at the wading pool. She wanted to surf on it—to capture the power of the sea—or nothing at all. Just to prove to him she was not a little kid, at all
, she yanked the towel away.

  He dropped his sunglasses down over his eyes rapidly, took a sudden interest in the two sets of snorkels and fins, but she could see his Adam’s apple jerk each time he swallowed.

  She marched down the sand to the surf, trying to pretend she was confident as could be but entirely aware she was nearly naked and in way over her head without even touching the water. She plunged into the sea as quickly as she could.

  Once covered by the blanket of the ocean, she turned back, pretending complete confidence.

  “The water is wonderful,” she called. “Come in.” It was true, the water was wonderful, warm, a delight she had been discovering all week was even better against almost-naked skin.

  Suddenly she was glad she’d found the courage to wear the bikini, glad she’d left the towel behind, glad she was experiencing how sensuous it was to be in the water with hardly anything between it and her, not even fabric. Her new haircut was perfect for swimming, too! Not heavy with wetness, it dried almost instantly in the sun.

  She looked again at the beach. Ronan was watching her, arms folded over his chest, like a lifeguard at the kiddy park.

  She was going to get that kiddy-park look off his face if it killed her!

  “Come in,” she called again, and then pressed the button she somehow knew, by instinct, he could not stand to have pressed. “Unless you’re scared.”

  Not of the water, either, but of her. She felt a little swell of that feeling, power, delicious, seductive, pure feminine power. She had been holding off with it, waiting, uncertain, but now the time felt right.

  She watched as Ronan dropped the snorkeling gear in the sand, pulled his shirt over his head. She felt her mouth go dry. This was how she had hoped he would react to her. A nameless yearning engulfed her as she stared at the utter magnificence of his build.

  He was pure and utter male perfection. Every fluid inch of him was about masculine strength, a body honed to the perfection of a hard fighting tool.

  Shoshauna had thought she would feel like the powerful one if they swam together, but now she could see the power was in the chemistry itself, not in her, not in him.

  There was a universal force that called when a certain woman looked at a certain man, when a certain man looked at a certain woman. It pulled them together, an ancient law of attraction, metal to magnet, a law irresistible, as integral as gravity to the earth.

  Shoshauna became aware that the “power” she had so wanted to experiment with, to play with, was out of her control. She felt a kind of helpless thrill, like a child who had played with matches and was now having to deal with a renegade spark that had flared to flame.

  Impossible to put this particular fire out. Ronan was all sleek muscle and hard lines, not an ounce of superfluous fat or flesh on his powerful male body. His chest was deep, his stomach flat, ridged with ab muscles, his shoulders impossibly broad. His legs were long, rippling with muscle.

  He dove cleanly into the water, cutting it with his body. Two powerful strokes carried him to her, another beyond her. She watched, mesmerized, as his strong crawl carried him effortlessly out into the bay. He stopped twenty or thirty yards from her, trod water, shook diamond droplets of the sea from his hair.

  Watching him, she realized what she had been doing could not even really be called swimming. She was paddling. No wonder he treated her as if she belonged in the kiddy pool! Bathing suit aside, in the water she was an elephant trying to keep pace with a cheetah!

  Ronan flipped over on his back, spread his arms like a star and floated. It looked so comfortable, so relaxing that she tried it and nearly drowned. She came up sputtering for air.

  “Are you okay?”

  And what if she wasn’t? Would he swim over here, gather her in his arms, maybe give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

  “I’m fine,” she squeaked.

  He did swim back over, but did not come too close. “You’re about as deep as you should go,” he told her. “I’ve noticed over the past few days you are not a very strong swimmer.”

  “In my mother’s mind swimming in the ocean was an activity for the sons and daughters of fishermen.”

  “It seems a shame to live in a place like this, surrounded by water and not know how to swim. It seems foolish to me, unnecessarily risky, because with this much water you’re eventually going to have an encounter with it.” Hastily he added, “Not that I’m calling your mother foolish.”

  “Plus, she has this thing about showing skin.” And that was with a regular bathing suit.

  Ronan eyed her. “I take it she wouldn’t approve of the bathing suit.”

  He had noticed.

  “She’d have a heart attack,” Shoshauna admitted.

  “It’s having just about the same effect on me,” he said with a rueful grin, taking all her power away by admitting he’d noticed, a man incapable of pretense, real, just as she’d known he was.

  “That’s why your mom doesn’t want you wearing stuff like that. Men are evil creatures, given to drawing conclusions from visual clues that aren’t necessarily correct.”

  Back to the kiddy pool! He was going to turn this into a lecture. But he didn’t. He left it at that, yet she felt a little chastened anyway.

  As if he sensed that, he quickly changed the subject. “So, I’ve got you out here in the water. Want to—”

  Was she actually hoping he was going to propose something a little evil?

  “Want to learn how to swim a little better?”

  She nodded, both relieved and annoyed by his ability to treat her like a kid, his charge, nothing more.

  “You won’t be ready to enter the Olympics after one lesson, but if you fall out of a boat, you’ll be able to survive.”

  * * *

  It had probably been foolish to suggest teaching Shoshauna to swim. But the fact of the matter was she lived on an island. She was around water all the time. It seemed an unbelievable oversight to him that her education had not included swimming lessons.

  On the other hand, what did he know about what skills a princess needed? Still, he felt he could leave here a better man knowing that if she did fall off a boat, she could tread water until she was rescued.

  Probably he was kidding himself that he was teaching her something important. If a princess fell overboard, surely ten underlings jumped in the water after her.

  But somehow it was increasingly important to him that she know how to save herself. And maybe not just if she fell off a boat. All these things he had been teaching her this week were skills that made no sense for a princess.

  But for a woman coming into herself, learning the power of self-reliance seemed vital. It felt important that if he gave her nothing else, he gave her a taste of that: what her potential was, what she was capable of doing and learning if she set her mind to it.

  Because Ronan was Australian and had grown up around beaches and heavy surf, he had quite often been chosen to instruct other members of Excalibur in survival swimming.

  Thankfully, he could teach just about anybody to swim without ever laying a hand on them.

  She was a surprisingly eager student, more willing to try things in the water than many a seasoned soldier. Like the things she had been doing on land, he soon realized she had no fear, and she learned very quickly. By the end of a half hour, she could tread water for a few minutes, had the beginnings of a not bad front crawl and could do exactly two strokes of a backstroke before she sank and came up sputtering.

  And then disaster struck, the kind, from teaching soldiers, he was totally unprepared for.

  She was treading water, when her mouth formed a startled little O. She forgot to sweep the water, wrapped her arms around herself and promptly sank.

  His mind screamed shark even though he had evaluated the risks of swimming in the bay and de
cided they were minimal.

  When she didn’t bob right back to the surface, he was at her in a second, dove, wrapped his arm around her waist, dragged her up. No sign of a shark, though her arms were still tightly wrapped around her chest.

  Details. Part of him was trying to register what was wrong, when she sputtered something incomprehensible and her face turned bright, bright red.

  “My top,” she sputtered.

  For a second he didn’t comprehend what she was saying, and when he did he was pretty sure the heart attack he’d teased her about earlier was going to happen for real. He had his arms around a nearly naked princess.

  He let go of her so fast she started to sink again, unwilling to unwrap her arms from around her naked bosom.

  Somehow her flimsy top had gone missing!

  “Swim in to where you can stand up,” he ordered her sharply.

  He knew exactly what tone to use on a frightened soldier to ensure instant obedience, and it worked on her. She headed for shore, doing a clumsy one-armed crawl—her other arm still firmly clamped over her chest—that he might have found funny if it was anyone but her. As soon as he made sure she was standing up on the ocean bottom, he looked around.

  The missing article was floating several yards away. He swam over and grabbed it, knew it was the wrong time to think how delicate it felt, how fragile in his big, rough hands, what a flimsy piece of material to be given so much responsibility.

  He came up behind her. She was standing up to her shoulder blades in water and still had a tight wrap on herself, but there was no hiding the naked line of her back, the absolute feminine perfection of her.

  “I’ll look away,” he said, trying to make her feel as if it was no big deal. “You put it back on.”

  Within minutes she had the bathing suit back on, but she wouldn’t look at him. And he was finding it very difficult to look at her.