by Cara Colter
Wordlessly she left the water, spread out her towel and lay down on her stomach. She still wouldn’t even look at him and he figured maybe that was a good thing. He put on the snorkeling gear and headed back out into the bay.
He began to see school after school of butterfly fish, many that he recognized as the same as he would see in the reefs off Australia: the distinctive yellow, white and black stripes of the threadfin, the black splash of color that identified the teardrop.
Suddenly, Ronan didn’t want her to stay embarrassed all day, just so that he could be protected from his own vulnerability around her. He didn’t want her to miss the enchantment of the reef fish.
Her embarrassment over the incident was a good reminder to him that she had grown up very sheltered. She had sensed the bikini would get his attention, but she hadn’t known what to do with it when she succeeded.
In his world, girls were fast and flirty and knew exactly what to do with male attention. Her innocence in a bold world made him want to share the snorkeling experience with her even more.
They would focus on the fish, the snorkeling, not each other.
“Shoshauna! Put on a snorkel and fins. You have to see this.”
He realized he’d called her by her first name, as if they were friends, as if it was okay for them to snorkel together, to share these moments.
Too late to back out, though. She joined him in the water, but not before tugging on her bathing suit strings about a hundred times to make sure they were secure.
And then she was beside him, and the magic happened. They swam into a world of such beauty it was almost incomprehensible. Fish in psychedelic colors that ranged from brilliant orange to electric blue swam around them. They saw every variety of damselfish, puffer fish, triggerfish, surgeonfish.
He tapped her shoulder. “Watch those ones,” he said, pointing at an orange band. “It’s a type of surgeonfish, they’re called that because their spines are scalpel sharp.”
Her wonder was palpable when a Moorish idol investigated her with at least as much interest as she was giving it! A school of the normally shy neon-green and blue palenose parrot fishes swam around her as if she was part of the sea.
He was not sure when he lost interest in the fish and focused instead on her reaction to them. Ronan was not sure he had seen anything as lovely as the awed expression on her face when a bluestripe snapper kissed her hand.
He was breaking all the rules. And somehow it seemed worth it. And somehow he didn’t care. Time evaporated, and he was stunned when he saw the sun going down in the sky.
They went in to shore, dried the saltwater off with towels. He saw she was looking at him with a look that was both innocent and hungry.
“I’m going to cook dinner,” he said gruffly. Suddenly breaking the rules didn’t seem as great, it didn’t seem worth it, and he did care.
He cared because he felt something, and he knew it was huge. He felt the desire to know someone. He wanted to know her better. He wanted things he had never wanted and that, in this case, he knew he could never have.
These four days together had created an illusion that they were just two normal people caught up together. These days had allowed him to see her as real, as few people had ever seen her. These days had allowed him to see her, and he had liked what he had seen. It was natural to want to know more, to explore where this affinity he felt for her could go.
But the island was a fantasy, one so strong it had diluted reality, made him forget reality.
He was a soldier. She was a princess. Their worlds were a zillion miles apart. She was promised to someone else.
With those facts foremost in his mind, he cooked dinner, refusing her offer to help, and he was brusque with her when she asked him if he knew the name of a bright-yellow snout-nosed fish they had seen. She took the hint and they ate in blessed silence. Why did he miss being peppered with her questions? Did she, too, realize that a dangerous shift had happened between them?
Still, getting ready for bed, he was congratulating himself on what a fine job he’d done on reerecting the barriers, when he heard an unmistakable whimper from her room.
Surely she wasn’t that embarrassed over her brief nude scene?
He knew he had to ignore her, but then she cried out again, the sound muffled, as if she had a blanket stuffed in her mouth. It was the sound being stifled that made him bolt from his room, and barge through her door.
She was alone, in bed. No enemy had crept up on him while he’d been busy playing reef guide instead of doing his job.
“What’s the matter?” He squinted at her through the darkness.
The sheet was pulled up around her, right to her chin.
“I hurt so bad.”
“What do you mean?”
He lit the hurricane lamp that had been left on a chair just inside her door, moved to the side of her bed and gazed down at her. She reluctantly pulled the sheet down just enough to show him her shoulders. That’s why she had been quiet at dinner.
Not embarrassed, not taking the hint that he didn’t want to talk to her, but in pain. Even in the light of the lantern he could clearly see she was badly sunburned. Cursing himself silently, he wondered how close she had come to heat exhaustion.
White lines where her bikini straps had been were in sharp contrast to her skin.
Because her skin tones were so golden it had never occurred to him she might burn. It had not seemed scorchingly hot out today. On the other hand he should have known breezes coming off the water could make it seem cooler than it was. It had never occurred to him that someone who lived in this island paradise might not avail themselves of the outdoors.
He remembered, too late, what she had said about her mother. “Has your skin ever seen the sun before?” he asked her.
She shook her head, contrite. “Not for a long time. I was allowed to come here until I was about thirteen, but then my mother thought I was getting to be too much of a tomboy. She thought skin darkened by the sun was—”
“Let me guess,” he said dryly. “Common.”
He was rewarded with a weak smile from her. Selfish bastard that he was he thought, At least I’m not going to have to see her in a bikini again for the three days we have left here on the island.
But there was another test he had to pass right now. He was going to have to administer first aid to her burns. She’d exposed her back to the sun while they snorkeled. The water beading on it had drawn the sun like a magnet. Though her shoulders were very red looking, most of that burn was going to be on her back where she couldn’t reach it herself.
Having grown up in Australia, he was cautious of the sun, but his skin was also more acclimatized to sun than that of most of the people he worked with. He did not have fair coloring, his skin seemed to like the sun.
But many times after long training days in the sun, especially desert training, soldiers were hurting. Ronan had learned lots of ways to ease the sting with readily available ingredients: either vinegar or baking soda added to bath water could bring relief. Unfortunately, just as when he was in the field, they didn’t have a bath here.
What they did have was aspirin, he had seen that in a cabinet in the outdoor kitchen, and powdered milk, an ingredient he’d used before to field dress a sunburn.
He knew, though, there was going to be a big difference between placing soothing dressings cooled with freshly made milk onto her back, and slapping it onto a fellow soldier’s.
All day he’d struggled to at least keep the physical barriers between them up, since the emotional ones seemed to be falling faster than he could reerect them. When she’d lost the top, and he’d wrapped his arms around her to pull her back to the water’s surface, he’d known he had to avoid going to that place again at all costs, skin against skin.
But here he was at that place agai
n. It almost felt as if the universe was conspiring against him.
But she was his charge. He had no choice. He felt guilty that she’d gotten burned on his watch in the first place. It was proof, really, he could not be trusted with softer things, more tender things, things that required a gentle touch.
It was proof, too, that he was preoccupied, missing the details that he had always been so good at catching.
“Come on out to the kitchen,” he said gruffly. “I’ll put something on that that will make it feel better.”
“I can’t get dressed,” she told him, and blushed. “My skin feels like its shrinking. I don’t think I can move my arms. I don’t want to put anything on that touches my skin.”
Oh well, just run out there naked then.
He yanked the sheet out from the bottom of the bed and tucked it around her right up to her chin. “Come on.”
She wobbled out behind him to the kitchen, the sheet draped clumsily over her, him uncomfortably and acutely aware that underneath it she was probably as naked as the day she was born. The outfit was somehow as dangerous—maybe more so—than the bikini had been.
And the night was dangerous—the stars like jewels in the night sky, the flowers releasing their perfume with a gentle and seductive vengeance.
“Sit,” he said, swinging a chair out for her. He took a deep breath, prayed for strength and then did what had to be done. He lifted the sheet away from her back, forced himself to be clinical.
Her back looked so tender with burn that he forgot how awkward this situation was. The marks where her bikini strings had been tied up dissected it, at her neck and midback, white lines in stark contrast to the rest of her. Her skin was glowing bright red on top of her copper tones.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, his sympathy genuine, his guilt acute even though he knew how hard it was to spot a burn as it was happening in the full sunlight, “but in the next few days your skin is going to be peeling. It may even blister.”
“Really?” she asked.
She couldn’t possibly sound, well, pleased, rather than distressed.
He had to make it a bit clearer. “Um, you could probably be lizard lady at the sideshow for a week or two.”
“Really?” she said, again.
No doubt about it. Definitely pleased.
“Is there some reason that would make you happy?” he asked.
“Between my new hair and lizard lady, Prince Mahail will probably call off the wedding. Indefinitely.”
Now there was no mistaking the pleasure in her voice.
Don’t ask, Ronan. “Is he really that superficial?”
“He chose me for my hair!”
Well, he’d asked. Now he had to deal with the rush of indignation he felt. A man chose a wife for her hair?
It was primitive and tyrannical. It was not what she deserved. Wasn’t he in the business of protecting democracy? Of protecting people’s freedoms and right to choose? If she was being forced into this, then what? Cause an international incident by imposing his values on B’Ranasha, by rescuing the princess from her fate?
“Are you being forced to marry him?” he asked.
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nobody forced me to say yes, but there was enormous pressure, the weight of everybody’s expectations.”
He turned from her quickly to stave off the impulse to shake her. Here he’d been thinking he had to rescue her when the aggravating truth was she had not, as far as he could see, made a single move to rescue herself. She seemed to just be blindly trusting something was going to happen to get her out of her marriage. And much as he hated to admit it, so far that had worked not too badly for her.
But her luck was going to run out, and for a take-charge kind of guy, relying on luck to determine fate was about the worst possible policy.
Rather than share that with her, or allow her to see the fury he felt with her, Ronan busied himself mixing a solution of powdered milk and water in a big bowl. He tore several clean tea towels into rags and submerged them in the mixture.
Then, his unwanted surge of emotion under control, a gladiator who had no choice but the ring, he turned back to her, lifted the sheet off her back.
“Hold that up for me.”
He laid the first of the milk-soaked rags flat on her naked back, smoothed it on with his hands. She seemed unbelievably delicate. Her skin was hot beneath the dressing. And, for now anyway, before the inevitable peeling, it felt incredibly smooth, flawless beneath his fingertips. He didn’t know of any other way to bring her comfort, but touching her like this was intimate enough to make him feel faintly crazy, a purely primitive longing welling up within him.
He thought she might flinch, but instead she gave a little moan of pleasure and relief as the first cool, milk-soaked dressing adhered to her back, a sound that could have easily been made in another context.
“Oh,” she breathed. “That feels so good. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything that good.”
His wicked male mind wondered just how innocent that made her. Plenty innocent. And it was his job to keep it that way.
He thought about a man he had never seen, whom he knew nothing about, becoming her husband, being trusted with her delicacy, and he felt another unwanted stab of strong emotion.
Not jealousy, he told himself, God forbid, not jealousy, just an extension of his job. Protectiveness.
But he knew it wasn’t exactly a part of his job to wonder, was that man whom she had almost married, worthy of her? Would her prince be able to make her pleasure as important as his own when the time came? Would he be tender and considerate? Would he stoke the fire that burned in her eyes, or would he put it out?
Ronan, he reprimanded himself. Stop it! By her own admission, she was not being forced into anything. It was her problem not his.
Still, the feeling of craziness intensified, he felt a sudden primitive need to show her what it should feel like, all heat and passion, tenderness and exquisite pleasure. If she’d ever experienced what was real between a man and a woman she wouldn’t accept a substitute, no matter how much pressure she thought she felt.
She was seriously going to pay with her life to relieve a little temporary pressure from her folks?
He gave himself a fierce mental shake. His thinking was ludicrous, totally unacceptable, completely corrupted by emotion. He had known her less than a full week, which really meant he did not know her at all!
He was not dating her, he was protecting her. Imagining his lips on her lips was not a part of the mission.
Who would have thought he would end up having to protect the princess from himself?
“Leave those dressings on there for twenty minutes,” he said, his voice absolutely flat, not revealing one little bit of his inner struggle, the madness that was threatening to envelope him. “Unfortunately in this heat the residue of the milk will start to sour if you leave it on overnight. You’re going to have to rinse off in the shower before you go back to bed.” He passed her some aspirin and a glass of water.
“This will take the sting out.” He sounded as if he was reading from a first-aid manual. “Drink all the water, too, just in case you’re a bit dehydrated. I think you’ll sleep like a baby after all this.”
She probably would, too, but he was wondering if he was ever going to sleep again!
Fixing her up had taken way too long, even with him trying to balance a gentle touch with his urgency to get this new form of torture over with.
“I’ll head back to bed, I’ll leave this lamp for you. You can peel those dressings off by yourself in twenty minutes or so. Don’t forget to shower.”
“All right.”
“You should be okay for a few hours. If the pain comes back, starts bugging y
ou, wake me up. We’ll do it all again.” He had to suck it up to even make that offer. He didn’t want to touch her back again, have her naked under a sheet, the two of them alone in a place just a little too much like paradise.
No wonder Adam and Eve had gone for the apple!
“Ronan?” Her voice was husky. She touched his arm.
He froze, aware he was holding his breath, scared of what could happen next, if she asked him to stay with her. Scared of the physical attraction, scared of the thoughts he had had earlier.
“What?” He growled.
“Thank you so much.”
What was he expecting? She was burned to a crisp. The last thing on her mind was, well, the thing that was on his mind. Which was her lips, soft and pliable, and how they would feel underneath his, how they would taste.
“Just doing my job.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes met his. There was no mistaking the heat and the hunger that changed their color from turquoise to a shade of indigo. He realized it wasn’t the last thing on her mind after all. That one small push from the universe and they’d be all over each other, burn or no burn. The awareness that sizzled in the air between them put that burn on her back to shame.
He sucked in a deep breath, then ducked his head, turned abruptly and walked quickly away from her.
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.