by Cara Colter
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.
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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHOSHAUNA FOUND THE waves extraordinarily beautiful, rolling four feet high out in the water where they began their curl, breaking on the beach with a thunderous explosion of white foam and fury.
Her foot actually touched the hard pack of wave-pounded sand, when his hand clamped down on her shoulder with such strength it spun her.
Even though she had spent way too much time imagining his touch, it was not satisfactory in that context! She faced him, glaring. “What?” she demanded.
“You’re not a strong enough swimmer for that surf.”
“Well, you don’t know everything! You said the surf would never even come up in this bay and you were wrong about that!”
“I’m not wrong about this. I’m not letting you go in the water by yourself.”
He had that look on his face, fierce; the warrior not to be challenged.
But Shoshauna had been counting days and hours. She knew this time of freedom was nearly over for her. Tomorrow they would be gone from here. And she knew something else. She was responsible for her own life and her own decisions.
She stood her ground, lifted her chin to him.
“I have a lifelong dream of doing this, and I’m doing it.”
He looked totally unimpressed with her newfound resolve, indifferent to her discovery of her own power, immune to the sway of her life dreams. He folded his arms over his chest, set his legs, a man getting ready to throw her over his shoulder if he had to.
As delicious as it might be to be carried by him kicking and screaming up to the cottage, this was important to her, and she suddenly had to make him see that.
“It’s my lifelong dream, and the waves came. Don’t you think you have to regard that as a gift from the gods?”
“No.”
“Ronan, all my life people have made my decisions for me. And I’ve let them. Starting right here and right now, I’m not letting them anymore. Not even you.”
Something in him faltered. He looked at the waves and he looked at her. She could see the struggle in his face.
“Ronan, its not that I want to. I have to. I have to know what it feels like to ride that kind of power, to leash it. I feel if I can do that, conquer those waves, it’s just the beginning for me. If I can do that, I can do anything.”
And suddenly she knew she had never spoken truer words. Suddenly she realized she had made a crucial error the other night when she had thought he held the key to the secrets locked away within her.
When they had started this adventure, she remembered saying she didn’t know how to find what she was looking for because she didn’t know where to look.
But suddenly she knew exactly where to look.
Every answer she had ever needed was there. Right inside herself. And part of that was linked to these waves, to knowing what she was capable of, to tapping her sense of adventure instead of denying it. She could not ask Ronan—or anyone else—not her mother or her father or Mahail to accept responsibility for her life. She was in charge. She was taking responsibility for herself. He did not hold the key to her secrets; she did.
She knew that what she was thinking must have shown in her face, because Ronan studied her, then nodded once, and the look on his face was something she would take back with her and cherish as much, maybe more, than the satisfaction of riding the wave.
She had won Ronan’s admiration—reluctant, maybe, but still there. He had looked at her, long and hard, and he had been satisfied with what he had seen.
She turned and stepped into the surf, laughed as she leaped over a tumbling wave and it crashed around her, soaking her in foam and seawater.
Then, when she was up to her knees, she placed the board carefully in front of her and tossed herself, belly down, on top of it. It was as slippery as a banister she had once greased with butter, and it scooted out from underneath her as if it was a living thing. A wave pounded over her, awesome in its absolute power, and then she got up and ran after the board.
Drenched, but deliriously happy, she caught the board, shook water from herself, tried again. And then again. It was discouraging. She couldn’t even lie on it without getting dumped off. How was she ever going to surf?
Her arms and shoulders began to hurt, and it occurred to her this was going to be a lot harder than she’d been led to believe by watching surfers on TV. But in a way she was glad. She wanted it to be challenging. She wanted to test her spunk and her determination and her spirit of adventure. Life-altering moments were not meant to be easy!
Ronan came and picked her up out of the sand after she was dumped for about the hundredth time, grabbed the board that was being dragged out to sea. She grabbed it back from him.
He sighed. “Let me give you a few tips before you go back out there. The first is this: you don’t conquer that water. You work with it, you read it, you become a part of it. Give me the board.”
It was an act of trust to hand the board to him, because he could just take it and go back to the cottage, but somehow she knew he was now as committed to this as she was. There was nothing tricky about Ronan. He was refreshing in that he was such a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy.
“You’re lucky,” he said, “it’s a longboard, not a short one, a thruster. But it’s old, so it doesn’t have a leash on it, which means you have to be very aware where it is at all times. This board is the hardest thing in the water, and believe me, it hurts when it clobbers you.”
She nodded. He tossed the board down on the sand.
“Okay, get on it, belly down.”
She recognized the gift he was giving her: his experience, and recognized her chances of doing this were better if she listened to him. And that’s what he’d said. True power wasn’t about conquering, it was about working with the elements, reading them.
And that’s what Ronan was like: one of the elements, not to be conquered, not to be tamed. To be read and worked with.
When she was down on her belly, he gave her tips about positioning: how to hold her chin, where to have her weight on the board—dead center, not too far back or too far forward.
And so she learned another lesson about power: it was all about balance.
He told her how to spot a wave that was good to ride. “Nothing shaped like a C,” he warned her sternly. “Look for waves shaped liked pyramids, small rollers to start with. We’ll keep you here in the surf, no deeper than your hips until you get the hang of it.”
He said that with absolute confidence, not a doubt in his mind that she would get the hang of it, that she would be riding waves.
“So, practice hopping up a couple of times, here on the sand. Grab the rails.”
“It doesn’t have rails!”
“Put your hands on the edges,” he showed her, positioning her hands. She tried not to find his touch too distracting! “And then p
ush up, bend your back and knees to start, get one leg under you, and pop up as fast as you can. If you do it slow, you’ll just tip over once you’re in the water.”
Under his critical eye, she did it about a dozen times. If he kept this up she was going to be too tired to do it for real!
“Okay,” he finally said, satisfied, peeling off his shirt and dropping it in the sand. “Let’s hit the water.”
They didn’t go out very far, the water swirling around his hips, a little higher on her, lapping beneath her breastbone.
“This is the best place to learn, right here.” He steadied the board for her while she managed to gracelessly flop on top of it.
“Don’t even try to stand up the first couple of times, just ride it, get a sense for how your surfboard sleds.”
“Sleds? As in snow?”
“Same word,” he said, and she smiled thinking this might be as close as she got to sledding of any kind. Maybe she would have to be satisfied to look after two dreams with one activity!
“Okay, here it comes. Paddle with those arms, not too fast, just to build momentum.”
Shoshauna felt the wave lift the board, paddled and then felt the most amazing thing: as if she was the masthead at the head of that wave. The board was moving with its own power now and it shot her forward with incredible and exhilarating speed. The ride lasted maybe a full two seconds, and then she was tossed onto the sand with such force it lifted her shirt and ground sand into her skin.
“Get up,” he yelled, “incoming.”
Too late, the next wave pounded down on top of her, ground a little more sand into her skin.
He was there in an instant hauling her to her feet.
She was laughing so hard she was choking. “My God, Ronan, is there anything more fun in the entire world than that?”
He looked at her, smiled. “Now, you’re stoked,” he said.
“Stoked?”
“Surfer word for ready, so excited about the waves you can barely stand it.”