by Cara Colter
She needed to choose.
“I’ve decided not to marry,” she said firmly, with no fear, no doubt, no hesitation. A bird within her took wing.
“Excuse me?” Prince Mahail was genuinely astonished.
“I don’t want to get married. I have so many things I want to achieve first. When I marry I want it to be for love, not for convenience. I’m sorry.”
He glared at her, put out. “Have you consulted your father about this?”
Of all the maddening things he could have said, that about topped her list!
“It’s my choice,” she said dangerously, “not his.”
Prince Mahail looked at her, confused, irritated, annoyed. “Perhaps it is for the best,” he decided. “I think I might like your cousin, Mirassa, better than you after all.”
“You would,” Shoshauna muttered as he marched from the room.
And yet the next day, when she met with her father, she felt terrible trepidation, aware her legs were shaking under her long skirt.
Meetings with him always had a stilted quality, formal, as if his children were more his subjects than his blood.
“I understand,” he said, without preamble, “that you have told Prince Mahail there will be no wedding.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Without consulting me?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
Shoshauna took a deep breath and told him who she was. She did not tell him she was the girl he wanted her to be, meek, docile, pliable, but she told him of longing for education and adventure...and love.
“And so you see,” she finished bravely, “I cannot marry Mahail. I am prepared to go to the dungeon first.”
Her father’s lips twitched, and then he laughed. “Come here,” he said.
As she stepped toward him, he stood up and embraced her. “I want for you what every father wants for his daughter—your happiness. A father thinks he knows best, but you have always been a strong-spirited girl, able, I think, to find your own way. Do you want to go to school?”
“Yes, Father!”
“Then it will be arranged, with my blessing.”
As she turned to go, he called her back.
“Daughter,” he said, laughing, “we don’t have a dungeon. If we did I suspect your poor mother would have locked you away in it a long time ago. I will explain this, er, latest development to her.”
“Thank you.”
Funny, she thought walking away, her whole life she had sought her father’s love and approval. And she had gotten it, finally, not when she had tried to please him, but when she had been brave enough to please herself, brave enough to be herself.
This was news she had to share with Ronan. She asked Colonel Peterson where he was.
He looked at her carefully. “He’s been deployed,” he said, “even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”
And then she realized that was the truth Ronan had tried to tell her about his life.
And she recognized another truth: if you were going to be with a man like that, you had to have a life—satisfying and fulfilling—completely separate from his. If Ronan was going to be a part of her life, she had to come to him absolutely whole, certainly able to function when his work called him to be away.
She renewed her application for school and was accepted. In two months she would be living one more dream. She would be going to study in Great Britain.
And until then?
She was going to learn to surf! There was no room in a world like Ronan’s for a woman who was needy or clingy. She needed to go to him a woman confident in her ability to make her own life.
And then she would be a woman who could make a life with him.
* * *
An alarm was going off, and men were pouring through the doors of an abandoned warehouse, men in black, their faces covered, machine guns at the ready. Ronan was with Shoshauna, his body between her and the onslaught, but he felt things no soldier ever wanted to feel—outnumbered, hopeless, helpless. He couldn’t protect her. He was only one man...
Ronan came awake, drenched in sweat, grateful it wasn’t real, perturbed that after six months he was still having that dream, was unable to shake his sense of failure.
Slowly he became aware that the alarm from his dream was really his phone ringing. He’d picked up the phone, along with a whole pile of other things he needed, when he’d moved off base a few months ago. Next time he bought a phone, he’d know to test the damned ringer first. This one announced callers with the urgency of an alarm system announcing a break-in at the Louvre.
He got up on one elbow and looked at the caller ID window.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Are you sleeping? It’s the middle of the day.”
“We’re just back from a deployment. I’m a little turned around.”
Six months ago he wouldn’t have imagined voluntarily giving his mother that information, but then, six months ago she would have been asking all kinds of questions about what he’d been up to, trying to get him to quit his job, do something safer.
Interestingly, Ronan found he wasn’t enjoying the emergency call-outs the way he once had. He recognized that adrenaline had become his fix, his drug, it had filled something in him.
It didn’t work anymore. Not since B’Ranasha. He’d felt something else then, softer, kinder, ultimately more real.
Adrenaline had been a substitute, a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Loneliness. Yearning.
He’d been asked if he would consider taking an instructor’s position with Excalibur. Maybe he was just getting older, but the idea appealed.
Now his mother didn’t even ask a single detail about the deployment, which was good. Even though she now had her own life and it had made her so much more accepting of his, Ronan thought it might set their growing trust in each other back a bit if he told her he’d just been behind the lines in a country where a military coup was in full swing rescuing the deposed prime minister.
Or, he thought, listening to the happiness in her voice, maybe not.
The big news that she had been trying to reach him about when he’d taken the wedding security position on B’Ranasha, amazingly, had nothing to do with another wedding, or at least not for her. No, she’d had an idea.
She’d wanted to know if he would invest in her new company.
But of course, that wasn’t really what she had been asking. Sometime, probably in that week with Shoshauna, Ronan had developed the sensitivity to know this.
She was really asking for an investment in her. She was asking him, fearfully, painfully, courageously, to believe in her. One last time, despite it all, please.
And isn’t that what love did? Believed? Held the faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence that to believe was naive?
The truth was he had all kinds of money. He’d had a regular paycheck since leaving high school. Renting this apartment was really the first time he’d spent any significant amount of it. His lifestyle had left him with little time and less inclination to spend his money.
Why not gamble it? His mother wanted to start a wedding-planning service and a specialized bridal boutique. Who, after all, was more of an expert on weddings than his mother? There was no sideways feeling in his stomach—not that he was at all certain it worked anymore—so he’d invested. When she’d told him she’d decided on a name for their new company, he’d expected the worst.
“‘Princess,’” she said, “the princess part in teeny letters. That’s important. And then in big letters ‘Bliss.’”
Into his telling silence she had said, “You hate it.”
That was putting it mildly. “I guess I just don’t understand it.”
“No, you wouldn’t, but Ronan, trust me, every woman dreams of being a
princess, if only for a day. Especially on that day.”
And then Ronan had been pleasantly surprised and then downright astounded at his mother’s overwhelming success. Within a few months of opening, Princess Bliss had been named by Aussie Business as one of the top-ten new businesses in the country. His mother had been approached about franchising. She was arranging weddings around the globe.
“Kay Harden just called,” his mother told him breathlessly. “She and Henry Hopkins are getting married again.”
“Uh-huh,” Ronan said.
“Do you even know who they are, Jacob?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me that! Jacob, you’re hopeless. Movie stars. They’re both movie stars.”
He didn’t care about that, he’d protected enough important people to know the truth. One important person in particular had let him know the truth.
All people, inside, were the very same.
Even soldiers.
“We’re going to have a million-dollar year!” his mother said.
Life was full of cruel ironies: Jake Ronan the man who hated weddings more than any other was going to get rich from them. He’d told his mother he would be happy just to have his initial investment back, but she was having none of it. He was a full, if silent, partner in Princess Bliss, if he liked it or not. And when he saw how happy his mother was, for the first time in his memory since his father had died, he liked it just fine.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m proud of you. I really am. Please, don’t cry.”
But she cried, and talked about her business, and he just listened, glancing around his small apartment while she talked. This was another change he’d made since coming home from B’Ranasha.
After a month back at work he had decided to give up barrack life and get his own place. The brotherhood of his comrades was no longer as comfortable as it once had been. After he’d gotten back from B’Ranasha he had felt an overwhelming desire to be alone, to create his own space, a life separate from his career.
If the apartment was any indication, he hadn’t really succeeded. Try as he might to make it homey, it just never was.
Try as he might to never think about her or that week on the island, he never quite could. He was changed. He was lonely. He hurt.
The apartment was just an indication of something else, wanting more, wanting to have more to life than his work.
And all that money piling up in his bank account, thanks to his partnership in Bliss, was an indication that something more wasn’t about money, either.
He’d contacted Gray Peterson once, a couple of days after leaving B’Ranasha. He’d been in a country so small it didn’t appear on the map, in the middle of a civil war. Trying to sound casual, which was ridiculous given the lengths he’d gone to, to get his hands on a phone, and hard to do with gunfire exploding in the background, he’d asked if she was all right.
And found out the only thing he needed to know: the marriage of Prince Mahail and Princess Shoshauna had been called off. Ronan had wanted to press for details, called off for what reason, by whom, but he’d already known that the phone call was inappropriate, that a soldier asking after a princess was not acceptable in any world that he moved in.
Ronan heard a knock on his door, got up and answered it. “Mom, gotta go. Someone’s at the door.”
Was it Halloween? A child dressed as a motorcycle rider stood on his outside step, all black leather, a helmet, sunglasses.
And then the sunglasses came off, and he recognized eyes as turquoise as the sunlit bay of his boyhood. His mouth fell open.
And then she undid the motorcycle helmet strap, and struggled to get the snug-fitting helmet from her head.
He had to stuff his hands in his pockets to keep from helping her. Finally she had it off.
He studied her hair. Possibly, her hair looked even worse than it had on the island, grown out considerably but flattened by the helmet.
“What are you doing here?” he asked gruffly, as if his heart was not nearly pounding out of his chest, as if he did not want to lift her into his arms and swing her around until she was shrieking with laughter. As if he had not known, the moment he had recognized her, that she was the something more that he yearned for, that filled him with restless energy and a sense of hollow emptiness that nothing seemed to fill.
This was his greatest fear: that with every moment he’d dedicated to helping her find her own power, he had lost some of his own.
“What am I doing here?” she said, with a dangerous flick of her hair. “Try this—‘Shoshauna, what a delightful surprise. I’m so glad to see you.’”
He saw instantly she had come into her own in ways he could not even imagine. She exuded the confidence of a woman sure of herself, sure of her intelligence, her attractiveness, her power.
“I’m going to university here now.”
That explained it. Those smart-alec university guys were probably all over her. He tried not to let the flicker of pure jealousy he felt show. In fact, he deliberately kept his voice remote. “Oh? Good for you.”
She glared at him, looked as if she wanted to stamp her foot or slap him. But then her eyes, smoky with heat, rested on his lips, and he knew she didn’t want to stamp her foot or slap him.
“I didn’t get married,” she announced in a soft, husky purr.
“Yeah, I heard.” No sense telling her he had celebrated as best he could, with a warm soda in one hand and his rifle in the other, watching the sand blow over a hostile land, wishing he had someone, something more to go home to. Feeling guilty for being distracted, wondering if he was just like his mother. Did all relationships equal a surrender of power? Wasn’t that his fear of love?
“But I have dated all kinds of boys.”
“Really.” It was a statement, not a question. He tried not to feel irritated, his sense of having given her way too much power over him confirmed! Seeing her after all this time, all he wanted to do was taste her lips, and he had to hear she was dating guys? Boys. Not men. Why did he feel faintly relieved by that distinction?
“I thought I should. You know, go out with a few of them.”
“And you stopped by to tell me that?” He folded his arms more firmly over his chest, but something twinkled in her eyes, and he had a feeling his defensive posture was not fooling her one little bit. She knew she had stormed his bastions, taken down his defenses long ago.
“Mmm-hmm. And to tell you that they were all very boring.”
“Sorry.”
“And childish.”
“Males are slow-maturing creatures,” he said. Had she kissed any of them, those boys she had dated? Of course she had. That was the way things worked these days. He remembered all too well the sweetness of her kiss, felt something both possessive and protective when he thought of another man—especially a childish one—tasting her.
“I didn’t kiss anyone, though,” she said, and the twinkle in her eyes deepened. Why was it she seemed to find him so transparent? She had always insisted on seeing who he really was, not what he wanted her to see.
He wanted to tell her he didn’t care, but he had the feeling she’d see right through that, too, so he kept his mouth shut.
“I learned to surf last summer. And I can ride a motorcycle now. By myself.”
“So I can see.”
“Ronan,” she said softly, “are you happy to see me?”
He closed his eyes, marshaled himself, opened them again. “Why are you here, Shoshauna?”
Not princess, a lapse in protocol that she noticed, too. She beamed at him.
“I want to play you a game of chess.”
He didn’t move from the doorway. A game of chess. He tried not to look at her lips. A game of chess was about the furthest thing from his poor, beleaguered male mind. “Why?
” he croaked.
“If I win,” she said softly, “you have to take me on a date.”
He could have gotten her killed back there on that island. She apparently didn’t know or didn’t care, but he was not sure he’d ever be able to forgive himself or trust himself either.
“I can’t take you on a date,” he said.
“Why not? You aren’t in charge of protecting me now.”
If he was, she sure as hell wouldn’t be riding a motorcycle around by herself. But he only said, “Good thing, since I did such a crack-up job of it the first time.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t you ever think what could have happened if those boats that arrived that day hadn’t been the colonel and your grandfather? Don’t you ever think of what might have happened if it hadn’t been your cousin, if it had been a well-organized terror cell instead?”
There it was out, and he was glad it was out. He felt as if he had been waiting months to make this confession. Why was it always so damned easy to show her who he really was? Flawed, vulnerable, an ordinary man under his warrior armor.
“No,” she said, regarding him thoughtfully, seeing him, “I don’t. Do you?”
“I think of the possibilities all the time. I didn’t do my job, Shoshauna, I just got lucky.”
“The boys at school use that term sometimes,” she said, her voice sultry.
“Would you be serious? I’m trying to tell you something. I can’t be trusted with you. I’ve never been able to protect the people I love the most.” The look wouldn’t leave her face, as if she thought he was adorable, and so he rushed on, needing to convince her, very sorry the word love had slipped out, somehow. “I have this thing, this sideways feeling, that tells me what to do, an instinct, that warns of danger.”
“What’s it doing right now?” she asked.
“That’s just it. It doesn’t work around you!”
She touched his arm, looked up at him, her eyes so full of acceptance of him that something in him stilled. Completely.