LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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