LITMIR.BIZ

      Shoshauna pressed her cheek up against the delicious hardness of Ronan’s shoulder. His scent, soapy and masculine, was stronger than the scent of the new shirt.

      Alone with him for a week. In a place where no one could find them. It felt dangerous and exciting and terribly frightening, too. She pressed into him, feeling far more endangered than she had when the gun had gone off in the chapel.

      Some kind of trembling had started inside her, and it was not totally because he had hurt her feelings telling her her hair looked terrible. It wasn’t totally because of the vibration of the motorbike, either!

      “Go faster,” she cried.

      He glanced over his shoulder at her.

      “It doesn’t go any faster,” he shouted back at her, but he gave it a hit of gas and the little bike surged forward.

      Her stomach dropped, and she squealed with delight.

      He glanced back again. His lips were twitching. He was trying not to smile. But he did, and his smile was like the sun coming out on the grayest of days. That glimpse of a smile made her forget she had only a short time to squeeze many dreams into, though a week was more than she could have hoped for.

      Still, it was as if his smile hypnotized her and made her realize maybe there was one dream he could help make come true. A dream more important than wearing shorts or riding astride or touching snow. A dream that scorned people who pretended all the time.

      She had only a few days, and she wanted to be with someone who was real, not kowtowing. Not anxious to please. Not afraid of her position. Someone who would tell her the truth, even if it hurt to hear it.

      I’m not going to be more responsible for you than you are willing to be for yourself, he had told her. She shivered. In that simple statement, as much as it had pained her to hear it, was the truth about how her life had gone off track so badly. Could Ronan somehow lead her back to what was real about herself?

      When she was younger, there’d been a place she had been allowed to go where she had felt real. Relaxed. As if it was okay to be herself.

      Herself—something more and more lost behind the royal mask, the essential facades of good manners, of duty. Something that might be lost forever when she was returned to Prince Mahail as his bride.

      “There’s an island,” she called over the putter of the engine. “My grandparents have a summer place on a small island just north of the mainland. No one is ever there at this time of year.”

      “No one? No security? No groundskeeper?”

      “It’s a private island, but not the posh kind. You’d have to know my grandfather to understand. He hates all the royal fuss-fuss as he calls it. He likes simplicity.

      “The island is almost primitive. There’s no electricity, the house is like a cottage, it even has a thatched roof.”

      “Fresh water, or do we have to bring our own?”

      “There’s a stream.” Ronan thought like a soldier, she realized. All she could think about was it would be such a good place to try on her new bikini, such a wonderful place to rediscover who she really was! But, given the strange trembling inside her, how wise would that be? Given the reality of his smile, the pure sexiness of it, was it possible she was headed into a worse danger zone than the one she was leaving?

      “Bedding? Blankets?”

      His mind, thankfully, a million miles from bikinis, on the more practical considerations. “I think so.”

      “How do you get to it?”

      “My grandfather keeps a boat at the dock across the bay from it.”

      “Perfect,” he said. “Show me the fastest way to the boat dock.”

      But she didn’t tell him the shortest way. She directed him the longest way possible, because who knew if she would ever ride a motorcycle again, her arms wrapped so intimately around a man with such an incredible, sexy smile?

      She loved the motorcycle, even if she had been deprived of feeling the fingers of the wind playing with her hair. She could still feel the island breeze on her face, playing with the hem of her skirt, touching her legs. She could feel the kiss of warm sunshine. She had a lovely sensation of being connected to everything around her. The air was perfumed, birds and monkeys chattered in the trees. She didn’t feel separate from it, she felt like a part of it.

      And she could feel the exquisite sensation of being connected to him—her arms wrapped around the hard-muscled bands of his stomach, her cheek resting on the solid expanse of his back, her legs forming a rather intimate vee around him.

      Her mother, she knew, would have an absolute fit. And her father wouldn’t be too happy with her, either. She could only imagine how Mahail would feel if he saw her now!

      Which only added to the delectable sense of dancing with danger that Princess Shoshauna was feeling: free, adventurous, as if anything at all could happen.

      Just this morning her whole life had seemed to be mapped out in front of her, her fate inescapable. Now she had hair that Prince Mahail would hate, and she didn’t think he’d like it very much that she had spent a week alone with a strange man, either!

      “Can you go faster?’ she called to Ronan over the wind.

      The slightest hesitation, and then he did, opening the bike up so that they were roaring down the twisting highway, until tears formed in her eyes and she could feel the thrill to the bottom of her belly.

      She refused to dwell on how long it would last, or if this was the only time she would ever do this.

      Instead she threw back her head and laughed out loud for the sheer joy of the moment, at her unexpected encounter with the most heady drug of all—freedom.