LITMIR.BIZ

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but didn’t wake, and he leaned into the boat and nudged her shoulder with his hand. She was slender as a reed, the roundness of her shoulder the epitome of feminine softness.

      “Princess.” It would be infinitely easy to reach in and scoop her up, to carry her across the sand to that cottage, but that brief contact with her shoulder was fair warning it would be better not to add one little bit of physical contact to the already volatile combination.

      A bad time to think of her lips on his cheek earlier in the day, her slight curves pressed hard against him on that motorcycle.

      “Wake up,” he said louder, more roughly.

      She did, blinked—that blank look of one who couldn’t quite place where they were. And then she focused on him and smiled in a way that could melt even the most professional soldier’s dedication to absolute duty.

      She sat up, looked around and then sighed with contentment. She liked being here. She had liked the entire day way too much! He had not been nearly as immune to her laughter and her arms wrapped around him as he had wanted to be, but thankfully she didn’t have to know that!

      She shrugged out of the life jacket and then stretched, pressing the full sensuous roundness of her breasts into the thin fabric of the ill-fitting blouse. Then she stood up. The boat rocked on the sand, and the physical contact he wanted so badly not to happen, happened anyway. He caught her, steadied her as the boat rocked on the uneven ground. She took one more step, the boat pitched, and she would have gone to her knees.

      Except his hands encircled her waist nearly completely, the thumb and index finger of his right hand nearly touching those of his left. He lifted her from the boat, swung her onto the sand, amazed by her slightness. She didn’t weigh any more than a fully loaded combat pack.

      “You’re strong!” she said.

      He withdrew from her swiftly, not allowing himself to preen under her admiration. A week. They had to make it a week.

      “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, hugging herself, apparently oblivious to his discomfort. “I love it here. My grandfather called it Naidina Karobin—it means something like my heart is home.”

      Great.

      “Isn’t that pretty?”

      “Yeah, sure.” Real men didn’t use words like pretty. Except maybe in secret, when they looked at a face like hers, washed in moonlight, alive with discovery. Mission.

      He reached into the boat and grabbed the knapsack. As he followed her across the sand toward the cottage, he noted that the trees in the grove around it were loaded with edible fruits, coconuts, bananas, mangos.

      He’d landed in the Garden of Eden. He only hoped he could resist the apple. Boundaries.

      As they got closer, the princess jacked her skirt up and ran, danced really, across the sand. She looked like some kind of moonlit nymph, her slender legs painted in silver. Rules, duty, professionalism.

      He followed her more slowly, as if he could put off the moment when they set up housekeeping together and everything intensified yet more.

      Becoming part of Excalibur, Ronan’s endurance, physical strength, intellectual assets, ability to cope with stress had all been tested beyond normal limits. One man in twenty who was recruited for that unit made it through the selection process. Membership meant being stronger, faster, tougher in mind and spirit than the average man.

      And yet to share the space of that cottage on this island with a real-live sleeping beauty seemed as if it would test him in ways he had never been tested before.

      Ronan had been in possession of the princess for less than twenty-four hours and he already felt plenty tested!

      He drew a deep breath as he followed her up wide steps to the screen door that he thought had been a screened-in veranda. As his eyes adjusted to the lack of moonlight inside, he saw he had been mistaken.

      It was not a screened porch, but a screened-in house. A summer house, she’d said, obviously designed so that it caught the breeze from every angle on hot summer nights. The huge overhang of the roof would protect it from the rare days of inclement weather these islands experienced.

      White, sheer curtains lifted and fell in the breeze, making the inside of the house enchanting and exotic. The main room had dark, beautiful wooden floors, worn smooth from years of use, moonlight spilling across them. Deeply cushioned, colorful rattan furniture was grouped casually around a coffee table, a space that invited conversation, relaxation.

      Intimacy.

      At the other end of the room was a dining area, the furniture old, dark, exquisitely carved and obviously valuable. That such good furniture would be left out in an unlocked cottage should have reassured him how safe the island was. But Ronan was a little too aware that the dangers here could come from within, not without.

      The screens as walls gave a magnificent illusion of there being no separation between the indoor living space and the outdoors.

      He spied a hurricane lamp and lit it, hoping the light would chase away the feeling of enchantment, but instead, in the flickering golden light, the great room became downright romantic, soft, sultry, sensual.

      The light was soft on her face, too, her expression rapt as she looked around, her eyes glowing with the happiness of memories.

      Ronan would have liked it a lot better if she was spoiled rotten, complaining about spiderwebs and the lack of electricity.

      To distance himself from the unwanted whoosh of attraction he felt, Ronan went hurriedly across the room to investigate a door at the back of it. It led to an outdoor kitchen, and he went out. The outdoor cooking space was complete with a huge wood-fired oven and a grill. Open shelves were lined with canned goods. A person could camp out here, on this island, comfortably, for a year.

      Beyond that, in a flower- and fern-encircled grove was an open-air shower, and the whoosh he’d been trying to outrun came back.

      He reentered the house reluctantly, thankful he didn’t see her right away. He finished his inventory of the main house: there were two rooms off the great room, and he entered the first. It was the main bedroom, almost entirely taken up by a huge bed framed with soaring rough timbers, dark with age, more sheer white curtains flowing around the bed, surrounding it. Again the screens acting as outer walls made the bed seem to be set right amongst the palms and mango trees. The perfume of a thousand different flowers tickled his nose. There was no barrier to sound, either. The sea whispered poetry. He backed hastily out of there.

      Princess Shoshauna was in the smaller of the bedrooms, looking around and hugging herself.

      “This is where I always stayed when I was a child! Look how it feels as if you are right outside! My grandfather designed this house. He was an architect. That’s how he came to be on B’Ranasha. I’ll have this room.”

      He would have much preferred she take the bigger room, act snotty and entitled so he could kill the whoosh in his stomach.

      “I think you should take the bigger room,” he suggested. “You are the princess.”

      “Not this week I’m not.” She smiled, delighted to have declared herself not a princess.

      If she wasn’t a princess, if she was just an ordinary girl…he cut off the train of his thought. It didn’t matter if she was a wandering gypsy. She was still the principal, and it was still his mission to protect her.

      He reached into his pocket, took out a pocketknife and cut the cord that kept the mattress rolled up. He found the bedding in a tightly closed trunk under the bed. A floral sachet had been packed with it, and the white linen sheets smelled exotic.

      He laid them quickly on the bed, then watched, bemused, when she eyed the pile of bedding as though it were an interesting but baffling jigsaw puzzle.

      “You don’t know how to make a bed,” he guessed, incredulous, then wondered why it would surprise him that a princess had no idea how

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