LITMIR.BIZ

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bathing suit it could steal a man’s strength as surely as Delilah had stolen Sampson’s by cutting off his hair.

      Shoshauna blew some more bubbles at him.

      “Cut it out,” he warned her again.

      She chuckled, unfortunately, not the least intimidated by him anymore.

      It was also unfortunately charming how much fun she was having doing the dishes. She had fun doing everything, going after life as if she had been a prisoner in a cell, marveling at the smallest things.

      Hard as it was to maintain complete professionalism in the face of her joie de vivre, he was glad her mood was upbeat. There had been no more emotional outbursts after that single time she had burst into tears at the very mention of her fiancé, her husband-to-be.

      Ronan could handle a lot of things, up to and including a mad mamma grizzly clicking her teeth at him and rearing to her full seven-foot height on her hind legs. But he could not handle a woman in tears!

      Still he found himself contemplating that one time, in quiet moments, in the evenings when he was by himself and she had tumbled into bed, exhausted and happy. How could Shoshauna not even know if her future life partner liked traveling, or if he shared her desire to touch snow, to toboggan? The princess was, obviously, marrying a stranger. And just as obviously, and very understandably, she was terrified of it.

      But all that fell clearly into the none-of-his-business category. The sense that swept over him, when he saw her shinny up a tree, grinning down at him like the cheeky little monkey she was, of being protective, almost furiously so, of wanting to rescue her from her life was inappropriate. He was a soldier. She was a princess. His life involved doing things he didn’t want to do, and so did hers.

      But marrying someone she didn’t even really know? Glancing at her now, bubbles from head to toe, it seemed like a terrible shame. She was adorable—fun, curious, bratty, sexy as all get-out—she was the kind of girl some guy could fall head over heels in love with. And she deserved to know what that felt like.

      Not, he told himself sternly, that he was in any kind of position to decide what she did or didn’t deserve. That wasn’t part of the mission.

      He’d never had a mission that made him feel curiously weak instead of strong, as if things were spinning out of his control. He’d come to like being with her, so much so that even doing dishes with her was weakness, pure and simple.

      It had been bad enough when she waltzed out in shorts every morning, her legs golden and flawless, looking like they went all the way to her belly button. Which showed today, her T-shirt a touch too small. Every time she moved her arms, he saw a flash of slender tummy.

      It was bad enough that when he’d glanced over at her, hacking away at the poor defenseless mango or pricking her fingers with a needle, he felt an absurd desire to touch her hair because it had looked spiky, sticking up all over the place like tufts of grass but he was willing to bet it was soft as duck down.

      It was bad enough that she was determined to have a friendship, and that even though he knew it was taboo, sympathy had made him actually engage with her instead of discouraging her.

      I had a lousy home life as a kid. That was the most personal information he’d said to anyone about himself in years. He hated that he’d said it, even if he’d said it to try and make her realize good things could come from bad.

      He hated that sharing with her that one stupid, small sentence had made him realize a loneliness resided in him that he had managed to outrun for a long, long time. He’d said he didn’t have a girlfriend because of his work, but that was only a part truth. The truth was he didn’t want anyone to know him so well that they could coax information out of him that made him feel vulnerable and not very strong at all.

      He was a man who loved danger, who rose to the thrill of a risk. He lived by his unit’s motto, Go Hard or Go Home, and he did it with enthusiasm. His life was about intensely masculine things: strength, discipline, guts, toughness.

      After his mother’s great love of all things frilly and froufrou, he had not just accepted his rough barracks existence, he had embraced it. He had, consciously or not, rejected the feminine, the demands of being around the female of the species. He had no desire to be kind, polite, gentle or accommodating.

      But in revealing that one small vulnerability to Shoshauna, he recognized he had never taken the greatest risk of all.

      Part of the reason he was a soldier—or maybe most of the reason—was he could keep his heart in armor. He’d been building that armor, piece by meticulous piece, since the death of his dad. But when he’d asked her, that first day together, “Who knows what love is?” he’d had a flash of memory, a realization that a place in him thought it knew exactly what love was.

      There was a part of him that he most wanted to deny, that he had been very successfully denying until a few short days ago, but now it nibbled around the edges of his mind. Ronan secretly hoped there was a place a man could lay his armor down, a place he could be soft, a place where there was room to love another.

      Shoshauna, without half trying, was bringing his secrets to the surface. She was way too curious and way too engaging. Luckily for him, he had developed that gift of men who did dangerous and shadowy work. He was taciturn, wary of any interest in him.

      In his experience, civilians thought they wanted to know, thought a life of danger was like adventure movies, but it wasn’t and they didn’t.

      But Shoshauna’s desire to know seemed genuine, and even though she had led the most sheltered of lives, he had a feeling she could handle who he really was. More than handle it—embrace it.

      But these were the most dangerous thoughts—the thoughts that jeopardized his mission, his sense of professionalism and his sense of himself.

      But what had his choices been? To totally ignore her for the week? Set up a tent out back here? Pretend she didn’t exist?

      He was no expert on women, but he knew they liked to talk. It was in his own best interests to keep the princess moderately happy with their stay here. Hell, part of him, an unfortunately large part, wanted to make her happy before he returned her to a fate that he would not have wished on anyone.

      Marriage seemed like a hard enough proposition without marrying someone you didn’t know. Ask his mother. She’d made it her hobby to marry people she didn’t really know.

      A renegade thought blasted through his mind: if he was Shoshauna’s prince, he’d take her to that mountaintop just because she wanted to go, just to see the delight in her face when she looked down over those sweeping valleys, to see her inhale the crispness of the air. He’d build snowmen with her and race toboggans down breathtakingly steep slopes just to hear the sound of her laughter.

      If he was her prince? Cripes, he was getting in bigger trouble by the minute.

      There had been mistakes made over the past few days. One of them had been asking her about the most exciting thing in her life. Because it had been so pathetically evident it had probably been that motorcycle ride and all of this.

      From the few words she’d said about passion he’d known instantly that she regretted the directions of her own life, yearned for more. And he’d been taken by her wisdom, too, when he’d told her that the dangerous parts of his job kept him from a relationship.

      Was there really a woman out there who understood that caring about someone meant encouraging her partner to pursue what made him whole and alive? Not in his experience there wasn’t! Beginning with his mother, it was always about how she felt, what she needed to feel safe, secure, loved. Not that it had ever worked for her, that strangling kind of love that wanted to control and own.

      The last thing he wanted to be thinking about was his mother! Even the bathing suit would be better than that. He was aware the thought of his mother had appeared because he had opened the door a crack when he admitted he had a lousy childhood. That was the whole problem with admissions like that.

      He was here, on this island, with the princess,

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