LITMIR.BIZ

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now.

      Still, he knew he had to be very, very careful because he was treading a fine line. He’d already felt the uncomfortable wriggle of emotion for her. He didn’t want to be rude, but he had to make it very clear, to himself and to her, this was his job. He wasn’t on vacation, he wasn’t supposed to be having fun.

      He couldn’t even allow himself to think the thoughts of a normal, healthy man when he saw her in that bathing suit every day.

      But now he was wondering if he’d overrated that danger and underrated this one. Because in the bathing suit she was sexy. Untouchable and sexy, like a runway model or a film actress. He could watch her from a safe distance, up the beach somewhere, sunglasses covering his eyes so she would never read his expression.

      With soap bubbles all over her from washing dishes, she was still sexy. But cute, too. He was not quite sure how she had managed to get soap bubbles all over the long length of her naked legs, but she had.

      She put bubbles on her face, a bubble beard and moustache. “Look!”

      “How old are you?” he asked, putting duty first, pretending pure irritation when in fact her enjoyment of very small things was increasingly enchanting.

      “Twenty-one.”

      “Well, quit acting like you’re six,” he said.

      Then he felt bad, because she looked so crestfallen. Boundaries, yes, but he was not going to do that again: try to erect them by hurting her feelings. He’d crossed the fine line between being rude and erecting professional barriers. Ronan simply expected himself to be a better man than that.

      Against his better judgment, but by way of apology, he scooped up a handful of suds and tossed them at her. She tossed some back. A few minutes later they were both drenched in suds and laughing.

      Great. The barriers were down almost completely, when he had vowed to get them back up—when he knew her survival depended on it. And perhaps his own, too.

      Still, despite the fact he knew he was dancing with the kind of danger that put meeting a grizzly bear to shame, it occurred to him, probably because of the seriousness of most of his work, he’d forgotten how to be young.

      He was only twenty-seven, but he’d done work that had aged him beyond that, stolen his laughter. The kind of dark, gallows humor he shared with his comrades didn’t count.

      Even when the guys played together, they played rough, body-bruising sports, the harder hitting the better. He had come to respect strength and guts, and his world was now almost exclusively about those things. There was no room in it for softness, not physical, certainly not emotional.

      His work often required him to be mature way beyond his years, required him to shoulder responsibility that would have crippled any but the strongest of men. Life was so often serious, decisions so often involved life and death, that he had forgotten how to be playful, had forgotten how good it could feel to laugh like this.

      The rewards of his kind of work were many: he felt a deep sense of honor; he felt as if he made a real difference in a troubled world; he was proud of his commitment to be of service to his fellow man; the bonds he had with his brothers in arms were stronger than steel. Ronan had never questioned the price he paid to do the work before, and he absolutely knew now was not the time to start!

      Sharing a deserted island with a gorgeous princess who was eager to try on her new bikini, was absolutely the wrong time to decide to rediscover those things!

      But just being around her made him so aware of softness, filled him with a treacherous yearning. The full meltdown could probably start with something as simple as wanting to touch her hair.

      “Okay,” he said, serious, trying to be very serious, something light still lingering in his heart, “you want to learn how to make my secret biscuit recipe?”

      Ronan had done many different survival schools. All the members of Excalibur prided themselves in their ability to produce really good food from limited ingredients, to use what they could find around them. He was actually more comfortable cooking over a fire than he was using an oven.

      An hour later with flour now deeply stuck on her damp skin, she pulled her biscuit attempt from the wood-fired oven.

      Ronan tried to keep a straight face. Every biscuit was a different size. Some were burned and some were raw.

      “Try one,” she insisted.

      Since he’d already hurt her feelings once today and decided that wasn’t the way to keep his professional distance, he sucked it up and took one of the better-looking biscuits.

      He took a big bite. “Hey,” he lied, “not bad for a first try.”

      She helped herself to one, wrinkled her nose, set it down. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”

      He hoped she wouldn’t. He hoped she’d tire soon of the novelty of working together, because it was fun, way more fun than he wanted to have with her.

      “Let’s go swimming now,” she said. “Could you come with me today? I thought I saw a shark yesterday.”

      Was that pure devilment dancing in the turquoise of those eyes? Of course it was. She’d figured out he didn’t want to swim with her, figured out her softness was piercing his armor in ways no bullet ever had. She’d figured out how badly he didn’t want to be anywhere near her when she was in that bathing suit.

      In other words, she had figured out his weakness.

      He could not let her see that. One thing he’d learned as a soldier was you never ran away from the thing that scared you the most. Never. You ran straight toward it.

      “Sure,” he said, with a careless shrug. “Let’s go.”

      He said it with the bravado of a man who had just been assigned to dismantle a bomb and didn’t want a single soul to know how scared he was.

      But when he looked into her eyes, dancing with absolute mischief, he was pretty sure he had not pulled it off.

      She was not going to be fooled by him, and it was a little disconcerting to feel she could see through him so completely when he had become such an expert at hiding every weakness he ever felt.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      SHOSHAUNA stared at herself in the mirror in her bedroom and gulped. The bathing suit was really quite revealing. It hadn’t seemed to matter so much when Ronan was way down the shoreline, spearfishing, picking up driftwood, but today he was going to swim with her! Finally.

      She could almost hear her mother reacting to her attire. “Common.” Her father would be none to pleased with this outfit, either, especially since she was in the company of a man, completely unchaperoned.

      But wasn’t that the whole problem with her life? She had been far to anxious to please others and not nearly anxious enough to please herself. She had always dreamed of being bold, of being the adventurer, but in the end she had always backed away.

      She remembered the exhilarating sense of power she had felt when she realized Ronan didn’t want to see this bathing suit, when she’d realized, despite all his determination not to, he found her attractive. Suddenly she wanted to feel that power again. She was so aware of the clock ticking. They had been here four days. There was three left, and then it would be over.

      Suddenly nothing could have kept her from the sea, and Ronan.

      At the last minute, though, as always, she wrapped a huge bath towel around herself before she stepped out of the house.

      Ronan waited outside the door, glanced at her, his expression deadpan, but she was sure she saw a glint of amusement in his eyes, as if he knew she was really too shy to wear that bikini with confidence, with delight in her own power when there was a man in such close quarters.

      “Look

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