Royal Families Vs. Historicals - Rebecca Winters Mills & Boon e-Book Collections

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try.”

      Shoshauna was a princess. She was not used to being ignored. She was used to people doing what she wanted them to do.

      But this felt different. It felt as if she would die if he ignored her, if they could not get back to that place they had been at yesterday, swimming in the magical world of a turquoise sea and rainbow-hued fish, his hands on her back strong, cool, filled with confidence, the hands of a man who knew how to touch a woman in ways that could steal her breath, her heart, her soul.

      Her sense of desperation grew. He was holding the key to something locked inside of her. How could he refuse to open that secret door? The place where she would, finally, know who she was.

      “If I told my father you had done something inappropriate,” she said coolly, “you’d spend the rest of your life in jail.”

      He gave her a look so fearless and so loaded with scorn it made her feel about six inches high. And that was when she knew he was immovable in his resolve. She knew it did not matter what she did—she could threaten him, try to manipulate him with sweetness—he was not going to do as she wanted. He had drawn his line in the sand.

      And over such a ridiculously simple thing. She only wanted him to play chess with her!

      Only, it wasn’t really that simple, and he knew it, even if she was trying to deny it. Getting to know each other better would have complications and repercussions that could resound through both their lives.

      But why worry about that today? They had so little time left. Couldn’t they just go on as they had been? Couldn’t they just pretend they were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances?

      But even as she thought it, she knew he would never like pretending. He was too real for that. And when she slid another look his way, she could tell by the determined set of his jaw that he intended to worry about that today, and she could tell something else by the set of his jaw.

      She was completely powerless over him.

      “I’m sorry I said that,” she said, feeling utterly defeated, “about my father putting you in prison. It was a stupid thing to say, very childish.”

      He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.” As if he expected her to say things like that, to act spoiled and rotten if she didn’t get her own way. She had not done one thing—not one—to lead him to believe such things of her.

      Unless you included saying yes to marrying a man she did not love.

      That would speak volumes about her character to a man like Ronan, who wore his honor and his integrity as part of the armor around him.

      “I would never do something so horrible as tell lies about you. I’m not a liar.” But hadn’t she lied to herself all along, about Mahail, her marriage, her life?

      “I said it didn’t matter,” he said sharply.

      “Now you really are mad at me.”

      He sighed heavily.

      Shoshauna, looking at herself with the brutal assessment she saw in his eyes, burst into tears, ran into the house, slammed her bedroom door and cried until she had no tears left.

      Shoot, Ronan thought, was she ever going to stop crying? Bastard. How hard would it have been to teach her to play chess?

      It wasn’t about teaching her how to play chess, he told himself sternly. It was about the fact that things were already complicated so much that she was in there crying over something as tiny as the fact he’d refused to teach her to play chess.

      Though, dammit, when she had said her mother didn’t want her to play chess, that it was masculine, something in him had just itched to give her the rudiments of the game. She had such a good mind. He bet she’d be a better-than-average player once she got the fundamentals down, probably a downright formidable one.

      She didn’t come out of that room for the rest of the day. When he told her he had lunch ready, she answered through the closed door, her voice muffled, that she wasn’t hungry.

      Now it was the same answer for supper. He should have been relieved. This was exactly what he needed to keep his vows. Distance. Space. Instead he felt worried about her, guilty about the pain he’d caused.

      “Come on,” he said, from the other side of the door, “you have to eat.”

      “Why? To make you feel like you’ve fulfilled your obligation to look after me? Is providing a nutritious menu part of protecting me? Go away!”

      He opened the door a crack. She was sitting on her bed cross-legged in those shorty-shorts that showed way too much of her gorgeous copper-toned legs. She looked up when he came in, looked swiftly back down. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Her short, boyish hair was every which way. She’d taken her bra straps off her burned shoulders, and they hung out the arms of her T-shirt.

      “I told you to go away.”

      “You should eat something.” He stepped inside the door a bit.

      “You know what? I’m not a little kid. You don’t have to tell me to eat.”

      He was already way too aware she was not a little kid. He’d seen the damned bikini once too often! He’d seen what was under the bikini, too.

      He was also aware this was becoming a failure of major proportions. He was going to take her back safe from threat but damaged nonetheless: hair chopped off, sunburned, starving, puffy-eyed from crying. Though they still had two days and a couple of hours to get through before he could cross back over that water with her, deliver her to Gray. She couldn’t possibly cry that long.

      His stomach knotted at the thought. Could she? He studied her to see if she was all done crying.

      She’d found a magazine somewhere, and she was avoiding his eyes. The magazine looked as if it had been printed in about 1957, but she was studying it as intently as if she could read her future on the pages. Her eyes sparkled suspiciously. More tears gathering?

      “Look,” he said uncomfortably, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, “I’m not trying to be mean to you. I’m just telling you the way things have to be.”

      “Is that right?” she snapped, and threw down the magazine. She regarded him with spitting eyes, and he could see clearly it was fury in them, not tears. “As it happens, I’m sick and tired of people telling me how it’s going to be. Why are you the one who decides how it’s going to be? Because you’re a man?”

      She had him there.

      “Because I’m the one with the job to do,” he said, but he heard the wavering of his own conviction. If ever a woman was born to be his equal it was this one.

      She hopped off the bed. Instinct told him to get away from her. A stronger instinct told him to stay.

      She stopped in front of him, regarded him with challenge. He, foolishly, held his ground.

      She reached up on tiptoe, and she took his lips with her own.

      He was enveloped in pure and sweet sensation. Her kiss was as refreshing and clean as rainwater. Her lips told him abut the polarities within her: innocence and passion, enthusiasm and hesitancy, desire and doubt.

      He had heard there were drugs so strong a man could be made helpless by them after one taste.

      He had never believed it until this moment. He willed himself not to respond, but he did not have enough will to move away from her, from the sweetness of her quest.

      The hesitancy and the doubt suddenly dissolved. Her arms reached out, tangled themselves around his neck, drew him closer to her. Her scent wrapped around him, feminine, clean, intoxicating. Through the thinness of her shirt he could feel the warmth radiating off her skin. Her curves, soft, sensual, womanly, pressed into him.

      Temptation was furious within him. Pure feeling tried to swamp rational thought. But the soldier in him, highly disciplined, did the clean divide between

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