LITMIR.BIZ

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do.

      If he continued this, if he accepted the invitation of her lips, the growing urgency of her kiss, if he allowed it to go where it wanted to go, it would be like a wild horse that had broken free, allowed to run. There would be no bringing it back under rein once it had gone too far.

      The soldier wanted control; the man wanted to lose control.

      The soldier insisted on inserting one more fact. If this carried to its natural conclusion, Princess Shoshauna would be compromised. The wedding would be off. Her wedding. Again, she wouldn’t have made a choice, just allowed herself to be carried along by forces she considered out of her control.

      It was not what Ronan wanted for her.

      He didn’t want her to get married to anyone but—

      But who?

      Him? A soldier. A soldier who didn’t believe in marriage? Who hated it? This must be a genetic flaw in his family, the ability to convince oneself over a very short period of time, before reality had a chance to kick in, that a marriage could work. He yanked himself away from her.

      This was the difference between him and his mother: he didn’t have to follow the fantasy all the way through to the end. He already knew the end of every love story.

      The soldier won—fact over fiction, practical analysis over emotion, discipline over the wayward leanings of a man’s heart.

      But he was aware it was a slim victory at best. And he was aware that aggravating word, love, had popped up again, banished from his vocabulary since around his thirteenth birthday. It was suddenly presenting itself in his life with annoying frequency.

      Ronan made himself hold Shoshauna’s gaze, fiery with passion, soft with surrender. He tried to force all emotion from his tone. But the magnitude of his failure to do so—the cold fury of his voice—even took him by surprise. Of course, he really wasn’t angry at her, but at himself, at his own vulnerability, his own weakness, his sudden crippling wistfulness.

      Hope—a sudden ridiculous wish to regain his own innocence, a desire to be able to believe in things he had long since lost faith in.

      “Are you using me to buy your freedom?”

      She reeled back from him. If he was not mistaken the tears were back in her eyes, all the proof he needed that insanity had grabbed him momentarily, that moment when he had contemplated her and himself and marriage in the same single thought.

      The truth was much more simple. He was a soldier, rough around the edges, hardened, not suitable for the company of a princess or anyone sensitive or fragile.

      But there was nothing the least bit fragile about Shoshauna when she planted both her little hands on his chest and shoved him with such amazing strength that it knocked him completely off balance. He stumbled backward, two steps, through her bedroom doorway, and she rushed forward and slammed the door behind him with the force of a hurricane.

      As he contemplated the slammed door, he had the politically incorrect thought that it was a mistake that hurricanes weren’t still named exclusively after women: volatile, completely unpredictable, even the strongest man could not hope to hold his balance in the fury.

      “Just go straight to hell!” she yelled at him through the door. She followed that with a curse that was common among working men and soldiers, a curse so common her mother surely would have had heart failure hearing it come from her princess daughter’s refined lips.

      So he was returning Shoshauna a changed woman. No hair, sunburned, starved and she was going to be able to hold her own in a vocabulary contest with a construction crew.

      He turned away, muttering to himself, “Well, that didn’t go particularly well.”

      But outside, contemplating a star-studded night, black-velvet sky meeting inky-black ocean, he rethought his conclusions.

      Maybe it had gone well. Shoshauna was a woman who needed to discover the depths of her own power, who needed to know how to utilize the hurricane forces within her, so she would not be so easily buffeted by the forces outside of her. In the past it seemed that every shift of wind had made her change direction.

      She’d made the decision to get married because her cat died? Only his mother could come up with a fruitier reason than that!

      But from the way Shoshauna had shoved him and slammed that door, she was nearly there. Could she hold on to what she was discovering about herself enough to refuse a marriage to a man she did not love? Could she understand she had within her the strength to choose the life she wanted for herself?

      Despite the peaceful serenity of the night, contemplating such issues made his head hurt. One of the things he appreciated most about his military lifestyle was that it was a cut-and-dried world, regulated, no room for contemplation, few complexities. You did what you were trained to do, you followed orders: no question, no thought, no introspection.

      He scrubbed his hand across his lips, but he had a feeling what had been left there was not going to be that easy to erase.

      After a long time he looked at his watch. It was past midnight. Just under forty-eight hours to go, and then they were leaving this island, meeting Gray.

      What if her life was still in danger?

      Well, if it was, if the situation was still not resolved, Gray had to have come up with a protection plan for her that did not involve Ronan.

      But was he going to trust anyone else with her protection if she was still in danger? Would he have a choice? If he was ordered back to Excalibur, he was going to have to go, whether she was in danger or not.

      He hoped it was a choice he was never going to have to make. Which would he obey? The call of duty or the call of his own heart?

      Jake Ronan had never had to ask himself a question like that before, and he didn’t like it one little bit that he had asked it now.

      The fact that he had asked it meant something had shifted in him, changed. He cared about someone else as much as he cared about duty. Once you had done that, could you ever go back to the way you were before?

      That’s what he felt over the next twenty-four hours. That he was a man trying desperately to be what he had been before: cool, calm, professional, a man notorious for being able to control emotion in situations gone wild.

      He almost succeeded, too.

      It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t easy, that he was managing to keep the barriers up between them. She was using the kitchen at different times than him. She refused to eat what he left out for her. He found her burnt offerings all over the kitchen, along with mashed fruit. He didn’t know if she was trying to torment him by washing her underthings and stringing them on a line by the outdoor shower, but torment him it did, especially since she had managed to turn her bra from pure white to a funny shade of pink.

      Of course, he could show her how to do laundry. He wanted to, but to what end? Nothing about her life included needing an ability to do laundry without turning her whites to pink.

      And nothing about his life needed the complication of inviting her back into it.

      No, this might be painful: these silences, the nose tilted upward every time she had to pass him, the hurt she was trying to hide with pride and seething silence, but in the end it was for the best. Even when he found an aloe vera plant and knew how it would soothe her sunburn, bring moisture and coolness and healing to her now badly peeling skin, he would not allow himself to make the offer.

      When he saw her sitting at the dining room table by herself, moving chess pieces wistfully, he would not allow himself to give in to the sudden weakness of wanting to teach her how to play.

      It only led to other wantings: wanting to make her laugh, wanting to see her succeed, wanting to see her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration, wanting to touch her hair.

      Wanting desperately to taste her lips again, just one more time, as if he could memorize how it felt and carry it inside him forever.

      But

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