LITMIR.BIZ

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elephant foot shrub. “Don’t you move until I tell you you can,” he said.

      “You’re not leaving me here!”

      He instantly saw that her concern was not for herself but for him. This was the price for letting his barriers down, for not maintaining his distance and his authority. She thought listening to him was an option. She did not want to understand it was his job to put himself between her and danger.

      She did not want to accept reality.

      And his weakness was that for a few hours yesterday he had not accepted it either.

      “Princess, do not make me say this again,” he said sharply. “You do not move until you hear from me, personally, that it’s okay to do so.”

      Three boats and a helicopter. He had to assume the worst in terms of who it was and what their intent was. That was his job, to react to worst-case scenarios. There was a good chance she might not be hearing from him, personally, ever again. He might be able to outthink those kind of numbers, but their only chance was if she cooperated, stayed out of the way.

      “My life depends on your obedience,” he told her, and saw, finally, her capitulation.

      He raced back to the tree line, watched the boats coming closer and closer, cutting through the waters of the bay. His mind did the clean divide, began clicking through options of how to keep her safe with very limited resources. Not enough rounds to hold off the army that was approaching.

      The boats drew closer, and suddenly he stood down. His adrenaline stopped pumping. He recognized Colonel Gray Peterson at the helm of the first boat, and he stepped from the trees.

      Ronan moved slowly, feeling his sense of failure acutely. This was ending well, but not because of his competence. Because of luck. Because of that thing she had always seemed to trust and he had scorned.

      Gray came across the sand toward him.

      “Where’s the princess?” he asked.

      “Secure.”

      Of course she picked that moment to break from the trees and scamper down the beach. She must have left her hiding place within seconds of Ronan securing her promise she would stay there.

      “Grandpa!” She threw herself into the arms of a distinguished-looking elderly man.

      Ronan contemplated her disobedience—the complete disintegration of his authority over her—with self-disgust.

      Gray looked at her, his eyebrows arched upward. “Good grief, man, tell me that’s not the princess.”

      “I’m afraid it is.”

      But Gray’s dismay was not because she had broken cover without being given the go-ahead.

      “What on earth happened to her hair?”

      The truth was Ronan could only vaguely remember what she had looked like before.

      “She’s safe. Who cares about her hair?”

      Gray’s look said it all. People cared about her hair. Ronan was glad she had cut it if it made her less of a commodity.

      “She is safe, isn’t she?” Ronan asked. “That’s why you’re here? That’s why you didn’t wait for me to come in?”

      “We made an arrest three days ago.”

      “Who?” He needed to know that. If it was some organized group with terror cells all over the place, she would never be safe. And what would he do then?

      Peterson lowered his voice. “You gave us the lead. Princess Shoshauna’s cousin, Mirassa. She was an old flame of Prince Mahail’s. You’ve heard that expression ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’ but in this case it was more like high school high jinx gone very wrong.”

      Ronan watched Shoshauna, felt her joy at being with her grandfather and felt satisfied that her instincts had been so correct. If she had that—her instincts—and now the ability to capture the power of the wave, she was going to be all right.

      “You went deep,” Gray said, “if I could have found you I would have pulled you out sooner.”

      Oh, yeah, he’d gone deep. Deep into territory he had no right going into, so deep he felt lost even now, as if he might never make his way out.

      “But when one of the villagers saw the fire last night and reported it to her grandfather he knew right away she’d be here.” Gray glanced down the beach at her, frowning. “She doesn’t look like the same person, Ronan.”

      Ronan was silent. She was the same person. But now she had a better idea of who that was, now, he hoped she would not be afraid to let it show, to let it shine.

      He was aware of Gray’s sudden scrutiny, a low whistle. “Anything happen that I should know about?”

      So, the changes were in him, too, in his face.

      “No, sir.” Nothing anybody should know about. He would have to live with the fact his mistakes could have cost her her life. Because they hadn’t, no one else had to know. Ronan watched the other two boats unload. Military men, palace officials, bodyguards.

      “Where’s Prince Mahail?’ he asked grimly.

      “Why would he be here?”

      “If I was going to marry her and she’d disappeared, I’d sure as hell be here.” But only her grandfather had come. Not her mother. Not her father. Not her fiancé. And suddenly he understood exactly why she had loved a cat so much, the loneliness, the emptiness that had driven her to say yes instead no.

      But she knew herself better now. She knew what she was capable of. As far as gifts went, he thought it was a pretty good one to give her.

      Gray was looking at him strangely now, then he shook it off, saying officiously, “Look, I’ve got to get you out of here. Your commanding officer is breathing down my neck. Your Excalibur team is on standby waiting to be deployed. I’ve been told, in no uncertain terms, you’d better be back when they pull the plug. I’m going to signal the helicopter to drop their ladder.”

      Ronan was a soldier; he trained for the unexpected; he expected the unexpected. But somehow it caught him completely off guard that he was not going to be able to say goodbye.

      The helicopter was coming in low now in response to Gray’s hand signals, sand rising around it. The ladder dropped.

      Don’t think, Ronan told himself and grabbed the swaying rope ladder, caught it hard, pulled himself up to the first rung.

      With each step up the ladder, he was aware of moving back toward his own life, away from what had happened here.

      Moments later, hands were reaching out to haul him on board.

      He made the mistake of looking down. Shoshauna was running with desperate speed. She looked as if she was going to attempt to grab that ladder, too, as if she was going to come with him if she could.

      But the ladder was being hauled in, out of the way of her reaching hands. Had he really been holding his breath, hoping she would make it, hoping by some miracle she could come into his world. Was he really not ready to let go? But this was reality now, the chasms between them uncrossable, forces beyond either of their control pulling them apart.

      She went very still, a small person on a beach, becoming smaller by the second. And then, standing in the center of a cyclone of dust and sand, she put her hand to her lips and sent a kiss after him. He heard the man who had hauled him in take in a swift, startled gasp at the princess’s obvious and totally inappropriate show of affection for a common man, a soldier no different from him.

      But he barely registered that gasp or the startled eyes of the crew turning to him.

      Jake Ronan, the most pragmatic of men, thought he felt her kiss fly across the growing chasm between him and touch his cheek, a whisper of an angel’s wings across the coarseness of his whiskers, as soft as a promise.

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