LITMIR.BIZ

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she said softly, “you have to take me on a date.”

      He could have gotten her killed back there on that island. She apparently didn’t know or didn’t care, but he was not sure he’d ever be able to forgive himself or trust himself either.

      “I can’t take you on a date,” he said.

      “Why not? You aren’t in charge of protecting me now.”

      If he was, she sure as hell wouldn’t be riding a motorcycle around by herself. But he only said, “Good thing, since I did such a crack-up job of it the first time.”

      “What does that mean?”

      “Don’t you ever think what could have happened if those boats that arrived that day hadn’t been the colonel and your grandfather? Don’t you ever think of what might have happened if it hadn’t been your cousin, if it had been a well-organized terror cell instead?”

      There it was out, and he was glad it was out. He felt as if he had been waiting months to make this confession. Why was it always so damned easy to show her who he really was? Flawed, vulnerable, an ordinary man under his warrior armor.

      “No,” she said, regarding him thoughtfully, seeing him, “I don’t. Do you?”

      “I think of the possibilities all the time. I didn’t do my job, Shoshauna, I just got lucky.”

      “The boys at school use that term sometimes,” she said, her voice sultry.

      “Would you be serious? I’m trying to tell you something. I can’t be trusted with you. I’ve never been able to protect the people I love the most.” The look wouldn’t leave her face, as if she thought he was adorable, and so he rushed on, needing to convince her, very sorry the word love had slipped out, somehow. “I have this thing, this sideways feeling, that tells me what to do, an instinct, that warns of danger.”

      “What’s it doing right now?” she asked.

      “That’s just it. It doesn’t work around you!”

      She touched his arm, looked up at him, her eyes so full of acceptance of him that something in him stilled. Completely.

      “You know why it doesn’t work around me, Ronan? Because nothing is wrong. Nothing was wrong on the island. You were exactly where you needed to be, doing exactly what you needed to do. And so was I.”

      “I forgot what I was there to do and, Shoshauna, that bugs the hell out of me. I didn’t do a good job of protecting you. I didn’t do my job, period.”

      “I seem to still be here, alive and kicking.”

      “Not because of anything I did,” he said stubbornly.

      She regarded him with infinite patience. “Ronan, there are some things that are bigger than even you. Some things you just have to surrender to.”

      “That’s the part you don’t get! Surrender is not in any soldier’s vocabulary!”

      She sighed as if he was being impossible and childish just like those boys she had dated. “Thank you for the kitten, by the way. I was able to bring him with me. He’s a monster. I called him Hope.”

      He wasn’t really done discussing his failures with her, but he said reluctantly, “That sounds like a girl’s name.” The name said it all, named the thing within him that he had not been able to outrun, kill, alter.

      He hoped. He hoped for the life he saw promised in her eyes: a life of connection, companionship, laughter, love.

      “You know what I think, Ronan?”

      “You’re going to tell me if I want to know or not,” he said.

      “Just like I want someone to see me for who I am, someone I don’t have to put on the princess costume for, you want someone to see you without your armor. You want someone to know there is a place where you are not all strength and sternness. You want someone to see you are not all warrior.”

      “No, I don’t!”

      “Now,” she said, casually, as if she had not ripped off his mask and left him feeling trembling and vulnerable and on the verge of surrendering to the mightiest thing of all, “let’s play chess. I told you the terms—if I win you have to take me on a date.”

      “And if I win?” he asked.

      She smiled at him, and he saw just how completely she had come into herself, how confident she was.

      “Ronan,” she said softly, her smile melting him, “why on earth would you want to win?”

       CHAPTER NINE

      “I CAN’T believe you’d ever accept anything but my very best effort,” he said, though the truth was he already knew he was lost.

      She contemplated him. “That’s true. So if you win?”

      “I haven’t even agreed to play yet!”

      “Well, we’ve stood at this point before, haven’t we, Ronan? Where you have to decide whether or not to let me in.”

      They had stood at this point before. On the island he’d refused to play chess with her, and he’d made her cry. But then he had only been doing his job, and in the end that barrier had not been enough to keep him from caring about her.

      Without that barrier where would it go?

      A single word entered his mind. And oddly enough, it was not surrender. Bliss.

      He stood back from his door, an admission in his heart. He was powerless against her; he had been from the very beginning. Princess Shoshauna of B’Ranasha walked into his humble apartment, took off the black jacket and tossed it on his couch as if she belonged here.

      The form-fitting white silk shirt and black leather pants were at least as sexy as that bikini she had nearly driven him crazy in, and his feeling of powerlessness increased.

      She looked around his place with interest. He shoved a pair of socks under the couch with his foot. She looked at him.

      “I want to live in a cute little place just like this, one day.”

      His mother had claimed that every girl wanted to be a princess, but somehow, someway he had lucked into something very different. A girl who had already been a princess and who wanted to be ordinary.

      He got his chess set out of a cabinet, set it up at the small kitchen table.

      “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked, sitting down, taking a black and a white chess piece and holding them out to him, closed fist.

      He chose. Black, then. Let her lead the way.

      He snorted. “Call you? You’re a princess. You’re not exactly listed in the local directory.”

      “You knew how to get ahold of me, though, if you’d wanted to.”

      “Yes.”

      “So you didn’t want to?”

      He was silent, contemplating her first move, her opening gambit. He made a defensive move.

      “I couldn’t. I still dream about what could have happened on that island. I failed you. There I was snorkeling and surfing, when really I should have been setting up defenses.”

      “I’d been protected all my life. You didn’t fail me. You gave me what I needed far more than safety. A wake-up call. A call to live. To be myself. You gave me a gift, Ronan. Even when you didn’t call it that, it was a gift.”

      He waited.

      “I needed to choose and I have. I’ve chosen.”

      “To play chess with a soldier?”

      “No,

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