LITMIR.BIZ

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day and this moment. He stood at the pagoda, his eyes searched the tree line until they found her.

      And he smiled.

      In his smile she saw such welcome and such wonder—and such sensual promise—that her own heart beat faster.

      Of course, there was one thing they had not done, one area where he had maintained every ounce of his formidable discipline. Jake Ronan had proven to be very old-fashioned when it came to the question of her virtue.

      Oh, he had kissed her until she had nearly died from wanting him, he had touched her in ways that had threatened to set her heart on fire, but always at the last moment he had pulled away. He had told her his honor was on the line, and she had learned you did not question a warrior’s honor!

      But tonight she would lie in his arms, and they would discover the breathtaking heights of intimacy. After the reception, they would take her grandfather’s boat, and they would go to their island, Naidina Karobin, my heart is home. The island would be once again inhabited only by them.

      Last night, even though he wasn’t supposed to see her until today, Jake had managed to charm his way past all her girlfriends and her cousins and aunts.

      “I brought you a wedding present.”

      “You’re not supposed to be here,” she told him, but not with a great deal of conviction. She loved seeing him.

      “I know. I couldn’t stay away. Knowing you were here, just a few minutes away from me, I couldn’t not be with you. Shoshauna, that’s what you do to me. Here I am, just about the most disciplined guy in the world, and I’m helpless around you. Worse,” he moved closer to her, touched her cheek with the familiar hardness of his hands, “I like being helpless. You make me want to be with you all the time. You make everything that is not you seem dull and boring and like a total waste of time.

      “You make me feel as if all those defenses I had, had kept me prisoner in a world where I was very strong but very, very alone. You rescued me.”

      Her eyes filled with tears. “Ronan, you could not have given me a more beautiful gift than those words.”

      He smiled, a little bit sheepishly. “There’s still enough soldier in me that I don’t see words as any kind of gift.” He opened the door and brought in what he had left in the hallway.

      She burst out laughing. That’s what he did to her, and for her—took her from tears to laughter and back again in the blink of an eye.

      A brand-new surfboard, and she had been delighted, but at the same time she rather hoped, much as she was stoked about surfing, that the waves would never come up. She rather hoped they would never get out of bed! Not for the whole two weeks. That she could touch him until she had her fill of the feel of his skin under her fingertips, until she had her fill of the taste of his lips, and she already knew she was never going to get her fill of that!

      Shoshauna was still blushing from the audacity of her own thoughts when her mother and her father came up beside her, not a king and a queen today but proud parents. Each of them kissed her on the cheek and then took their seats.

      Her father in particular was very taken with Jake. Her mother had been more slow to come around, but no one who truly got to know Jake could do anything but love him.

      Her mother had also been appalled by the simplicity of the wedding plans, but she and Bev had managed to console each other and had become quite good friends as they planned the wedding of their children.

      Her grandfather came to her side, linked his arm through hers, smiled at her, though his eyes were wet with tears of joy.

      And then Shoshauna was moving across the sand toward her beloved, toward Jake Ronan, and she could see the whole future in his eyes. Her grandfather let her go, and she walked the last few steps to him on her own, a woman who had chosen exactly the life she wanted for herself.

      Jake watched Shoshauna move toward him across the fineness of the pure white sand.

      She had chosen the simplest of dresses, her feet were bare, but when you were as beautiful as she was, even his mother had agreed that simplicity was the best way to let her true beauty shine through.

      His mother and his wife-to-be, here together.

      And in him the most wonderful surrender. He would protect them with his life, if he ever had to, and they both knew that.

      Someday he would have children with Shoshauna, and he could feel the fierce protectiveness within himself extend to them, but something new was there, too.

      A trust, that he would do whatever he could do, but when his strength ran dry, then there would be something else there to step in, something that seemed to have a better plan for him than anything he could have ever planned for himself, if the woman walking over the sand toward him was any indication.

      He knew that something went by a great many names. Some called it the Universe, the life force, God.

      He had come to call it Love, and to recognize it had been running the show long before he’d come along, and would be running it long after.

      There came a point when a man had to realize that there were things he did not control, and that he would only exhaust himself, drain away his strength and his soul, if he continued to think the whole world would fall apart if he was not running it.

      Ronan had come to believe that he could trust the protection and care of a force larger than himself.

      It was the same force that brought a certain man and a certain woman together, against impossible odds, across cultural and social differences, the force that made one heart recognize another.

      And it was that force that would protect them and see their children into the world.

      Once upon a time Jake Ronan had thought if he ever had to stand where he was standing today, he would probably faint.

      And yet the truth was, he had never felt so calm, so strong, so right. And the strangest thing of all was that, even as Ronan admitted he was powerless in the face of this thing called love, with each day of his surrender he felt more powerful, more alive and more relaxed, more grateful, more everything.

      This was the something more he had longed for all his life: to be a part of the magnificent mystery that flowed around him and in him as surely as it flowed through the waves on the sea. He longed to ride that incredible energy with the ease and joy with which he could ride the most powerful of waves. Not to conquer but to feel connected.

      He watched Shoshauna move toward him, and he almost laughed out loud.

      For one thing he had come to know that this thing he chose to call Love had the most delicious sense of humor.

      And for the longest time he had thought it was his job to rescue the princess.

      But now he saw that wasn’t it at all.

      That she had come to rescue him. And that allowing himself to be rescued had not made him a weaker man but a better one.

      She reached him, looked him in the face, his equal, the woman who would be the mother of his children, his companion, his friend, his lover through all the days of his life.

      “Beloved,” she said, her voice hushed with reverence of what they stood in the presence of, that Force greater than all things. “Retnuh.”

      And he said to her, his eyes never leaving her face, in her own language, a greeting and a vow, “My heart is home.”

       The Secret Princess

      Jessica Hart

      For my dear niece, Suzy,

      with love on her engagement.

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