The Royal Collection

He tucked her under the waxy leaves of a gigantic 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.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SHOSHAUNA looked around her bedroom. It was a beautiful room: decorated in turquoises and greens and shades of cream and ivory. Like all the rooms in her palatial home, her quarters contained the finest silks, the deepest rugs, the most valuable art. But with no cat providing lively warmth, her space seemed empty and unappealing, a showroom with no soul.

She was surrounded by toys and conveniences: a wonderful sound system; a huge TV that slid behind a screen at the push of a button; a state-of-the-art laptop with Internet access; a bathroom with spa features. But today, despite all that luxury, all those things she could occupy herself with, her room felt like a prison.

She longed for the simplicity of the island, and she felt as if she had been robbed of her last few hours with Ronan. She had thought they would at least have one more motorcycle ride together. No, she had even been robbed of her chance to say goodbye, and to ask the question that burned in her like fire.

What next?

The answer to that question lay somewhere in the six days of freedom she had experienced. She could not go back to the way her life had been before, to the way she had been before.

Where was Ronan? She still felt shocked at the abruptness of his departure. After that final night they had shared, she had wanted to say goodbye. No, needed to say goodbye.

Goodbye? That isn’t what she wanted to say! Hello. I can’t wait to know you better. I love the way I feel when I’m with you. You show me all that is best about myself.

There was a knock on her door, and she leaped off her bed and answered it, but it was one of the maids and a hairdresser.

“We’ve come to fix your hair,” the maid said cheerfully, “before you meet with Prince Mahail. I understand he’s coming this afternoon.”

Shoshauna did not stand back from the door to invite them in. She said quietly but firmly, “I happen to like my hair the way it is, and if Prince Mahail would like to see me he will have to make an appointment to see if it’s convenient for me.”

And then she shut the door, her maid’s mouth working soundlessly, a fish gasping out of water. For the first time since she had come back to this room, Shoshauna felt free, and she understood the truth: you could live in a castle and be a prisoner, you could live in a prison and be free. It was all what was inside of you.

A half hour later there was another knock on her door, the same maid, accompanied by a small boy, a street ragamuffin.

“He said,” the maid reported snippily, “he has something that he is only allowed to give to you. Colonel Peterson said it would be all right.”

The boy shyly held out the basket he was carrying and a book.

Shoshauna took the book and smiled at him. She glanced at the book. Chess Made Simple. Her heart hammering, she took the basket, heard the muted little whimper even before she rolled back the square of cloth that covered it.

An orange kitten stared at her with round green eyes.

She felt tears film her eyes, knew Ronan was gone, but that he had sent her a message.

Did he know what it said to her? Not “Learn to play chess,” not “Here’s a kitten to take the edge off loneliness.”

To her his message said he had seen the infinite potential within her.

To her his message said, “Beloved.” It said that he had heard her and seen her as no one else in her life ever had.

But then she realized this gift was his farewell gift to her. It said he would not be delivering any messages himself. Had he let his guard down so completely on that final day together because he thought he would never see her again?

Never see him again? The thought was a worse prison than this room—a life sentence.

She wanted to just slam her bedroom door and cry, but that was not the legacy of her week with Ronan. She had learned to be strong. She certainly had no intention of being a victim of her own life! No, she planned from this day forward to be the master of her destiny! To take charge, to go after what she wanted.

And to refuse what she didn’t want.

“Tell Prince Mahail I will see him this afternoon after all,” she said thoughtfully.

She realized she had to put closure on one part of her life before she began another. She did not consult her father or her mother about what she had to say to Mahail.

He was waiting for her in a private drawing room, his back to her, looking out a window. When she entered the room, she paused for a moment and studied him. He was a slight man, but handsome and well dressed.

She saw the boy who had said to her, years ago, as he was learning to ride a pony at his family’s compound, “Girls aren’t allowed.”

He turned and smiled in greeting, but the smile faltered when he saw her hair. She deliberately wore short sleeves so he could see the chunks of skin peeling off her arms, too.

He regained himself quickly, came to her and bowed, took both her hands.

“You are somewhat worse the wear for your adventure, I see,” he said, his voice sorrowful, as if she had survived a tsunami.

“Not at all,” she said, “I’ve never felt better.”

Of course he didn’t get that at all—that how she felt was so much more important than how she looked.

“I understand you have been unaccompanied in the presence of a man,” he said. “Others might see that as a smirch on your character, but of course, I do not. I understand the man’s character is unimpeachable.”

She knew she should be insulted that the man’s character was unimpeachable, but in fact it had been Ronan who had exercised self-control, not her. Still!

“How big of you,” she said. “Of course that man saved me from a situation largely of your making, but why think of that?”

“My making?” the prince stammered.

“You were cruel and thoughtless to Mirassa. She didn’t deserve that, and she retaliated. I’m not excusing what she did, but I am saying I understand it.”

The prince was beginning to look annoyed, not used to anyone speaking their mind around him, especially a woman. What kind of prison would that be? Not being able to be honest with the man you shared the most intimate things in the world with?

“And that man, whom others might see as having put a smirch on my character, was absolutely devoted to protecting me. He was willing to put my well-being ahead of his own.” To refuse everything I offered him, if he felt it wasn’t in my best interests.

“How noble,” the prince said, but he was watching her cautiously. She wasn’t supposed to speak her mind, after all, just toss her hair and blink prettily.

“Yes,” she agreed, “noble.” Ronan, her prince, so much more so than this man who stood in front of her in his silk and jewels, the aroma of his expensive cologne filling the room.

What would he say if she said she would rather smell Ronan’s sweat? She smiled at the thought, and Mahail mistook the smile for a change in mood, for coy invitation.

“Are you well enough, then, to reschedule the day of our marriage?” he asked formally.

So, despite the hair, the skin, her new outspokenness, he was not going to call it off, and suddenly she was glad, because that made it her choice, rather than his—that made it her power that had to be utilized.

She needed to choose.

“I’ve decided not to marry,” she said firmly, with no fear, no doubt, no hesitation. A bird within her took wing.

“Excuse me?” Prince Mahail was genuinely astonished.

“I don’t want to get married. I have so many things I want to achieve first. When I marry I want it to be for love, not for convenience. I’m sorry.”

He glared at her, put out. “Have you consulted your father about this?”

Of all the maddening things he could have said, that about topped her list!

“It’s my choice,” she said dangerously, “not his.”

Prince Mahail looked at her, confused, irritated, annoyed. “Perhaps it is for the best,” he decided. “I think I might like your cousin, Mirassa, better than you after all.”

“You would,” Shoshauna muttered as he marched from the room.

And yet the next day, when she met with her father, she felt terrible trepidation, aware her legs were shaking under her long skirt.

Meetings with him always had a stilted quality, formal, as if his children were more his subjects than his blood.

“I understand,” he said, without preamble, “that you have told Prince Mahail there will be no wedding.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Without consulting me?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Shoshauna took a deep breath and told him who she was. She did not tell him she was the girl he wanted her to be, meek, docile, pliable, but she told him of longing for education and adventure…and love.

“And so you see,” she finished bravely, “I cannot marry Mahail. I am prepared to go to the dungeon first.”

Her father’s lips twitched, and then he laughed. “Come here,” he said.

As she stepped toward him, he stood up and embraced her. “I want for you what every father wants for his daughter—your happiness. A father thinks he knows best, but you have always been a strong-spirited girl, able, I think, to find your own way. Do you want to go to school?”

“Yes, Father!”

“Then it will be arranged, with my blessing.”

As she turned to go, he called her back.

“Daughter,” he said, laughing, “we don’t have a dungeon. If we did I suspect your poor mother would have locked you away in it a long time ago. I will explain this, er, latest development to her.”

“Thank you.”

Funny, she thought walking away, her whole life she had sought her father’s love and approval. And she had gotten it, finally, not when she had tried to please him, but when she had been brave enough to please herself, brave enough to be herself.

This was news she had to share with Ronan. She asked Colonel Peterson where he was.

He looked at her carefully. “He’s been deployed,” he said, “even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”

And then she realized that was the truth Ronan had tried to tell her about his life.

And she recognized another truth: if you were going to be with a man like that, you had to have a life—satisfying and fulfilling—completely separate from his. If Ronan was going to be a part of her life, she had to come to him absolutely whole, certainly able to function when his work called him to be away.

She renewed her application for school and was accepted. In two months she would be living one more dream. She would be going to study in Great Britain.

And until then?

She was going to learn to surf! There was no room in a world like Ronan’s for a woman who was needy or clingy. She needed to go to him a woman confident in her ability to make her own life.

And then she would be a woman who could make a life with him.

An alarm was going off, and men were pouring through the doors of an abandoned warehouse, men in black, their faces covered, machine guns at the ready. Ronan was with Shoshauna, his body between her and the onslaught, but he felt things no soldier ever wanted to feel—outnumbered, hopeless, helpless. He couldn’t protect her. He was only one man…

Ronan came awake, drenched in sweat, grateful it wasn’t real, perturbed that after six months he was still having that dream, was unable to shake his sense of failure.

Slowly he became aware that the alarm from his dream was really his phone ringing. He’d picked up the phone, along with a whole pile of other things he needed, when he’d moved off base a few months ago. Next time he bought a phone, he’d know to test the damned ringer first. This one announced callers with the urgency of an alarm system announcing a break-in at the Louvre.

He got up on one elbow and looked at the caller ID window.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

“Are you sleeping? It’s the middle of the day.”

“We’re just back from a deployment. I’m a little turned around.”

Six months ago he wouldn’t have imagined voluntarily giving his mother that information, but then, six months ago she would have been asking all kinds of questions about what he’d been up to, trying to get him to quit his job, do something safer.

Interestingly, Ronan found he wasn’t enjoying the emergency call-outs the way he once had. He recognized that adrenaline had become his fix, his drug, it had filled something in him.

It didn’t work anymore. Not since B’Ranasha. He’d felt something else then, softer, kinder, ultimately more real.

Adrenaline had been a substitute, a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Loneliness. Yearning.

He’d been asked if he would consider taking an instructor’s position with Excalibur. Maybe he was just getting older, but the idea appealed.

Now his mother didn’t even ask a single detail about the deployment, which was good. Even though she now had her own life and it had made her so much more accepting of his, Ronan thought it might set their growing trust in each other back a bit if he told her he’d just been behind the lines in a country where a military coup was in full swing rescuing the deposed prime minister.

Or, he thought, listening to the happiness in her voice, maybe not.

The big news that she had been trying to reach him about when he’d taken the wedding security position on B’Ranasha, amazingly, had nothing to do with another wedding, or at least not for her. No, she’d had an idea.

She’d wanted to know if he would invest in her new company.

But of course, that wasn’t really what she had been asking. Sometime, probably in that week with Shoshauna, Ronan had developed the sensitivity to know this.

She was really asking for an investment in her. She was asking him, fearfully, painfully, courageously, to believe in her. One last time, despite it all, please.

And isn’t that what love did? Believed? Held the faith even in the face of overwhelming evidence that to believe was naive?

The truth was he had all kinds of money. He’d had a regular paycheck since leaving high school. Renting this apartment was really the first time he’d spent any significant amount of it. His lifestyle had left him with little time and less inclination to spend his money.

Why not gamble it? His mother wanted to start a wedding-planning service and a specialized bridal boutique. Who, after all, was more of an expert on weddings than his mother? There was no sideways feeling in his stomach—not that he was at all certain it worked anymore—so he’d invested. When she’d told him she’d decided on a name for their new company, he’d expected the worst.

“‘Princess,’” she said, “the princess part in teeny letters. That’s important. And then in big letters ‘Bliss.’”

Into his telling silence she had said, “You hate it.”

That was putting it mildly. “I guess I just don’t understand it.”

“No, you wouldn’t, but Ronan, trust me, every woman dreams of being a princess, if only for a day. Especially on that day.”

And then Ronan had been pleasantly surprised and then downright astounded at his mother’s overwhelming success. Within a few months of opening, Princess Bliss had been named by Aussie Business as one of the top-ten new businesses in the country. His mother had been approached about franchising. She was arranging weddings around the globe.

“Kay Harden just called,” his mother told him breathlessly. “She and Henry Hopkins are getting married again.”

“Uh-huh,” Ronan said.

“Do you even know who they are, Jacob?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that! Jacob, you’re hopeless. Movie stars. They’re both movie stars.”

He didn’t care about that, he’d protected enough important people to know the truth. One important person in particular had let him know the truth.

All people, inside, were the very same.

Even soldiers.

“We’re going to have a million-dollar year!” his mother said.

Life was full of cruel ironies: Jake Ronan the man who hated weddings more than any other was going to get rich from them. He’d told his mother he would be happy just to have his initial investment back, but she was having none of it. He was a full, if silent, partner in Princess Bliss, if he liked it or not. And when he saw how happy his mother was, for the first time in his memory since his father had died, he liked it just fine.

“Mom,” he said. “I’m proud of you. I really am. Please, don’t cry.”

But she cried, and talked about her business, and he just listened, glancing around his small apartment while she talked. This was another change he’d made since coming home from B’Ranasha.

After a month back at work he had decided to give up barrack life and get his own place. The brotherhood of his comrades was no longer as comfortable as it once had been. After he’d gotten back from B’Ranasha he had felt an overwhelming desire to be alone, to create his own space, a life separate from his career.

If the apartment was any indication, he hadn’t really succeeded. Try as he might to make it homey, it just never was.

Try as he might to never think about her or that week on the island, he never quite could. He was changed. He was lonely. He hurt.

The apartment was just an indication of something else, wanting more, wanting to have more to life than his work.

And all that money piling up in his bank account, thanks to his partnership in Bliss, was an indication that something more wasn’t about money, either.

He’d contacted Gray Peterson once, a couple of days after leaving B’Ranasha. He’d been in a country so small it didn’t appear on the map, in the middle of a civil war. Trying to sound casual, which was ridiculous given the lengths he’d gone to, to get his hands on a phone, and hard to do with gunfire exploding in the background, he’d asked if she was all right.

And found out the only thing he needed to know: the marriage of Prince Mahail and Princess Shoshauna had been called off. Ronan had wanted to press for details, called off for what reason, by whom, but he’d already known that the phone call was inappropriate, that a soldier asking after a princess was not acceptable in any world that he moved in.

Ronan heard a knock on his door, got up and answered it. “Mom, gotta go. Someone’s at the door.”

Was it Halloween? A child dressed as a motorcycle rider stood on his outside step, all black leather, a helmet, sunglasses.

And then the sunglasses came off, and he recognized eyes as turquoise as the sunlit bay of his boyhood. His mouth fell open.

And then she undid the motorcycle helmet strap, and struggled to get the snug-fitting helmet from her head.

He had to stuff his hands in his pockets to keep from helping her. Finally she had it off.

He studied her hair. Possibly, her hair looked even worse than it had on the island, grown out considerably but flattened by the helmet.

“What are you doing here?” he asked gruffly, as if his heart was not nearly pounding out of his chest, as if he did not want to lift her into his arms and swing her around until she was shrieking with laughter. As if he had not known, the moment he had recognized her, that she was the something more that he yearned for, that filled him with restless energy and a sense of hollow emptiness that nothing seemed to fill.

This was his greatest fear: that with every moment he’d dedicated to helping her find her own power, he had lost some of his own.

“What am I doing here?” she said, with a dangerous flick of her hair. “Try this—‘Shoshauna, what a delightful surprise. I’m so glad to see you.’”

He saw instantly she had come into her own in ways he could not even imagine. She exuded the confidence of a woman sure of herself, sure of her intelligence, her attractiveness, her power.

“I’m going to university here now.”

That explained it. Those smart-alec university guys were probably all over her. He tried not to let the flicker of pure jealousy he felt show. In fact, he deliberately kept his voice remote. “Oh? Good for you.”

She glared at him, looked as if she wanted to stamp her foot or slap him. But then her eyes, smoky with heat, rested on his lips, and he knew she didn’t want to stamp her foot or slap him.

“I didn’t get married,” she announced in a soft, husky purr.

“Yeah, I heard.” No sense telling her he had celebrated as best he could, with a warm soda in one hand and his rifle in the other, watching the sand blow over a hostile land, wishing he had someone, something more to go home to. Feeling guilty for being distracted, wondering if he was just like his mother. Did all relationships equal a surrender of power? Wasn’t that his fear of love?

“But I have dated all kinds of boys.”

“Really.” It was a statement, not a question. He tried not to feel irritated, his sense of having given her way too much power over him confirmed! Seeing her after all this time, all he wanted to do was taste her lips, and he had to hear she was dating guys? Boys. Not men. Why did he feel faintly relieved by that distinction?

“I thought I should. You know, go out with a few of them.”

“And you stopped by to tell me that?” He folded his arms more firmly over his chest, but something twinkled in her eyes, and he had a feeling his defensive posture was not fooling her one little bit. She knew she had stormed his bastions, taken down his defenses long ago.

“Mmm-hmm. And to tell you that they were all very boring.”

“Sorry.”

“And childish.”

“Males are slow-maturing creatures,” he said. Had she kissed any of them, those boys she had dated? Of course she had. That was the way things worked these days. He remembered all too well the sweetness of her kiss, felt something both possessive and protective when he thought of another man—especially a childish one—tasting her.

“I didn’t kiss anyone, though,” she said, and the twinkle in her eyes deepened. Why was it she seemed to find him so transparent? She had always insisted on seeing who he really was, not what he wanted her to see.

He wanted to tell her he didn’t care, but he had the feeling she’d see right through that, too, so he kept his mouth shut.

“I learned to surf last summer. And I can ride a motorcycle now. By myself.”

“So I can see.”

“Ronan,” she said softly, “are you happy to see me?”

He closed his eyes, marshaled himself, opened them again. “Why are you here, Shoshauna?”