Читать книгу The Royal Collection - Annie West, Rebecca Winters - Страница 27

SHOSHAUNA stared at herself in the mirror in her bedroom and gulped. The bathing suit was really quite revealing. It hadn’t seemed to matter so much when Ronan was way down the shoreline, spearfishing, picking up driftwood, but today he was going to swim with her! Finally.

She could almost hear her mother reacting to her attire. “Common.” Her father would be none to pleased with this outfit, either, especially since she was in the company of a man, completely unchaperoned.

But wasn’t that the whole problem with her life? She had been far to anxious to please others and not nearly anxious enough to please herself. She had always dreamed of being bold, of being the adventurer, but in the end she had always backed away.

She remembered the exhilarating sense of power she had felt when she realized Ronan didn’t want to see this bathing suit, when she’d realized, despite all his determination not to, he found her attractive. Suddenly she wanted to feel that power again. She was so aware of the clock ticking. They had been here four days. There was three left, and then it would be over.

Suddenly nothing could have kept her from the sea, and Ronan.

At the last minute, though, as always, she wrapped a huge bath towel around herself before she stepped out of the house.

Ronan waited outside the door, glanced at her, his expression deadpan, but she was sure she saw a glint of amusement in his eyes, as if he knew she was really too shy to wear that bikini with confidence, with delight in her own power when there was a man in such close quarters.

“Look what I found under the porch,” he said.

Two sets of snorkels and fins! No one could look sexy or feel powerful in a snorkel and fins! Still, she had not snorkeled since the last time she had been here, and she remembered the experience with wonder.

“Was the surfboard there?”

“Yeah, an old longboard. You want me to grab it? You could paddle around on it.”

“No, thank you,” she said. Paddle around on it, as if she was a little kid at the wading pool. She wanted to surf on it—to capture the power of the sea—or nothing at all. Just to prove to him she was not a little kid, at all, she yanked the towel away.

He dropped his sunglasses down over his eyes rapidly, took a sudden interest in the two sets of snorkels and fins, but she could see his Adam’s apple jerk each time he swallowed.

She marched down the sand to the surf, trying to pretend she was confident as could be but entirely aware she was nearly naked and in way over her head without even touching the water. She plunged into the sea as quickly as she could.

Once covered by the blanket of the ocean, she turned back, pretending complete confidence.

“The water is wonderful,” she called. “Come in.” It was true, the water was wonderful, warm, a delight she had been discovering all week was even better against almost-naked skin.

Suddenly she was glad she’d found the courage to wear the bikini, glad she’d left the towel behind, glad she was experiencing how sensuous it was to be in the water with hardly anything between it and her, not even fabric. Her new haircut was perfect for swimming, too! Not heavy with wetness, it dried almost instantly in the sun.

She looked again at the beach. Ronan was watching her, arms folded over his chest, like a lifeguard at the kiddy park.

She was going to get that kiddy-park look off his face if it killed her!

“Come in,” she called again, and then pressed the button she somehow knew, by instinct, he could not stand to have pressed. “Unless you’re scared.”

Not of the water, either, but of her. She felt a little swell of that feeling, power, delicious, seductive, pure feminine power. She had been holding off with it, waiting, uncertain, but now the time felt right.

She watched as Ronan dropped the snorkeling gear in the sand, pulled his shirt over his head. She felt her mouth go dry. This was how she had hoped he would react to her. A nameless yearning engulfed her as she stared at the utter magnificence of his build.

He was pure and utter male perfection. Every fluid inch of him was about masculine strength, a body honed to the perfection of a hard fighting tool.

Shoshauna had thought she would feel like the powerful one if they swam together, but now she could see the power was in the chemistry itself, not in her, not in him.

There was a universal force that called when a certain woman looked at a certain man, when a certain man looked at a certain woman. It pulled them together, an ancient law of attraction, metal to magnet, a law irresistible, as integral as gravity to the earth.

Shoshauna became aware that the “power” she had so wanted to experiment with, to play with, was out of her control. She felt a kind of helpless thrill, like a child who had played with matches and was now having to deal with a renegade spark that had flared to flame.

Impossible to put this particular fire out. Ronan was all sleek muscle and hard lines, not an ounce of superfluous fat or flesh on his powerful male body. His chest was deep, his stomach flat, ridged with ab muscles, his shoulders impossibly broad. His legs were long, rippling with muscle.

He dove cleanly into the water, cutting it with his body. Two powerful strokes carried him to her, another beyond her. She watched, mesmerized, as his strong crawl carried him effortlessly out into the bay. He stopped twenty or thirty yards from her, trod water, shook diamond droplets of the sea from his hair.

Watching him, she realized what she had been doing could not even really be called swimming. She was paddling. No wonder he treated her as if she belonged in the kiddy pool! Bathing suit aside, in the water she was an elephant trying to keep pace with a cheetah!

Ronan flipped over on his back, spread his arms like a star and floated. It looked so comfortable, so relaxing that she tried it and nearly drowned. She came up sputtering for air.

“Are you okay?”

And what if she wasn’t? Would he swim over here, gather her in his arms, maybe give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

“I’m fine,” she squeaked.

He did swim back over, but did not come too close. “You’re about as deep as you should go,” he told her. “I’ve noticed over the past few days you are not a very strong swimmer.”

“In my mother’s mind swimming in the ocean was an activity for the sons and daughters of fishermen.”

“It seems a shame to live in a place like this, surrounded by water and not know how to swim. It seems foolish to me, unnecessarily risky, because with this much water you’re eventually going to have an encounter with it.” Hastily he added, “Not that I’m calling your mother foolish.”

“Plus, she has this thing about showing skin.” And that was with a regular bathing suit.

Ronan eyed her. “I take it she wouldn’t approve of the bathing suit.”

He had noticed.

“She’d have a heart attack,” Shoshauna admitted.

“It’s having just about the same effect on me,” he said with a rueful grin, taking all her power away by admitting he’d noticed, a man incapable of pretense, real, just as she’d known he was.

“That’s why your mom doesn’t want you wearing stuff like that. Men are evil creatures, given to drawing conclusions from visual clues that aren’t necessarily correct.”

Back to the kiddy pool! He was going to turn this into a lecture. But he didn’t. He left it at that, yet she felt a little chastened anyway.

As if he sensed that, he quickly changed the subject. “So, I’ve got you out here in the water. Want to—”

Was she actually hoping he was going to propose something a little evil?

“Want to learn how to swim a little better?”

She nodded, both relieved and annoyed by his ability to treat her like a kid, his charge, nothing more.

“You won’t be ready to enter the Olympics after one lesson, but if you fall out of a boat, you’ll be able to survive.”

It had probably been foolish to suggest teaching Shoshauna to swim. But the fact of the matter was she lived on an island. She was around water all the time. It seemed an unbelievable oversight to him that her education had not included swimming lessons.

On the other hand, what did he know about what skills a princess needed? Still, he felt he could leave here a better man knowing that if she did fall off a boat, she could tread water until she was rescued.

Probably he was kidding himself that he was teaching her something important. If a princess fell overboard, surely ten underlings jumped in the water after her.

But somehow it was increasingly important to him that she know how to save herself. And maybe not just if she fell off a boat. All these things he had been teaching her this week were skills that made no sense for a princess.

But for a woman coming into herself, learning the power of self-reliance seemed vital. It felt important that if he gave her nothing else, he gave her a taste of that: what her potential was, what she was capable of doing and learning if she set her mind to it.

Because Ronan was Australian and had grown up around beaches and heavy surf, he had quite often been chosen to instruct other members of Excalibur in survival swimming.

Thankfully, he could teach just about anybody to swim without ever laying a hand on them.

She was a surprisingly eager student, more willing to try things in the water than many a seasoned soldier. Like the things she had been doing on land, he soon realized she had no fear, and she learned very quickly. By the end of a half hour, she could tread water for a few minutes, had the beginnings of a not bad front crawl and could do exactly two strokes of a backstroke before she sank and came up sputtering.

And then disaster struck, the kind, from teaching soldiers, he was totally unprepared for.

She was treading water, when her mouth formed a startled little O. She forgot to sweep the water, wrapped her arms around herself and promptly sank.

His mind screamed shark even though he had evaluated the risks of swimming in the bay and decided they were minimal.

When she didn’t bob right back to the surface, he was at her in a second, dove, wrapped his arm around her waist, dragged her up. No sign of a shark, though her arms were still tightly wrapped around her chest.

Details. Part of him was trying to register what was wrong, when she sputtered something incomprehensible and her face turned bright, bright red.

“My top,” she sputtered.

For a second he didn’t comprehend what she was saying, and when he did he was pretty sure the heart attack he’d teased her about earlier was going to happen for real. He had his arms around a nearly naked princess.

He let go of her so fast she started to sink again, unwilling to unwrap her arms from around her naked bosom.

Somehow her flimsy top had gone missing!

“Swim in to where you can stand up,” he ordered her sharply.

He knew exactly what tone to use on a frightened soldier to ensure instant obedience, and it worked on her. She headed for shore, doing a clumsy one-armed crawl—her other arm still firmly clamped over her chest—that he might have found funny if it was anyone but her. As soon as he made sure she was standing up on the ocean bottom, he looked around.

The missing article was floating several yards away. He swam over and grabbed it, knew it was the wrong time to think how delicate it felt, how fragile in his big, rough hands, what a flimsy piece of material to be given so much responsibility.

He came up behind her. She was standing up to her shoulder blades in water and still had a tight wrap on herself, but there was no hiding the naked line of her back, the absolute feminine perfection of her.

“I’ll look away,” he said, trying to make her feel as if it was no big deal. “You put it back on.”

Within minutes she had the bathing suit back on, but she wouldn’t look at him. And he was finding it very difficult to look at her.

Wordlessly she left the water, spread out her towel and lay down on her stomach. She still wouldn’t even look at him and he figured maybe that was a good thing. He put on the snorkeling gear and headed back out into the bay.

He began to see school after school of butterfly fish, many that he recognized as the same as he would see in the reefs off Australia: the distinctive yellow, white and black stripes of the threadfin, the black splash of color that identified the teardrop.

Suddenly, Ronan didn’t want her to stay embarrassed all day, just so that he could be protected from his own vulnerability around her. He didn’t want her to miss the enchantment of the reef fish.

Her embarrassment over the incident was a good reminder to him that she had grown up very sheltered. She had sensed the bikini would get his attention, but she hadn’t known what to do with it when she succeeded.

In his world, girls were fast and flirty and knew exactly what to do with male attention. Her innocence in a bold world made him want to share the snorkeling experience with her even more.

They would focus on the fish, the snorkeling, not each other.

“Shoshauna! Put on a snorkel and fins. You have to see this.”

He realized he’d called her by her first name, as if they were friends, as if it was okay for them to snorkel together, to share these moments.

Too late to back out, though. She joined him in the water, but not before tugging on her bathing suit strings about a hundred times to make sure they were secure.

And then she was beside him, and the magic happened. They swam into a world of such beauty it was almost incomprehensible. Fish in psychedelic colors that ranged from brilliant orange to electric blue swam around them. They saw every variety of damselfish, puffer fish, triggerfish, surgeonfish.

He tapped her shoulder. “Watch those ones,” he said, pointing at an orange band. “It’s a type of surgeonfish, they’re called that because their spines are scalpel sharp.”

Her wonder was palpable when a Moorish idol investigated her with at least as much interest as she was giving it! A school of the normally shy neon-green and blue palenose parrot fishes swam around her as if she was part of the sea.

He was not sure when he lost interest in the fish and focused instead on her reaction to them. Ronan was not sure he had seen anything as lovely as the awed expression on her face when a bluestripe snapper kissed her hand.

He was breaking all the rules. And somehow it seemed worth it. And somehow he didn’t care. Time evaporated, and he was stunned when he saw the sun going down in the sky.

They went in to shore, dried the saltwater off with towels. He saw she was looking at him with a look that was both innocent and hungry.

“I’m going to cook dinner,” he said gruffly. Suddenly breaking the rules didn’t seem as great, it didn’t seem worth it, and he did care.

He cared because he felt something, and he knew it was huge. He felt the desire to know someone. He wanted to know her better. He wanted things he had never wanted and that, in this case, he knew he could never have.

These four days together had created an illusion that they were just two normal people caught up together. These days had allowed him to see her as real, as few people had ever seen her. These days had allowed him to see her, and he had liked what he had seen. It was natural to want to know more, to explore where this affinity he felt for her could go.

But the island was a fantasy, one so strong it had diluted reality, made him forget reality.

He was a soldier. She was a princess. Their worlds were a zillion miles apart. She was promised to someone else.

With those facts foremost in his mind, he cooked dinner, refusing her offer to help, and he was brusque with her when she asked him if he knew the name of a bright-yellow snout-nosed fish they had seen. She took the hint and they ate in blessed silence. Why did he miss being peppered with her questions? Did she, too, realize that a dangerous shift had happened between them?

Still, getting ready for bed, he was congratulating himself on what a fine job he’d done on reerecting the barriers, when he heard an unmistakable whimper from her room.

Surely she wasn’t that embarrassed over her brief nude scene?

He knew he had to ignore her, but then she cried out again, the sound muffled, as if she had a blanket stuffed in her mouth. It was the sound being stifled that made him bolt from his room, and barge through her door.

She was alone, in bed. No enemy had crept up on him while he’d been busy playing reef guide instead of doing his job.

“What’s the matter?” He squinted at her through the darkness.

The sheet was pulled up around her, right to her chin.

“I hurt so bad.”

“What do you mean?”

He lit the hurricane lamp that had been left on a chair just inside her door, moved to the side of her bed and gazed down at her. She reluctantly pulled the sheet down just enough to show him her shoulders. That’s why she had been quiet at dinner.

Not embarrassed, not taking the hint that he didn’t want to talk to her, but in pain. Even in the light of the lantern he could clearly see she was badly sunburned. Cursing himself silently, he wondered how close she had come to heat exhaustion.

White lines where her bikini straps had been were in sharp contrast to her skin.

Because her skin tones were so golden it had never occurred to him she might burn. It had not seemed scorchingly hot out today. On the other hand he should have known breezes coming off the water could make it seem cooler than it was. It had never occurred to him that someone who lived in this island paradise might not avail themselves of the outdoors.

He remembered, too late, what she had said about her mother. “Has your skin ever seen the sun before?” he asked her.

She shook her head, contrite. “Not for a long time. I was allowed to come here until I was about thirteen, but then my mother thought I was getting to be too much of a tomboy. She thought skin darkened by the sun was—”

“Let me guess,” he said dryly. “Common.”

He was rewarded with a weak smile from her. Selfish bastard that he was he thought, At least I’m not going to have to see her in a bikini again for the three days we have left here on the island.

But there was another test he had to pass right now. He was going to have to administer first aid to her burns. She’d exposed her back to the sun while they snorkeled. The water beading on it had drawn the sun like a magnet. Though her shoulders were very red looking, most of that burn was going to be on her back where she couldn’t reach it herself.

Having grown up in Australia, he was cautious of the sun, but his skin was also more acclimatized to sun than that of most of the people he worked with. He did not have fair coloring, his skin seemed to like the sun.

But many times after long training days in the sun, especially desert training, soldiers were hurting. Ronan had learned lots of ways to ease the sting with readily available ingredients: either vinegar or baking soda added to bath water could bring relief. Unfortunately, just as when he was in the field, they didn’t have a bath here.

What they did have was aspirin, he had seen that in a cabinet in the outdoor kitchen, and powdered milk, an ingredient he’d used before to field dress a sunburn.

He knew, though, there was going to be a big difference between placing soothing dressings cooled with freshly made milk onto her back, and slapping it onto a fellow soldier’s.

All day he’d struggled to at least keep the physical barriers between them up, since the emotional ones seemed to be falling faster than he could reerect them. When she’d lost the top, and he’d wrapped his arms around her to pull her back to the water’s surface, he’d known he had to avoid going to that place again at all costs, skin against skin.

But here he was at that place again. It almost felt as if the universe was conspiring against him.

But she was his charge. He had no choice. He felt guilty that she’d gotten burned on his watch in the first place. It was proof, really, he could not be trusted with softer things, more tender things, things that required a gentle touch.

It was proof, too, that he was preoccupied, missing the details that he had always been so good at catching.

“Come on out to the kitchen,” he said gruffly. “I’ll put something on that that will make it feel better.”

“I can’t get dressed,” she told him, and blushed. “My skin feels like its shrinking. I don’t think I can move my arms. I don’t want to put anything on that touches my skin.”

Oh well, just run out there naked then.

He yanked the sheet out from the bottom of the bed and tucked it around her right up to her chin. “Come on.”

She wobbled out behind him to the kitchen, the sheet draped clumsily over her, him uncomfortably and acutely aware that underneath it she was probably as naked as the day she was born. The outfit was somehow as dangerous—maybe more so—than the bikini had been.

And the night was dangerous—the stars like jewels in the night sky, the flowers releasing their perfume with a gentle and seductive vengeance.

“Sit,” he said, swinging a chair out for her. He took a deep breath, prayed for strength and then did what had to be done. He lifted the sheet away from her back, forced himself to be clinical.

Her back looked so tender with burn that he forgot how awkward this situation was. The marks where her bikini strings had been tied up dissected it, at her neck and midback, white lines in stark contrast to the rest of her. Her skin was glowing bright red on top of her copper tones.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, his sympathy genuine, his guilt acute even though he knew how hard it was to spot a burn as it was happening in the full sunlight, “but in the next few days your skin is going to be peeling. It may even blister.”

“Really?” she asked.

She couldn’t possibly sound, well, pleased, rather than distressed.

He had to make it a bit clearer. “Um, you could probably be lizard lady at the sideshow for a week or two.”

“Really?” she said, again.

No doubt about it. Definitely pleased.

“Is there some reason that would make you happy?” he asked.

“Between my new hair and lizard lady, Prince Mahail will probably call off the wedding. Indefinitely.”

Now there was no mistaking the pleasure in her voice.

Don’t ask, Ronan. “Is he really that superficial?”

“He chose me for my hair!”

Well, he’d asked. Now he had to deal with the rush of indignation he felt. A man chose a wife for her hair?

It was primitive and tyrannical. It was not what she deserved. Wasn’t he in the business of protecting democracy? Of protecting people’s freedoms and right to choose? If she was being forced into this, then what? Cause an international incident by imposing his values on B’Ranasha, by rescuing the princess from her fate?

“Are you being forced to marry him?” he asked.

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nobody forced me to say yes, but there was enormous pressure, the weight of everybody’s expectations.”

He turned from her quickly to stave off the impulse to shake her. Here he’d been thinking he had to rescue her when the aggravating truth was she had not, as far as he could see, made a single move to rescue herself. She seemed to just be blindly trusting something was going to happen to get her out of her marriage. And much as he hated to admit it, so far that had worked not too badly for her.

But her luck was going to run out, and for a take-charge kind of guy, relying on luck to determine fate was about the worst possible policy.

Rather than share that with her, or allow her to see the fury he felt with her, Ronan busied himself mixing a solution of powdered milk and water in a big bowl. He tore several clean tea towels into rags and submerged them in the mixture.

Then, his unwanted surge of emotion under control, a gladiator who had no choice but the ring, he turned back to her, lifted the sheet off her back.

“Hold that up for me.”

He laid the first of the milk-soaked rags flat on her naked back, smoothed it on with his hands. She seemed unbelievably delicate. Her skin was hot beneath the dressing. And, for now anyway, before the inevitable peeling, it felt incredibly smooth, flawless beneath his fingertips. He didn’t know of any other way to bring her comfort, but touching her like this was intimate enough to make him feel faintly crazy, a purely primitive longing welling up within him.

He thought she might flinch, but instead she gave a little moan of pleasure and relief as the first cool, milk-soaked dressing adhered to her back, a sound that could have easily been made in another context.

“Oh,” she breathed. “That feels so good. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything that good.”

His wicked male mind wondered just how innocent that made her. Plenty innocent. And it was his job to keep it that way.

He thought about a man he had never seen, whom he knew nothing about, becoming her husband, being trusted with her delicacy, and he felt another unwanted stab of strong emotion.

Not jealousy, he told himself, God forbid, not jealousy, just an extension of his job. Protectiveness.

But he knew it wasn’t exactly a part of his job to wonder, was that man whom she had almost married, worthy of her? Would her prince be able to make her pleasure as important as his own when the time came? Would he be tender and considerate? Would he stoke the fire that burned in her eyes, or would he put it out?

Ronan, he reprimanded himself. Stop it! By her own admission, she was not being forced into anything. It was her problem not his.

Still, the feeling of craziness intensified, he felt a sudden primitive need to show her what it should feel like, all heat and passion, tenderness and exquisite pleasure. If she’d ever experienced what was real between a man and a woman she wouldn’t accept a substitute, no matter how much pressure she thought she felt.

She was seriously going to pay with her life to relieve a little temporary pressure from her folks?

He gave himself a fierce mental shake. His thinking was ludicrous, totally unacceptable, completely corrupted by emotion. He had known her less than a full week, which really meant he did not know her at all!

He was not dating her, he was protecting her. Imagining his lips on her lips was not a part of the mission.

Who would have thought he would end up having to protect the princess from himself?

“Leave those dressings on there for twenty minutes,” he said, his voice absolutely flat, not revealing one little bit of his inner struggle, the madness that was threatening to envelope him. “Unfortunately in this heat the residue of the milk will start to sour if you leave it on overnight. You’re going to have to rinse off in the shower before you go back to bed.” He passed her some aspirin and a glass of water.

“This will take the sting out.” He sounded as if he was reading from a first-aid manual. “Drink all the water, too, just in case you’re a bit dehydrated. I think you’ll sleep like a baby after all this.”

She probably would, too, but he was wondering if he was ever going to sleep again!

Fixing her up had taken way too long, even with him trying to balance a gentle touch with his urgency to get this new form of torture over with.

“I’ll head back to bed, I’ll leave this lamp for you. You can peel those dressings off by yourself in twenty minutes or so. Don’t forget to shower.”

“All right.”

“You should be okay for a few hours. If the pain comes back, starts bugging you, wake me up. We’ll do it all again.” He had to suck it up to even make that offer. He didn’t want to touch her back again, have her naked under a sheet, the two of them alone in a place just a little too much like paradise.

No wonder Adam and Eve had gone for the apple!

“Ronan?” Her voice was husky. She touched his arm.

He froze, aware he was holding his breath, scared of what could happen next, if she asked him to stay with her. Scared of the physical attraction, scared of the thoughts he had had earlier.

“What?” He growled.

“Thank you so much.”

What was he expecting? She was burned to a crisp. The last thing on her mind was, well, the thing that was on his mind. Which was her lips, soft and pliable, and how they would feel underneath his, how they would taste.

“Just doing my job.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes met his. There was no mistaking the heat and the hunger that changed their color from turquoise to a shade of indigo. He realized it wasn’t the last thing on her mind after all. That one small push from the universe and they’d be all over each other, burn or no burn. The awareness that sizzled in the air between them put that burn on her back to shame.

He sucked in a deep breath, then ducked his head, turned abruptly and walked quickly away from her.

It took more discipline to do that than to do two hundred push-ups at the whim of a aggravated sergeant, to make a bed perfectly for the thousandth time, to jump out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet in the dead of the night. Way more.

He glanced at his watch to check the date. He had to get control over this situation before it deteriorated any more.

But when he thought of her shaking droplets of water from the jagged tips of her hair, laughing, the tenderness of her back underneath the largeness of his hands, he felt a dip in the bottom of his belly.

He focused on it, but it wasn’t that familiar warning, his sideways feeling. It was a warmth as familiar as the sun and as necessary to life.

What had happened to his warning system? Had it become dismantled? Ronan wondered if he had lost some part of himself that he needed in the turquoise depths of her eyes.

Isn’t that what he’d learned about love from his mother? That relationships equaled the surrender of power?

“You are not having a relationship with her,” he told himself sternly, but the words were hollow, and he knew he had already crossed lines he didn’t want to cross.

But tomorrow was a new day, a new battle. He was a warrior and he fully intended to recapture his lost power.