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“I’ve had some instructions. A week. We need to disappear for a week.”
She grabbed a pair of shorty-shorts.
“We have to go.”
“I’m not finished.”
He took her elbow, glanced again at the clerk, guided her further back in the room. “Look, Princess, you have a decision to make.”
She spotted a bikini on the rack by his head. “I know!” she said, deliberately missing his point. “Pink or green?”
Definitely pink, but he forced himself to remain absolutely expressionless, pretended he was capable of ignoring the scrap of material she was waving in front of his face. Unfortunately, it was just a little too easy to imagine her in that, how the pink would set off the golden tones of her skin and the color of her eyes, how her long black hair would shimmer against it.
He took a deep breath.
“This is about your life,” he told her quietly. “Not mine. I’m not going to be more responsible for you than you are willing to be for yourself. So, if you want to take chances with your life, if you want to make my life difficult instead of cooperating, I’ll take you back to the palace right now.”
Despite the sunglasses, he could tell by the tightening of her mouth that she didn’t want to go back to the palace, so he pressed on.
“That would work better for me, actually,” he said. “I kind of fell into this. I signed up for wedding security, not to be your bodyguard. I have a commanding officer who’s going to be very unhappy with me if I don’t report back to work on Tuesday.”
He was bluffing. He wasn’t taking her back to the palace until Gray had sorted out who was responsible for the attack at the church. And Gray would look after getting word back to his unit that he had been detained due to circumstances beyond his control.
But she didn’t have to know that. And if he’d read her correctly, she’d been relieved that her wedding had been interrupted, delirious almost. The last thing she wanted to do was go back to her life, pick up where she’d left off.
He kept talking. “I’m sure your betrothed is very worried about you, anxious to make you his wife, so that he can keep you safe. He’s probably way more qualified to do that than I am.”
He could see, clearly, that he had her full attention, and that she was about as eager to get back to her prince as to swim with crocodiles.
So he said, “Maybe that’s the best idea. Head back, a quick secret ceremony, you and your prince can get off the island, have your honeymoon together, and this whole mess will be cleared up by the time you get home.”
His alertness to detail paid off now, because her body language radiated sudden tension. He actually felt a little bit sorry for her. She obviously didn’t want to get married, and if she had feelings for her fiancé they were not positive ones. But again he had to shut down any sense of curiosity or compassion that he felt. That wasn’t his problem, and in protection work, that was the priority: to remember his business—the very narrow perimeters of keeping her safe—and to not care anything about what was her business.
Whether she was gorgeous, ugly, unhappy at love, frustrated with her life, none of that mattered to him. Or should matter to him.
Still, he did feel the tiniest little shiver of unwanted sympathy as he watched her getting paler before his eyes. He was glad for her sunglasses, because he didn’t want to see her eyes just now. She put the pink bikini back, thankfully, but turned and marched to the counter as if she was still the one in charge, as if he was her servant left to trail behind her—and pay the bills.
Apparently paying had not occurred to her. She had probably never had to handle money or even a credit card in her whole life. She would put it on account, or some member of her staff would look after the details for her.
She seemed to realize that at the counter, and he could have embarrassed her, but there was no point, and he certainly did not want the clerk to find anything memorable about this transaction.
“I got it, sweetheart,” he said easily.
Though playing sweethearts had been her idea, she was flustered by it. She looked everywhere but at him. Then, without warning, she reached up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.
“Thanks, Charming,” she said huskily, obviously deciding he needed a code name that matched hers.
But a less-likely prince had never been born, and he knew it.
He hoped the clerk wouldn’t look up, because there might be something memorable about seeing a man blushing because his supposed lady friend had kissed him and used an odd endearment on him.
Ronan didn’t make it worse by looking at her, but he felt a little stunned by the sweetness of her lips on his cheek, by the utter softness, the sensuality of a butterfly’s wings.
“Oh, look,” she said softly, suddenly breathless. She was tapping a worn sign underneath the glass on the counter.
“Motorcycles for rent. Hour, day, week.”
It would be the last time he’d be able to use this credit card, so maybe, despite his earlier rejection of the idea, now was the time to change vehicles. Was it a genuinely good idea or had that spontaneous kiss on the cheek rattled him?
He’d already nixed the motorcycle idea in his own mind. Why was he revisiting the decision?
Was he losing his edge? Finding her just too distracting? He had to do his job, to make decisions based solely on what was most likely to bring him to mission success, which was keeping her safe. Getting stopped in a stolen car was not going to do that. Blending in with the thousands of tourists that scootered around this island made more sense.
Since talking to Gray, he wondered if the whole point of the threats against the princess had been to stop the wedding, not harm her personally.
But he knew he couldn’t let his guard down because of that. He had to treat the threat to her safety as real, or there would be too many temptations to treat it lightly, to let his guard down, to let her get away with things.
“Please?” she said softly, and then she tilted her sunglasses down and looked at him over the rims.
Her eyes were stunning, the color and depth of tropical waters, filled at this moment with very real pleading, as if she felt her life depended on getting on that motorcycle.
Half an hour later, he had a backpack filled with their belongings, he had moved the car off the road into the thick shrubs beside it and he was studying the motorcycle. It was more like a scooter than a true motorcycle.
He took a helmet from a rack beside the motorcycles.
“Come here.”
“I don’t want to wear that! I want to feel the wind in my hair.”
He had noticed hardly anyone on the island did wear motorcycle helmets, probably because the top speed of these little scooters would be about eighty kilometers an hour. Still, acquiring the motorcycle felt a bit like giving in, and he was done with that. His job was to keep her safe in every situation. Life could be cruelly ironic, he knew. It would be terrible to protect her from an assassin and then get her injured on a motorbike.
“Please, Charming?” she said.
That had worked so well last time, she was already trying it again! It served him right for allowing himself to be manipulated by her considerable charm.
She took off her sunglasses and blinked at him. He could see the genuine yearning in her eyes, but knew he couldn’t cave in. This was a girl who was, no doubt, very accustomed to people jumping to make her happy, to wrapping the whole world around her pinky finger.
“Charming isn’t a good code name for me,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not. Charming. And I’m certainly not a prince.” To prove both, he added, sternly, “Now, come here and put on the helmet.”
“Are you wearing one?”
He didn’t answer, just lifted his eyebrow at her, the message clear. She could put on the helmet or she could go home.
Mutinously she snatched the straw hat from her head.
He tried not to let his shock show. In those few unsupervised minutes while he had talked to Gray on the phone, she had gone to the washroom, all right, but not for the reason he had thought or she had led him to believe. Where had she gotten her hands on a pair of scissors? Or maybe, given the raggedness of the cut, she had used a knife.
She was no hairdresser, either. Little chunks of her black hair stood straight up on her head, going every which way. The bangs were crooked. Her ears were tufted. There wasn’t a place where her hair was more than an inch and a half long. Her head looked like a newly hatched chicken, covered in dark dandelion fluff. It should have looked tragic.
Instead, she looked adorable, carefree and elfish, a rebel, completely at odds with the conservative outfit he had picked for her. Without the distraction of her gorgeous hair, it was apparent that her bone structure was absolutely exquisite, her eyes huge, her lips full and puffy.
“Where’s your hair?” he asked, fighting hard not to let his shock show. He shoved the helmet on her head quickly, before she had any idea how disconcerting he found her new look. His fingers fumbled on the strap buckle, he was way too aware of her, and not at all pleased with his awareness. The perfume he’d caught a whiff of at the wedding tickled his nostrils.
“I cut it.”
“I can clearly see that.” Thankfully, the mysteries of the helmet buckle unraveled, he tightened the strap, let his hands fall away. He was relieved the adorable mess of her hair was covered. “What did you do with it after you cut it?”
Her contrite expression told him she had left it where it had fallen.
“So, you did it for nothing,” he said sternly. “Now, when we’re traced this far, and we will be, they’ll find out you cut your hair. And they’ll be looking for a bald girl, easier to spot than you were before.”
“I’m not bald,” she protested.
“I’ve seen better haircuts on new recruits,” he said. She looked crestfallen, he told himself he didn’t care. But he was aware he did, just a little bit.
“I’ll go back and pick up my hair,” she said.
“Never mind. Hopefully no one is going to see you.”
“Does it look that bad?”
He could reassure her it didn’t, but that was something Prince Charming might do. “It looks terrible.”
He hoped she wasn’t going to cry. She put her sunglasses back on a little too rapidly. Her shoulders trembled tellingly.
Don’t be a jerk, he told himself. But then he realized he might be a lot safer in this situation if she did think he was a jerk.
When had his focus switched from her safety to his own?
Rattled, he pushed ahead. “I need you to think very carefully,” he said. “Is there a place on this island we can go where no one would find us for a week?”
He tried not to close his eyes after he said it. A week with her, her new haircut and her new green bikini stuffed in the backpack. Not to mention the shorty-shorts, and a halter top that had somehow been among her purchases.
He could see in her eyes she yearned for things that were forbidden to her, things she might not even be totally aware of, things that went far beyond riding on motorcycles and cutting her hair.
Things her husband should be teaching her. Right this minute. He had no right to be feeling grateful that she had not been delivered into the hands of a man she’d dreaded discovering those things with.
Instead she’d been delivered into his hands. One mission: keep her safe. Even from himself.
Still, he was aware he was a warrior, not a saint. The universe was asking way too much of him.
He turned from her swiftly, got on the motorcycle, persuaded it to life. He patted the seat behind him, not even looking at her.
But not looking at her didn’t help. She slid onto the seat behind him. The skirt hiked way up. Out of his peripheral vision he could see the nakedness of her knee. He glanced back. The skirt was riding high up her thigh.
It was a princess like no one had ever seen, of that he was certain. On the other hand, no one would be likely to recognize her looking like this, either.
“Hang on tight,” he said.
And then he felt her sweet curves pull hard against him. Oh, sure. For once she was going to listen!
“I know a place,” she called into his ear. “I know the perfect place.”
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He slowed, checked the caller ID. His mother. He wrestled an impulse to answer, to yell at her, Don’t do it! Instead he listened to her leave yet another voice mail.
“Ronan, call me. It’s so exciting.”
They were crossing over a bridge, rushing water below, and he took the phone and flung it into the water.
He was in the protection business; sometimes it felt as if the whole world was his responsibility. But the truth was he could not now, and never had been able to, protect his own mother from what she most needed protecting from.
Herself.
Shoshauna pressed her cheek up against the delicious hardness of Ronan’s shoulder. His scent, soapy and masculine, was stronger than the scent of the new shirt.
Alone with him for a week. In a place where no one could find them. It felt dangerous and exciting and terribly frightening, too. She pressed into him, feeling far more endangered than she had when the gun had gone off in the chapel.
Some kind of trembling had started inside her, and it was not totally because he had hurt her feelings telling her her hair looked terrible. It wasn’t totally because of the vibration of the motorbike, either!
“Go faster,” she cried.
He glanced over his shoulder at her.
“It doesn’t go any faster,” he shouted back at her, but he gave it a hit of gas and the little bike surged forward.
Her stomach dropped, and she squealed with delight.
He glanced back again. His lips were twitching. He was trying not to smile. But he did, and his smile was like the sun coming out on the grayest of days. That glimpse of a smile made her forget she had only a short time to squeeze many dreams into, though a week was more than she could have hoped for.
Still, it was as if his smile hypnotized her and made her realize maybe there was one dream he could help make come true. A dream more important than wearing shorts or riding astride or touching snow. A dream that scorned people who pretended all the time.
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