Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish (25 page)

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?”

Not princess, a lapse in protocol that she noticed, too. She beamed at him.

“I want to play you a game of chess.”

He didn’t move from the doorway. A game of chess. He tried not to look at her lips. A game of chess was about the furthest thing from his poor, beleaguered male mind. “Why?” he croaked.

“If I win,” 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, Ronan,” she said gently. “It was never about the chess.”

“So I see.” He was surrendering to her, just as he had on the island, even though he didn’t want to, even though he knew better. Bliss. It unfolded in him like a sail that had finally caught the wind, it filled him, it carried him forward into a brand-new land.

She beat him soundly at chess, though he might have been slightly distracted by the scent of her, by the pure heaven of having her in the same room again, by the sound of her voice, the light in her eyes, the way she ran her hand through the disaster that was her hair.

“Do you know why I dated those other boys?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“So that you wouldn’t have one single excuse to say no to me. So that you couldn’t say, ‘You only think you love me. You don’t know anyone else.’”

“Love?” he said.

She sighed. “Ronan, I made it perfectly clear it wasn’t about the chess game.”

That was true, she had.

“So,” he said, “what do you want to do for that date?”

What would a princess want to do? The opera? Live theater? Was he going to have to get a new wardrobe?

“Oh,” she said, “I want to go to a pub for fish and chips and then to a movie after. Just like an ordinary girl.”

His mother had been so wrong. Not every girl wanted to be a princess, not at all. Still, when he looked at her and smiled, he knew there was no hope she would ever be an ordinary girl, either.

And suddenly it came to him, a truth that was at the very core of humanity. A truth that was humbling and reassuring at the very same time.

Love was more powerful than he was.

He got up from his chair, came around to hers and tugged her out of it. Shoshauna came into his arms as if she was coming home.

“I guess,” he whispered against her hair, “it’s time for you to start calling me Jake.”

* * *

He picked her up for their first official date three nights later. He felt like a teenager getting ready. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, trying for just the right note of casual.

As he approached her address, he was aware that for a man who had done the most dangerous things in the world with absolute icy calm, his heart was beating faster, and his palms were sweat-slicked.

She lived on campus in what looked to be a very ordinary house until he went to the front door, rang the bell and was let in.

There were girls everywhere, short girls, tall girls, skinny girls, heavy girls. There were girls dressed to go to nightclubs and girls in their pajamas. There were girls with their hair in rollers and girls hidden behind frightening facial masks of green creams and white creams. And it seemed when he stood in that front foyer, every single one of them stopped and looked at him. Really looked.

“Sexy beast,” one of them called out. “Who are you here for?”

The last time he had blushed was when Shoshauna had kissed him on the cheek and called him Charming in that little market in B’Ranasha. She was determined to put him in predicaments that stretched him! At least now he knew a little blush wouldn’t kill him.

“I’m here for Shoshauna.” There were groans and calls of “lucky girl,” and he found himself blushing harder.

But when he saw her, coming down the steps, two at a time, flying toward him, all thought of himself, of his wild discomfort at finding himself, a man so used to a man’s world, so surrounded by women, was gone.

There was a look on her face when she saw him that he knew he would never forget, not if he lived to be 102.

It was unguarded and filled with tenderness.

A memory niggled at him, of a moment a long, long time ago. His father coming up the steps from work, in combat uniform, his mother running to meet him, a look just like the one on Shoshauna’s face now in her eyes. And he remembered how his father had looked at her. Despite the uniform, in that moment his father had not been a warrior. No, just a man, filled with wonder, gentled by love, amazed.

In the next few weeks, even though Ronan had to run the gauntlet of her housemates every time he saw her, he spent every moment he could with her. Every second they could wangle away from hectic schedules, they were together. Simple moments—a walk, holding hands, eating pizza, playing darts at the pub—simple moments became infused with a light from heaven.

Ronan was aware that, left to his own devices, he would have performed his duties perfectly on B’Ranasha. He would have been a perfect professional, he would never have allowed himself to become personally involved with the principal.

And he would have missed this: the tenderness, the sweetness of falling head over heels in love. But somehow, some way, a kind universe had taken pity on him, given him what he needed the most, even though he had been completely unaware of that need. Even though he had strenuously denied that need and tried to fight against it.

Falling in love with Shoshauna was like waking from a deep hypnotic state. When he woke in the morning, his first thought was of her. He felt as if he was living to make her laugh, to feel the touch of her hand, to become aware of her eyes resting on his face, something in them so unguarded and so breathtakingly, exquisitely beautiful.

For some reason he, a rough soldier, had come to be loved by a woman like this one. He planned to be worthy of it.

* * *

Shoshauna looked around, let the trade winds lift her hair. There was a flower-laced pagoda set up on the beach, the royal palace of B’Ranasha white and beautiful in the background. They had tried to keep things small, but even so the hundred chairs facing the wedding pagoda were filled. The music of a single flute intertwined with the music of the waves that lapped gently on the sand.

Jake’s mother, Bev, had managed to get over her disappointment that, despite the fact it was a royal wedding, her first, they wanted nothing elaborate. Now Shoshauna saw why her mother-in-law’s business was so successful: she had read their hearts and given them exactly what they wanted—simplicity—the beauty provided by the ocean, the white-capped waves in the blue bay the perfect backdrop to the day.

Shoshauna wore a simple white sheath, her feet were bare, she had a single flower in her hair.

She watched from the tree line as Jake made his way across the sand and felt the tears rise in her eyes. Beloved.

He was flanked by Gray Peterson, just as he had been the first time she had seen him, but this time Jake looked calm and relaxed, a man at ease despite the formality of the black suit he was wearing, the people watching him, the fact it was his wedding day.

It had been almost a year since she had first laid eyes on him, six months since she had won her first date with him in that chess match.

Since then there had been so much laughter as they discovered a brand-new world together—a world seen through the viewfinder of love.

They had ridden motorcycles, gone to movies, walked hand in hand down rain-filled streets, played chess and done nothing at all. Everything was equally as astounding when she did it with him.

He was so full of surprises. Who would have ever guessed he had such a romantic nature hidden under that stern exterior? The kitten as a gift should have been her first clue! He was constantly surprising her with heartfelt or funny little gifts: a tiara he’d gotten at a toy store; a laser pointer that drove the kitten, Hope, to distraction; a book of poems; a pink bikini that she would use now, for the first time, on her honeymoon.

And the stern exterior was just that. An exterior. She’d always thought he was good-looking, but now the hard lines on his face were relaxed around her, and the stern mask was gone from his eyes. The remoteness was gone from him and so was his need to exercise absolute control over everything. Jake Ronan seemed to have enjoyed every second of letting go of control, seeing where life—and love—would take them, if they gave it a chance.

It had taken them to this 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.