Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish (14 page)

“Here, too. Aurora—” he named the princess in Sleeping Beauty, a reference that was largely cultural, that might not be understood by anyone listening “—is fine.”

“Excellent. We have the perp. No one injured. The guy was firing blanks. He could have been killed. What kind of nutcase does that?”

He contemplated that for a moment and came up with one who wants to stop the wedding. “Want me to bring her back in? Maybe they could still go ahead with the ceremony.”

Details. The princess flinched ever so slightly beside him.

“No. Absolutely not. Something’s wrong here. Really wrong. Nobody should have been able to penetrate the security around that wedding. It has to be someone within the palace, so I don’t want her back here until I know who it is. Can you keep her safe until I get to the bottom of it?”

Ronan contemplated that. He had a handgun and two clips of ammunition. He was a stranger to the island and was now in possession of a stolen vehicle, not to mention a princess.

Despite circumstances not being anywhere near perfect, he knew in his business perfect circumstances were in short supply. It was a game of odds, and of trust in one’s own abilities. “Affirmative,” he said.

“I can’t trust my phone, but we can probably use yours once more to give you a time frame and set a rendezvous.”

“All right.” He should have hung up, but he made the mistake of glancing at her pinched face. “Ah, Gray? Is her grandfather all right?”

“Slamming back the Scotch.” Gray lowered his voice, “Though he actually seems a little, er, pleased, that his granddaughter didn’t manage to get married.”

Ronan pocketed his phone. “Your grandfather’s fine.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful news! Thank you!”

“I can’t take you back just yet, though.”

Some finely held tension disappeared from her shoulders, as if she allowed herself to start breathing after holding her breath.

Eyes that had been clouded with worry, suddenly tilted upward when she smiled. If he was not mistaken, and he rarely was, given his gift with details, a certain mischief danced in their turquoise depths.

She did not inquire about the groom, and now that her concerns for her grandfather had been relieved, she didn’t look anything like a woman who had just had her wedding ceremony shattered by gunfire, her dress shredded. In fact, she looked downright happy. As if to confirm that conclusion, she took off her bridal headdress, held it out the window and let the wind take it. She laughed with delight as it floated behind them, children chasing it down the street.

The wind billowing through the open window caught at the tendrils of her hair, and she shook it all free from the remaining pins that held it, and it spilled down over the slenderness of her shoulders.

If he was not mistaken, Princess Shoshauna was very much enjoying herself.

“Look, Your Highness,” he said, irritated. “This is not a game. Don’t be throwing anything else out the window that will make us easy to follow or remember.”

She tossed her hair and gave him a look that was faintly mutinous. Obviously, because of her position, she was not accustomed to being snapped at. But that was too bad. There was only room for one boss here, and it wasn’t going to be her.

With the imminent danger now at bay, at least temporarily, his thought processes slowed, and he began to sort information. His assessment of the situation wasn’t good. He had been prepared to do a little wedding security, not to find himself in possession of a princess who had someone trying to kill her.

He didn’t know the island. He had no idea where he could take her where it would be secure. He had very little currency, and at some point he was going to have to feed her, and get her out of that all-too-attention-grabbing outfit. He had to assume that whoever was after her would be sophisticated enough to trace credit card use. Ditto for his cell phone. They could use it once more to arrange a time and place for a rendezvous and then he’d have to pitch it. On top of that, he had to assume this vehicle had already been reported stolen; it would have to be ditched soon.

On the plus side, she was alive, and he planned to keep it that way. He had a weapon, but very little ammunition.

He was going to have to use the credit card once. To get them outfitted. By the time it was traced, they could be a long way away.

“Do you have any enemies?” he asked her. If he had one more phone call with Gray, maybe he could have some information for him. Plus, it would help him to know if this threat was about something personal or if it was politically motivated. Each of those scenarios made for a completely different enemy.

“No,” she said, but he saw the moment’s hesitation.

“No one hates you?”

“Of course not.” But again he sensed hesitation, and he pushed.

“Who do you think did this?” he asked. “What’s your gut feeling?”

“What’s a gut feeling?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“Your instinct.”

“It’s silly.”

“Tell me,” he ordered.

“Prince Mahail was seeing a woman before he asked me to marry him. She’s actually a cousin of mine. She acted happy for me, but—”

Details. People chose to ignore them, which was too bad. “Your instincts aren’t silly,” he told her gruffly. “They could keep you alive. What’s her name?”

“I don’t want her to get in trouble. She probably has nothing to do with this.”

The princess wasn’t just choosing to ignore her instincts, but seemed determined to. Still, he appreciated her loyalty.

“She won’t be in trouble.” If she didn’t do anything. “Her name?”

“Mirassa,” she said, but reluctantly.

“Now tell me how to find a market. A small one, where I can get food. And something for you to wear.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “Can I have shorts?” She blinked at him, her lashes thick as a chimney brush over those amazing ocean-bay eyes.

He tried not to sigh audibly. Wasn’t that just like a woman? Even a crisis could be turned into an opportunity to shop!

“I’m getting what draws the least attention to you,” he said, glancing over at her long legs exposed by her torn dress. “I somehow doubt that’s going to be shorts.”

“Am I going to wear a disguise?” she asked, thrilled.

She was determined not to get how serious this was. And maybe that was good. The last thing he needed was hysteria.

“Sure,” he said, going along, “you get to wear a disguise.”

“You could pretend to be my boyfriend,” Princess Shoshauna said, with way too much enthusiasm. “We could rent a motorcycle and blend in with the tourists. How long do you think you’ll have to hide me?”

“I don’t know yet. Probably a couple of days.”

“Oh!” she said, pleased, determined to perceive this life-and-death situation as a grand adventure. “I have always wanted to ride a motorcycle!”

The urge to strangle her was not at all in keeping with the businesslike, absolutely emotionless attitude he needed to have around her. That attitude would surely be jeopardized further by pretending to be her boyfriend, by sharing a motorcycle with her. His mind went there—her pressed close, her crotch pressed into the small of his back, the bike throbbing underneath them.

Buck up, soldier, he ordered himself. There’s going to be no motorcycle.

“I’ll cut my hair,” she decided.

It was the first reasonable idea she had presented, but he was aware he wasn’t even considering it. Her hair was long and straight, jet-black and glossy. Her hair was glorious. He wasn’t letting her cut her hair, even if it would be the world’s greatest disguise.

He knew he was making that decision for all the wrong reasons, and that his professionalism had just slipped the tiniest little notch. There was no denying the sideways feeling seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his stomach.

* * *

Shoshauna slid the man who was beside her a look and felt the sweetest little dip in the region of her stomach. He was incredibly good-looking. His short hair was auburn, burnt brown with strands of red glinting as the sun struck it. His eyes, focused on the road, were topaz colored, like a lion’s. As if the eyes were not hint enough of his strength, there was the formidable set of his lips, the stubborn set of his chin, the flare of his nostrils.

He was a big man, broad and muscled, not like the slighter men of B’Ranasha. When he had thrown her onto the floor of the chapel, she had felt the shock first. No man had ever touched her like that before! Technically, it had been more a tackle than a touch. But then she had become aware of the hard, unforgiving lines of him, felt the strange and forbidden thrill of his male body shielding hers.

Even now she watched as his hands found their way to his necktie, tugged impatiently at it. He loosened it, tugged it free, shoved it in his pocket. Next, he undid the top button of his shirt, rubbed his neck as if he’d escaped the hangman’s noose.

“What’s your name?” she asked. It was truly shocking, considering how aware she’d felt of him, within seconds of marrying someone else. She glanced at his fingers, was entranced by the shape of them, the faint dusting of hair on the knuckles. Shocked at herself, she realized she could imagine them tangling in her hair.

Of course, she had led a somewhat sheltered life. This was the closest she had ever been, alone, to a man who was not a member of her own family. Even her meetings with her fiancé, Prince Mahail of the neighboring island, had been very formal and closely chaperoned.

“Ronan,” he said, and then had to swerve to miss a woman hauling a basket of chickens on her bicycle. He said a delicious-sounding word that she had never heard before, even though she considered her English superb. The little shiver that went up and down her spine told her the word was naughty. Very naughty.

“Ronan.” She tried it out, liked how it felt on her tongue. “You must call me Shoshauna!”

“Your Highness, I am not calling you Shoshauna.” He muttered the name of a deity under his breath. “I think it’s thirty lashes for calling a member of the royal family by their first name.”

“Ridiculous,” she told him, even though it was true: no one but members of her immediate family would even dare being so familiar as to call her by her first name. That was part of the prison of her role as a member of B’Ranasha’s royal family.

But she’d been rescued! Her prayers had been answered just when she had thought there was no hope left, when she had resigned herself to the fact she had agreed to a marriage to a man she did not love.

She did not know how long this reprieve could possibly last, but despite Ronan telling her so sternly this was not a game, Shoshauna intended to make the very most of it. Whether she had been given a few hours or a few days, she intended to be what she might never be again. Free. To be what she had always wanted most to be.

An ordinary girl. With an ordinary life.

She was determined to get a conversation going, to find out as much about this intriguing foreigner as she could. She glanced at his lips and shivered. Would making the most of the gift the universe had handed her include tasting the lips of the intriguing foreigner?

She knew how wrong those thoughts were, but her heart beat faster at the thought. How was it that imagining kissing Ronan, a stranger, could fill her with such delirious curiosity, when the thought of what was supposed to have happened tonight, between her and the man who should have become her husband, Prince Mahail, filled her with nothing but dread?

“What nationality are you?”

“Does it matter? You don’t have to know anything about me. You just have to listen to me.”

His tone, hard and cold, did not sound promising in the kiss department! Miffed, she wondered how he couldn’t know that when a princess asked you something, you did not have the option of not answering. Even though she desperately wanted to try life as an ordinary girl, old habit made her give him her most autocratic stare, the one reserved for misbehaving servants.

“Australian,” he snapped.

That explained the accent, surely as delicious sounding as the foreign phrase he had uttered so emphatically when dodging the chicken bicycle. She said the word herself, out loud, using the same inflection he had.

The car swerved, but he regained control instantly. “Don’t say that word!” he snapped at her, and then added, a reluctant afterthought at best, “Your Highness.”

“I’m trying to improve my English!”

“What you’re trying to do is get me a one-way ticket to a whipping post for teaching the princess curse words. Do they still whip people here?”

“Of course,” she lied sweetly. His expression darkened to thunder, but then he looked hard at her, read the lie, knew she was having a little fun at his expense. He made a cynical sound deep in his throat.

“Are women in Australia ever forced to marry men they don’t love?” she asked. But the truth was, she had not been forced. Not technically. Her father had given her a choice, but it had not been a real choice. The weight of his expectation, her own desperate desire to please him, to be of value to him had influenced her decision.

Plus, Prince Mahail’s surprise proposal had been presented at a low point in her life, just days after her cat, Retnuh, had died.

People said it was just a cat, had been shocked at her level of despair, but she’d had Retnuh since he was a kitten, since she’d been a little girl of eight. He’d been her friend, her companion, her confidante, in a royal household that was too busy to address the needs of one insignificant and lonely little princess.

“Turn here, there’s a market down this road.”

He took the right, hard, then looked straight ahead.

“Well?” she asked, when it seemed he planned to ignore her.

“People get married all over the world, for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “Love is no guarantee of success. Who even knows what love is?”

“I do,” she said stubbornly. It seemed her vision of what it was had crystallized after she’d agreed to marry the completely wrong man. But by then it had been too late. In her eagerness to outrun how terrible she felt about her cat, Shoshauna had allowed herself to get totally caught up in the excitement—preparations underway, two islands celebrating, tailors in overtime preparing gowns for all members of both wedding parties, caterers in overdrive, gifts arriving from all over the world—of getting ready for a royal wedding.