The Royal Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.
He took a big bite. “Hey,” he lied, “not bad for a first try.”
She helped herself to one, wrinkled her nose, set it down. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”
He hoped she wouldn’t. He hoped she’d tire soon of the novelty of working together, because it was fun, way more fun than he wanted to have with her.
“Let’s go swimming now,” she said. “Could you come with me today? I thought I saw a shark yesterday.”
Was that pure devilment dancing in the turquoise of those eyes? Of course it was. She’d figured out he didn’t want to swim with her, figured out her softness was piercing his armor in ways no bullet ever had. She’d figured out how badly he didn’t want to be anywhere near her when she was in that bathing suit.
In other words, she had figured out his weakness.
He could not let her see that. One thing he’d learned as a soldier was you never ran away from the thing that scared you the most. Never. You ran straight toward it.
“Sure,” he said, with a careless shrug. “Let’s go.”
He said it with the bravado of a man who had just been assigned to dismantle a bomb and didn’t want a single soul to know how scared he was.
But when he looked into her eyes, dancing with absolute mischief, he was pretty sure he had not pulled it off.
She was not going to be fooled by him, and it was a little disconcerting to feel she could see through him so completely when he had become such an expert at hiding every weakness he ever felt.
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