The Royal Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.
“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