The Royal Collection. Rebecca WintersЧитать онлайн книгу.
they’re called that because their spines are scalpel sharp.”
Her wonder was palpable when a Moorish idol investigated her with at least as much interest as she was giving it! A school of the normally shy neon-green and blue palenose parrot fishes swam around her as if she was part of the sea.
He was not sure when he lost interest in the fish and focused instead on her reaction to them. Ronan was not sure he had seen anything as lovely as the awed expression on her face when a bluestripe snapper kissed her hand.
He was breaking all the rules. And somehow it seemed worth it. And somehow he didn’t care. Time evaporated, and he was stunned when he saw the sun going down in the sky.
They went in to shore, dried the saltwater off with towels. He saw she was looking at him with a look that was both innocent and hungry.
“I’m going to cook dinner,” he said gruffly. Suddenly breaking the rules didn’t seem as great, it didn’t seem worth it, and he did care.
He cared because he felt something, and he knew it was huge. He felt the desire to know someone. He wanted to know her better. He wanted things he had never wanted and that, in this case, he knew he could never have.
These four days together had created an illusion that they were just two normal people caught up together. These days had allowed him to see her as real, as few people had ever seen her. These days had allowed him to see her, and he had liked what he had seen. It was natural to want to know more, to explore where this affinity he felt for her could go.
But the island was a fantasy, one so strong it had diluted reality, made him forget reality.
He was a soldier. She was a princess. Their worlds were a zillion miles apart. She was promised to someone else.
With those facts foremost in his mind, he cooked dinner, refusing her offer to help, and he was brusque with her when she asked him if he knew the name of a bright-yellow snout-nosed fish they had seen. She took the hint and they ate in blessed silence. Why did he miss being peppered with her questions? Did she, too, realize that a dangerous shift had happened between them?
Still, getting ready for bed, he was congratulating himself on what a fine job he’d done on reerecting the barriers, when he heard an unmistakable whimper from her room.
Surely she wasn’t that embarrassed over her brief nude scene?
He knew he had to ignore her, but then she cried out again, the sound muffled, as if she had a blanket stuffed in her mouth. It was the sound being stifled that made him bolt from his room, and barge through her door.
She was alone, in bed. No enemy had crept up on him while he’d been busy playing reef guide instead of doing his job.
“What’s the matter?” He squinted at her through the darkness.
The sheet was pulled up around her, right to her chin.
“I hurt so bad.”
“What do you mean?”
He lit the hurricane lamp that had been left on a chair just inside her door, moved to the side of her bed and gazed down at her. She reluctantly pulled the sheet down just enough to show him her shoulders. That’s why she had been quiet at dinner.
Not embarrassed, not taking the hint that he didn’t want to talk to her, but in pain. Even in the light of the lantern he could clearly see she was badly sunburned. Cursing himself silently, he wondered how close she had come to heat exhaustion.
White lines where her bikini straps had been were in sharp contrast to her skin.
Because her skin tones were so golden it had never occurred to him she might burn. It had not seemed scorchingly hot out today. On the other hand he should have known breezes coming off the water could make it seem cooler than it was. It had never occurred to him that someone who lived in this island paradise might not avail themselves of the outdoors.
He remembered, too late, what she had said about her mother. “Has your skin ever seen the sun before?” he asked her.
She shook her head, contrite. “Not for a long time. I was allowed to come here until I was about thirteen, but then my mother thought I was getting to be too much of a tomboy. She thought skin darkened by the sun was—”
“Let me guess,” he said dryly. “Common.”
He was rewarded with a weak smile from her. Selfish bastard that he was he thought, At least I’m not going to have to see her in a bikini again for the three days we have left here on the island.
But there was another test he had to pass right now. He was going to have to administer first aid to her burns. She’d exposed her back to the sun while they snorkeled. The water beading on it had drawn the sun like a magnet. Though her shoulders were very red looking, most of that burn was going to be on her back where she couldn’t reach it herself.
Having grown up in Australia, he was cautious of the sun, but his skin was also more acclimatized to sun than that of most of the people he worked with. He did not have fair coloring, his skin seemed to like the sun.
But many times after long training days in the sun, especially desert training, soldiers were hurting. Ronan had learned lots of ways to ease the sting with readily available ingredients: either vinegar or baking soda added to bath water could bring relief. Unfortunately, just as when he was in the field, they didn’t have a bath here.
What they did have was aspirin, he had seen that in a cabinet in the outdoor kitchen, and powdered milk, an ingredient he’d used before to field dress a sunburn.
He knew, though, there was going to be a big difference between placing soothing dressings cooled with freshly made milk onto her back, and slapping it onto a fellow soldier’s.
All day he’d struggled to at least keep the physical barriers between them up, since the emotional ones seemed to be falling faster than he could reerect them. When she’d lost the top, and he’d wrapped his arms around her to pull her back to the water’s surface, he’d known he had to avoid going to that place again at all costs, skin against skin.
But here he was at that place again. It almost felt as if the universe was conspiring against him.
But she was his charge. He had no choice. He felt guilty that she’d gotten burned on his watch in the first place. It was proof, really, he could not be trusted with softer things, more tender things, things that required a gentle touch.
It was proof, too, that he was preoccupied, missing the details that he had always been so good at catching.
“Come on out to the kitchen,” he said gruffly. “I’ll put something on that that will make it feel better.”
“I can’t get dressed,” she told him, and blushed. “My skin feels like its shrinking. I don’t think I can move my arms. I don’t want to put anything on that touches my skin.”
Oh well, just run out there naked then.
He yanked the sheet out from the bottom of the bed and tucked it around her right up to her chin. “Come on.”
She wobbled out behind him to the kitchen, the sheet draped clumsily over her, him uncomfortably and acutely aware that underneath it she was probably as naked as the day she was born. The outfit was somehow as dangerous—maybe more so—than the bikini had been.
And the night was dangerous—the stars like jewels in the night sky, the flowers releasing their perfume with a gentle and seductive vengeance.
“Sit,” he said, swinging a chair out for her. He took a deep breath, prayed for strength and then did what had to be done. He lifted the sheet away from her back, forced himself to be clinical.
Her back looked so tender with burn that he forgot how awkward this situation was. The marks where her bikini strings had been tied up dissected it, at her neck and midback, white lines in stark contrast to the rest of her. Her skin was glowing bright red on top of her copper tones.
“I