to last a year.”
“Maybe it will be a year,” she said, just a trifle too hopefully, confirming what he already knew—this was one princess not too eager to be kissed by a prince.
“I’ve had some instructions. A week. We need to disappear for a week.”
She grabbed a pair of shorty-shorts.
“We have to go.”
“I’m not finished.”
He took her elbow, glanced again at the clerk, guided her further back in the room. “Look, Princess, you have a decision to make.”
She spotted a bikini on the rack by his head. “I know!” she said, deliberately missing his point. “Pink or green?”
Definitely pink, but he forced himself to remain absolutely expressionless, pretended he was capable of ignoring the scrap of material she was waving in front of his face. Unfortunately, it was just a little too easy to imagine her in that, how the pink would set off the golden tones of her skin and the color of her eyes, how her long black hair would shimmer against it.
He took a deep breath.
“This is about your life,” he told her quietly. “Not mine. I’m not going to be more responsible for you than you are willing to be for yourself. So, if you want to take chances with your life, if you want to make my life difficult instead of cooperating, I’ll take you back to the palace right now.”
Despite the sunglasses, he could tell by the tightening of her mouth that she didn’t want to go back to the palace, so he pressed on.
“That would work better for me, actually,” he said. “I kind of fell into this. I signed up for wedding security, not to be your bodyguard. I have a commanding officer who’s going to be very unhappy with me if I don’t report back to work on Tuesday.”
He was bluffing. He wasn’t taking her back to the palace until Gray had sorted out who was responsible for the attack at the church. And Gray would look after getting word back to his unit that he had been detained due to circumstances beyond his control.
But she didn’t have to know that. And if he’d read her correctly, she’d been relieved that her wedding had been interrupted, delirious almost. The last thing she wanted to do was go back to her life, pick up where she’d left off.
He kept talking. “I’m sure your betrothed is very worried about you, anxious to make you his wife, so that he can keep you safe. He’s probably way more qualified to do that than I am.”
He could see, clearly, that he had her full attention, and that she was about as eager to get back to her prince as to swim with crocodiles.
So he said, “Maybe that’s the best idea. Head back, a quick secret ceremony, you and your prince can get off the island, have your honeymoon together, and this whole mess will be cleared up by the time you get home.”
His alertness to detail paid off now, because her body language radiated sudden tension. He actually felt a little bit sorry for her. She obviously didn’t want to get married, and if she had feelings for her fiancé they were not positive ones. But again he had to shut down any sense of curiosity or compassion that he felt. That wasn’t his problem, and in protection work, that was the priority: to remember his business—the very narrow perimeters of keeping her safe—and to not care anything about what was her business.
Whether she was gorgeous, ugly, unhappy at love, frustrated with her life, none of that mattered to him. Or should matter to him.
Still, he did feel the tiniest little shiver of unwanted sympathy as he watched her getting paler before his eyes. He was glad for her sunglasses, because he didn’t want to see her eyes just now. She put the pink bikini back, thankfully, but turned and marched to the counter as if she was still the one in charge, as if he was her servant left to trail behind her—and pay the bills.
Apparently paying had not occurred to her. She had probably never had to handle money or even a credit card in her whole life. She would put it on account, or some member of her staff would look after the details for her.
She seemed to realize that at the counter, and he could have embarrassed her, but there was no point, and he certainly did not want the clerk to find anything memorable about this transaction.
“I got it, sweetheart,” he said easily.
Though playing sweethearts had been her idea, she was flustered by it. She looked everywhere but at him. Then, without warning, she reached up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.
“Thanks, Charming,” she said huskily, obviously deciding he needed a code name that matched hers.
But a less-likely prince had never been born, and he knew it.
He hoped the clerk wouldn’t look up, because there might be something memorable about seeing a man blushing because his supposed lady friend had kissed him and used an odd endearment on him.
Ronan didn’t make it worse by looking at her, but he felt a little stunned by the sweetness of her lips on his cheek, by the utter softness, the sensuality of a butterfly’s wings.
“Oh, look,” she said softly, suddenly breathless. She was tapping a worn sign underneath the glass on the counter.
“Motorcycles for rent. Hour, day, week.”
It would be the last time he’d be able to use this credit card, so maybe, despite his earlier rejection of the idea, now was the time to change vehicles. Was it a genuinely good idea or had that spontaneous kiss on the cheek rattled him?
He’d already nixed the motorcycle idea in his own mind. Why was he revisiting the decision?
Was he losing his edge? Finding her just too distracting? He had to do his job, to make decisions based solely on what was most likely to bring him to mission success, which was keeping her safe. Getting stopped in a stolen car was not going to do that. Blending in with the thousands of tourists that scootered around this island made more sense.
Since talking to Gray, he wondered if the whole point of the threats against the princess had been to stop the wedding, not harm her personally.
But he knew he couldn’t let his guard down because of that. He had to treat the threat to her safety as real, or there would be too many temptations to treat it lightly, to let his guard down, to let her get away with things.
“Please?” she said softly, and then she tilted her sunglasses down and looked at him over the rims.
Her eyes were stunning, the color and depth of tropical waters, filled at this moment with very real pleading, as if she felt her life depended on getting on that motorcycle.
Half an hour later, he had a backpack filled with their belongings, he had moved the car off the road into the thick shrubs beside it and he was studying the motorcycle. It was more like a scooter than a true motorcycle.
He took a helmet from a rack beside the motorcycles.
“Come here.”
“I don’t want to wear that! I want to feel the wind in my hair.”
He had noticed hardly anyone on the island did wear motorcycle helmets, probably because the top speed of these little scooters would be about eighty kilometers an hour. Still, acquiring the motorcycle felt a bit like giving in, and he was done with that. His job was to keep her safe in every situation. Life could be cruelly ironic, he knew. It would be terrible to protect her from an assassin and then get her injured on a motorbike.
“Please, Charming?” she said.
That had worked so well last time, she was already trying it again! It served him right for allowing himself to be manipulated by her considerable charm.
She took off her sunglasses and blinked at him. He could see the genuine yearning in her eyes, but knew he couldn’t cave in. This was a girl who was, no doubt, very accustomed to people jumping to make her happy, to wrapping the whole world around