If Shoshauna wasn’t a princess, if she was just an ordinary girl…Jake cut off the train of his thought. It didn’t matter if she was a wandering gypsy. It was still his mission to protect her.
The truth was, it would be way too easy to forget she was a princess, especially with her standing there in a badly rumpled and ill-fitting dress.
But that was exactly what he had to remember to keep his boundaries clear, his professionalism unsullied, his duty foremost in his mind. She was a princess, a real one. He was a soldier. Their stations in life were millions of miles apart. And they were going to stay that way.
By Royal Appointment
You’re invited to a royal wedding!
From turreted castles to picturesque palaces—these kingdoms may be steeped in tradition, but romance always rules!
So don’t miss your VIP invite to the most extravagant weddings of the year!
Your royal carriage awaits….
Don’t miss future books in this wonderful miniseries!
In August
Marion Lennox
brings us the final story in her royal quartet
of Alpine principalities
Wanted: Royal Wife and Mother
Prince Rafael is heir to the throne
and looking for a family of his own….
Cara Colter
Her Royal Wedding Wish
By Royal Appointment
Dear Reader,
A terrible thing happened as I was writing this story. My cat, Hunter—bossy, beautiful, one of my greatest inspirations—died unexpectedly. It might be easy to dismiss him as just a cat, but to me it seems he was a spark of the universal life force wrapped in a funny, furry, delightful package.
Love finds us in so many different ways. It comes when we least expect it, when it’s inconvenient; it comes as cats and dogs; its message comes through songs and movies and books. All of life pulses with this undercurrent of something so magnificent it makes us pause in our busy lives and whisper “ahhh,” in awed recognition and gratitude.
There is a sense in this story of the exquisite tenderness of love wiggling its way into Jake’s reluctant-warrior heart, and of love giving a princess her first real understanding of how rich life can be. That is the epitome of Hunter. If you pause for just a moment right now, I hope you’ll hear the rich vibration of purring…and of love.
Best wishes,
Cara Colter
www.cara-colter.com
In memory of Hunter
1997–2007
Beloved.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER ONE
JAKE Ronan took a deep, steadying breath, the same kind he would take and hold right before the shot or the assault or the jump.
No relief. His heart was beating like a deer three steps ahead of a wolf pack. His palms were slick with sweat.
He was a man notorious for keeping his cool. And in the past three years that notoriety had served him well. He’d taken a hijacked plane back from the bad guys, jumped from ten thousand feet in the dead of night into territory controlled by hostiles, rescued fourteen school-children from a hostage taking.
But in the danger-zone department nothing did him in like a wedding. He shrugged, rolled his shoulders, took another deep breath.
His old friend, Colonel Gray Peterson, recently retired, the reason Ronan was here on the tiny tropical-island paradise of B’Ranasha, shifted uneasily beside him. Under his breath he said a word that probably had never been said in a church before. “You don’t have your sideways feeling, do you?” Gray asked.
Ronan was famous among this tough group of men, his comrades-in-arms, for the feeling, a sixth sense that warned him things were about to go wrong, in a big way.
“I just don’t like weddings,” he said, keeping his voice deliberately hushed. “They make me feel uptight.”
Gray contemplated that as an oddity. “Jake,” he finally said reassuringly, his use of Ronan’s first name an oddity in itself, “it’s not as if you’re the one getting married. You’re part of the security team. You don’t even know these people.”
Ronan had never been the one getting married, but his childhood had been littered with his mother’s latest attempt to land the perfect man. His own longing for a normal family, hidden under layers of adolescent belligerence, had usually ended in disillusionment long before the day of yet another elaborate wedding ceremony, his mother exchanging starry-eyed “I do’s” with yet another temporary stepfather.
Ronan had found a family he enjoyed very much when he’d followed in his deceased father’s footsteps, over his mother’s strenuous and tear-filled protests, and joined the Australian military right out of high school. Finally, there had been structure, predictability and genuine camaraderie in his life.
And then he’d been recruited for a multinational military unit that was a first-response team to world crises. The unit, headquartered in England, was comprised of men from the most elite special forces units around the world. They had members from the British Forces SAS, from the French Foreign Legion, from the U.S. SEALs and Delta Force.
His family became a tight-knit brotherhood of warriors. They went where angels feared to go; they did the work no one else wanted to do; they operated in the most dangerous and troubled places in the world. As well as protecting world figures at summits, conferences, peace talks, they dismantled bombs, gathered intelligence, took back planes, rescued hostages, blew up enemy weapons caches. They did the world’s most difficult work. They did it quickly, quietly and anonymously. There were few medals, little acknowledgment, no back-patting ceremonies.
But there was: brutal training, exhausting hours, months of deep cover and more danger than playing patty-cake with a rattlesnake.
When Ronan had been recruited, he had said a resounding yes. A man knew exactly when his natural-born talents intersected with opportunity, and from his first day in the unit, code-named Excalibur, he had known he had found what he was born to do.
A family, other than his brothers in arms, was out of the question. This kind of work was unfair to the women who were left at home. A man so committed to a dangerous lifestyle was not ready to make the responsibilities of a family and a wife his priority.
Which was a happy coincidence for a man who had the wedding thing anyway. Ronan’s most closely guarded secret was that he, fearless fighting man, pride of Excalibur, would probably faint from pure fright if he ever had to stand at an altar like the one at the front of this church as a groom. As a man waiting for his bride.