Royal Families Vs. Historicals. Rebecca Winters

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      Jake watched Shoshauna move toward him across the fineness of the pure white sand.

      She had chosen the simplest of dresses, her feet were bare, but when you were as beautiful as she was, even his mother had agreed that simplicity was the best way to let her true beauty shine through.

      His mother and his wife-to-be, here together.

      And in him the most wonderful surrender. He would protect them with his life, if he ever had to, and they both knew that.

      Someday he would have children with Shoshauna, and he could feel the fierce protectiveness within himself extend to them, but something new was there, too.

      A trust, that he would do whatever he could do, but when his strength ran dry, then there would be something else there to step in, something that seemed to have a better plan for him than anything he could have ever planned for himself, if the woman walking over the sand toward him was any indication.

      He knew that something went by a great many names. Some called it the Universe, the life force, God.

      He had come to call it Love, and to recognize it had been running the show long before he’d come along, and would be running it long after.

      There came a point when a man had to realize that there were things he did not control, and that he would only exhaust himself, drain away his strength and his soul, if he continued to think the whole world would fall apart if he was not running it.

      Ronan had come to believe that he could trust the protection and care of a force larger than himself.

      It was the same force that brought a certain man and a certain woman together, against impossible odds, across cultural and social differences, the force that made one heart recognize another.

      And it was that force that would protect them and see their children into the world.

      Once upon a time Jake Ronan had thought if he ever had to stand where he was standing today, he would probably faint.

      And yet the truth was, he had never felt so calm, so strong, so right. And the strangest thing of all was that, even as Ronan admitted he was powerless in the face of this thing called love, with each day of his surrender he felt more powerful, more alive and more relaxed, more grateful, more everything.

      This was the something more he had longed for all his life: to be a part of the magnificent mystery that flowed around him and in him as surely as it flowed through the waves on the sea. He longed to ride that incredible energy with the ease and joy with which he could ride the most powerful of waves. Not to conquer but to feel connected.

      He watched Shoshauna move toward him, and he almost laughed out loud.

      For one thing he had come to know that this thing he chose to call Love had the most delicious sense of humor.

      And for the longest time he had thought it was his job to rescue the princess.

      But now he saw that wasn’t it at all.

      That she had come to rescue him. And that allowing himself to be rescued had not made him a weaker man but a better one.

      She reached him, looked him in the face, his equal, the woman who would be the mother of his children, his companion, his friend, his lover through all the days of his life.

      “Beloved,” she said, her voice hushed with reverence of what they stood in the presence of, that Force greater than all things. “Retnuh.”

      And he said to her, his eyes never leaving her face, in her own language, a greeting and a vow, “My heart is home.”