Hitched (4 page)

So decent, in fact, that it sort of worked, if the chagrin-drenched stab of arousal between her legs was to be believed.

Damn.
Damn.

Roman put on his blinker. “I’m stopping for gas.”

And because she couldn’t quite manage to locate a witty comeback, Ashley simply said, “Fine by me.”

When he cut the engine, she jumped out and made for the bathroom, telling herself that her knees were weak and her pulse too fast because of the ordeal she’d been through. Two nights on a palm tree would mess a girl up, even if she’d grabbed a shower, some snacks, and two naps.

It wasn’t Roman making her feel so unsettled.

That would be absurd.

* * *

Her stomach started growling around Lauderdale Lakes.

Monitoring her in his peripheral vision, he couldn’t help but notice the way her gaze fixed on fast-food billboards and highway signs. She sighed when they blew by one with a stack of blueberry pancakes on it.

At Coconut Creek, she wrapped one arm over her belly. He felt a pang of conscience.

No, he didn’t. He didn’t have a conscience. That catch in his throat, that nagging in his head—it was nothing more than reason.

Reason told him that she had to eat something. She’d been stuck on the palm tree for thirty-six hours, and all she’d consumed since was a bag of popcorn, some chips, and a candy bar. It was well past lunchtime. Roman was starving, but he wanted to know where they were headed, and he needed leverage to get the information.

His own stomach made a traitorous noise. He ignored it. He could hold out longer than she could. There was no question.

They passed West Palm Beach. The traffic thinned. Rain pummeled the windshield, but he didn’t mind that. He liked the ruthless efficiency of the wipers and the ease with which the climate controls kept the windshield free of fog.

He liked the vehicle’s quiet cabin, riding high above the other cars, feeling as though he could roll over any trouble that came his way.

Of course, the goddamn Airstream trailer would probably blow over on a bridge and drag him and Ashley to their doom. But he found that if he tilted the rearview mirror just so, he could almost manage to forget it was there.

He might be able to forget Ashley, too, if it weren’t for the way her stomach grumbled. Or the way she fiddled with the radio, which she did randomly, halfway through songs, or five
seconds in, or right before the end. Every time with an abrupt plunge forward against her seatbelt that made every muscle in his body tense up at her violation of the bubble that was supposed to separate her part of the car from his own.

He couldn’t believe she was really so carefree—not when she’d been attached to a palm tree just this morning. She was doing this to torture him, and it was working. It hurt in his joints, in his bones, to endure her. As though she’d aged him, and now he was a four-hundred-year-old creature, dry and dusty. He was an ancient pharaoh mummy, all his organs stored in jars, and she was … fuck, some kind of Girl Scout who wandered into his tomb in search of a merit badge. Naively, gleefully desecrating his thousand-year sleep.

If he were a pharaoh, he would curse her. Not with death—just something to stop her from being so disorderly and annoying and vital all the time. Whenever her stomach rumbled, he wanted to reach over and give her shoulder a push and say, “Stop it.”

Stop it, stop it, stop it.

But she couldn’t, of course. It wasn’t her fault that she was hungry. It was his fault for starving her. His fault he was so hungry, so disrupted around her.

The thought struck him—mallet against gong—and reverberated inside his head.

She made him hungry.

Unacceptable.

But he couldn’t get rid of her, and he couldn’t shut her off. He had to find a way to control her.

“Don’t you want something to eat?” he asked.

“No.”

“Just say the word, and I’ll stop. Anytime.”

She got another piece of gum out of her purse. It smelled—synthetic cherries and oranges—and the
noise
of it. The noise made him think of spit and teeth and tongues and lips. Kissing. Sex.

It did
not
make him think of sex. He wouldn’t allow it to.

A new song came on, and she reached for the radio dial. He tapped her hand away. “Leave it.”

“I hate this song.”

“I hate driving without knowing where I’m going.”

“Get used to it.”

“Back at you.”

She crossed her arms, and they both endured a particularly unbearable version of “The Loco-Motion,” followed by a country ballad that made her fidgety.

“Do you need a restroom?”

“Stop asking me if I have to pee,” she snapped.

“Stop squirming like a three-year-old, and I will.”

“I’m squirming because this song is so awful.”

“You were the one who wanted to listen to the radio. You had your turn to choose the music. Now it’s mine.”

“For how long?”

“Until we get wherever it is we’re going.”

She snorted.

“What?” he asked.

“If this is a trick to get information from me, you should know that it’s not going to work.”

“If you’re irritating me on purpose because you hope I’ll lose my temper and blurt out something you can use against me, you should know that’s not going to work, either.”

“You think I’m being irritating?”

“I think you might be the single most irritating person I’ve ever met.”

She crossed her arms and looked down. When she glanced back at him, she was smiling again, proud and defiant, and he could almost convince himself he hadn’t seen it.

That instant gleam of moisture in her eyes, the widening of her nostrils.

He’d hurt her feelings.

She was so easy to hurt. Such a strange combination of tough and vulnerable. He didn’t know how to act around her. She made him feel like a giant, squeezing the goose to death in the hope it would lay a golden egg.

“Just quit messing with the stereo,” he said, trying to be reasonable. “Enjoy … whatever this is.”

“I think it’s Garth Brooks. I’m pretty sure I made out with a guy in a closet to this song once.”

“Why were you in a closet?”

Damn it, why did he keep asking questions in response to her inane conversation? She drew them from him against his will. He didn’t
care
why she’d made out with a guy in a closet. He didn’t want to hear about it.

“It was a party game.”

“Sounds like fun.” The statement didn’t come out as disdainful as he’d meant it to.

Ashley was exactly the kind of woman who’d spent her adolescence making out with guys in closets. Going to the beach all the time, prancing around in a sparkly bikini, playing dunking games with boys in the surf as an excuse to get groped. Working on her tan and drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon. Grinding sand into the floor mats of her cheap, dented car.

He’d never envied people like her. He’d pitied them.

Heberto disdained them.
We work harder than they do. We deserve to have more.

And Roman did have more. Or he would. He had the Cadillac, Ojito Enterprises, a growing reputation for putting together innovative development deals and always coming out on top. He had the trust of Heberto Zumbado—Miami’s most successful Cuban real estate entrepreneur—and the key to all the doors Heberto would open for him. He had a nice condo, a country club membership, a beautiful girlfriend whose ambitions moved in lockstep with his own.

He didn’t envy Ashley Bowman that beach, that closet. Her youth.

He sure as hell didn’t envy that nameless, faceless guy who’d spent those minutes in the dark closet with her, pressed up against her soft body, lost in her mouth and the bubblegum-ocean smell of lip gloss and hairspray and teenage girl.

The country ballad ended. Whitney Houston came on. That iconically terrible song from the bodyguard movie.

Ashley started to sing.

“Please don’t do that,” Roman said.

She sang even louder, her reedy voice breaking on the high notes. She knew all the words.

He endured it for all of ninety seconds, and then, abruptly, he couldn’t. “I’m already having a bad day,” he said. “And I guarantee you, if you don’t stop—”

The key changed with the arrival of the chorus. Ashley reached out and wrapped her hand
around his bicep. When he looked at her, she tilted her head and sang the words straight at him, as though she really meant them. As though she cared.

As though she loved him more than anyone alive.

Utter bullshit. No one felt that way about him. No one ever had.

Roman wouldn’t allow it.

But Ashley’s eyes were a blue snipped directly from the sky on a clear day, and she had perfectly arched golden eyebrows and hair that made him think of clouds—soft-looking, wispy, insubstantial. She had a ruddy flush on one tanned cheek and deep purple bruises in the tender skin beneath her eyes.

She looked tired and vulnerable and broken, and if she didn’t stop doing this to him soon, he would lose it. He could only handle so much of people who wore all their feelings out in the open, who were obnoxiously courageous, openly heartbroken, openly
anything.
He didn’t do well with feelings, period, and if she kept this up, he would just—

He couldn’t listen. He couldn’t look at her. Simply couldn’t.

“Stop that.”

Her fingers clutched harder.

She dragged his eyes back to her face by sheer force of will, and he watched, horrified, as a tear rolled down her pink cheek. It would be one thing if she were simply a good actress—the kind of woman who could cry on command. He could understand that. He could respect it.

But that wasn’t what was happening here. Her tears were real. That look on her face was real. The crack in her voice—real.

Roman didn’t know why she was crying, and he wasn’t about to ask. She had reasons, no doubt. Her attachment to Sunnyvale. Her grandmother’s death. The chaotic wreckage that seemed to be her life.

Or maybe she was just one of those unforgivably sentimental women who would cry over a twenty-year-old pop song on the radio.

He didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to care.

When he spotted an exit, he swerved into the right lane without bothering to check whether it was safe. Breathing too fast, too hard, he snapped off the radio.

She sang into the silence until he pulled into the lot of a chain restaurant, parked the Escalade and trailer across five spaces, and cut the engine.

Then she wiped her eyes with the wrist of her long-sleeved T-shirt, gathered her purse off the floor by her feet, and said, “Oh, good. I’m starving.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Across from him, Ashley handed her menu to the waitress. “Is there bacon in the green beans?”

“Yes.”

The waitress’s name tag read “Makenna.” Her eye makeup was neatly divided vertically into an area of blue on the inside and an area of reddish-brown on the outside.

“How about the baked beans, are they made with pork?”

Makenna scratched her scalp with her pen. “Yeah, I think they are.”

“Okay. I’d like the vegetable plate, then, with corn.”

“You get four vegetables and a bread.”

“I know. I want corn, corn, corn, and corn. And a biscuit.”

Makenna started writing it down. Roman interrupted, “She’s not having that.”

“Yeah I am.”

“You haven’t eaten in two days. You can’t just have corn.”

“Everything else is made with meat. I’m a vegetarian.”

Of course she was a vegetarian. Because she’d been put on the earth to plague him.

He flipped through his menu, looking for something with actual calories that she could eat. The restaurant was a family-style place, and all the photographs in the menu were of meat—fried, grilled, dripping juice. “Omelet,” he said.

“I don’t like eggs.”

“Mashed potatoes.”

“Is the gravy made with meat?” Ashley asked.

Makenna sighed. “I think so. You want me to check?”

“No, I’m sure it is.”

“So have them without gravy,” Roman said.

Ashley wrinkled her nose. “They’re made from flakes. With just butter? Ew.”

He flipped another page. “You can have fish.”

“I don’t eat fish. I’m a
vegetarian
.”

“Fish aren’t meat.”

“Of course they’re meat.”

“So get some cheese. Grilled cheese. French fries.”

“The cheese won’t be real cheese, it’ll be that cheese that’s made from hydrogenated oil, which is disgusting. And the bread will be white bread, like eating a cotton ball. And—”

He dropped his menu on the table and gave up. “Fine. Eat whatever you want.”

But when it was his turn to order, he got extra hash browns and a side of pancakes he didn’t want. Just in case.

After Makenna left, Ashley slid the plastic bowl of half-and-half tubs to a spot in front of her and began stacking them to form a tower. Their booth sat by the window beneath a light with a faux stained-glass shade of red, green, and yellow plastic. Two of the three bulbs had burned out. The gloom highlighted all the hills and hollows of her face. Her shirtsleeves flapped at the cuff as she built, revealing wrist bones as delicate as a bird’s.

She looked like a girl.

She looked like what she was—a grieving granddaughter, eight years younger than Roman. Younger than that, if you looked at what she’d done with her life. Or not done with it.

The kind of person who could barely manage to pay the heat bill, but damned if she wasn’t doing an excellent job of screwing up all his plans.

“So tell me what your grand vision is,” she said to the creamer. “For Sunnyvale.”

“Why, so you can change my mind?”

“Because we’re going all the way to Georgia together, and we need to find something to talk about.”

“Your friend is in Georgia?”

She nodded.

Georgia.

Fucking
Georgia.

The news did something to his body—disconnected it from reason long enough for his fist to hit the table and make the creamers jump. Make one of them spin in a lopsided circle and then roll off onto her lap.