Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues (3 page)

It didn’t matter how he kissed her. Ashley wasn’t the kind of woman who made “nice” a requirement. She took his tongue, made him taste hers, bit his lip. She found his hip, snuck her hand under his shirt and pinched him hard enough to leave a mark. Then she had his ass in her hands and she was grinding against him, one leg up, pushing where he was hard and getting harder all the time.

“Jesus, Ash. I’m sorry.”

He kissed her face. Her neck. He ran his thumbs over her nipples and watched her eyes close and her head dip back into the light with the sound of the traffic all around them, sealing them into this space where they were exposed, indecent,
stupid
, and he didn’t care.

“Roman,” she said.

He kissed her throat. Kissed her mouth. “What?”

She smiled with her eyes closed. “Nothing. Just Roman.”

Something about her smile. The honesty of it, and knowing it was for him, it was real, purely Ashley, putting up with his shit and kissing him back, grabbing him close, finding a way to turn this horrible morning into a smile. He pulled his hands out from under her shirt so he could cup her head and kiss her temple and say, “You know I like you, right?”

Her smile turned into a grin. Sunlight and gold, and those bluer-than-blue eyes looking up at him. “Yeah. But I could stand to hear it again.”

He couldn’t help it. She made him grin. He’d never met another woman who could do that—who did it as effortlessly as she pulled air into her lungs.

“I like you. You make me happy. I’m glad I rescued you from getting creamed by that car.”

She laughed. There might have been a hysterical edge to it, and tears in her eyes, but she laughed, and she tickled his sides and his ribs, goosed his abs until he was laughing, too.

Bent over with his hands on his knees, leaning his butt against the trailer.

Holding her hand and laughing.

“Oh, I almost forgot!”

Nana dug around in the plastic bag hanging off her elbow and came up with a few slips of paper and a silver pen. She had to dip down to hand it to Ashley, who perched awkwardly on the lip of a deck chair designed to force her into a reclining posture. The bag swung as Nana dipped, nearly whacking Ashley in the nose. When she jerked away, she fell against the back of the chair, spilling the cocktail Nana had just handed her onto her bare toes.

She smelled fruit punch and felt stupid.

“You have to write advice for the newlyweds on this one,” Nana said, oblivious. “And these other ones are etiquette questions for a game, so you have to answer those, too. And then put them in the basket on the table right inside the door.”

Fantastic.

As she struggled to sit up, Ashley furtively scanned the yard from her position on the front porch, wishing it weren’t such an outlandishly beautiful day and she weren’t surrounded by so many outlandishly beautiful people. There were A-list actors here. Singers whose posters she had hung up on her bedroom wall in middle school. Even Devon Alexander, a gorgeous dark-haired Olympic swimmer who’d taken three golds in the summer games.

She turned the pen over in her hand. It said
Jamie and Carly
in elegant white script. “We’re doing games?” she asked, faintly horrified.

“It’s tradition! But don’t worry, they’re dirty games, mostly. It’ll be fun!”

Nana’s smile lit up her face. Ashley smiled in return, though she’d felt vaguely sick ever since she arrived at Nana’s house to find a wedding shower in full swing.

A celebrity-studded wedding shower. With security guards.

“I’m not sure I know Carly well enough to give her advice.”
Or be at her shower
.

Nana petted her arm, shaking her loose white curls. “Don’t think about it too hard. Just write something. I’ll get you a drink, too. That’ll help.”

Ashley watched her go inside. She scratched at a bug bite right above her kneecap. A mosquito must have gotten into the Airstream in Pennsylvania last night, because she’d woken
up with her legs covered in bumps. The shorts and tank top she wore were way too informal for this party, but she didn’t have anything better to change into that was clean.

This wasn’t the quiet, private visit she’d been seeking. It was a circus. And probably a mistake.

The final part of their drive today, which Roman and Stanley had spent in blessed silence, Ashley had spent remembering her last trip to Camelot. She and her grandmother had come when Ashley was sixteen years old, having hosted Nana and Carly at Sunnyvale the previous two seasons and hit it off so well they’d arranged this visit as part of their summer rambles.

Back then they’d eaten breakfast in Nana’s funky 1970s kitchen, where Nana had served strong black coffee and made teenaged Ashley feel included, even when the conversation turned to raunchy sex jokes—as conversations had a tendency to do when Nana and Ashley’s grandmother were together.

At one point that trip, Carly had come to see her grandmother, and she’d taken Ashley swimming at a nearby lake. Carly was eight years older—Ashley’s age now, she realized with a start. To Ashley, she’d seemed gloriously grown up.

They’d lain out on towels and put sunscreen on each other’s backs. Sipping gas-station Cokes packed with slivers of ice, they’d joked about how they should start a club for women raised by oddball grandmothers.

Carly had shrieked at how cold the water was. Ashley could still recall the silky feel of the mud squishing between her toes.

Not too long ago, she had seen Carly’s picture on a tabloid rack in a checkout line—Carly smiling and holding hands with pop star Jamie Callahan. Ashley had done a double take. She bought the magazine and studied the pictures, captivated by the unlikelihood of it all.

A week ago, Carly and Jamie had eloped in Vegas. Distracted by her own drama, Ashley had missed the headlines this time, although according to Nana the wedding had made all the tabloids and celebrity gossip websites.

Ashley had no right to be crashing Carly’s post-elopement shower.

She didn’t belong here.

The strange thing was, Roman did. He hadn’t so much as blinked at the barricade—had just asked her,
You go way back with these people, right?
and, at her affirmative, talked their way through security, smooth as satin.

Smooth as the Roman she’d met a week ago, loping across the parking lot in his perfectly tailored suit.

He stood now on the lawn, talking to the bridegroom. Hands in his pockets, legs planted wide in the grass, totally at ease in a group of people with a collective net worth of approximately four kajillion dollars.

Stanley was inside. He’d found another codger to play backgammon with in the kitchen.

Ashley looked at the slips of paper in her hand. The top one read
Advice for the Married Couple
. There were six blank lines where she was supposed to write down words of connubial wisdom for a friend she hadn’t seen in years.

“Never go to bed angry,” she mumbled to herself. “Take time for each other. Don’t forget to have sex. How the hell should I know?”

On the lawn, Carly sidled up to her husband, their young daughter in her arms. She handed the girl over, and Ashley watched as Jamie introduced his bride to Roman, draping his arm casually over her shoulder.

Carly looked cool and beautiful in a slim-fitting beige dress. Jamie looked like … he looked like Jamie Callahan, the gorgeous boy next door whom half the women in the free world had sex dreams about. The pudgy redheaded toddler in his arms patted his face, the skirt of her fuchsia party dress ballooning out around her.

Roman must have said something funny, because Carly laughed. Jamie pulled her in close for a kiss.

They stood in the sunlight, beautiful, secure.

Ashley crumpled up the paper and shoved it into her front pocket.

She had no advice to give. Not to Jamie and Carly.

Not to anyone.

When the party games were over, the shower presents opened, and most of the guests gone, Ashley found herself on the front porch again, sitting beside Nana in the lounge chairs.

The light was fading now, sunset not too far off. Fireflies winked on the lawn. The smell of charcoal and seared meat still drifted from the grill out back. Last time Ashley had checked,
Jamie and Roman were there, talking about basketball over beers. Stanley had retired to the trailer for the night. Carly was inside with her friend Ellen, Nana’s neighbor, organizing the remains of the party.

“So,” Nana said. She leaned toward Ashley with her blue eyes alight. “What brings you to Ohio?”

“You.”

“Me, huh? All right, I’ll bite. What do you need?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” And maybe the morning would be better for telling it. The story had gone thick and dark as syrup inside her head. Sticky.

“I’ve got time for you. Let’s hear it, sweetie.”

Carly came out of the house with a short stack of plastic cups and a glass pitcher of something maroon.

“What have you got?” Nana asked.

“Sangria. Ellen made it.”

Nana took the cups and held them up as Carly poured. “You girls should sit with us.”

“That’s the plan. Ellen’s putting together a second pitcher, and then we’ll come out.”

Ashley took her cup from Nana as Carly set down the pitcher and went back inside the house. “Thank you.”

“It’s a bribe. I can’t stand waiting anymore—you have to tell me what you’re doing traipsing around the Midwest with that beautiful,
interesting
man.”

“Stanley, you mean?”

Nana snorted. “I’m assuming you brought Stanley as a chaperone. Or a hair shirt.” She lifted her glass. “Cheers, Ashley. It’s good to see your face again.”

Ashley clicked her plastic cup to Nana’s and took a cool swallow of her drink. She looked at the front yard, empty now. “I’m trying to keep Roman from knocking down Sunnyvale.”

Nana’s eyes widened. “Why would he do that?”

“He’s a developer. He wants to build a resort there.”

“But isn’t Sunnyvale yours?”

“He bought it from Grandma. She didn’t tell me—I only found out after she died.”

Frowning, Nana said, “You better start from the beginning.”

Ashley told her the whole story. She told her about how she’d been in Bolivia when her grandmother had died, how she’d come home to Florida, only to find the office empty, Grandma gone, Susan Bowman’s whole life erased as though it hadn’t happened.

She explained how she’d chained herself to a palm tree to keep Roman from razing the property. How the hurricane had arrived and given her the leverage she’d needed.

When she was telling Nana about dragging him to the commune in Georgia, Carly and Ellen came out with the promised second pitcher and took seats on the other side of her. So Ashley started over and told them, too.

How Roman had been sort of attacked by an alligator and how she’d figured out, with Mitzi’s help, that she could blackmail him into taking this trip with her by revealing that she’d seen Key deer on the property. That she’d threatened to hire a lawyer to block his project for ecological reasons if he didn’t cooperate.

The level in the sangria pitchers dropped, and Ashley told the women her plan to make Roman meet all the regular renters she loved best, to force him to listen to stories about Sunnyvale so he could understand what a great place he was about to destroy. But how, when they’d stopped to visit Prachi and Arvind in North Carolina and Stanley and Michael in Pennsylvania, her plan hadn’t worked the way she’d hoped it would.

There were parts she left out: Skinny-dipping and rolling around in the mud with Roman. Kissing him. The pulse of his heartbeat when she’d put her mouth to his throat. The fire he’d made from a wisp of breath, wood shavings, friction drawn from his palms and his utter concentration.

Maybe it was because of these omissions, or maybe it was because the wedding shower had involved a lot of cocktails, but for some reason the story came out wrong. Nana, Carly, and Ellen kept laughing. Even when Ashley wasn’t trying to be funny, it all became sort of inadvertently hilarious, and she found herself playing to their riotous mood. Alligators and hurricanes, blackmail and communes, Stanley being such a jerk in the car: it
was
funny. Ashley could make it be funny in the telling.

She could laugh at herself, though her lips felt wrong doing it, and her throat hurt.

Nana praised Ashley’s cleverness in the campaign against Roman. When Ashley tried to protest that she
liked
Roman, that they were in fact kind of
involved
, she only made Nana laugh harder.

“Nana!” Carly shoved her grandmother’s shoulder. “Don’t be mean.”

“I’m not!” Nana was bent over her knees, her drink trembling in her outstretched hand, shaking with laughter. “It’s just—oh, Ashley, you
would
get involved with him. Who else but you?”

Ellen rescued the cup from Nana’s fingers. Carly asked, “How much did you drink today?”

“None of your business,” Nana said primly. And then grinned, straightening, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said to Ashley. “It’s just that you always fall for these guys. Who was the fellow you were with that first time we came to Little Torch? Tom or Tim or something? With the goatee.”