Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (18 page)

“Well, that, too. But mostly it’s to sleep in.”

“Not happening.”

“Oh, relax. I’m not talking about tonight anyway. The Airstream’s too much of a mess until I get it cleaned up. We can stay at Prachi and Arvind’s tonight.”

Roman’s jaw tightened, and he didn’t answer.

Half a mile passed. Ashley thought about the phrase
boil on my ass
and smiled.

Sometimes he could be such a curmudgeon.

He’d put a tie on this morning, God bless him—the Roman equivalent of suiting up for battle. It was dark red, and she alternated between wanting to choke him with it and wanting to test the texture of his platinum tie clasp with her fingertip. To loosen the perfect half-Windsor at his throat, unbutton his shirt at the collar, run her hand down his pec to find out how much chest hair he had and discover the texture of it.

Roman slid loose fists around the steering wheel in an unconscious caress, and she wondered if he knew he did that. Stroked his car when he was unhappy, or thinking hard. He had such a
thing
for his car. She could easily imagine him prone across the backseat, suit pants unzipped, shirttails flapping, jerking off to the new-car smell of it, the supple leather and the unmarked carpet.

All this perfection, his. Unmarred, utterly possessed.

She thought of the therapist she’d been forced to visit before her father sent her to live with her grandmother. A beige office and a man with a bland face who’d refused to engage with her anger, and who’d encouraged her to think about control—who had power over Ashley, why she wanted it back, how her behavior was designed to make that happen.

She’d stomped out of that office in a rage and refused to go back, but she’d never forgotten the therapist’s viewpoint.

Who had taken all the control away from Roman when he was younger, to make him so covetous of it now? And why did she keep falling into the habit of flaunting her control over him when she knew how much he disliked being jerked by his puppet strings?

Good questions, but she couldn’t bring herself to dwell on them long enough to come up with answers.

“Hinesville is only about a twenty-minute detour,” she said. She meant it as an apology. “We’re near the military base, and there’s a great army surplus store in town. There’s three, actually, but the one I like best is all old and random, like a flea market. You never know what
you’re going to find there.”

They passed another sign. Half a mile to the exit.

“I want to know where we’re going,” Roman said.

“I just told you. Hinesville.”

He looked over at her, no hint of humor in his expression, and she realized she’d done it again. Baited him just to get a better look at his face. Just to hear him speak and maybe, if she was lucky, to put some heat into his voice.

Since she’d resolved yesterday to take a different tack with Roman—to try to be kind, even though he continued to despise her—she gave him a little more of what he needed. “We’re going to North Carolina. A little town near Chapel Hill called Chatham Village. The plan is to get outfitted in Hinesville, grab some lunch, then drive straight through the rest of the way. We should be in Chatham by dinnertime. Okay?”

The exit came into view.

Roman didn’t answer, but he signaled the turn and steered them off the interstate, into the world beyond.

The army surplus store smelled like mothballs and treated canvas, motor oil and cartridge grease.

Though Roman didn’t know if cartridge grease existed anymore. Maybe it had gone out with the India Mutiny—sepoy soldiers, Hindus and Muslims, tearing their cartridges open with their teeth, then learning they’d been greased with pork fat.

When his high school history teacher told that story, Roman had wondered how such a small thing could set off a war, but now he got it. The sepoys had been colonized, undervalued. Simmering with a thousand unvoiced resentments.

Anything might have set them off.

Ashley held up a dark green fatigue jacket that said “Anderson” over one breast pocket and made a show of measuring the fit against his chest. “You’re going to need some normal clothes,” she said. “How do you feel about green?”

You’ve colonized me. Don’t ask me how I feel
.

He kept the thought to himself. With Ashley, he found that things went most smoothly
when he voiced about one percent of his thoughts.

“Do you have a list?” he asked. A vain hope—she was meandering purposelessly through the store, picking up reams of onionskin typing paper and ancient combat boots creased with the shapes of strange men’s feet.

“In my head.”

Roman lifted a stapled pamphlet from the top of a pile on one gunmetal-gray shelf. “Army Field Manual FM 21-20: Physical Readiness Training.” The cover featured line drawings of soldiers in fatigue pants, combat boots, and T-shirts. One was doing a sit-up, another jogging into the distance. He flipped through the pages and then dropped the book into Ashley’s cart.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A manual.”

“For what?”

“To keep me from losing my mind around you.”

She picked it up and studied the cover, and he wanted to tear the book out of her hands.

“Cute,” she said, tossing it back into the cart. “Are you going to run ten miles and do five hundred jumping jacks before breakfast? Maybe we should find you a vintage sweat suit to go with your vintage workout routine.”

He wanted to take her by the wrist and pull her out of the store, flatten her against the stucco outside and press right up against her, get right in her face and insist,
insist
, that she tell him everything about this trip she had planned. That she stop teasing him and taunting him and leading him around as though he were harmless as a pony on a rope.

He wasn’t a fucking pony. He was a tiger. He would claw and eat her. He’d rebel against her, and she wouldn’t even see it coming.

Roman crossed his arms and leaned back against the shelving. He tried to feel like a tiger while Ashley moved farther down the aisle and poked through a pile of canteens.

Easier said than done.

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I wouldn’t get so close to that shelf if I were you. There’s a big glob of something.”

He just stared at her until she turned away.

Then he looked. Something black and thick—more like caulk than grease—was smeared along the edge of the shelf. All over the back of his jacket.

He took it off and assessed the damage. The jacket was Italian. Imported. Roman’s favorite.

Garbage now, like all this other garbage.

Balling it up, he dropped it on the floor and kicked it as far as he could along the aisle of the yellow-lit, foul-smelling, offensively miscellaneous store.

Reaching above his head, Roman clenched the edge of a shelf in both hands, disturbing the arrangement of stained canvas-covered helmets, gripping it hard and closing his eyes until the wave of rage passed.

Ashley’s hand landed in the center of his back and she … Jesus, she was patting him. He wanted to tear her limb from limb, and she was patting him.

“Poor Roman,” she said. “This is hard for you.”

She stroked over his shoulders and down his back. In his mind’s eye, he saw what they must look like. Him in his shirtsleeves, bent slightly, feet wide, with his head down and his arms spread. Ashley soothing him. Stroking him into submission.

He wanted to hate her for it, but his dick grew heavy and hot.

She kneaded his deltoids, her voice dropping to a husky secret. “After this place, we’re going to find a grocery store and load up, okay?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

The words sounded harsh, but it was unbearable not knowing anything of what she had planned or how she intended to accomplish it. She doled information out to him one drip at a time—torture.

Her thumbs dug into the muscles on either side of his spine. “I guess I’m telling you. But I’d rather … look, Roman, I know I’m kind of making you do this, but—”

“There’s no ‘kind of’ about it. You’re blackmailing me into doing this.”

Her punishing fingers dug harder into his shirt, into his skin and muscle, forcing the tension from him even as her proximity made it worse.

She smelled like the ocean. How was that possible? He knew her shampoo now, her soap, her face wash. None of them smelled like the sea. It was Ashley.

“I know I’m blackmailing you, but do you think we could try to make it more pleasant? I mean, here you are. Here I am. Just because we’re stuck together doesn’t mean we have to fight all the time.”

Her fingers were lighter now. Gentling him. “I could tell you more about the plans,” she suggested. “That way, you could contribute. I’m not really cut out to be the planner anyway. I’m more of the good-time girl, you know? I’ll make sure we have drinks for happy hour, you make sure we have enough gas in the car and a chance of getting to our destination on time.”

“You’re going to give me a say.”

“I guess I’d like to. If you can accept that ultimately I’m … you know. That ultimately it’s my trip.”

“That you’re in charge.”

“Yeah.”

He let go of the shelf and turned around. She didn’t give him any room. The aisle was wide enough, and he thought about pushing her away. Flattening his hand over her collarbone and exerting just enough pressure to get the distance he needed from her bewildered blue eyes and her ocean smell.

But to move her, he’d have to touch her.

“There’s no question you’re in charge, Ashley. If I were in charge, I’d be in Miami.”

“I know, but—”

“But you’re right. It would be a hell of a lot easier for me if you told me what was happening and gave me a role to play besides chauffeur.”

“It would?”

“So why don’t you tell me what’s on our list?”

“Our list?”

She kept repeating his statements as questions.

She kept smoothing her palms over the caps of his shoulders, as though she had some reason to be touching him, some authorization he hadn’t given her.

Her pupils were huge. The lighting was dim.

That didn’t explain why her nipples were hard.

She wanted him. He’d thought it was a joke before—that kiss just before she fainted, all her sly remarks—but it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt dangerous, this tight pull in his balls and her permissive hands.

He pushed them off. “The list of what we’re here to buy.”

She looked at the floor and shoved her fists in the pockets of her minuscule shorts. Then
she took them out and crossed her arms.

“Hang on.” She walked rapidly toward the front of the store. He watched her borrow a notepad and a pen from the storekeeper and begin writing.

He measured the height of the countertop, the crease at her hip, and the angle he would have to bend her at. The tightness of her shorts over her ass.

She turned around and saw him doing it, and something in her face—something in the way she leaned into the countertop a fraction when she turned back around—told him she knew what he’d been thinking.

That she would let him, if he tried it.

More dangerous than dangerous, this woman.

After a minute, she tore off the sheet and returned. “Here. You can find this stuff, okay?”

He looked it over, but it was her handwriting that caught his attention. Steeply angled, precise, almost masculine. He’d expected round, looping letters and
i
’s dotted with circles or even tiny little hearts.

“Okay,” he said.

The list gave him an excuse to walk away from her.

He walked as far away from her as he could get.

Parked on the cul-de-sac outside Prachi and Arvind’s house, the Airstream looked like an enormous metal turd. Ashley stood a few feet beyond Roman’s Escalade, sweltering and feeling like the human equivalent.

Roman still had his seatbelt on. He hadn’t budged from the car. When she realized he wasn’t getting out, she’d had to throw the passenger door open so she could talk to him.

“What do you think?” she asked.

She sounded squeaky, nervous, which was dumb. Inside the house were two members of her Sunnyvale family. Money didn’t matter to family. They would take her in, even if she was a little sleep-creased and bleary. Possibly a bit smelly. A lot intimidated by the privileged gorgeousness of the neighborhood they called home.

Even if she should have phoned ahead to warn them but hadn’t, and even though it was dinnertime, they would welcome her.

And besides, what would she have said if she’d phoned anyway?

I’m coming to visit so you can help me convince a strange man not to destroy Sunnyvale
.

Yeah, no. Better to just show up.

She had thought. Until she saw their place.

“What do I think about what?” Roman asked.

She gestured at the two-story vision in butter-yellow siding set beneath sheltering trees and a classic Carolina blue sky. The rest of the street boasted equally lovely, architecturally unique homes. Beyond it, out of sight, a facsimile village butted up against a facsimile farm—just like a village of old, if a village of old had possessed a gourmet restaurant, an inn, gorgeous gardens, hiking paths, chic shops, an independent bookstore, and bucolic cows.