Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (21 page)

The muscles in her legs kept pulling his eyes back from wherever he banished them to. Her calves bunching and releasing. Her ass rising and falling with each step.

Her legs were too skinny, but he couldn’t not look.

Following her was stupid, but he couldn’t not follow.

He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to her face at the dinner table when he told her he’d visited Susan when she was sick.

A loose cannon
, Carmen had called her. Those were the words he’d used to convince
himself to go with her wherever it was she was going.

The fact was, they were supposed to be enemies, and he was supposed to be striking blows for his side, but every time he struck one, he felt like someone had punched him in the stomach.

She could get into trouble. Get herself hurt. That was why he was out here. To protect his investment, his future.

He wondered if there was anyone alive dumb enough to believe that.

“Did you ever go cow-tipping?” she asked.

“No. I don’t think people actually do that.”

“I bet they do. I bet they just never invited you.”

“That’s possible.”

“What about petty theft—did you ever break the law and steal something? Pack of gum? A car?”

“No.”

“God, you really are a hundred years old.”

She turned off the road and began walking over the grass, heading downhill toward a pond.

“Where are you going?”

She didn’t say. He went after her, even though he knew he shouldn’t. Even though he knew that in her current frame of mind—in his—going after Ashley wasn’t simply annoying or reckless. It was dangerous.

He followed her, and he watched her, knowing something was about to happen.

She crossed her arms at the waist, grabbed a handful of shirt, and pulled it over her head.

Roman passed it, a lump in the grass, and watched the smooth expanse of her naked back shift with each step. He gazed at the spot at the base of her spine, just above the band of her shorts, where he wanted to put his mouth.

She reached the water’s edge, kicked off her sandals, shoved down her pajama shorts and panties, and stood there in profile, naked in the moonlight.

Her tan arms and white breasts. Her nipples. Her navel. Her pubic hair.

All her skin, pale at night, as though she were vulnerable.

Even naked, she was invulnerable.

“You’re going to get arrested.”

“No, I’m going to get in the water.”

The bottom made muddy squelching noises as she walked in. When she’d gone deep enough, she bent her knees, put her back to the water, and let it envelop her. She dipped back her head and wet her hair, and she looked radiant.

She would always do this. She would always get herself hurt, and she would always turn it into movement and transgressive grace, and he would always want to watch her do it, even though he couldn’t do it himself.

“Come in the water, Roman.”

“I’m going back to the house.”

But he stood by the edge of the pond, and she swam closer and swept her palm flat across the surface, splashing him.

He wiped the water off his face.

“Come in the water.”

“No.”

She splashed him again. “You’re no better than I am.”

Water dripped down his stomach, soaking his waistband. His jeans clung to his thighs. She splashed him a third time. “You feel it, too,” she said.

“What do I feel?”

“Everything.”

This time, she aimed for his crotch, and the water was surprisingly cold, which told him how hot he was. How hard.

“You’re being stupid,” he said.

She made a sound, too torn apart to be a laugh. “I’m always stupid.”

She wasn’t. He wanted to say it aloud, but he didn’t like this urge to make her feel better. An urge so strong, it was like a sickness, and he was supposed to be able to find all his sicknesses, pin them down and label them and store them away. He’d given himself over to the project, and if he couldn’t do that—if he couldn’t just
not care
about Ashley Bowman—then he was well and truly fucked.

Ashley used her whole forearm as a paddle and heaved a wave of water up onto his feet and calves. “Too distracted to do well in school,” she said. “Too lazy to go to college.”

She splashed him again and lowered her voice, imitating a male register. “Too lacking in ambition to keep the same job for more than a season. Lacking in moral principles. Lacking in sense.”

Her father, he would guess. Roman had met her father once.

She sounded positively senatorial when she said, “When are you going to grow up, Ashley? When are you going to take on some
adult responsibilities
?”

This time, she pushed the water out from her body, her palm at just the right angle, and it hit him in the chest.

He felt foolish. She was always making a fool of him.

Making him feel things—all the
wrong
things. Because he didn’t even feel sorry for her. He had no pity for Ashley Bowman. What he felt when she used that voice, ran herself down in that tone that was so obviously her father’s tone, these patronizing observations about her behavior that were so similar to what
he’d
thought about her, that were so obviously her father’s observations—

What Roman felt was
angry
.

Furious.

At her father.

At anyone who’d ever told her that about herself.

At her, for humiliating him and soaking him. Making him care. Making him
feel
.

When a wall of water hit him in the face, Roman lunged.

He caught her easily by one wrist. She tried to get him again with her free arm, but he found the crown of her head and pushed her under. She came up spitting and sputtering, then head-butted him in the stomach.

Roman folded and went under, finding her shoulders, her armpits, taking her down with him. When he pushed to standing, she was clinging to him, her bare, wet breasts pressing against his chest, one arm slung around his neck, her face close, water clumping her eyelashes together, muck on her neck, danger in her smile.

Reckless, yes. She was as reckless, as
stupidly
reckless, as anyone he’d ever met.

But she was
alive
, and he was drawn to her despite himself. His weakness to her strength. He didn’t know what to do about it. About her.

He didn’t want to feel compelled to make her feel better, or to get harder at the feel of her
body against him, which was softer than he’d expected. Warm everywhere, alive everywhere, breathing and human and so real, it hurt to touch her.

“Now you’ve got me,” she said. “What are you going to do with me?”

In that moment, he felt everything, just like she’d said. Everything in precarious balance—a broomstick in the palm of his hand, and on top of it a ball, and on top of the ball Heberto, Carmen, Ashley, Sunnyvale, Coral Cay.

His foster family—Patrick and Samantha—his past.

Carmen. His future.

Carmen.

“Nothing,” he said, and the word helped a bit, but not enough. Nothing he did seemed to put enough distance between them. “I’m not going to do anything with you except get you inside where you can’t get picked up and charged with public indecency.”

He tried to mean it. He started moving toward the shore. His soaked jeans made it almost impossible to walk, and he couldn’t shake Ashley off. He had to heave her up higher so he could push his legs through the water, which meant his fingers sank into her ass, his palms memorizing the breadth of her hips, the strength of her thighs wrapped around his waist.

It meant not thinking about her spread open and bare against his stomach, pink and wet, that sweet cunt a mystery he wouldn’t look at, wouldn’t think about, wouldn’t
feel
.

She took his face firmly between her hands and kissed him.

Roman tripped and fell, knocking his nose into something hard, her teeth or her skull. He managed to take most of the fall on his right knee and elbow, but she still said “Ow!” and scrambled away from him in the shallow water near the bank.

Then she started to laugh.

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“Why not? You’re hilarious.”

He grabbed her ankle.

“Hey!”

He pulled her back toward him, crawled over her, pinned her down in three inches of water, covered in muck, his knees on either side of her waist. She was naked and filthy and infuriatingly beautiful, and his nose fucking hurt. “Don’t laugh at me. I’m not hilarious. I’m not a fucking
joke
, I’m normal. Normal people don’t
do
this kind of shit.”

“And yet here you are.”

Ashley reached out a hand, dipped it into the mud, and smeared it all over his chest. She beamed at him. There was mud on her lip.

“I hate what you do to me,” he said.

“I know.”

“I hate
you
.”

She laughed. “I know. Poor Roman.”

She got more mud and dabbed a spot on each nipple. With a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows, she painted it down his stomach and filled his navel. She reached the button of his jeans and glanced at his face.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Kiss me, and I won’t.”

“No.”

“Kiss me, or I’ll paint my name on your stomach.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I
so
would.”

He could stop her. He could get out of the water, climb up the bank, walk back to the house.

He could, but he didn’t.

She didn’t paint her name on his stomach, either, because she’d never planned to do that. She did the worst best thing, instead. She unzipped him. Her hand found him hard and aching hot, and she took him in her filth-coated palm as her other hand shoved his jeans and briefs a few inches down his ass to give her better access.

“Jesus, Roman.”

She squeezed, and it hurt. The grit against his tender skin. The revelation that this fault line of his, this weakness, went so much deeper than he’d wanted to acknowledge.

Something wrong with you
.

He kissed her.

It was a nightmare.

The worst kind of nightmare, because it was so good, he couldn’t stop.

They rolled. Rolled again. Mud and rushes and water, flesh and tongues and lips and
teeth, sucking sounds, silica crunching between his molars when she stroked him harder and he had to clench his jaw. He cupped her breast, full and round in his hand, her nipples tight points that he sucked, twisted, bit. He didn’t know if they were fighting or fucking or what. It was all the same. Rage and pain and ecstasy all mixed together, and he hated the way they mixed, hated the sweet beauty of the ache in his cock, the urgency of his need to get inside her and make her arch up beneath him, make her come until her eyes crossed, make her smile.

The last one worst of all. That he wanted to make her smile.

That he’d wanted to break down that bathroom door and take her out of there, cheer her up, restore her to herself.

He liked her. Because he was weak, and she was alive, her aliveness so deeply rooted that no trauma could kill it, no pain pull it up by the roots and extinguish her. No one could ever hurt her as deeply as he would hurt every day, every minute, if he let himself.

And if he stayed with her, if he allowed her to get at him, get
into
him, she would make him feel it.

He couldn’t stand it.

But he couldn’t stop, either. He shook his hand in the water to clean it, found her clit with his thumb and stroked. Slicked up her wetness with two fingers over the hood, made her writhe, did it again, and then got distracted when she bit his neck. They were like that—biting teeth, stroking hands, leg over hip over back, pressing together and rolling and dripping on each other. Like mating animals that drew blood until it made them frenzied, fucked hard and made their pleasure audible with screams that sounded like death.

It should’ve been meaningless. Two adults rolling around in the mud, one of them naked, the other one getting there. It should have been seedy and sordid and dirty and wrong, and what messed him up worst of all—what made him thrust against her hip, dip his fingers deeper and search with his thumb for the stroke she liked, the pleasure she wanted—was that it wasn’t any of those things.

It felt good. It felt right.

Her feet pushed at his jeans, shoving them farther down his legs.

“Roman, please,” she said.
“Please.”

“Please what?” He kissed the pulse point at her neck. Fisted his hand in her hair, dark yellow at the roots, dirty and tangled.

“Fuck me.”

“I can’t.”

“Roman, if you go all moral on me, I swear I’ll hurt you. Fuck me now. Regret it later. That’s the way this works.” She lapped her thumb over the head of his cock. “This. Inside me. Please.”

“No, Ash, I mean, I
can’t
. I can’t move my legs.”

Her eyes widened, her whole face taken over by a slowly spreading shock. “You’re paralyzed?”

“I’m not
paralyzed
, dumbshit, I’m stuck. My jeans. I’m stuck in my jeans. And I don’t have a condom.”

He rolled to the side, and she let go of him to look. Then she started laughing, a hysterical sound that murdered his arousal and broke some crucial piece of his resistance, because
God
, the way she laughed. He had no defense against it. “I can’t believe you just called me
dumbshit
,” she said. “This from the guy who’s stuck in his own pants.”

“You’re the one who shoved them down.”

“I thought—oh my God.” She was wheezing now, incapable of coherent speech. Tipped over from sexual excitement to hysterical mirth, and he loved that it was even possible for that to happen. He loved that she could feel those things side by side, because he couldn’t. He hadn’t thought he could. “I thought—you were—
crippled
. Because I—oh, make it stop.” She clutched her stomach, folded in half with laughter. “—I saw it in a movie once, and—”

“You saw it in a
movie
?”

That made her laugh even harder, and Roman couldn’t help it. He gave up.

There was absolutely no way for him to stop himself from feeling like this when she acted like that, and he didn’t even want to.