Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (24 page)

It was the only way he knew. The only compass he could trust.

Roman untied his filthy, sweat-stained shirt from around his foot and shook it out. He put it back on. Buttoned it up. Tucked it into his pants.

He limped toward the bathroom, ignoring the pain in his heel.

Lifting it into the sink, he cleaned it as best he could with just water. From the hand-sanitizer dispenser on the wall, he filled his palm with cool, sterile gel and spread it over his wounds.

It hurt, but that didn’t matter.

He wrapped his foot in toilet paper, wet his face and hair and neck, and looked at himself in the mirror until his hands stopped shaking and nothing he felt showed around his mouth, between his eyebrows, or in his eyes.

When he was satisfied, he returned to the site. He knocked on the trailer door, pushed past Ashley’s dumbfounded expression and the boxes crowding the floor, and claimed the sleeping bag from one mattress.

He locked himself in his truck and laid towels on the seat. The sleeping bag went on top.

He crawled inside it.

Too hot. Too close.

But he fell asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.

Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight.

Bleary-eyed and yawning, Ashley watched Roman out the window of the Airstream as he curled up into one sit-up after another.

Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four.

Quiet Pennsylvania morning. Dark green hills rising beyond the cleared patch of campground. Roman, punishing himself.

She’d only started counting a minute ago, but the sweat at the neckline and under the arms of his new workout shirt said he’d been at this for a while. The army calisthenics pamphlet from the surplus store lay facedown on the picnic table bench beside him.

It was enough to make a girl feel a little guilty about her pajama-clad voyeurism.

Fifty-nine. Sixty. Sixty-one.

The rhythm of the repetitive movement sank down inside her. The way his body curled up, then released. The perfection of him.

Every time he came down, his elbow brushed against the rainfly of his new tent, making it jitter and shed dew. With the exception of its color—bright green—the tent in no way resembled the model they’d admired on the floor at REI yesterday, where they’d gone to find Roman a shelter after he refused to sleep in the Airstream.

Or, rather, it looked like that floor model would have if Sasquatch had come along and stepped on it.

Any normal person would stop and shift his sleeping pad an inch to the left to keep from knocking against the nylon, but Roman didn’t. Maybe the moisture felt good against his flushed skin. Or maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to stop once he’d started. For any reason at all.

Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Eighty.

Unease lifted her feet onto the upholstered bench and wrapped her arms around her knees. He ought to have been sexy doing this—the curve of his biceps, his clenched jaw, feet planted, quads tense as he came up and lowered down again and again, slow and controlled.

But just how long had he been at it?

Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. A hundred.

Come on, Roman. Give it a rest
.

He didn’t. Even when she opened the Airstream’s door and walked down the wet metal steps into the silence of the morning, he kept going.

“Morning.”

He grunted without breaking rhythm.

She found a dry spot on the picnic table to sit. The grassy islands of Shamokin Campground were silvered with dew. The snack machines by the office hummed quietly. Roman rose and fell, implacable as the sea.

They’d rolled in last night late and taken this site in section H, the end of the loop closest to the office, moving stealthily in the hope that they wouldn’t wake up Stanley and Michael or any of the paying customers. Not that there were a lot of those—just a tent camper over in the primitive section and an RV in one of the loops with electrical but no water and sewer hookups.

The office door opened. Stanley came out with his coffee mug and sat at the concrete table where he liked to watch the bird feeders.

She lifted a hand and waved. He nodded, an economical acknowledgment across the thirty feet separating them. Very Stanley—he wasn’t the type to make a fuss, even when old friends dropped in on his doorstep without warning. He would come over and say hello, but not until he was good and ready.

The trick to loving Stanley was that it was important not to push him into anything. Or try to get him to talk when he didn’t feel like it.

Or make him do anything he didn’t want to do, actually.

The trick to Stanley was to just wait, and watch, and find out what he would accept.

“How many sit-ups are you planning to do?” she asked Roman.

“Five hundred.”

She picked up the calisthenics pamphlet. Her eyes scanned the instructions, but there were no counts on the page, just exercises. Roman was providing his own targets.

Five hundred sit-ups.
Yeesh
.

“Where are you at?”

“Four-oh-eight, four-oh-nine, four-ten,” he said, and then blew out an audible breath that she took to mean
Piss off and let me do my thing
.

“All right. I get it. I’ll leave you to your flogging.”

She ducked back into the Airstream for her bathroom stuff and took herself off for a shower in the bathhouse. An older woman was at the sink, blow-drying her hair.

“Morning,” the woman said.

“Good morning.”

“That you in the Airstream, with the sit-up guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Nice.”

“Thanks.”

“Airstream’s not bad, either.”

Ashley smiled, even though she didn’t feel like it.

The water was hot, the pressure strong. The walls and ceiling had been painted a sort of industrial mint since she was last here, years ago. Stanley took good care of his place, but he wasn’t big on aesthetics.

When she got back to the campsite, Roman had switched to push-ups. The back of his shirt had soaked through. His arms trembled.

“Would you like me to build you an obstacle course while you’re finishing up here?”

He ignored her.

“I bet Stanley has some old tires I could set out. You could use the bathhouse as your wall-climbing thingy. Pole-vault over the muddy area by the tent-camping sites.”

His body sank toward the earth, then rose again. Again. Again.

“I’ll make up a fifty-pound backpack, and you can wear it on your twenty-mile run.”

“I already ran.”

God
. “How far?”

“I don’t have any way to know.”

“Was it still dark when you started?”

His head came up, and his eyes found hers. He sank. Rose. Sank. Rose. “What do you think?”

She broke eye contact and kicked at a pinecone in the dirt. “How did you sleep?”

Roman shook his head and looked down.

“Tent’s on a bit of an incline, isn’t it? I tried to tell you.”

“It’s fine.”

“It looks like the stick you used to prop it up didn’t hold. Did it fall on your head and wake you up?”

Nothing.

“I tried to tell you it was a bad idea to set up a brand-new tent in the dark.”

“That pole was defective.”

“Or maybe
you
were defective, thinking you could just slap that puppy together without reading the directions. ‘I’ll just push this through the sleeve. How hard can it be?’ ”

“Give it a rest.”

But she wouldn’t. Not until he did.

“I bet you woke up a hundred times, and every time, you were crunched up at the bottom of the tent, and you had to crawl back up onto your sleeping pad like an inchworm.”

He ignored her.

“I slept like a baby,” she said mildly. “In case you were wondering.”

“Wasn’t.”

Sank. Rose.

“If you want, I can give you some tips today. How to pick a good spot for your tent and stake it out so it doesn’t fall on your head in the night. Camp craft stuff.”

“I know camp craft.”

“Really? Because your tent—”

“Shut up.”

Sank. Rose.

He wasn’t nearly as irritated as he wanted her to think, though. Not with all that light behind his face.

“I’m just saying. If we’re going to be doing this for the full two weeks.”

“We’re not.”

“Hey, we might be. I’ve still got ten days to change your mind.”

“You won’t last that long.”

Would she? Ten more days of this—the prospect unsettled her. Ashley wasn’t sure how much longer she could postpone the inevitable. But she wanted to go to Ohio, Wisconsin … she had people to see, people she wanted Roman to meet. This was
her
time, her chance to change
Roman’s mind and convince him Sunnyvale was too important to destroy, too essential to be taken from her.

If she failed, she’d promised to forget about the Key deer and get out of Roman’s way. He’d knock down Sunnyvale, and she’d go on with her life. Somehow.

Ten days.

“I’ll last as long as I have to,” she said. “And in the meantime, you should know how to start a fire and all that. Without cheating. A proper fire, with an A-frame and one match, little piles of tinder and kindling and all.”

Another few push-ups, and he said, “I know how to start a fire.”

“Just like you know how to put up a tent?”

Roman dropped to his knees.
Finally
.

When he levered up his torso and looked at her, projecting annoyance, the challenge in his eyes made her nipples bead inside the shelf bra of her sports top.

Roman wiped sweat off his forehead. His color was up, his chest heaving. “I can build a better fire than you,” he said.

“One match?”

“Anyone can build a one-match fire.”

“You can do better? Oh,
tell
me you bought flint and steel at REI, and you can strike a fire off one of those key-chain things.”

“Not flint and steel. I can start a friction fire.”

“With just sticks? You cannot.”

“I can.”

“Do it, then.”

“It’s a pain. I’m not going to do it just to show you.”

“Do it,” she repeated. “Doitdoitdoitdoooooit.”

“Does that actually work on people?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Roman stood up and reached for the camp towel he’d left on the bench next to her. She could feel the heat coming off him, all those charged particles in the air between them. He bumped her with his bare knee, and she looked at the black hair on his legs, the runnels of sweat.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m disgusting.”

She wanted him just like this, though. Braced over her with his arms trembling, his heat sinking into her skin. One delirious, stupid, ecstatic glide, and she’d have him inside her, and she could stop all this mental lusting. This weird obsession with Roman and his Roman-ness.

Not that he’d go for it, even if he were available. The man probably had sex in the dark, beneath a top sheet, with his eyes closed. And wiped his girlfriend down with a damp washcloth afterward.

Petty, Ashley
.

She knew him better than that by now. Knew how he kissed.

Knew that he cared.

“If you can start a fire with friction, I’ll make you dinner,” she said.

“You cook?”

“Not on a stove, but I’m the best campfire cook you’ll ever meet.”

“Will you cook whatever I want?”

“No meat. Otherwise, yes.”

His lips compressed, and something happened to his cheek that might have been a dimple, except it was completely impossible that Roman had a dimple. “How long do I have?”

“Take as long as you want. We’ve got nothing else going on today except visiting with Michael and Stanley.”

“They own this place?”

“Yep.”

“What are they, gay?”

“No, they’re brothers,” she explained. “They’re from here. Stanley says—”

From inside the Airstream, the chorus of “Eye of the Tiger” began playing at full blast. Mitzi calling.

“Your phone works here?” he asked.

“Obviously. Doesn’t yours?”

“No.”

When Ashley had taken a shift driving yesterday, Roman spent a lot of time cursing at the new phone he’d bought in North Carolina. It didn’t seem to want to sync with all his stored accounts. Despite having conferred repeatedly with his PA, he hadn’t managed to get his email, calendar, or address book to work right. And now the phone itself wasn’t working.

Poor Roman.

“Huh. I’ve got to get that. You can grab a shower if you want, and then we can rustle up breakfast.”

Roman nodded. Ashley ducked into the trailer and answered the call right before it would have gone to voicemail. “Hey, Mitz.”

“Ashley! Where are you? I’ve been trying to get you for days.”

“In Pennsylvania.”

“Why?”

“Stanley.”

“Oh. Right.” She sounded crestfallen. Stanley and Mitzi weren’t the best of friends. “Well, have you got any good dirt yet on your developer?”

“Not really.”

“Have you fucked him?”

“What? No.”

“You might want to think about it. Men get sloppy after a good orgasm. He might tell you something.”

“That would be an awesome idea if it weren’t totally amoral.”

“Morality’s flexible. Anyway, I’ve been working from my end, but I’m drawing a blank. I talked to a bunch of people in the Keys—the permit guy, your grandma’s neighbors, chamber of commerce—and they all say Díaz is squeaky clean.”

“He is. I mean, as far as I can tell.”

“Right. He’s got the
perfect
facade. You have to admire him for it. But I’m thinking maybe there’s something in the paperwork. Have you gone through all your grandma’s records?”

“I looked through a few things.” The box with the title transfer. The medical bills. Those rent receipts signed in Roman’s scrawl—signed personally, as though he’d received the rent directly from Grandma. “There’s nothing strange.”

“Well, what about those cartons of stuff in the Airstream? Have you gone through all of the paperwork yet?”

Ashley glanced at the boxes lined up along the trailer walls. Eleven of them, each labeled with her name in permanent marker.

“No.”

“There could be a note or something.”