Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (31 page)

A shot of irritation made her want to lick his earlobe or suck on his neck. Annoy the crap out of him to pay him back for her shaky uncertainty about pretty much everything.

Yesterday, Roman had kissed her like he needed something, like she had it, like she
mattered
. He couldn’t take it back.

Maybe he wasn’t trying to. It could be he just didn’t go for PDA. Or he didn’t like being surprised by the last-minute addition of random old men to his travel plans. Roman wasn’t big on surprises.

She folded her forearms across the back of his seat. “Everybody’s so crabby. We should play a game or something. An icebreaker. Two truths and a lie? Roman, you first. Tell us three things about yourself, and one of them should be a lie.”

“I’m not a fan of icebreakers.”

“Come on. Give it a whirl.”

“The smell of your gum is giving me a headache.”

“That’s too easy—it’s got to be true. Now I’ll know whatever you say next has a fifty-fifty chance of being a lie.”

He sighed. “I’d rather not play, Ash.”

“Was that a lie? Because that could make everything kind of confusing. I think we should stick with non-game-playing-related lies, or else—”

“Please,” he said quietly. “I really do have a headache.”

Her gum soured. She felt jittery, a chittering tin top whirling in random spirals right at the edge of a drop. “Fine. Stanley? What about you?”

“Not a chance in hell,” Stanley said. “You want entertainment, talk to your boyfriend.”

“Who said I’m her boyfriend?” Roman asked.

“I’m old, not blind.”

Ashley clamped her jaw tight and sat back against the seat, annoyed with herself.

He wasn’t her boyfriend. It shouldn’t hurt to hear him deny it.

They rode along, listening to the highway noise and the distant squawk of the stereo. The mad spinning of the top in her head accelerated.

“Can somebody turn up the radio?”

No one did.

She unbuckled her seat belt, climbed over the armrest, and jacked up the volume.

Stanley scratched his ear, squinting at a sign. “You want to turn right up there.”

Roman glanced at his navigation system. “GPS says to go another four miles.”

“This way’s faster. Turn right.”

Roman passed the turn.

Stanley cleared his throat, lowered the window, and spat. The gob landed against the passenger-side window, where Ashley watched it smear across the glass, its stop-and-go progress a disgusting measure of their velocity.

Fuck
, she thought.
Fuck, fuck, fuck
.

She should have pulled Roman aside and given him some pointers on how to handle Stanley. He had to be handled, or else he got defensive and prickly, and when he was in this mood, he did things like accidentally-on-purpose spit on your car, just to see if he could wind you up.

Winding people up was kind of a sport for Stanley.

He began clearing phlegm from his throat.

“You spit in my car again, I’ll leave you by the side of the road,” Roman said.

“I didn’t spit
inside
the car, son.”

“I’m not your son.”

“Thank the Lord for small favors,” Stanley muttered.

“What did you say?”

“Guys—” Ashley interrupted.

“I said, ‘Thank the Lord for small favors.’ ”

“Roman, honey, you can’t actually put Stanley out of the car,” she said. “He’s old, and it’s hot.”

“Ashley,
honey
, whatever bed he makes, he’s gonna lie in it.”

“See, that’s the way he talks to you,” Stanley said. “He’s got no respect.”

“If I didn’t respect her,” Roman bit out, “Sunnyvale would be rubble by now.”

“Can we just try, like, a five-minute quiet period?” Her voice sounded far away, small. She couldn’t stand listening to the people she loved at odds with one another. It was what her parents had done when they were together, bicker and snap, one-up each other, score points until one of them won and the other started yelling. She’d always been in the middle, working to calm them as they shouted over the top of her head.

“Fine,” Roman said.

She was taking her second deep breath when Stanley twisted around in his seat to look at her, jerking his thumb in Roman’s direction. “You know why you should stay away from this one? He thinks he’s smarter than everybody else. Take that turn he blew past back there—that turn would’ve saved us half an hour, but he decides his computer knows better than a man who’s lived in this part of the country most of his life!”

“I might have made the turn,” Roman said calmly, “if you’d bothered to explain where it went. But I’m not going to blindly drive off the map because you say to. It might be fine for Ashley to follow your directions without questioning your motives, but …”

Ashley covered her ears with her hands and closed her eyes.

They were making her heart race, and she was suddenly so tired. She’d been tired for days. Tired from thinking about her grandmother and tired from trying to figure out the right thing to do. Tired from looking through those boxes, tired from crying. She’d gone to the ghost town with Roman last night emptied out, willing to take whatever he gave her because she didn’t have the energy anymore to stop what was happening between them.

It had been enough to know he liked her. Enough that he wanted her, that he trusted her with his story, that he kissed like he meant it.

This morning, though, it wasn’t enough. Everything looked different, and it wasn’t because of Stanley, although it was starting to seem like bringing him along had been an epically bad idea. She’d been up half the night thinking about Roman and what she was getting into with him. What he wanted. Whose side he was on.

Because the thing about Roman was, he wanted her. He would take from her, take
her
if she let him—her support, her body—but what could he give her in return? They weren’t equals, they were antagonists. She was blackmailing him. That hadn’t changed.

And even if she slept with him, nothing
would
change.

Ashley had slept with the wrong men often enough to know that sex never shifted the balance of power or transformed anyone’s personality. Sex just made everything more complicated.

This was why they were heading to Ohio, rather than straight to Wisconsin. Not because she was afraid to go to Wisconsin—although, yeah, she was. It scared her to think about talking with Esther about her grandma. She feared getting to the end of this trip only to discover she still had no answers and no idea where to go next.

They were going to Ohio because Ashley wanted to see Nana.

Nana had confidence. Nana was
direct
. She knew exactly who she was and what she wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to say it. She was energetic, bawdy, funny, and she called things like she saw them.

Nana was incapable of making the sort of mistake with a man that Ashley had been making ever since she grew boobs, and if Ashley could just get to Camelot, Ohio, to ask her, Nana would help her sort out how to think about all this—her feelings for Roman, her power over him, his power over her.

When her shoulders got sore, she had to drop her hands from her ears. Roman and Stanley had stopped fighting about her and started plucking subjects to argue over out of the scenery—farm subsidies and the interstate highway system, duck hunting, the “check engine” indicator that had lit up on the dash. Anything. Everything.

This was what Stanley did when he found someone new to do it to.
God
, how had Ashley failed to anticipate this? And why the hell was Roman letting him get away with it?

They bounced over something, and Stanley began lecturing Roman on his driving.

“Stop,” she groaned, turning the word into a long, drawn-out plea.
Staaaaaahp
. “I’m dying. You guys are killing me. Every single thing you say feels like a stab wound.”

Stanley talked over her, giving her license to attempt even greater heights of melodrama.

“It’s like a needle in my eye socket. Every insult is a leech, stuck on my eyeball, sucking out my soul. I would rather be riding
underneath
the car than listen to this. I would rather be tied
to the grille naked, with bugs splatting into me. I would rather …” Ashley paused to think up another form of torture and realized, abruptly, that the car had fallen silent.

“You’d rather what?” Stanley asked.

“I was going to say I’d rather have duct tape wrapped all over my body and then ripped off, but I thought it might be too salacious.”

“You’re nuts,” laughed Stanley.

“This from a man who just argued about the sacred rights of duck hunters with the guy who’s giving him a free ride,” said Roman. “Tell me the truth, Stanley—have you ever even been duck hunting?”

“Don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“You have a pet crow!” Ashley interjected. “Why do you have to argue with Roman about hunters’ rights?”

He shrugged. “Being ornery keeps me alive.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to make him have a stroke and crash the car.”

Stanley turned to look at her. “You know what I don’t get about you, girl? Why you always care so much about guys who don’t even like you.”

All the air went out of Ashley.

“Roman likes me,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“I’m not having this conversation,” he said. “Not with him in the middle of it.”

“I’m pointing out what’s obvious,” Stanley said. “The girl needs someone to take care of her.”

“Ashley can take care of herself,” Roman snapped.

“Let’s hope so. Because if she keeps picking people like you—”

“ ‘Like you’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Some rich bastard from Miami who only cares about money.”

Roman slammed the flat of his hand into the steering wheel. “That’s fine, from
you
. Because you’ve been doing such a grand job watching out for her. I’m sure you called her every day after the funeral to check how she was doing. And I know you must have welcomed her to your campground with open arms, because—Oh, wait! You didn’t actually do that, did you? You didn’t even come over to say hi. She had to go to
you
, and then—”

“What d’you know about anything, huh? Waltzing in and buying up her birthright
without so much as a by your leave—”

“Listen to me, old man, because I’m going to tell you something about Ashley Bowman that you
don’t
know—”

And that was all she could take. More than she could take, actually, of Roman shouting in that tone of voice, shouting about
her
as if she weren’t in the car, defending her as though she didn’t know how to defend herself, both of them making her a pawn in their stupid,
stupid
argument as if she hadn’t been through this her whole fucking childhood, as if she hadn’t learned that it was a zero-sum game and the person who turned out to be equal to zero was named Ashley Marie Bowman.

“Shut up!” she shouted. “Both of you! Shut UP shut UP shut UP SHUT UP—”

Bam!

It took her a moment to register the noise. Even after she heard it, she lost another few seconds putting it together with the odd shuffling sensation beneath her feet.

The Escalade lurched dramatically to the left.

“What’s going on? Roman?”

“Engine’s goin’,” Stanley said.

“Be quiet,” Roman threatened.

Stanley lifted up in his seat to peer past Roman at the dash. “I told you, you can’t ignore them indicators.”

Roman hit the turn signal and punched the button for the hazard lights. The Escalade decelerated rapidly, rolling to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.

“I knew a guy who ignored that light, burned up his whole engine,” Stanley said. “The car was only good for scrap after that. Fancier car than this one.”

“It’s not the engine,” Roman bit out.

“ ’Course, there’s no steam coming out of the hood,” Stanley said. “So maybe it’s not all over yet. Could be you’ll be able to get it fixed, if you can find somebody to tow you to a garage that stocks Cadillac parts.”

Roman slammed the car into park, cut the engine, and turned to face Stanley. The grooves alongside his mouth were as deep as Ashley had ever seen them, his jaw hard, his shoulders tight, and his eyes … She couldn’t see his eyes. She could only see his sunglasses.

Even his sunglasses looked furious.

“It’s a flat on the trailer, not my truck’s engine,” he said, and the effort he made to clamp down on his anger was terrifyingly apparent. “A flat tire. I’ll change it, and we’ll be on our way. And when I get back into this car, you are not going to speak. Not one fucking word, all the rest of the way to Ohio.”

Stanley produced a gravely grunt that somehow managed to be mocking. “Could be we’ll get back on the road,” he said. “If your girl has a spare.”

Two heads swung around to stare at her in the backseat.

“The thing is …” she said.

Roman sighed explosively and pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head so he could wipe both hands down his face.

Ashley unbuckled her seat belt, resigning herself to how much her life was about to suck.

Which was a lot. And it
already
sucked a lot.

She pushed open the passenger-side door. “Let me show you what we have.”

Nineteen seventy-six.

Nineteen-seventy-
fucking
-six.

“You’re telling me,” he said.

And then he had to take a breath and let it out, because his fists were clenching, and that wouldn’t do.

He took a second one, just to be safe.

“You’re telling me, in all seriousness, that the spare tire for this vehicle is five years older than I am.” It was the most neutral thing Roman could think of to say. He was trying—trying very hard—to find solid ground again and plant his feet on it, because he hated feeling this out of control. He hated it more than he hated Stanley taunting him. He hated it more than he hated knowing, with crystalline clarity, that he’d made himself easy to taunt.

Because of Ashley.

“Well, it could be worse,” she said.

“How?”
Roman asked incredulously. “How could it be worse?”