Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (6 page)

“Buddy,” she said sweetly, as the clapping hands returned, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

And then she fainted, and he caught her.

Ashley tussled with consciousness for what felt like an eternity. She groped at it in that timeless, unending way of dreams, her need to emerge from sleep manifested as an empty ache between her legs, a yearning for her dream-lover that she couldn’t slake because,
God
, she’d been trying forever, but she couldn’t figure out how to get his zipper down and his jeans off.

And then the jeans were history—
success!
—and she was blinking futilely at the elastic band of his underwear, trying to remember what to do next. Incapable of pushing her own underwear either down or aside.

Another magical removal left them skin to skin below the waist, dark to light, her lover perched above her on his elbows and her eyes on the condom he held out to her. They passed it back and forth a few times, utterly baffled. Her frustration reached a fever pitch and held there, back arched, hips lifting, until finally,
finally
he moved inside her, and she saw the understanding and the rapture break over his face at the same moment he spoke.

“Carmen,” he said, and Ashley woke up. “It’s Roman.”

It was Roman between her legs, inside her head.

No. It was Roman speaking on the phone from the other side of the room.

Ashley squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. Fuzzy avocado green. A splash of orange. She knew this couch. It sat in the low cinder-block building that served as Sunnyvale’s office.

And the only way she could’ve gotten from the palm tree—the last place she remembered being—to this couch—where she most assuredly was
now
—was if Roman had carried her.

She’d passed out and woken up having a sex dream about her arch-enemy.

How humiliating.

Worse, she kind of wanted to go back to the dream, because she could still
feel
him. That hot, thick slide. That moment of heavy-lidded, hazy recognition. Her whole body singing
yes, yes, this
.

“No,” he said. “No, no, no, that’s not going to happen.” He paused. “I know. Right, I know, but the thing is—”

He stopped speaking.

He sighed.

Ashley sighed, too, as if in echo, and registered her surroundings more completely. Roman on the phone by the front window. Her bare, aching legs stretched out on the couch. The soft brush of the chenille throw against her cheek, her exposed hip, her calf.

He’d carried her in here. Spread her out on her side, put a pillow beneath her head, covered her up.

How long had she been out?

“Sure. Yes. I’ve had a few wrinkles here, but nothing I can’t handle. I’m not going to make it to New York, though. I’ll have to ride out the storm here. Give me a call when you get in, or I’ll call you guys once I’m able to. It might be a few hours. All right. Bye.”

He turned around just as she sat up, which meant he saw her wince and press her fingers to the space between her eyebrows in a futile attempt to contain the throbbing pain in her head.

Some creature had crawled into her mouth and died. Possibly the very small, very stupid squirrel taxed with the job of safeguarding her good sense.

She’d
kissed
him. She’d made him swear an oath, and then he’d unlocked her and she’d kissed him, passed out, and had a desperate, vivid dream about how badly she wanted to have sex with him.

Which she kind of
did
now, even though that was totally cracked, and how was she supposed to get him to Georgia in these circumstances? How could she drag him to Mitzi, Airstream in tow, when she couldn’t even sit up without feeling like her brain was going to explode and dribble out her nose?

She couldn’t handle this. She couldn’t even trust herself to stick to the plan while unconscious.

“How are you feeling?”

“Great,” she croaked.

When he raised an eyebrow, she had no idea how to respond. She attempted a smile, but her bottom lip cracked and started to bleed.

Ashley licked the blood away, wishing she weren’t such a mess. That she weren’t so itchy, filthy, her skin beneath her bikini and T-shirt clammy and her head weirdly elephantine, perched on top of her spindly little neck.

And while she was wishing, she went ahead and wished he hadn’t brought her to the office, too. She’d been avoiding it ever since she opened a file drawer and found it empty.

Everything was empty that was supposed to be full. The files, her grandma’s apartment, the storage area—nearly all of Susan Bowman’s personal effects had been swept off the face of the earth, leaving behind her furniture, the Airstream, and inside it a stack of boxes with Ashley’s name on them.

She’d opened only one and found in it nothing but a few folders labeled “Finances.” Tax records from the past decade. Title transfer documents that had taken Ashley half an hour to understand the gist of. A stack of quarterly rent receipts that went back two years.

Flipping through papers on the floor of the trailer, she had felt the pain of utter betrayal grow inside her until it was a pressure so intense that she’d been sure she couldn’t draw another breath without choking on the tears she was trying to repress.

She hadn’t been back in the office, Grandma’s apartment, or the Airstream since. Instead, she’d stuck to the little gardener’s cottage that had been her bedroom since Grandma converted it as a sixteenth birthday present.

She didn’t want to be here now—to be feeling the familiar nap of the couch under her legs or smelling ancient nicotine and Grandma’s phantom mint tea with every breath she took. It was all a little
much
at the moment, and Roman made it worse. Maybe it was the dream, or maybe it was the fact that he’d caught her and carried her inside, but he looked good. Not plastic-good, but wet-haired, dark-stubbled, frowning forehead
messy
good.

“You look awful,” he said, in that rich, vowel-tumbling voice of his. That voice that reminded her of the way he’d groaned in her dream, low and harsh and animal.

She closed her eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath.

Then she took another one, just in case the first one hadn’t been deep and cleansing enough to get her through this conversation.

“I could use a shower and a sandwich,” she said. “And some clean clothes. And about three days to sleep.”

“But considering there’s a hurricane on the way and we’ve got to hook up your trailer and pack your stuff and get out of here …”

“Yeah.” She braced a hand against the back of the couch and sat up the rest of the way, irritated with herself for about seven different reasons. For passing out. For being tired and
hungry. For being swollen and slippery between her legs, and for failing to shut down her insanely inappropriate arousal now that she was awake.

For being unequal to the situation. As always.

She lifted her hand and felt the ends of her hair. Still damp, but not dripping, and clumped into thick locks the way it did when it dried on its own.

She’d been out over a half hour, surely.

On the table behind her grandmother’s desk, a green ceramic mug steamed peppermint fumes into the air. Not phantom tea, then. Real tea that he must have made for her. The snack basket held microwave popcorn, chips, candy, and gum. Grandma had a weakness for junk food.

“I can get by with that tea and some popcorn, for starters.”

“Good.”

When she stood up, the throw fell off her legs, and the floor buckled. Or possibly her knees. She reached out a hand to brace herself against nothing at all and somehow ended up jamming her palm into his chest so hard, her wrist shrieked.

“Whoa,” he said. “Slow down.”

He had his hands on her. His bare hands. One at her waist, the other spreading over her ribs. Her shirt had rucked up when she fell, and the only thing keeping her off the floor was Roman’s hands.

She glanced down at her legs, traitorously intertwined with his. “This looks bad.”

“You were falling.”

“I know, but you caught me.”
Twice. Inside of an hour
.

“I’m a gentleman.”

Not in my dream you weren’t
.

She attempted to straighten her noodle legs and found that if she concentrated hard, she could stand up. “I think I’m okay now.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. You can let go.”

He did. “What were you going after?”

“The tea.”

“Sit down. I’ll get it for you.”

She wanted to point out that she’d only just managed to get up, but his tone brooked no
argument, and she didn’t feel like putting up a fight.

She would pretend this was still the truce period. When they got on the road again, the truce would be over. Once he found out where they were headed, he would
kill
her.

But for now, she would allow him to make tea for her, and she would try very hard not to let it change anything.

It doesn’t matter how warm his hands are
, she reminded herself.
He has a cold, black heart
.

“Half an hour,” he said. “We can spare that much. Then we have to get moving.”

Plenty of time to drink the tea and shovel some sugar, fat, and carbohydrates into her food hole. She’d eat, take a shower, and feel much better.

In half an hour, she could steal back the offensive, and Roman could return to being the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

The Airstream was a nightmare—a thirty-foot-long silver bullet with riveted seams that sat on a pad of gravel behind the office building, gleaming in the rain.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Ashley crooned.

Roman saw nothing that would inspire her use of the word. The camper could only be called ramshackle. For some ungodly reason, the windows that wrapped around one blunt end had been covered from the inside with tinfoil—badly. Whoever had done the job had used black electrical tape that had loosened since its application, and the foil on the largest window hung suspended by one solitary square of tape.

A pressed-metal identification plate beneath the window declared this beast to be an Airstream Sovereign “land yacht,” but to Roman it looked like an albatross. A white whale.

A sleeping contagion, resting quietly on four balding tires.

He kicked one. Too soft—it needed air. The trailer hitch was rusty, and a large wooden wedge lay on top of it, its presence a mystery that Roman couldn’t solve.

The screen door didn’t sit flush. It looked like a gust of wind might tear it off at any moment. He counted seven dents in the body before Ashley pressed her breasts against his arm and distracted him from his inventory.

She hung on him like a lover. The urge to shake her off nearly overwhelmed him.

He didn’t want her hands on him. She was so … disorderly. She’d showered and put on clothes, but she wore flip-flops with her raincoat, and she’d used the last few minutes of the reprieve he’d granted her to put a fresh coat of blue polish on her toenails.

Who wore sandals in a downpour? What purpose did toenail polish serve? She ought to be checking the hurricane readiness of the property or emptying the contents of the fire safe—if they even had a fire safe, which he had to admit seemed unlikely. With Hurricane Minnie on the way, it was a time to be gathering up essential records as a hedge against potential disaster. It was a time for lesser people to
panic
, and though he didn’t want Ashley to, per se, he didn’t want her painting her toenails, either.

And the office—it looked exactly the way it had the day he dropped by to make an offer
on Sunnyvale. He’d given Ashley two weeks to clear out after the funeral, yet it appeared that she’d done nothing to prepare for his arrival. Nothing but harass him.

For the past twelve years, Roman had worked to ensure that he never got angry, or sad, or overwhelmed. That he never felt vulnerable or defeated or depressed, impassioned or inspired or giddy with joy. He’d had enough of extremes in the first two decades of his life. Now he was a machine of reason.

He didn’t enjoy passing time with unreasonable people.

Ashley stroked his wet arm, rattling off a sarcastic Airstream sales pitch in a voice rubbed hoarse by the elements while the rain lashed at them both.

“…  1976 model features allllll the modern conveniences: vista-view windows, tambour doors, luxurious shag carpeting …”

She talked like a used-trailer salesman, but she sounded like she belonged in a black-and-white movie, waving around a cigarette at the end of her elegant ebony holder. She had this low, mellow voice that didn’t go with her
Brady Bunch
appearance. A voice that trailed smoke everywhere she went.

Her grandmother had been a smoker. Surely Ashley wasn’t. But she had to be smoking
something
to be able to view this trailer with so much enthusiasm, much less to expect him to tether it to his most cherished possession.

He’d given his word.

The simplest thing would be to break it.

Sometime in the next hour or so, Carmen and Heberto would board a jet in Miami and fly to New York, where they’d weather the storm in their penthouse. That was where Roman belonged—above the city, behind glass and soundproofed walls, tucked away with the woman he wanted to marry and the man who had taken him under his wing. He yearned for the drone of the television Heberto never turned off. For the spot on the living room sofa where he always sat with Carmen, her with her laptop open and her reading glasses on, him studying the Village of Islamorada zoning rules alongside some snapshots he’d taken last week on a drive spent searching out exploitable anomalies.

That was his place, not this.

Not
here
, with this flip-flop-wearing, fainting, frustrating woman whose blue toenails matched the unnatural color of her eyes, and who kept pushing him in ways he didn’t wish to be
pushed.

He’d given her his word.

Since when did he even have a word anyway? Since never. He had no honor. He had a murdering
gusano
for a father—a worm—and a foster father who’d raised him without affection and then tossed him out shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Two men who were supposed to have loved him and didn’t, only one of them honorable.