Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (8 page)

“It’s more than thirty miles,” she said. “You should probably get gas before Miami.”

“When are you planning to tell me where we’re going?”

“Later.”

She caught herself picking at the pocket of her cargo pants and folded her hands in her lap.

What would Roman be like when he was angry? Would he turn red, yell? Or was he one of those people who got even quieter and planned revenge?

Leaning forward, she pointed the heat vent away from her. The control for her side of the car read 70 degrees, but the air from the vent felt cold, raising goose bumps all over her arms.

Roman drove. After a few more miles, he signaled and took an exit.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Hotel.”

“We can’t stop here. We’re only at Homestead. If this is some trick—if you’re going to dump me here and leave, then I just want to say—”

“Relax. This is where I’ve been staying. I need to take a shower and pick up my things.”

“Oh. I thought you lived in Miami. Why are you staying in Homestead?”

“In traffic, it’s still another seventy-five, eighty minutes to my place. When I’m working in the Keys, I don’t always feel like making the drive.” He pulled into the parking lot of one of those extended-stay chain hotels for businessmen and parked.

“So you have a room here all the time?”

“Not all the time. Often.” He put his hand over the key in the ignition and paused. “I’ll be thirty minutes or so. You can wait here, or you can wait in the lobby.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“Fine.”

He paused again.

“You’re not going to steal my truck.”

The way he said it, it wasn’t quite a question. It wasn’t an order, either.

His hand hovered protectively over the key.

Ashley rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Roman, I’m not a
criminal
. What would I even do with it? Drive out onto Route 1 and get stuck in evacuation traffic? It would be the shortest joyride in the history of car theft.”

That seemed to decide him. Leaving the key where it was, he opened the door and hopped out, retrieved his briefcase, and loped through the sliding-glass doors.

Ashley turned up the heat and toed off her sandals. She twisted sideways in the seat to rest her cheek against the leather upholstery.

She watched the raindrops move over the window, each following its own unpredictable track, and she tried not to think about how tired she was—how utterly beaten.

How far out on the limb she’d walked with this stranger.

She tried not to think of Roman behind the windows of one of those hotel rooms. The shower filling the air with warm steam that smelled of him. He hadn’t invited her up, and she didn’t want to go, even in her imagination. She didn’t want to see his throat bared as his razor scraped a path through his shaving cream, or to imagine his brown arms pushing into the sleeves of a starched white shirt.

She didn’t want to know how much better, how much more
settled
he would feel with his jaw gleaming, his clothes clean, his neck smelling of aftershave. Perfect again.

She didn’t want to know him.

She wanted her grandmother, and her bed at Sunnyvale, and for none of this to be happening.

Ashley closed her eyes, and her tears tried to come up, but she pushed them down deep into a dark well where she had learned to keep them long ago. She piled all her hateful thoughts in on top of them, and when the well brimmed over, she put the wooden cover on and closed her eyes.

She slept.

She woke to the sound of his voice outside the driver’s window. The door opened and brought the cool, moist air with it, and a cacophony of wind.

He wore the gray suit she’d first seen him in, with a white shirt open at the collar. He looked exactly as she’d expected him to. He leaned into the car but didn’t climb up to his seat.

“You said so this morning.” He spoke into his phone. “I haven’t forgotten.”

A pause. “Yes.”

“No.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

And then, after another pause, “Give Heberto my best.”

“All right.”

A flash of white teeth.

“I’ll do that, kitten.”

He disconnected the call and opened the back door to toss his briefcase and suitcase behind the seat, then climbed up into the car and started the engine.

“Ready to go?”

Never let them see you sweat
. It was the only truly useful motto Ashley had adopted from her father.

She straightened her legs, pushing her toes back into the thongs of her flip-flops. “Did you just call a woman
kitten
?”

“If you need to use the facilities, now’s a good time. Or you can wait a bit. I’m going to stop for gas just up the road.”

“Does she like that? Because I have to tell you, I’ve been called a lot of things, but if somebody called me
kitten
, I’d laugh in his face.”

“I’m going to take that as a ‘No, Roman, I don’t need to use the facilities.’ ”

“What does she call you?
Tiger?
Ooh, no, or
Tomcat
?”

He looked at each mirror and put the car in reverse.

“What’s her name?”

But then she remembered. Earlier, she’d dreamed of Roman poised above her and awakened to the sound of another woman’s name. “Carmen,” she said. “It’s Carmen, isn’t it?”

“None of your business.” They pulled out of the lot and headed toward the highway.

“What is she, your boss?”

He said nothing, but his mouth did this sort of tightening, locking-down thing, like he was mentally screwing his lips shut to keep from speaking.

A good sign, if her goal was to rile him up. Which apparently it was. What other ammo did she have in her arsenal, after all? If she got him annoyed, she might be able to make him tell her things he wouldn’t otherwise. She
had
to keep pestering him if she wanted to learn anything worthwhile—anything she could use against him in this war of theirs.

“You really shouldn’t get sexually involved with your boss,” she said. “It’s such a bad idea. This one time, I was working at a swim-with-dolphins place, and—”

“She’s not my boss.”

“But you
are
sleeping with her.”

No response.

“Or maybe you just want to be? If so, I’d lay off the
kitten
thing. You’ll never get her to give it up that way.”

“Don’t be crude.”

“What, you’re not trying to get her to give it up? You are straight, aren’t you?”

“None of this is open for discussion. It’s private. My private business.”

It was. And her heart was pounding, her head full of imaginary versions of Roman’s Carmen. Long, thick black hair. Lush curves packed into a designer suit.

Killer high heels.

She didn’t like these visions—this physical reaction—but if Roman’s locked-down mouth was any indication, he didn’t like it even more.

“Maybe it’s not open for discussion, strictly speaking, but here we are, stuck together for however many hours, and—”

“Hours?”

“—you’ve already kissed me. We should probably—”

“I didn’t kiss you. You kissed
me
. If I’d had any warning, I would have stopped you.”

“Okay, well, all I was trying to say is that we should get this stuff all out in the open. Like, I should probably tell you that I’m not currently involved with anybody. There was a guy with the nonprofit in Bolivia, Chad, but he came back to the States a few weeks before I did, and anyway he wasn’t all that in the sack. Not bad on oral, but—”

“Ashley,” he interrupted. “I’m not
interested
in your sexual exploits.”

The extra emphasis he bestowed to the word
interested
gave her a thrill. “So you’re saying you’re not available?”

“I’m saying you have no sexual interest in me. You’re just trying to get a rise out of me.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“You’re provoking me, and you’re totally shameless about it. Are you even capable of subtlety?”

“I tried to hit on a guy subtly once. He took my best friend home. So the next time, I just shoved my breasts in his face. That worked a lot better.”

“I can imagine.”

“Oh, you like my breasts?”

He rolled his eyes and muttered something that sounded like it might have been “Completely without shame.”

“Makes for interesting sex.”

“Stop with the sex talk. I’m taken.”

“By Carmen.”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see the woman who could take you. I bet she wears leather. Binds you to the headboard, and then straps on—”

“Jesus,” he said, and she laughed, unable to help herself. He was such an excellent straight man, his face a mask of disgust. “I should have left you on that tree.”

“Probably. But instead you rescued me when I fainted. You’re my hero now.”

“I didn’t rescue you. I tossed you over my shoulder like a sack of cornmeal.”

“You did?”

“How did you think I got you into the office?”

“I assumed you cradled me tenderly in your arms.”

That made him snort, and one corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah, right.”

“Admit it, Díaz. You had dirty thoughts when I was unconscious.”

“I did. I thought,
‘Díos mio
, this
jeba
is
filthy.’
 ”

He didn’t just say the Spanish words. He spoke the whole sentence as though he were, briefly, the Miami Cuban he looked like—slow, drawling, with a girls-can’t-resist-me machismo and a decent facsimile of a disreputable smile.

So decent, in fact, that it sort of worked, if the chagrin-drenched stab of arousal between her legs was to be believed.

Damn.
Damn
.

Roman put on his blinker. “I’m stopping for gas.”

And because she couldn’t quite manage to locate a witty comeback, Ashley simply said, “Fine by me.”

When he cut the engine, she jumped out and made for the bathroom, telling herself that her knees were weak and her pulse too fast because of the ordeal she’d been through. Two nights on a palm tree would mess a girl up, even if she’d grabbed a shower, some snacks, and two naps.

It wasn’t Roman making her feel so unsettled.

That would be absurd.

Her stomach started growling around Lauderdale Lakes.

Monitoring her in his peripheral vision, he couldn’t help but notice the way her gaze fixed on fast-food billboards and highway signs. She sighed when they blew by one with a stack of blueberry pancakes on it.

At Coconut Creek, she wrapped one arm over her belly. He felt a pang of conscience.

No, he didn’t. He didn’t have a conscience. That catch in his throat, that nagging in his head—it was nothing more than reason.

Reason told him that she had to eat something. She’d been stuck on the palm tree for thirty-six hours, and all she’d consumed since was a bag of popcorn, some chips, and a candy bar. It was well past lunchtime. Roman was starving, but he wanted to know where they were headed, and he needed leverage to get the information.

His own stomach made a traitorous noise. He ignored it. He could hold out longer than she could. There was no question.

They passed West Palm Beach. The traffic thinned. Rain pummeled the windshield, but he didn’t mind that. He liked the ruthless efficiency of the wipers and the ease with which the climate controls kept the windshield free of fog.

He liked the vehicle’s quiet cabin, riding high above the other cars, feeling as though he could roll over any trouble that came his way.

Of course, the goddamn Airstream trailer would probably blow over on a bridge and drag him and Ashley to their doom. But he found that if he tilted the rearview mirror just so, he could almost manage to forget it was there.

He might be able to forget Ashley, too, if it weren’t for the way her stomach grumbled. Or the way she fiddled with the radio, which she did randomly, halfway through songs, or five
seconds in, or right before the end. Every time with an abrupt plunge forward against her seatbelt that made every muscle in his body tense up at her violation of the bubble that was supposed to separate her part of the car from his own.

He couldn’t believe she was really so carefree—not when she’d been attached to a palm tree just this morning. She was doing this to torture him, and it was working. It hurt in his joints, in his bones, to endure her. As though she’d aged him, and now he was a four-hundred-year-old creature, dry and dusty. He was an ancient pharaoh mummy, all his organs stored in jars, and she was … fuck, some kind of Girl Scout who wandered into his tomb in search of a merit badge. Naively, gleefully desecrating his thousand-year sleep.

If he were a pharaoh, he would curse her. Not with death—just something to stop her from being so disorderly and annoying and vital all the time. Whenever her stomach rumbled, he wanted to reach over and give her shoulder a push and say, “Stop it.”

Stop it, stop it, stop it
.

But she couldn’t, of course. It wasn’t her fault that she was hungry. It was his fault for starving her. His fault he was so hungry, so disrupted around her.

The thought struck him—mallet against gong—and reverberated inside his head.