Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (12 page)

Each time, his response was a perfectly polite, perfectly calm negative, delivered in a
tone that suggested he’d been asked to lunch but had a previous engagement.

He actually said those words, in response to the sweat-lodge three-way offer:
I’m sorry, but I have a previous engagement
. Eavesdropping from the kitchen, where she’d been helping Mitzi get the food ready, Ashley had laughed so hard she gave herself a stomach cramp.

Each subsequent indignity made him stiffer, less responsive—this place, his stuck truck, the drum circle, the unrestrained conversation and unconventional offers. The way people kept introducing themselves by asking,
So you’re with Ashley?

Worst of all, the exposure to all this unabashed sharing of
feelings
, all this
love
. Roman’s worst nightmare.

And oh, yes, that lifted her up, too. That put lightness in her heart, to be comforted and buoyed, certain that the morning would bring the solution she needed, while Roman was deliciously miserable.

Nicole began a chant. Ashley repeated the words back, adding her voice to the chorus, admiring the gleam of Nicole’s waist-length red hair under the lights.

Mitzi caught her eye and smiled conspiratorially. She’d promised to help, just as Ashley had known she would. Her eyes had lit up with the delight of it. Mitzi loved to scheme, loved even more to exact revenge.

Hee-hee-ti-kago-oah!

“Hee-hee-ti-kago-oah.”

Kirk’s baritone carried the response line, and Ashley added a little flourish with her drum, an extra syncopated beat that gave her more lift.

Free me, Key Largo!

“Free me, Key Largo.”

Ashley just sang whatever words came out. Whether they made sense or not was irrelevant. When you were drumming, you didn’t care about logic. The drum circle was all about freedom from shame. About physical, rhythmical, sexual, primitive rhythm—letting it move through you, releasing you from your burdens. Kirk had a whole spiel about chakra energy and drumming, how it activated the sacral chakra, which was the seat of sexual impulse.

This explained why the drumming always made Ashley happy, hungry, and horny.

Roman had his plastic-man thing going again. That look was starting to do strange things to her. She wanted to stand up and dance over and twine her arms around his neck and whisper
phrases in his ear that would make the color rise up his neck and heat his cheeks. To invite him to do things to her that Carmen would never allow and Roman would never, ever permit himself to want.

She wanted to see if she could make him want them, too.

It wasn’t a
real
impulse, of course. It was just the drums talking.

But the fantasy felt good. It pushed the rhythm down, down to the base of her. She closed her eyes, dreamy and hot and bothered and happy.

When she opened them, he was watching her, and she smiled at him, just because she could.

Then she lowered her head and closed her eyes and
pounded, pounded, pounded
at the drum.

The headboard beat a relentless tattoo into the wall behind him.

“Oh! Oh, oh, yeah, yeah baby, yeah, like that. Just like that. Just like—oh!”

Roman sat up. Methodically, he began stripping the bedding off the futon.

He’d tried covering his ears with his palms and his head with the pillow, but it didn’t help. Nothing helped. Mitzi and Kirk had been fucking since the dawn of time, and it was never going to end.

Kirk was a god. He was a machine. For the first hour, Roman had been—if not envious, at least mildly impressed. It was an accomplishment of sorts, having such a vigorous sex life at Kirk’s age. Kitty-cat sweatshirt aside, Mitzi was an attractive woman.

But God almighty, she made so much
noise
.

Roman piled the bedding on top of his suitcase and folded the futon into the frame, returning it to a lumpy-couch shape. He folded the sheets, the blanket, and made a neat stack.

Order restored—at least to this small corner of the living room. The rest of the place was still trashed from the party that had followed the drum circle. The party that had gone on for hours and hours, well into the night.

He’d been trying to block out the mess, telling himself it wasn’t his living room, wasn’t his house, wasn’t even his
state
.

No luck. Combined with the endless symphony of Kirk and Mitzi, the mess was more than he could take.

He’d thought about going out to sleep in the truck, but it was too buggy and too humid to try that without turning on the AC, and he didn’t want to risk running down the battery or running out of gas in the middle of Swampland. Getting his tires stuck was bad enough. He could just imagine the rusted-out hulk that used to be his Cadillac. Feral swamp children gleefully stripping the tires and hood ornament.

And even if he could have left, his foster father, Patrick, had trained him to be polite. All those childhood lessons made it next to impossible for Roman to leave without saying goodbye and thanking his hostess for her hospitality. He couldn’t thank his hostess without knocking on
her bedroom door.

Obviously, out of the question.

In the kitchen, he found a garbage can under the sink. He returned to the living room and started picking up plates, stacking them into a pile and tossing all the food into the trash. He tried not to listen, but there was no way not to listen, and apparently no way to distract himself from making unwelcome comparisons.

To Carmen, who had never made that much noise in bed with him. Not once. Not ever.

To Ashley.

Ashley, with her hair loose and her legs crossed on the floor, skin glowing with heat, shirt dark under her arms. Smiling at everyone, swaying back and forth as she beat on that stupid drum.

Ashley, who’d pranced out of the bathroom and brushed her teeth while teasing him about all the invitations he’d received during the party. She’d been barely intelligible, her lips coated in blue foam, and he’d tried not to notice the way her pajama shorts hugged the curve of her ass, but failed.

Rather spectacularly.

She slept in the guest room, her bed separated from the futon in the living room by the width of a paneled wall.

He picked up casserole dishes and coffee mugs with dried maroon blotches at the bottom. Half-empty beer bottles. A glass that held something that looked like water and smelled like apple pie laced with ethanol. Appetizer plates sprinkled with frosted brown crumbs.

“Fuck me! God, yes, fuck me! Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, yeah yeah yeah
yeah
, baby, just like that, oh, I’m gonna come, I’m coming, I’m—”

Roman turned on both taps at the sink, found the plug, and began filling the basin with warm water. He squirted in soap. He visualized his travel kit—a neat red-and-black nylon bag he’d purchased online because it had exactly the right number of pockets.

One held a plastic vial filled with earplugs the color of flesh, another a set of earbuds in a small disc-shaped case, ready to be plugged into his phone.

Two separate solutions to his problem.

Too bad he’d forgotten the travel kit in the bathroom of the hotel back in Homestead.

Ashley had showered before bed, and he’d been forced to share the guest bathroom with
her shampoo smell. To wash his face with borrowed soap, and to skip brushing his teeth because he couldn’t bear the thought of using anyone else’s toothbrush or—Ashley’s repulsive solution—his finger.

And now he had to listen to
this
, and he had to push the image of Ashley’s ass out of his head because if he didn’t, he found himself thinking about what it would look like framed between his palms. He found himself fixing on slick, glistening heat, slapping skin, moaning Ashley, and he couldn’t.

He
couldn’t
.

He wouldn’t.

But he did. God, he did, over and over again until his stomach hurt and he thought he might be the single most vile person on the face of the earth.

He had more willpower than this.

With a flick of his hand, he pushed the faucet handle all the way to the left and stuck his hands under the water. Warm to hot to too hot, too much, and he watched the pale flesh at the base of his thumb and along his wrists redden in a flare of pain.

He was loyal to Carmen, with her sweet face and her buttoned blouses and her endearing blunt ruthlessness.

He was loyal to his own dignity, his principles, his self-control, and he had no
interest
in Ashley, but he knew what she’d be like. She’d be lewd. She’d be loud—outrageously loud—and he would hate it.

He would hate every second of it, just like he hated being trapped in this house, this swamp, with these awful people.

Mitzi stopped announcing her impending orgasm and started moaning, a sound beyond words that shamed him to hear. Shamed him to respond to that sound, to be pulling his hand from the water and pushing it, wet, against his disobedient cock through his cotton pajamas and his briefs. Willing this need to subside.

But the action gave him only thick, burning pleasure and bottomless guilt, played out to the sound of Kirk groaning
Fuck, fuck, babe
in the next room.

Roman couldn’t take it. With one hand, he untied his pajamas, shoved them and his briefs down and out of the way, took hot flesh in his searing hand for three slow strokes that made his eyes roll back into his head, made him go faster, a blurred fist and the other one wet, burning, the
pain only making the pleasure ache better.

He shouldn’t be doing this, so exposed, or at all. Not in the kitchen, because someone could come out. Someone might see, might
know
, and he had to go fast. Get it done before she caught him at it.

A door in his mind swung open, unlocked only when his cock was in his hand and his control was gone, vanished.

Behind it, his roommate at Princeton hunched on the couch with his girlfriend’s head between his legs, bobbing and glistening, his slack mouth wet and open.

Carmen, fifteen, dressed for the beach and completely off-limits—the bounce of her tits and the mystery of her pussy and the forbidden smell between her legs.

Roman’s first time, at a party, on a pile of coats with a girl they called a skank whose face reminded him of Samantha, and who let him fuck her without a condom even though it had been stupid, stupid—

Scenes from a dozen porn movies, paragraphs stolen from books, anger, power, slavery, abuse, captivity, all of it bad, so bad, but none of it sparked and his hand hurt, he
ached
, he thought for a second this might not even work—and then another door opened inside his head, and there was Ashley.

Ashley’s white ass tipped up, his cock deep inside her, her spine a runway for his fingers to travel to the back of her neck and hold her down, keep her put.

Ashley with her wrists chained behind her back and no T-shirt, just that blue bikini and mulch stuck to her legs, her burned cheek flaming pink and his cock halfway down her throat.

Ashley and her armpits, her armpit hair, her wrists pinioned above her head on the bed and her mouth, smiling, her breasts flattening against his chest as he kissed her and he fucked her and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him in, into this heat hot wet guilt, unable to believe he’d even done it. This terrible thing. This betrayal.

Unable to believe it, unable to stop, unable to regret it or prevent his hand from stroking, stroking, weakening his knees and sending tremors through his arm braced on the countertop, forcing his wet mouth open in a soundless shout that hurt deep in his chest.

The house fell quiet, the silence like a death.

You’re sick
.

Never want to see you again
.

Something wrong with you
.

Always, always something wrong with him. Something broken that he could never fix.

But it was done now. He’d done it, and he couldn’t undo it. He could only draw a line under it and refuse to repeat it.

Roman tucked himself away and washed his hands.

The sun had begun to come up, lighting a glow out over the swamp.

He washed all the dishes twice, dried them, and put them away.

Ashley found Roman at the breakfast table.

Morning light came in at an angle through the glass patio doors and made his black hair gleam white, as though he had no color to him at all. Beneath the table, the bunched shapes of his calves were visible through his gray-and-white striped pajama pants.

Old-man pajamas. She bet he had the matching top in his suitcase—collared, with long sleeves and buttons. She bet he wore it, normally, but hadn’t been able to bring himself to put it on in Mitzi’s House of Carnal Hippie Sin.

The T-shirt he’d put on instead was green and surprisingly soft-looking. So was the curve of his neck as he bent his head over his cell phone. It unsettled her how much she wanted to walk up behind him and run one finger along the visible bumps of his vertebrae. Lean close to smell his warm skin.

Damn. Maybe her dirty thoughts last night hadn’t been entirely drumming-related.

She made coffee.

When she placed a mug on the table in front of him, he said, “The only tow service is a hundred miles away.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“What do they do around here if a car needs towing?”

“Usually Jerry does it. He has a big truck with a hitch.”

“Bigger than the Cadillac?”

“Yeah, he could tow the Cadillac. Does it really need to be towed?”

Roman glanced outside. “The mud’s up to the axles, and it hardened overnight. It’s like concrete now. Plus, something’s wrong with the trailer hitch. It won’t unhook.”

“That’s probably just the pressure from it being jackknifed.”

“No, I’m pretty sure a piece got bent. It’s going to have to be cut off.”

“With a saw?” She imagined Roman kneeling in the grass, furiously working a handsaw. Sweaty and hot. Desire curled in her lower belly and started to purr.

Oh, fuck. Double fuck.

“I was thinking with a cutting torch.”