Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (16 page)

There was only one way out of this place, and it wasn’t Roman’s way or Mitzi’s way. Freezing up had never worked. Neither had fighting, hating. The only thing that had ever worked for Ashley was love. Loving her grandmother. Loving the people she met—the family she’d created at Sunnyvale, the friends and lovers she’d found in her travels.

She lifted her head and looked at Roman. Really looked at him. Wide nose, soft mouth, strong chin, broad cheekbones, two-day stubble, caterpillar eyebrows.

Roman Díaz. Her enemy. She liked him.

She liked his face, his basic decency, and—as much as it would annoy him if she ever said it out loud—his spirit.

She didn’t
want
him for an enemy. Whatever Mitzi said, all Ashley wanted was a chance to show him. To keep him with her for long enough to change his mind.

And yes, she had to manipulate him to make that happen. She had to threaten him, at least a little, because if she didn’t do that there was no way he would stay with her.

But whatever he thought of her, whatever he said to her, she wasn’t going to hate him back.

I’ll destroy you, Ashley
.

She lifted her hand and smoothed her thumb over one bristly eyebrow. She stroked his cheek. Ignored his flinch. “You’re welcome to give it a try,” she said. “But I think you’re going to find it’s harder than it sounds.”

Sunnyvale was a mess.

Carmen lifted one steel-toed work boot and stepped gingerly over a fallen gutter. Her hard hat slipped down her forehead, and she pushed it up with her phone, which had the effect of turning down the volume on Roman’s non-explanation.

It had no useful effect on the hat.

She needed a new one. Was it too much to ask for a hard hat that would sit properly on her tiny woman-head?

No. It wasn’t her head that was the problem. The world was the problem. As ever.

Still, if she had to inspect properties in conditions like this—post-hurricane, messy, possibly dangerous—she had to have the right equipment. And there was no getting out of the occasional inspection. She worked for her father, she dated Roman. She was awash in men with properties to be inspected.

Stopping, she squeezed her phone to her shoulder with her ear and made a note on her clipboard.
New hard hat
.

Roman was going on about … as best she could tell, nothing. He sounded strange, too. Flustered. Not like Roman at all.

Best to cut this off at the pass.

“You keep talking about wrinkles and hiccups,” she said, and began walking again, passing a large palm tree at one end of the pool. “We’re not playing doctor here, Roman. What’s going on?”

Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t “Blackmail.”

Carmen stopped. Turned around. Walked back to the tree. She poked at the padlock and pile of chain beneath it with her toe.

This was the spot, then. Grand Gesture Central.

This was the woman who was blackmailing Roman Díaz?

Please
.

“In order to be blackmailed,” she said, “you have to have done something wrong.”

She didn’t say
And that’s not possible
, because she didn’t need to. Roman knew as well as she did that he never did anything wrong. He parked between the lines, filed all his paperwork perfectly the first time, bought her flowers at just the right not-calculated-seeming times. He zeroed out his email inbox before he went to sleep at night. He knew where semicolons went and where they didn’t go. He could salsa dance.

Roman was perfect.

Usually. He’d gone strange on her the past few days, which was why she was here, inspecting his property, hoping to get this demolition back on track so her father wouldn’t find out what was going on.

This development meant a lot to Roman, and Roman was hers, so it meant a lot to Carmen, too. At least theoretically.

She had to admit, the reality was that she didn’t like these sad, sagging buildings, and she didn’t like how the air smelled like rot because of something dead on the beach, and she would prefer to wrap up and go home as soon as she could manage it.

Roman must have put his palm over the phone, muffling his voice, but she heard the beeping of a large truck backing up and the sound of someone who sounded like Roman but couldn’t be, because his disconnected words were too unhinged—
stupid
and
don’t do that
and
Oh, Christ on a crutch, tell me you didn’t just—

And then a crash.

When Roman came back on the line, he spoke over the low throbbing chug of a diesel engine. “You’re right about blackmail generally,” he said, “but not in this case.”

She could tell that he was trying to sound calm, but an undertone of hysteria in his speech sent her back to when she was fourteen and she met him for the first time. When he’d had nowhere else to go, her father had invited him to stay at their house in Coral Gables for his spring break, and he’d seemed like such an exotic species to her—nineteen-year-old college-student Roman with his Wisconsin accent and his dog-eared Nietzsche paperback, his wild kinky-curly hair, his ideals. He’d spent the entire two weeks arguing with her father. Roman would fly into rages, declaim for minute after breathless minute, cite obscure sources and strangely specific facts.

He’d frightened her with his intensity, his passion, but her father had been delighted with him. Riveted by him.

She remembered, too, how devastated Roman had been when he moved to Miami expecting a job at her father’s office and instead been told he needed to earn it. Carmen could still remember Heberto’s cold proclamation.
You have to work your way up from the bottom
, he’d said.
If you can’t do that, what good are you to me?

Roman had gone about it with feverish intensity, renting a shit-hole basement apartment off Calle Ocho and working construction jobs while he earned a contractor’s license, then a real estate license, finally a loan officer’s license. He’d cut off his hair, bought the best clothes he could afford, and started carrying building codes and binder-clipped zoning regulations around in the front seat of his car, flipping through them whenever he had five minutes to read.

Heberto had encouraged him, in his way—offering cutting remarks to puncture Roman’s pride, telling anecdotes about life in Cuba that were meant to deliver important lessons. When Roman told him proudly of his first big deal, Heberto had waltzed in and stolen it, then laughed when Roman seemed hurt.

Carmen rarely thought of Roman that way now—as a man who could be hurt.

It irritated her to think he’d backslid so rapidly.

“What’s all that beeping?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

He didn’t tell her. Instead, he began to run through a litany of complaints. His truck stuck in the mud. An Airstream trailer, a road trip, hippies, an alligator.

Carmen listened, perplexed, while she searched the site for the contractor. His pickup was in the lot, but there was no sign of him out front, and she’d already checked the pool area, the beach—ah.

There he was, waving from the open door of the office. She began making her way toward him. Roman was going on and on about someone named Jerry, who had been hard to locate and then turned out to have a shotgun on the front seat of his truck,
loaded
, and no sense of physics whatsoever, even if he was a mechanical genius, and—

“Stop,” she interrupted.

Roman stopped.

“Tell me what she’s trying to blackmail you over.”

“She claims there are Key deer. That the property is Key deer habitat.”

“That’s absurd.”

But Carmen found herself glancing around anyway, looking for them.

All she saw was eight down-at-the-heel buildings, a cinder-block office, a pool. A lot of downed palm fronds, the gutter, an upside-down kayak, a chunk of pink attic insulation, some other debris that had blown in during the hurricane.

No place for Key deer to sleep or eat or whatever it was Key deer did besides be a pain in the ass.

“I know it’s absurd,” Roman said, “but that’s how judges are. Even a whisper of habitat destruction, and they’ll shut me down for years.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

But Roman didn’t exaggerate.

He didn’t hare off to Georgia, either, with girls who chained themselves to palm trees. Roman didn’t get blackmailed, and if he did, he didn’t sound so damn
worried
about it.

She reached the office and made a note on her clipboard to find out more about the local judges, and then another note to get a second Bluetooth headset so she wouldn’t have to keep squeezing her phone between her shoulder and her ear to free up a hand.

Tucking the pen into the clipboard, she lifted one French-tipped fingernail in the direction of the contractor. He’d have to wait for her to finish the call. She couldn’t do three things at once.

“You got all the environmental work done properly?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“And your expert found no impact on Key deer?”

“Negligible impact. Ashley’s bluffing. I’m going to call her bluff and head back to Miami. If she tries to stop the demo, I’ll throw everything I’ve got at her.”

“That’s ludicrous.
Think
, Roman. This is a woman who chained her own body to a palm tree without making any provision for food or toilet. She’s the walking, talking definition of
loose cannon
. You don’t turn your back on a loose cannon. You get it under control. If my dad finds out what a mess things are here by reading about adorable baby Key deer in the
Herald
, you’re going to have much bigger problems than some eco-terrorist chick. You two have a handshake agreement, not a contract, and you
know
Heberto—that’s not enough to protect you or your development if he decides to bail. Or, shit, if he decides to
take over
, I can’t see you being able to stop him from doing that, either. Now, I’ve got your contractor here, and he says he can get everything cleaned up and be ready to do the knockdown in …” She lifted her gaze to the
contractor’s face for the first time.

He had a beard.

A lovely beard.

She didn’t like beards, but this one …

This man …

She gave her head a shake, knocking out unwelcome thoughts of soft brown hair and warm brown eyes. Knocking her hat out of alignment again. It slipped down over her eyebrows. “When will you be ready to do the demo?” she asked.

He smiled, and it was like sun-warmed liquid pouring over her whole body. “I can fit it in next week if we get the site cleaned up, but—”

Carmen turned away. Today was Wednesday. They would lose another five days to this madness. Not good, but with the hurricane cleanup messing with the timing anyway, it could be borne. “Monday, Roman. Bribe her, pay her off, shut her up. I don’t care what you do, but get her locked down, and do it by Monday.”

She poked the phone to end the call, then stared at it instead of looking up.

Because she wasn’t accustomed to Roman being a problem, or sounding so strangely
helpless
.

And also, unfortunately, because she wasn’t accustomed to sharing space with men who could do weird things to her blood when she wasn’t even looking at them.

This was the first time, actually.

“Everything all right?” the contractor asked.

She lifted her chin and collided with his eyes again. Soft eyes. Soft face, soft mouth. She glanced down, hoping for a soft body, a target for the disdain she needed to locate, but instead she found a chest and the word
burly
.

A big, burly chest, and
giant
arms covered in fur, and jean-clad thighs that she wasn’t sure she could span with her hands. Snug jeans. A big belt buckle that belonged in Texas or somewhere, and beneath it—

Oh, God.

Carmen dragged her eyes up, up, up to his face, thinking
burly
again along the way and feeling her cheeks heat. She made her voice extra cool when she said, “Everything is fine. You’ll have to make it Monday. Roman will be back by then.”

The man nodded. “I’m Noah.”

He stuck out his hand.

She took it, and it engulfed hers, and her entire lower body disappeared in the conflagration.

“Carmen,” she squeaked.

“I know.” He tipped up her hard hat, ran a finger under the strap, and frowned. “Here. There’s a trick to these.”

She just stood there. Stood there like a wax figure—a melting wax figure—as he took her hat off, made some adjustment to it, put it back on, and fastened the strap under her chin.

Impossible. She’d looked at the mechanism, and she understood it perfectly well. There were no tricks.

But her hat fit now.

“So you’re Roman’s girl,” he said. “I’ve wondered about you.”

I’m not anyone’s girl
, she snapped. Inside her head.
Don’t be impertinent. And don’t stand so close
.

Though he had to be four feet away now. He’d stepped back when he finished with her hat. He only
felt
close.

She only
felt
as though she couldn’t control her tongue when she said “No.”

Noah’s forehead corrugated. “Oh.” An awkward silence reigned for a few beats, and then he asked, “Does Roman know that?”

Of course he does
, she said.

Except she didn’t, at all. She opened her mouth, and a torrent of nonsense came out. “You’ve misunderstood. I’m seeing Roman—I mean, he’s in Georgia, so—but we’re not exclusively … we haven’t said that we won’t. See other people. And it’s not as though he owns me, but yes, we’re still going out, if that’s what you mean.”

Something poked Carmen in the throat. The clipboard. She was clutching it to her chest like a shield.

How mortifying. Where had those words even
come
from? Not exclusive? She’d been dating Roman for a year, sleeping with him for nearly as long, and even before he’d asked her out there had been an inevitability to their relationship. She’d known, and he must have, too, that as soon as he traded his run-down apartment for a decent condo with landscaped grounds—as
soon as he traded in his late-model Accord for the Cadillac—he would ask her out, and she would accept.