Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (22 page)

She’d thought he was paralyzed.

They were coated in mud, horny, confused, idiotic—and yet he’d seen more white around her eyes than he’d known she possessed, just because Ashley had once watched a movie where somebody got paralyzed during sex.

She was asinine.

Reckless, insensitive, optimistic, joyful, credulous, naive, sexy, funny.
God
, she was
funny
. Flopping onto his back, he dropped his wrist over his eyes and grinned at the stars.

Still wheezing, Ashley crawled over him, her hair dripping water onto his face.

“Look at you. You’re smiling.” She pushed his wrist out of the way and studied him, and for a few seconds that felt like years, he let her see what she did to him—the good part of what she did to him. The part he’d been hiding even from himself.

But under her guileless scrutiny, the smile started to feel wrong on his face—stiff and false—and he thought of a picture that Patrick had stuck on the refrigerator and forgotten about. The three of them at a water slide in the Wisconsin Dells, Patrick and Samantha smiling like a matched set, perfect, and Roman standing slightly apart. Too small, too brown, skinny like only a six-year-old boy could be. All his ribs showing. The grin so wide it split his face.

His birthday. That picture had been taken just a few months before someone told him what his
real
father had done, and Samantha found out, and everything that had made it possible for him to smile that way got broken.

Ashley sat back on her heels and stroked her palm down his chest. “Aw. You ruined it,” she said.

Roman thought about Carmen. He would have to call and tell her, because even as he swore to himself that this would never happen again, he caught his eyes focusing on Ashley’s nipples and the white triangles of skin where she had no tan. He caught himself thinking about the way her ribcage had felt under his hands, and he knew he couldn’t be trusted. He couldn’t be sure he would always say no.

Sometimes he lied to people to get what he wanted, but he had never lied to Carmen. He’d never had to. He wouldn’t start now.

Roman sat halfway up, found the waistbands of his jeans and briefs, and tugged them upward. He kept pulling, straining against stiff denim as displaced water rushed down his thighs until he got the jeans on again and zipped.

He thought about telling Ashley that he always ruined it. Always.

But he decided it would be kinder if he just didn’t tell her anything.

He called Carmen at 6:30, as soon as he was reasonably certain Prachi and Arvind were awake and moving around in the master bedroom.

He used the landline in the living room, grateful that the Kapoors still owned such a thing. His own phone sat on a towel on the floor of the craft room, leaking brownish water and small pieces of grit every time he picked it up. One more reminder of his folly.

Roman didn’t need reminding. His wet jeans had rubbed a rash across his thighs on the walk back to the house.

He and Ashley had snuck back inside while it was still dark out. Afraid the noise of the shower would wake Prachi and Arvind, they’d opted to clean up at the sink in the downstairs bathroom, splashing water on their heads, necks, and arms and drying off with a hand towel.

He’d tried to apologize, but Ashley had waved him off and asked,
Are you going to tell her?

In the morning
.

Good luck with that
.

Carmen picked up on the fourth ring. “Who is this?”

“It’s Roman.”

“What happened to your phone?”

“It got wet.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. Have you gotten that woman under control yet?”

“No.”

A door opened upstairs, and Ashley descended a few steps and leaned over the banister. When she saw him on the phone, she made an
eep
shape with her mouth, covered it with her hand, and tiptoed the rest of the way down the steps.

“…  even tell me we can’t do the demo Monday,” Carmen was saying. “The site’s ready. You’ve still got seventy-two hours, so I don’t want to hear any whining. Get it done.”

Ashley disappeared into the kitchen.

“That’s not why I called.”

“So why did you call?”

“I … got involved with her last night.”

A cabinet door closed. Then another. Ashley was looking for something.

“Her, meaning the palm tree girl?”

Carmen sounded different—her voice a bit higher than usual, with not-quite-surpressed emotion. Surprise? Hurt?

“Her, meaning Ashley. Yes.”

She cleared her throat. When she spoke again, she sounded like she always did. Assertive, demanding. Easy to interpret. “You kissed her, slept with her, what? Spell it out.”

The deafening whine coming from the coffee grinder in the kitchen drowned out all thought for a moment. Prachi appeared on the stairs. “Good morning, Roman.”

“Good morning.”

“Roman?” Carmen said. “I’m on tenterhooks here.”

But the irony in her tone announced that tenterhooks were for other people. Weak people. She disdained the very idea of nervous anticipation, while Roman felt like a pinned specimen, stared at, weak-stomached, and spiky.

He inhaled deeply, waiting for Prachi to start talking with Ashley in the kitchen before he spoke. “Third base. I guess.”

“Don’t guess. There’s no guesswork involved. First base is kissing. Second base is—”

“Third base.”

She exhaled a sigh. “Okay.”

Roman waited for her to say something more, but he heard nothing from her end but an increase in the volume of white noise. She’d turned the shower on. She would have just finished her workout, and she was multitasking this phone call, probably stepping naked on the scale beside the shower and noting her weight on the chart that hung from the wall, subtracting a few ounces for her cell phone.

One hundred and ten pounds. Always the same weight, within a pound or two, since he’d first seen the chart. Ashley would find that amusing. Why chart your weight when it never changed? She wouldn’t understand it because she didn’t understand the impulse to find small, concrete ways to bring the world under control.

Carmen did.

“Roman?” she asked. “Are we done here?”

Arvind descended the stairs, whistling. “Good morning,” he said at the bottom.

“Good morning.”

He went into the kitchen.

“I guess … no. I’m not done,” Roman said.

Ashley appeared and set a cup of coffee on the end table beside him, then disappeared again. He heard a noise that might have been nothing or might have been Carmen, tapping her fingernails on a clipboard in his mind’s eye.

“Why is it okay?” he asked.

“What? Speak up.”

“I said I’m wondering why it’s okay. That I cheated on you.”

“It wouldn’t be okay if you
had
cheated on me, but we’re not exclusive, Roman. If you use a condom with this woman—and I have to assume you’ll always use a condom because you’re not a moron—you don’t even have to call to tell me about it if you don’t want to. Though I would be astonished if you didn’t. You’re honorable to a fault.”

Roman couldn’t speak. Words had become elusive, slippery. He reached for them, but he couldn’t find any that seemed like they might come close to expressing his confusion.

Finally, he managed, “So, you’re telling me … What are you telling me? We’re not in a relationship?”

“Of course we’re in a relationship, but we’ve never defined it as an
exclusive
relationship. We’re dating. If I had wanted to ensure you would never go out with another woman, or touch anyone but me, I’d have at least bothered to say so, don’t you think?”

Roman held the handset between his knees, away from his ear, and traced the pattern of the holes in the receiver with one finger.

Not exclusive? When had exclusivity become a thing you had to declare to the woman you’d been seeing for a year? The woman you were sleeping with? It wasn’t—this wasn’t how things worked. If Carmen believed—

An uncomfortable thought made him lift the phone back to his ear. “Carmen, have you …?” But he couldn’t say it. No matter what Carmen said, if he asked her, he’d be leveling an accusation, and he had no business accusing her of anything. “Never mind.”

“Not recently, Roman, no. But I hadn’t ruled out the possibility.” Her voice was crisp.

She was always crisp. She wore crisp clothes and put her hair up. She had an ice-blue blouse that made her skin look flawless as a satin sheet.

Probably she wasn’t cold all the way through, any more than he was. But it went deep.

It had never chilled him before.

“So we’ve been dating each other for a year. I hadn’t been with anyone else, and you haven’t,” he said. “That suggests we’re exclusive.”

“Suggests?” She sounded distracted. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Roman. Whatever. Whatever you want, really. We were exclusive, if you say so. Now we’re not. Are you calling to beg my forgiveness or to break up with me?”

Roman’s mental gears ground to a halt again.

Why was he calling?

He hadn’t thought past confession. Now that he did, neither of the options she offered seemed to fit.

Carmen laughed. “Never mind. It’s clear you don’t have the first idea. I hope at least you made some progress with this woman. Is she feeling more pliable this morning?”

Prachi came out of the kitchen with a stack of plates, Ashley trailing her with four filled juice glasses. They set them around the table.

Ashley’s hair was wet from the shower. She wore tight orange yoga-type pants that ended just below her knees. A black top that tied behind her neck. She had freckles all over her shoulders, and she looked a little tired when she met his eyes, but she didn’t look the slightest bit pliable.

“No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“You know what today is?”

“Saturday?”

“September first. And you know what you are?”

Screwed
.

“No.”

“Behind schedule. Do what it takes to make this happen. Sleep with her if you think it’ll get her to drop the Key deer thing by Monday. I’m not bothered.”

She wasn’t bothered.

Carmen truly, honestly didn’t care. The woman he’d planned to marry.

If Ashley and Prachi hadn’t been in the room, he would have told her that he wasn’t going to sleep with Ashley regardless. Since they were, all he could say was, “About Monday. There’s no chance.”

“You’ll think of something. Always darkest before the dawn and all that. Look, I’m not good at pep talks. Just pretend I gave you one, okay? Call me back when you know something.” She disconnected the call.

Roman returned the receiver to the cradle and looked at his hand wrapped around it, thinking about the woman on the other end.

It wasn’t a question of Carmen’s concealing her feelings. It was more a question of whether she had them at all.

He
liked
that about her. He didn’t need help from Noah or his PA to guess how to treat Carmen because he could treat her as an extension of himself. They wanted the same things: money, recognition, Heberto’s esteem.

He’d always assumed that made them perfect for each other.

It had. It still did.

But …

But it bothered him that she didn’t care that he’d come very close to having sex with Ashley last night. Wouldn’t he care, if their positions were reversed?

He tried to imagine Carmen beneath another man. Another man’s mouth on her breasts. Another man’s dick inside her. Roman waited for his pulse to quicken, his fists to clench.

Nothing happened.

“Did you sleep well?” Prachi asked.

“Very well.”

“Wonderful. Ashley and I are whipping up breakfast. Should be ready in twenty minutes or so, if you’d like to shower.”

“Thank you. I think I will.”

He didn’t move.

Ashley came over and perched on the arm of the couch. When Prachi left the room, she asked, “How’d it go?”

Her eyes were somber.

“I’m not sure.”

“Did you get an ultimatum?”

Hands off the bitch, or we’re through
. That was the sort of ultimatum she meant.

Not
Use sex to manipulate her into letting you demolish Sunnyvale, or my father won’t be happy
.

“You could say that.”

Ashley picked at her thumbnail. She lifted it to her lips and bit at it, gently. “I’m sorry I put you in that position,” she said. “I don’t—I’ve never been the other woman before. I don’t want to be now.” She tried out a bright smile and made a show of tucking her hands under her thighs. “So I’ll stop assaulting your virtue, I swear.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

A slight downward turn to her mouth made him regret putting it that way. It wasn’t her fault, what had happened last night. It had been both of them together, unhitching themselves from their common sense.

It wouldn’t happen again.

“We’re going to head out in a few hours, all right?” she asked. “Prachi said she has some old curtains and other things I might be able to use for the Airstream, so I need to go through that stuff first, but then we’d better get out of their hair.”

“Where are we going next?”

He’d given up the idea that he might not be going with her. There was Florida, Sunnyvale, Coral Cay—far away and unaffected—and then there was this trip. This thing he was doing with Ashley.

He didn’t understand what it was, but he accepted now that he was part of it, and he wouldn’t be getting off the ride until it came to a full and complete stop.

“Pennsylvania.”

“Camping?”

Ashley did a butter-churning dance with her arms. “In Virginia tonight, baby. Airstream all the way. And then again when we get to the big PA.”

Her glee was a performance. Another man might have been convinced. It was just that Roman kept looking at her eyes, and they were wrong. Too serious. Too sad.

He tried to figure out what he was supposed to be feeling about that.

Nothing. That had been his goal for so long, he’d developed a knack for it.

But he’d misplaced the knack. When he thought of breakfast, camping, sleeping bags, campfires, Pennsylvania, Ashley’s eyes—when he thought of Carmen essentially saying
You can score with other women to your heart’s content
—he felt a dozen things he couldn’t name. He didn’t know how to sort them into compartments or decide how to act on them, and that made his hands restless, smoothing back and forth over his pajamas.