Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (34 page)

Ashley had wanted so much, from the moment she arrived back in Florida, to do something with her grief—use it to find a direction, to deliver truth or produce change. Her grief was the reason she’d chained herself to the palm tree, the root of her decision to throw her body down as physical proof of her dedication to the place she’d made her home.

But grief wasn’t all of it, because Ashley had stayed on the palm for two days. She’d stayed overnight, alone, when there was no purpose to her protest, no one to see her steadfast or listen to the anthems she sang in the dark.

She had remained there—hungry, tired, and aching—when the wind picked up. And she’d almost wanted to carry on for longer. Let the hurricane blow through her. Find out what was left of her when the storm was over and the waters receded.

Find out who she was.

Underneath all the roles she played to please other people, was there really a spark of starlight, or was there just emptiness—a well full of pain, a desperate need to be recognized, valued, loved?

If she opened up her little red address book and called ten of the people she counted as friends, plucking names out at random, would they know her? What kind of help would they offer? What kind of love?

She looked at Roman again. His hands, loose at his sides.

His eyes, dark and unreadable from this distance.

“Ashley, are you really okay?” Carly asked.

She didn’t mean to answer. Didn’t realize she had an answer. But she spoke, and what she said was, “She’s right.”

Nana was right. Ashley made herself over for men. It wasn’t just men, either—it was her
friends, too. Carly and Nana, Stanley and Michael, Prachi and Arvind. She gave them too much power, and when they used it against her, she smiled the whole time.

But she’d never played a role for Roman.

She’d never smiled at him when she didn’t mean it.

He’d begun crossing the lawn. Ashley closed her eyes and waited for the heavy sound of his footfalls on the porch steps.

“Can we talk?” he asked. “Alone?”

A rising tide of emotion made it impossible for her to answer.

Roman’s hand landed in the middle of her back. When he leaned closer to speak quietly in her ear, the world seemed to close around the two of them.

“Ash,” he said. “Please.”

She thought of the way he’d looked this morning, right after he yanked her away from traffic. How he’d touched her face by the Airstream, kissed her with such desperation.

She thought of everything he’d told her at the ghost town last night. What they’d shared. Ashley pivoted to face him. His hand rested at her waist. His eyes were awake, alive with feeling.

Not a robot. A man who was looking at her. He’d always been looking right at her.

She thought, then, that it wasn’t that she’d been telling the story wrong to Nana and Carly and Ellen. It was that they hadn’t been
listening
.

Roman listened.

“You weren’t kidding,” she whispered. “You really like me.”

“A lot,” he said.

When that made her smile, he leaned closer and kissed her.

The kiss was public-appropriate, gentle and uninsistent, but by the time Roman’s mouth left hers Ashley felt kind of dense for having taken so long to figure all of this out.

She didn’t know who she was—not exactly. But she knew that when Roman told her he liked her, he meant that he’d seen her there, attached to his palm tree, obstructing his path, and he’d liked the woman he saw.

He liked her when she got in his way. He liked her in the rain, and at the drum circle, and post–alligator attack. When she was blackmailing him, kissing him, infuriating him, crying in the Airstream.

She liked him, too. Far more than she could have imagined possible.

Resting her forehead against his shoulder, Ashley said, “Yeah. Let’s talk.”

He offered her his hand, and when she took it, he led her away from her friends.

Ashley went willingly, confident that this time she wasn’t mistaken in her trust.

It made sense to go with Roman down the driveway, onto a dark and unfamiliar path. He had come with her, after all. He’d driven her into the unknown, put up with her crazy stunts, built her a fire and held her hand.

He’d wrapped her legs in a space blanket, followed her into the lake in the moonlight, pulled her out of the path of a speeding semi, talked their way into this party.

She wouldn’t say no to him anymore.

Not when she needed so badly to say yes.

“You all right?” Roman asked.

He’d waited until they hit the bottom of the driveway to ask. He couldn’t imagine how she could be all right. He’d overheard her so-called friends ripping her apart back there.

“I’ll survive.”

He squeezed Ashley’s small, damp hand and wished he was someone who knew how to help.

They crossed the road. He led her onto an asphalt path. “You have any idea where this goes?”

“Hmm? Oh. No. I’ve never been here before. It’s the college, I guess.”

“You want to walk around the college for a while?”

“If you want to.”

They followed the path up a steep hill and through a group of dorms. A student sat on a plastic chair beside his front door, smoking a cigarette. Another bombed past them, flying downhill on her bicycle.

She should have safety lights. One of those flashers. It was starting to get dark.

Halfway up the hill, Ashley let go of his grip to wipe her palm along the seam of her shorts. She didn’t make any move to take his hand again.

Let her go
.

Roman led her through the parking lot at the top of the hill. To the right, past a dorm, along the path to the road again. Then they were on the gravel central path that ran through the little string of businesses downtown—they’d driven through this part of the village earlier—and it became impossible for him to pretend that the right moment would present itself soon.

There were no right moments for doing wrong things.

When he spotted a large tree in the middle of an otherwise empty lawn, he said, “Let’s check that tree out.”

They followed a dirt path that branched off the gravel, through the grass to a gap in the tree’s canopy. It was a willow with branches that trailed all the way to the ground. Underneath
was a private world, waiting for them. The bare earth revealed signs of frequent visitation—random pieces of plastic garbage, a Popsicle stick. Initials had been carved into the thick trunk.

The tree had a low fork that made climbing easy. Bare of impediments, its limbs stretched out almost horizontally. Roman put both hands on one and lifted his feet, testing his weight, hanging in space.

“This is cool,” Ashley said.

“We should sit in it.”

That brought a faint smile to her lips. “Never thought I’d see you climb a tree, Díaz.”

“You’re the wind beneath my wings,” he said with a smirk. He unlaced his shoes and peeled off his socks to stand barefoot in the dirt. As Ashley watched, wide-eyed and solemn, he took off his tie, freed his cuffs, rolled his shirtsleeves up.

Then he climbed the tree.

He’d meant to find a place to perch just off the ground, but the bark was smooth and cool against his feet, and there was satisfaction in finding the right handholds, stretching for a good grip, making his body do the work of propelling him upward.

He only stopped when the branches began to thin. He found a place to sit, back against the trunk, feet dangling on either side. When he looked down for Ashley, she’d disappeared.

“Where’d you go?” he asked the night.

“I’m here.”

He spotted her eight feet below him, away from the trunk, out toward the end of a long limb. She had her feet pulled beneath her, and she made a neat package of slim femininity, balanced there.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“Okay.”

“By tomorrow, I’m supposed to have convinced you to give up Sunnyvale. I’m going to get a call from Carmen, or I’ll call her, and she’ll ask me if she has a green light to do the demolition yet.”

“I thought Carmen was your girlfriend.”

“She was.”

“You said she wasn’t your boss.”

“She’s not.”

“So why is she giving you demolition deadlines? Or, wait, whose deadline is it?”

She sounded calm, unaffected. Balanced.

“Her father’s. Heberto Zumbado. Do you know who he is?”

“No.”

“I guess there’s no reason you should. He’s a developer in Miami. A big deal. He’s also Carmen’s dad, and … not really my boss, either. I don’t have a boss. But he owns a big share of this project.”

“I thought you owned Sunnyvale.”

“I do. A lot of the land around it, too. But Heberto’s put a bunch of money into the property we’re going to develop in the later phases, and it’s his reputation backing it. If it weren’t for him, I couldn’t pull this thing off. I’m too small-time for a resort this big.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. And Carmen works for him. So if I tell Carmen tomorrow it’s a no-go, she’s going to tell her father, and then … then I’m not sure.”

“I thought I had two weeks.”

“You had them from me.”

“But you’re not in charge.”

He dropped his head backward, against the trunk. Through the canopy, here and there, he could see stars. The night was clear. When he closed his eyes, he could still visualize Ashley out at the end of her branch. A woman tied up and walked to the end of a plank.

Roman didn’t want to be the one to push her off. He’d been standing back, waiting and watching so he wouldn’t miss it when she figured out how to rescue herself.

He’d assumed, all along, that she would, somehow. She’d outsmarted him at Sunnyvale, manipulated him into going along with her plans, and she’d done it with such
style
—maybe he’d started to think she had an escape all figured out. That when the marauding pirates came after her, stalking down the plank, Ashley would heroically pull out a rapier and start fencing.

He’d thought she could keep spinning, whirling around, energy and light, until she won. This whole time, deep down, he’d believed in her power to outsmart him and defeat Carmen and Heberto, too.

Or, if she failed, at the very least she would land on her feet and find something else. He’d told her days ago that she was the kind of person who always found something else.

He’d been mistaken.

Ashley was at the end of her resources. Poised out over the water, toes gripping the bare board, sharks roiling beneath, and she was scared as hell.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have the
spirit
to get out of her situation. She had more spirit than anyone he’d ever met. It was that she was all alone out there.

That wasn’t how it went in the movies. In the movies, when the heroine was in peril, someone always frayed her bonds so all she had to do was tug sharply and they’d snap. Someone tossed her a rope so she could go swinging across the deck, recover her sword, and fight her way to freedom.

Roman hadn’t given her anything to work with. He’d let Carmen set deadlines while he waited for events to overtake them and overwhelm Ashley.

She didn’t deserve his cowardice. She deserved allegiance.

She deserved for him to throw her a fucking rope.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “Which do you want to hear first?”

“I thought you already told me the bad news.”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Okay. Well, I guess the bad news.”

“Heberto’s going to bring your father into this.”

She stiffened, swayed slightly, and put her hand out for balance.

“It’s possible he already has,” Roman added. “It’s even possible he’s knocked down Sunnyvale already, although I doubt it. But this game—it’s about to get bigger than you and me. And uglier.”

“What’s the good news?”

“I guess that I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I was supposed to bring you here and find some way to convince you to give Sunnyvale to me. Neutralize you, or something. I’m not going to do that. I’m … I’m on your side. I’m not sure what that looks like right now, or if we can win, if we could even figure out some way both of us could win at the same time. But for what it’s worth, I’m … I’m defecting, I guess. I’m putting myself at your disposal.”

She laughed—a short exhale, her shoulders curling in.

“Is it so ridiculous?” he asked.

Ashley lifted her hands above her head, braced herself on a higher branch, and pivoted on
her seat in a neat, graceful spin that Roman could never have executed.

She looked at him. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

“Whatever you want.”

She reached for her toes, covered them with her palms, and Roman heard a series of small pops as her joints cracked. Not a pretty sound, but a very Ashley sort of move—he’d seen her do it before. A nervous habit, or just an action she could take because she needed to take one.

Motion, for Ashley, was everything.

“Roman, what I want is my grandma back. My home back. What I want is impossible. You heard them at the party, didn’t you? And Stanley, and Prachi and Arvind—these people know me. I mean, there’s a reason I’m bringing you to them, right? Because they’re the people I love the most, after Grandma. I thought I’d be able to show you something, prove it to you, but instead I just keep hearing what I look like from the outside. I keep … I think I might be cracking up a little bit from all this. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t—I mean, thanks for offering to be on my team, but even
I
don’t want to be on my team at the moment.”

“You should. It’s the right team.”

“It’s the losing team. I’m tired of losing. I feel like I’ve been losing ever since … since I don’t even know when. Nothing I do ever works, not for long. So I just spin off into some other thing, as though if I keep going, keep investing myself in
new
things, sooner or later I’ll … get somewhere. Have something.”

“You have me.”

She looked all the way up at him. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

Roman offered her a tentative smile. “I could give you some ideas.”

Ashley snorted, dismissing the sexual invitation she’d heard in his remark. “That’s it, though. That was Nana’s whole point. I
have
those kinds of ideas already. I feel like … you know, those things she said? And what Stanley said earlier, that I keep giving myself to men who don’t like me? I know they’re back there thinking,
Oh, Ashley. What kind of idiot thing is she doing now?
And all I can think of is a hundred ways to be an idiot.”