Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (45 page)

Because there wasn’t just a video camera. There was another man with a boom mike. They both had bags over their shoulders, black nylon tote bags that looked as if they contained equipment.

Not amateurs.
Professionals
.

“Oh,” Noah said. “That must be what Kirk wanted to talk about. He said he knew this videographer who wanted to come out and film.”

“Why?”

“Mitzi and Gus both think it will be a good thing to get the media on this. Get the word
out about the Key deer, stop the development in its tracks.”

“There aren’t any Key deer!”

“Mitzi says that Ashley says—”

“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have a mind of your own? You work for
Roman
. Not Ashley. Not these—these
crazy
people. Why do you think I haven’t called the police and had you all evicted from the property?”

Noah wiped his hand over his mouth. “The goodness of your heart?”

“I don’t have any goodness in my heart.”

“I don’t believe that, baby.” He reached for her shoulders.

Don’t call me
baby.

Carmen brought her hands up between his arms and pushed them off her. “Look. I haven’t called the police because I don’t want them driving out here and drawing attention to what’s going on. I don’t want some idiot picking up the story, some newspaper reporter or morning radio moron—or, God, a bunch of nature-loving
bloggers
writing about how the noble Key deer is endangered by Roman’s development. It’s not true. There aren’t any deer.”

“So if there aren’t any, the people who study that stuff will come and figure it out, and then Roman can build, but at least we’ll know—”

“
No
. That isn’t how it works. How it works is studies and then more studies, and lawsuits and obstructive judges, and articles in the paper, news coverage—it gets all fucked up! Have you thought what it will look like for Roman to have people with signs talking to the cameras about what an evil bastard he is? How easy is that going to make it for him to buy up the rest of the property he needs to get his hands on? How friendly is the Chamber of Commerce going to be, or the people who offer tax incentives? Use your head, Noah. This is bad for Roman. This is bad for
everybody
.”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Thinking isn’t your strong suit.”

He sucked in a breath, and Carmen hated that she’d said it. She shouldn’t have, didn’t believe it, didn’t consider him stupid, but God, she was having such a hard time, and she didn’t have her thumb on anything,
anything
.

“That was an ugly thing to say.”

I know. I’m sorry
.

I like you. I like you so much
.

She couldn’t make herself tell him.

“Call these people off,” she said instead. “Or it’s going to get uglier.”

He shook his head. Sorrowful this time. Sad that she’d gone there.

When he lifted his eyes, she could see how much she’d hurt him. She could see that he cared about her, and that was hard, too.

To be cared for, when she hated herself.

“Maybe the video isn’t such a great idea,” he said. “I’ll talk to them.”

He left her there. Alone among strangers, cold in the heat, so cold she was shivering.

Carmen walked slowly to the porch.

She picked up the rock. Weighed it in her hand. Set it aside.

She wasn’t a woman who threw stones. Not normally.

She didn’t run.

She didn’t fall in love.

What she did was bring things under control. This new problem with the videographer left her with only one way to do that.

Those commune people—they wouldn’t listen to Noah. They didn’t care about Roman or Heberto, what was good for them, what was supposed to happen here. They cared about their protest. Their loyalty was to Ashley Bowman.

They cared about ideals, grand gestures, stupid love.

Carmen flipped through her papers until she found the number she’d inked onto the bottom sheet.

Senator Bowman
, it said.
Private line
.

She picked up her phone, took a deep breath, and dialed.

The morning they left Coldwater, Michigan, behind, Ashley spent half an hour with Carly, bent over the maps on their phones, talking through what it might be fun to see and what they wanted to avoid.

“Chicago,” Carly said. “And Gary, Indiana.”

“You want to go to Gary?”

“I want to
not
go to Gary. Or Chicago. I hate driving up that way.”

“The Jackson Five were from Gary,” Ashley pointed out. “We could tour their childhood home.”

“Seriously?”

“I have no idea.” Ashley googled it while Carly thumbed over her screen. “Actually, no,” she said after a minute. “There aren’t any tours. And all these reviews say to visit this neighborhood during daylight hours only, and stay no more than a few minutes.”

“Pass,” Carly said. “Let’s go around to the west, through Rockford.”

“What’s in Rockford?”

Carly poked at the screen of her phone. “NickelWorld.”

“Which is?”

“An arcade where you can play for a nickel.”

“That’s what you want to do today?”

Carly shrugged. “Jamie and Dora would like it.”

“Sold. Anything else on your agenda?”

Carly looked over to where Dora was hanging off Jamie’s leg, squealing with laughter as he dragged her around the campsite. “I’m enjoying not having an agenda,” she said with a smile.

Ashley could respect that.

Later, when she presented the itinerary to Roman, he accepted it without complaint, then boxed her in between the driver’s-side door and the Escalade so he could kiss her.

And kiss her.

And kiss her some more.

He’d turned off his phone. After he finished torturing her with unconsummated foreplay, he plucked hers out of her now-limp hand and turned it off, too.

“Let’s ignore the rest of the world,” he said. “Just for today.”

She couldn’t come up with any reason to disagree.

They hit NickelWorld before lunch. Ashley and Carly were profligate with their nickels, losing spectacularly at one game after another. Roman and Jamie played Donkey Kong on the same two nickels for nearly an hour, until Dora started to whine and they all left to grab a snack and get back on the road.

From Rockford, they carried on to Madison, Wisconsin, where they stopped first at the REI.

Ashley tried and failed to get the tent pole fixed. Roman, meanwhile, picked out another tent, an air mattress, and a neat little flint-and-steel tool. Jamie spent five hundred dollars on a lot of expensive camping doohickeys he couldn’t possibly have a use for, then chased Carly around the parking lot with a recycled plastic spork, threatening to poke her in the butt.

Good times.

They caravanned downtown and parked. Roman and Ashley sat on the steps of the enormous white capitol building while Stanley walked a slow circle around it, working out the tightness in his hip and muttering to himself.

Nana and Jamie opted for a free tour of the opulent interior, leaving Carly to hold Dora’s hands as she walked up and down the four million steps and then circled around and around a tall bronze statue of a woman in flowing robes with her arm stretched toward the heavens.

Forward
, the plaque said.

Dora got dizzy, plopped onto the statue’s foot, and giggled at the sky.

Ashley stretched her legs out over the stairs. She dropped her head against Roman’s shoulder and let the word beat through her.

Forward
.

Eventually, Nana and Jamie emerged blinking from the building and asked about an early dinner before the last push of driving.

“I know a place,” Roman said.

He led them a few blocks to the contemporary art museum, where they climbed a glass
staircase to the rooftop sculpture garden. The restaurant was expensive but informal. After some negotiation, they were seated outside, Nana and Stanley sharing a couch and Roman and Ashley standing at a table while Carly and Jamie took turns talking with them and chasing Dora around the garden.

As they looked over their menus, Roman frowned and said, “I thought they’d have more vegetarian stuff.”

Ashley studied hers. “No, it’s fine. There’s a bunch here I can eat.”

She ordered risotto cakes and corn-and-tomato salad, both of which turned out to be amazing. She relished every bite, sipping white wine Roman had ordered and visually tracing the twists and turns of the sculpture visible from their table—a bright snare of metal and sunlight.

Over Jamie’s protests, Roman paid for the meal. He seemed pleased that Ashley had finished her food, more pleased when they stopped for frozen custard and she ordered two different flavors in a waffle cone because she couldn’t make up her mind between pistachio and Moose Tracks.

He made a pig-snuffling noise at her when she took the first bite. She offered him a taste, and when he leaned close she held the cone at just the right angle to smear cold custard all over his nose.

He laughed, so she had to kiss him, and he had to transfer the ice cream from his nose onto hers, at which point Stanley observed that sex made some people unbearable to be around. Nana chucked him on the shoulder, hard.

Roman gave Ashley a napkin, still grinning.

He held her hand on the walk to the Escalade. They were at the back of the group, meandering at Dora’s start-and-stop, investigate-everything toddler pace.

“How far from here is it?” she asked him, careful to keep her voice down. “Where you grew up.”

“Just over an hour.”

“Will we go past it, or …?”

“No, it’s to the west.”

“You came here to Madison a lot?”

“In high school. Once my sister, Samantha, could drive, we’d see artsy movies at the Orpheum down the street.”

“Do you miss her?”

He lifted his gaze from the sidewalk to meet Ashley’s eyes. “All the time.”

She thought about that. What he’d lost, or maybe what he’d given up.

He kissed the back of her hand.

When they got back into the car, he didn’t say anything for a hundred miles.

Forward
.

They found campsites at an unremarkable commercial campground near Green Bay at about eight o’clock. Dora had already cashed in her chips. Ashley set up the new tent, a shocking bright orange, and Roman laid out their stuff inside, inflating the air mattress with a small battery-operated blower and arranging their bags around the sides of it.

Ashley watched him through the screen as he zipped open the sleeping bags and laid one on top of the other. He picked up their pillows last and placed them side by side, then sat back on his heels and scanned the interior of the tent. Leaning way out, he rolled up one tent flap more evenly.

“Well?” he asked, without glancing her way. “Will it do?”

“It looks great.”

He turned. “You should come in and see.”

Ashley stepped out of her sandals, unzipped the flap, and backed into the tent, leaving her flip-flops on the nylon square she’d staked to the ground.

A welcome mat. She’d never seen a tent with a welcome mat before. And here Roman had bought them one.

She supposed it was silly that he’d done all this. Spent good money on a tent they might only use once. Made them a bed. Provided a welcome mat.

She sat on the air mattress. Tested the bounce.

When she lay down on her side, Roman did the same, testing the stability with an elbow before he gradually lowered his weight.

Their eyes met.

It didn’t feel silly.

It felt like a homecoming—the sort of homecoming where you worked all day until your eyes felt gritty and you needed a shower and food before you could even begin to unpack everything that had happened to you, and then you opened your door and found the person
behind it who would care.

The one person who would worry about your tired feet.

The person who would tell you to sit down and take a load off, hand you a beer, give you ten minutes before he even asked about your day.

When Roman scooted closer, studied her face, trailed blunt fingertips over her hairline, that’s what she felt. That she’d come home. To this feeling. This man.

“It’s comfy,” she said. Because she couldn’t say the rest of it.

“I hope it doesn’t deflate in the middle of the night.”

“We’d be fine if it did. Have you ever slept on the ground?”

A flicker of emotion in his eyes. “Yes.”

“Really? When?”

“In the Boy Scouts. I was really into survival stuff, and I thought … I went off by myself in the woods with a tarp and no food or water or anything. I got lost. They didn’t find me for a few days.”

Ashley sat up, chilled in an instant.

He’d said it so matter-of-factly, but there was nothing matter-of-fact about what Roman had just told her. “How many days is a few?”

“Four.”

“Oh, God, Roman.”

“It was a long time ago.”

But the strain around his mouth looked fresh, and he reached up and pulled her into his arms, sprawling her across his body.

“You poor thing,” she said.

His arms tightened. Ashley rolled onto her back, bringing him on top of her so she could pet his hair, stroke his shoulders, hold him close with her legs wrapped around his waist.

“You must have been so scared. And so lonely.”

He tucked his face against her neck. One of them was trembling. Both of them had been there, lost in the woods, alone in the world. Discarded, forgotten.

Small sparks of starlight up against the whole howling wilderness.

She held him, and he held her, and she closed her eyes and promised whatever gods or karmic forces had influence over her life, whatever fates controlled her destiny—the ghost of her
grandmother, the saints of Cuban Miami, anything with influence, all of them—that she would never let Roman be alone that way again.

If she could hold on to him, she would give him her constancy. Because if she were to be given just one thing, one wish granted in the whole of her life, Ashley wanted Roman Díaz.

She wanted this home to come to.