Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (48 page)

She couldn’t stand it.

“Your grandmother was not a nice person,” her father said. “She was a bad mother.”

“You were a bad father.”

“And you’re never going to let me forget it.”

“Why should you get to forget it? My mom died, and you dumped me on
your
mom, who you didn’t even like, because you couldn’t be bothered to talk to me.”

“You were impossible! You didn’t leave me any choice, and then you turned into her.”

“She saved me.”

“Saved you.” He laughed, incredulous. “From what?”

“From turning into you! Grandma taught me how to be happy. She was beautiful.”

“She was
nuts
.”

“She loved me.”

Her father snorted. “Of course she loved you. You were her meal ticket.”

Ashley’s heart stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I had to beg her to take you, Ashley. I had to pay her.”

The words pushed into her gut, and she had to wrap her arms around her middle. “Room and board,” she suggested, her voice weak. “Expenses.”

“More than that. Thousands of dollars extra so she would keep you for the school year, thousands more if I wanted her to take you on those trips of hers in the summer.”

“You didn’t.”

“I most certainly did.”

He paid her. Paid her to take care of me
.

And she never loved me. Not the way I loved her. She cut me out of her life when she was sick, cut me out of Sunnyvale’s sale, left me with nothing, didn’t even think about how I would feel
.

Because she didn’t care
.

Ashley wanted to crumple to the ground under the weight of all of it—her folly, her idiotic hope, all the years she’d spent thinking she was a free spirit, a whirling spark, when she’d been nothing of the sort.

She wanted to fall to the road and tear at her hair and cry.

But if she did that, her father would only tell her to quit being such a fucking embarrassment.

Ashley looked for the lake, but she couldn’t find it. She closed her eyes.

Behind them, she saw Roman.

You, sweetheart, are
not
other people
, he’d told her.

He’d said it with so much affection—as though her weirdness, her hopeless confusion, was totally okay.

As though it was just part of life, this struggle, and he didn’t mind sitting with her on the lawn, talking her through it. He understood.

I could take care of this for you
, he’d said, because he saw her fear and wanted to help.

Ashley squeezed her eyelids more tightly shut and held on to Roman like a talisman.

Twelve days ago, she’d chained herself to a palm tree with a hurricane coming because she was afraid of losing the last thing she understood—what it felt like to be loved by her grandmother, to be seen and cared for by the one person in the world who seemed to think she was worth something.

She’d been afraid because her grandmother had left her alone without a guide, but when she’d sat alone at night by the palm tree, she hadn’t needed a guide. The wind had scoured her clean, and the road she’d traveled with Roman since then had given her a sense of purpose.

Roman’s trust, his
allegiance
, had given her confidence.

Ashley knew who she was, and she knew what mattered. She didn’t need her father to tell her. She didn’t need anyone to. She
knew
.

“Dad—” she said, but he cut her off again.

“You’re my daughter,” he repeated. “And I’ve tried to be a good father. I send you money. I got you that job in Bolivia, thinking you’d finally found something to do with your life that wasn’t completely selfish. And now this.”

This
. As though the indignity of
this
were a foregone conclusion.

Ashley fisted her hand around the invisible feeling of what it was to believe in
this
. Her quest. Her right to do as she pleased, take to the road, claim Roman, fight for a future.

She squeezed her fingers tight around the memory of how it had felt to rest her head against the palm tree and sing to the stars.

“Do you have any idea,” her father asked, “what it’s like to meet other people’s daughters? I talk to them about their careers and their children. I see their fathers’ pride, and I think of you. My daughter, the perpetual teenager. Why can’t you just be normal?”

“I
am
normal, you self-important prick.”

Her father pointed an accusing finger at her. “Watch what you say. I’m your father, whether you like it or not.”

“I don’t like it. You’re being condescending and pushy, and I don’t like it one bit.”

“Yeah, well, get used to it. I’m the only family you’ve got, and you have nowhere to live and no money and no better options. I’m taking you home.”

“You’re not taking me anywhere.”

“You’re going to get in that plane with me, and I’m going to fly us both back to Florida so you can tell those protesters to call off this insane stunt.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your swamp people.” She must have looked as baffled as she felt, because his gaze sharpened. “Your friends. The Georgia people, the protesters at Sunnyvale.”

“There are people from Okefenokee at Sunnyvale? Who?”

“How should I know? Some kind of bottle-and-can man broke into the office, and he called all these hippies, and now they won’t leave.”

Ashley laughed. “Really?”

Gus? And Mitzi? A deluge of hippies, video on the Internet—and her father was beside himself.

Mitzi had been
busy
.

“Stop smiling,” he said.

“It’s not my fault,” she said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

She wanted to skip. To sprint. She wanted to
move
.

When she was a girl, he would make her sit at the dining room table, and he would pick her apart until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d have to kick her leg, jiggle her knee, drum on the tabletop—and then he would make her stop.

He made her sit with his disappointment, take in her faults,
bear
it, and he never let her move.

But she was twenty-four years old. She could walk away from this conversation whenever she wanted to.

She did.

Ashley walked away, eyes focused on the spot where she would see Roman when she got close enough to have a view across the lawn.

She listened to her feet hit the pavement. The slap of her foam sandals against her skin.

She didn’t listen to her heart, because it hadn’t slowed down yet. It beat out the familiar rhythm of her panic, her inadequacy, a lifetime’s conditioning, but
she didn’t have to listen
.

She didn’t listen to her father. Not until he said Roman’s name.

“You care about that man? Roman Díaz?”

Ashley stopped.

“If you care about him, you’ll think about what you’re doing. Because you’re ruining that man’s career. You’re putting everything that matters to him at risk.”

She wasn’t. They’d talked about this. They were just taking a few more days to adjust the plan, and then—

“Your people at Sunnyvale, they’re doing everything they can think of to get attention. The story’s going to hit state news channels soon. If this gets bigger, it’ll poison the whole development.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

Her father was right behind her now. He’d caught up, his voice low and smooth. “Díaz
will run into trouble with local people, environmentalists, government. It’s tricky trying to build something that large. Complicated. And if the wrong person puts pressure in the right place …”

If
he
did. That was what her dad meant. If
he
put pressure in the right place, he could ruin Roman’s development. His career. His life.

“You wouldn’t.”

He would, though.

He wouldn’t even have to try hard, because she’d laid all the groundwork for Roman’s ruin herself.

She’d set this thing in motion—her friends at Sunnyvale trying to rescue the apartments because of her, Roman in Wisconsin because of her, problems at his office because of her, his ex-girlfriend threatening his partnership with Heberto because of her.

This was her mistake. It
was
her fault. Her father wasn’t wrong about it.

He was being a manipulative jerk, but he wasn’t wrong.

“Everybody loses then, Ashley,” he said. “Díaz loses biggest of all. You don’t want that, do you?”

She didn’t. She wanted Roman to get to make his own choices, free and clear of the mess she’d created.

What if he couldn’t?

Her father stepped to her front and wrapped his fingers around her chin. “Come back to Florida with me,” he said. “Tell them to clear out. Let Carmen get those buildings knocked down, and the press will lose interest.”

He breathed down on her. Pinned her with his gaze, full of wounded pride and a terrible resolve that Ashley couldn’t understand. “Let her go,” he said.

“I can’t. I loved her.”

“You have to.”

She moved away from him, putting distance between them until she came to the edge of the lawn and looked out over it and saw Roman.

He sat next to Carmen at a picnic table, their twin dark heads bent over Carmen’s clipboard. She said something, and he made an animated gesture in the air with his hand, a looping circle that meant nothing to Ashley.

They were talking about the project. The development.

They were talking about the demolition or their financing or how to manage Heberto. How to get around zoning laws. What kind of footers to use.

Ashley had no idea what they were talking about, because she and Roman existed in completely different worlds, and in eleven days she’d barely brushed the surface of understanding what his life had looked like before she blithely imploded it.

Yesterday, she’d had sex with him in the orange glow of their tent. He’d bent her over the mattress and pushed into her while she cried, and it had seemed significant. It had seemed beautiful, a singular experience, a love like nothing else she’d ever felt.

But now, with her father’s words ringing in her ears, she felt delusional. What had she thought, that she and Roman would get married? Have babies? Build a monument to Susan Bowman and live in it?

When this trip came to an end, Ashley didn’t even have a place to
go
. What was she planning to do, ask Roman if she could crash with him? Park the Airstream at his apartment complex, his condo, in the driveway of his mansion? She didn’t know where he lived, but she knew it would be attractive and sterile, and she wouldn’t be able to stand it.

She couldn’t get another job waiting tables or serving drinks and come home every night to Roman, whose life she’d ruined. There was no way.

Maybe the reason she hadn’t been able to see their future was because she’d set this giant blockade in the way of it. She’d told Roman that Sunnyvale was his, but she hadn’t moved out of the way and given it back to him.

The senator came up behind her. He laid his hand on her shoulder.

“Ashley,” he said.

Be reasonable
, he meant.

Be reasonable
, she told herself.
Even though it hurts. Even though it sucks
.

Fix what you’ve broken. Act like an adult
.

Her father squeezed her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for that to get so out of hand.”

“You never do,” she replied.

Neither did she.

She looked at Roman again. From a distance, she took in the shape of him, one leg bent on the seat of the picnic table, the other on the ground, his elbow on the table and his body
leaning in toward Carmen’s, interested in something she was pointing his attention toward on her clipboard.

If Ashley were closer, she’d be able to see his face. His mouth. His cheekbones, his caterpillar eyebrows, those dark, expressive eyes.

She loved him.

She loved him, but she’d stolen Sunnyvale from him, and even when he’d bent over backward to assure her that he was on her side, she’d never given it back.

It was time.

Past the picnic table where Roman sat with Carmen, Lake Michigan had lost its magic under a rolling carpet of clouds. It looked flat and dark, deep enough to sink into, cold enough to leach the life right out of her.

Ashley measured the distance from where she stood to the car her father had arrived in. Fifteen feet. They could walk around behind it, open the doors, and be gone before anyone noticed.

She could be a coward and run.

But the last time she’d allowed fear to steer her, she’d ended up padlocked to a palm tree with ants in her bikini. This time, she’d do better.

“I’ll leave with you,” she said. “But I have to say goodbye to Roman first.”

Roman guessed it was going to be bad when she led him away from the others.

All of them were watching: Esther and Stanley, Nana, Carly and Jamie, Dora. Her father. Carmen. Everyone wanted to know what was going on, but Ashley didn’t tell them. She didn’t introduce her father around. She didn’t gather her troops together and make an announcement.

She said she needed to talk to him, so he followed her toward the water.

When they reached the cliffs above the shoreline, she turned onto a parallel dirt path. She kept walking until Roman couldn’t hear anything but Lake Michigan rushing up against the rocks.

The farther she took him, the more he sweat. The more his skin crawled. The path was perfectly flat, the movement far from strenuous. Roman kept scratching the back of his neck and the backs of his hands, but it didn’t help.

Something wrong with you
, Patrick had told him once, and Roman had believed him.

He knew now that it wasn’t true.

Part of him knew.

But part of him couldn’t let it go, convinced there had to be something wrong with him because the good things in his life never lasted.

Ashley kept walking until he began to feel as though they were the last two people on earth, lone survivors of a cataclysm. When she led him out onto a crag of pitted rock—a prow that extended into the water with a view of dark gray turbulence—he understood that the cataclysm was what he was headed into, not what she’d led him away from.