Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (49 page)

Without meeting his eyes, she took both of his hands in a loose grip. “I told my father I’d go back to Florida with him.”

The announcement made him itch all over.

It made him want to scratch his skin until he hit whatever was underneath it—this skittering loud frightened thing. He would find it and scratch it, scrape it under his nails and put an end to it.

“When?” he asked.

“Right now.”

Right now.

But that wasn’t true. She meant after she finished breaking the news to him—that was when she’d leave. She would fly back to Florida on a plane, and he would stand on this rock and … what?

Watch the world end?

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“My dad says Mitzi is at Sunnyvale. That a whole bunch of the people from Okefenokee—”

“No, I get that part. Carmen told me.”

Sunnyvale had been occupied by friends of Ashley’s, and they seemed to think that the more publicity they could draw to their cause, the more likely they were to rescue Sunnyvale from his evil clutches.

Never mind that he’d already put the demolition on hold.

Never mind that he’d pissed off Heberto and fucked up the partnership that was supposed to make financing the development possible.

Never mind that it was
his
property,
his
decision,
his
fight. Or that Ashley was his girlfriend, his lover—whatever this was, this mess, this problem, it belonged to both of them, not just to Ashley.

It wasn’t her father’s to fix, or even Ashley’s. It was theirs.

She pulled her hands away to stick them in her back pockets. “He wants me to go back with him and make them stop.”

“Because it’s bad press for him?”

“Because it could be, yeah. But more because I’m embarrassing him.”

“You’re not doing anything to him.”

“I kind of am, I guess. I mean, if this turns into a big news story, that doesn’t look good.”

“But it has no bearing on him. None whatsoever.”

“I guess the people at Sunnyvale, they’re making it all about me. Because of my whole stupid deal with the palm tree.”

“What you did with the palm tree was genius.”

“It was crazy.”

“It
worked
.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think it through.”

“Ashley—”

She turned her back on him and stepped closer to the water, and he knew she didn’t want to hear it.

She needed space. She needed time. She needed movement, action, a chance to think, and it wouldn’t help for him to get in her face, trying to fight off her father’s version of reality with his own.

He hated her father’s version of reality.

Though he hadn’t been present for their conversation, Roman had heard the way her father spoke to her. That night in North Carolina, naked in the pond, she’d enumerated her faults in the senator’s voice, and Roman had hated it even then, when he’d been trying to resist her.

He hated it so much more now, because he knew her. He loved her.

“Ashley.” He stepped close and put his arms around her. She still had her hands in her pockets, making for an awkward embrace. “This isn’t your problem. You don’t have to fix it.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Because your dad says so?”

“I just have to.”

“But what about us? Aren’t we …”

He didn’t know how to put it.
Aren’t we in love?

There was no way. No way he could say that out loud, even though he believed it.

Don’t we have something between us? Doesn’t it mean anything to you?

Don’t you think we can figure out the future on our own, without input from your dad or Carmen or Heberto or anybody?

What’s wrong with me, with
us,
that you can’t bring yourself to believe in that?

He couldn’t say any of it.

Ashley felt so small in his arms, stripped of the glamour of her confidence.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t have a plan. I just thought it would all work out, somehow.”

“It still could.”

“But don’t you get it? It can’t, because this is how it ends. I created this mess. My
father’s here to make me clean it up.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He didn’t really have to tell me. That’s just … what we do.”

“Twenty minutes ago you were on a quest.”

“It was you who said that.”

“But you believed it.”

“I tried to believe it.”

So believe it. Believe in us. Believe in me
.

He didn’t know how to say that, either.

“And this is what you want now?” he asked. “You want to get on a plane and fly away with your father, and we’re just … over?”

She kept looking at the water instead of at him. “It’s not like we ever made much sense.”

“Why not?”

Ashley shrugged. “You’re Roman Díaz, with the suits and the sunglasses, and your place in Miami. You’re a land developer. I’m just … me.”

Roman’s throat felt tight, like he would choke if he tried to speak, and it wasn’t because he didn’t have the words to give her.

He could come up with a way to describe what she’d looked like the first morning he met her—how brave she was, how clever her idea had been, how magnificent when she parried and thrust and fought her way out of one tight spot after another.

He could find a way to describe her energy, her vitality, the way she
glowed
sometimes. How she’d reminded him that he was alive, that being alive was important, that it was absolutely fucking everything, even when it hurt.

How right now, despite how much it hurt, he was grateful to her.

He could tell her all of that.

The problem was, there wasn’t any way to make her hear him. And if she did hear him,
his
version of her was the last thing she needed.

She kept asking people to tell her what to do—to tell her what she was like. Her friends. Her father. They all told her. They were
wrong
, but they told her, and she believed them.

Roman didn’t want to be the fifth person or the tenth person or the hundredth person to tell Ashley what she was like. He wanted to be the person who saw her, and trusted her, and gave
her the space to figure it out for herself.

Because deep down, she knew. That morning when he drove up and found her chained to the palm tree, she’d lifted up her chin and looked at him with defiance because she’d known.

And last night in the tent, when she’d yanked at his clothes and told him she needed him—she’d known then, too. What she wanted. Who she was.

Ashley didn’t need to find some gold chalice in a hidden cave that would teach her all the secrets of herself. She just needed confidence. She needed to listen to her
own
voice, because she’d been right all along about the stuff that mattered, even as she got a lot of the stuff that didn’t matter wrong.

He couldn’t tell her that.

He could only let her go and have faith that she’d figure it out.

And he could make sure, before she left, that she saw
him
, so she would recognize him again when he came after her.

“Look at me.” When she didn’t respond, he took her by the shoulders and turned her around. “Where’s my suit?”

“You probably had to throw it away because of me.”

“I’m not wearing a suit, because
I’m not a suit
, Ash. Look at my face.” When her eyes flicked to his, he said, “This is me. And what I want to know is, who do you think I am that I don’t deserve to be with you?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. It’s
me
. I’m not employed. I’m not stable. I never had the right to traipse in and wreck your development thing. I’m so sorry I did that.”

“I’m not.”

“You should be! This deal was important to you, and I put it at risk. You should hate me. You should always have hated me.”

“Look at
me
,” he said again. Because she wasn’t seeing him. She was seeing everything she’d done that she considered a mistake.

He understood how that felt. Roman knew exactly what it was to look in the mirror and see another person’s version of himself. He’d spent more than a decade hearing Patrick’s voice in his head, telling him,
There’s something wrong with you
.

Something wrong with him, that he couldn’t hold Ashley’s eyes on him now.

Something wrong with him, that she didn’t seem to see him.

Always, always something wrong with him, and one after another, every important person in his life slipped away.

We never want to see you again
, Patrick had said.

Roman had said,
Fine
.

Fine.

It had never been fine. It wasn’t fine now.

He could spend what was left of his life believing that he was broken, unlovable, unfixable. That by some accident of birth, some trick of inheritance, he would never belong to anything—never have love, family, community.

Or he could hope. He could risk.

He could lay everything out on the line.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said.

“I have to.”

“I know you think so. I don’t know what he said to you, but I know
you
. I know you need to move right now, so bad you can hardly bear to be standing here talking to me. I know you want to
do
something, because that’s how you are when you’re feeling too much—you need to act, to work, to make things change. So that’s fine, if that’s what you have to do. If you can’t take me with you, then I’ll stay here and talk to Esther and deal with getting my truck and your trailer and all your friends back where they’re supposed to be. But don’t leave telling me that I’m supposed to chalk up everything that’s happened to us as some big, impulsive mistake you made, because that’s bullshit.”

“Roman—”

“No, it is. It’s bullshit. I care about you. This trip—you and me—it’s real.”

“We haven’t even been together two weeks.”

“Maybe not, but you can’t tell me we haven’t been
more together
in however many days we’ve had than you’ve ever been with anybody else. You can’t tell me that, because I won’t fucking believe it. I don’t know everything that’s ever happened to you, but if you try to tell me that I don’t know
you
and you don’t know me—no. I don’t accept that.”

“It was sex.”

“It was more than sex.”

He took her by the shoulders, biting down on the urge to shake her. Biting down hard on
the voice in his head that just kept saying it, over and over,
Something wrong with you. Let her go. Something wrong with you. Give it up. Something wrong with you, Roman, and you don’t get to have this. You aren’t ever going to get to have it, so stop thinking you can. Stop hoping. Build a bigger fortress, live alone, count on nothing and no one. It’s the only way
.

Roman shook his head to clear it. He looked at Ashley—looked right at Ashley—and told that voice to fuck off.

He was done with that voice.

He refused to spend the rest of his life alone when he had a shot at spending it with her. If that meant he had to chase her all over the country—if it meant he had to tell her he loved her, or punch her senator-father in the face and probably make himself throw up in the process, or if it meant he had to tell her every day before she got out of bed that she was amazing and beautiful, exciting and awesome, worth every sacrifice he could possibly make for her—then he would do that.

He would do it for ten days or ten months or ten years. He would keep trying. Keep hoping. Because when he was with her, he couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with him—nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

He’d lived without hope. He was done.

This time, he would let her go, but he wouldn’t let go of her.

He would follow her. He’d take care of her friends. He’d talk to Esther.

He’d drive her trailer to his hometown and walk around in the mess of his own past, because there were parts of himself he’d left behind in Heraly, Wisconsin, and it was about time he took the past out to the woodshed and dealt with it.

There were things you couldn’t turn into
fine
just by pretending they’d never happened.

There were things you could never get your head around until you waded into the muck and made yourself feel them. It didn’t matter if you were afraid. It only mattered what you
did
about it.

He’d learned that from Ashley.

She looked up at him, her blue eyes pained, her mouth thin, and her lips blue. The wind whipped her hair into his face, and he caught a piece just to rub his thumb over its softness. He cupped her neck to feel her warmth, her pulse, and he said, “Ash, honey, it was
always
more than sex.”

She closed her eyes. “I have to go.”

“Then go. But I’m going to follow you.”

“Roman—”

“Go,” he said again, and he kissed her mouth. “But I love you.”

She shuddered. He didn’t think about it. He just kissed her again, harder, squeezing her shoulders, compressing all his hope for the future into this one kiss, this promise.

We can do this. You and I. Even if nobody believes it. Even if you don’t believe it right now—we can still do it
.

We can compromise. We can build something. We can love each other
.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Her voice came out high and pinched.

“Yeah, you do. And whatever it is, it’ll be the right thing. It’s going to be awesome, just because you’re doing it.”

She huffed a laugh. “I meant about you.”

“So take some time and think about it. And when I see you again, maybe you’ll know.”

The look she gave him was impossible to pick apart. Frustration and sorrow. Guilt and anger. Hope.

He would hang on to the hope.

Roman kissed her forehead. Then he turned the woman he loved around, flattened his palm in the middle of her back, and gave her a gentle push.

“I’ll take care of everything,” he said. “You go.”

With one last look over her shoulder, she went.

He stood on the plank she’d led him out on and watched her walk away, listening to her sandals flapping against the soles of her feet.