Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (56 page)

“I was about to.”

“I know, but now you have permission.”

“I’m worried about your apartment.”

“It’s actually a condo.”

“Oh, God,” she said.

“What’s wrong with condos?”

“Fees. Snobs. Just the word, actually. The word
condo
gives me hives.”

“You can think of it as an apartment if that helps.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Maybe you should see it before you hate it.”

“I should, but I have to tell you, this thing I’m worrying about? It feels like a bigger thing than just your condo. It feels like—like the difference between you and me. In building form.”

“I thought we were doing a pretty good job bridging our differences.”

“The licking?”

“If you want to take the crudest possible example, sure. Or the tofu eating, or the kissing, or the fact that you told me you loved me when I was kissing you.”

“I wasn’t sure you heard that.”

“I’ve been playing it back on a mental loop.”

“That’s … You have? Really?”

He nodded. Then, without warning, he moved in, pivoted on his hip, and laid his head in her lap. Ashley gazed down into his eyes, swamped with tenderness.

“I’m starting to think I might be a romantic,” he said. “Carmen called me a pussy because I’m so crazy about you.” Reaching up, he captured a hank of her hair and wound it around his fingers so he could pull her down to meet his rising mouth.

When their lips touched, all the bats flew away.

Ashley kissed him back, gentle and sweet. She lived in the kiss. It was a beautiful place to live. She would happily move into Roman’s mouth forever.

“Talk to me.” He unwound his grip and traced the rim of her ear with a fingertip. “What’s this about?”

“We’ve been on a road trip. We’ve been
camping
.”

“So?”

“Road trips are—they’re outside of real life, right? They’re play. But now playtime’s over. What if we go back to your apartment and you realize,
Oh, actually, there isn’t anything about everyday Ashley that I like
.”

“Not going to happen.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“What if you think the same thing about me?”

She wouldn’t.

But what if she did?

His mouth hardened into a determined line. “It’s not because I live in a condo. What is it? My money? My job? My values?”

“
Our
values, maybe.”

“What’s wrong with our values?”

“We don’t have any in common.”

He sat up abruptly. “That’s not true.”

“I hope it’s not, but I’m worried it is.”

His fingers found the hem of her dress and crumpled it in an unconscious fist. “You’re saying you’re afraid that we might love each other—which, you know, we might have taken a few minutes to enjoy that before launching into this conversation, but here we go—and even though we’re in love, we still have, what? Irreconcilable differences?”

The phrase caught her off guard.

Irreconcilable differences—that was what her parents had had. Endless bickering. Divorce. Irreconcilable differences meant there would never be enough common ground, and there was no room for compromise.

The words gave Ashley
all
the bat feelings.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Roman was silent.

When he spoke again, his voice had softened. “Then let’s figure out who we are, fundamentally, and we’ll know if our differences are so irreconcilable.”

“That won’t work. We can’t figure it out sitting on a blanket, eating cold spring rolls.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t have an answer to that question.

He brushed her hair away from her shoulder and let his hand rest in the space he’d cleared. “You know, I remember thinking when I first met you that we didn’t have any common ground. Here you were on the tree, and I didn’t know how to make you do what I wanted, because I had power over you but you didn’t care. I thought you were disorderly and frustrating and … kind of alarming, to be honest.”

“You said I sucked.”

“I know. And you told me I was soulless.”

“But I thought you were really hot, too.”

“Ash.” He dropped his hand onto her thigh.

Picking up his fingers, she studied the beds of his nails and the wrinkled terrain of his knuckles. “You were never soulless.”

“I did a good imitation.”

She nipped at the fleshy spot at the base of his thumb, then kissed it. “Not that good.”

“My point is, that’s not where we are anymore. I’m not going to try to make you do what I want or be who I want. I want to figure out what
you
want and help you do that, which means I have to care about your ideals, even when they’re not the same as mine. And maybe you’re curious about who I am when I’m at home in Miami. At least enough to want to sleep a few nights in my bed, or to come by and see my office. Talk to people who know me.”

“Of course I am.”

“So tell me your philosophy of life.”

A startling request. Ashley could feel the shock of it, her eyes widening, her heart rate speeding up. “I don’t think I have one.”

“Make something up. Spit out whatever comes to mind. I want to hear what you say.”

She breathed in. On the exhale, she said, “Love.”

“Explain.”

“I want everything I do to be about love. Not just with you, but with other people, and the rest of the world, the way I am in the world …” Roman’s hand was creeping up her leg. “This sounds dumb.”

Long fingers traced the outline of her panties. “It sounds like you.”

“Does it?”

“Absolutely.” He wrapped his hand around her hip and gripped her there, an anchor.

“What’s yours?” she asked.

“Belonging, maybe. I’ve always thought of myself as being on the outside. My dad, and everything with Patrick. But I think a lot of it was me. I made a choice to walk away from
Patrick and Samantha, and I haven’t belonged to anyone since. Even Heberto and Carmen—I picked them because of how they were. Carmen and I were perfect because we never asked each other for anything. Until you, I didn’t want to admit that I wanted more. That I
need
it.”

She moved closer, pressing her legs against his, pulling his head to hers and lifting her own so they could touch nose against nose, breathing with their mouths separated by inches, sharing the same air, the same space.

“I want to belong to you,” he said softly. “And I want you to belong to me.”

Her breaths came short, but his hand on her body steadied her, its pressure a promise that he would stay.

He would stay, and she wouldn’t walk away.

The wind raised goose bumps on her arms. Ashley exhaled her fear, one breath at a time.

Love and belonging weren’t incompatible. They were two sides of the same thing.

She turned to rest her cheek against Roman’s temple. He pulled her into his lap. His arms came around her.

“I want that, too,” she said.

They sat together in the rubble of the place she’d called home, and she found the bravery she’d drawn on when the hurricane was bearing down on both of them.

All they needed was this.

Love, and the desire to make something together. A home. A shelter.

She kissed his neck. Then she kissed his lips. He kissed her in return, fingers winding into her hair, tongue easing into her mouth, offering her everything. His hopeful heart. His need for her. Their future.

When they broke apart, she rested her hands on his shoulders. “The last time I asked you about Sunnyvale, I wasn’t in a very receptive frame of mind.”

“You knocked down my creamer house.”

“Huh?”

“At that diner. We stopped for lunch, and I was building that house out of coffee creamers—”

“Oh, right.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry. Will you tell me now again?”

“If you promise to think of three nice things to say about it before you tear it to shreds, yes.”

“I can do that.”

Roman looked past her toward the water, surveying the alien landscape. “It all starts with the beach. The stretch of beach you’ve got here is the most important one on this side of the key. You’ll see why if you look over that way …”

He sketched with his hands while he talked, pointing to important features, drawing buildings in the air. She listened with half her attention, but with the other half she watched him, wondering how she’d missed it the first time.

His passion for this. His excitement.

She didn’t love everything he said, but she loved the way he said it, with his face lit up and his hands moving. The energy of him. The way he pulled her from the blanket and drew her by the hand across the uneven ground so he could pace out the distances from here to there and describe a set of possibilities that she was only beginning to be able to imagine.

She loved that the longer Roman spoke, the less important it became to absorb exactly what he told her, because she’d already heard what she needed to know.

What she’d needed didn’t have anything to do with property development or his condo.

It had to do with Roman. With love and belonging.

She heard him say they were going to be fine, and she finally believed him.

Roman unlocked the door to his condo and held it open for Ashley.

He wondered what she’d make fun of first. White furniture, white walls, white throw pillows—the place looked like a magazine spread. It smelled like artificial-lemon cleaning products, everything buffed and shining. The art was modern, the kitchen marooned in the huge open space of the living area.

None of this was Ashley’s style.

He’d spent the drive up from Little Torch biting his tongue against the explanations he didn’t owe her. That he’d bought the place as an investment. That the last owner had been in a hurry to move, and he’d sold it furnished and fully decorated—art collection included.

Roman wanted to tell her it wasn’t to his taste, but the truth was he didn’t know what his taste might be. He’d never bothered to think about it.

The condo looked expensive, and expensive suited him fine.

He wished she would say something.

Across the room, she passed along the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Rain lashed the glass, blurring the world beyond into a white-gray landscape of sound and water. Fifty-six stories up, the condo’s primary selling point was its view of downtown. At night, the walls seemed to fall away, and everywhere Roman looked he found color and light and the stark black silhouette of the Miami skyline against the backdrop of Biscayne Bay.

Would she see everything he’d achieved in that view?

He hoped she’d see
him
here, because there was more of him in this place than he’d realized. More hours spent between these walls, more trips up and down the elevators. More nights when he’d awakened in the hush and found himself wandering from room to room, looking out at the city. Pressing his nose against the glass.

She stood with her back straight and her hands locked behind her, uncharacteristically quiet.

“Can I get you a drink?” he asked.

She turned to face him. “Show me your bed.”

He dropped his keys where he always left them—inside the mouth of a frog-shaped, crystal-studded bowl that had been bequeathed to him by the previous owner—and toed off his shoes by the door.

As she followed him to the master suite, her sandals smacked against the soles of her feet.

She stopped just inside the bedroom. Reaching to her thighs, she pulled her dress over her head and dropped it on his floor. Then she hooked her thumbs into her panties and pushed them off. Naked, Ashley walked to the head of his bed and flipped down the covers.

She crawled in and pulled them up over her shoulders.

“What do you think of the place?” he asked inanely.

“I’ll tell you after you take off your clothes.”

She didn’t. When he slid in beside her, into her open arms, and settled over her, skin against skin, her hair on his pillow, her mouth was opening even as he lowered himself to it.

He claimed her. The peaked tips of her breasts, the ripple of her ribs beneath his palm, the flare of her hip, the secret slippery heat between her legs. He claimed her with his mouth and his hands, boxed her in with his thighs, covered them both with goose down and himself with latex
and entered her body with the sound of the rain in his head, her soft sigh against his neck the only reassurance required that he wasn’t too rough for her or too needy.

He wasn’t too rich or too broken, heartless or soulless, lacking in anything she desired.

Roman rocked into her just right, and she made sure he knew it.

She claimed him. Her hands on his back, heels pulling him in, back arching up as he thrust deep and ground against her clit. She took him, kissed him, loved him with her heat and with her open heart, with her movements and her actions.

He’d worried about what she would say, but with Ashley it was always what she did that mattered.

She’d come to his bed.

They moved together, a pulse beat, a drumbeat, a rhythm they’d found in hundreds of miles, thousands of minutes that culminated here at the end of the road, making love in the rain, in the sky, in his bedroom.

Home again.

Home for the first time.

Noah came to the door in boxer briefs and body hair.

It was such an explicit shock—the thatch on his chest enough to build a cottage with, the straw-colored mess on his head mashed so severely on one side that she glimpsed the white of his scalp beneath it—Carmen didn’t know where to look.

She’d seen him naked before, yet she hadn’t seen him like
this
, head-to-toe hair, standing in the doorway of his house with his eyes slitted against the brightness of the porch light, bewildered and sleepy at two in the morning.

All day, she’d kept herself from coming here. Roman had dropped her at home and she’d stayed there. She’d changed and showered and put her stuff away, worked out, showered again, weighed herself, made dinner, thrown it away. She’d wrapped herself in the blanket on her bed and convinced herself not to come, and then she’d talked herself into a change of plans, then back again, over and over until finally she snapped and dressed, got in the car and drove.