Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (9 page)

She made him hungry
.

Unacceptable.

But he couldn’t get rid of her, and he couldn’t shut her off. He had to find a way to control her.

“Don’t you want something to eat?” he asked.

“No.”

“Just say the word, and I’ll stop. Anytime.”

She got another piece of gum out of her purse. It smelled—synthetic cherries and oranges—and the
noise
of it. The noise made him think of spit and teeth and tongues and lips. Kissing. Sex.

It did
not
make him think of sex. He wouldn’t allow it to.

A new song came on, and she reached for the radio dial. He tapped her hand away. “Leave it.”

“I hate this song.”

“I hate driving without knowing where I’m going.”

“Get used to it.”

“Back at you.”

She crossed her arms, and they both endured a particularly unbearable version of “The Loco-Motion,” followed by a country ballad that made her fidgety.

“Do you need a restroom?”

“Stop asking me if I have to pee,” she snapped.

“Stop squirming like a three-year-old, and I will.”

“I’m squirming because this song is so awful.”

“You were the one who wanted to listen to the radio. You had your turn to choose the music. Now it’s mine.”

“For how long?”

“Until we get wherever it is we’re going.”

She snorted.

“What?” he asked.

“If this is a trick to get information from me, you should know that it’s not going to work.”

“If you’re irritating me on purpose because you hope I’ll lose my temper and blurt out something you can use against me, you should know that’s not going to work, either.”

“You think I’m being irritating?”

“I think you might be the single most irritating person I’ve ever met.”

She crossed her arms and looked down. When she glanced back at him, she was smiling again, proud and defiant, and he could almost convince himself he hadn’t seen it.

That instant gleam of moisture in her eyes, the widening of her nostrils.

He’d hurt her feelings.

She was so easy to hurt. Such a strange combination of tough and vulnerable. He didn’t know how to act around her. She made him feel like a giant, squeezing the goose to death in the hope it would lay a golden egg.

“Just quit messing with the stereo,” he said, trying to be reasonable. “Enjoy … whatever this is.”

“I think it’s Garth Brooks. I’m pretty sure I made out with a guy in a closet to this song once.”

“Why were you in a closet?”

Damn it, why did he keep asking questions in response to her inane conversation? She drew them from him against his will. He didn’t
care
why she’d made out with a guy in a closet. He didn’t want to hear about it.

“It was a party game.”

“Sounds like fun.” The statement didn’t come out as disdainful as he’d meant it to.

Ashley was exactly the kind of woman who’d spent her adolescence making out with guys in closets. Going to the beach all the time, prancing around in a sparkly bikini, playing dunking games with boys in the surf as an excuse to get groped. Working on her tan and drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon. Grinding sand into the floor mats of her cheap, dented car.

He’d never envied people like her. He’d pitied them.

Heberto disdained them.
We work harder than they do. We deserve to have more
.

And Roman did have more. Or he would. He had the Cadillac, Ojito Enterprises, a growing reputation for putting together innovative development deals and always coming out on top. He had the trust of Heberto Zumbado—Miami’s most successful Cuban real estate entrepreneur—and the key to all the doors Heberto would open for him. He had a nice condo, a country club membership, a beautiful girlfriend whose ambitions moved in lockstep with his own.

He didn’t envy Ashley Bowman that beach, that closet. Her youth.

He sure as hell didn’t envy that nameless, faceless guy who’d spent those minutes in the dark closet with her, pressed up against her soft body, lost in her mouth and the bubblegum-ocean smell of lip gloss and hairspray and teenage girl.

The country ballad ended. Whitney Houston came on. That iconically terrible song from the bodyguard movie.

Ashley started to sing.

“Please don’t do that,” Roman said.

She sang even louder, her reedy voice breaking on the high notes. She knew all the words.

He endured it for all of ninety seconds, and then, abruptly, he couldn’t. “I’m already having a bad day,” he said. “And I guarantee you, if you don’t stop—”

The key changed with the arrival of the chorus. Ashley reached out and wrapped her hand
around his bicep. When he looked at her, she tilted her head and sang the words straight at him, as though she really meant them. As though she cared.

As though she loved him more than anyone alive.

Utter bullshit. No one felt that way about him. No one ever had.

Roman wouldn’t allow it.

But Ashley’s eyes were a blue snipped directly from the sky on a clear day, and she had perfectly arched golden eyebrows and hair that made him think of clouds—soft-looking, wispy, insubstantial. She had a ruddy flush on one tanned cheek and deep purple bruises in the tender skin beneath her eyes.

She looked tired and vulnerable and broken, and if she didn’t stop doing this to him soon, he would lose it. He could only handle so much of people who wore all their feelings out in the open, who were obnoxiously courageous, openly heartbroken, openly
anything
. He didn’t do well with feelings, period, and if she kept this up, he would just—

He couldn’t listen. He couldn’t look at her. Simply couldn’t.

“Stop that.”

Her fingers clutched harder.

She dragged his eyes back to her face by sheer force of will, and he watched, horrified, as a tear rolled down her pink cheek. It would be one thing if she were simply a good actress—the kind of woman who could cry on command. He could understand that. He could respect it.

But that wasn’t what was happening here. Her tears were real. That look on her face was real. The crack in her voice—real.

Roman didn’t know why she was crying, and he wasn’t about to ask. She had reasons, no doubt. Her attachment to Sunnyvale. Her grandmother’s death. The chaotic wreckage that seemed to be her life.

Or maybe she was just one of those unforgivably sentimental women who would cry over a twenty-year-old pop song on the radio.

He didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to care.

When he spotted an exit, he swerved into the right lane without bothering to check whether it was safe. Breathing too fast, too hard, he snapped off the radio.

She sang into the silence until he pulled into the lot of a chain restaurant, parked the Escalade and trailer across five spaces, and cut the engine.

Then she wiped her eyes with the wrist of her long-sleeved T-shirt, gathered her purse off the floor by her feet, and said, “Oh, good. I’m starving.”

Across from him, Ashley handed her menu to the waitress. “Is there bacon in the green beans?”

“Yes.”

The waitress’s name tag read “Makenna.” Her eye makeup was neatly divided vertically into an area of blue on the inside and an area of reddish-brown on the outside.

“How about the baked beans, are they made with pork?”

Makenna scratched her scalp with her pen. “Yeah, I think they are.”

“Okay. I’d like the vegetable plate, then, with corn.”

“You get four vegetables and a bread.”

“I know. I want corn, corn, corn, and corn. And a biscuit.”

Makenna started writing it down. Roman interrupted, “She’s not having that.”

“Yeah I am.”

“You haven’t eaten in two days. You can’t just have corn.”

“Everything else is made with meat. I’m a vegetarian.”

Of course she was a vegetarian. Because she’d been put on the earth to plague him.

He flipped through his menu, looking for something with actual calories that she could eat. The restaurant was a family-style place, and all the photographs in the menu were of meat—fried, grilled, dripping juice. “Omelet,” he said.

“I don’t like eggs.”

“Mashed potatoes.”

“Is the gravy made with meat?” Ashley asked.

Makenna sighed. “I think so. You want me to check?”

“No, I’m sure it is.”

“So have them without gravy,” Roman said.

Ashley wrinkled her nose. “They’re made from flakes. With just butter? Ew.”

He flipped another page. “You can have fish.”

“I don’t eat fish. I’m a
vegetarian
.”

“Fish aren’t meat.”

“Of course they’re meat.”

“So get some cheese. Grilled cheese. French fries.”

“The cheese won’t be real cheese, it’ll be that cheese that’s made from hydrogenated oil, which is disgusting. And the bread will be white bread, like eating a cotton ball. And—”

He dropped his menu on the table and gave up. “Fine. Eat whatever you want.”

But when it was his turn to order, he got extra hash browns and a side of pancakes he didn’t want. Just in case.

After Makenna left, Ashley slid the plastic bowl of half-and-half tubs to a spot in front of her and began stacking them to form a tower. Their booth sat by the window beneath a light with a faux stained-glass shade of red, green, and yellow plastic. Two of the three bulbs had burned out. The gloom highlighted all the hills and hollows of her face. Her shirtsleeves flapped at the cuff as she built, revealing wrist bones as delicate as a bird’s.

She looked like a girl.

She looked like what she was—a grieving granddaughter, eight years younger than Roman. Younger than that, if you looked at what she’d done with her life. Or not done with it.

The kind of person who could barely manage to pay the heat bill, but damned if she wasn’t doing an excellent job of screwing up all his plans.

“So tell me what your grand vision is,” she said to the creamer. “For Sunnyvale.”

“Why, so you can change my mind?”

“Because we’re going all the way to Georgia together, and we need to find something to talk about.”

“Your friend is in Georgia?”

She nodded.

Georgia.

Fucking
Georgia
.

The news did something to his body—disconnected it from reason long enough for his fist to hit the table and make the creamers jump. Make one of them spin in a lopsided circle and then roll off onto her lap.

Ashley flinched as though he’d struck her.

Roman took a deep breath.

He wasn’t that kind of man. He’d come into close proximity to physical violence only
twice in his life, and both times he’d thrown up. An unpleasant side effect of having been fathered by a man who was serving a life sentence for the cold-blooded murder of two women.

Roman had no stomach for violence.

He didn’t get angry. He was not the sort of man who pounded tabletops.

It was just her. This woman, this situation—the first time in years he’d so completely lost his cool. He inhaled again, slow and controlled, and forced himself to calm down.

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t guessed it would be a long drive. If she’d wanted him to drop her off somewhere close, she wouldn’t have worked so hard to keep from telling him. And Georgia wasn’t Alaska. True, they were still four hours from the border, and it was a big state. Huge. He could be stuck with her all day.

He could be stuck with her overnight.

Ashley placed a fourth creamer on top of her stack and glanced at him from under her eyelashes.

It doesn’t matter. You’ll drive wherever you need to go in order to get rid of her
.

The thing to do now was to put her at ease. That’s what Roman’s contractor, Noah, would do if he were here. He would
care
, in his awkward, fumbling way, and his caring would calm her.

He was all feelings, that man. Roman’s opposite. But for whatever reason, they worked well together. Roman kept hiring him—had hired him over and over again, expanding the scope of the jobs he gave Noah until he was essentially an employee.

What would Noah ask if he were here?

He would try to get to know her. Find out what her interests were, her desires.

“Whereabouts in Georgia?” Roman asked.

“Okefenokee.”

That caught him off guard. “She lives in a
swamp
?”

“Sort of.”

“Nothing is ever easy with you, is it?”

He needed to recalibrate his expectations, somehow. It shouldn’t be possible for her to keep knocking him off balance, and so
easily
. The deeper she disturbed the stillness he’d spent so many years cultivating, the happier she seemed to be.

She balanced two creamers on top of the fourth, and neither fell when she let go. “No, I
guess I’m not easy.” A moment passed, and she said, “Go ahead and kill me, if you’re going to.”

“What are you talking about?”

He sounded too high-strung, too aggressive, but she’d hit a sore spot. Jokes about murder weren’t funny when your father was a killer and you’d grown up in a small town where everyone knew it.

There were acts that couldn’t be forgiven. Acts that had to be paid for—if not by fathers, then by sons. His father would never be let out of prison. He’d paid for his crimes with his freedom, but it wasn’t enough.

Roman had been stuck footing what remained of the bill. The taint of his father’s betrayal a cloud that hung over his childhood, poisonous and still.

His foster father, Patrick, had tried to forgive him. He’d tried to love him. But he’d failed, and the failure had marked every minute of Roman’s youth.

We never want to see you again
.

“Georgia,” Ashley said.

“What?” He’d lost the thread of the conversation.

“You’re not going to kill me for making you go to Georgia?”

“I said I’d take you to your friend. I’ll take you.”

She flicked the pull tab on the sealed top of the creamer with her fingernail. Silence invaded the space between them.

Flick
.

Flick
.

And then, blessedly, she spoke. “So what’s the diabolical plan, then?”