Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues (11 page)

“I, uh, have to call my dad.”

“After that.”

“I should probably go back to the office. I don’t usually … yesterday was …”

“It was, wasn’t it? Let’s do it again.”

“I can’t.”

“It’ll be mid-afternoon by the time you get back to Miami.”

“Early afternoon.”

“It’s a nice day,” Noah coaxed. “Stay here, I’ll take you out on my boat.”

“I don’t really do boats.”

He kissed the tip of her nose. “You’ll like it.”

“I don’t have a swimsuit.”

“You won’t need a swimsuit.”

“If we’re going to be—”

“Just say yes, baby. Yes, you want to see my boat.” He licked over her lips. “Yes, you want to go out on the water and get hot and drink a couple beers with me. Then we can grab some awful fried seafood and go back to my place again.” He moved his mouth over her cheek. “I’ll strip that skirt off and eat you out in the shower. We’ll drop onto my bed naked and dripping and fuck each other until we’re so worn out we can’t move.”

Carmen couldn’t respond, or really even breathe, or think of anything but the picture his words made. She could
see
it. She could feel what it would be like to take this from him—to accept the gift of life the way Noah lived it.

She could imagine, almost, what it would be like to belong to this man not just for today but for every day, stretching out into the future.

When he looked at her, he saw a woman she’d never been.

When he touched her, she became someone she liked. A woman who responded. Who felt. A Carmen who writhed and smiled and ate fried food.

She gazed at his face—those kind, smiling eyes—and she wanted to be that woman. She was right on the verge of telling him yes when movement behind his arm caught her eye, and she refocused her gaze on the doorway.

Where she saw her father.

The flush came over her so violently, she felt for a moment as though she might be having some sort of health crisis. A stroke. A heart attack. Death by embarrassment.

“Papi! What are you doing here?”

She hadn’t called Heberto
papi
since the fifth grade.

He’d never caught her with a strange man straddling her thighs and her shirt untucked.

“It’s a good question,” her father said mildly. “I could ask you the same.”

“I’m—working.”

He raised an eyebrow. A trick he’d picked up from Roman.

Carmen hastily tucked her blouse back in. “Heberto, this is Noah, um—”

She didn’t know his last name. And he had lipstick on his chin.
Fuck
.

“Noah Archer.” He stepped forward, extending his hand. “Roman’s contractor. Nice to meet you, sir.”

Heberto glanced at Noah’s hand and turned his gaze back to Carmen. “You’re messing
around on Roman with an employee?”

“Roman dumped me,” she said flatly.

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. He’s sleeping with Ashley.”

“Should I know who that is?”

“Ashley the palm tree protester?”

Her father looked briefly surprised, but his expression subsided into mild dissatisfaction, as it always did. “So this is revenge,” he said, glancing from her neckline—almost certainly askew—back to Noah’s hand, which he’d dropped to his side when it became apparent Heberto had no intention of shaking it.

Noah opened his mouth to speak. Carmen shot him a quelling look and jumped down from the top of the desk, wobbling for a moment on her heels. Even with her father here, she felt the effects of that last kiss—the things Noah had
said—

But now wasn’t the time for that. Nor was it the time to defend Noah’s delicate feelings, if he had them. There were more important issues to discuss.

“What are you doing here?” she asked Heberto again.

“You haven’t been answering your phone.”

“I was going to get back to you after I had this situation resolved.”

He glanced at his watch. “Which would be when, exactly? You should be half done with the demolition by now.”

“I had to wait until I talked to Roman.”

“Don’t tell me he hasn’t got the woman under control yet.”

“He says he’s planning something. He needs time to think.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“He wanted me to tell you that this is …” She glanced at her father’s frowning mouth. He was going to hate this. “He said it’s his property, and he’ll knock down the buildings when
he
wants. He’ll get in touch with us when he’s ready. Until then, he doesn’t plan to take our calls.”

Her father walked away. Bracing his hands in the doorway, he leaned out to look to the left, where the rental units surrounded the swimming pool. He looked for half a minute, maybe more.

Noah didn’t touch her, but he stood close by, and she couldn’t keep herself from looking.

She studied his hair-covered forearm. The sleeve of his T-shirt. Her eyes crept upward, over his shoulder to his mouth. His nose. His eyes.

Heberto turned around, flicked his gaze at them both, and said, “I’ll be damned if I’m letting this thing fall behind schedule one more day just because Roman is balls-deep in some idiot hippie.” He focused his attention on Noah. “Take it down. I don’t want there to be one scrap of this place left tomorrow morning, and that includes the building we’re standing in, you understand me?”

“No,” Noah said.

“Which part’s got you confused?”

“Sorry,” Noah said. “I wasn’t clear. Yes, I understand you. But no, I won’t do that. It’s Roman’s property. I’m not taking it down unless Roman tells me to.”

“I’m his partner,” said Heberto.

“Handshake partner,” Carmen cut in.

Her father gave her a look that meant
Keep out of this
.

“They’re not really partners yet,” she explained to Noah. “This phase of the development is all Roman’s responsibility.”

“I’m building a resort hotel on this land,” Heberto said. “I’ve got it all lined up.”

“
Informally
lined up,” she countered. “The hotel is Phase Three. There’s a lot of work to be done before we’re in any shape
legally
to start building.”

“I need the site cleared,” Heberto insisted.

“And I’ll clear it,” Noah said calmly, “as soon as Roman gives me the go-ahead.”

Heberto made a disgusted noise. “Carmen, get on the phone and find me another demo guy. Your man here is free to leave.”

Noah folded his arms. He looked massive when he did that. Massive and muscular and … quite impressive, actually. “Roman left the keys with me. I’m custodian of the property. If you’re going to threaten to break the law, I won’t leave this building until the police restrain you or Roman gives me the word.”

Her father rolled his eyes. “Fine. Stay here.” He flicked his hand at Carmen. “Go outside and tell the hard hats to go home.”

Carmen looked from her father to Noah. Then back to her father again.

She couldn’t hold Noah’s steady gaze. Her obedience to Heberto was a foregone
conclusion, and this impatient
leaping
inside her—this attention-starved thing that she’d made the mistake of feeding, not understanding that it would grow stronger and louder and
more—

She would ignore it.

Carmen wouldn’t acknowledge it, and she wouldn’t mourn it. She would look away from Noah as she ground the heel of her shoe into the soft skull bones of this fledgling connection that had so audaciously come to life in the space of a day. This hummingbird-hearted scrap of feeling that had made itself at home in the soft, warm place between her hips. Bracketed by Noah’s hands. Soothed with his tongue.

There were other things to look at. Work to focus on.

She picked up her clipboard, pressed it to her chest, and walked from the building.

“Carmen!”

She moved down the steps as quickly as she could, but her shoes were impractical, and her skirt shortened her stride. Noah was so much larger. His long legs ate up the difference in an instant.

“Don’t do this,” he said.

“This is my job.”

“It’s not right. You know it’s not.”

“I thought you understood,” she said. “I’m not that way.”

Her heels clipped over the smooth expanse of concrete surrounding the pool. Noah reached for her arm, his hot grip firm over her silk blouse, and it hurt, it hurt.

“Baby.”

“Don’t call me baby.”

They’d stopped moving. His jaw was slack, his mouth open in soft astonishment.

“My name is Carmen. I’m not your baby. I’m not
anyone’s
baby. I took you to a motel to fuck you, and just because I—just because we—” She had to stop, to inhale, which sounded like a gasp, painful, broken, issuing from her throat before she could lock it down, and his eyes were so warm when he said it again.

One syllable. A meaningless word.

“Baby.”

“You weren’t supposed to get any
ideas
,” she said fiercely.

“I know.”

Her emotions were climbing her throat, that leaping creature wailing at her, alive, wounded. “We aren’t going to have a
thing
.”

Tears. There were tears in her eyes. God.

Noah gazed at her, forehead crumpled, eyebrows in, brown eyes steady and fathomless with the kind of steady wisdom she’d never possessed, never seen modeled, never learned. “All right. If that’s what you want.”

This man—he knew what to say. She didn’t understand how he could, but he did. He knew how to plant seeds and leave them alone, how to give them space to grow, how to keep faith that the world wouldn’t destroy them as soon as he looked away.

They couldn’t be more different.

“This isn’t going to work,” she said.

“It might not,” he agreed with a shrug. “It might. I think it’s too early to tell.”

“So, what? You just wait and see?”

He smiled. “Yeah. I just wait and see.”

She looked past him to the other side of the pool, where his men had gathered in a knot around their machines, watching. “I guess if I go over and tell your crew to leave, you’ll countermand the order,” she said.

“Yep.”

“I’m going back to the office.”

“Okay.”

He walked beside her all the way, and she felt the crewmen’s eyes on them. The sun warmed her cheek and heated her hair. Beyond the buildings, the waves smacked against the beach. Noah found her hand, squeezed it, and let it go.

The world went on. On and on, waves against the beach, sunrise and sunset, notes on her clipboard, papers crumpled and tossed away at the end of the day.

Carmen thought about boats and beer, fried seafood and slow, tipsy sex.

She thought about what it would be like to have faith in what she wanted.

Her father was on his phone when they entered the office. “Fine. Give me twenty minutes.” He ended the call. “I’m running late for a meeting in Key West. I guess you’re going to tell me you couldn’t send them home with Mr. Superhero trailing you out there.”

“Yes.”

He wiped his hand up and down over one cheek. “Look. Get your boyfriend here to do his job or get a new wrecking crew in—I don’t care. Just get it over with today. I don’t have time for this shit.”

Her father’s eyes looked tired, and his accent was pronounced.
I doan have time for this sheet
. He would talk that way sometimes for effect, if he was meeting with other Cubans or trying to cultivate someone’s poor opinion so he could take advantage of being underestimated. But at the moment he wasn’t calculating. He was just weary.

“Call me when it’s done,” he said. “Send me a picture so I can email it to Roman and ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing. I need to take a leak. This place have a bathroom?”

Carmen pointed to the bathroom door. Heberto yanked at the knob, swore softly, and pushed it inward, leaving Carmen and Noah together in the dim office, isolated, awkward.

Her father did this. Took over rooms, took over situations, until there was nothing left when he walked out but the anticipation of his return.

Through the closed door, she heard the stream of his urine hit the water in the toilet.

The sound ceased, cut off prematurely.

There was a dull
thump
, the sound of a foot or a head striking the drywall.

“¿Pero qué coño?”
her father shouted. “Who the fuck are you?”

“You’re quiet,” Ashley said. “Everything okay?”

Roman glanced at her. She had her feet up on his dashboard, her long legs bare to where her shorts gaped beneath the curve of her hamstrings.

She’d been quiet, too, since they left Camelot, Ohio, but the silence felt okay.

Strange to think that wouldn’t have been the case a few days ago.

He’d renounced one tie that bound him to his life back in Miami, made
one
choice—to side with Ashley—and since that moment, everything had been happening so quickly.

He thought of a rope under tension. How if you took a knife to it, nicked through just a few fibers, the cut ends would whip and spin, unraveling themselves.

“It’s all these small towns,” he said. “They look like where I’m from.”

The apples of her cheeks lifted—Ashley’s sly smile. “You told me you were
from
Miami.”

“They look like where I grew up,” he corrected.

“It’s the same.”

Yeah. No matter where in the world he lived, Heraly, Wisconsin, would always be where he was
from
. There was no escaping it—no getting away from Heraly in some final, forever way. Not when the tides of memory could always drag him back.

But this wasn’t Wisconsin. They were on a back road in north-central Ohio, a world of flat green expanses punctuated by the sort of towns that lined up politely on either side of the road, waiting for their turn to spill secrets.

“You think it’s gone yet?” she asked.

“Sunnyvale?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That depends on Heberto.”

They’d left the subject behind hours ago, tacitly settling into silence when they pulled away from the curb. Nana and Stanley had stayed behind to get Carly’s mobile home—and possibly also Carly and company—while Roman and Ashley scouted out a campsite for tonight
and grabbed some time alone.