Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues (25 page)

She’d taken off her clothes, but she hadn’t been naked.

Before Noah, she’d never
felt
as naked as she did now, all the time.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said. “I didn’t even know the name of the town you were from.”

“I never told you.”

“Because I never asked.”

“I didn’t want you to ask.”

“I was thinking about that. How did I know what I wasn’t supposed to ask? Did we have a conversation I can’t remember about that, when we first met?”

He flopped onto his back, arms spread wide, and looked at the ceiling. “You were a kid when we met.”

“I thought maybe that was why I didn’t remember. You know, like you said,
Carmen, you’re a cool kid. Let’s agree never to talk about my family or my feelings or where I came from or why I don’t seem to have any people, and once you’re grown up enough, if your dad says it’s okay, I’ll ask you out
. And I said,
Yeah, all right
. And then we both forgot.”

“That never happened.”

“What did happen?”

“What are you asking—how come we’re the way we are together?”

She pulled her feet up onto the seat of the chair and wrapped her arms around her bent legs to rest her chin on her kneecap. “I thought we were going to get married.”

“When you were a kid?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

Roman lifted both hands from the bed, interlaced them, and stretched his arms above his head. He looked like a sacrifice, vulnerable to her sharpness.

He looked beautiful, and she appreciated his beauty, but she didn’t want it.

“So did I,” he said.

“I liked thinking about it,” she confessed. “It was … it was so …”

“Comfortable?” he asked.

“Easy.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Sure. Because we didn’t need to have that conversation, right? You were never going to ask me about my family. And I was never going to ask you why you’re like you are.”

“Like I am?”

He levered up onto his elbows so he could see her. “With your clipboard and your clothes, and the way you work out at exactly the same time every morning, for the same number of minutes, and weigh yourself before you take a shower. And how you went to college close to home and only studied things that would be useful when you went to work for your dad. Like
that
.”

“Oh.”

Roman flopped back down.

Carmen felt his words crawling on her. Crawling all over her, like they needed some way in, and she couldn’t decide whether she should open her mouth and give them access or close her eyes, flatten her lips, make understanding impossible.

“Come here by me,” Roman said. “Lie down. You look tired.”

She wasn’t sure she could unbend her limbs, but he patted the bed beside him, and she found herself standing.

She found herself on the bed next to him.

She found herself saying, “She doesn’t look like anything special.”

“Who?”

“Ashley.”

He rose on one elbow, jaw stubbornly set. “If you came here to insult her—”

“No, settle down. I was just going to say, she doesn’t
look
special. I thought she would. After everything that’s happened, I thought she’d be some kind of … amazing.”

“She is amazing.”

“But that’s what I’ve been thinking about. How you’re obviously completely enthralled with her, like she’s trapped you or … I don’t know,
transformed
you, but I saw her and I thought,
Her?
”

He was close enough that she could actually see his jaw muscle working as he ground his teeth together.

“Just
wait
, okay? My point is, I think I understand. How this skinny blond girl with tangled hair—”

“Get to your point.”

Carmen took a deep breath. “Noah is like that.”

“Like what?”

“He’s like
that
—like I objectively know that he’s just this sort of big, dumb guy—”

“Noah’s not dumb.”

“—this big Labrador retriever man with a beard and a giant belt buckle,
objectively
, but I can’t …” She made a helpless gesture in the air with her hand. A looping sign of defeat.

Roman’s mouth softened. “You can’t, huh?”

“I
can’t
.”

She couldn’t get away from his mouth or his hands or the kindness in his eyes.

She couldn’t get away from the way she craved him, even though she was afraid of the mess of him. The chaos of her feelings.

She couldn’t.

“So don’t,” Roman said.

“I don’t know how not to.”

“It’s not hard. You just
don’t
. You wait for when your
don’t
is right on the verge of kicking in, and then you
do
, instead.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“Yep. It’s dangerous.”

She needed him to tell her how to protect herself from the part that was dangerous, but he didn’t.

He didn’t, which meant she’d been right. There wasn’t any way to protect herself from the part that was dangerous.

You either did, or you didn’t. You had to pick.

“It’s worth it,” he said.

“You don’t know that,” she said irritably. “You don’t even know what
it
is. Either of those
its
.
It
is worth
it
. Complete nonsense.”

“I do too know. And I’m telling you, it’s worth it.”

She sighed. “I was mean. When I left Sunnyvale.”

“How come?”

“He told me about his kid, and I freaked.”

“Can you fix it?”

She turned her head. There was Roman, looking at her with concern and understanding.

There was her friend. The reason she was in Indiana right now.

To talk to Roman.

“He texted me.”

“What, today? What did he say?”

“He said,
When you’re ready to talk, call me
.”

“Did you call?”

“I turned off my phone.”

Roman shook his head, smiling. “You’re a piece of work.”

“I know.”

And then they just lay there for a minute, and he picked up her hand and held it. The touch was so explicitly
not
sexual—so frankly and completely
un
arousing—that it forced her to say, “I never liked having sex with you.”

Roman started to laugh. “Thanks.”

“It’s not as if you liked having sex with me.”

“We did all right.”

“It’s nine hundred times better with her, though, isn’t it?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“It’s a
million
times better with Noah.”

Roman turned his face away and covered his eyes with his hand. “A million. Jesus. If baby angels sing when you guys are in bed together, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I cry. Every time.”

He barked with laughter. “He makes you cry in bed. You should
marry
him, Carm.”

“Shut up.”

“You should have his babies.”

Carmen’s stomach did a flip.

Maybe not her stomach. Maybe below her stomach.

Possibly her baby-making equipment, quiescent her entire life, had just tucked into a little roll, a sort of happy somersault that felt dizzy and disorienting and … good.

Scary-good.

Scary to think, if she figured out how to
do
instead of
don’t
-ing all the time, she might feel it again. She might feel it all the time.

Carmen smiled. “Shut up.”

“I cried this morning with my sister.”

“You’re turning into kind of a pussy.”

He curled into a ball, laughing so hard that Carmen thought he might break something.

Except he’d already broken something.

Broken open.

She’d never seen him so happy.

Before tonight, she’d never seen him happy at all.

The arrival of the dusty black SUV in the parking lot startled the fawn into flight.

Ashley watched it bound into the thicket at the property line, and she flattened the palm of her hand over her sternum, excited and scared.

Scared to be excited.

Today was two weeks. Two weeks since she’d tricked him into taking this trip with her, and this was the end of it. This moment.

The end or the beginning—or both. The high point that happened when you arrived where you were going and looked out over the vista and then … and then.

She and Roman had made it to the
and then
, and it turned out that
and then
scared the ever-loving crap out of her.

And then
was the stage at which her relationships usually imploded.

She didn’t want another implosion. She wanted everything to go well this morning, and she had to believe the flight of the Key deer wasn’t a bad omen.

She was crazy and shoeless, but that wasn’t Roman’s fault. He hadn’t asked her to wait for him on this pile of mulch beneath the palm tree, nor had he known when he called last night to tell her he’d be here early in the morning that she would lie awake for hours, restless and fretting, plotting and planning in her motel bed.

He’d suggested they meet at Sunnyvale, then go grab some breakfast.

It hadn’t occurred to her until she was sitting here waiting that he might have been setting the stage for a tactful breakup. He could be planning to drive her to breakfast, avoid eye contact over the muffins, and tell her it had been fun, but they both needed to get back to their lives.

She’d gone full-bore and planned a picnic, which would be awkward if he was here to dump her.

None of which was Roman’s fault. He hadn’t known what she had in mind. He probably would have tried to talk her out of it—or at least to talk her into wearing pants and a decent pair of shoes.

She’d failed to check the weather, which was windy and unseasonably cool.

She’d also failed to consider how prickly the mulch would be against the backs of her thighs.

The ants had discovered her sandals and crawled over the bare soles of her feet three times, and the third time, she’d flipped out and torn off the straps, flinging the shoes into the closest pile of rubble.

So yeah. She was shoeless and crazy, which was not, sadly, an unfamiliar state. Nor was it Roman’s fault. Even though Roman Díaz was responsible for the destruction of the place that had mattered to her most in the world, she didn’t hate him.

She loved him.

But man, she’d really been enjoying the little Key deer. It had been such an excellent distraction from all the depressing thoughts about her grandmother. And the regretful thoughts about what she’d said to Roman the last time she saw him—and what she hadn’t said.

Not to mention the low-grade, ever-present terror that she had no clue how the future was supposed to work now that she’d fallen in love with a not-remotely-evil Latino Cheesehead land developer.

It was all a little much.

To the left of where the deer had disappeared, the last gasp of sunrise washed the sky in muted pink. The mounds of rubble that had once been Sunnyvale stood in dark relief against the sky like a miniature Floridian mountain range—which would make an interesting postcard, actually.

Welcome to Florida! The Alps of the South
.

Whereas the SUV was like no postcard she’d ever seen. Dingy, dented, scratched, and bouncing along with Susan Bowman’s Airstream trailer behind it, it looked like a joke whose punch line Ashley didn’t know.

The driver’s door opened, and black dress shoes appeared beneath gray slacks. The black top of his head crested the door. Ashley’s attention focused to a point, waiting for the moment when she’d see his face.

There.

Roman
.

He had to detour around the remains of Turquoise Treasure, and the closer he walked, the more this rich Miami land developer looked like everything she’d ever wanted but had been
afraid to ask for: tall, dark, expensive, beautifully proportioned, and—her favorite part—smiling.

Smiling as though he saw her, Ashley Bowman, and he liked what he saw.

Smiling as though he’d always seen her.

As though seeing her was the very best thing he could imagine.

And then they were kissing.

It happened so fast, it was more like an act of nature than a decision. A hurricane of stored-up desire that lifted her fingertips and made them frantically paw at his shoulders and his neck and his head until they found all the teeny little curls that had been born along his hairline in the past few days. A whirlwind of energy and grappling hands, Roman’s hands, Roman’s lips on hers. He skipped the first three stages of kissing and moved directly to the part where his tongue stroked into her mouth in that deep, delicious way that was more explicit than sex, with predictable effects in her underpants.

It turned out that the palm tree made an excellent sort of brace if your hot boyfriend wanted to get his thigh between your legs and hoist you up by the ass cheeks so he could do amazing, terrible, glorious things with his hands underneath your dress in lieu of saying hello.

Ashley was panting by the time they broke apart. Dizzy and happy, only halfway aware he was speaking, she didn’t realize he expected a reply until he bit her earlobe and said, impatiently, “Ash?”

“What?”

“Was that the deer?”

“Huh?”

“I think I saw the deer when I was driving up. Small, right? Brown?”

“That’s the deer.”

“Now I’ve seen everything.”

She pulled him closer, pressing her breasts against his chest. “Honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Roman smiled, and then he kissed her again.

She’d had a speech to give him, but she couldn’t remember how it went.

“I love you,” he told her neck.

“I really love you,” he told her mouth.

Her heart fluttered and settled. “I love you, too,” she said.

They’d figure the rest out.

After they finished kissing.

Which didn’t seem likely to happen, actually, anytime soon.

“Cheers!” Ashley clicked her plastic tumbler against Roman’s and took a long swallow. He was eyeing his cup with skepticism. “You’re supposed to say ‘Cheers’ back, you know.”