by Ruthie Knox
She’d taught Cadillac men how to sea kayak off Baja. They always hated the part where she flipped them over and they had to escape the splash skirt and effect their own rescue.
Experience had forced Ashley to conclude that—while there were certainly exceptions—Cadillac men were almost always assholes.
This asshole came back with a small plastic-wrapped package. “Do you want this?”
She didn’t even know what it was. “No.”
“Your legs are blue.”
“I’m fine.”
He tore the package open and unfolded a silver space blanket. “Top or bottom? It won’t cover both.”
She didn’t respond, because she was fighting back the sudden, distressing urge to cry.
Roman Díaz was ruining her life. He could at least have the decency to be cruel.
He dropped to one knee, wrapped her legs in the crinkling blanket. He smelled good—aftershave or soap, clean and fresh like a very manly breath mint—and she willed herself to stop widening her nostrils and sucking at his smell like an excited puppy.
She was not excited. Or attracted. Or a puppy.
And this was serious business. She had to study him as though she were a detective, or, no, a soldier, because that was what you did with the enemy. Learned his ways. Found his weaknesses and exploited them.
It was beyond unfortunate that she was so awful at exploiting things.
He leaned back to survey his work. “Of course, if we leave that on you, in three or four hours you’ll be crisping up like a cat on a hot tin roof.”
He pronounced roof as though it had a u in it. Ruf.
Not the sort of accent she would have predicted for a Latino developer from Miami. She’d figured Roman Díaz would be Cuban, Honduran, Nicaraguan—and he looked the part. But he had to be second generation, at least. He spoke English too perfectly for it to be anything but a first language.
And even then, ruf? Wasn’t that how they said it in Canada?
“You wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“No.” He tipped his briefcase over, unlatched it, and withdrew a smartphone, which he used to take her picture from several different angles. “I wouldn’t.” He spoke quietly, his words punctuated by the phone’s artificial shutter noise. “Because you are a liability, Ashley Bowman. And I am a cautious man.”
“Why are you taking my picture?”
“I’m documenting you. Six-twenty a.m., Monday, August twenty-seventh. Protester alive and well.”
She snorted. “You can fake those.”
“Protesters?”
Once again, she couldn’t tell if he was joking. “I meant pictures.”
He put the camera away. “I’m sure I could. But why would I waste my time?”
“Because you’d already secretly done away with me and dumped my body in the ocean?”
“You’d float right back to shore. I’d have to chop you into pieces and hire a boat to take you way out where it’s deep, and even so.” He laid out this plan as though he’d considered it but rejected its impracticality. Then he looked at his watch.
“Bigger fish to fry today, huh?” she asked.
Roman glanced at her legs, and it was possible—just possible—that his eyes stuttered in the vicinity of her breasts as he brought his gaze back up to her face.
But if he’d ogled her, it had been the smoothest ogle in the history of ogling.
“You aren’t a fish,” he said. “You don’t have a tail.”
Ashley wiggled her legs in the metallic blanket. “No, but this is pretty fancy. I feel like you’ve upped my cool factor by about three hundred percent.”
Roman blinked. Frowned.
He looked toward her toes and shook his head slightly, as if to clear it.
“So,” he said. “You have my attention. Was there something you needed to tell me?”
She had planned to make a speech. To tell him what Sunnyvale meant to her—all the time she’d spent here with her grandmother, the people they’d met and the friends they’d made. Their crew of regular renters who came back year after year, Mitzi and Esther, Stanley and Michael, Prachi and Arvind …
Her family. Her home.
She tried to think of a way to put into words why she’d come back to live here every winter, even after she left at eighteen. How it wasn’t just a bunch of apartments plunked down on one of the cheaper Keys—wasn’t simply inexpensive weekly or monthly lodging for old folks down for the season and vacationers too strapped to afford Key West prices.
It was magic. The kind of magic made up of canasta tournaments by the swimming pool and long, laughter-filled evenings sitting on the dock surrounded by tiki torches and old friends. The magic of belonging somewhere. Having something.
That’s what she’d wanted to tell Roman Díaz. But he had his arms crossed, and his flat, expressionless eyes made her uncomfortable, reminding her too vividly of how she must look to him. Young and dumb and barefoot. Full of reckless, useless passion.
What did a man like him care about canasta?
“It’s just … this is too great a place to throw away,” she said. “It needs fixing up, I know, but if you put the right person in charge … I would do the work. I would work hard. You could turn a profit. Why knock it down when it has so many good years left?”
His eyebrows gathered themselves together. He had abundant eyebrows—the kind of eyebrows with the potential to take over his whole face if he didn’t keep them carefully trimmed. Which obviously he did, but still. Somewhere, there was a sophomore-year-of-high-school photograph of this guy with giant caterpillar eyebrows.
The thought made her a little smug, and she cherished the feeling for a moment, imagining Roman in thirty years with eyebrows so bushy and uncontrolled that they crawled right off his face.
“That’s your whole pitch?” he asked.
Oh, no. I have a much better pitch. I just thought I’d start with one that sucked, in case I didn’t need to waste the ringer.
Ashley kept her smart mouth firmly zipped. She believed in kindness over snark. And anyway, what was the point of arguing? He’d already made up his mind. There was nothing she could do to save Sunnyvale. Not alone. She was—as ever—inadequate to the situation.
It had been a mistake to chain herself to the tree. She should have called for reinforcements. All those people who came back to Sunnyvale every year, who loved it as much as she did—surely they would help if they knew. They had more experience, better connections, and she always did best as part of a crew.
That was where her talents lay: bringing people together, motivating them, smoothing out any little wrinkles to help a group pull together toward a common goal. She was a team player, not an oddball loner of the sort who could launch a successful solo protest.
Too bad this hadn’t occurred to her yesterday when Gus was still around. She might have told him that she was not remotely the sort of person who could live in a redwood for four years. A village of redwoods? Yes. Totally. She would be the one who started the Redwood Village Softball League.
But alone in a tree?
Fuck no. She’d never last.
“Yeah, that was more or less my whole pitch,” she admitted.
“You should have saved yourself the effort.”
A pickup truck pulled into the lot. Ashley recognized it even before Noah the contractor got out and hailed Roman with a lazy wave. Another car arrived, followed by a Jeep.
The crew. They were showing up to begin their day’s work of tearing her heart out of her body and driving over it with the scarred metal treads of their diesel-fueled implements of destruction.
Ashley’s shoulders sent a howling pain-memo to her central nervous system, and it took her a second to realize it was because she’d sat up, straightened her spine, and tossed her hair behind her shoulders. She’d done it without planning, without thinking. Her defiance was visceral, a full-body NO that seemed to have little to do with logic.
You should have saved yo
urself the effort.
Such a perfect line, delivered with such perfect blankness. She ought to feel defeated. Obviously, she was defeated. This man would roll right over her.
But her posture seemed to be insisting that the only reasonable answer to a line like that was Screw you, buddy.
She wouldn’t let him take the only place she had from her. Not ever, if she could help it, but definitely not today.
Lifting her chin, Ashley met Roman Díaz’s scary brown eyes. “The thing is, though, I don’t need a pitch. I’m in your way, and I’m not moving until you agree to send the machines home and call off the demolition.”
Roman rubbed one hand over his clean-shaven jaw.
He walked away.
“Hey!” she called. “Where are you going?”
He turned around to walk backward, casual as could be. “I’m going to talk to my crew. Then I’m going to send somebody over to give you a drink of water. And then, once I’ve made sure you’re in no danger of dying on me, I’m going to ignore you until you beg me to cut you loose.”
Ashley watched him turn without breaking stride, graceful and dangerous as a swordsman. He strolled toward the parking lot, briefcase swinging gently in his grip. When he was within verbal range, Noah said something, and Roman broke into a huge, easy smile.
A devastating smile.
She’d known it would be devastating, and it totally, completely, absolutely was. Just as bad as she’d figured. Worse.
Damn it all to hell.
Ashley took a deep breath, but then she couldn’t figure out what to do with the air. Or her face. The only sound she could make was a sort of stupefied huff.
This evil Latino Canadian land developer was an opponent ten times more formidable than she’d imagined.
CHAPTER TWO
Roman held out his hand.
“Right now?” Noah asked.
“I won, didn’t I? Pay up.”
The contractor reached into his back pocket and unearthed two wrinkled, dog-eared twenties and a ten from his wallet. “You won on a technicality.”
“How do you figure? You said she’d give up by morning. I said you were wrong. I was right. I get the fifty.”
Noah handed the money over, and Roman placed it in his wallet, using a receipt to segregate the bills from the rest of the notes. He didn’t like things messy. Disorder had a way of inviting chaos, and he avoided chaos at all costs.
“Yeah, but I didn’t know she was going to be alone out here,” Noah explained. “I thought some friend or relative would lure her off the property, get her to eat some dinner and watch TV. I don’t like the idea she was here by herself all night, chained up. Think what could’ve happened to her.”
The possibility that some harm might have come to the half-dressed, freckle-faced Marcia Brady look-alike chained to Roman’s palm tree obviously distressed Noah.
Everything distressed Noah.
But then, that was one reason Roman kept him around. His PA, too—both of them wore their feelings on their faces, and both of them told Roman exactly what was supposed to distress him.
Handy, that, when you rarely got distressed by anything.
“I sent someone to keep an eye on her,” Roman said.
“What, last night?”
“Yes.”
Close enough to the truth. He’d sent himself.
Noah’s forehead became a map of wrinkles. “You knew she was out here all night alone, and you just let her sit?”
“That was her decision, not mine.”
“But you made sure she was safe.”
He’d parked a quarter mile away and walked up from the dock side of the property, hugging the shadows, making sure his footfalls didn’t signal his approach.
He needn’t have bothered with stealth. The woman had been singing show tunes to the night sky. Safe, whole, completely incapable of carrying a tune—and acquainted, it would seem, with virtually all the lyrics to the musical Rent.
Roman recognized the songs. He’d seen the musical with his sister, Samantha, in Milwaukee once. A million years ago.
“Of course.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I was worried about her, too.”
Rather improbably, Noah seemed to believe this. His forehead eased. “I didn’t know you ever worried about anything.”
Roman smiled, because that was what people did. Bared their teeth at one another. “Worry might be too strong a word.”
In fact, he’d visited the site last night because if Ashley Bowman came to any harm, it would be the end of the project. The stink of negative press was nearly impossible to wash off, and Heberto would back out of the Little Torch development if it turned ugly in this first phase.
Without Heberto, there would be no Coral Cay Resort. Forget Phase II and Phase III. Forget the partnership offer Heberto had been dangling over his head for years. And, most likely, forget about marrying Heberto’s daughter, Carmen, too.
The stakes were way too high for Roman to let one rogue woman ruin everything.
Noah rubbed his hands together. “So I figure we can get started on the units that are farthest from her without putting her in any danger. Maybe knock out number eight, then work back toward her side of the pool after she gives up?”
“No. we’re not doing any demo until we get rid of her. Have someone find her a sun umbrella. Stay here with her, but don’t talk to her. She can have water every hour—every half hour from twelve to four, if it gets as hot as it’s supposed to, and if it doesn’t rain. No food.”
“You want me to babysit her?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
Noah tried to school his face to blankness, but he didn’t have nearly as much practice as Roman did. The strain showed at the corners of his eyes and the margins of his mouth. “I thought we were starting today.”
“We were. Now we’re not.”
Seconds passed. Roman waited, watching Noah mentally tick through a list of scheduling and payroll concerns.
“Look, Rome, this whole schedule is tight, and that Category Three storm that hits Haiti today is supposed to be headed for us next. By tomorrow night or Wednesday morning, they’re saying, and I don’t think—”
“She won’t last.”
“You’re sure.”
Roman was always sure.
Almost always. When he wasn’t, he faked it, which worked just as well. The important thing was not to hesitate.
“I’m sure,” he said.
But there was something about that woman. The way she’d tossed her hair back, defiant. The way she’d tried to tease him, as though he were a man to be teased.
She didn’t respect his power, and he didn’t respect her ideals. Which left him … less sure than he might have preferred.
What leverage could he bring to bear on a woman like Ashley Bowman?
“I won’t risk some piece of random debris flying over and whacking her in the head,” he said. “Keep her alive, don’t feed her, and don’t talk to her. She’ll give in by nightfall. Tomorrow morning at the outside.”
“You think?” Noah asked.
Roman put his hand on Noah’s shoulder. “I guarantee it.”
That worked. The touching thing always worked on Noah.
“All right. I’ll put Mark on the girl, and we can meet here in the morning if she hasn’t taken off yet.”
“Not Mark. You.”
“I have to do this personally?”
Roman pretended to consider. “Well, maybe not. As long as you can promise me that I won’t come back here in the morning to find out that your guy got bored and took off, or he couldn’t keep it in his pants, so, Sorry, Roman, but she’s filed an assault claim with the police, and—”
Noah raised his hands. “Got it. I’m on it.”
“And you won’t touch her.”
Noah looked befuddled. “Why would I touch her?”
“Exactly.”
Sometimes it surprised h
im, how little conception Noah seemed to have of evil. As if it were incomprehensible to him, the product of a mind so different from his own, he couldn’t bridge the mental gulf between him and it.
Roman always understood evil. He’d come from evil, born of it, marked by it, and he’d spent most of his life feeling cast out, nose pressed up against glass, looking in from the outside. It had been a long road, teaching himself to step away from the glass. To be comfortable on the outside, to embrace it, to own it.
What Roman didn’t understand was what it was like to be Noah—completely at ease with humanity, full of tender impulses and good intentions.
Why would you touch her? Because she’s pretty, and she can’t move, and you’re stronger than her. You would touch her because you can.
He’d learned not to have conversations like that with Noah. It was pointless.
The important thing was, with Noah’s help, Roman could make sure no one took advantage of Ashley Bowman.
“But I can’t work overnight,” Noah said.
“You can leave at five. I’ll take care of the night shift.”
“Sounds good.”
Roman climbed into the Escalade while Noah gathered his crew and explained that they wouldn’t be knocking down any buildings today. He turned the key in the ignition. The V8 awoke at his command.
It gave him a deep, warming satisfaction, every time. Pride. Vanity.
Roman wasn’t above them. He knew what he had going for him. People were easily led astray by appearances, seduced by wealth and a symmetrical face, well-tailored clothes, confidence.
He had all those things. He used them like the tools they were.
He glanced at Ashley as he put the truck into reverse.
Not a bad-looking woman, and not as powerless as she seemed to think, given the situation. But she didn’t know how to use what she had to her advantage. As obstacles went, she was a bump in the road.
One day. That was all she would cost him. He’d known something like this was a possibility when he purchased the property. Susan Bowman had made it clear that her granddaughter wouldn’t approve of Sunnyvale’s sale, and she wasn’t to know about it until it was a done deal.
