Roman Holiday 3: Blindsided: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Ruthie Knox

  She made coffee.

  When she placed a mug on the table in front of him, he said, “The only tow service is a hundred miles away.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “What do they do around here if a car needs towing?”

  “Usually Jerry does it. He has a big truck with a hitch.”

  “Bigger than the Cadillac?”

  “Yeah, he could tow the Cadillac. Does it really need to be towed?”

  Roman glanced outside. “The mud’s up to the axles, and it hardened overnight. It’s like concrete now. Plus, something’s wrong with the trailer hitch. It won’t unhook.”

  “That’s probably just the pressure from it being jackknifed.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure a piece got bent. It’s going to have to be cut off.”

  “With a saw?” She imagined Roman kneeling in the grass, furiously working a handsaw. Sweaty and hot. Desire curled in her lower belly and started to purr.

  Oh, fuck. Double fuck.

  “I was thinking with a cutting torch.”

  “Is this part of the trailer or of your car?”

  “My truck.”

  “Good.”

  “No, I mean, I drive a truck. Not a car. It’s part of the trailer.”

  “You’re not cutting anything off the Airstream. Do you know how hard it is to get parts?”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “It will be if you cut something off my trailer.”

  His phone made a noise, and he lifted it, dismissing her.

  Ashley moved toward the stove. She opened a cabinet and pulled out wheat flour and agave syrup.

  In Miami, Roman could have made arrangements for a tow truck and a cutting torch in an hour, but up here in Okefenokee people moved more slowly. Plus, everyone who didn’t have to work would be sleeping late after the drum circle—especially Mitzi and Kirk.

  He was here for the morning at the very least. Maybe all day.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” he said. An afterthought.

  “No problem.”

  But it was a problem. It was a problem that she’d made the coffee a little bit for herself and a lot for him, and that she’d served it to him, and that when he’d thanked her she’d started to hum with pleasure.

  It was a problem that the pleasure had amplified when they started bickering and amplified even more when it sank in that he was stuck here.

  Big problem.

  She got out almond milk, baking powder, wheat germ, and cashew butter—ingredients for Mitzi’s magical morning muffins—and she told herself she wasn’t delighted he’d remembered to thank her, nor was she gleeful over the fact that he was stuck and couldn’t escape.

  But she didn’t believe herself. Not even a little bit.

  Triple, quadruple, quintuple fuck.

  “How do I find Jerry?” Roman had gone even more tonelessly robotic.

  “You’ll have to ask Mitzi. Jerry doesn’t have a phone, and he lives in his truck. He’s in the swamp a lot.”

  “Naturally.”

  She got out a box of raisins.

  “You didn’t have to clean,” she said.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  She cut her eyes in his direction, but he was looking down at the table, his body curled protectively around his phone, face averted to hide whatever this oblique reference to Kirk and Mitzi’s athletic rutting had done to his expression.

  It was in his voice, though. A something. Discomfort, disgust, arousal?

  Something.

  It scared her a little, how much she wanted to see his face.

  “You like tempeh?” she asked. “I think I’m going to make muffins, potatoes, and tempeh hash.”

  “I’ve never had it.”

  “You’re in for a treat, then. You want to peel the potatoes?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You might as well. It’s going to be a while before Mitzi and Kirk get up. It’ll pass the time.”

  She opened a drawer, found the peeler, and set it on the counter.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll work.”

  “Why not take the day off?”

  He raised an eyebrow over one of those blank, empty, lovely eyes, then returned his attention to the screen of his phone.

  She was starting to figure out his eyes. They went blank when he didn’t want to deal with some emotion.

  She was starting to figure out, too, that he didn’t want to deal with any emotions.

  For some reason the knowledge made her think about plucking the phone from his hand and doing a million dirty things to him on top of the table.

  Also, his fussy-old-man pajama pants were kind of adorable.

  She was colossally, magnificently fucked.

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  He made a call and left someone a message about his schedule—move this meeting, reschedule that one for the afternoon, yes, he could do the two o’clock but not at that time, push it back a week, because he wanted to meet with the city planner first.

  He tapped at his phone for a few minutes.

  Then he got up and started peeling the potatoes.

  “Thank you,” she told him.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Ashley chopped an onion and wondered how she was going to manage to shake off this fog of contented domesticity before Mitzi came out and caught her mooning over the enemy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The canoe slipped through water the color of milky tea, hemmed in on both sides by thick-based swamp-cypress draped with Spanish moss.

  Mitzi paddled. Ashley sat.

  I do my best thinking on the water, Mitzi had said after breakfast, while Roman was still in the shower. Let’s go. Kirk can distract him for a while.

  So they’d fled the house, and as they’d portaged the canoe from Mitzi’s garage to the muddy spot on the bank where she put it in the water, Ashley had filled her in on everything in one long, unpunctuated gush of unburdening.

  She let Mitzi in on what a shock it had been when the lawyer called her to his office and told her what she’d inherited—or, rather, what she hadn’t. Her confusion and surprise when she’d learned that Sunnyvale wasn’t part of her grandmother’s estate.

  She explained about the letter she’d gotten from Roman’s company by FedEx saying she had two weeks to move out, how she’d frittered them away crying too much and drinking too much and sleeping too late every day, until there had only been eight days left and she hadn’t known where to go to protest, so she’d gone everywhere and accomplished nothing.

  She told Mitzi about the afternoon when Roman’s contractor, Noah, had arrived with demolition equipment, and how Gus had encouraged her to chain herself to the palm tree in the courtyard. The two nights she’d spent there, and how Roman had responded, and the hurricane. The bargain they’d struck to get her off the tree, the way she’d sprung the Airstream on him, their journey to Georgia.

  By the time she’d finished spilling her guts, the boat was in the water, Mitzi was paddling, and Ashley was very tired.

  “Let me think,” Mitzi said.

  Ashley sat in the stillness and listened to the subdued sound of the paddle, the water knocking against the fiberglass boat, the swamp waking up—birdcalls, rustling sounds, croaking gators, splashing. She rested for the first time in what felt like ages, relieved of her burden because she’d finally, finally turned it over to someone better equipped to handle it.

  Mitzi. One of her grandmother’s two best friends, and a frequent presence in Ashley’s life since her father had sent her to live in the Keys.

  Susan and Ashley had always begun their annual summer road trip with several weeks at the commune, and Mitzi visited Sunnyvale every winter for at least a few weeks. She usually dragged along whoever her current lover was—Kirk had been the first one Ashley met, and her perennial favorite—and they all initiated him into the ways of Sunnyvale: happy hour, cards, ribald jokes, beachcombing.

/>   Her grandmother’s directive that there be no funeral and no party after her death meant that none of her friends had come to the Keys to mark her passing, but Mitzi had told Ashley last night that she’d been aware of Susan’s illness and had visited her more than once in her last months. Ashley was afraid that if she asked Mitzi, she’d find out that she had known about the sale, too, and only Ashley had been left out.

  She looked at the trees instead, and heard the broken bugling calls of a group of sandhill cranes overhead.

  On her first visit to this swamp, when she was fourteen, Kirk had told her these were Seminole canoe trails, dozens of pathways they’d cut through the floating vegetation so they could attack government soldiers and then melt away where the whites wouldn’t follow. He collected tales about Billy Bowlegs, the Alligator Chief—a Seminole who had organized a resistance movement from deep within the swamp, gathering displaced Indians and runaway slaves to his cause during the Seminole Wars.

  Kirk loved the romance of those stories—the idea of Bowlegs’s ragtag band defending their patch of wilderness, refusing to give up or give in. But Ashley had always found them unsettling. She’d plagued him with questions. What did they eat? How did they survive? Did they like it here?

  She’d never been able to think about Billy Bowlegs without remembering that in the end, the army had built forts all around Okefenokee and sent in wave after wave of soldiers until the Seminole were beaten, cleared out, their identity as a people nearly obliterated.

  She could never forget that Billy Bowlegs had died in Arkansas, driven from his home, utterly defeated.

  “What do you suppose Roman’s doing?” she asked.

  “Calling half the tow services in Georgia, I expect,” Mitzi replied.

  “He’ll find a way to get his car unstuck by the end of the day.”

  Mitzi lifted her dripping paddle from the water and placed it inside the canoe. “That’s why we’ll have to act fast.” She turned around, maneuvering carefully to avoid capsizing the boat, and took a seat so close to Ashley, their knees touched. “So. Here’s what I’m thinking. You can’t hold him off forever just by threatening to get in his way. Honestly, I don’t know why he hasn’t sent his guys in to knock the place down already.”

  “Because of the hurricane?”

  On TV this morning, she’d seen pictures of the Keys, but not until the last few minutes of the newscast. The storm hadn’t hit as hard as expected.

  Mitzi flapped a hand. “Sure, but that’s passed now. If I were him, I’d have had the bulldozers out there this morning.”

  “He promised he wouldn’t.”

  “Why should he care if he breaks a promise to you?”

  Ashley frowned, because she couldn’t answer the question.

  “He’s a good person,” she tried.

  “Are you kidding? He’s a stiff-necked, anal-retentive corporate drone who wants to turn the Keys into a theme park. We need to break this guy.”

  “Break him?”

  “Destroy him. Otherwise, he’ll never give it up. You said yourself, this place is important to him. So we have to make it completely impossible.”

  “I don’t want to break him,” Ashley said. “I just want Sunnyvale back.”

  Mitzi grabbed her hand, pressing it between her own. “Look, honey. You’ve got a big heart. The biggest heart. But now’s not the time to make decisions with your heart. Not with your twat, either, if you’re having any of those kinds of ideas—and I’m guessing you are, because man alive, look at the guy. But you can’t be sweet to this one. You just can’t. Not if you want Sunnyvale.”

  “I do.”

  She wanted it more than anything, because when she tried to imagine the shape of her future without Sunnyvale—what would that even look like?

  She couldn’t go back to Bolivia. It hadn’t been working out with H2O Global. They’d promised her a job in the mountains, a villa called Huaycaba where there were nearly two hundred people whose lives would be changed by the installation of a gravity-fed water pump. But when Ashley had arrived for duty in Cochabamba, travel-greasy and gawping at the crush of a million people gathered in the Andean valley, they’d told her, You need to work on your Spanish.

  Her Spanish was fine. She’d traveled around Mexico for six months when she was twenty, and she’d spent another summer as a tour guide out of Baja. It was her they didn’t like.

  They’d taken one look at her bare arms and her blond hair, her tan and freckles and impractical shoes, and they’d stuck her in the office writing press releases on an ancient computer. She’d overheard the director tell one of the field agents that they’d only taken her on in the first place because of who her father was.

  Ashley didn’t know if it was true. It might have been. If it was, she couldn’t do anything about it. But she’d figured if they weren’t going to take her seriously, she wouldn’t take the job seriously. She’d started putting more energy into flirting with Chad than spreading the gospel of clean water, because they never sent out any of her press releases, and because that was what she did. The easy thing. The fun thing.

  She looked wispy and frivolous, and that was how people treated her, so she went along with it. She drifted from job to job, hooked up with guys who weren’t worth the time she wasted on them, let her life slide through her fingers.

  That was who she was.

  But after Chad left, there had been mornings in Cochabamba when she could almost convince herself she would be able to make this work. That she could be a serious person if they just gave her a chance. If she stayed long enough, worked harder, they’d see that she really had something to contribute, and she’d see it, too.

  Then she’d heard her father’s voice on her cell, scratchy with distance, authoritative and remote, and she’d known she was wrong.

  Ashley had quit on the spot. The country director had made a face that meant, I knew this would happen. I knew you’d never stick.

  I knew it, too, she’d thought. This is how I am. I’m nothing.

  Her grandmother was dead, and she was nothing.

  And if she lost Sunnyvale, she’d be nothing with nowhere to go. Evicted from her homeland like the Seminole, sent off into the world to try to live without a place.

  Although that probably wasn’t an acceptable comparison, since the Seminole were a whole Indian nation, and she was just one skinny white girl with an unhealthy attachment to a bunch of vacation apartments.

  “I do want it,” she said again, more firmly this time. “I just don’t know how to change his mind.”

  “You’re never going to change his mind,” Mitzi said. “You have to take him down—make it impossible for him to carry out his plans. Did you ever read that book The Monkey Wrench Gang? You have to be a monkey wrench. Pour sugar in his gas tanks, cut down his billboards, that kind of stuff. Corporate terrorism.”

  “I’m not cut out to be a terrorist.”

  “You got him here, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think that was terrorism. I think it was grief-induced psychosis.”

  “Well, the important thing is, he’s here. Did you get any dirt on him on the way up? Gambling problem, alcohol, penchant for hookers?”

  Ashley shook her head.

  “What he’s planning, he must have been working it for years. Lining up permits. Sugar-coating deals for anybody reluctant to sell, putting the pressure on. These guys are slimy, Ash. They’ll do anything. Maybe he bribed people. Maybe he manipulated the rules. I don’t see how else he would have got the property from Susan. She always said she was leaving it to you.”

  “I can’t imagine him bribing anyone,” she said. “He’s a straight shooter.”

  But she flashed back to his rain-covered face. His flat eyes.

  I lie.

  She didn’t know him. She didn’t know much of anything, but she knew she loved Sunnyvale, and she wished that were enough. She wished that were all it would take to convince Roman to back off.

  “You kn
ow what would be great?” she asked. “If I could take him back in time and make him see it. Like, summer before last, when I was selling jewelry at the flea markets and failing spectacularly at all those online premed classes—remember when we made those drinks with the coconut shavings for happy hour, and we had that limbo contest and Arvind and Prachi kicked everybody’s asses? I wish I could make him be there for that. I wish I could show him what he’ll bring an end to if he knocks it down.”

  “That would never work, doll. You can’t make him have a change of heart if he doesn’t have a heart.”

  “Roman has a heart.”

  “Have you looked in his eyes? The man’s got scary eyes. No, you need something to hold over him while we dig around and figure out what dirty trick he used to get Susan to sell. Secret perversions, clubbing baby seals, toxic waste dumping, violating zoning regulations. You suppose Little Torch is zoned for what he wants to do to it?” Mitzi frowned, then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. He hasn’t done it yet, so we can’t zap him for that. What about the animal angle? Can we invent some manatees or sea turtles or something? Or there’s birds, maybe, or those little Key deer that are always in the paper. Or I know! Snakes. We’ll look on the Internet, there have to be some snakes you could say you’d seen, and then—”

  “Wait,” Ashley interrupted. “Back up.”

  “What’d I say? I’m just riffing, here, so you can’t expect me to remember every little—”

  “Key deer. We have Key deer. Sunnyvale does. I’ve seen them.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah. Just the other day, in fact, there was this little one in the pool, drinking water from a puddle. But—that’s not news, right? I mean, the refuge is just over on Big Pine.”

  “I’ve never seen Key deer at Sunnyvale.”

  Ashley considered. “I guess I hadn’t, either. I’ve seen them on the beach, and all kinds of other places. But not right there at Sunnyvale. That was the first time.”

  Mitzi grinned, brilliant and a little bit menacing. “One time is all it takes.”

  “But he must have gotten permission already. Environmental impact statements or whatever.”