Free Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) by Ruthie Knox Page B

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 handaround 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