Free Roman Holiday 1: Chained: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance by Ruthie Knox Page A

didn’t walk so much as he
loped
, taking the circular pavers two at a time. His suit was so well behaved that it loped right along with him, too expensively tailored to look awkward for even a heartbeat.
    When he’d passed the office, he veered off the path to make a slow circuit around the palm. His expression betrayed nothing as he took in the mound of mulch where Ashley sat. Her bound wrists, tucked tight against her lower back. Her bare arms and barer legs and barest-of-all feet.
    He stopped directly in front of her.
    “Ashley Bowman, I presume.”
    A joke? He delivered the line with such dignity, she couldn’t tell if he meant to be funny.
    “That’s me.”
    He placed his briefcase on the ground and hunkered down, resting his elbows on his spread knees and clasping his hands lightly between them. Normal people would look awkward doing that, but he made it seem like he’d been born to hunker.
    His shirt was black, open at the collar, his sunglasses mirrored. He took them off, and his dark eyes were mirrored, too. Impenetrable.
    Good-looking, yes. But good?
    She wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.
    Not for the first time, it occurred to Ashley that chaining herself to the palm tree had not been her best decision ever. The idea had been to take a stand. Instead, she felt like a virgin staked below a volcano.
    A nostalgic sort of feeling, since it had been so very long since she was a virgin. But this guy definitely had some magmalike qualities. Slow-moving. Molten. Dangerous.
    The danger explained why all her frayed nerve endings were sizzling.
    It had to be the danger. Because attraction under these circumstances would be insane.
    Which was why she hadn’t glanced at his package, so conveniently on display in front of her.
    No. She had not.
    “I’m Roman Díaz. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but …” He spread his hands, encompassing the scene before him. “You’re protesting, I take it?”
    “I can’t let you knock it down.”
    “Yes. You mentioned that in your voicemail.”
    So he’d listened to her messages. She hadn’t been sure, since he had never bothered to call her back. Or answer the letter she’d sent by registered mail. Or admit her to the inner sanctum of his office.
    Ashley had done everything she could think of to get his attention, just as soon as her grief had abated enough to let her begin to process a freshly discovered set of horrible truths: That she didn’t own Sunnyvale. Grandma had sold it two years ago without telling her or, as faras she knew, anyone. She’d secretly and sneakily transferred title on the property to Roman Díaz’s development group, Ojito Enterprises, for a generous sum of money that had vanished—though she’d definitely spent some of it leasing the property back from Díaz.
    “I’ll buy it from you,” Ashley offered. “Whatever you paid for it, I’ll double.”
    He raised an eyebrow.
    She had to admire his economy. The mere flick of an eyebrow said it all. He knew she had no savings to speak of, no property of value—nothing to her name but an inherited Airstream trailer full of her grandmother’s junk.
    She didn’t have Sunnyvale because he’d taken it from her before she even had a chance to claim it.
    He glanced at her bound hands. She’d looped the chain around the tree, then around her wrists, which rested against her back, knuckles brushing the ground. “Is that a padlock?”
    “Yes. And I can cover the keyhole with my fingers, so you won’t be able to drill it open unless you cut them off.”
    “I could cut the chain behind the tree, where you can’t reach.”
    “I’ll rattle it. And probably if you do that, I’ll manage to get hurt, and the media headlines will be all, like, ‘Protester Mangled by Heartless Developer.’ ”
    “What did you do with the key, swallow it?”
    She’d shoved it down her bikini bottoms, where it had spent the evening tattooing itself onto her tailbone. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
    He