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

made a tiny gesture with his shoulders. A non-shrug, as though he couldn’t even be bothered to put his beautiful physique to the trouble of actually shrugging on her account. “You’ve been out here all night?”
    “Yes.”
    The bastard knew it, too. It had been his contractor’s arrival with a small fleet of demolition equipment that had driven Ashley to attach herself to the tree in the first place.
    She’d passed the first few days after her grandmother’s death in a haze. Her father’s voice over the phone had called her back from Bolivia, but when she arrived in the Keys there’d been no one here. No funeral, because Grandma hadn’t wanted one. No family, because her family was broken, and her father and grandmother had hated each other.
    No idea what to do with herself.
    When she’d come to her senses and realized she had to do
something
before Sunnyvale was lost, only a little more than a week remained of the grace period Díaz had given her, and she’d wasted it whirling around South Florida in an unfocused panic. She’d hounded the secretary at Díaz’s Miami office and pestered various Monroe County officials in an attempt to figure out how to prevent a wrecking ball from taking down her home.
    When the demolition team had shown up anyway, even Ashley had been surprised by how completely she’d gone off her nut.
    You can’t do this
, she’d insisted.
I won’t let you
.
    And the contractor—a kindly, bearded man named Noah—had said,
you’ll have to talk to Roman
.
    I can’t! He won’t return my calls!
    He’ll be here. Roman always supervises the demo
.
    Just seconds later, Gus had pulled up in his junker of a truck. Out on his rounds, looking for cans and bottles to turn in or trash to sell on Craigslist. Gus was a Little Torch Key fixture—harmless, friendly, slightly cracked.
    Usually, he pulled over onto the curb and hailed whoever was outdoors, hanging his elbow out of the truck window to settle in for a long chat. She’d thought it would be a reprieve, chatting with Gus. That it would help her reset her head into a less panicked mode.
    Instead, he’d said hello, and she’d launched into a monologue, blurting out everything she’d discovered since she came home to Florida and ending with the lament that had been playing on a loop inside her head all day long: In the morning, Ojito Enterprises was going to knock Sunnyvale down and build something else on the site, and there was nothing Ashley could do about it.
    It would be a shame
, Gus had said.
This is such a great place
.
    She’d wanted to cry then, because even
Gus
knew what a big thing this was. How people came here, and it didn’t look like much, but it changed them.
    Such a great place—
her
place—that the thought of losing it opened up a hole in her heart from which all kinds of horrible things kept escaping.
    Grief. Needy desperation. Fear. She hadn’t felt so scared since she was thirteen. Not since her mother died and she’d come to understand there wasn’t a single person in the world she really mattered to—and there never had been. At thirteen, she’d felt like nothing. Invisible.Useless. Terrified. And angry—
so
angry.
    But later, after things didn’t work out with her dad and she came to live with her grandmother, Ashley had learned to chase away the fear and anger. She’d spent years loving the world and being loved back—happy, well-adjusted years.
Good
years.
    So the fear caught her attention, for sure. The fear made her lean in to listen when Gus spoke, slow and mellifluous, like some sort of Little Torch Key sage offering her The Answer.
    I saw a movie about this guy in California? Didn’t want them to cut the redwoods down, so he built a platform and lived in one
.
    In her overwrought condition, Ashley had forgotten that Gus was not the brightest light on the patio. That he wasn’t even, by non-Florida-Keys standards, altogether
well
. She’d been too distracted by the clarity of this vision of