Roman Holiday 1: Chained: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (3 page)

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.

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 him, 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.

An odd agreement to strike, but that was one of several conditions Susan had demanded, and the sale had been too good to pass up. Sunnyvale sat smack dab in the middle of a prime stretch of real estate whose owners had purchased the land when it was going cheap after World War II and then refused to release their choke hold until the string of hurricanes in ’04 and ’05 had pushed up insurance rates and driven them out. Roman had snapped up as many as he could get the financing on, and when he’d run out of credit, he’d gone to Heberto on his hands and knees.

In a gratifying display of faith, Heberto had bought in. Big. Roman had most of the property, the vision, and the plan: exclusive architecture in a gorgeous setting, high-end shops, a small-town feel. Heberto owned the parcels of land Roman hadn’t been able to afford. More important, Heberto’s funding and Heberto’s reputation would make it possible to build the resort hotel—a much bigger project than Roman could swing on his own.

Coral Cay would
make
him, and Sunnyvale was the keystone—situated at the center of the spot where the hotel would go, with a marina that he intended to turn into a world-class beach.

All he had to do was remove the woman who had padlocked herself to his keystone.

He could think of any number of ways to shear her off, but he preferred to let her do it herself.

The sort of person who bolstered her courage by singing show tunes in the dark—who cared enough for a falling-down collection of crappy 1960s rental units to plead for their rescue—she wouldn’t last long.

He’d studied Ashley Bowman. She floated through life without attachments, never
sticking to anything or anyone. She had no will. No backbone.

Roman knew what it felt like to be in her shoes. Stunned by grief, clinging desperately to the flotsam of the life you’d just lost. Alone. Frightened and helpless.

But he also knew how to survive it, how to wash up on the other side. His experiences had taught him how to do it.

Hers hadn’t.

He’d be surprised if she made it through the night.

It was harder with an audience.

Sitting alone by the tree last night hadn’t been so great, but sitting here knowing Noah was out there in his truck, listening to music, running the AC, counting down the minutes until her next sip of water?

Much worse.

Robbed of all dignity, Ashley felt like a performance of herself. A tasteless melodrama with a silly protagonist. If she were in the audience for this play, she would be full of critical thoughts.

Why doesn’t she just give up?

What does she think she’ll achieve here, heatstroke?

But Roman had robbed her of even that outcome. He’d protected her from the elements and left her to stew in the consequences of her own choices, accompanied only by her gritching belly and a lot of self-sabotaging mind noise.

Because he didn’t understand her at all, he thought it would take nothing more than the passage of time to break her.

Ashley didn’t break. She bent. People who bent were nearly impossible to defeat.

The trick was to stay flexible. She had to pee, but she had no access to a bathroom, no privacy, and no use of her hands. The only solution that offered even a modicum of dignity required her to unlock herself—not easy to achieve, but just possible.

Ashley waited until she was sure Noah was distracted by his phone. She spent five minutes fiddling behind her back with swollen fingers and stiff wrists until she’d managed to fish out the key and release the padlock. Then she’d peed in the mulch like a sad little animal. Trembling all over, sick to her stomach, with black spots floating at the edges of her vision, she locked herself back up.

Victory.

Of course, the key sank into her butt crack, but that was a comparatively comfortable place for it to be.

Later, the ants arrived. A few of them found a pathway into her bikini bottoms, and she learned that she had been wrong to think she could no longer feel her butt. Wrong to assume she’d completely lost sensation in her labia.

She felt the ants. She felt them
everywhere
—their itchy, filthy little feet an outrage that made her violently wiggle, hoping to drive them out, squish them, or at least make their stay in her crotch so inhospitable that they’d be driven out in alarm.

She must have looked like she was having a seizure because Noah came to check on her, asking what was wrong. When she told him, he repositioned her umbrella, which she recognized as the only thing he could think of to do, since he could hardly scratch her crotch for her.