Ignited (Roman Holiday 5)

“It’s nice,” she said with a sniffle and a brave smile. “To have all these things to remind me of our stories. It just makes me sad to remember. Sometimes it’s good to be sad, you know?”

She tried to sell it, she really did. But her eyes had ghosts in them, and he recognized those ghosts. He’d curled up under a tarp in the woods, trying to keep his gaze on the stars to drown out their howling.

Deep down, she knew the truth as well as he did. These boxes, this dusty trailer—they weren’t love. They were what you got instead of love, if you got anything at all.

There were no boxes anywhere with Roman’s name on them, but he didn’t envy Ashley’s, and she couldn’t convince herself that her grandmother’s legacy was worth the gas they’d burned hauling it around.

“This is just a bunch of old crap,” he said.

Her smile collapsed. “Don’t be mean.”

“I’m telling you what I see. Mardi Gras beads. A back-scratcher. This isn’t what you wanted, right? You wanted Sunnyvale, and you got a stuffed wiener. I don’t see why you’re trying to convince me that you’re happy about it. Especially when you’re crying.”

She pushed her hand through her hair. Her fingers got tangled in the ends, and she had to wiggle them to work herself free. Sometimes her hair looked windblown. Beach mussed. Right now it looked scraggly, like she hadn’t had it cut in a while.

So much about Ashley was like that. If she felt good, she could make you think she was made of sunlight and spun gold. She could make herself believe it. But when she was struggling—then she just looked like what she was.

Young and uncertain. Poor. Lost.

Those were the times he most wanted to touch her. When he saw how much of herself she pushed out into the world—her bravery, her astonishing optimism—and how little the world gave her back.

“It’s not what I expected,” she said quietly. “That’s all. I just need … I have to adjust my hopes to reality sometimes. I have a problem with that. Expecting more than … more than I should. And I don’t mind, really. Except … except I didn’t know she was sick again.”

“What do you mean, you didn’t know?”

“I mean I didn

’t know. She was always losing her phone. She hated email. She just wouldn’t get around to it. I mean, it was fine. I saw her lots in the winter when I was living back at Sunnyvale, and then when I wasn’t home, there was always next winter, right? That was how Grandma was.”

“She didn’t tell you she was sick.” He had to repeat it so he’d stop mentally stumbling over it.

Roman had understood that Ashley didn’t know about the terms of the will. About Sunnyvale. He hadn’t understood she didn’t know anything.

But the worst of it was, it made sense with what he knew of Susan. How secretive she’d been about her debt and about the condo sale. How she would focus on whoever was in the room, whatever was right in front of her, but he’d had to hound her on the detail stuff. It took them three months to close on Sunnyvale after they’d agreed to the sale, and that had been ninety-five percent because Susan never returned phone calls and never got around to scheduling the appointment. Once she did, she missed it, and they’d had to start all over again.

“I don’t understand it,” Ashley said. She sounded plaintive. “And I don’t know how to figure out what to do next when I feel like … like everything keeps shifting. Like I haven’t got anything to hang on to anymore, you know?”

Eyes gleaming, fierce and frightened, she looked right at him in a way that no one ever did. No one. As if he could give something to her, something she needed. His fist curled around the impulse to soothe her with his hands, his mouth.

“Maybe she wanted me to work out my own path.” She’d managed to inject a little cheer into her tone again. “Maybe that’s what these boxes are all about. Like, ‘Here’s your past, hon. Go find your own future.’ ”

“Or maybe she was selfish and shortsighted, and she never stopped to think how you would feel about any of this.”

“I don’t believe that.”

He shouldn’t do this. He didn’t want to. But it made him so fucking mad to think about Susan, blithely ignoring Ashley. Keeping the sale from her, the cancer, the chemo, packing up those boxes but never picking up the phone.

It made him so mad, he needed to make Ashley understand.

“Of course you don’t. You never see unpleasant stuff. You never see what’s going on at all. You think you’ll be happiest if you move back to Sunnyvale, change your name to Susan, and start wearing ugly pants suits.”

“She wore classy pants suits!”

Roman took a step toward her, leaning in. “She wore polyester. Pink and blue. And really terrible scarves. She ate too many candy bars. Her thighs rubbed together when she walked. She ran up gambling debts she couldn’t pay and took out a second mortgage on the property, and then she ran through that, too, and then when she was totally fucking broke, she still hard-balled me on the sale and made me pay her three times what the place was worth so I could get it before foreclosure, because she knew I’d have a bitch of a time getting the land if the bank owned it.”

He wasn’t supposed to tell her that.

He wasn’t supposed to be this close to her, pushing her back against the wall, their noses nearly rubbing, her breasts against his chest.