Ignited (Roman Holiday 5)

He liked her. Just as much as she liked him. Even though he didn’t want to.

This story was more than a story. It was his trust, placed in her hands. It frightened him. The knowledge filled Ashley with so much feeling—so much sticky-sweet empathetic tenderness for the kid Roman had been and the man he’d turned into—she wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold on tight.

But she contented herself with squeezing his hand, since that was what he could deal with. That was what he’d asked for. The first thing he’d ever asked her for.

“By the time I was born, the camp was mostly empty. My dad was still there. I think he must have seen the writing on the wall—all that was left was riffraff, and they were going to send him somewhere else, some kind of INS detention that would have been a prison. He’d already been in prison in Cuba. So one night he escapes, and he finds Patrick and Laurel’s house. Patrick wasn’t home. Nobody really knows what happened—what he wanted.”

Roman paused, scuffing at the step with the toe of his shoe. “He knows. But he’s not saying. When Patrick came home, Samantha was out on the road, all alone. She was barely old enough to walk, so this was bad. He scoops her up and goes to the house and finds the door open, and there’s my mom, strangled to death in the living room. Laurel’s in the kitchen, blood everywhere, still breathing. She died in the ambulance.”

He exerted pressure where they were linked, pulling her closer so he could clasp her fingers between both of his own hands. He took his eyes and his mind far away, but he compressed her hand as though all of his feelings, all of his need and fear, could be concentrated into her finger bones. Packed in at the knuckles.

She let herself absorb it, because it was easy for her to do this. So much easier for her than for him. “Where were you?”

“I was asleep in a crib. My dad got picked up by the police inside of an hour. The trial took about seven minutes. Life without parole.”

“But he never said what happened, or why he did it?”

“He says he didn’t do it. Has a blog, if you can believe that. It’s bullshit, though. The evidence was cut and dried. He’s a sociopath.”

“Have you met him?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

A long pause. “I’m not sure I want to talk about that.”

She put her cheek against his shoulder and, when he didn’t object, left it there. “And you stayed with Patrick?”

“He asked to keep me, and they let him. There wasn’t anybody else to give me to unless they sent me to Cuba, which wasn’t happening. I guess it helped that I already lived at his house.”

This whole time, she’d kept her gaze modestly turned away, afraid Roman wouldn’t keep talking to her if she could see his face. If he showed pain, disappointment—he’d want to keep it from her. But now she looked right up into his eyes and said, “I’m glad you had someone to love you.”

He stiffened. Everywhere. Rigor against her hand, sternness at his mouth.

Oh.

“He didn’t love you.”

“He tried.”

In those two words, she found the shape of his childhood.

Oh, Roman.

“What about Samantha?”

She asked only because she hoped for him—hoped that if not Patrick, then Samantha had loved him. If not Samantha, then someone else. A neighbor. A teacher. A librarian.

But she could see it in his jaw. Feel it in his hand. That tightness that said No. Not anyone.

“When we were little,” he said. “When we were really little.”

“What happened?” And then, immediately, “You don’t have to tell me. If it’s too—”

“No. It’s—it just is. When I was six, there were these big prison riots in the South. A bunch of Marielitos were still locked up—people who’d never been let out of the refugee camps, or else they’d been released and then gotten picked up by the INS for one thing or another. They weren’t charged or sentenced, but they’d been in jail for six or seven years, treated like garbage. They took over this prison in Atlanta, took hostages, set things on fire, the whole deal. So all of a sudden the Marielitos are getting tons of media attention, and everybody’s talking about all this scum Castro had sent over, how he’d made America just bend over and take it in the ass, you know?”

She nodded. The ferocity in his voice should have scared her, but it didn’t. It only fed her need to know him.