Blindsided (Roman Holiday 3)

She opened a drawer, found the peeler, and set it on the counter.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll work.”

“Why not take the day off?”

He raised an eyebrow over one of those blank, empty, lovely eyes, then returned his attention to the screen of his phone.

She was starting to figure out his eyes. They went blank when he didn’t want to deal with some emotion.

She was starting to figure out, too, that he didn’t want to deal with any emotions.

For some reason the knowledge made her think about plucking the phone from his hand and doing a million dirty things to him on top of the table.

Also, his fussy-old-man pajama pants were kind of adorable.

She was colossally, magnificently fucked.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

He made a call and left someone a message about his schedule—move this meeting, reschedule that one for the afternoon, yes, he could do the two o’clock but not at that time, push it back a week, because he wanted to meet with the city planner first.

He tapped at his phone for a few minutes.

Then he got up and started peeling the potatoes.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“You’re welcome.”

Ashley chopped an onion and wondered how she was going to manage to shake off this fog of contented domesticity before Mitzi came out and caught her mooning over the enemy.

CHAPTER FOUR

The canoe slipped through water the color of milky tea, hemmed in on both sides by thick-based swamp-cypress draped with Spanish moss.

Mitzi paddled. Ashley sat.

I do my best thinking on the water, Mitzi had said after breakfast, while Roman was still in the shower. Let’s go. Kirk can distract him for a while.

So they’d fled the house, and as they’d portaged the canoe from Mitzi’s garage to the muddy spot on the bank where she put it in the water, Ashley had filled her in on everything in one long, unpunctuated gush of unburdening.

She let Mitzi in on what a shock it had been when the lawyer called her to his office and told her what she’d inherited—or, rather, what she hadn’t. Her confusion and surprise when she’d learned that Sunnyvale wasn’t part of her grandmother’s estate.

She explained about the letter she’d gotten from Roman’s company by FedEx saying she had two weeks to move out, how she’d frittered them away crying too much and drinking too much and sleeping too late every day, until there had only been eight days left and she hadn’t known where to go to protest, so she’d gone everywhere and accomplished nothing.

She told Mitzi about the afternoon when Roman’s contractor, Noah, had arrived with demolition equipment, and how Gus had encouraged her to chain herself to the palm tree in the courtyard. The two nights she’d spent there, and how Roman had responded, and the hurricane. The bargain they’d struck to get her off the tree, the way she’d sprung the Airstream on him, their journey to Georgia.

By the time she’d finished spilling her guts, the boat was in the water, Mitzi was paddling, and Ashley was very tired.

“Let me think,” Mitzi said.

Ashley sat in the stillness and listened to the subdued sound of the paddle, the water knocking against the fiberglass boat, the swamp waking up—birdcalls, rustling sounds, croaking gators, splashing. She rested for the first time in what felt like ages, relieved of her burden because she’d finally, finally turned it over to someone better equipped to handle it.

Mitzi. One of her grandmother’s two best friends, and a frequent presence in Ashley’s life since her father had sent her to live in the Keys.

Susan and Ashley had always begun their annual summer road trip with several weeks at the commune, and Mitzi visited Sunnyvale every winter for at least a few weeks. She usually dragged along whoever her current lover was—Kirk had been the first one Ashley met, and her perennial favorite—and they all initiated him into the ways of Sunnyvale: happy hour, cards, ribald jokes, beachcombing.

/> Her grandmother’s directive that there be no funeral and no party after her death meant that none of her friends had come to the Keys to mark her passing, but Mitzi had told Ashley last night that she’d been aware of Susan’s illness and had visited her more than once in her last months. Ashley was afraid that if she asked Mitzi, she’d find out that she had known about the sale, too, and only Ashley had been left out.