Hitched (Roman Holiday 2)
Page 8
“So you have a room here all the time?”
“Not all the time. Often.” He put his hand over the key in the ignition and paused. “I’ll be thirty minutes or so. You can wait here, or you can wait in the lobby.”
“I’ll wait here.”
“Fine.”
He paused again.
“You’re not going to steal my truck.”
The way he said it, it wasn’t quite a question. It wasn’t an order, either.
His hand hovered protectively over the key.
Ashley rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Roman, I’m not a criminal. What would I even do with it? Drive out onto Route 1 and get stuck in evacuation traffic? It would be the shortest joyride in the history of car theft.”
That seemed to decide him. Leaving the key where it was, he opened the door and hopped out, retrieved his briefcase, and loped through the sliding-glass doors.
Ashley turned up the heat and toed off her sandals. She twisted sideways in the seat to rest her cheek against the leather upholstery.
She watched the raindrops move over the window, each following its own unpredictable track, and she
tried not to think about how tired she was—how utterly beaten.
How far out on the limb she’d walked with this stranger.
She tried not to think of Roman behind the windows of one of those hotel rooms. The shower filling the air with warm steam that smelled of him. He hadn’t invited her up, and she didn’t want to go, even in her imagination. She didn’t want to see his throat bared as his razor scraped a path through his shaving cream, or to imagine his brown arms pushing into the sleeves of a starched white shirt.
She didn’t want to know how much better, how much more settled he would feel with his jaw gleaming, his clothes clean, his neck smelling of aftershave. Perfect again.
She didn’t want to know him.
She wanted her grandmother, and her bed at Sunnyvale, and for none of this to be happening.
Ashley closed her eyes, and her tears tried to come up, but she pushed them down deep into a dark well where she had learned to keep them long ago. She piled all her hateful thoughts in on top of them, and when the well brimmed over, she put the wooden cover on and closed her eyes.
She slept.
She woke to the sound of his voice outside the driver’s window. The door opened and brought the cool, moist air with it, and a cacophony of wind.
He wore the gray suit she’d first seen him in, with a white shirt open at the collar. He looked exactly as she’d expected him to. He leaned into the car but didn’t climb up to his seat.
“You said so this morning.” He spoke into his phone. “I haven’t forgotten.”
A pause. “Yes.”
“No.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
And then, after another pause, “Give Heberto my best.”
“All right.”
A flash of white teeth.
“I’ll do that, kitten.”