It wasn’t Roman making her feel so unsettled.
That would be absurd.
* * *
Her stomach started growling around Lauderdale Lakes.
Monitoring her in his peripheral vision, he couldn’t help but notice the way her gaze fixed on fast-food billboards and highway signs. She sighed when they blew by one with a stack of blueberry pancakes on it.
At Coconut Creek, she wrapped one arm over her belly. He felt a pang of conscience.
No, he didn’t. He didn’t have a conscience. That catch in his throat, that nagging in his head—it was nothing more than reason.
Reason told him that she had to eat something. She’d been stuck on the palm tree for thirty-six hours, and all she’d consumed since was a bag of popcorn, some chips, and a candy bar. It was well past lunchtime. Roman was starving, but he wanted to know where they were headed, and he needed leverage to get the information.
His own stomach made a traitorous noise. He ignored it. He could hold out longer than she could. There was no question.
They passed West Palm Beach. The traffic thinned. Rain pummeled the windshield, but he didn’t mind that. He liked the ruthless efficiency of the wipers and the ease with which the climate controls kept the windshield free of fog.
He liked the vehicle’s quiet cabin, riding high above the other cars, feeling as though he could roll over any trouble that came his way.
Of course, the goddamn Airstream trailer would probably blow over on a bridge and drag him and Ashley to their doom. But he found that if he tilted the rearview mirror just so, he could almost manage to forget it was there.
He might be able to forget Ashley, too, if it weren’t for the way her stomach grumbled. Or the way she fiddled with the radio, which she did randomly, halfway through songs, or five seconds in, or right before the end. Every time with an abrupt plunge forward against her seatbelt that made every muscle in his body tense up at her violation of the bubble that was supposed to separate her part of the car from his own.
He couldn’t believe she was really so carefree—not when she’d been attached to a palm tree just this morning. She was doing this to torture him, and it was working. It hurt in his joints, in his bones, to endure her. As though she’d aged him, and now he was a four-hundred-year-old creature, dry and dusty. He was an ancient pharaoh mummy, all his organs stored in jars, and she was … fuck, some kind of Girl Scout who wandered into his tomb in search of a me
rit badge. Naively, gleefully desecrating his thousand-year sleep.
If he were a pharaoh, he would curse her. Not with death—just something to stop her from being so disorderly and annoying and vital all the time. Whenever her stomach rumbled, he wanted to reach over and give her shoulder a push and say, “Stop it.”
Stop it, stop it, stop it.
But she couldn’t, of course. It wasn’t her fault that she was hungry. It was his fault for starving her. His fault he was so hungry, so disrupted around her.
The thought struck him—mallet against gong—and reverberated inside his head.
She made him hungry.
Unacceptable.
But he couldn’t get rid of her, and he couldn’t shut her off. He had to find a way to control her.
“Don’t you want something to eat?” he asked.
“No.”
“Just say the word, and I’ll stop. Anytime.”
She got another piece of gum out of her purse. It smelled—synthetic cherries and oranges—and the noise of it. The noise made him think of spit and teeth and tongues and lips. Kissing. Sex.
It did not make him think of sex. He wouldn’t allow it to.
A new song came on, and she reached for the radio dial. He tapped her hand away. “Leave it.”
“I hate this song.”
“I hate driving without knowing where I’m going.”