Hitched (Roman Holiday 2)

He didn’t envy Ashley Bowman that beach, that closet. Her youth.

He sure as hell didn’t envy that nameless, faceless guy who’d spent those minutes in the dark closet with her, pressed up against her soft body, lost in her mouth and the bubblegum-ocean smell of lip gloss and hairspray and teenage girl.

The country ballad ended. Whitney Houston came on. That iconically terrible song from the bodyguard movie.

Ashley started to sing.

“Please don’t do that,” Roman said.

She sang even louder, her reedy voice breaking on the high notes. She knew all the words.

He endured it for all of ninety seconds, and then, abruptly, he couldn’t. “I’m already having a bad day,” he said. “And I guarantee you, if you don’t stop—”

The key changed with the arrival of the chorus. Ashley reached out and wrapped her hand around his bicep. When he looked at her, she tilted her head and sang the words straight at him, as though she really meant them. As though she cared.

As though she loved him more than anyone alive.

Utter bullshit. No one felt that way about him. No one ever had.

Roman wouldn’t allow it.

But Ashley’s eyes were a blue snipped directly from the sky on a clear day, and she had perfectly arched golden eyebrows and hair that made him think of clouds—soft-looking, wispy, insubstantial. She had a ruddy flush on one tanned cheek and deep purple bruises in the tender skin beneath her eyes.

She looked tired and vulnerable and broken, and if she didn’t stop doing this to him soon, he would lose it. He could only handle so much of people who wore all their feelings out in the open, who were obnoxiously courageous, openly heartbroken, openly anything. He didn’t do well with feelings, period, and if she kept this up, he would just—

He couldn’t listen. He couldn’t look at her. Simply couldn’t.

“Stop that.”

Her fingers clutched harder.

She dragged his eyes back to her face by sheer force of will, and he watched, horrified, as a tear rolled down her pink cheek. It would be one thing if she were simply a good actress—the kind of woman who could cry on command. He could understand that. He could respect it.

But that wasn’t what was happening here. Her tears were real. That look on her face was real. The crack in her voice—real.

Roman didn’t know why she was crying, and he wasn’t about to ask. She had reasons, no doubt. Her attachment to Sunnyvale. Her grandmother’s death. The chaotic wreckage that seemed to be her life.

Or maybe she was just one of those unforgivably sentimental women who would cry over a twenty-year-old pop song on the radio.

He didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to care.

When he spotted an exit, he swerved into the right lane without bothering to check whether it was safe. Breathing too fast, too hard, he snapped off the radio.

She sang into the silence until he pulled into the lot of a chain restaurant, parked the Escalade and trailer across five spaces, and cut the engine.

Then she wiped her eyes with the wrist of her long-sleeved T-shirt, gathered her purse off the floor by her feet, and said, “Oh, good. I’m starving.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Across from him, Ashley handed her menu to the waitress. “Is there bacon in the green beans?”

“Yes.”

The waitress’s name tag read “Makenna.” He

r eye makeup was neatly divided vertically into an area of blue on the inside and an area of reddish-brown on the outside.

“How about the baked beans, are they made with pork?”