Chained (Roman Holiday 1)

But the time passed, and she endured it. She had done this before—kept breathing, kept going, even when she didn’t feel like it. Even when she couldn’t remember why she was bothering, why it mattered to keep fighting, why she cared.

You have a spark of starlight in you, her grandmother had said once.

Ashley had been thirteen ye

ars old and furious. She didn’t remember her reply. Something rude, certainly. Packed off by her father to live with an old lady she barely knew, freshly motherless, unwanted, she had converted her pain into anger and spewed it at anyone who came in range.

A spark of starlight. So typical of her slightly mystical, open-to-anything grandmother to use words like that. Words that had sounded like a bunch of crap to Ashley.

But they had power, too. They’d struck her and sunk inside, taken hold with gentle barbs. Because who wouldn’t want to believe that about themselves?

And if you accepted the premise—if you acknowledged the spark—you found yourself trying to deserve it, hoping to be worthy of such a phrase. Less venomous. Less toxic.

You found yourself changing.

Whether the spark of starlight had been there all along or her grandmother had put it there, a seed of aspiration, Ashley didn’t know. But she knew that it was because of Susan Bowman that the light hadn’t gone out.

Which only made the clamor of the questions more confusing. Why Grandma hadn’t given Sunnyvale to Ashley in her will, as she always used to say she would. Why she hadn’t told Ashley that the cancer was back. Why she’d chosen not to call, instead growing sicker and going into hospice care and dying without Ashley knowing any of it was happening.

Why she hadn’t called Ashley home from Bolivia when she must have known—simply must have known—that Ashley loved her more than anyone on this earth, and that she would have considered it a privilege to hold her hand and smooth her blankets, to ease her from this world into the next.

So many things Ashley didn’t understand. So many questions, and the burning brick of pain at the base of her spine made it impossible to think very hard about answers.

But some things didn’t require thinking. Some things she just knew.

The wind was picking up—a storm coming.

She had a spark of starlight in her.

And if Roman Díaz thought she would beg, he had another think coming.

CHAPTER FOUR

Roman skirted around the hood of the Escalade, transferring his phone from one ear to the other as he reached for the door handle. The wind pushed hard against his back, and he had to wrench the car open. When he let the wind shove it closed behind him, the sudden silence inside the vehicle put Carmen’s voice at far too high a volume.

“—that’s a problem? Because Heberto was not thrilled when he heard about the woman. Not thrilled at all, Roman.”

“She’s not a problem.”

In truth, Roman had upgraded Ashley Bowman from problem to threat at sunrise, when he’d carried her a bottle of water. The wind whipping her hair around had put him in mind of Medusa, her head covered with snakes, her narrowed eyes too cool, too calm. She’d looked seductively dangerous.

Not as though she might turn him to stone, because that didn’t seem like her style. No, the thought he’d had was that she was the sort of woman who could lure a man into the rocks and destroy him.

He wouldn’t be lured. Not by her.

Not by anyone.

But it was clear that no easy capitulation would be forthcoming from Ashley. It was time to negotiate.

“And by ‘not a problem’ you mean she’s gone, you’ve got the site locked down and secure, and you’re prepared to evacuate?” Carmen asked.

Roman wiped his free hand over his face. Stubble rasped against his palm, and he yearned, briefly, for a hot shower and clean clothes. He would feel more in control of the situation if he looked more like a man who had control.

How you feel is unimportant.

The point is not to feel anything at all.

“No, she’s still here,” he clarified. “But in an hour, she’ll be gone.”