Chained (Roman Holiday 1)

But if she didn’t get it back …

She couldn’t finish the thought. When she tried to flip the key around, she dropped it. Her fingers had become alarmingly fat and incompetent since she’d last had to do this in the middle of the night. She couldn’t feel her pinky at all, in fact, or the back of her right thigh.

She hoped her mind wasn’t as incompetent as her body. Once her head cleared, she might just realize that her advantage had been illusory, and Roman had already beaten her.

Ah, well. She’d cross that bridge when she came to it. First she had to get unlocked.

“I need help,” she said. “I dropped the key.”

“Dropped it where?”

“On the ground.”

He turned and lowered himself to one knee to retrieve the key from behind her.

His shoulder brushed her arm, and she craned her head toward him, even though she couldn’t see anything. Just cold, wet, dark red fabric plastered over a mass of muscle. The side of his neck. The curved shape of his ear and the whorled growth pattern of his hair near the crown of his head, like wood grain.

It would curl, she thought. Right there at the crown, and in the space between his ear and hairline, it would curl if he let it grow even a tiny bit longer.

It wanted to curl.

But he didn’t want it to.

“What would you have done if I dropped it down my pants?” she wondered aloud. “Called in reinforcements, I bet. Or found a way to document how very little you enjoyed the inadvertent groping.”

“I would have gone indoors for a hanger.”

“You would not stick a wire hanger down my bikini.”

“Try me.”

Suddenly, the pressure at her wrists eased, and her shoulders dropped forward. It hurt so horrifically much, tears sprung to her eyes. “God,” she said. She fell to all fours, turning her face away so he wouldn’t see how much pain it caused her just to move.

Worse than the last time she’d gone to the bathroom. Black hands clapped in from the sides of her vision, and she lowered her forehead to the ground very quickly, because it was going that way whether she approved of its decision or not.

She stayed there, breathing, until her legs began to cramp. Then she straightened them and lay flat on her belly on the ground and hated Roman Díaz.

Hated him, hated him, hated him.

“Ashley,” he said.

“Shut up.”

“Ashley. It’s time to go.”

She turned her head so she could see him. He held out his hand.

I despise you.

But she took it, and it was big and wet and radiating heat, like holding a warm cat against your stomach on a cold night. Which she’d actually never done, but people did it in books. In the Little House books, they’d even gone to bed with a hot pan. She’d always wanted to be like Nellie Oleson on the reruns. Those golden curls with the meat name. Bacon curls. No. Sausage? Or—

Roman pulled her to her feet, and she had to close her eyes again and press her lips tight to keep the painful fireworks inside, where he couldn’t see them.

They exploded and exploded and exploded against her eyelids.

Jesus, what had she done to herself?

“Okay?” he asked.