Hitched (Roman Holiday 2)

There were acts that couldn’t be forgiven. Acts that had to be paid for—if not by fathers, then by sons. His father would never be let out of prison. He’d paid for his crimes with his freedom, but it wasn’t enough.

Roman had been stuck footing what remained of the bill. The taint of his father’s betrayal a cloud that hung over his childhood, poisonous and still.

His foster father, Patrick, had tried to forgive him. He’d tried to love him. But he’d failed, and the failure had marked every minute of Roman’s youth.

We never want to see you again.

“Georgia,” Ashley said.

“What?” He’d lost the thread of the conversation.

“You’re not going to kill me for making you go to Georgia?”

“I said I’d take you to your friend. I’ll take you.”

She flicked the pull tab on the sealed top of the creamer with her fingernail. Silence invaded the space between them.

Flick.

Flick.

And then, blessedly, she spoke. “So what’s the diabolical plan, then?”

“I’m not diabolical.”

“You’re ruining my life. At least do me the favor of being diabolical.”

Roman ran his finger over the spines of the sugar packets, lining them up more neatly.

Ruining her life. Just the sort of exaggeration she was prone to. If her life revolved around Sunnyvale Vacation Rentals, she had bigger problems than he could solve.

The sugar packets were all out of order. He dumped them onto the table and began sorting them by color and size.

“All right, fine. Have you ever been to Truman Annex in Key West?”

She made a face. “That’s what you want to do to Sunnyvale?”

“Not to Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale will be gone. To the property, and all the property surrounding it. Upscale architecture that respects local style, a mix of hotels and rental cottages with single-family owner-occupied homes, shopping—”

“But Little Torch is one of the old-school keys,” she interrupted. “It’s quiet. It’s not like Key West at all.”

“Not yet.” He tapped the last sugar into place and put the caddy back, lining it up so it sat perfectly perpendicular to the edge of the table.

Ashley stuck another creamer on top of her tower, but her hands weren’t steady, and the whole thing collapsed. “You’re nuts.”

“I’m not. I’m just better informed than you.” He swept the creamers into the space in front of him and began building a house. Three creamers on the long wall, two on the short. There were enough to make it three stories tall. Sugar packets would do for the roof. “Tourism has a life cycle, and the Keys are in a consolidation phase. Over the next ten to fifteen years, all the old mom-and-pop motels and run-down rental places like Sunnyvale are going to be cleared out in favor of what tourists want now—bigger hotels, more luxurious rooms, Starbucks on the ground floor, a horizon pool so they can look at the ocean without actually going in it.”

“That’s not why people come to the Keys. They like how eccentric it is. They want to get away from all the Starbucks.”

He shook his head. “That’s why people came to the Keys before. Now they want everything the way it is at home, only with a little Florida flavor. Conch houses and great landscaping. Seafood flown in from Japan. Jimmy Buffet songs. They want to spend their whole vacation at the resort and never have to look at a map, but they also want to feel like they’ve really been someplace.”

“Wait, how big is this resort of yours going to be?”

“By the time all the phases are finished, it’ll take up that whole side of Little Torch.”

“Half the key?”

“Approximately.”