Ignited (Roman Holiday 5)

Someone needed to give her what Heberto had given him. A purpose. A sense of her abilities, so she could focus on the future and what she could have instead of letting everything she didn’t have drag her into darkness.

He could do that.

But to do it, he’d have to hurt her.

Roman exhaled, eyes on his shoes. On the ugly carpet. On anything but Ashley. “You need to grow up,” he said.

When he looked at her, she’d gone still. Her cheeks were stained red, as though he’d slapped her.

It’s for her own good.

Not his. Hers.

“Stop moping around like a teenager,” he said, “and start thinking about what you want to do with the rest of your life. Because you get to keep the boxes. That’s more than most people get. But I’m knocking down Sunnyvale, and you’re just going to have to deal.”

She sank to the floor, eyes closed, hands braced on her knees, wrists dangling. “I don’t like you very much.”

“You’re not supposed to. I keep being a dick to you.”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

It was that movement—her hands, how hard she pushed, her sharp elbows and thin ankle bones and the way she pressed into herself—that made it impossible for him.

Impossible to break her.

Impossible even to try to mold her into someone more like himself.

He dropped into a squat, needing to get closer to her. “The thing is, Ash? I don’t want you to hate me.”

She nodded, as though she’d known that all along.

They didn’t say anything for a while. Roman didn’t know what to say. He had no handbook for this. No mentor to mimic. No rules.

No skills.

Ashley asked, “You want to see a ghost town?”

He wanted dinner. And calm.

Five hundred more push-ups that would give him aching shoulders and a smooth mind.

He didn’t get to have that. Here they were, and there wasn’t any getting around it. Whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted to or not, it had been like this with her from the beginning.

She would keep asking

him to do things, and he would keep saying yes.

“Sure, if we grab something to eat first.”

“Let me find my shoes.”

CHAPTER FOUR

They scrounged up microwave pizzas from the camp store, nuked them, and ate them with burning fingers. Afterward, Ashley showed him the road just beyond the back edge of the campground property.

“This used to be the front,” she said, “but in the nineties they had to reroute the highway and abandon this section because it was too dangerous.”

“Dangerous how?”