Blindsided (6 page)

“Stop,” she interrupted.

Roman stopped.

“Tell me what she’s trying to blackmail you over.”

“She claims there are Key deer. That the property is Key deer habitat.”

“That’s absurd.”

But Carmen found herself glancing around anyway, looking for them.

All she saw was eight down-at-the-heel buildings, a cinder-block office, a pool. A lot of downed palm fronds, the gutter, an upside-down kayak, a chunk of pink attic insulation, some other debris that had blown in during the hurricane.

No place for Key deer to sleep or eat or whatever it was Key deer did besides be a pain in the ass.

“I know it’s absurd,” Roman said, “but that’s how judges are. Even a whisper of habitat destruction, and they’ll shut me down for years.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

But Roman didn’t exaggerate.

He didn’t hare off to Georgia, either, with girls who chained themselves to palm trees. Roman didn’t get blackmailed, and if he did, he didn’t sound so damn
worried
about it.

She reached the office and made a note on her clipboard to find out more about the local judges, and then another note to get a second Bluetooth headset so she wouldn’t have to keep squeezing her phone between her shoulder and her ear to free up a hand.

Tucking the pen into the clipboard, she lifted one French-tipped fingernail in the direction of the contractor. He’d have to wait for her to finish the call. She couldn’t do three things at once.

“You got all the environmental work done properly?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“And your expert found no impact on Key deer?”

“Negligible impact. Ashley’s bluffing. I’m going to call her bluff and head back to Miami. If she tries to stop the demo, I’ll throw everything I’ve got at her.”

“That’s ludicrous.
Think
, Roman. This is a woman who chained her own body to a palm tree without making any provision for food or toilet. She’s the walking, talking definition of
loose cannon
. You don’t turn your back on a loose cannon. You get it under control. If my dad finds out what a mess things are here by reading about adorable baby Key deer in the
Herald
, you’re going to have much bigger problems than some eco-terrorist chick. You two have a handshake agreement, not a contract, and you
know
Heberto—that’s not enough to protect you or your development if he decides to bail. Or, shit, if he decides to
take over
, I can’t see you being able to stop him from doing that, either. Now, I’ve got your contractor here, and he says he can get everything cleaned up and be ready to do the knockdown in …” She lifted her gaze to the
contractor’s face for the first time.

He had a beard.

A lovely beard.

She didn’t like beards, but this one …

This man …

She gave her head a shake, knocking out unwelcome thoughts of soft brown hair and warm brown eyes. Knocking her hat out of alignment again. It slipped down over her eyebrows. “When will you be ready to do the demo?” she asked.

He smiled, and it was like sun-warmed liquid pouring over her whole body. “I can fit it in next week if we get the site cleaned up, but—”

Carmen turned away. Today was Wednesday. They would lose another five days to this madness. Not good, but with the hurricane cleanup messing with the timing anyway, it could be borne. “Monday, Roman. Bribe her, pay her off, shut her up. I don’t care what you do, but get her locked down, and do it by Monday.”

She poked the phone to end the call, then stared at it instead of looking up.

Because she wasn’t accustomed to Roman being a problem, or sounding so strangely
helpless
.

And also, unfortunately, because she wasn’t accustomed to sharing space with men who could do weird things to her blood when she wasn’t even looking at them.

This was the first time, actually.

“Everything all right?” the contractor asked.

She lifted her chin and collided with his eyes again. Soft eyes. Soft face, soft mouth. She glanced down, hoping for a soft body, a target for the disdain she needed to locate, but instead she found a chest and the word
burly
.

A big, burly chest, and
giant
arms covered in fur, and jean-clad thighs that she wasn’t sure she could span with her hands. Snug jeans. A big belt buckle that belonged in Texas or somewhere, and beneath it—

Oh, God.

Carmen dragged her eyes up, up, up to his face, thinking
burly
again along the way and feeling her cheeks heat. She made her voice extra cool when she said, “Everything is fine. You’ll have to make it Monday. Roman will be back by then.”

The man nodded. “I’m Noah.”

He stuck out his hand.

She took it, and it engulfed hers, and her entire lower body disappeared in the conflagration.

“Carmen,” she squeaked.

“I know.” He tipped up her hard hat, ran a finger under the strap, and frowned. “Here. There’s a trick to these.”

She just stood there. Stood there like a wax figure—a melting wax figure—as he took her hat off, made some adjustment to it, put it back on, and fastened the strap under her chin.

Impossible. She’d looked at the mechanism, and she understood it perfectly well. There were no tricks.

But her hat fit now.

“So you’re Roman’s girl,” he said. “I’ve wondered about you.”

I’m not anyone’s girl
, she snapped. Inside her head.
Don’t be impertinent. And don’t stand so close
.

Though he had to be four feet away now. He’d stepped back when he finished with her hat. He only
felt
close.

She only
felt
as though she couldn’t control her tongue when she said “No.”

Noah’s forehead corrugated. “Oh.” An awkward silence reigned for a few beats, and then he asked, “Does Roman know that?”

Of course he does
, she said.

Except she didn’t, at all. She opened her mouth, and a torrent of nonsense came out. “You’ve misunderstood. I’m seeing Roman—I mean, he’s in Georgia, so—but we’re not exclusively … we haven’t said that we won’t. See other people. And it’s not as though he owns me, but yes, we’re still going out, if that’s what you mean.”

Something poked Carmen in the throat. The clipboard. She was clutching it to her chest like a shield.

How mortifying. Where had those words even
come
from? Not exclusive? She’d been dating Roman for a year, sleeping with him for nearly as long, and even before he’d asked her out there had been an inevitability to their relationship. She’d known, and he must have, too, that as soon as he traded his run-down apartment for a decent condo with landscaped grounds—as
soon as he traded in his late-model Accord for the Cadillac—he would ask her out, and she would accept.

And yet the words kept crawling up her throat from some place she couldn’t even name. She kept them contained behind her tongue, but they rioted around back there, clamoring to get out.

We don’t live together
.

He rarely even sleeps over
.

Sometimes a week goes by—two weeks—without my seeing him, and I’m not bothered
.

Sometimes when we have sex, I’m bored. I think he might be bored, too
.

I like your belt. I like your eyes. I like your mouth
.

Noah smiled again, sort of sheepish. As though he were the one who’d just unleashed a flood of embarrassing nonsense. “Yeah. That’s what I meant.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She clicked her nails against the clipboard, impatient. She had no idea for what.

Noah looked past her, out the door, and cleared his throat. “So I’ve about looked everything over already. All the damage is superficial—it’s mostly just a god-awful mess. If you want, we can do a quick sweep, then I’ll lock up and we can maybe grab some lunch after.”

Carmen didn’t react. She kept her face completely serene. She had no idea why Noah responded by lifting his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Just lunch,” he said, with a self-effacing sort of chuckle that had no guile in it, no calculation whatsoever. “Totally platonic. I wouldn’t be dumb enough to hit on Roman’s girl.”

She searched all her mental store cupboards for cool, but cool was out of stock. This strange man and his big hands and his beard and that belt buckle and everything
underneath
the belt buckle had done something to her, had stolen her cool, so she did the only thing she could possibly do.

She fled.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Escalade waited in Mitzi’s gravel driveway, sporting a deep new dent in the bumper courtesy of Jerry’s being both reckless and insane, as well as a long scratch along the side courtesy of he had no idea who.

Roman waited on Mitzi’s porch.

His keys were in his pocket, his bag packed and sitting by his right hip. Ashley had turned out to be correct about the trailer hitch—it was just the pressure of its being jackknifed that had made it impossible to remove—and he’d towed the Airstream into Mitzi’s driveway and then set it loose.

All of it a performance, of course. Ashley had him by the balls, and both of them knew it.

So he waited.

She came out of the house and sat down beside him. Through the open screen door, he heard Mitzi and Kirk talking, alto and baritone. He could hear a dog barking, and he could see past his truck over the lawn to the swamp, but he couldn’t see the shape of what was supposed to happen next.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“What do you want from me?”

There was a long silence. He wondered if she was hesitating because she thought he might snap. He might have told her not to worry about it. All the snap had gone out of him. How many days had he been with her—three? And she’d already beaten him.

Jerry had been the last straw. Jerry and the fucking dent in Roman’s fucking Cadillac, and then Carmen telling him he couldn’t leave. That he had to find a way to control Ashley. By Monday.

As if there were such a thing as a way to control Ashley.

“I want you to change your mind,” she said.

“That’s not possible.”

She tucked her feet closer and wrapped her arms around her knees, converting herself into a small, neat package perched at the edge of the step. “I think it is,” she said. “And even if
it’s not, I have to try.”

“Haven’t you already tried? I got the speech at the palm tree, the speech at the diner.” He lifted his hand, gestured at the view. “I got one all-expenses-paid night in this lovely swamp, which I assume is supposed to be a taste of the good life, courtesy of Ashley Bowman.”

“That’s not fair. I didn’t get you stuck here.”

“You didn’t help get me unstuck, either.”

After a moment, she said, “Fine. I’ll take half the responsibility if you take the other half.”

Roman could accept that. He was at least fifty percent responsible for getting himself into this mess. He hadn’t listened when his instincts told him to be wary of the deal he’d made with Susan. He’d underestimated Ashley from the beginning, and then he’d let her get to him, and then he’d underestimated her
again
and she’d blindsided him with this Key deer bullshit.

He just hadn’t expected her to lie to him. Hadn’t expected her to use this particular brand of sneaky, underhanded manipulation.

“What will it take to make you drop the deer thing?”

“Your cooperation.”

“With …?”

He turned slightly to study her compact form, her inward-focused expression. She wore shorts and a T-shirt with black flip-flops. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, her nose freckled, her lips shiny with glossy stuff that smelled like watermelon.

She looked exactly as she had when he met her. Nothing special.

Yet he had to do whatever she asked.

“With a trip,” she said. “We’re going to take a trip.”

“Where?”

“That’s for me to know and you to discover.”

He felt so tired, so heavy, he couldn’t even care. Gravity pulled on every part of him, and he wanted to lie down and let it have him.

Just give up.

Just quit.

He might have. Except if he didn’t have Sunnyvale—if he didn’t have a way to prove his worth to Heberto, to Carmen—then what did he have?

Nothing.

At eighteen, he’d been emancipated from the foster care system and kicked out of the house he’d grown up in by a man who no longer wanted to be his father.

Something wrong with you
.

Never want to see you again
.

He’d moved to Princeton, New Jersey, to begin an education paid for by another man. A stranger who despised his values but admired his energy. Heberto Zumbado had read Roman’s entry in an essay contest, and he’d taken Roman on as a project.

Never mind that Roman’s essay had been, essentially, a middle finger brandished at Zumbado’s anti-Castro, pro-capitalist ethos. Roman was deep in his Cuban revolutionary phase at the time, and he’d written a screed about Che Guevara and the New Man that must have made Heberto’s blood pressure spike. Still, Heberto had seen Roman’s potential, and he’d shaken his hand and voted for it in the way that counted most: with his own money.

He’d paid every cent of Roman’s tuition and board, and when he found out Roman had no home to visit, he flew him to Miami for Thanksgiving and Christmas from then on.

Heberto gave him summer jobs. Heberto molded him into the man he’d become.

Heberto had voted for Roman’s Coral Cay development with his own money, and Roman would come through. He had to. He owed it to Heberto—this offering, this
proof
that he’d been a worthwhile investment.

More than that, he owed it to himself, because once he had the first phase of Coral Cay done, Heberto would buy out Ojito Enterprises and make Roman a partner. Then he’d be set for life. Wealthy enough to buy a house in Coral Gables and a ring he wouldn’t be ashamed to give to Carmen.

They didn’t let people like Ashley Bowman past the gates in Coral Gables. Money would make him impermeable.