Hitched (3 page)

Distract him. Get his mind on how annoying he finds you, and maybe you can put off that side-of-the-road-abandonment scenario a little while longer.

Ashley leaned forward and studied the built-in GPS screen, as if she were pondering entering the necessary coordinates. “I’m not sure
precisely.
” She dialed one of the knobs, then
poked at a few buttons.

“Quit touching that.”

“How much does a car like this cost anyway?”

“Buy one, and you’ll find out.”

“More than it’s worth, I’m sure.” She ran her hand over the dashboard. He’d chosen a charcoal interior with silver accents and that dark, burled wood that they always seemed to put in the dashboards of luxury cars. Ashley had never been able to understand the impulse. Was the idea to make the inside of the car look like some nineteenth-century tycoon’s library, or was it more like,
Here’s a little bit of the nature you’re destroying with your egregious consumption of fossil fuels
?

She bet he’d paid thousands of dollars extra for the interior package. They didn’t just give you a little hem of wood around the steering wheel, after all. They made you think you were treating yourself to it.

“It’s worth whatever the buyer’s willing to pay,” Roman said.

“Is that how you justify it to yourself?”

“That’s the definition of worth.”

“I drive a 1980 Volkswagen Fox. I got it for four hundred dollars at a used car dealership when I was nineteen.” She’d gotten it on a trade-in, actually, and kept it, the summer she’d worked at one of the used car lots her father owned—part of a dealership empire that now stretched all over north Florida and into Georgia.

But she didn’t have to mention that. Maybe Roman didn’t know who her father was yet.

Unlikely. Pretty much everybody in Florida knew Senator Bowman, and it was no secret that she and he weren’t close. The summer she’d worked the lot had been the last time Ashley and her father had spent more than three consecutive hours in each other’s presence.

“It’s rusty,” she continued brightly. “And there’s a huge dent in the driver’s-side door. The headlights stop working if you try to turn on the high beams when it’s too humid. If I drive over seventy miles an hour on the highway, either the gas gauge or the heat stops working—but never both at the same time. It has unknown mileage, because the odometer took a little nap at some point before the trade-in, but it’s upward of a hundred and sixty thousand. So, given all that, how much is my car worth?”

He glanced at her. “About a buck more than a drive-in burrito.”

Surprised, Ashley laughed. Roman glanced at her with all the affect of a superior alien species observing an incomprehensible earth creature, and she found herself touching her lips, as if they’d betrayed her somehow.

It had been a joke, right?

Why could she never tell if he was joking?

She put her feet up on the dash. He frowned, and that made her feel a little better.

“Cash value aside,” she said, “I’ve had my car for five years. It never fails me. It’s the most reliable car in the whole world. I love that car.”

“So the question is what you would be willing to pay for it. That’s what it’s worth.”

“I don’t need to pay for it. I already own it.”

“What if I came into possession of it? What would you pay to get it back?”

“If that happened, you should just give it back. Because of how much I love it, and because it doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“If anything, knowing how much you loved it would make me raise the price.”

“That makes you a jerk.”

“No, it makes me a capitalist.” His hand slid over the steering wheel in a gentle caress. “If you wouldn’t pay to get it back, it has no value.”

God, she’d had him pegged right from the get-go. One of those glass-bottomed-boat-cell-phone men. An invisible-hand-of-the-market ideologue who justified his soulless behavior with empty ethics.

Irredeemable.

Although it was strange. Most of the ideologues she’d met delivered their lines with more passion than Roman. He sounded as though he were reading his off a script.

“You have a seriously skewed sense of value.”

He gave her one of his brilliant, empty smiles. “One of us does.”

“Not me.”

“So you say.”

She rubbed at a spot beneath her sternum that had begun to ache.

Hunger. That’s all it was. Not disappointment.

“If we’re going more than thirty miles, I’m going to have to stop for gas,” he said. “You know what that will be like.”

Ugh. Mid-evacuation gas lines were insane. Ashley mentally added another forty-five minutes to the length of the journey.

Stupid gas-guzzling monster-beast car.

“It’s more than thirty miles,” she said. “You should probably get gas before Miami.”

“When are you planning to tell me where we’re going?”

“Later.”

She caught herself picking at the pocket of her cargo pants and folded her hands in her lap.

What would Roman be like when he was angry? Would he turn red, yell? Or was he one of those people who got even quieter and planned revenge?

Leaning forward, she pointed the heat vent away from her. The control for her side of the car read 70 degrees, but the air from the vent felt cold, raising goose bumps all over her arms.

Roman drove. After a few more miles, he signaled and took an exit.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Hotel.”

“We can’t stop here. We’re only at Homestead. If this is some trick—if you’re going to dump me here and leave, then I just want to say—”

“Relax. This is where I’ve been staying. I need to take a shower and pick up my things.”

“Oh. I thought you lived in Miami. Why are you staying in Homestead?”

“In traffic, it’s still another seventy-five, eighty minutes to my place. When I’m working in the Keys, I don’t always feel like making the drive.” He pulled into the parking lot of one of those extended-stay chain hotels for businessmen and parked.

“So you have a room here all the time?”

“Not all the time. Often.” He put his hand over the key in the ignition and paused. “I’ll be thirty minutes or so. You can wait here, or you can wait in the lobby.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“Fine.”

He paused again.

“You’re not going to steal my truck.”

The way he said it, it wasn’t quite a question. It wasn’t an order, either.

His hand hovered protectively over the key.

Ashley rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Roman, I’m not a
criminal.
What would I even do with it? Drive out onto Route 1 and get stuck in evacuation traffic? It would be the shortest joyride in the history of car theft.”

That seemed to decide him. Leaving the key where it was, he opened the door and hopped out, retrieved his briefcase, and loped through the sliding-glass doors.

Ashley turned up the heat and toed off her sandals. She twisted sideways in the seat to rest her cheek against the leather upholstery.

She watched the raindrops move over the window, each following its own unpredictable track, and she tried not to think about how tired she was—how utterly beaten.

How far out on the limb she’d walked with this stranger.

She tried not to think of Roman behind the windows of one of those hotel rooms. The shower filling the air with warm steam that smelled of him. He hadn’t invited her up, and she didn’t want to go, even in her imagination. She didn’t want to see his throat bared as his razor scraped a path through his shaving cream, or to imagine his brown arms pushing into the sleeves of a starched white shirt.

She didn’t want to know how much better, how much more
settled
he would feel with his jaw gleaming, his clothes clean, his neck smelling of aftershave. Perfect again.

She didn’t want to know him.

She wanted her grandmother, and her bed at Sunnyvale, and for none of this to be happening.

Ashley closed her eyes, and her tears tried to come up, but she pushed them down deep into a dark well where she had learned to keep them long ago. She piled all her hateful thoughts in on top of them, and when the well brimmed over, she put the wooden cover on and closed her eyes.

She slept.

She woke to the sound of his voice outside the driver’s window. The door opened and brought the cool, moist air with it, and a cacophony of wind.

He wore the gray suit she’d first seen him in, with a white shirt open at the collar. He looked exactly as she’d expected him to. He leaned into the car but didn’t climb up to his seat.

“You said so this morning.” He spoke into his phone. “I haven’t forgotten.”

A pause. “Yes.”

“No.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

And then, after another pause, “Give Heberto my best.”

“All right.”

A flash of white teeth.

“I’ll do that, kitten.”

He disconnected the call and opened the back door to toss his briefcase and suitcase behind the seat, then climbed up into the car and started the engine.

“Ready to go?”

Never let them see you sweat.
It was the only truly useful motto Ashley had adopted from her father.

She straightened her legs, pushing her toes back into the thongs of her flip-flops. “Did you just call a woman
kitten
?”

“If you need to use the facilities, now’s a good time. Or you can wait a bit. I’m going to stop for gas just up the road.”

“Does she like that? Because I have to tell you, I’ve been called a lot of things, but if somebody called me
kitten
, I’d laugh in his face.”

“I’m going to take that as a ‘No, Roman, I don’t need to use the facilities.’ ”

“What does she call you?
Tiger?
Ooh, no, or
Tomcat
?”

He looked at each mirror and put the car in reverse.

“What’s her name?”

But then she remembered. Earlier, she’d dreamed of Roman poised above her and awakened to the sound of another woman’s name. “Carmen,” she said. “It’s Carmen, isn’t it?”

“None of your business.” They pulled out of the lot and headed toward the highway.

“What is she, your boss?”

He said nothing, but his mouth did this sort of tightening, locking-down thing, like he was mentally screwing his lips shut to keep from speaking.

A good sign, if her goal was to rile him up. Which apparently it was. What other ammo did she have in her arsenal, after all? If she got him annoyed, she might be able to make him tell her things he wouldn’t otherwise. She
had
to keep pestering him if she wanted to learn anything worthwhile—anything she could use against him in this war of theirs.

“You really shouldn’t get sexually involved with your boss,” she said. “It’s such a bad idea. This one time, I was working at a swim-with-dolphins place, and—”

“She’s not my boss.”

“But you
are
sleeping with her.”

No response.

“Or maybe you just want to be? If so, I’d lay off the
kitten
thing. You’ll never get her to give it up that way.”

“Don’t be crude.”

“What, you’re not trying to get her to give it up? You are straight, aren’t you?”

“None of this is open for discussion. It’s private. My private business.”

It was. And her heart was pounding, her head full of imaginary versions of Roman’s Carmen. Long, thick black hair. Lush curves packed into a designer suit.

Killer high heels.

She didn’t like these visions—this physical reaction—but if Roman’s locked-down mouth was any indication, he didn’t like it even more.

“Maybe it’s not open for discussion, strictly speaking, but here we are, stuck together for however many hours, and—”

“Hours?”

“—you’ve already kissed me. We should probably—”

“I didn’t kiss you. You kissed
me
. If I’d had any warning, I would have stopped you.”

“Okay, well, all I was trying to say is that we should get this stuff all out in the open. Like, I should probably tell you that I’m not currently involved with anybody. There was a guy with the nonprofit in Bolivia, Chad, but he came back to the States a few weeks before I did, and anyway he wasn’t all that in the sack. Not bad on oral, but—”

“Ashley,” he interrupted. “I’m not
interested
in your sexual exploits.”

The extra emphasis he bestowed to the word
interested
gave her a thrill. “So you’re saying you’re not available?”

“I’m saying you have no sexual interest in me. You’re just trying to get a rise out of me.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“You’re provoking me, and you’re totally shameless about it. Are you even capable of subtlety?”

“I tried to hit on a guy subtly once. He took my best friend home. So the next time, I just shoved my breasts in his face. That worked a lot better.”

“I can imagine.”

“Oh, you like my breasts?”

He rolled his eyes and muttered something that sounded like it might have been “Completely without shame.”

“Makes for interesting sex.”

“Stop with the sex talk. I’m taken.”

“By Carmen.”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see the woman who could take you. I bet she wears leather. Binds you to the headboard, and then straps on—”

“Jesus,” he said, and she laughed, unable to help herself. He was such an excellent straight man, his face a mask of disgust. “I should have left you on that tree.”

“Probably. But instead you rescued me when I fainted. You’re my hero now.”

“I didn’t rescue you. I tossed you over my shoulder like a sack of cornmeal.”

“You did?”

“How did you think I got you into the office?”

“I assumed you cradled me tenderly in your arms.”

That made him snort, and one corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah, right.”

“Admit it, Díaz. You had dirty thoughts when I was unconscious.”

“I did. I thought, ‘
Díos mio
, this
jeba
is
filthy.
’ ”

He didn’t just say the Spanish words. He spoke the whole sentence as though he were, briefly, the Miami Cuban he looked like—slow, drawling, with a girls-can’t-resist-me machismo and a decent facsimile of a disreputable smile.