Ravaged (2 page)

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A manual.”

“For what?”

“To keep me from losing my mind around you.”

She picked it up and studied the cover, and he wanted to tear the book out of her hands.

“Cute,” she said, tossing it back into the cart. “Are you going to run ten miles and do five hundred jumping jacks before breakfast? Maybe we should find you a vintage sweat suit to go with your vintage workout routine.”

He wanted to take her by the wrist and pull her out of the store, flatten her against the stucco outside and press right up against her, get right in her face and insist,
insist
, that she tell him everything about this trip she had planned. That she stop teasing him and taunting him and leading him around as though he were harmless as a pony on a rope.

He wasn’t a fucking pony. He was a tiger. He would claw and eat her. He’d rebel against her, and she wouldn’t even see it coming.

Roman crossed his arms and leaned back against the shelving. He tried to feel like a tiger while Ashley moved farther down the aisle and poked through a pile of canteens.

Easier said than done.

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I wouldn’t get so close to that shelf if I were you. There’s a big glob of something.”

He just stared at her until she turned away.

Then he looked. Something black and thick—more like caulk than grease—was smeared along the edge of the shelf. All over the back of his jacket.

He took it off and assessed the damage. The jacket was Italian. Imported. Roman’s favorite.

Garbage now, like all this other garbage.

Balling it up, he dropped it on the floor and kicked it as far as he could along the aisle of the yellow-lit, foul-smelling, offensively miscellaneous store.

Reaching above his head, Roman clenched the edge of a shelf in both hands, disturbing the arrangement of stained canvas-covered helmets, gripping it hard and closing his eyes until the wave of rage passed.

Ashley’s hand landed in the center of his back and she … Jesus, she was patting him. He wanted to tear her limb from limb, and she was patting him.

“Poor Roman,” she said. “This is hard for you.”

She stroked over his shoulders and down his back. In his mind’s eye, he saw what they must look like. Him in his shirtsleeves, bent slightly, feet wide, with his head down and his arms spread. Ashley soothing him. Stroking him into submission.

He wanted to hate her for it, but his dick grew heavy and hot.

She kneaded his deltoids, her voice dropping to a husky secret. “After this place, we’re going to find a grocery store and load up, okay?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

The words sounded harsh, but it was unbearable not knowing anything of what she had planned or how she intended to accomplish it. She doled information out to him one drip at a time—torture.

Her thumbs dug into the muscles on either side of his spine. “I guess I’m telling you. But I’d rather … look, Roman, I know I’m kind of making you do this, but—”

“There’s no ‘kind of’ about it. You’re blackmailing me into doing this.”

Her punishing fingers dug harder into his shirt, into his skin and muscle, forcing the tension from him even as her proximity made it worse.

She smelled like the ocean. How was that possible? He knew her shampoo now, her soap, her face wash. None of them smelled like the sea. It was Ashley.

“I know I’m blackmailing you, but do you think we could try to make it more pleasant? I mean, here you are. Here I am. Just because we’re stuck together doesn’t mean we have to fight all the time.”

Her fingers were lighter now. Gentling him. “I could tell you more about the plans,” she suggested. “That way, you could contribute. I’m not really cut out to be the planner anyway. I’m more of the good-time girl, you know? I’ll make sure we have drinks for happy hour, you make sure we have enough gas in the car and a chance of getting to our destination on time.”

“You’re going to give me a say.”

“I guess I’d like to. If you can accept that ultimately I’m … you know. That ultimately it’s my trip.”

“That you’re in charge.”

“Yeah.”

He let go of the shelf and turned around. She didn’t give him any room. The aisle was wide enough, and he thought about pushing her away. Flattening his hand over her collarbone and exerting just enough pressure to get the distance he needed from her bewildered blue eyes and her ocean smell.

But to move her, he’d have to touch her.

“There’s no question you’re in charge, Ashley. If I were in charge, I’d be in Miami.”

“I know, but—”

“But you’re right. It would be a hell of a lot easier for me if you told me what was happening and gave me a role to play besides chauffeur.”

“It would?”

“So why don’t you tell me what’s on our list?”

“Our list?”

She kept repeating his statements as questions.

She kept smoothing her palms over the caps of his shoulders, as though she had some reason to be touching him, some authorization he hadn’t given her.

Her pupils were huge. The lighting was dim.

That didn’t explain why her nipples were hard.

She wanted him. He’d thought it was a joke before—that kiss just before she fainted, all her sly remarks—but it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt dangerous, this tight pull in his balls and her permissive hands.

He pushed them off. “The list of what we’re here to buy.”

She looked at the floor and shoved her fists in the pockets of her minuscule shorts. Then
she took them out and crossed her arms.

“Hang on.” She walked rapidly toward the front of the store. He watched her borrow a notepad and a pen from the storekeeper and begin writing.

He measured the height of the countertop, the crease at her hip, and the angle he would have to bend her at. The tightness of her shorts over her ass.

She turned around and saw him doing it, and something in her face—something in the way she leaned into the countertop a fraction when she turned back around—told him she knew what he’d been thinking.

That she would let him, if he tried it.

More dangerous than dangerous, this woman.

After a minute, she tore off the sheet and returned. “Here. You can find this stuff, okay?”

He looked it over, but it was her handwriting that caught his attention. Steeply angled, precise, almost masculine. He’d expected round, looping letters and
i
’s dotted with circles or even tiny little hearts.

“Okay,” he said.

The list gave him an excuse to walk away from her.

He walked as far away from her as he could get.

Parked on the cul-de-sac outside Prachi and Arvind’s house, the Airstream looked like an enormous metal turd. Ashley stood a few feet beyond Roman’s Escalade, sweltering and feeling like the human equivalent.

Roman still had his seatbelt on. He hadn’t budged from the car. When she realized he wasn’t getting out, she’d had to throw the passenger door open so she could talk to him.

“What do you think?” she asked.

She sounded squeaky, nervous, which was dumb. Inside the house were two members of her Sunnyvale family. Money didn’t matter to family. They would take her in, even if she was a little sleep-creased and bleary. Possibly a bit smelly. A lot intimidated by the privileged gorgeousness of the neighborhood they called home.

Even if she should have phoned ahead to warn them but hadn’t, and even though it was dinnertime, they would welcome her.

And besides, what would she have said if she’d phoned anyway?

I’m coming to visit so you can help me convince a strange man not to destroy Sunnyvale
.

Yeah, no. Better to just show up.

She had thought. Until she saw their place.

“What do I think about what?” Roman asked.

She gestured at the two-story vision in butter-yellow siding set beneath sheltering trees and a classic Carolina blue sky. The rest of the street boasted equally lovely, architecturally unique homes. Beyond it, out of sight, a facsimile village butted up against a facsimile farm—just like a village of old, if a village of old had possessed a gourmet restaurant, an inn, gorgeous gardens, hiking paths, chic shops, an independent bookstore, and bucolic cows.

“This place. Nice, huh?”

Roman rasped his hand over his jaw. “I think the development expanded too fast in a shaky market, and now they have too many open units.” He pointed at the slightly faded FOR SALE sign in front of the house. “This place is worth half a million dollars, tops, but I bet they bought it ten years ago for eight hundred thousand. What do these people do for work?”

“Prachi’s an administrator at UNC, and Arvind is an athletic trainer.”

Roman nodded. “They’ve been coming to Sunnyvale in the winter for a long time?”

“Five years, maybe? It’s the first place they’ve ever come back to for more than one winter break. They used to travel to a different warm place every year.”

“That’s because they’re house rich and cash poor,” he said. “How old?”

“I think they’re in their late sixties? Arvind looks younger because he does a ton of yoga.”

“Retired?”

“Not yet.”

“They’ll end up unloading it for three-fifty, I bet. I could sell it for five hundred. Not a bad profit.”

There was something in his expression, not quite a smile but a kind of lightness behind his face. “You’re really pleased with yourself now, huh?” she asked.

“Not particularly.”

“You look around at these cute little houses and start mentally adding up columns of figures, guessing what it would take to make money off them. Your brain is a scary place.”

Roman got out of the car with a little hop and closed the door behind him. Then he was beside her, heat and breath and that unconscious loping grace. Platinum cufflinks caught the light at his wrists.

“You feel better, though, don’t you?” he asked.

“I feel fine. I’ve felt fine all day. Unlike some.”

He’d been too quiet in the car. Hiding behind his mirrored sunglasses, dead lenses over dead eyes that, if she’d been able to see them, would have told her,
Piss off, Ashley, I’m not home
.

Roman pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head and squinted, a quick compression of crow’s-feet that smoothed out again before she had a chance to appreciate them. “No. You were nervous. You looked at this garden, all these trees, and you felt inferior. You thought maybe these friends of yours wouldn’t like you here at their classy house. But now that you know they probably can’t actually afford their classy house, you feel better.”

“That’s not true. I’m not that petty.”

Slowly, he craned his head around and looked over his shoulder at the trailer. When he
brought his gaze to hers again, his eyes were lively. “Ashley Bowman, you are
exactly
that petty.”

He made it a reprimand, but she didn’t feel chastised. She felt … warm. Flushed from the heat radiating off the asphalt and burning the backs of her calves. Pleasantly fixed at the center of his regard.

Roman grabbed her elbow. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Prachi said. “You’re on some sort of … quest?”

Ashley gazed into the bitten-off end of her egg roll, suspicious that the grayish pink bits in there with the cabbage were pork. Prachi had said the egg rolls she’d ordered were vegetarian, but the reassurance had been casual, almost automatic, and Ashley was having a hard time believing it.

She chewed slowly. The egg roll became a gluey mass in her mouth. When she tried to come up with the words to explain more clearly what she was doing here, her brain unhelpfully supplied
Pig meat! You’re eating pig meat! Gaaaaaaah
.

Arvind pried open a take-out container and peeked inside. “I think this one is yours, Ash. Tofu with garlic sauce?”

She swallowed with difficulty and took a sip of water. “Yeah, that’s me.”

Arvind handed her the carton.

He was the one who had greeted them at the door. They’d interrupted him in the middle of his personal yoga practice, and he’d seemed a bit put out about it.

She should have called. Should have skipped North Carolina and gone straight to Pennsylvania, where Stanley and Michael would never make her feel this way. Nauseated with regret and pork products.

“I wouldn’t call it a quest, exactly.”

“I would,” Roman said.

When Ashley shot him a glare, Prachi saw it. She asked, “Then how would you describe it?”

Ashley had forgotten this. The way Prachi could be counted upon to deliver
straightforward questions in the refined, lilting English she’d learned as a girl in Jaipur. The sort of questions that Ashley always felt like she ought to be able to answer but never could.

How are those premed classes going, Ashley?

I don’t understand. Why have you dropped out of the program?

What are your plans for the future, if you won’t be pursuing your interest in medicine?

“It’s more of a crusade,” Roman suggested.

He popped a green bean in his mouth, and she glared at him. No effect. They’d had a few minutes to clean up and change before dinner, and Roman had used the time to make himself immaculate: folded in all the right places, good-smelling, his teeth blinding. An impregnable fortress of attractive gentility.