by Linda Cajio
It didn’t bode well.
The soft glow of early morning did little to conceal the fact that the eight-unit rental complex spread out around the pool had seen better days. Peachy Keen and Salmon Sunset had faded to a pinkish beige and beigeish pink, respectively, while Turquoise Treasure was a sort of anemic white-blue. The interiors were worse, the carpet grotty and the blond-wood-and-seashell theme of the decor begging for an update.
But for Ashley, Sunnyvale Vacation Rentals retained a timeless beauty—the white railings on the upper and lower porches matching the trim around the windows and along the rooflines; the broad, fringed leaves of the sheltering palms; the ocean beyond, just a short walk to the dock.
The sky, the sun, the light, the breeze off the water. All of it bound up together, indivisibly part of this place she loved more than any other.
The driver’s door opened, and black dress shoes appeared beneath gray slacks. The black top of his head crested the door, then disappeared as he ducked down to reach into the car—probably retrieving his hooded cape and sickle, just to complete the look.
But no. When he emerged from behind the door, his evil was far more subtle than she’d expected. The closer he walked, the more this rich Miami land developer looked like television’s version of a bad guy: tall, dark, expensive, beautifully proportioned, and—she had to admit—way more handsome than people were supposed to be in real life.
Ashley liked a handsome man as much as the next girl, but the ones who really got her going always had endearingly imperfect teeth, bad haircuts, unfortunate facial hair—some flaw that made them approachable. She picked the sort of guys who were game to go surfing on a whim or try out sex in a hammock even if they risked ending up in the dirt, slightly bruised and laughing.
Whereas this man—no way did he own a hammock. He was too perfect, his handsomeness nothing less than a loaded weapon aimed at the world. She imagined him bleaching his teeth so white that he purposefully blinded people when he smiled. You’d be gazing at his face, mesmerized by those teeth—which she couldn’t even see right now, but she knew just how they’d look, their contrast to the deep brown of his skin both surprising and delicious—and then you’d blink and he’d be gone, and so would your wallet and your house.
Possibly he’d leave you the hammock.
Of course, it was also possible she was projecting. She’d only been watching him for about four seconds, and she had, admittedly, a fairly strong bias against the guy.
His slick soles crunched over the crushed-shell surface of the lot. He didn’t walk so much as he loped, taking the circular pavers two at a time. His suit was so well behaved that it loped right along with him, too expensively tailored to look awkward for even a heartbeat.
When he’d passed the office, he veered off the path to make a slow circuit around the palm. His expression betrayed nothing as he took in the mound of mulch where Ashley sat. Her bound wrists, tucked tight against her lower back. Her bare arms and barer legs and barest-of-all feet.
He stopped directly in front of her.
“Ashley Bowman, I presume.”
A joke? He delivered the line with such dignity, she couldn’t tell if he meant to be funny.
“That’s me.”
He placed his briefcase on the ground and hunkered down, resting his elbows on his spread knees and clasping his hands lightly between them. Normal people would look awkward doing that, but he made it seem like he’d been born to hunker.
His shirt was black, open at the collar, his sunglasses mirrored. He took them off, and his dark eyes were mirrored, too. Impenetrable.
Good-looking, yes. But good?
She wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.
Not for the first time, it occurred to Ashley that chaining herself to the palm tree had not been her best decision ever. The idea had been to take a stand. Instead, she felt like a virgin staked below a volcano.
A nostalgic sort of feeling, since it had been so very long since she was a virgin. But this guy definitely had some magmalike qualities. Slow-moving. Molten. Dangerous.
The danger explained why all her frayed nerve endings were sizzling.
It had to be the danger. Because attraction under these circumstances would be insane.
Which was why she hadn’t glanced at his package, so conveniently on display in front of her.
No. She had not.
“I’m Roman Díaz. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but …” He spread his hands, encompassing the scene before him. “You’re protesting, I take it?”
“I can’t let you knock it down.”
“Yes. You mentioned that in your voicemail.”
So he’d listened to her messages. She hadn’t been sure, since he had never bothered to call her back. Or answer the letter she’d sent by registered mail. Or admit her to the inner sanctum of his office.
Ashley had done everything she could think of to get his attention, just as soon as her grief had abated enough to let her begin to process a freshly discovered set of horrible truths: That she didn’t own Sunnyvale. Grandma had sold it two years ago without telling her or, as far as she knew, anyone. She’d secretly and sneakily transferred title on the property to Roman Díaz’s development group, Ojito Enterprises, for a generous sum of money that had vanished—though she’d definitely spent some of it leasing the property back from Díaz.
“I’ll buy it from you,” Ashley offered. “Whatever you paid for it, I’ll double.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She had to admire his economy. The mere flick of an eyebrow said it all. He knew she had no savings to speak of, no property of value—nothing to her name but an inherited Airstream trailer full of her grandmother’s junk.
She didn’t have Sunnyvale because he’d taken it from her before she even had a chance to claim it.
He glanced at her bound hands. She’d looped the chain around the tree, then around her wrists, which rested against her back, knuckles brushing the ground. “Is that a padlock?”
“Yes. And I can cover the keyhole with my fingers, so you won’t be able to drill it open unless you cut them off.”
“I could cut the chain behind the tree, where you can’t reach.”
“I’ll rattle it. And probably if you do that, I’ll manage to get hurt, and the media headlines will be all, like, ‘Protester Mangled by Heartless Developer.’ ”
“What did you do with the key, swallow it?”
She’d shoved it down her bikini bottoms, where it had spent the evening tattooing itself onto her tailbone. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
He made a tiny gesture with his shoulders. A non-shrug, as though he couldn’t even be bothered to put his beautiful physique to the trouble of actually shrugging on her account. “You’ve been out here all night?”
“Yes.”
The bastard knew it, too. It had been his contractor’s arrival with a small fleet of demolition equipment that had driven Ashley to attach herself to the tree in the first place.
She’d passed the first few days after her grandmother’s death in a haze. Her father’s voice over the phone had called her back from Bolivia, but when she arrived in the Keys there’d been no one here. No funeral, because Grandma hadn’t wanted one. No family, because her family was broken, and her father and grandmother had hated each other.
No idea what to do with herself.
When she’d come to her senses and realized she had to do something before Sunnyvale was lost, only a little more than a week remained of the grace period Díaz had given her, and she’d wasted it whirling around South Florida in an unfocused panic. She’d hounded the secretary at Díaz’s Miami office and pestered various Monroe County officials in an attempt to figure out how to prevent a wrecking ball from taking down her home.
When the demolition team had shown up anyway, even Ashley had been surprised by how completely she’d gone off her nut.
You can’t do this, she’d insisted. I won’t let you.
And t
he contractor—a kindly, bearded man named Noah—had said, You’ll have to talk to Roman.
I can’t! He won’t return my calls!
He’ll be here. Roman always supervises the demo.
Just seconds later, Gus had pulled up in his junker of a truck. Out on his rounds, looking for cans and bottles to turn in or trash to sell on Craigslist. Gus was a Little Torch Key fixture—harmless, friendly, slightly cracked.
Usually, he pulled over onto the curb and hailed whoever was outdoors, hanging his elbow out of the truck window to settle in for a long chat. She’d thought it would be a reprieve, chatting with Gus. That it would help her reset her head into a less panicked mode.
Instead, he’d said hello, and she’d launched into a monologue, blurting out everything she’d discovered since she came home to Florida and ending with the lament that had been playing on a loop inside her head all day long: In the morning, Ojito Enterprises was going to knock Sunnyvale down and build something else on the site, and there was nothing Ashley could do about it.
It would be a shame, Gus had said. This is such a great place.
She’d wanted to cry then, because even Gus knew what a big thing this was. How people came here, and it didn’t look like much, but it changed them.
Such a great place—her place—that the thought of losing it opened up a hole in her heart from which all kinds of horrible things kept escaping.
Grief. Needy desperation. Fear. She hadn’t felt so scared since she was thirteen. Not since her mother died and she’d come to understand there wasn’t a single person in the world she really mattered to—and there never had been. At thirteen, she’d felt like nothing. Invisible. Useless. Terrified. And angry—so angry.
But later, after things didn’t work out with her dad and she came to live with her grandmother, Ashley had learned to chase away the fear and anger. She’d spent years loving the world and being loved back—happy, well-adjusted years. Good years.
So the fear caught her attention, for sure. The fear made her lean in to listen when Gus spoke, slow and mellifluous, like some sort of Little Torch Key sage offering her The Answer.
I saw a movie about this guy in California? Didn’t want them to cut the redwoods down, so he built a platform and lived in one.
In her overwrought condition, Ashley had forgotten that Gus was not the brightest light on the patio. That he wasn’t even, by non-Florida-Keys standards, altogether well. She’d been too distracted by the clarity of this vision of herself attached to the palm in the middle of the courtyard, head held high, fending off injustice.
Within five minutes, Gus had pulled a long length of chain out of the back of his truck, Ashley had located the padlock, and they’d bound her to the tree in full view of the contractor.
Watch him try to knock the place down now, Gus had said, and Ashley had smiled, filled with triumph.
It was only after Gus took off and the contractor finished getting his heavy equipment in order, made a phone call, and left for the day that Ashley remembered how very stupid fear could be.
How, when you let fear be in charge, it made terrible, terrible decisions.
A number of inconvenient facts elbowed their way to the forefront of her consciousness. Like the fact that she probably should have brought food and water and some way to consume it.
Or that she definitely should have changed her clothes, because a still-damp, salt-encrusted bikini covered by an oversized T-shirt was simply not adequate protection against crotch-poking mulch, much less from the elements.
That she’d never managed to stick with a job for more than a season or a man for more than sixty days, so there was absolutely no reason to think she could stick with a protest for long enough to make it count. Especially when the contractor hadn’t actually said when Díaz would arrive.
And of course that she was a moron. An impulsive, grieving moron.
The chain rubbed her wrists raw within a few hours. The muscles of her neck and shoulders screamed every time she moved. She hadn’t felt her ass since midnight. Her lips were chapped, her mouth dry and desperate for liquid. And she was so, so hungry.
All of which made it difficult right now to decide how to feel about the man looming over her with no expression whatsoever on his face. He was the enemy, but he also had the use of his hands, which made it hard for her to resist the urge to suck up to him.
He could bring her water. He could rescue her.
Except for the part where she didn’t want to be rescued.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
Yesterday evening, the setting sun had lit a flaming burn on her right cheek, neck, forearm, and thigh. Just before dawn, the wind picked up.
There were goose bumps on her legs. Her head was too hot.
She had no idea if she was cold.
“No.”
He rose. “Don’t move.”
Ashley mulled over whether that had been a joke while he walked to his car.
The SUV’s silver front grille gleamed like a nasty set of teeth. Even from thirty feet away, she could see the Cadillac symbol stuck between its chompers.
What kind of gas mileage did an Escalade get? Twelve miles to the gallon? Nine?
At the crab shack, she’d served lobster to men who drove cars like that. Another summer, she’d worked on the glass-bottomed boat in Maui, and she’d watched the Cadillac men tapping at their cell phones, checking for a signal while their kids whined for their attention and their wives shot them dirty looks.
She’d taught Cadillac men how to sea kayak off Baja. They always hated the part where she flipped them over and they had to escape the splash skirt and effect their own rescue.
Experience had forced Ashley to conclude that—while there were certainly exceptions—Cadillac men were almost always assholes.
This asshole came back with a small plastic-wrapped package. “Do you want this?”
She didn’t even know what it was. “No.”
“Your legs are blue.”
“I’m fine.”
He tore the package open and unfolded a silver space blanket. “Top or bottom? It won’t cover both.”
She didn’t respond, because she was fighting back the sudden, distressing urge to cry.
Roman Díaz was ruining her life. He could at least have the decency to be cruel.
He dropped to one knee, wrapped her legs in the crinkling blanket. He smelled good—aftershave or soap, clean and fresh like a very manly breath mint—and she willed herself to stop widening her nostrils and sucking at his smell like an excited puppy.
She was not excited. Or attracted. Or a puppy.
And this was serious business. She had to study him as though she were a detective, or, no, a soldier, because that was what you did with the enemy. Learned his ways. Found his weaknesses and exploited them.
It was beyond unfortunate that she was so awful at exploiting things.
He leaned back to survey his work. “Of course, if we leave that on you, in three or four hours you’ll be crisping up like a cat on a hot tin roof.”
He pronounced roof as though it had a u in it. Ruf.
Not the sort of accent she would have predicted for a Latino developer from Miami. She’d figured Roman Díaz would be Cuban, Honduran, Nicaraguan—and he looked the part. But he had to be second generation, at least. He spoke English too perfectly for it to be anything but a first language.
And even then, ruf? Wasn’t that how they said it in Canada?
“You wouldn’t do that,” she said.
“No.” He tipped his briefcase over, unlatched it, and withdrew a smartphone, which he used to take her picture from several different angles. “I wouldn’t.” He spoke quietly, his words punctuated by the phone’s artificial shutter noise. “Because you are a liability, Ashley Bowman. And I am a cautious man.”
“Why are you taking my picture?”
“I’m documenting you. Six-twenty a.m., Monday, August twenty-seventh. Protester alive and well.”
/> She snorted. “You can fake those.”
“Protesters?”
Once again, she couldn’t tell if he was joking. “I meant pictures.”
He put the camera away. “I’m sure I could. But why would I waste my time?”
“Because you’d already secretly done away with me and dumped my body in the ocean?”
“You’d float right back to shore. I’d have to chop you into pieces and hire a boat to take you way out where it’s deep, and even so.” He laid out this plan as though he’d considered it but rejected its impracticality. Then he looked at his watch.
“Bigger fish to fry today, huh?” she asked.
Roman glanced at her legs, and it was possible—just possible—that his eyes stuttered in the vicinity of her breasts as he brought his gaze back up to her face.
But if he’d ogled her, it had been the smoothest ogle in the history of ogling.
“You aren’t a fish,” he said. “You don’t have a tail.”
Ashley wiggled her legs in the metallic blanket. “No, but this is pretty fancy. I feel like you’ve upped my cool factor by about three hundred percent.”
Roman blinked. Frowned.
He looked toward her toes and shook his head slightly, as if to clear it.
“So,” he said. “You have my attention. Was there something you needed to tell me?”
She had planned to make a speech. To tell him what Sunnyvale meant to her—all the time she’d spent here with her grandmother, the people they’d met and the friends they’d made. Their crew of regular renters who came back year after year, Mitzi and Esther, Stanley and Michael, Prachi and Arvind …
Her family. Her home.
She tried to think of a way to put into words why she’d come back to live here every winter, even after she left at eighteen. How it wasn’t just a bunch of apartments plunked down on one of the cheaper Keys—wasn’t simply inexpensive weekly or monthly lodging for old folks down for the season and vacationers too strapped to afford Key West prices.
It was magic. The kind of magic made up of canasta tournaments by the swimming pool and long, laughter-filled evenings sitting on the dock surrounded by tiki torches and old friends. The magic of belonging somewhere. Having something.