by Ruthie Knox
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.
CHAPTER TWO
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 attra
ctive gentility.
Prachi seemed to love him. She spooned rice onto her plate. “Is this the sort of crusade where the knights rescue the princess or the sort where the Christians attack the infidels?”
Roman looked up from his plate. “What do you think, Ash? Is Sunnyvale a princess or a temple?”
“Neither,” she said. “It’s just Sunnyvale.”
“I think Sunnyvale is the castle,” Roman said to Prachi and Arvind. “Ashley is riding out on horseback to rally her troops so she can prevent the foreign hordes from razing it to the ground.”
“The foreign hordes do have a tendency to rape and pillage,” Ashley pointed out.
A frown puckered Prachi’s forehead. “Who are the hordes in this scenario?”
Roman lifted his fork and ducked his head modestly. “That would be me, ma’am.”
“I never called you a horde,” Ashley protested.
“You just implied that he’s a rapist,” Prachi scolded.
“I did not! All I was trying to say was—”
“It’s all right,” Roman interrupted with another one of his awful smiles. “It’s just perspective anyway. To you, I’m the barbarian who’s busted his way into your keep. From my perspective, you’re the backward one, clinging to the old ways while I bring advanced technologies and other gifts of civilization.”
“Starbucks coffee is not a gift of civilization.”
“I beg to differ,” Arvind said. “Starbucks would be a distinct improvement over the coffee at the grocery store on Little Torch.”
“Tell us more about these advanced technologies, Roman,” Prachi said smoothly. “Do they include Wi-Fi?”
Ashley inhaled deeply, reminding herself that it wouldn’t help to give in and argue with Roman at the dinner table. She was supposed to be showing him what she loved about Sunnyvale. To get her friends reminiscing, to demonstrate the strength of their bond.
“Of course,” Roman was saying. “We’ll have free Wi-Fi in every room at the hotel, as well as in the shopping area. It will be similar to the one you have here at Chatham—in fact, the development will be like this one in a lot of ways. Mixed residential and rental properties, a hotel, common areas that all the guests can enjoy.”
“That sounds quite nice, actually.”
Ashley wanted to reply that it sounded like plastic soul-death, but she couldn’t say that without insulting the completely soul-dead community where Prachi and Arvind had chosen to live, or the plastic-wrapped home around her, with its Corian countertops and floral-patterned valences, its piano room and polished wood floors.
There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the living room that was comfortable to sit on. She’d tried them all.
“I’d be happy to show you the website,” Roman said. “We’re in the earliest phase right now, but in a few years I hope to be offering a conversion program for home owners—something like a trade-in. Say the two of you wanted to move to Little Torch Key, for example. You could sell your home here in North Carolina to my development group, and we’d give you title to a property on Little Torch in exchange. We would make sure what you got in the Keys was at least equivalent in value to what you’d be leaving behind, if not better. Then our real estate office would manage the sale of this property, and the burden would be entirely off your shoulders.”
Arvind gave Prachi a meaningful look. She cleared her throat and glanced guiltily at Ashley before turning her attention back to Roman. “What about … say the owner had a property to sell in a market where housing prices were depressed,” she asked. “How would you establish equivalent value?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Roman said. “A situation like that is difficult for the individual home owner, but it’s actually a tax advantage for the development group to carry those properties on the books. We’re happy to wait for the right moment to sell the home for what it’s really worth. And if we need to pay for certain improvements to make a home more attractive for sale, we have deep enough coffers to do that.” His gaze swept over the kitchen and into the living room. “Of course, no improvements would be necessary with a place like this. You have a beautiful home, Mr. and Mrs. Kapoor.”
Prachi smiled. “Thank you.”
Ashley’s armpits felt damp, her cheeks hot despite the cold. “I thought you guys would—I thought—you love Sunnyvale. Five years in a row, you’ve come back, and Prachi, you learned to knit from Esther. Arvind has the fishing boat. You said you’d always wanted a fishing boat. You spent hours out on the water.”
Arvind shoved a crab rangoon in his mouth.
“We do like Sunnyvale,” Prachi said soothingly. “We wouldn’t have visited so many times if we didn’t like it. But—”
“But what? There’s no but!”
“But,” Prachi continued evenly, “this new place Roman is planning sounds good, too.”
Ashley couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even sputter. She hurt too much.
“Will it have a gym?” Arvind spoke with his mouth full.
“Yes, a full gym,” Roman said. “Weight room, treadmills, ellipticals, studio space for classes in yoga, Pilates, the works.”
“How about—”
“They can’t both sound good,” Ashley interrupted. She heard the whine in her voice and tried to tone it down. “They’re opposites, right? Sunnyvale is heart and soul and community, and this development Roman wants to do—this dead, cheap thing—”
“I’m planning to call it Coral Key.”
“There’s no coral! Not anywhere nearby.”
He shrugged, a loose roll of his shoulders. “It sounds nice, though. That’s key spelled c-a-y.”
“I hate that,” Ashley spat. “I hate key spelled c-a-y.”
“Really? I’ve always thought it looked classier that way,” Prachi said.
“We’ll have excellent sport fishing,” Roman said to Arvind. “Have you ever tried sport fishing?”
“Can’t say that I have. What kind of boat do you use?”
Leave it to Roman to tap into Arvind’s love of boats. She was the one who knew how Arvind felt about boats. She was the one who’d heard his stories of living near the ocean as a boy. Ashley knew all about Prachi, too—how much she enjoyed her work, how hard she found it to relax on vacation. She and Grandma and Prachi had fun developing relaxation strategies for Prachi’s visits, trying out spa days, shopping, hiking, finally discovering that knitting was the thing that took Prachi out of her work head-space and into vacation mode. They’d spent hours by the pool, drinking and talking and laughing while Prachi knit scarves, baby blankets, and—her latest passion—socks.
Roman didn’t know any of that. He didn’t know Prachi and Arvind at all. He only knew what he wanted. He knew what he saw when he looked at their house and how to use it to manipulate them.
He was callous and self-serving. Why were they smiling at him?
“Is your dinner all right, Ashley?” Prachi asked.
“It’s delicious.”
“Are you sure? Because you haven’t touched the tofu. I can get you something else, if you’d prefer.”
“No, this is great.” She picked up the egg roll again, shoved it in her mouth, and chewed.
It tasted like pork. She gagged.
“I was sorry to hear about Susan,” Prachi said. “It seemed so sudden.”
Ashley couldn’t speak. Her mouth was full of this foul taste, and even when she grabbed her water glass and forced the food down her throat, an invisible fist gripped it, filling her sinuses with pressure.
“It was sudden,” Roman said. “But painless, I think. The hospice workers kept her comfortable.”
“How do you know that?” Ashley’s voice was a hoarse whisper.
“I visited.”
She closed her eyes for a second, looking for her center. Searching for peace, for a spark of starlight or a deep breath that would help her push the pain down, back into the well where it belonged.
The conversation continued around her, P
rachi saying something, Roman responding, but the pain roared, and she couldn’t hear over it. Wood chair legs scraped over the floor. She stumbled, which was how she knew she was standing. Her palms found silver and linen—the tablecloth.
“Ashley?” Prachi.
“Ashley, are you all right?” Roman.
“You don’t understand,” she said. Three pairs of eyes gazed up at her. She hit the tabletop with her fist, making the red-paper-wrapped chopsticks jump. Arvind and Prachi looked startled. Roman went blank.
“All of you are just deliberately missing the point.” She tried to find the words to tell them what the point was, but she couldn’t find any she hadn’t already said. Sunnyvale had made them happy. They needed it, because …
She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“What Roman wants to do there—it’s wrong,” she said. “It won’t feed your spirit, because there’s no place for that in his vision. He’s just throwing everything good about the Keys away. That’s not what you want, is it? To spit on my grandmother’s memory so you can go sport fishing?”
She flung the last words at Arvind, a curse and an imprecation, but he’d stopped looking at her around the time she’d banged on his table, and Prachi’s mouth was pursed in displeasure.
Roman stood up. His warm hand enveloped her shoulder.
“I’d like to speak to you. Privately.”
Ashley shook him off. She looked across the table at her friends. “Just tell me you’re on my side,” she said to Prachi. “Please.”
Prachi’s fingers rose to sweep a stray lock of hair back, tucking it into place with a dip of her hand. She looked uncomfortable, unhappy. “I’m on your side, Ashley,” she said. “Of course I’m on your side. But to be perfectly honest with you, I think …” Her eyes flicked to Arvind’s again, and she took a deep breath. “I think if your grandmother had wanted you to spend the rest of your life at Sunnyvale, she would have made it possible for you to do that.”
The room fell silent, but there was this sound inside her head. This far-away, high-pitched keening that kept getting louder.
When Roman touched her arm again, she slapped his fingers away.