by Ruthie Knox
Noah stroked her breast. Pressed her nipple. Too sensitive, she shied from his touch. He moved his hand away and she grabbed it back, hypocritical, mistaken, silently asking for another chance. He gave it to her, firm pressure, a tweak, a twist that made her grip the headboard tighter, and oh!
Another chance. He’d done it again, distracted her from the building rush of pleasure between her thighs just long enough for it to crest and break, hot wet intense tightening affirmation in her abs and her thighs and her breasts, heat climbing her neck and that spot beneath his tongue clenching pulsing yes, yes, yes.
Noah made her come.
Coming made her cry.
He rolled her over and pulled her on top of him so her hair curtained down, falling around their faces, ruffling in the breeze, and she rested her wet cheek against his wiry beard. He kissed her and wiped her face dry, saying, “Baby, it’s all right.”
It was, with him. For a little while.
She tried to leave, but he pulled her back. He made her cry, and then he made it all right.
CHAPTER TWO
Ashley rang the doorbell.
Yesterday, she’d been in and out of Nana’s house half a dozen times, but this morning she didn’t want to presume.
Roman stood behind her. When they heard the hollow thumps of approaching footfalls, he grazed his hand down her back and left it resting just above the rise of her butt.
The door opened on Nana, blinking in the direct light, smiling broadly. “I was starting to wonder when you two would turn up,” she said. “Come on in to the kitchen. We’re just having breakfast.”
Ashley toed off her shoes, because Nana wasn’t wearing hers. Roman did the same. They followed the older woman through the living room and into a spacious kitchen that must have been all the rage in the 1970s. It had harvest orange countertops, dark woodwork, and the trippiest wallpaper—yellow, brown, and avocado, with peace doves, mushrooms, giant feminine eyes, and the word love rendered in cartoonish letters.
Ashley adored Nana’s wallpaper.
Stanley sat at the round breakfast table in a fresh plaid shirt, coffee in hand. The plate in front of him showed evidence of recent occupation. He took a swallow from his oversize ceramic mug and said, “G’morning.”
“Would you like breakfast?” Nana asked. “I’ve got eggs and toast, and I could do hash browns from the freezer. Or if you don’t want anything hot, I have some muffins and cereal.” She opened and closed a cupboard door for no apparent reason. “Coffee? Tea? I think I might have some orange juice. Let me check.”
“We ate already, thanks.”
Room service. Toast and jam and strawberry waffles, and afterward, sex sitting up on Roman’s lap, his hands sliding over my back, down and down some more until he got to the cleavage of my ass, where he figured out a new place to put his fingers and learned how very little pressure it takes to make me lose my mind.
“But I’d love some coffee,” she added, even though coffee would do nothing to cool off the lust-avalanche she’d just triggered.
“Roman?” Nana asked.
“I’ll take coffee, too, thanks.”
“Cream?”
“Just black.”
“Cream and sugar for me,” Ashley said.
While Nana fixed the coffee, Ashley pulled out a chair. Roman sat down next to her.
Ashley caught Stanley’s eye and said, “About last night.” She wanted to apologize, because she should have called, probably. She ought to have explained where she and Roman were going instead of sneaking up the driveway to take the Escalade, leaving Stanley and Nana to wonder where she’d gone off to.
Stanley looked down at his coffee.
Maybe there was no need to explain. It was obvious, wasn’t it? Man kisses woman. Man and woman go for a walk. Man and woman don’t come back until breakfast. A fill-in-the-blank exercise where the answer is S-E-X.
Nana carried both coffees and her own mug of hot tea to the table. “Before you start,” she said, “I want to say something. And you should probably brace yourself, because it’s not going to be pretty.”
Ashley managed a strained smile. After her talk with Nana, Carly, and Ellen last night, she wasn’t sure how much ugly conversation she could take.
“I spoke to Carly this morning, and she thinks—” Nana stopped. She plucked at the tea tag hanging from her mug. “No.” She sucked in a quick breath and started again. “I spoke to Carly, and I owe you an apology.” Nana lifted her blue eyes to Ashley’s. “My mother used to tell me to look before I leapt, but I’m afraid I never got the knack of it. I say things without thinking. I’m worse with a few drinks in me.” She lifted the tag again, bobbed her tea bag up and down, and lifted it from the mug to rest on the saucer. “You came here for help. I insulted you. I feel … small. I’m sorry.”
A heavy silence settled over the kitchen. “Um, thank you?”
“You don’t need to thank me.” Nana fixed Stanley with a hard look. “He wanted to say something, too.”
“Mind your own business.”
“You said you would tell them,” Nana hissed.
“In my own time.”
“Now.”
A flush of red crawled up Stanley’s neck. He crossed his arms. The silence thickened.
When Ashley inhaled, preparing to smooth over the awkwardness, he cleared his throat. “In the car,” Stanley said to Roman. “That was out of order.”
“Which part?” Roman asked stiffly.
“I shouldn’t have riled you up. I was trying to help the girl, but I messed it up. There’s a reason Michael talks to the customers and I keep to myself most of the time.”
More silence. Ashley itched to stand up. Pace off the kitchen. Take a walk.
“Apology accepted,” Roman said.
Stanley fixed his attention on her, as though it were up to her to put a final stamp of approval on this exchange. “What?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“Is it?” Nana asked.
Ashley looked over Stanley’s shoulder, through the patio door to the back deck and the dense, overgrown patch of woods beyond. Was it all right?
This morning, she’d awakened to feel Roman’s sleep-warmed skin beneath her arm and the calm rushing of the tide inside her. Not a new sensation for her, but a rare one—the way she felt when she stayed up all night by a bonfire, talking and dancing, singing, making love on a blanket spread over the sand.
The way she felt when she’d gathered beach glass with her grandmother to put in a jar, or when the two of them had spent a long afternoon by the pool at Sunnyvale, soaking up heat as the conversation washed over them.
Elastic. Humming and vital, but calm.
So calm it was kind of eerie.
Nana put the tea bag back into her mug and resumed fiddling with the tag.
Roman sat with one leg crossed over the other at the knee, a relaxed pose belied by the tightness in his muscles.
Stanley sipped his coffee—sipped it and sipped it.
However undervalued and misunderstood her friends had made her feel yesterday, they were here in this kitchen having this uncomfortable conversation because of her.
Nana was nervous, apologetic, because she cared. Stanley was being gruff and obnoxiously protective because he cared, too. And Roman—he didn’t have a lot of practice caring, but he was sure as hell trying his best. Roman’s attempts at caring had a lot to do with how good she felt right now.
Well. His caring and his penis. But the two things were related. And they were both Roman’s, so …
So.
The only link between these people was her.
Nana and Stanley and Roman, all here because of her.
None of them loved her in some exactly right, perfect way. They weren’t perfect people. But neither was she—far from it. What she was, this morning, was the person they were all looking at.
She was the one who’d proposed this journey, set th
e itinerary, gotten all the wheels moving. Not Roman. Not even her grandmother. Her.
It was up to her now to decide what came next, because for better or for worse, she was the leader of this mad expedition. Captain of the ship. These people were her Redwood Village Softball Team, and she’d been head coach all along.
Ashley huffed a laugh.
“What is it?” Roman asked.
“I was just thinking, you know, how did we all get here?” She gestured at the groovy wallpaper. “Life is strange.”
“Tell me about it,” Nana said. “My granddaughter just married a man who can’t take a dump in a public bathroom without worrying someone’s going to scoop it up and sell it on eBay.”
Ashley snorted, which made Stanley chuckle. Even Roman smiled, and she watched the way she always did. She didn’t like to miss these rare, real smiles. His flashing eyes and that underground dimple—Roman’s genuine smile got to her like nothing else.
Really, it wasn’t fair of him to combine it with that handsome face, or with the pleasing contrast of his skin tone to the soft green T-shirt she liked so much. The sun came through Nana’s sliding patio door to kiss his shoulders, and Ashley couldn’t blame it, because she’d had those broad, capable shoulders beneath her hands last night, and she’d kissed them, too, for being so exactly right.
Masculine, muscular, sexy shoulders. Guh. Utterly unfair.
The first time she saw him, striding over the pavers in his dark suit like the harbinger of her doom, she’d been planning to deliver a speech about Sunnyvale—to talk about friendship, home, and family. But when she’d seen his face, the words had died in her throat.
Back then, she’d thought she understood what kind of man he was. She hadn’t understood anything. And even if she’d read him right from the start, that morning was thousands of miles behind them now. It had been torn away from them by a hurricane, attacked by an alligator. The people they’d been that morning had wilted in the sunlight and been crushed and rumpled beyond repair in the mud. They’d been grieved in a hot trailer over cardboard boxes full of cheap memories, elegized in a ghost town.
The person she’d been—the person he’d seemed to be—gone. Ruined or cast off or just burned up and reborn, maybe, in the fire that grew up between them and the urgency of their need to be together.
Who would they be now?
Roman’s phone buzzed, as if on cue.
Carmen. She’d called earlier, while Ashley and Roman were eating breakfast in bed. Roman had fished his phone out of yesterday’s pants, silenced it, and set it to vibrate before laying it on the bedside table.
What are you going to say to her? Ashley had asked him.
That’s what we have to figure out, he’d said.
So.
Roman ignored the buzzing in his back pocket. He lifted an eyebrow at her.
This was it—this round kitchen table, these steaming mugs, these people. Her team.
This was where they would figure out what happened next.
Ashley inhaled deeply, and for the first time since her grandmother’s death, the future didn’t scare her. This trip they were on, this holiday—it was a little crazy. But it was her life. Her life, not her grandmother’s. Not the life her mother might have wanted for her. Not the life her dad considered appropriate. Hers.
She would get through this adventure, and when it ended she’d be somewhere new.
Someone new.
From now on, she would keep her eyes on the future. She’d keep her heart open, even though it meant she might hurt more when her affair with Roman came to an end.
She would do that, because she’d already tried to protect herself. She’d tried to keep her pain contained in the well inside her, and she’d tried to mold herself into the person that other people wanted her to be, but none of it had taken her where she needed to be.
Ashley looked at Roman. “You know that when we met, I was going to give you this whole speech?”
“How was it supposed to go?”
She closed her eyes, trying to recall the words, but she couldn’t recapture it. “I don’t remember.”
“Just give us the gist of it,” Nana said encouragingly.
“The gist of it,” Ashley said, “was that I have lived a lot of places. Probably dozens of places. But Sunnyvale is the only one that has ever felt like home.”
“Oh,” Nana said.
“Yeah. And that it was wrong for Roman to be taking that away from me.”
Beneath the table, she lifted her foot to balance on his kneecap. He covered her toes with his hand and squeezed. She met his eyes.
“But what I’ve figured out since then is that you didn’t take anything. My grandma gave it to you, and it was hers to do what she wanted with. I guess that’s not the choice I wanted her to make, but I’m starting to get used to it. What I’m still kind of stuck on is the whole question of what happens next. I think about that little Key deer in the pool, and I think … you know, I’d like it if there was a place for that deer to go. I’d like it so much if, even if that place isn’t going to be Sunnyvale anymore, it doesn’t completely erase what Sunnyvale was. I’d like it if it could still be something beautiful.”
“You mean there really was a Key deer?” Roman asked. “You didn’t just invent that?”
“Of course I didn’t. It was in the pool, drinking from a puddle when you pulled up. If you’d looked, you would have seen it run away.”
He sat back in his chair. Ashley was caught in his stare, her foot snared in his hand, his thumb idly strumming over her arch.
“Roman?”
“I’m thinking. It’s funny—” He looked at Nana and Stanley. “ ‘Of course,’ she says to me. ‘Of course I didn’t make it up.’ As though she would never do something so unethical as invent a Key deer to blackmail me with. It’s only aboveboard blackmail for our Ashley.”
Ashley thought there might have been something to take exception to in this appeal to Stanley and Nana, but she was stuck on the words our Ashley, so she tasted her coffee.
Sweet and dark, slightly bitter. Just how she liked it.
“Blackmail?” Stanley asked.
“You don’t know this story?” Nana chirped. “It’s a good one. See, it was Mitzi’s idea. Ashley needed a way to keep Roman from bulldozing Sunnyvale, so Mitzi said—” She broke off, turning to Ashley. “Is it all right if I tell it?”
Ashley made a lazy go-ahead motion with her hand, too in love with her coffee and the curious light in Roman’s eyes to take the mug from her mouth.
Nana told the story while Roman rubbed Ashley’s foot and then her ankle. When Nana got to the part where Roman sank his Escalade up to the axles in the mud, Stanley laughed so hard that he choked on his own spit and turned red.
Roman leaned toward her and asked in a low voice, “How many?”
“How many what?” she whispered, not wanting to interrupt Nana and Stanley’s entertainment.
“How many Key deer did you see at Sunnyvale?”
“Just one. I mean, they were always on the beach, and there’s the refuge right across on the other key, but I only ever saw that one drinking in the pool. Why?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure yet.”
Stanley pounded the tabletop, breaking into their conversation. He was beaming. “Ashley-girl, I didn’t know you had it in you!”
“Had what?”
“This whole thing! Blackmail. Chaining yourself up. Sittin’ out there in the rain and in the dark, taking a stand. I’m proud of you.”
“Why? It didn’t work. And plus, it was kind of stupid.”
“No ‘kind of’ about it. But it’s the first time since I knew you that you stood up for something you really cared about.”
“I stand up for myself all the time,” she protested.
“You stand up for other people.”
“She stands up for causes,” Nana said. “Remember when she was with that Sierra Club guy?”
“But that was
for him,” said Stanley. “She’ll do it for a no-account man, or if it’s going to tick off her daddy, or because Susan was doing it.” He looked at Ashley again, eyes bright with conviction. “But this—this was you, wanting something, sticking with it even when it got rough. I can’t remember you ever doing that before.”
“Really?” Roman asked. “She’s a natural.”
“Well, sure,” Stanley said. “I knew she had it in her. I just wasn’t sure when it was going to come out.”
“Isn’t there a saying about that?” Nana asked. “Something about desperate times?”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures?” Ashley asked.
“Not that one. About rising to the occasion? Or the chips being down … Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The point is, you kicked ass when ass needed kicking.”
“I object to being referred to as ass,” Roman said mildly.
“Oh, but honey, you’re my ass,” Ashley said.
The eyebrow rose again, amused this time. She wanted to lean across the table and kiss him right on that lifted-eyebrow spot, but he was too far away, and she’d probably knock over the jam jar with her boobs. Instead she wiggled her toes against his palm. He squeezed her foot with just enough pressure to anchor her amid all this giddy lightness.
Nana looked back and forth between them. “So where do we stand now?”
“My colleagues want to knock the place down this morning,” Roman said. “They’ve probably got all the equipment there, ready to go, and they’re just waiting to make sure they’re not going to get sued for it. That’s my end—making sure Ashley doesn’t sue over the imaginary Key deer.”
“The presumed-to-be-imaginary Key deer,” Ashley corrected.
“Which are not, in fact, imaginary,” Roman agreed.
“Right. At least, one of them isn’t.”
“But since I’m not holding up my end, and I can’t put off calling Carmen back too much longer, we need to start formulating a plan.”
“What kind of plan are you open to?” Ashley asked. “I mean, you’re still the one who wants to build the resort right smack dab on top of Sunnyvale.”
“Not just on Sunnyvale, all over that side of the key. Sunnyvale is where the hotel is supposed to go.”