by Ruthie Knox
“Talk to me.” He unwound his grip and traced the rim of her ear with a fingertip. “What’s this about?”
“We’ve been on a road trip. We’ve been camping.”
“So?”
“Road trips are—they’re outside of real life, right? They’re play. But now playtime’s over. What if we go back to your apartment and you realize, Oh, actually, there isn’t anything about everyday Ashley that I like.”
“Not going to happen.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“What if you think the same thing about me?”
She wouldn’t.
But what if she did?
His mouth hardened into a determined line. “It’s not because I live in a condo. What is it? My money? My job? My values?”
“Our values, maybe.”
“What’s wrong with our values?”
“We don’t have any in common.”
He sat up abruptly. “That’s not true.”
“I hope it’s not, but I’m worried it is.”
His fingers found the hem of her dress and crumpled it in an unconscious fist. “You’re saying you’re afraid that we might love each other—which, you know, we might have taken a few minutes to enjoy that before launching into this conversation, but here we go—and even though we’re in love, we still have, what? Irreconcilable differences?”
The phrase caught her off guard.
Irreconcilable differences—that was what her parents had had. Endless bickering. Divorce. Irreconcilable differences meant there would never be enough common ground, and there was no room for compromise.
The words gave Ashley all the bat feelings.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Roman was silent.
When he spoke again, his voice had softened. “Then let’s figure out who we are, fundamentally, and we’ll know if our differences are so irreconcilable.”
“That won’t work. We can’t figure it out sitting on a blanket, eating cold spring rolls.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t have an answer to that question.
He brushed her hair away from her shoulder and let his hand rest in the space he’d cleared. “You know, I remember thinking when I first met you that we didn’t have any common ground. Here you were on the tree, and I didn’t know how to make you do what I wanted, because I had power over you but you didn’t care. I thought you were disorderly and frustrating and … kind of alarming, to be honest.”
“You said I sucked.”
“I know. And you told me I was soulless.”
“But I thought you were really hot, too.”
“Ash.” He dropped his hand onto her thigh.
Picking up his fingers, she studied the beds of his nails and the wrinkled terrain of his knuckles. “You were never soulless.”
“I did a good imitation.”
She nipped at the fleshy spot at the base of his thumb, then kissed it. “Not that good.”
“My point is, that’s not where we are anymore. I’m not going to try to make you do what I want or be who I want. I want to figure out what you want and help you do that, which means I have to care about your ideals, even when they’re not the same as mine. And maybe you’re curious about who I am when I’m at home in Miami. At least enough to want to sleep a few nights in my bed, or to come by and see my office. Talk to people who know me.”
“Of course I am.”
“So tell me your philosophy of life.”
A startling request. Ashley could feel the shock of it, her eyes widening, her heart rate speeding up. “I don’t think I have one.”
“Make something up. Spit out whatever comes to mind. I want to hear what you say.”
She breathed in. On the exhale, she said, “Love.”
“Explain.”
“I want everything I do to be about love. Not just with you, but with other people, and the rest of the world, the way I am in the world …” Roman’s hand was creeping up her leg. “This sounds dumb.”
Long fingers traced the outline of her panties. “It sounds like you.”
“Does it?”
“Absolutely.” He wrapped his hand around her hip and gripped her there, an anchor.
“What’s yours?” she asked.
“Belonging, maybe. I’ve always thought of myself as being on the outside. My dad, and everything with Patrick. But I think a lot of it was me. I made a choice to walk away from Patrick and Samantha, and I haven’t belonged to anyone since. Even Heberto and Carmen—I picked them because of how they were. Carmen and I were perfect because we never asked each other for anything. Until you, I didn’t want to admit that I wanted more. That I need it.”
She moved closer, pressing her legs against his, pulling his head to hers and lifting her own so they could touch nose against nose, breathing with their mouths separated by inches, sharing the same air, the same space.
“I want to belong to you,” he said softly. “And I want you to belong to me.”
Her breaths came short, but his hand on her body steadied her, its pressure a promise that he would stay.
He would stay, and she wouldn’t walk away.
The wind raised goose bumps on her arms. Ashley exhaled her fear, one breath at a time.
Love and belonging weren’t incompatible. They were two sides of the same thing.
She turned to rest her cheek against Roman’s temple. He pulled her into his lap. His arms came around her.
“I want that, too,” she said.
They sat together in the rubble of the place she’d called home, and she found the bravery she’d drawn on when the hurricane was bearing down on both of them.
All they needed was this.
Love, and the desire to make something together. A home. A shelter.
She kissed his neck. Then she kissed his lips. He kissed her in return, fingers winding into her hair, tongue easing into her mouth, offering her everything. His hopeful heart. His need for her. Their future.
When they broke apart, she rested her hands on his shoulders. “The last time I asked you about Sunnyvale, I wasn’t in a very receptive frame of mind.”
“You knocked down my creamer house.”
“Huh?”
“At that diner. We stopped for lunch, and I was building that house out of coffee creamers—”
“Oh, right.” She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry. Will you tell me now again?”
“If you promise to think of three nice things to say about it before you tear it to shreds, yes.”
“I can do that.”
Roman looked past her toward the water, surveying the alien landscape. “It all starts with the beach. The stretch of beach you’ve got here is the most important one on this side of the key. You’ll see why if you look over that way …”
He sketched with his hands while he talked, pointing to important features, drawing buildings in the air. She listened with half her attention, but with the other half she watched him, wondering how she’d missed it the first time.
His passion for this. His excitement.
She didn’t love everything he said, but she loved the way he said it, with his face lit up and his hands moving. The energy of him. The way he pulled her from the blanket and drew her by the hand across the uneven ground so he could pace out the distances from here to there and describe a set of possibilities that she was only beginning to be able to imagine.
She loved that the longer Roman spoke, the less important it became to absorb exactly what he told her, because she’d already heard what she needed to know.
What she’d needed didn’t have anything to do with property development or his condo.
It had to do with Roman. With love and belonging.
She heard him say they were going to be fine, and she finally believed him.
CHAPTER TWO
Roman unlocked the door to his condo and held it open for Ashley.
He wondered what she’d make fun of first. White furniture, white walls, white th
row pillows—the place looked like a magazine spread. It smelled like artificial-lemon cleaning products, everything buffed and shining. The art was modern, the kitchen marooned in the huge open space of the living area.
None of this was Ashley’s style.
He’d spent the drive up from Little Torch biting his tongue against the explanations he didn’t owe her. That he’d bought the place as an investment. That the last owner had been in a hurry to move, and he’d sold it furnished and fully decorated—art collection included.
Roman wanted to tell her it wasn’t to his taste, but the truth was he didn’t know what his taste might be. He’d never bothered to think about it.
The condo looked expensive, and expensive suited him fine.
He wished she would say something.
Across the room, she passed along the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Rain lashed the glass, blurring the world beyond into a white-gray landscape of sound and water. Fifty-six stories up, the condo’s primary selling point was its view of downtown. At night, the walls seemed to fall away, and everywhere Roman looked he found color and light and the stark black silhouette of the Miami skyline against the backdrop of Biscayne Bay.
Would she see everything he’d achieved in that view?
He hoped she’d see him here, because there was more of him in this place than he’d realized. More hours spent between these walls, more trips up and down the elevators. More nights when he’d awakened in the hush and found himself wandering from room to room, looking out at the city. Pressing his nose against the glass.
She stood with her back straight and her hands locked behind her, uncharacteristically quiet.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked.
She turned to face him. “Show me your bed.”
He dropped his keys where he always left them—inside the mouth of a frog-shaped, crystal-studded bowl that had been bequeathed to him by the previous owner—and toed off his shoes by the door.
As she followed him to the master suite, her sandals smacked against the soles of her feet.
She stopped just inside the bedroom. Reaching to her thighs, she pulled her dress over her head and dropped it on his floor. Then she hooked her thumbs into her panties and pushed them off. Naked, Ashley walked to the head of his bed and flipped down the covers.
She crawled in and pulled them up over her shoulders.
“What do you think of the place?” he asked inanely.
“I’ll tell you after you take off your clothes.”
She didn’t. When he slid in beside her, into her open arms, and settled over her, skin against skin, her hair on his pillow, her mouth was opening even as he lowered himself to it.
He claimed her. The peaked tips of her breasts, the ripple of her ribs beneath his palm, the flare of her hip, the secret slippery heat between her legs. He claimed her with his mouth and his hands, boxed her in with his thighs, covered them both with goose down and himself with latex and entered her body with the sound of the rain in his head, her soft sigh against his neck the only reassurance required that he wasn’t too rough for her or too needy.
He wasn’t too rich or too broken, heartless or soulless, lacking in anything she desired.
Roman rocked into her just right, and she made sure he knew it.
She claimed him. Her hands on his back, heels pulling him in, back arching up as he thrust deep and ground against her clit. She took him, kissed him, loved him with her heat and with her open heart, with her movements and her actions.
He’d worried about what she would say, but with Ashley it was always what she did that mattered.
She’d come to his bed.
They moved together, a pulse beat, a drumbeat, a rhythm they’d found in hundreds of miles, thousands of minutes that culminated here at the end of the road, making love in the rain, in the sky, in his bedroom.
Home again.
Home for the first time.
CHAPTER THREE
Noah came to the door in boxer briefs and body hair.
It was such an explicit shock—the thatch on his chest enough to build a cottage with, the straw-colored mess on his head mashed so severely on one side that she glimpsed the white of his scalp beneath it—Carmen didn’t know where to look.
She’d seen him naked before, yet she hadn’t seen him like this, head-to-toe hair, standing in the doorway of his house with his eyes slitted against the brightness of the porch light, bewildered and sleepy at two in the morning.
All day, she’d kept herself from coming here. Roman had dropped her at home and she’d stayed there. She’d changed and showered and put her stuff away, worked out, showered again, weighed herself, made dinner, thrown it away. She’d wrapped herself in the blanket on her bed and convinced herself not to come, and then she’d talked herself into a change of plans, then back again, over and over until finally she snapped and dressed, got in the car and drove.
Now she was here, and the sweet shape of his ear—God. The tender line of bumpy pink skin along the edge of his beard where he must have trimmed it recently made her want to cry, and she didn’t know what to do with that impulse.
That was the thing about Noah. She didn’t know what to do.
She’d left her clipboard in the car.
She’d left her sense back in Coral Gables.
“I woke you up,” she said, because he looked drunk with sleep, and it seemed necessary that she begin by outlining the mistakenness of her every action since she’d seen him last. “You said to call, but I didn’t.”
“That’s okay.”
“I can come back in the morning.”
“What are you wearing?”
She looked down at herself as though she couldn’t remember, but there wasn’t any way to not remember when you’d put on a vintage pink Chanel suit and four-inch black patent leather pumps and driven for nearly two hours in the middle of the night.
There was no way to miss the fact that you were doing something outlandish, and you were doing it badly. Carmen had spent most of the first hour of the drive convincing herself not to turn around and the entirety of the second trying to figure out what to say.
“A suit?” she asked.
She’d dressed for battle. In the car, she’d carefully worked through her reasons, picked apart her behavior, and constructed an explanation and an apology.
She had nerved herself up for his displeasure, but when their eyes met, she felt as though she’d arrived for the wrong event at the wrong address.
He looked so fucking happy to see her.
Pleased, excited, aroused. All of it right there in his eyes, and when he stared at her this way she didn’t know what to do, because her supposed to clashed spectacularly with her want to, and she got all turned around.
“You look amazing,” he said.
“I … I can’t … I don’t know how to start.”
Noah reached for her waist and pulled her across the threshold, catching her up against his chest. The sleep-soaked warmth of his skin hit her like a rogue wave, wiping her mind clean of all thought.
He nuzzled her neck. “You smell good.”
“Perfume.”
“It’s sexy.” His hands slid up her rib cage, and he shifted his stance, moving into her with more purpose. One palm found her thigh and dragged up it, forcing her skirt to form ridges and valleys, a glacier moving slowly toward her hip.
The plate tectonics of desire, its effect on her as undeniable as shaking earth and drifting continents, crashing into each other.
“The shoes, too,” he said. “Fuck, those shoes are hot.”
Her shoulder blades hit the door frame.
Her hands found his furry bare chest. “Noah …”
“I missed you, baby. Missed this.” Then he was stroking between her legs, over her panties, blunt and firm, as sure of himself as he’d been a week ago. “You gonna let me call you baby tonight?”
She’d told him not to right before she walked away. She’d insulted his intellige
nce, threatened him, turned her back on him, and left without saying goodbye because she’d needed to believe she didn’t want to be that woman. His woman.
What a liar she was.
“Yes.”
Yes apparently gave him permission to push her panties aside and move two fingers deep into the wet core of her.
Yes meant that all of the terms of her apology flew out of her head, and Carmen was left with the dawning understanding that Noah was going to fuck her. Very soon. He was a nude animal, and she’d wandered into his den in the middle of his hibernation. Of course he was going to fuck her. That was what happened.
Probably she ought to stop him.
His thumb found her clit. She tightened around his fingers. His mouth moved up her neck, kissed over her jawline, found her lips, and smiled on them. Smiled into her. “Say hello to me, baby. That’s how you start.”
Carmen wasn’t a person who said hello. She didn’t believe in mincing words. She didn’t let herself feel this much, this fast, with anyone. Not usually.
“Hi, Noah.”
He pushed under her skirt with his free hand and cupped her ass, lifting and separating one cheek to fix her in place as his fingers worked in and out of her, relentless in their assault. “And what do you say when you leave?”
“Bye, Noah.”
“That’s right. Next time, say goodbye to me. Lift that leg a little higher.”
She did, and he pressed against her in response, surging and crowding in, hot and perfect. “You want it right now? Right here, with the door open where anybody can see you?”
“Yes.” She sounded like she was right on the verge of sobbing, and she didn’t care. There was a part of her that had to sob, to be broken, to sit with its brokenness and acknowledge it, live with it, so she could start to figure out what she needed to do and who she wanted to be. “No. Can we—can I have you?”
“You can have me anytime you want.” He eased off, took his fingers out of her, and then she really did sob, once.
He made a soothing sound and closed the door.
He carried her into the bedroom, where he undressed her, kissing the swell of her breasts, thumbing over her nipples, making appreciative noises at her navel. She let him strip off her flimsy defenses. She lay in his bed and held out her arms, because she wanted him to come to her under this faded sheet printed with daisies.