by Ruthie Knox
She blinked.
“In my pocket.”
“Oh. Right.”
The air rapidly cooled. She cast around for something to say. “Did you get in touch with the tow-truck guy?”
“I’m supposed to call him back.”
“I can ask Mitzi about Jerry.”
“Don’t put yourself out.”
“Roman—”
“Oh, knock it off.”
“I can’t. I just want you to know how sorry I am about—”
He flung his door open and hopped down from the car. Abruptly, the cool air cut out, and the car fell silent. Roman slammed his door shut.
Ashley flung open her door and followed him out. “Where are you going?”
But he was twenty feet away already, with his head down. She had to run to catch up. “Roman, where are you going?”
“Away from you.”
“You can’t. I need to talk to you.”
“I can’t talk to you right now.”
But he had to. If not now, when?
He would leave. He would leave, and she would lose her chance to make him see all the things she needed him to see. What Sunnyvale was all about. What her grandmother had meant to her.
She would lose her chance to make him see her.
“You don’t have a choice,” she said.
“Don’t I?”
He walked faster. He had longer legs, and he was in better shape, and she got a stitch in her side almost immediately. She pushed her fingers into it hard and kept going, but she fell behind anyway.
“You’re being so immature!” she called. He didn’t stop. He didn’t care. He just hated her, couldn’t stand to be around her, wanted her gone.
Roman hated her.
The force of it brought her to a halt with an upwelling pain that choked her throat and filled her eyes with tears.
It wasn’t right to care what Roman thought, wasn’t right to cry, and she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t, not over him, not after all the tears she’d shed lately.
She was supposed to be the one who hated him. That was the natural order of things, and she wanted to. She wanted to so much.
She wanted to be angry at her grandma for shutting her out and taking away the life Ashley had been waiting to live for so long, the future she’d been grooming herself for, and she wanted to despise Roman for being the one who was there to grab the property when it had been grabable.
But instead she liked him. She liked him a lot, and she loved her grandma, and it hurt too much, being left behind to deal with all this shit. It wasn’t fair. And for Roman to make it even worse?—well, fuck him. If that was how he felt, if he couldn’t endure her company, just … fuck him.
“I’m filing a complaint against your resort!” she called.
He stopped. His back heaved and sank beneath his jacket. A black suit jacket in the ninety-degree heat. Something weird there. Some compulsion to always look good, always seem calm, always be perfect.
No wonder she got under his skin. She’d never been perfect for one second of her existence. Not even close. He hated her for getting her grubby fingers in his business? Fine. Let him hate her. She would make him hate her more. She would twist her hands up in all the wires and cords of his life and tangle them mercilessly until he couldn’t find a way to sort himself out again. Wipe her grubby palms on his perfect chest and smear all her disgusting emotional secretions on him.
And he would have to take it, because he didn’t have the upper hand. He couldn’t have it back. She was keeping it. Her hold on him was the only thing that felt good in her life right now.
He could hate her all he wanted. She would like him back, and he could hate that, too. She would keep him with her, screw with his head, make him as twisty and confused as she was.
Fuck him.
“There are Key deer on the property. They’re a protected species, and if you knock down Sunnyvale, you’ll be destroying their habitat.”
Roman turned around.
His eyes weren’t blank. They were squinting and mean, fired up with rage.
Good.
“Sunnyvale is not a habitat,” he said. “It’s a bunch of shitty apartments.”
“They drink in the pool. It’s a source of freshwater.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Tell it to the EPA.”
His face filled with scorn. “The EPA’s got nothing to do with it. It’s Fish and Wildlife, but they won’t care, either, because I have a permit to build from Monroe County Planning, and it’s totally aboveboard.”
“I knew that.”
Roman stepped closer and put his hands on his hips. A performance of control, but his face—his mouth—still looked like she’d punched him and he wanted to punch her back. “No, you didn’t.”
“Whatever. The point is, I’m going to find the right allies—the Save the Key Deer people, or whoever—and they’ll help me hire a lawyer who knows all about this stuff, and we’ll file a complaint, and a judge will stop the demolition.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Not for my own sake, Roman. Just to save the baby Key deer.”
“You sanctimonious, conniving little—” He punched himself in the thigh. Hard. “You suck, you know that?”
The question hit her hard, because it had come from some deeper part of him that had never spoken to her before. This wasn’t groomed, perfect Miami Roman. It was some older Roman. The real Roman, maybe.
He hated her, too.
But oh, he didn’t like it that she’d seen that. Nostrils flared, Roman sucked in a breath and did that screwing-down thing with his mouth. His shoulders dropped. The lines of his suit fell into better order.
He stepped close enough that she could see the whites of his eyes and feel the tension coming off his body. The barely restrained energy. “You can’t stop it,” he said quietly. “This kind of thing—it’s not your game. It’s another whole league from your game. I’ll destroy you, Ashley. Don’t think I won’t.”
But she was already destroyed, and she’d been here before. When she was nine and her parents split up and put her in the middle of their endless, bitter custody dispute, and she’d tried to save her family but failed miserably—she’d been here.
When her mother won full custody and then proceeded to spend seventy hours a week in the lab, proving how little she cared for Ashley—when she got liver cancer and kept working with dangerous solvents anyway, when she died when Ashley was thirteen—she had been here.
When her father took her in and fought with her, ignored her, turned her over to the grandmother she’d never known—destroyed again—she’d been here.
She’d been here.
God. What was she doing?
Ashley took a deep breath and exhaled, looking down at her sandals. She took another one and released the fear and the hatred she’d clung to as an adolescent. She imagined her own negative feelings as a dark shadow in her breath, twisting through the hazy humidity and dissipating. Dissolving.
There was only one way out of this place, and it wasn’t Roman’s way or Mitzi’s way. Freezing up had never worked. Neither had fighting, hating. The only thing that had ever worked for Ashley was love. Loving her grandmother. Loving the people she met—the family she’d created at Sunnyvale, the friends and lovers she’d found in her travels.
She lifted her head and looked at Roman. Really looked at him. Wide nose, soft mouth, strong chin, broad cheekbones, two-day stubble, caterpillar eyebrows.
Roman Díaz. Her enemy. She liked him.
She liked his face, his basic decency, and—as much as it would annoy him if she ever said it out loud—his spirit.
She didn’t want him for an enemy. Whatever Mitzi said, all Ashley wanted was a chance to show him. To keep him with her for long enough to change his mind.
And yes, she had to manipulate him to make that happen. She had to threaten him, at least a little, because if she didn’t do that there was
no way he would stay with her.
But whatever he thought of her, whatever he said to her, she wasn’t going to hate him back.
I’ll destroy you, Ashley.
She lifted her hand and smoothed her thumb over one bristly eyebrow. She stroked his cheek. Ignored his flinch. “You’re welcome to give it a try,” she said. “But I think you’re going to find it’s harder than it sounds.”
CHAPTER SIX
Sunnyvale was a mess.
Carmen lifted one steel-toed work boot and stepped gingerly over a fallen gutter. Her hard hat slipped down her forehead, and she pushed it up with her phone, which had the effect of turning down the volume on Roman’s non-explanation.
It had no useful effect on the hat.
She needed a new one. Was it too much to ask for a hard hat that would sit properly on her tiny woman-head?
No. It wasn’t her head that was the problem. The world was the problem. As ever.
Still, if she had to inspect properties in conditions like this—post-hurricane, messy, possibly dangerous—she had to have the right equipment. And there was no getting out of the occasional inspection. She worked for her father, she dated Roman. She was awash in men with properties to be inspected.
Stopping, she squeezed her phone to her shoulder with her ear and made a note on her clipboard. New hard hat.
Roman was going on about … as best she could tell, nothing. He sounded strange, too. Flustered. Not like Roman at all.
Best to cut this off at the pass.
“You keep talking about wrinkles and hiccups,” she said, and began walking again, passing a large palm tree at one end of the pool. “We’re not playing doctor here, Roman. What’s going on?”
Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t “Blackmail.”
Carmen stopped. Turned around. Walked back to the tree. She poked at the padlock and pile of chain beneath it with her toe.
This was the spot, then. Grand Gesture Central.
This was the woman who was blackmailing Roman Díaz?
Please.
“In order to be blackmailed,” she said, “you have to have done something wrong.”
She didn’t say And that’s not possible, because she didn’t need to. Roman knew as well as she did that he never did anything wrong. He parked between the lines, filed all his paperwork perfectly the first time, bought her flowers at just the right not-calculated-seeming times. He zeroed out his email inbox before he went to sleep at night. He knew where semicolons went and where they didn’t go. He could salsa dance.
Roman was perfect.
Usually. He’d gone strange on her the past few days, which was why she was here, inspecting his property, hoping to get this demolition back on track so her father wouldn’t find out what was going on.
This development meant a lot to Roman, and Roman was hers, so it meant a lot to Carmen, too. At least theoretically.
She had to admit, the reality was that she didn’t like these sad, sagging buildings, and she didn’t like how the air smelled like rot because of something dead on the beach, and she would prefer to wrap up and go home as soon as she could manage it.
Roman must have put his palm over the phone, muffling his voice, but she heard the beeping of a large truck backing up and the sound of someone who sounded like Roman but couldn’t be, because his disconnected words were too unhinged—stupid and don’t do that and Oh, Christ on a crutch, tell me you didn’t just—
And then a crash.
When Roman came back on the line, he spoke over the low throbbing chug of a diesel engine. “You’re right about blackmail generally,” he said, “but not in this case.”
She could tell that he was trying to sound calm, but an undertone of hysteria in his speech sent her back to when she was fourteen and she met him for the first time. When he’d had nowhere else to go, her father had invited him to stay at their house in Coral Gables for his spring break, and he’d seemed like such an exotic species to her—nineteen-year-old collegestudent Roman with his Wisconsin accent and his dog-eared Nietzsche paperback, his wild kinky-curly hair, his ideals. He’d spent the entire two weeks arguing with her father. Roman would fly into rages, declaim for minute after breathless minute, cite obscure sources and strangely specific facts.
He’d frightened her with his intensity, his passion, but her father had been delighted with him. Riveted by him.
She remembered, too, how devastated Roman had been when he moved to Miami expecting a job at her father’s office and instead been told he needed to earn it. Carmen could still remember Heberto’s cold proclamation. You have to work your way up from the bottom, he’d said. If you can’t do that, what good are you to me?
Roman had gone about it with feverish intensity, renting a shit-hole basement apartment off Calle Ocho and working construction jobs while he earned a contractor’s license, then a real estate license, finally a loan officer’s license. He’d cut off his hair, bought the best clothes he could afford, and started carrying building codes and binder-clipped zoning regulations around in the front seat of his car, flipping through them whenever he had five minutes to read.
Heberto had encouraged him, in his way—offering cutting remarks to puncture Roman’s pride, telling anecdotes about life in Cuba that were meant to deliver important lessons. When Roman told him proudly of his first big deal, Heberto had waltzed in and stolen it, then laughed when Roman seemed hurt.
Carmen rarely thought of Roman that way now—as a man who could be hurt.
It irritated her to think he’d backslid so rapidly.
“What’s all that beeping?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t tell her. Instead, he began to run through a litany of complaints. His truck stuck in the mud. An Airstream trailer, a road trip, hippies, an alligator.
Carmen listened, perplexed, while she searched the site for the contractor. His pickup was in the lot, but there was no sign of him out front, and she’d already checked the pool area, the beach—ah.
There he was, waving from the open door of the office. She began making her way toward him. Roman was going on and on about someone named Jerry, who had been hard to locate and then turned out to have a shotgun on the front seat of his truck, loaded, and no sense of physics whatsoever, even if he was a mechanical genius, and—
“Stop,” she interrupted.
Roman stopped.
“Tell me what she’s trying to blackmail you over.”
“She claims there are Key deer. That the property is Key deer habitat.”
“That’s absurd.”
But Carmen found herself glancing around anyway, looking for them.
All she saw was eight down-at-the-heel buildings, a cinder-block office, a pool. A lot of downed palm fronds, the gutter, an upside-down kayak, a chunk of pink attic insulation, some other debris that had blown in during the hurricane.
No place for Key deer to sleep or eat or whatever it was Key deer did besides be a pain in the ass.
“I know it’s absurd,” Roman said, “but that’s how judges are. Even a whisper of habitat destruction, and they’ll shut me down for years.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
But Roman didn’t exaggerate.
He didn’t hare off to Georgia, either, with girls who chained themselves to palm trees. Roman didn’t get blackmailed, and if he did, he didn’t sound so damn worried about it.
She reached the office and made a note on her clipboard to find out more about the local judges, and then another note to get a second Bluetooth headset so she wouldn’t have to keep squeezing her phone between her shoulder and her ear to free up a hand.
Tucking the pen into the clipboard, she lifted one French-tipped fingernail in the direction of the contractor. He’d have to wait for her to finish the call. She couldn’t do three things at once.
“You got all the environmental work done properly?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“And your expert found no impa
ct on Key deer?”
“Negligible impact. Ashley’s bluffing. I’m going to call her bluff and head back to Miami. If she tries to stop the demo, I’ll throw everything I’ve got at her.”
“That’s ludicrous. Think, Roman. This is a woman who chained her own body to a palm tree without making any provision for food or toilet. She’s the walking, talking definition of loose cannon. You don’t turn your back on a loose cannon. You get it under control. If my dad finds out what a mess things are here by reading about adorable baby Key deer in the Herald, you’re going to have much bigger problems than some eco-terrorist chick. You two have a handshake agreement, not a contract, and you know Heberto—that’s not enough to protect you or your development if he decides to bail. Or, shit, if he decides to take over, I can’t see you being able to stop him from doing that, either. Now, I’ve got your contractor here, and he says he can get everything cleaned up and be ready to do the knockdown in …” She lifted her gaze to the contractor’s face for the first time.
He had a beard.
A lovely beard.
She didn’t like beards, but this one …
This man …
She gave her head a shake, knocking out unwelcome thoughts of soft brown hair and warm brown eyes. Knocking her hat out of alignment again. It slipped down over her eyebrows. “When will you be ready to do the demo?” she asked.
He smiled, and it was like sun-warmed liquid pouring over her whole body. “I can fit it in next week if we get the site cleaned up, but—”
Carmen turned away. Today was Wednesday. They would lose another five days to this madness. Not good, but with the hurricane cleanup messing with the timing anyway, it could be borne. “Monday, Roman. Bribe her, pay her off, shut her up. I don’t care what you do, but get her locked down, and do it by Monday.”
She poked the phone to end the call, then stared at it instead of looking up.
Because she wasn’t accustomed to Roman being a problem, or sounding so strangely helpless.
And also, unfortunately, because she wasn’t accustomed to sharing space with men who could do weird things to her blood when she wasn’t even looking at them.
This was the first time, actually.