Love the One You're With (33 page)

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.

That's what she'd wanted to tell Roman Díaz. But he had his arms crossed, and his flat, expressionless eyes made her uncomfortable, reminding her too vividly of how she must look to him. Young and dumb and barefoot. Full of reckless, useless passion.

What did a man like him care about canasta?

“It's just … this is too great a place to throw away,” she said. “It needs fixing up, I
know, but if you put the right person in charge … 
I
would do the work. I would work hard. You could turn a profit. Why knock it down when it has so many good years left?”

His eyebrows gathered themselves together. He had abundant eyebrows—the kind of eyebrows with the potential to take over his whole face if he didn't keep them carefully trimmed. Which obviously he
did
, but still. Somewhere, there was a sophomore-year-of-high-school photograph of this guy with giant caterpillar eyebrows.

The thought made her a little smug, and she cherished the feeling for a moment, imagining Roman in thirty years with eyebrows so bushy and uncontrolled that they crawled right off his face.

“That's your whole pitch?” he asked.

Oh, no. I have a much better pitch. I just thought I'd start with one that sucked, in case I didn't need to waste the ringer
.

Ashley kept her smart mouth firmly zipped. She believed in kindness over snark. And anyway, what was the point of arguing? He'd already made up his mind. There was nothing she could do to save Sunnyvale. Not alone. She was—as ever—inadequate to the situation.

It had been a mistake to chain herself to the tree. She should have called for reinforcements. All those people who came back to Sunnyvale every year, who loved it as much as she did—surely they would help if they knew. They had more experience, better connections, and she always did best as part of a crew.

That was where her talents lay: bringing people together, motivating them, smoothing out any little wrinkles to help a group pull together toward a common goal. She was a team player, not an oddball loner of the sort who could launch a successful solo protest.

Too bad this hadn't occurred to her yesterday when Gus was still around. She might have told him that she was not remotely the sort of person who could live in a redwood for four years. A village of redwoods? Yes. Totally. She would be the one who started the Redwood Village Softball League.

But alone in a tree?

Fuck no. She'd never last.

“Yeah, that was more or less my whole pitch,” she admitted.

“You should have saved yourself the effort.”

A pickup truck pulled into the lot. Ashley recognized it even before Noah the contractor
got out and hailed Roman with a lazy wave. Another car arrived, followed by a Jeep.

The crew. They were showing up to begin their day's work of tearing her heart out of her body and driving over it with the scarred metal treads of their diesel-fueled implements of destruction.

Ashley's shoulders sent a howling pain-memo to her central nervous system, and it took her a second to realize it was because she'd sat up, straightened her spine, and tossed her hair behind her shoulders. She'd done it without planning, without thinking. Her defiance was visceral, a full-body
NO
that seemed to have little to do with logic.

You should have saved yourself the effort
.

Such a perfect line, delivered with such perfect blankness. She ought to feel defeated. Obviously, she was defeated. This man would roll right over her.

But her posture seemed to be insisting that the only reasonable answer to a line like that was
Screw you, buddy
.

She wouldn't let him take the only place she had from her. Not ever, if she could help it, but definitely not today.

Lifting her chin, Ashley met Roman Díaz's scary brown eyes. “The thing is, though, I don't need a pitch. I'm in your way, and I'm not moving until you agree to send the machines home and call off the demolition.”

Roman rubbed one hand over his clean-shaven jaw.

He walked away.

“Hey!” she called. “Where are you going?”

He turned around to walk backward, casual as could be. “I'm going to talk to my crew. Then I'm going to send somebody over to give you a drink of water. And then, once I've made sure you're in no danger of dying on me, I'm going to ignore you until you beg me to cut you loose.”

Ashley watched him turn without breaking stride, graceful and dangerous as a swordsman. He strolled toward the parking lot, briefcase swinging gently in his grip. When he was within verbal range, Noah said something, and Roman broke into a huge, easy smile.

A devastating smile.

She'd known it would be devastating, and it totally, completely, absolutely was. Just as bad as she'd figured. Worse.

Damn it all to hell.

Ashley took a deep breath, but then she couldn't figure out what to do with the air. Or her face. The only sound she could make was a sort of stupefied huff.

This evil Latino Canadian land developer was an opponent ten times more formidable than she'd imagined.

Love stories you'll never forget
By authors you'll always remember

eOriginal Romance from Random House
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