Roman Holiday 1: Chained: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the Florida Keys! Our story begins here, in a land of palm trees, sandy beaches, conch shells, aging bohemians, and rapid-fire development. Are you sweaty yet? I hope not. Here, take a load off. I made you a drink.

(
Hands over a Rum Runner
.)

Better? Good. This is supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, we’re doing something wrong.

On the left, chained to a palm tree, you’ll find our heroine, Ashley—a little flighty, perhaps, but she’s all heart, and when happy hour rolls around you’ll find her salting the margarita glasses and bopping along to the music.

And who’s that tall, dark drink of water on the right, all stone-faced and looking mighty foxy in his suit? Ah, yes. That would be Roman. Don’t let the robot act fool you. Every minute of Ashley’s company he’s forced to endure, he gets a little more lively and a whole lot more lovable.

He has no choice, really, because
Roman Holiday
is a romance—a road trip—an adventure. It’s about love and family, life and community. It’s about figuring out what we need to take from the past and learning how to throw the rest aside so we can define the future for ourselves.

We’ve got two seasons of the Roman-and-Ashley show ahead of us—five episodes each, with a break in the middle—so pace yourself. If you drink that too fast, you’ll wake up tomorrow morning with a headache, and then where will we be? I love you guys, but I can’t gently massage your temples through the screen of the e-reader. I’m sorry. There are limits to even my powers.

All right, are we sorted? Let’s do this thing!

xoxo,

Ruthie

P.S. If you like what you’re reading, come chat with me and other readers in the Roman Holiday forum
at
http://forum.ruthieknox.com
.

The arrival of the shiny black SUV in the parking lot startled the fawn into flight.

Ashley watched it bound out of the empty swimming pool, between the two-story rental units, and onto the beach. She tried not to hate the man who had driven it away.

Her chafed wrists were not his fault. He hadn’t pushed her down onto this pile of mulch, nor had he chained her to the palm tree. He hadn’t insisted she launch her protest clad only in a damp bikini and a T-shirt.

No, all of that was Ashley’s doing. She had to place the blame for this harebrained caper squarely on her own aching shoulders.

Even though Roman Díaz was about to destroy the only place in the world that mattered to her, she wouldn’t hate him. Hate was poisonous.

But man, she’d really been enjoying the little Key deer. It had been such an excellent distraction from all the depressing thoughts about her grandmother.

Past the spot where it had disappeared, a slice of sunrise washed the sky in orange, and the dark silhouette of an angular palm tree framed a view straight off a Florida landscape postcard.

Whereas the SUV was like the other kind of postcard—the tacky kind that had a smiling woman shoving her enormous, barely clad hooters toward the viewer over a neon-script tagline like “A Big Hello from Florida.”

It didn’t bode well.

The soft glow of early morning did little to conceal the fact that the eight-unit rental complex spread out around the pool had seen better days. Peachy Keen and Salmon Sunset had faded to a pinkish beige and beigeish pink, respectively, while Turquoise Treasure was a sort of anemic white-blue. The interiors were worse, the carpet grotty and the blond-wood-and-seashell theme of the decor begging for an update.

But for Ashley, Sunnyvale Vacation Rentals retained a timeless beauty—the white railings on the upper and lower porches matching the trim around the windows and along the rooflines; the broad, fringed leaves of the sheltering palms; the ocean beyond, just a short walk to
the dock.

The sky, the sun, the light, the breeze off the water. All of it bound up together, indivisibly part of this place she loved more than any other.

The driver’s door opened, and black dress shoes appeared beneath gray slacks. The black top of his head crested the door, then disappeared as he ducked down to reach into the car—probably retrieving his hooded cape and sickle, just to complete the look.

But no. When he emerged from behind the door, his evil was far more subtle than she’d expected. The closer he walked, the more this rich Miami land developer looked like television’s version of a bad guy: tall, dark, expensive, beautifully proportioned, and—she had to admit—way more handsome than people were supposed to be in real life.

Ashley liked a handsome man as much as the next girl, but the ones who really got her going always had endearingly imperfect teeth, bad haircuts, unfortunate facial hair—some flaw that made them approachable. She picked the sort of guys who were game to go surfing on a whim or try out sex in a hammock even if they risked ending up in the dirt, slightly bruised and laughing.

Whereas this man—no way did he own a hammock. He was too perfect, his handsomeness nothing less than a loaded weapon aimed at the world. She imagined him bleaching his teeth so white that he purposefully blinded people when he smiled. You’d be gazing at his face, mesmerized by those teeth—which she couldn’t even see right now, but she knew just how they’d look, their contrast to the deep brown of his skin both surprising and delicious—and then you’d blink and he’d be gone, and so would your wallet and your house.

Possibly he’d leave you the hammock.

Of course, it was also possible she was projecting. She’d only been watching him for about four seconds, and she had, admittedly, a fairly strong bias against the guy.

His slick soles crunched over the crushed-shell surface of the lot. He didn’t walk so much as he
loped
, taking the circular pavers two at a time. His suit was so well behaved that it loped right along with him, too expensively tailored to look awkward for even a heartbeat.

When he’d passed the office, he veered off the path to make a slow circuit around the palm. His expression betrayed nothing as he took in the mound of mulch where Ashley sat. Her bound wrists, tucked tight against her lower back. Her bare arms and barer legs and barest-of-all feet.

He stopped directly in front of her.

“Ashley Bowman, I presume.”

A joke? He delivered the line with such dignity, she couldn’t tell if he meant to be funny.

“That’s me.”

He placed his briefcase on the ground and hunkered down, resting his elbows on his spread knees and clasping his hands lightly between them. Normal people would look awkward doing that, but he made it seem like he’d been born to hunker.

His shirt was black, open at the collar, his sunglasses mirrored. He took them off, and his dark eyes were mirrored, too. Impenetrable.

Good-looking, yes. But good?

She wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.

Not for the first time, it occurred to Ashley that chaining herself to the palm tree had not been her best decision ever. The idea had been to take a stand. Instead, she felt like a virgin staked below a volcano.

A nostalgic sort of feeling, since it had been so very long since she was a virgin. But this guy definitely had some magmalike qualities. Slow-moving. Molten. Dangerous.

The danger explained why all her frayed nerve endings were sizzling.

It had to be the danger. Because attraction under these circumstances would be insane.

Which was why she hadn’t glanced at his package, so conveniently on display in front of her.

No. She had not.

“I’m Roman Díaz. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but …” He spread his hands, encompassing the scene before him. “You’re protesting, I take it?”

“I can’t let you knock it down.”

“Yes. You mentioned that in your voicemail.”

So he’d listened to her messages. She hadn’t been sure, since he had never bothered to call her back. Or answer the letter she’d sent by registered mail. Or admit her to the inner sanctum of his office.

Ashley had done everything she could think of to get his attention, just as soon as her grief had abated enough to let her begin to process a freshly discovered set of horrible truths: That she didn’t own Sunnyvale. Grandma had sold it two years ago without telling her or, as far
as she knew, anyone. She’d secretly and sneakily transferred title on the property to Roman Díaz’s development group, Ojito Enterprises, for a generous sum of money that had vanished—though she’d definitely spent some of it leasing the property back from Díaz.

“I’ll buy it from you,” Ashley offered. “Whatever you paid for it, I’ll double.”

He raised an eyebrow.

She had to admire his economy. The mere flick of an eyebrow said it all. He knew she had no savings to speak of, no property of value—nothing to her name but an inherited Airstream trailer full of her grandmother’s junk.

She didn’t have Sunnyvale because he’d taken it from her before she even had a chance to claim it.

He glanced at her bound hands. She’d looped the chain around the tree, then around her wrists, which rested against her back, knuckles brushing the ground. “Is that a padlock?”

“Yes. And I can cover the keyhole with my fingers, so you won’t be able to drill it open unless you cut them off.”

“I could cut the chain behind the tree, where you can’t reach.”

“I’ll rattle it. And probably if you do that, I’ll manage to get hurt, and the media headlines will be all, like, ‘Protester Mangled by Heartless Developer.’ ”

“What did you do with the key, swallow it?”

She’d shoved it down her bikini bottoms, where it had spent the evening tattooing itself onto her tailbone. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

He made a tiny gesture with his shoulders. A non-shrug, as though he couldn’t even be bothered to put his beautiful physique to the trouble of actually shrugging on her account. “You’ve been out here all night?”

“Yes.”

The bastard knew it, too. It had been his contractor’s arrival with a small fleet of demolition equipment that had driven Ashley to attach herself to the tree in the first place.

She’d passed the first few days after her grandmother’s death in a haze. Her father’s voice over the phone had called her back from Bolivia, but when she arrived in the Keys there’d been no one here. No funeral, because Grandma hadn’t wanted one. No family, because her family was broken, and her father and grandmother had hated each other.

No idea what to do with herself.

When she’d come to her senses and realized she had to do
something
before Sunnyvale was lost, only a little more than a week remained of the grace period Díaz had given her, and she’d wasted it whirling around South Florida in an unfocused panic. She’d hounded the secretary at Díaz’s Miami office and pestered various Monroe County officials in an attempt to figure out how to prevent a wrecking ball from taking down her home.