Read Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues for Free Online

I’ll call her, and she’ll ask me if she has a green light to do the demolition yet.”
    “I thought Carmen was your girlfriend.”
    “She was.”
    “You said she wasn’t your boss.”
    “She’s not.”
    “So why is she giving you demolition deadlines? Or, wait, whose deadline is it?”
    She sounded calm, unaffected. Balanced.
    “Her father’s. Heberto Zumbado. Do you know who he is?”
    “No.”
    “I guess there’s no reason you should. He’s a developer in Miami. A big deal. He’s also Carmen’s dad, and … not really my boss, either. I don’t have a boss. But he owns a big share of this project.”
    “I thought you owned Sunnyvale.”
    “I do. A lot of the land around it, too. But Heberto’s put a bunch of money into the property we’re going to develop in the later phases, and it’s his reputation backing it. If it weren’t for him, I couldn’t pull this thing off. I’m too small-time for a resort this big.”
    “Ah.”
    “Yeah. And Carmen works for him. So if I tell Carmen tomorrow it’s a no-go, she’s going to tell her father, and then … then I’m not sure.”
    “I thought I had two weeks.”
    “You had them from me.”
    “But you’re not in charge.”
    He dropped his head backward, against the trunk. Through the canopy, here and there, he could see stars. The night was clear. When he closed his eyes, he could still visualize Ashley out at the end of her branch. A woman tied up and walked to the end of a plank.
    Roman didn’t want to be the one to push her off. He’d been standing back, waiting and watching so he wouldn’t miss it when she figured out how to rescue herself.
    He’d assumed, all along, that she would, somehow. She’d outsmarted him at Sunnyvale, manipulated him into going along with her plans, and she’d done it with such
style
—maybe he’d started to think she had an escape all figured out. That when the marauding pirates came after her, stalking down the plank, Ashley would heroically pull out a rapier and start fencing.
    He’d thought she could keep spinning, whirling around, energy and light, until she won. This whole time, deep down, he’d believed in her power to outsmart him and defeat Carmen and Heberto, too.
    Or, if she failed, at the very least she would land on her feet and find something else. He’d told her days ago that she was the kind of person who always found something else.
    He’d been mistaken.
    Ashley was at the end of her resources. Poised out over the water, toes gripping the bare board, sharks roiling beneath, and she was scared as hell.
    It wasn’t that she didn’t have the
spirit
to get out of her situation. She had more spirit than anyone he’d ever met. It was that she was all alone out there.
    That wasn’t how it went in the movies. In the movies, when the heroine was in peril, someone always frayed her bonds so all she had to do was tug sharply and they’d snap. Someone tossed her a rope so she could go swinging across the deck, recover her sword, and fight her way to freedom.
    Roman hadn’t given her anything to work with. He’d let Carmen set deadlines while he waited for events to overtake them and overwhelm Ashley.
    She didn’t deserve his cowardice. She deserved allegiance.
    She deserved for him to throw her a fucking rope.
    “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “Which do you want to hear first?”
    “I thought you already told me the bad news.”
    “Unfortunately, no.”
    “Okay. Well, I guess the bad news.”
    “Heberto’s going to bring your father into this.”
    She stiffened, swayed slightly, and put her hand out for balance.
    “It’s possible he already has,” Roman added. “It’s even possible he’s knocked down Sunnyvale already, although I doubt it. But this game—it’s about to get bigger than you and me. And uglier.”
    “What’s the good news?”
    “I guess that I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. I was supposed to bring you here and find some way to convince you