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“Why, so you can change my mind?”
“Because we’re going all the way to Georgia together, and we need to find something to talk about.”
“Your friend is in Georgia?”
She nodded.
Georgia.
Fucking Georgia.
The news did something to his body—disconnected it from reason long enough for his fist to hit the table and make the creamers jump. Make one of them spin in a lopsided circle and then roll off onto her lap.
Ashley flinched as though he’d struck her.
Roman took a deep breath.
He wasn’t that kind of man. He’d come into close proximity to physical violence only twice in his life, and both times he’d thrown up. An unpleasant side effect of having been fathered by a man who was serving a life sentence for the cold-blooded murder of two women.
Roman had no stomach for violence.
He didn’t get angry. He was not the sort of man who pounded tabletops.
It was just her. This woman, this situation—the first time in years he’d so completely lost his cool. He inhaled again, slow and controlled, and forced himself to calm down.
It wasn’t as though he hadn’t guessed it would be a long drive. If she’d wanted him to drop her off somewhere close, she wouldn’t have worked so hard to keep from telling him. And Georgia wasn’t Alaska. True, they were still four hours from the border, and it was a big state. Huge. He could be stuck with her all day.
He could be stuck with her overnight.
Ashley placed a fourth creamer on top of her stack and glanced at him from under her eyelashes.
It doesn’t matter. You’ll drive wherever you need to go in order to get rid of her.
The thing to do now was to put her at ease. That’s what Roman’s contractor, Noah, would do if he were here. He would care, in his awkward, fumbling way, and his caring would calm her.
He was all feelings, that man. Roman’s opposite. But for whatever reason, they worked well together. Roman kept hiring him—had hired him over and over again, expanding the scope of the jobs he gave Noah until he was essentially an employee.
What would Noah ask if he were here?
He would try to get to know her. Find out what her interests were, her desires.
“Whereabouts in Georgia?” Roman asked.
“Okefenokee.”
That caught him off guard. “She lives in a swamp?”
“Sort of.”
“Nothing is ever easy with you, is it?”
He needed to recalibrate his expectations, somehow. It shouldn’t be possible for her to keep knocking him off balance, and so easily. The deeper she disturbed the stillness he’d spent so many years cultivating, the happier she seemed to be.
She balanced two creamers on top of the fourth, and neither fell when she let go. “No, I guess I’m not easy.” A moment passed, and she said, “Go ahead and kill me, if you’re going to.”
“What are you talking about?”
He sounded too high-strung, too aggressive, but she’d hit a sore spot. Jokes about murder weren’t funny when your father was a killer and you’d grown up in a small town where everyone knew it.
