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He’d known she would. He’d almost looked forward to it.
Ashley Bowman was impulsive, passionate, and absurdly idealistic. She’d never committed herself to a job for more than a few months. She’d never been engaged, never married. Susan had told Roman more about her than he’d wanted to hear, which was how he knew that Ashley had never had a relationship with a lover that lasted more than a few months. Her mother was dead, and she was estranged from her senator father.
The only person in the world she’d still cared deeply about had died, and Roman had taken her home away from her.
He knew enough about what Ashley loved to understand that he would never be able to buy her off. Once he got her to the swamp in Georgia and left her with her friend, she’d regroup and come after him again with everything she had.
But she wouldn’t win, because he’d done nothing wrong. He had the property. She didn’t.
Most people who got knocked around by life just gave up. They let themselves become victims.
Not Roman.
And even though she drove him crazy, he had to admit, Ashley wasn’t anybody’s victim, either. She deserved some kind of reward for all this effort. If she’d wanted something less than Sunnyvale—some boon he could bestow before sending her on her way—he might have given it to her. It was just that she wanted his keystone. His future.
She wanted the one thing he would never give up.
Makenna brought their food, and the jams and jellies and creamers had to be sorted and replaced in their caddies, lined up along the far edge of the table. By the time he’d finished, Ashley had begun eating her absurd meal.
The plate was divided into four sections. She dipped her fork into the piles of corn at random, as though it didn’t matter which section she ate from in what order.
Roman concentrated on his own food, dividing up the grilled catfish into neat bites. It tasted of nothing, which was how he preferred his food. He ate the rice pilaf next—fluffy nothing—and then he drank his water and put his napkin on the plate and pushed it away.
“Are you going to eat your hash browns?” she asked.
He shook his head and shoved the plate in her direction. She inhaled them. When she bumped the flat of her hand into the plate and got ketchup on it, she failed to notice, then smeared it on her sleeve.
She licked grease off her lips, and he found her disgusting.
He did.
For the most part.
When she’d finished the hash browns, he pushed the pancakes at her. She drowned them in butter and syrup. She got syrup in the webbing between her fingers and licked it off, her tongue acrobatic as a cat’s. Syrup dripped off her fork onto her pants, and Roman imagined the black spot soaking into the olive-green material. Wet and sticky.
“What?” she asked. “You’re staring.”
He shook his head, though he knew he had been.
He couldn’t stop.
“What’s the point?” she asked, swirling a doubled-up bite of pancakes around in a pool of syrup. “What do you get out of destroying one of the best places I’ve ever been? Just money?”
“Yes, just money.”
But there was no “just” about it. Money was respect. Success. Proof.
Money was everything.
“You are diabolical, you know.” She made it almost an apology. “I mean, you probably already know this. But you’re kind of a greedy, soulless son of a bitch.”
Roman smiled. He didn’t disagree. He only disagreed with the assumption that there was something wrong with being a greedy, soulless son of a bitch.
He’d worked such a long time to become one.
CHAPTER FIVE
They made good time after lunch. They’d outpaced the worst of the storm, and Ashley stared out the window at the yellow line that marked the boundary of the highway, letting her thoughts drift.
