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She had, in fact. And then he’d touched her, and she’d forgotten.
Because he was so gorgeous.
And she was a moron.
She stepped backward, crushing a box. “It’s fine. I’ll just …”
… crawl in a hole and die.
Helplessly discombobulated, Ashley cast around for something to look at and saw only the cartons her grandmother had asked a stranger to pack for her—this legacy Ashley hadn’t even been able to bring herself to open yet. She glanced around the trailer. The deeply, terribly familiar location of so many of her happiest memories with Grandma.
She tried to find something to look at that didn’t hurt, but there was nothing, so she looked at Roman. A sound came out of her throat that she couldn’t accept and didn’t even want to admit she’d heard.
Like her heart, punctured by an awl, leaking out all the hope.
Roman touched her elbow.
It was a different sort of touch for him, and so awkward. He put one fingertip on her body with such reluctance—as though he had to, but he didn’t want to own what might happen afterward.
“You know,” he said quietly, “you’ll find something else. You’re the kind of person who always finds something else.”
She wished, then, that she weren’t.
Everyone always said, You’re just like Susan
. You’re so like your grandmother. They’d toured the country in the Airstream every summer, making new friends, seeing new places. Free spirits. Sparks of starlight.
Only, a free spirit wouldn’t feel like a kicked puppy when she learned that her grandmother had left her with nothing to tether her down.
A spark of starlight wouldn’t want to curl up on the dusty mattress at the back of the trailer and sleep because it was so much easier than feeling.
Ashley looked at Roman, and she realized she’d given too much away. She knew she looked as lost and sad as she felt. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be seeing what could only be pity in Roman Díaz’s dark brown eyes, and she definitely wouldn’t be thinking that if he weren’t the worst man in the entire world, she might actually like him.
CHAPTER SIX
If it hadn’t been for the ticket, they would have made it by nightfall.
Once the state patrolman had stopped to see if they needed help, though, there was no getting rid of him. Not until they’d pulled back onto the road—at which point, of course, he noticed that the signals and lights weren’t working on the Airstream and flashed his lights.
Roman would have taken the ticket, but instead Ashley and the patrolman had spent ninety minutes digging through an old box full of cracked plastic electrical harnesses and dangerous-looking wires before they finally had everything hooked up to their mutual satisfaction.
By then she was calling him Tommy. She’d put his home phone number in a little red address book she fished out of her purse—the kind of address book that lots of people used to have but no one carried anymore—and promised to call if she was ever in Alachua, Florida, again to take him up on his offer of his mother’s tamales and a six-pack of beer.
All things considered, Roman would have preferred to handle things his way. If he’d accepted the ticket, they could have been on the road much earlier, and now he wouldn’t be driving down a gravel road in the dark, in the rain, waiting for things to go even more horribly wrong.
The Escalade’s high beams picked out a white shape, and after a minute it resolved itself into a sign.
OKEFENOKEE LAND COOPERATIVE
An Intentional Community
Ashley bounced. “There it is! I knew we were almost there. It’s just so much harder to find stuff in the dark, and your GPS is worthless.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my GPS. Ordinary people don’t need to know how to get to swamp communes.”
“Everybody needs to know how to get to swamp communes. Swamp communes are great.”
As they rolled closer to the sign, Roman made out the words along the bottom.
