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Albeit by the unusual means of catching her when she fainted, making her tea, hooking up her trailer, and driving her and her worldly belongings to safety.
“Ashley.” His voice again, as calm and unperturbed as ever despite the fact that she’d spaced out and forced
him to repeat the question. “Where are we going?”
“Oh, it’s a ways north yet.”
Roman drove. If he felt any impatience about the traffic—any tension about the hurricane on its way, discomfort in his wet jeans and damp shirt, irritation with her refusal to supply a destination—he didn’t show it.
He had borrowed a towel from the office bathroom, though, and laid it carefully over the leather-upholstered driver’s seat. Three more towels sat in the middle of the backseat, at the ready in the case of some Ashley-spawned disaster.
He loved his awful car.
“How far is ‘a ways’?” he asked.
Distract him. Get his mind on how annoying he finds you, and maybe you can put off that side-of-the-road-abandonment scenario a little while longer.
Ashley leaned forward and studied the built-in GPS screen, as if she were pondering entering the necessary coordinates. “I’m not sure precisely.” She dialed one of the knobs, then poked at a few buttons.
“Quit touching that.”
“How much does a car like this cost anyway?”
“Buy one, and you’ll find out.”
“More than it’s worth, I’m sure.” She ran her hand over the dashboard. He’d chosen a charcoal interior with silver accents and that dark, burled wood that they always seemed to put in the dashboards of luxury cars. Ashley had never been able to understand the impulse. Was the idea to make the inside of the car look like some nineteenth-century tycoon’s library, or was it more like, Here’s a little bit of the nature you’re destroying with your egregious consumption of fossil fuels?
She bet he’d paid thousands of dollars extra for the interior package. They didn’t just give you a little hem of wood around the steering wheel, after all. They made you think you were treating yourself to it.
“It’s worth whatever the buyer’s willing to pay,” Roman said.
“Is that how you justify it to yourself?”
“That’s the definition of worth.”
“I drive a 1980 Volkswagen Fox. I got it for four hundred dollars at a used car dealership when I was nineteen.” She’d gotten it on a trade-in, actually, and kept it, the summer she’d worked at one of the used car lots her father owned—part of a dealership empire that now stretched all over north Florida and into Georgia.
But she didn’t have to mention that. Maybe Roman didn’t know who her father was yet.
Unlikely. Pretty much everybody in Florida knew Senator Bowman, and it was no secret that she and he weren’t close. The summer she’d worked the lot had been the last time Ashley and her father had spent more than three consecutive hours in each other’s presence.
“It’s rusty,” she continued brightly. “And there’s a huge dent in the driver’s-side door. The headlights stop working if you try to turn on the high beams when it’s too humid. If I drive over seventy miles an hour on the highway, either the gas gauge or the heat stops working—but never both at the same time. It has unknown mileage, because the odometer took a little nap at some point before the trade-in, but it’s upward of a hundred and sixty thousand. So, given all that, how much is my car worth?”
He glanced at her. “About a buck more than a drive-in burrito.”
Surprised, Ashley laughed. Roman glanced at her with all the affect of a superior alien species observing an incomprehensible earth creature, and she found herself touching her lips, as if they’d betrayed her somehow.
It had been a joke, right?
Why could she never tell if he was joking?
She put her feet up on the dash. He frowned, and that made her feel a little better.
“Cash value aside,” she said, “I’ve had my car for five years. It never fails me. It’s the most reliable car in the whole world. I love that car.”
“So the question is what you would be willing to pay for it. That’s what it’s worth.”
“I don’t need to pay for it. I already own it.”
