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“What if I came into possession of it? What would you pay to get it back?”
“If that happened, you should just give it back. Because of how much I love it, and because it doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“If anything, knowing how much you loved it would make me raise the price.”
“That makes you a jerk.”
“No, it makes me a capitalist.” His hand slid over the steering wheel in a gentle caress. “If you wouldn’t pay to get it back, it has no value.”
God, she’d had him pegged right from the get-go. One of those glass-bottomed-boat-cell-phone men. An invisible-hand-of-the-market ideologue who justified his soulless behavior with empty ethics.
Irredeemable.
Although it was strange. Most of the ideologues she’d met delivered their lines with more passion than Roman. He sounded as though he were reading his off a script.
“You have a seriously skewed sense of value.”
He gave her one of his brilliant, empty smiles. “One of us does.”
“Not me.”
“So you say.”
She rubbed at a spot beneath her sternum that had begun to ache.
Hunger. That’s all it was. Not disappointment.
“If we’re going more than thirty miles, I’m going to have to stop for gas,” he said. “You know what that will be like.”
Ugh. Mid-evacuation gas lines were insane. Ashley mentally added another forty-five minutes to the length of the journey.
Stupid gas-guzzling monster-beast car.
“It’s more than thirty miles,” she said. “You should probably get gas before Miami.”
“When are you planning to tell me where we’re going?”
“Later.”
She caught herself picking at the pocket of her cargo pants and folded her hands in her lap.
What would Roman be like when he was angry? Would he turn red, yell? Or was he one of those people who got even quieter and planned revenge?
Leaning forward, she pointed the heat vent away from her. The control for her side of the car read 70 degrees, but the air from the vent felt cold, raising goose bumps all over her arms.
Roman drove. After a few more miles, he signaled and took an exit.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Hotel.”
“We can’t stop here. We’re only at Homestead. If this is some trick—if you’re going to dump me here and leave, then I just want to say—”
“Relax. This is where I’ve been staying. I need to take a shower and pick up my things.”
“Oh. I thought you lived in Miami. Why are you staying in Homestead?”
“In traffic, it’s still another seventy-five, eighty minutes to my place. When I’m working in the Keys, I don’t always feel like making the drive.” He pulled into the parking lot of one of those extended-stay chain hotels for businessmen and parked.
