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It was magic. The kind of magic made up of canasta tournaments by the swimming pool and long, laughter-filled evenings sitting on the dock surrounded by tiki torches and old friends. The magic of belonging somewhere. Having something.
That’s what she’d wanted to tell Roman Díaz. But he had his arms crossed, and his flat, expressionless eyes made her uncomfortable, reminding her too vividly of how she must look to him. Young and dumb and barefoot. Full of reckless, useless passion.
What did a man like him care about canasta?
“It’s just … this is too great a place to throw away,” she said. “It needs fixing up, I know, but if you put the right person in charge … I would do the work. I would work hard. You could turn a profit. Why knock it down when it has so many good years left?”
His eyebrows gathered themselves together. He had abundant eyebrows—the kind of eyebrows with the potential to take over his whole face if he didn’t keep them carefully trimmed. Which obviously he did, but still. Somewhere, there was a sophomore-year-of-high-school photograph of this guy with giant caterpillar eyebrows.
The thought made her a little smug, and she cherished the feeling for a moment, imagining Roman in thirty years with eyebrows so bushy and uncontrolled that they crawled right off his face.
“That’s your whole pitch?” he asked.
Oh, no. I have a much better pitch. I just thought I’d start with one that sucked, in case I didn’t need to waste the ringer.
Ashley kept her smart mouth firmly zipped. She believed in kindness over snark. And anyway, what was the point of arguing? He’d already made up his mind. There was nothing she could do to save Sunnyvale. Not alone. She was—as ever—inadequate to the situation.
It had been a mistake to chain herself to the tree. She should have called for reinforcements. All those people who came back to Sunnyvale every year, who loved it as much as she did—surely they would help if they knew. They had more experience, better connections, and she always did best as part of a crew.
That was where her talents lay: bringing people together, motivating them, smoothing out any little wrinkles to help a group pull together toward a common goal. She was a team player, not an oddball loner of the sort who could launch a successful solo protest.
Too bad this hadn’t occurred to her yesterday when Gus was still around. She might have told him that she was not remotely the sort of person who could live in a redwood for four years. A village of redwoods? Yes. Totally. She would be the one who started the Redwood Village Softball League.
But alone in a tree?
Fuck no. She’d never last.
“Yeah, that was more or less my whole pitch,” she admitted.
“You should have saved yourself the effort.”
A pickup truck pulled into the lot. Ashley recognized it even before Noah the contractor got out and hailed Roman with a lazy wave. Another car arrived, followed by a Jeep.
The crew. They were showing up to begin their day’s work of tearing her heart out of her body and driving over it with the scarred metal treads of their diesel-fueled implements of destruction.
Ashley’s shoulders sent a howling pain-memo to her central nervous system, and it took her a second to realize it was because she’d sat up, straightened her spine, and tossed her hair behind her shoulders. She’d done it without planning, without thinking. Her defiance was visceral, a full-body NO that seemed to have little to do with logic.
You should have saved yourself the effort.
Such a perfect line, delivered with such perfect blankness. She ought to feel defeated. Obviously, she was defeated. This man would roll right over her.
But her posture seemed to be insisting that the only reasonable answer to a line like that was Screw you, buddy.
She wouldn’t let him take the only place she had from her. Not ever, if she could help it, but definitely not today.
Lifting her chin, Ashley met Roman Díaz’s scary brown eyes. “The thing is, though, I don’t need a pitch. I’m in your way, and I’m not moving until you agree to send the machines home and call off the demolition.”
Roman rubbed one hand over his clean-shaven jaw.
He walked away.
“Hey!” she called. “Where are you going?”
He turned around to walk backward, casual as could be. “I’m going to talk to my crew. Then I’m going to send somebody over to give you a drink of water. And then, once I’ve made sure you’re in no danger of dying on me, I’m going to ignore you until you beg me to cut you loose.”
Ashley watched him turn without breaking stride, graceful and dangerous as a swordsman. He strolled toward the parking lot, briefcase swinging gently in his grip. When he was within verbal range, Noah said something, and Roman broke into a huge, easy smile.
A devastating smile.
