Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues by Ruthie Knox Read Free Book Online

air-conditioned. It felt good to pull the comforter up and bury herself under it, a secret warm clean body against a soft mattress, breathing in the faint scent of bleach.
    She turned onto her side, her back to the bathroom and the muffled noises of Roman in the shower. He’d let her take her turn first—such a nice Midwestern boy under his slick Miami shell—and she’d come out in her towel to find him on the bed with his feet up, watching the news.
    Then she’d rummaged around in his bag, and he’d turned off the TV to watch her drop the towel and pull his own comfy T-shirt over her head.
    He’d stood and stripped for the shower right in front of her, his movements as casual as if he were unobserved, and walked away bare-assed and smiling. Ashley had smiled, too, bemused at how seductive it was not to be seduced.
    She wouldn’t have thought she would throb like this, just from knowing he was going to come back and they were going to have sex, plain old sex in a plain old hotel bed, but there was something erotic about having it be
assumed
.
    They were like an old married couple.
    She’d never before wanted to be part of an old married couple, but she was starting to see the appeal.
    After the water came on in the shower, she’d turned out the lights. There was too much light from the parking lot outside for the room to be truly dark, but it got dim and filled with shadows. The sheets felt cool beneath her stroking hand, the pillow downy under her cheek.
    The water shut off in the bathroom.
    She waited.
    Before tonight, she wouldn’t have expected her first time with Roman to be this way. They’d begun in the mud—surely it only made sense to think they’d consummate this week of insanity with sex on the prow of a boat, or at the top of a Ferris wheel, or up in the hayloft ofsome barn where they trespassed against everything good and smart and sensible.
    An hour ago, when he’d chased her and caught her and they’d walked to the end of the gravel path together, they ended up at a water tower, a massive spider with metal legs, and she’d thought about dragging him into the shadows underneath. They could have done it standing up, her leg hitched over his hip and last year’s accumulation of dried leaves crunching under his feet as he lifted her and pinned her, held her and fucked her.
    She’d thought of grabbing his thigh in the car. Rubbing up against him in the elevator. Pulling him into the shower with her and making him slick and soapy and desperate.
    But they’d had such a long day out in the sun, arguing, talking to strangers,
feeling
things. She was exhausted, and what she wanted was this. A bed in the dark. Waiting for Roman in the green T-shirt he’d worn with his old-man pajamas that morning at Mitzi’s house, the first soft thing she’d seen on his body.
    No script, no stupid games, no nonsense.
    Just them.
    When he returned, he flipped the switch in the bathroom first so they lost the noise of the fan, and most of the light. The covers twitched away from her shoulder, and cold air rushed down her legs. She smelled mint—toothpaste—and the spicy scent of male deodorant, and then she felt his hand at her hip, the press of his kneecaps against the back of hers, weight on the pillow behind her head.
    His hand slid beneath the shirt to her stomach. He settled against her, pulling her into his heat, the ticklish hair of his thighs, the sigh of his breath on her neck.
    “Hi there,” he said.
    He kissed her shoulder, smoothing her hair out of his way. His hand moved in slow circles over her stomach, brushing the underside of her breasts, following the dip of her waist, trailing heat beneath her navel.
    “Hi,” she whispered, and hoped he heard what she wanted to mean.
    Here I am, picking my team
.
    You’re not my enemy. You’re my choice
.
    I’m not afraid
.
    “Nice shirt.”
    “Mmm.”
    “Take it off.”
    He was already tugging it up as she turned. She rose slightly, lifting her arms,