Roman Holiday 1: Chained: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance by Knox Ruthie

Author:Knox, Ruthie [Knox, Ruthie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780345546975
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-11-10T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

It was harder with an audience.

Sitting alone by the tree last night hadn’t been so great, but sitting here knowing Noah was out there in his truck, listening to music, running the AC, counting down the minutes until her next sip of water?

Much worse.

Robbed of all dignity, Ashley felt like a performance of herself. A tasteless melodrama with a silly protagonist. If she were in the audience for this play, she would be full of critical thoughts.

Why doesn’t she just give up?

What does she think she’ll achieve here, heatstroke?

But Roman had robbed her of even that outcome. He’d protected her from the elements and left her to stew in the consequences of her own choices, accompanied only by her gritching belly and a lot of self-sabotaging mind noise.

Because he didn’t understand her at all, he thought it would take nothing more than the passage of time to break her.

Ashley didn’t break. She bent. People who bent were nearly impossible to defeat.

The trick was to stay flexible. She had to pee, but she had no access to a bathroom, no privacy, and no use of her hands. The only solution that offered even a modicum of dignity required her to unlock herself—not easy to achieve, but just possible.

Ashley waited until she was sure Noah was distracted by his phone. She spent five minutes fiddling behind her back with swollen fingers and stiff wrists until she’d managed to fish out the key and release the padlock. Then she’d peed in the mulch like a sad little animal. Trembling all over, sick to her stomach, with black spots floating at the edges of her vision, she locked herself back up.

Victory.

Of course, the key sank into her butt crack, but that was a comparatively comfortable place for it to be.

Later, the ants arrived. A few of them found a pathway into her bikini bottoms, and she learned that she had been wrong to think she could no longer feel her butt. Wrong to assume she’d completely lost sensation in her labia.

She felt the ants. She felt them everywhere—their itchy, filthy little feet an outrage that made her violently wiggle, hoping to drive them out, squish them, or at least make their stay in her crotch so inhospitable that they’d be driven out in alarm.

She must have looked like she was having a seizure because Noah came to check on her, asking what was wrong. When she told him, he repositioned her umbrella, which she recognized as the only thing he could think of to do, since he could hardly scratch her crotch for her.

The day wore on. Roman didn’t come back. The temperature climbed toward 90 before the rain knocked it down a few degrees. The parasol funneled water directly onto her head. Rain dripped off the tip of her nose and wet her lips, gluing her hair to her neck and washing away the ant feeling.

Ashley fell asleep with her toes twitching, dreaming of spiders crawling up her legs. She woke up unrefreshed, unsure whether seconds or minutes had passed.

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