Ruthie Knox's ROMAN HOLIDAY: The Complete Adventure is out
today! We are so excited to share all of the information with you. Check out a
terrific excerpt and enter the giveaway below!
ROMAN HOLIDAY
is a contemporary romance published by LoveSwept, an imprint of Random
House.
About ROMAN HOLIDAY: The Complete
Adventure-
Ashley Bowman has always been impetuous, but even she is a
little shocked when she chains herself to a palm tree in the Florida Keys hours
before a hurricane is due to blow in. It’s all with the hope of saving her
childhood home from a heartless Miami developer. But the moment she meets Roman
Díaz she realizes he does have a heart—it’s just encased in ice. Ashley’s
determined to get Roman to crack . . . even if she has to drag him all over the
eastern seaboard to do it.
Roman can hardly believe he’s been talked into driving
across the country with this brazen wild child in a skimpy bikini. He tells
himself he had no choice—Ashley insists he meets the elderly snowbirds whose
community will be displaced by his career-making development deal. But in truth
he knows that there’s something about Ashley that makes him want to get a
little wild himself . . . and the closer they get, the more tempted he becomes.
But no. When he emerged from behind the door, his evil was
far more subtle than she’d expected. The closer he walked, the more this rich
Miami land developer looked like television’s version of a bad guy: tall, dark,
expensive, beautifully proportioned, and—she had to admit—way more handsome
than people were supposed to be in real life.
Ashley liked a handsome man as much as the next girl, but
the ones who really got her going always had endearingly imperfect teeth, bad
haircuts, unfortunate facial hair—some flaw that made them approachable. She
picked the sort of guys who were game to go surfing on a whim or try out sex in
a hammock even if they risked ending up in the dirt, slightly bruised and
laughing.
Whereas this man—no way did he own a hammock. He was too
perfect, his handsomeness nothing less than a loaded weapon aimed at the world.
She imagined him bleaching his teeth so white that he purposefully blinded
people when he smiled. You’d be gazing at his face, mesmerized by those
teeth—which she couldn’t even see right now, but she knew just how they’d look,
their contrast to the deep brown of his skin both surprising and delicious—and
then you’d blink and he’d be gone, and so would your wallet and your house.
Possibly he’d leave you the hammock.
Of course, it was also possible she was projecting. She’d
only been watching him for about four seconds, and she had, admittedly, a
fairly strong bias against the guy.
His slick soles crunched over the crushed-shell surface of
the lot. He didn’t walk so much as he loped, taking
the circular pavers two at a time. His suit was so well behaved that it loped
right along with him, too expensively tailored to look awkward for even a
heartbeat.
When he’d passed the office, he veered off the path to make
a slow circuit around the palm. His expression betrayed nothing as he took in
the mound of mulch where Ashley sat. Her bound wrists, tucked tight against her
lower back. Her bare arms and barer legs and barest-of-all feet.
He stopped directly in front of her.
“Ashley Bowman, I presume.”
A joke? He delivered the line with such dignity, she
couldn’t tell if he meant to be funny.
“That’s me.”
He placed his briefcase on the ground and hunkered down,
resting his elbows on his spread knees and clasping his hands lightly between
them. Normal people would look awkward doing that, but he made it seem like
he’d been born to hunker.
His shirt was black, open at the collar, his sunglasses
mirrored. He took them off, and his dark eyes were mirrored, too. Impenetrable.
Good-looking, yes. But good?
She wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.
Not for the first time, it occurred to Ashley that chaining
herself to the palm tree had not been her best decision ever. The idea had been
to take a stand. Instead, she felt like a virgin staked below a volcano.
A nostalgic sort of feeling, since it had been so very long
since she was a virgin. But this guy definitely had some magmalike qualities.
Slow-moving. Molten. Dangerous.
The danger explained why all her frayed nerve endings were
sizzling.
It had to be the danger. Because attraction under these
circumstances would be insane.
Which was why she hadn’t glanced at his package, so
conveniently on display in front of her.
No. She had not.
“I’m Roman Díaz. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but .
. .” He spread his hands, encompassing the scene before him. “You’re
protesting, I take it?”
“I can’t let you knock it down.”
“Yes. You mentioned that in your voicemail.”
So he’d listened to her messages. She hadn’t been sure,
since he had never bothered to call her back. Or answer the letter she’d sent
by registered mail. Or admit her to the inner sanctum of his office.
Ashley had done everything she could think of to get his
attention, just as soon as her grief had abated enough to let her begin to process
a freshly discovered set of horrible truths: That she didn’t own Sunnyvale.
Grandma had sold it two years ago without telling her or, as far as she knew,
anyone. She’d secretly and sneakily transferred title on the property to Roman
Díaz’s development group, Ojito Enterprises, for a generous sum of money that
had vanished—though she’d definitely spent some of it leasing the property back
from Díaz.
“I’ll buy it from you,” Ashley offered. “Whatever you paid
for it, I’ll double.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She had to admire his economy. The mere flick of an eyebrow
said it all. He knew she had no savings to speak of, no property of
value—nothing to her name but an inherited Airstream trailer full of her
grandmother’s junk.
She didn’t have Sunnyvale because he’d taken it from her
before she even had a chance to claim it.
He glanced at her bound hands. She’d looped the chain around
the tree, then around her wrists, which rested against her back, knuckles
brushing the ground. “Is that a padlock?”
“Yes. And I can cover the keyhole with my fingers, so you
won’t be able to drill it open unless you cut them off.”
“I could cut the chain behind the tree, where you can’t
reach.”
“I’ll rattle it. And probably if you do that, I’ll manage to
get hurt, and the media headlines will be all, like, ‘Protester Mangled by
Heartless Developer.’”
“What did you do with the key, swallow it?”
She’d shoved it down her bikini bottoms, where it had spent
the evening tattooing itself onto her tailbone. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
USA Today bestselling
author Ruthie Knox writes contemporary romance
that’s sexy, witty, and angsty—sometimes all three at once. After training to
be a British historian, she became an academic editor instead. Then she got really
deeply into knitting, as one does, followed by motherhood and romance novel
writing.
Her debut novel, Ride with
Me, is probably the only existing cross-country bicycling love
story. She followed it up with About Last Night, a
London-set romance whose hero has the unlikely name of Neville, and
then Room at the Inn, a Christmas novella—both of which
were finalists for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award. Her
four-book series about the Clark family of Camelot, Ohio, has won accolades for
its fresh, funny portrayal of small-town Midwestern life.
Ruthie moonlights as a mother, Tweets incessantly, and bakes
a mean focaccia. She’d love to hear from you, so visit her website
at www.ruthieknox.com and
drop her a line.
Website
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