Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (12 page)

Whatever, Ashley. Right now, you’ve got a situation to deal with, so first things first – whoever this is that’s calling, give him and the rest of the suits a story that will hold for at least a little while, and then go find your guy.

“You’ve reached Mr. Killane’s phone – this is Ashley Daniels speaking, how may I help you?”

An instant of surprise, then a swift recovery. “Ah – Ms. Daniels, this is Randall Vinton, in charge of the team that’s overseeing the Radford Systems deal; if you could put Mr. Killane on the phone, I’d certainly appreciate it.”

His tone indicated that he expected to put in touch with the boss immediately as a matter of course, in much the same way that you expect the sun to come up in the east instead of the west. I decided he needed to be relieved of that assumption right away.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Vinton, but I’m afraid Mr. Killane is out at the moment pursuing another issue relating to his San Francisco interests – may I take a message?”

The man let out a tightly controlled sigh that wanted to be an exasperated groan, and I could almost hear the eye-roll. “Please tell me he’s not pulling one of his disappearing acts again – that’s the last thing we need when we’re about to tie up this deal with a neat little bow. Or … shit, he didn’t take off last night to have at some actress or waitress or something, did he? Please, Ms. Daniels, we need him here to conduct business, and we need him here now. If you know where he is, I have to insist that you –”

I don’t like your tone, sunshine, and you don’t get to insist on jackshit today.

“I know exactly where he is, and if he wished you to know as well, I imagine he would have told you. As matters stand, however, he plainly thought you were competent to manage for a few hours without his holding your hand – how sad that he apparently misjudged your ability to handle your assigned responsibilities.

“In any case, I suggest you and your team polish the remaining rough edges off the Radford matter and be ready to meet with Mr. Killane in his hotel’s main conference room at 2:00 p.m. today. At that time, he’ll conclude the small part of his San Francisco business that you’re working on – assuming, of course, that you’re able to have the deal ready for his appraisal by that time. Will that be a problem, Mr. Vinton?”

The guy reined in his attitude and got his words out with only the barest hint of who-the-hell-IS-this-bitch in his voice. “We’ll be prepared and waiting for Mr. Killane at 2:00 p.m., Ms. Daniels.”

I thanked Mr. Vinton, and directed him to inform the remaining Killane operatives in town that their boss would be unavailable until the 2:00 p.m. meeting – repeating the same improvised tale of Mr. Killane’s whereabouts to every nervous executive and lawyer working on the Radford Systems deal was way more lying than I had time for – and then I tapped the call to a close.

I sat on the edge of the huge bed, the phone clutched in my hand as I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

I’d hurdled the first obstacle – no one would be freaking out about where the hell my errant boss was until 2:00 p.m. That was a time I’d just pulled out of the air, based on my impression that the deal was close to conclusion as it was, and also on my guesstimate that if I couldn’t find Mr. K after a few hours, I’d have to call in the cavalry anyway.

I sighed, opened my eyes, and looked down at the phone. It displayed the current time as 8:01 a.m. I needed to get on to the next obstacle. So where is he, Ashley?

I couldn’t ask the hotel staff if they’d seen him, since I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to broadcast his ‘missing’ status to people who probably passed their underpaid hours by gossiping about the guests. If word got out to the executives or the world at large that Mr. Killane was seriously gone, I’d have about sixty more problems to deal with, the worst of them being a ballistic boss when he found out I’d fumbled my cover-up of his disappearance.

Disappearance … hadn’t Mr. Vinton said something about Mr. K’s ‘disappearing acts’? And sure, I was mostly concentrating on what was under the boss’s towel the other night, but hadn’t he mentioned one of my duties would be lying for him during his ‘disappearances’? So he took off without a word like this as a regular thing, huh?

Not cool, boss, not cool at all. I was beginning to understand why he reportedly went through personal assistants like a man with a head cold goes through tissues.

Yeah, but unlike his previous personal assistants, you, Ashley, have made the mistake of seriously liking the guy. So yes, you are most definitely stuck with his peculiarities. Deal with it.

Talking to the hotel people was a non-starter, so what next? I looked down and swiped through the iPhone’s contacts list until I found myself staring at the listing for the head of the local security team, the leader of the intense and scary ‘nice boys’ who’d shadowed Mr. Killane’s every movement since he hit town.

If he was doing his job, wouldn’t he know where Mr. Killane was? If not, at least he should be able to tell me when Mr. K went out and what direction he took off in, right?

Thirty seconds later, I found out that the leader of the security team, a guy named Dugspur, was calm, professional, and way closer to nice than scary, at least when he was talking to a new and nervous personal assistant.

“Ms. Daniels, I can confirm that our man left the hotel at 5:00 a.m. and proceeded on foot to the north. For whatever it’s worth, he seemed pretty mellow and relaxed – however, I’m afraid he did insist that we not accompany him.”

“Can you give me any clues at all? Did he say anything else, mention any of the local landmarks or somewhere he might have breakfast?”

Mr. Dugspur chuckled. “Don’t worry, Ms. Daniels – I know how to follow a client’s rules and still do my job. After I gave Mr. Killane a head start, I sent my guy Bobby to tail him from a discreet distance; Bobby reports that Mr. Killane walked six miles without stopping until he got to the Golden Gate Bridge. Then your boss strolled out onto the span, and he’s been wandering up and down the pedestrian walkway on the east side of the bridge ever since – just checking out the view, so far as we can tell.”

“Mr. Dugspur, I need to get out there right now – he probably is just ambling about at random and all, but he’s maybe not the most stable person in the world, so I don’t like his running loose like this, if you understand me …”

“I do, Ms. Daniels. Meet me in the hotel lobby in ten minutes, and I’ll run you out to the parking lot just south of the bridge. We’ll wait there while you head out onto the walkway and see what Mr. Killane’s up to, okay?”

That was most definitely okay.

When we pulled into the parking lot at the bridge, Bobby was waiting for us.

“Mr. Dugspur, the client’s still on the walkway, and is currently located about halfway down the bridge. I didn’t want to get any closer than this, afraid he might spot me.”

“Good work, Bobby. Ms. Daniels here is going out there to see if she can rein our boy in, and maybe persuade him to come back with us?”

Mr. Dugspur’s tone turned the last part of his statement into a question, and he raised an eyebrow at me.

“Ah, I’m pretty much playing this by ear – right now, I just want to get him talking to me, and then see what happens. I’ve got your number, and if he doesn’t freak or anything, I’ll call you when I have some idea of what to do next. Sound good?”

“Sounds like he’s lucky to have a sensible young lady like you on his side, Ms. Daniels.”

So I walked out onto the Golden Gate Bridge.

Like everybody, I’d seen it a million times on screens large and small, but up close and personal, the bridge was a whole different animal.

In movies and on TV, doing its assigned duty as the standard shorthand symbol for ‘San Francisco,’ it looks like a neat little red toy bridge – in person, it’s more like a giant’s game of pick-up-sticks, or the mounted skeleton of a huge and improbable dinosaur.

When I reached the first tower, I just stood there a minute and gawked up at the thing; it was like staring up at a giant sequoia, or an alien monolith. The experience was made all the more bizarre by the people jogging and strolling past my awestruck self and not so much as glancing up at the metal behemoth looming over them.

The tower, the even-thicker-than-me cables linking the tower to the bridge, the cars zipping past to my left, the self-absorbed pedestrians, the shrieking seagulls, the way the morning fog condensed onto the walkway’s railing in thousands of gleaming droplets – they were all great distractions, but there was no escaping the real reason I was here.

I found Devon Killane just past the midway point of the bridge, leaning against the railing and staring down at the waters of the bay.

From a hundred feet away, I stopped and just watched him, as joggers pounded on by, as couples and tourists and people on their way to work eddied past me on either side, as cyclists spun past and conversations and smartphones and the hum of traffic blurred into a single echoing rumble in the background.

I edged closer and watched my boss turn his gaze to a ferry boat making its way across the bay, its horn sounding a warning through the fog. He glanced up as a gull flashed past over his head, slicing through the chilly air on its way west to the ocean. He shifted his weight a bit, then crossed his arms on the railing and leaned on his elbows, staring east towards Alcatraz Island.

I wasn’t the only one taking a good look at him, of course. He was wrapped in the kind of stylish trench coat you’d expect a disgustingly rich guy to wear, fog beaded on his collar and in his black hair, and his stark model’s face, his aggressive jaw, and those haunting eyes were enough to make more than a few women slow down and have a good long drool as they drifted past him.

I burned with instant, irrational jealousy. One barely legal blonde bitch gawked at him, nudged her pal and nodded at my – as in MY – guy, and when they giggled together like loons, I was immediately certain they were both wretched sluts.

Back off, skanky bitches – Ashley is coming through, and you do NOT want to get in this big girl’s way.

I cut through the walkers and joggers, drew angry squawks from the Slut Twins when I accidentally-on-purpose slammed a hip into them on my way past, and then I was there, standing at Devon Killane’s side.

I leaned on the railing next to him, my left elbow only a few inches away from his right. He didn’t say a word, he didn’t seem to take any notice of me at all; he just watched the boats and the birds and the choppy water far below.

I pretended to take in the sights too. I watched a trio of gulls snapping peevishly at each other as they fought over scraps, I looked at the abandoned prison huddling on Alcatraz Island, I spotted the distinctive pyramid of the Transamerica building, and I made a special point of not looking at my boss.

Hey, I’m just another sightseer here, somebody who happens by an absolute coincidence to have taken up a position right next to a certain handsome, moody kazillionaire …

I made an even bigger point of not looking down at the icy waters directly beneath us – way, way too far beneath us for my tastes.

I shivered in the morning chill, noted the distant splash as a pelican hunting for its breakfast plunged into the swirling currents of the bay, and accepted that I’d have to make the first move.

“Once a practical teleportation technology comes on the market, all this will be so obsolete, it’s not even funny. No bridge, no cars, no boats – why, I bet even roaming bitches will beam their slutty little asses from bar to bar as they market their hoo-hahs to anyone who will buy them a drink. But hey, at least that way they won’t be tramping it up out here and forcing themselves on chaste and virginal billionaires, huh?”

His stone face held for about three more seconds, and then he snorted laughter. He still didn’t look at me, but he laughed, he shook his head, and a smile like the sun coming up spread across his face.

“Until such time as Killane Corporate Holdings corners the teleportation market, I have complete faith in my Ashley’s ability to protect me from any and all roaming bitches.”

I felt a sweet, silly thrill at the words ‘my Ashley.’ It was childish of me and then some, sure, but for those few seconds, the fantasy of being his Ashley meant everything to me.

“Tell me, Ashley, what time is it?”

I jerked back to reality, wondered for a wild second just what the time might be, then remembered that wow, I had an actual phone on me that would be happy to tell me the time.

I pulled out my mega-futuristic prototype iPhone. “Looks like it’s 8:38 a.m., big guy.”

“My, it only took you three hours and thirty-eight minutes to find me – you’ve far surpassed the record of your predecessor, though that’s hardly surprising. I don’t mind telling you, when I first pulled this disappearing nonsense on Mr. Lexington, I found it hilarious that the fool needed two days to find me.”

“And where did this happen?”

“A dark and naughty neighborhood in Bangkok, full of illicit ventures and a range of fascinating social activities that for some reason are not mentioned in the city’s travel brochures – I’ll grant that it was less than sporting of me to vanish into a place where that idiot didn’t speak the language and I did, but I believe in tossing my personal assistants into the deep end immediately, to sink or swim as fortune dictates. Did you know that Bangkok has more brothels per square mile than any other city in Asia?”

I closed my eyes as I tried and failed to keep from picturing Devon Killane getting all sweaty and frolicsome with the employees of various sleazy fleshpots in Bangkok. Then my eyelids snapped wide open again as my brain reported in with the results of a certain mathematical equation.

“Wait a minute – three hours and thirty-eight minutes, as in you’re calculating from when you first left the hotel at 5:00 a.m. until now? No fair, dude – I didn’t even get up until 7:30, and didn’t realize you were gone until at least twenty minutes after that. That makes my official Killane trackdown time no more than forty-eight minutes, tops.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Ashley.”

“How the hell do you figure?”