Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (20 page)

Once when I settled a hand on his arm during one of these moments, silently trying to bring him down from whatever mental precipice he was on, he nearly jumped right out of his chair. He sucked in a sharp breath, darted his eyes around the room to see if anyone had noticed his lapse – so far as I could tell, no one had – and then took my hand and held it, behind his desk and out of sight, for the rest of the meeting.

For another thing, Uncle Sheridan the Jedi was always present for discussions of the special project. Common, run-of-the-mill business was usually conducted without his calm, deliberate presence – but if this mystery deal was the topic at hand, the old man was there.

Usually he stood or strolled about in the background, nodding or murmuring at appropriate moments, but I could tell he wasn’t missing a single microscopic detail. Whenever the boss spoke up, his uncle’s eyes were instantly on him, and I somehow knew the old guy sensed the nervous energy surging through Mr. Killane every bit as much as I did.

On a rainy morning in late April, Uncle Sheridan stayed behind after one of these tense, nerve-jangling meetings about the special project. The senior suits filed out of Mr. Killane’s office as the boss’s uncle held the door, nodding and smiling to each of them, shaking a hand or two, and then firmly thumping the door shut behind them.

Now it was just us three.

Mr. K sank deeper into his chair of command. Leaning back, he sighed like a man who’d just signed away his soul, and then turned his face away from us. Fingering the bridge of his nose, he stared into a distant corner of his cavernous office.

I felt six times as helpless as a newborn baby. My guy – I couldn’t help thinking of him that way, no matter how little sense it made – was hurting, and I had no freaking idea in hell of how to help him. How could I help when I didn’t even know what was wrong?

Uncle Sheridan turned away from the door and strolled toward us, hands thrust into the pockets of his tasteful and ruinously expensive suit. He stopped about six feet away from Mr. K’s desk and turned to raise an eyebrow at me. I shrugged like a useless moron, but when the old man gave me his soothing calm-old-Jedi smile, I felt a little better – not much, but a little.

He turned to his nephew. “They’ll not be happy with you when they find out.”

Mr. Killane didn’t meet his eyes. Still staring into the shadows, he replied, “They’ve been unhappy with me from the moment I was conceived.”

“I know it’s useless, but I must ask, for your sake and not for theirs – can I talk you out of this? Anyone with eyes can see what it’s doing to you.”

Mr. Killane turned away from his examination of the distant corner and faced his uncle with a faint smile. “What it’s doing to me is irrelevant.”

“I think it’s relevant as hell.”

Both men turned to me. Uncle Sheridan’s gaze was tired and understanding, while the boss looked at me like a drowning man who wasn’t sure if trying for the nearest lifeboat was even worth it.

“Mr. K, I don’t know what’s going on or who ‘they’ are, but I do know you can’t let them do this to you. Tell those assholes to get lost, and then drop this thing, whatever it is.”

I nodded toward the floor-to-ceiling window, now covered with an endless sliding cascade of rain drops. “After that, we’ll blow this town and head for a tropical beach somewhere, okay? You can stretch out on the white sand and work on your tan, while I guzzle mai tais and beat women off with you with a stick – deal?”

Uncle Sheridan nodded in my direction and smiled. “That’s a smart girl you’ve got there, Devon – you should listen to her.”

Mr. Killane turned towards me and his face lit up with one of his patented magnificent smiles. “She’s far better than I deserve, I know that well enough.”

Then in a single heartbreaking instant, his smile faded. He turned away from me, leaned forward, and covered his face with both hands. When he looked up at his uncle again, his haunting blue-violet eyes were distant and cold.

“I also know that they leave me with no choice. I will do this, and when the time comes, they will all take their medicine and like it. I respect your opinion, Uncle, but I won’t change my mind.”

The old man sighed, glanced over at me, then turned back to his nephew – well, grand-nephew, but whatever. “Just remember that there’s still time to take another path. Most of the pieces are in place, but up until you give the final word, you can still walk away from this.”

“No, I cannot. The pieces have been in place from the moment I was born, and I will topple them into chaos as surely as the sun will rise over that tropical beach I’ll never see.”

My heart felt as if it struggled in the grip of an iron hand, a hand that held it pinned and struggling inside my chest. What was my guy talking about? I wanted to know, I was terrified to know, and I felt like a rat trapped in an endless maze.

Uncle Sheridan soldiered on. “Devon, I only ask you to promise one thing. If you do nothing else I ask, will you at least promise to do this one thing for me?”

The boss got that guarded look on his face, the look of a man who didn’t know if he dared to trust that two plus two might equal four. I learned just how strongly he felt about his uncle in the moment when he looked up at him and sighed, “Yes. Yes, I will.”

I jumped a little when Uncle Sheridan turned and pointed to me. “Promise me you will listen to Miss Daniels. Promise me you will listen to her, that you will keep her close by your side, that you will stay in her company whenever you can. She has a brave and kind heart, Devon – listen to her, trust her, and I promise that she will not steer you wrong.”

Mr. Killane stared at his uncle for two or three heartbeats. Then the crazy bastard turned and hit me with that blazing, heart-melting smile that no woman in her right mind could resist.

“You see, Ashley? Even your favorite Jedi master agrees that you should sleep with me.”

He brayed laughter like a donkey huffing nitrous oxide and Uncle Sheridan adopted the blissful smile of an angel having dirty thoughts, while I just gawped at both of them and realized I was doomed.

13. Sushi

I sealed my own fate less than two weeks later, during lunch in the boss’s office.

It began with one of those entertaining phone calls. This time it was Sasha Hollins on the line, as in the Sasha Hollins who’d won three Emmys and a Golden Globe or two for her starring role as a police detective who solved crimes with the power of her magic vagina – okay, there was probably more to it than that, but it’s not like I watched her show much; I just knew her character dressed more like a runway model than an actual cop, and that she didn’t so much question suspects as just aggressively thrust her slinkiness at them.

She called near the end of a morning that had been one solid block of meetings. Every minute was crammed with a host of ornate details about profit and loss and quarterly earnings and spreadsheets and market projections, and by the time the meetings were over and lunch was delivered – sushi for Mr. Killane, a steak panini for me – my ears were bleeding from boredom.

That’s when Mr. K’s iPhone sounded off, warbling the theme from Sasha Slut’s TV show.

“Boss, do you want me to get that?”

My question had to make it around a mouthful of peppers and melted cheddar, while Mr. Killane leaned back in his executive chair of command, propped his feet on his battleship of a desk, and popped chunks of sushi – cold raw fish, yeccch – into his mouth from a plate balanced on his midsection.

“Please do, lovely Ashley – but might I request that you put her on speaker? I’ve been ignoring poor Sasha’s calls ever since you and I met, so listening to her frustrated whining erupting from my phone should be quite entertaining.”

“Will do, big guy.” I retrieved the phone from his desk, set my plate aside – this bitch was going to pay for interrupting my steak panini – and swiped the screen to take the call. I murmured the deepest unidentifiable “Mmm-hmmm?” that I could manage, tapped the speaker icon, and dropped the phone back onto his desk to await the fun.

“My god, Devon, finally! I’ve been trying to reach you for months now, do you realize that? Between my shooting schedule and the script changes and the way you’ve been ignoring me, my nerves are shot, baby.”

Her simpering fucktoy whine set my teeth on edge. I was also so not fond of this sleek little whore calling MY guy ‘baby’ and using his first name, particularly when I didn’t even do that yet.

Meanwhile, she babbled on. “I’ve been so lonely without you, Devon, you just can’t imagine it. I can’t handle being by myself and I certainly can’t be with anyone else, Devon, not after you – you understand that, right?”

Really, bitch? That grainy footage on Youtube that shows you pawing one of your co-stars outside a motel last week says you can handle being with someone else just fine.

“So on top of everything else, you know what it does to me when every other magazine cover I see has a fresh picture of you with your arm around that nobody of a fat chick – please, Devon, tell me you are not fucking that whale. I don’t even want to picture what that would be like – anyway, you’re not, are you?”

Man, shooting down this tramp was going to make my day. I glanced over at Mr. K and he nodded his agreement – the right moment had arrived.

I turned toward the phone and purred in my most innocent kitten-drinking-milk voice.

“I’m afraid Mr. Killane isn’t available at the moment to take your call, Ms. Hollins. May I give him a message for you?”

“Who the hell is this?”

“This is the nobody of a fat chick he’s fucking.”

I could list all the obscenities she screamed at that point, but why bother? Let’s just say that after she gave her vocal cords and the nastiest corners of the English language a serious workout, we heard what sounded like her phone slamming into something hard at a high speed, and then the call cut off.

Mr. Killane grinned like a devil. “You’re such a naughty girl for fibbing to Sasha like that – if your word means anything at all to you, then obviously you must sleep with me immediately.”

“Right here and now, boss? With onions on my breath and your mouth tasting like nasty-ass uncooked fish?”

I kept my voice light and silly, but a tremor ran through me. My body thought that jumping his body here and now was a fine idea, onions and sushi and all.

He didn’t help matters at all when he held up his plate and added, “Why, I can see it now – your lush, ripe body open to me, with bits of my lunch placed on it at various interesting locations, delicious mouthfuls that I would then eat right off your warm skin. Can you imagine my sucking sushi from your nipples, sweet Ashley?”

Hell yes, I could imagine it. Me and my hard nipples could imagine that scenario all day long …

I had to keep control, though, or at least fake it. I knew that if I didn’t get a handle on where this conversation was going, I might really end up naked and covered with sushi right there on his desk, and that would just be unbearably weird.

Yeah, and hot as hell, too, I admit it.

But not only was I aroused as anything, I was also scared. I was scared and uncertain, and I wondered what all this meant – because after all, Sasha Slutster wasn’t the only frustrated celebrity tramp lusting after my boss.

The gossip magazines couldn’t stop talking about us. Things had died down on that front since the initial flurry of ‘ooh, he’s jumping a chubby girl!’ covers, but now interest in our non-relationship had flared up again. Multiple models and singers and porn stars and reality attention-sluts gave pouting ‘what about meeeee?’ interviews in which his lack of interest in anyone other than yours truly was criticized, puzzled over, and generally assumed to be an absolute fact of nature, like gravity and calories.

Was he being faithful to me? Why? And how can you be faithful to someone you’re not even sleeping with in the first place?

It felt like shooting myself in the foot to even ask, but I had to know.

“Mr. K, do you remember when we traded questions over dinner, back in San Francisco?”

“I remember it well, Ashley. Are we going to play that game again now?”

The big guy made an elaborate show of yawning, then dipped a raw glob of fish into some vile green sauce and gulped it down. He arched an eyebrow at me and waited.

“Well, not as such, no – but you said that night you hadn’t been with a woman since I started working as your amateur therapist and babysitter, right? For what at the time was a total of five days?”

“Correct.” He peered with an expert’s eye at one chunk of fish that was probably from an endangered species or something, rejected it in favor of another bit of nastiness, and downed that one like a pro.

“And you still haven’t had any filthy, raunchy, bumpin’ uglies sex since I started this job, have you?”

“I have not participated in one single incident of sexual union involving another person since the morning I confronted a certain strong-willed and captivating woman over doughnuts in the lobby. I have been a chaste and pure angel of control for you, Ashley, to the tune of three months and eight days so far.”