Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (46 page)

“In any case, once counted, the money disappeared into Devon’s pocket. He then produced a single sheet of paper, filled in the amount on a blank line provided for the purpose, then signed at the bottom of the page.

“Devon then pushed the document across the table to his uncles.

“ ‘Sign.’

“Kennan Killane, the oldest of his uncles, spoke for them all. ‘You can’t make us sign one single damn thing more, you ungrateful bastard, so you and your precious little paper there can just go fuck each other.’

“He leaned back, crossed his arms, and the rest of the Killanes mirrored him. Devon told us that their lawyers, however, looked just a tad bit nervous – they had more wits than their masters, and sensed that blood and more was in the water.

“Devon, as always, knew exactly what he was about. ‘Oh, I think you want to sign my precious little paper.’

“Suspicion percolated through the Killanes. They looked at each other, they eyed their lawyers as if daring them to make sense out of what was going on, and then they stared at Devon’s single sheet of paper. Finally, Kenmare Killane reached out and used just one fingertip to pull the paper closer, as if he expected it might bite him.

“They read it. They stared at each other. They read it again, one by one. They read it together a third time, while stealing occasional glances at Devon. They showed it to their lawyers, who scanned through it line by line as their faces went slack with shock.

“Kennan Killane then stood up, snatched the paper from the hands of the family’s senior lawyer, and slammed it down in the center of the table with the flat of his hand. With the page still under his hand, he stared down the entire Killane legal team.

“ ‘Just tell me one thing – is this real? Is this a legitimate goddamn document?” He whipped his head around to glare daggers at Devon – who smiled at him with the innocence of a Golden Retriever puppy – and then he turned back to the Killane lawyers. ‘Because I don’t trust that batshit kid for one second, and I just know he’s fucking with us somehow.’

“He snatched the paper from the table and waved it under the nose of the Killanes’ lead lawyer. ‘So I’m asking you, is this rag legit? Is it binding?’

“Devon told us he felt sorry for the head of their legal team. The man sighed as if having second, third, and fourth thoughts about working for the Killanes, and when he spoke, his voice was dry, clipped, and distant – the voice of a man who would have been deliriously happy to be almost anywhere else, working for anyone else.

“ ‘Sir, it is my judgment, based on my extensive experience in contract law, that what we have here is indeed a legitimate legal document. All concerned individuals signing it are agreeing to a legally binding sale, with the property in question being rendered over to you and your associates in exchange for the consideration of six dollars and twenty-nine cents. As Devon Killane has received said consideration, all that is now required are your signatures, and the sale will then be complete.’ ”

“Wait up – no, he did NOT do what that sounds like … did he?”

“Indeed he did, Miss Daniels. Devon sold his majority share of Killane Industries – worth at that time over four billion dollars – back to his uncles for six dollars and change.”

Holy shit. “Why? How did that make any sense at all?”

“Once I picked my jaw up off the floor, I asked him that same question. Once I heard his answer, I realized that I had never respected him more than in that moment.

“He looked at me from across the dining room table – the same table, as it happens, that we’d sat at when he asked me where his mother was, all those years before. He looked at me, he looked around at my household staff, and it seemed so simple, so obvious when he said it.

“ ‘I couldn’t let my father win. He took everything from Mama and from me, and I couldn’t let him win. He wanted to hang Killane Industries around my neck like a millstone, forcing me into years of conflict with my uncles, laughing from beyond the grave while we drove each other mad, and I couldn’t let him get away with that. I’d already lost everything else to him, and I determined that I wouldn’t let him take my future as well.’ ”

“But didn’t his uncles score a major win? I mean, they got all that sweet, sweet money that they’d been lusting after for years, and they got it for next to nothing. How could he let them win?”

“I asked him that, rather wondering if he grasped that he’d thrown away all my years of effort in keeping his inheritance safe for him – and his answer was cryptic, maddening, and pure Devon.

“He looked me right in the eye, he smiled, and he said, ‘No, Uncle, I did not let them win – I let them think that they’d won.’ He did not elaborate, despite all my efforts to worm out of him an answer that made some sort of sense.”

“So he was dead broke but free of the Killanes, he had his whole life in front of him, and he did … what?”

Uncle Sheridan swirled a dollop of fake cream into his coffee. “Devon had some specific ideas about his immediate future, and he was not in fact with me for long. Harvard was the best source, he told me, for both an education and the connections that would fuel future business endeavors, and might I be interested in funding him for a four-year stay?

“I agreed to bankroll his grand scheme, and it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. It was somewhat harder to persuade such a selective institution to accept someone with Devon’s erratic educational history, but a few calls to friends in the administration and a generous donation to the dean’s favorite charity transformed their reluctant fussing into a place for Devon in the freshman class that fall.

“He thrived at Harvard – no one there knew or cared about his personal history, and he found the course work about as challenging as you or I would find a game of tic-tac-toe. The women were more than friendly, he stayed out of fights and earned perfect grades, and as far as his daily experience was concerned, the Killanes might as well have vanished off the face of the earth.”

“I guess I know the panic attacks didn’t go away entirely, but did he at least get a little bit of a break from those, with the uncles from hell off his back?”

“It is my best guess that the occasional attacks seized him during his time at Harvard, in stray moments of stress and self-doubt – but that is one of many secrets he has kept shut away from the world.

“As for the rest, after he graduated with every honor available – well, you know the rest. Everyone does. Building a small loan I gave him into a global empire, absorbing companies and technologies and rivals, owning virtually everything anyone might care to own, and accumulating yet more at every turn of the road – it’s all there in the public record.

“I watched Devon’s meteoric rise to the summit of the business world, I watched him pile up more money than anyone could ever spend or give away or burn, and I always assumed it was done in the name of security – that, and outdoing the Killanes, rubbing their noses in the fact that they couldn’t begin to achieve between them the destiny that a single terrified, rootless child had built up from next to nothing.

“I thought leaving them behind in the dust was the future Devon had in mind when he said he’d allowed his uncles to think they’d won – until four years ago, when I became the first person he ever told about the special project. In that moment, I realized he had planned the Killanes’ outright destruction from the moment he signed over his inheritance to them.”

“So what’s his plan now?”

“Beg pardon?”

Out of nowhere, the moment I drove away from Devon’s place on Sunday morning popped into my head, the moment I looked into my rearview mirror to see him staring back at me with an expression I couldn’t begin to read.

What was he trying to tell me? What was he trying to keep from me?

“Miss Daniels?”

Uncle Sheridan stared at me now, worry lining his face as surely as age.

When I looked at Devon, I saw someone with a secret – a secret he was hiding from all of us, with the skill of someone who’d spent a lifetime concealing the truth of who and what he was from everyone around him.

A secret he was hiding from himself.

“Uncle Sheridan, there’s something Devon’s not telling us. The Killanes might be in jail and their family business in ruins, but something more is going on here, something he won’t tell me.”

My words tumbled over each other and I knew I must sound like a nervous idiot, but so the hell what? Devon needed me, somehow, for something, and that counted for a lot more than sounding all mannered and rational.

The toughest Jedi in town took me at my word and refused to notice that I was babbling. “Well, the special project is complete, it must be – its goal was to shatter Killane Industries beyond repair and put Devon’s uncles out into the street with nothing, and that has been accomplished.

“The fact that his father’s brothers are also under indictment and enjoying the hospitality of the federal government is an unexpected bonus – everyone always knew the Killanes were as crooked as the coastline of Wales, but there was never any proof until Devon’s people turned over the right rocks in the course of their investigation.

“So far as I can tell, the special project has more than served its particular function and is now history. What more could there be to it?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Sheridan. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know if it’s even anything to do with the special project, but I do know that I’m not imagining things. Devon looks at me, and it’s as if … as if he’s trying to fix me in his memory, like he doesn’t expect me to be around much longer.

“He talks to me, and there’s so much more to his words than what he’s saying – there’s a truth that he’s afraid to tell me, that he doesn’t want to tell me, that he’s begging me to figure out on my own. And whatever it is …”

I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know what I was basing it on. I just knew – so I just blurted it out.

“Whatever it is, sir, there’s a time limit. There’s a clock in Devon’s head that’s ticking off a countdown only he knows about – and there could be months left, or weeks, or days … or hours. I just don’t know.”

Tears welled up in my eyes, but I forced them back. Buck up, Ashley – your man needs you, and it’s not his fault that he can’t tell you why.

Uncle Sheridan stared at me the same way the Sphinx stares at the sun. He stared at me as crowds of laughing, arguing, undeniably alive kids pushed past us, as somebody yelled, and somebody else cranked up the volume on one of the flat screen TVs bolted overhead.

Just about the time I was thinking the old guy could give Jimmy staring lessons, his face softened. He looked over my shoulder at the cars and people choking the street outside, he favored his melting sundae with a glance, and then he turned back to me

“There is a great deal here that I am uncertain about, Miss Daniels, but I am quite sure of two things.

“One, I am sure that you’re right about Devon hiding a greater truth from us – I have no idea what this truth might be, but you know him as well as I do, you know him better than he knows himself, and I trust your judgment in this matter.

“Two, I know for a certainty just what Devon needs from you.”

“Then in the name of the Force, sir, you’ve got to tell me exactly what that is, because I’m feeling pretty clueless right now.”

The old man nodded. “Not long after this conversation began, you told me you wanted to know just what the Killanes had done to Devon that I found unforgivable. You told me you needed to know the worst.

“The worst was not the physical abuse. Were it only a matter of beatings, deliberate malnutrition, and denial of medical care, I am confident that Devon would have survived with his body and mind intact, because he possesses an inner strength that would serve him well if a mountain were to fall on him.

“The worst was not the mental abuse, the exquisite psychological torture that filled all the days and nights he spent under the control of his uncles and their vile families. Other children have survived being hated for their very existence, and I am confident that Devon would have done so as well, if there was no more to it than that.

“The worst was not even that they believed him to be utterly worthless and undeserving of love or care of any kind, or that they shoved that belief in his face at every opportunity.

“The worst, the one thing I cannot forgive them for, is that they made him believe it. Somewhere in all those lost years, the Killanes broke some crucial part of Devon and now he needs more than anything for you to believe in him, because he is no longer able to believe in himself.”

Now that I could do. I still felt a clock ticking somewhere, somehow, a relentless countdown that had Devon’s name all over it – but in the meantime, I’d believe in him enough for both of us.

I opened my mouth to tell Uncle Sheridan so, but instead of me babbling, we both heard the classical strains of Mozart echoing from the depths of his suit jacket.

Mild and mannered as ever, the classiest honorary uncle in town pulled out his phone. “Speak of the devil and here he is – do you think that remarkable boy knows what we’ve been saying about him?”

While Uncle Sheridan put his phone to his ear, I decided I wouldn’t put it past my guy to have some weird psychic radar that kicked in whenever people talked about him – that seemed like Devon’s style. Uncanny, deliciously odd, and smarter than the offspring of a supercomputer getting all freaky with Stephen Hawking – yep, that’s the boyfriend fate decided to toss your way, Ashley. Where fate got its twisted sense of humor was a whole other subject, one that –

“Why yes, Miss Daniels is still here.” A pause. “Certainly, if you like.”

Uncle Sheridan tapped his phone, and then set it in the middle of the table. “Devon asked me to put him on speaker, as it seems he wishes to speak to both of us.”

As it turned out, he insisted on speaking to the entire restaurant.

“UNCLE, ARE YOU RAVISHING MY GIRLFRIEND IN THE MIDDLE OF McDONALD’S?”

Every head in the place turned our way, because of course the big crazy-making goofball not only shouted that question at max volume on purpose, but he also had the perfect timing to do it just as the buzz of conversations surrounding us dropped off for a few seconds.