Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (55 page)

I thought it over while I didn’t read and he stared, and I decided I was done with maybe – it was time to make this strange, broken guy I couldn’t help but love tell me what was going on, before it was too late for knowing to make any difference.

Tick, tock.

35. Confession

I snapped the book shut. A puff of dust rose from the pages, and then I tossed all those soldiers and explosions onto the floor. The leather-bound volume thumped onto the pine planks like a spent cannonball, Devon twitched and looked around as if he was waking up from a dream, and I did my best to take charge of the situation – like Lee cleaning up the place with blue uniforms after the Seven Days battles, if you squint hard and use tons of imagination.

“Devon, why are we here?”

He stared at me with those peculiar, unforgettable eyes.

“Devon, why are we here, really? Don’t tell me it was to see off the last dusty bits of Uncle Sheridan, because we squared that away in the first five minutes. Granted, the place has grown on me since then, just like you said it would, but getting me in tune with the great outdoors is not why you insisted on coming here, is it?”

He glanced once more, just once, into the kingdom of night outside the window, and then he stood up. I noticed he still insisted on being way taller than was reasonable.

“I should have known you wouldn’t let me escape.”

Instead of elaborating, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans, looked around, and his gaze landed on the kitchen.

“Ashley, might we have a midnight snack while I answer your question? Granted, it actually feels like somewhere between nine and ten o’clock – but a midnight snack sounds rather more appropriate for a confession, don’t you think?”

“Confessions are for guilty people, big guy, and I’d bet serious money you’re not guilty of anything that needs confessing.”

He turned on one heel. He tilted his head to one side, and he stared at me like a giant, handsome, odd-eyed scarecrow.

“Ashley, I am guilty of more than your kind heart can imagine.”

He kept staring.

Pins dropped on every planet in the solar system.

Suddenly that midnight snack sounded pretty good.

Five minutes later, I lounged in a chair at the table in the cabin’s kitchen corner, while Devon and our temperamental woodstove conspired to produce bacon and eggs.

The big guy selected strips of bacon with the professional eye of a surgeon deciding on the right scalpel. Once they were sizzling in the iron skillet that he said was the only kind of pan that could cook bacon properly, he glanced over at me.

“Ashley, I must say that breakfast seems like an odd sort of meal for this time of night – are you quite certain you wouldn’t rather have sandwiches, or soup, or perhaps even a nice little slice of sirloin?”

“You, Devon Killane, are accusing
me
of being odd?”

He nodded, adding a smile almost made it to his eyes. “Point taken.”

“Besides, as a veteran of a lot of midnight breakfasts, I can testify that bacon and eggs are great food for the soul and perfect confession fuel – get a whole lot of grease and cancer-causing nitrates under your belt, and you’ll confess to all kinds of crap, trust me. So keep frying, evil guilty boy.”

My eggs arrived at the table in the form of a ham-cheese-and-gobs-of-green-peppers omelet, and right behind came a platter piled high with grease-dripping bacon that could make you gain weight and have a heart attack just by looking at it.

Orange juice chilled to within an inch of its life followed, condensation dripping down the sides of the glass pitcher as Devon set it next to the bacon. He brought over his own plate of scrambled eggs, he sat down across from me, and that was it.

Confession time.

He didn’t try to waffle or evade or drag things out any longer, I’ll give him that – he got right down to business.

“Ashley, I did not bring you here to deceive you.”

He looked at me and into me, and he never broke eye contact while he forked up a helping of scrambled eggs.

“I brought you to these mountains because there are certain things you deserve to know, things you need to hear before … well, before.”

He chewed.

Before? Before the hell what?

He swallowed.

“I brought you to this place to hear these awful things because this forest, that meadow and our river, and the granite mountains that climb to the clouds have always brought me closer to peace than anything else ever has – until I discovered the safe haven of your arms.”

He picked up the pitcher and poured a stream of orange juice into his glass. He filled my glass too, although I hadn’t asked him to, seeing as how I was too busy staring at him, staring at him and wanting to wrap those safe arms of mine around him and stop this confession before it got started, because I’m a coward that way.

He put the pitcher back down with a decisive thunk, and I watched the juice in my glass shimmer as a faint vibration ran through it.        

“I thought that here, in the midst of this calm and quiet and safety, I could find the strength to tell you what you need to hear from me. Instead, it seems that I have deceived myself.”

My voice was so small, I could barely hear myself. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s quite all right, I will explain.”

He sipped his juice, in much the same way he would have during a break at a business meeting about stock options and market indicators and a thousand other dry, passionless financial mysteries. Was all of that really still waiting for us out there? Did we have to go back to it?

“Rather than using this interlude to focus myself and find strength, I have instead used it to escape. I have escaped by teaching you how to love this place as I do, by showing you the wild creatures and watching the stars beside you, by walking the trails at your side, by reading to you, and by talking with you about everything except what I came here to talk about.”

He lifted three slices of bacon from the mountain of greasiness on the platter between us, settled the piggy goodness on his plate, and looked up at me.

I stared back, forcing myself to keep eye contact. What was this confession that was coming? What did he do? More likely, what did he
think
he’d done?

I knew right down to the marrow of my bones that he wasn’t cheating on me, that wasn’t it – he couldn’t have done that any more than the sun could have casually decided to come up in the west one morning. Was he … did he maybe have a terminal illness? Was that what he was working up to telling me? Or perhaps ‘before’ referred to –

“Ashley?”

“Yes, Devon?” Here it comes …

“Ashley, I do believe your omelet’s getting cold.”

Way to blindside me with trivia, asshole.

I looked down at my cholesterol special. “So it is.”

“Did I not prepare it to your satisfaction?”

Screw this, let’s cut through all this nervous fumbling crap and get to the point, okay?

“Devon, are you sick?”

“Excuse me?”

A fork-speared chunk of bacon stopped halfway to his mouth. He raised one eyebrow, he pulled his head back a bit, and he looked like a man who’d just been presented with absolute proof that two plus two equals sixteen.

“Big guy, do you have … I don’t know, cancer? Something heart-stopping and final and incurable, is that it? If it is, we’ll get through it somehow, I promise. I don’t quite know how, but –”

“Ashley, I undergo two complete physicals a year – you know that, because you schedule them. An entire stable of doctors pokes and prods me, blood is drawn and X-rays are taken, and you would be the first to know if they found anything amiss, but they never do. To the best of my knowledge, I am in perfect physical health.”

He finished sending the forkful of bacon to his mouth, chewed and swallowed, and then added, “My mental health, of course, is another matter entirely.”

“Smartass. So anyway, if it’s not cancer or mad cow disease or rabies, what is it? What do you need to tell me? Is your entire financial kingdom about to explode in a spectacular meltdown that will crash the world’s economy? Do you have a secret identity as a serial killer who lures curvy girls to remote rural cabins? Was it you on the grassy knoll in Dallas?”

I dumped a spattering of ketchup onto my omelet, tossed a couple of slices of bacon on the thing for good measure, and dug in. Calories always take the edge off bad news, right?

“Ashley, I know you and Uncle Sheridan likely discussed me and my peculiarities at great length in that McDonald’s, over caffeine and industrialized food products –”

“We talked about how someone we both loved had been fucked over by life, Devon. And by the way, never diss the honor of alleged meat and yummy synthetic glop, because that’s how girls like me grow big and strong and badass, okay?”

“Understood. Did Uncle Sheridan tell you how my father died?”

Great, that. I wanted to know, I didn’t want to know, and I needed to know. So I washed down a mouthful of my real, non-industrialized omelet with a swallow of orange juice that was probably mostly real while I looked through my mental files.

“He said you told him what happened to your dad. He said he was pretty sure you’d be fine with him telling me about it, but then he clammed up and refused to unveil the big, bad secret.”

“And did Uncle reveal why he chose not to tell you that ghastly tale?”

“He said I needed to hear it from you. I said I felt like you’d already gone above and beyond when it came to telling me heart wrenching stories, but he wouldn’t budge.”

 I searched my memory, then added, “He also said it was pretty messy, but he didn’t get into specifics as to why – just implied an open-casket funeral was out of the question, and the guy had to be cremated.”

“Messy is putting it mildly. My father’s death was pretty messy in the same way the Pacific Ocean is rather damp. I had nightmares for weeks, months … I still have the occasional heart-stopping black dream about his death.”

“So how did it happen?”

He sidled around my question while pouring a generous dollop of Canadian maple syrup over his bacon.

“Pictures were taken, both by the coroner’s office and one or two bystanders with strong stomachs and an appetite for the grotesque; I understand that the images may in fact be found within the darker recesses of Google, but I would not advise searching for them.”

“Well, I was all over the internet hunting for details about his death after Uncle Sheridan took off that morning …”

My voice trailed off as I remembered that was the last time I’d seen him, but then I booted that memory aside and moved on. “Um, anyway, I didn’t think to look for pictures, because I got bogged down just trying to uncover the basic facts of what happened. All the articles and video links just kept repeating something about a riding accident, that it happened on Long Island, that the family was heartbroken – ”

“His family hated him with a passion.”

“ – that the list of high-and-mighty types attending the services was a mile long –”

“Strangers hated him too.”

“ – and that he was survived by a single son.”

“Everyone hated me.”

“You hate you, that’s the problem here.” I didn’t plan to say that, it just sort of blurted out of my mouth without permission, but that’s not to say it was wrong; the idea of how Devon would react was kind of scary, but he took no more offense than if I’d said he hated Hitler, or shooting puppies, or Christmas sales starting six months before Christmas.

“I have many excellent reasons to hate myself, so I don’t see my being logical about it as a problem, but I grant that you might feel differently.

“In any case, you’re right about the mystery – the Killane scandal machine went into overdrive after my father died, as my uncles called in favors left and right and sideways, and so the matter slipped into the news and out again as quietly and with as few details as possible.”

I should have known this would be like pulling teeth. I polished off another bite of my omelet, and then volunteered the best guess I’d come up with during my online investigation.

“So, if it was a riding accident … did he crash his motorcycle? Was that it?”

Devon stopped midway through gathering another forkful of scrambled eggs, answering my question with the same raised eyebrow and look of honest puzzlement that had greeted my oh-so-wrong guess that he was terminally ill.

“So far as I know, my father never owned or rode a motorcycle. Where did that idea come from?”

I shrugged. “Well, ‘riding accident’ suggested something involving a horse, but your dad didn’t strike me as being the horsey type. But from what I did know of him, he seemed very much like the type who’d think it was a swell idea to get blind stinking drunk, climb onto some huge crotch rocket of a motorcycle without a helmet, and then splatter himself all over the highway. But I take it I’m all wrong about that?”

And he shrugged. “Not as such, since had the idea occurred to him, that sounds exactly like something he would have done – perhaps even if he knew he’d crash, because he was just that contrary.”