Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (19 page)

“Actually, he’s got a pretty sweet ass, Mom.”

Her mock gasp followed by a fit of giggles made me feel a whole lot better. I promised to keep her updated on any new developments, with special emphasis on any moments of rampant Killane assholery, and ended the call.

Generous? Mom didn’t know the half of it.

I closed out the celebrity website and went back to the one I’d been looking at before she called. This was the Killane Corporate Holdings intranet site, and I’d seen it a thousand times before; it was where all us KCH wage slaves went to check our earnings statements, change our healthcare elections – not that I’d ever been able to afford even the most humble of the company’s health plans – and generally keep track of our relations with our benevolent corporate overlords.

      For the umpteenth time, I pulled up my last pay stub from before the world turned upside down, and saw the same old hilariously inadequate figure of $13.25 an hour being tendered in exchange for my services. Check.

Now, the current pay period, which began after I started my new position – once again, I saw that I was no longer being paid on an hourly basis, but was now a salaried employee instead. And once again I ran the numbers, did the calculations, double-checked, and stared at the same inescapable conclusion I’d come to for ten times in a row.

My boss was paying me $100,000 a year to be his babysitter.

This was like going from being paid in pennies to being paid in bags of African blood diamonds. This was like swapping a rusty tricycle for a new Lamborghini. This was all kinds of crazy, that’s what this was.

Technically, it did make a rough sort of sense. Some hard-core googling revealed that personal assistants to top-level executives often did receive pay in the six-figure range – but I still had trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that I was now part of a world where this was considered a reasonable sum to pay someone for the onerous duty of riding herd on a rich guy’s whims. Not to mention that $100,000 meant about as much to Devon Killane as a grungy green penny did to me.

Oh, and benefits? Try a health plan that covered every possible medical condition under the sun, that paid for every procedure that could conceivably be seen as necessary in this or any other universe, that authorized hospital stays lasting from a day to infinity, and all for a cost to me of zero dollars and no cents – not even a freakin’ co-pay. 

I refused to believe it until I’d spent an hour on hold and then twenty minutes talking to two different customer service reps who independently confirmed that yes, this was an unadvertised, exclusive, elite level of impossibly great coverage afforded only to Killane’s chosen few. Did I mention that this plan also provided the same one hundred percent coverage for Mom, from now until the end of time?

Or at least until Devon Killane got tired of me.

I wanted to believe that wouldn’t happen. I wanted to believe that Mom was worrying too much, that I was smart enough and strong enough to not get hurt, that for once a real, imperfect girl with too many curves and not a whole lot other than heart to recommend her could live the fantasy that all those magazines were selling.

More than anything, I wanted to believe in the Devon Killane I saw in his rare unguarded moments. I wanted to believe in him when he was goofy and adorable, when he flashed his smile that was like the sun coming up, when he laughed, when he held me in his arms and made me feel that I was safe and could never be hurt again while I was with him.

I wanted to believe he wouldn’t leave me, even though every other man I’d ever known had deserted me.

I wanted to believe he was real.

12. The Special Project

Humans can get used to anything.

Three weeks into my new job as keeper of the Chief Executive Ego, I had accompanied the boss to an air show in Dubai and taken notes during board meetings in London and Hong Kong. I plied him with tons of questions as we toured factories he owned in Argentina, and I was hit with a storm of wolf whistles when we made a post game appearance in the locker room of the NBA team he also owned.

I held his clothes while he swam naked in a Central Park fountain at three in the morning, and then talked three cops out of arresting him on indecent exposure charges. I also persuaded the big guy to not make a surprise visit to North Korea – dropping in unannounced on isolated, hungry, crazy people with lots of guns was not a scenario likely to end well, I pointed out, particularly since they were probably among the few people on the planet who had no idea who he was.

For a former receptionist accustomed to decisions about which variety of doughnuts to buy and which fake smile to wear, this was heady stuff.

Oh, and I also told the White House to fuck off – did I mention that yet?

That memorable moment came during one of Mr. Killane’s morning workouts in the lavishly appointed gym twenty floors below his office at company headquarters. I had the fun duty of sending out a mass email ordering all employees high and low to steer clear of the gym on this particular sunny morning in late March, since Mr. K didn’t care for company while exercising. I also had the much more fun duty of standing around and watching while my ripped and muscular boss did his sweaty thing on various weight machines.

The call from Washington came a few minutes after he’d moved on from a resistance machine that looked like a device designed by some perverted medieval torture expert to a reasonably conventional treadmill. Sexy walking escalated into a steady and very sexy jog, and I was happily comparing seeing him wearing sweatpants and no shirt to seeing him in just that amazing towel back in San Francisco when his phone started braying.

I picked it up, wondered who a contact labeled ‘Beggar in Chief’ calling from a Washington, D.C. area code might be, and ceased wondering when two aides and one chief of staff later, I found myself talking to, yes, the actual President of the United States.

“Ms. Daniels, it’s a pleasure to speak to you – you know, I think you’ve been on more front pages than I have lately. Are you enjoying your new job?”

Whoa, small talk with the President? Okay, I could do this …

“Um, never a dull moment, sir – speaking of my job, may I let Mr. Killane know the reason for your call?”

The leader of the free world chuckled. “Well, it’s an old story – I’ve got a re-election campaign coming up, and I’d like to see if I can pry a spare few million or so out of him. He’s infamous for being just about the only guy in his income class who doesn’t give money to politicians, but I figure it’s worth taking another shot.”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath, sir, but hang on and I’ll see if he’s available.” I put the President on hold, since I’m all cool like that, and waggled the phone at my boss.

“The President of the United States wants your money, big guy – what do I tell him?”

Mr. Killane never broke stride as he took a swig from a bottle of expensive and trendy vitamin water. I admired the way sweat dripped off his chest and the play of his powerful arm muscles as he returned the water bottle to its holder in the treadmill’s console – but why did the sweatpants have to hide his gorgeous thighs from me? Had the man never heard of shorts?

I jerked back to non-hormonal reality when the boss spoke. “I am deathly sick of vote whores begging to use my money for the purpose of deceiving the public. Feel free to tell that fool I’m far more likely to give a fully automatic assault rifle to every toddler in America than I am to give him a single thin Roosevelt dime.”

“So you’re saying I should tell the President of These United States to fuck off?”

Mr. K continued his easy lope, but the sudden devilish glint in his eye combined with his I’m-about-to-be-oh-so-bad grin told me I was in for another of those never-dull moments.

“What I am saying, my bold and lovely Ashley, is that if you tell him ‘fuck off, Mr. President’ in those exact words, I will donate one million dollars to the homeless shelter of your choice.” He eased into a faster stride as a blissful, my-work-here-is-done smile settled on his face.

That was easier than choosing whether to have jamocha mint ice cream or raw turnips for dessert.

“Mr. President, are you there?”

“I’m here and waiting, Ms. Daniels.”

“Then on behalf of Killane Corporate Holdings and the good and decent people of this great nation, I’d like to instruct you to fuck off, Mr. President.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, fella. You need to fuck most firmly off, you need to fuck yourself too, and if you have a minute, I’d be happy to suggest the most effective positions for fucking yourself and everyone in your immediate vicinity, as well as which brands of lube you might care to –”

Why he hung up on me at that point is a mystery for the ages.

Meanwhile, Mr. Killane shut off the treadmill, stumbled to a stop, and leaned over the console of the machine laughing like a loon. He laughed until he couldn’t breathe, he lurched away from the treadmill and sat down on a nearby weight bench to laugh some more, and when he was able to form actual words, he said, “Make that two million dollars, and I’d pay many times more if I could only see his face right now.” He barely managed to add something about my being magnificent before collapsing into a fresh fit of laughter.

I considered that to be a morning’s work well done.

Calls were all kinds of fun – if it wasn’t the President, it was some slinky Oscar winner or tattooed rock goddess wanting to know why Killane didn’t call her anymore. Sometimes it might be a roadie for Rats Eat My Brain advising me in limited English that the band needed bail money to get out of a jail in Malawi, while on other days it was Oprah pleading for an interview. Yep, that phone was an endless source of entertainment.       

Business meetings, not so much.

In theory, I didn’t need to know squat about Devon Killane’s business dealings – my job was shepherding his delicate psyche through the trials of daily existence, not keeping watch on his money. In practice, sitting at his elbow through a dozen or more daily sessions of executives and aides and analysts and corporate drones of every variety going on at excruciating length about profit and loss meant that I picked up a thing or two.

Most of what I figured out seemed reasonable enough. Profits needed to be maximized and then either saved or reinvested to become the seeds of future and greater profits; varying strategies for how these things might be accomplished were the subject of much tedious debate. Developing new fields of endeavor and securing fresh sources of income were also common topics, as was which executive or temperamental visionary was best suited to lording it over some corner or other of the Killane empire.

All in all, boring but reasonable stuff.

Devon Killane being who and what he was, though, more than a few unreasonable business scenarios popped up from time to time.

But hey, maybe he needed an abandoned amusement park in China for something – who am I to judge? I’m sure he got a sweet deal on those decommissioned missile silos in the Ukraine, and who couldn’t use twenty metric tons of beanbag chairs? I’m also not prepared to condemn him for buying that salt mine in Poland and then having it flooded for no apparent reason – maybe he was wiping out a nest of vampires, who knows?

Those deals were no big secret – mildly quirky and no more than low-level crazy on the Killane Insanity Scale, these weirder acquisitions were a common subject of gossip in the halls of Killane Corporate Holdings.

But as the days grew longer and the weeks bled away, another deal was not being talked about in the corridors or dissected over microwaved lunches in the break room.

This deal was spoken of only after junior executives were dismissed from the room. When a meeting concluded with aides and secretaries and entry-level ass kissers being sent away, I knew this deal was about to be discussed. The senior board members and department heads left behind would often glance at me in these moments, but Mr. Killane’s deadly glare dared them to try to have me sent out, and I always stayed.

They didn’t have anything to fear, of course, since I had next to no idea what this mysterious piece of business was all about. No name was ever attached to it, at least not in my hearing; the closest it ever came to a name when I was around was when one grim executive or another referred to it as ‘the special project.’

All I could divine from what little I heard was that it was a hostile takeover of some sort, though the identity of the company or person or whatever Mr. Killane wanted to absorb was never revealed in my presence. And sure, hostile takeovers were part of the boss’s daily bread and butter, but this one was different.

For one thing, Mr. K was usually calm and distant, or harsh and decisive, or mellow, or occasionally angry when deals were being discussed; but when this ‘special project’ was on the table, tension hummed through him like an electrical charge. His face paled, he clamped his fingers deep into the leather armrests of his chair, he contributed only a few words or a nod when his input was required, and every shivering line of his body spoke of an explosion waiting to happen.