Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (36 page)

“Ashley, I must ask you a question.”

“Go for it – after two crying jags in one night, though, I can’t promise any answer I come up with will make a whole lot of sense.”

He pitched his voice higher and did a pretty fair Ashley Daniels imitation as he bounced my own words back at me.

“Honestly, my lovely big girl, what the hell’s wrong with you, that you’ve saddled yourself with such a weird, needy boyfriend?”

I choked back a giggle, and then he dropped back into his own voice and added, “Particularly one who tells such ghastly stories? I would think any sensible young woman in this situation would drag me back to Billionaires-R-Us and demand a refund.”

Yeah, you guessed it – just like that, he had me laughing as hard as I’d been crying only a few minutes earlier.

“I guess I’ve just developed a taste for moody duck-owning head cases with rock-solid abs and a personal army of mannequins.”

That got him laughing, and we snuggled together like a couple of happy, giggly idiots for I don’t know how long.

I do know it wasn’t long enough.

I stirred in Devon’s arms, looking up at him, not knowing what expression I wanted to see. He looked down at me, he sighed, and being the crazy smart bastard he was, he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Ashley, can you bear to hear the rest of this story?”

“I need to hear it, big guy – whether I can bear it or not is beside the point, right? Besides, you should know by now that despite all these weird crying fits, I am in fact the queen of curves and badassery – if you can say it, I can stand to hear it.”

I prayed that was true and crossed my fingers where he couldn’t see, just for insurance. “So, the King of All Earthly Assholes, aka Kevin Killane, gets this innocent kid pregnant – was that part of his dastardly plan, or a slip-up?”

Devon drew in a deep breath and shivered all over, just for an instant. Then he sat up straight, and when he spoke, his dry, calm, this-horror-show-happened-to-someone-else-entirely voice was back.

“He never spoke to me of the day he deserted her. However, I have uncovered a number of police reports filed for a date that would have been early in her pregnancy; in these reports, her neighbors claim to have heard him screaming through the thin walls of her apartment, cursing at her while she cried. The crashing sounds of overturned furniture, the impacts of assorted objects being thrown against the walls, and the fact that he stormed out alone, still shouting and issuing threats, would seem to indicate that no, he did not intend for her to carry his child.

“Mama never spoke to me of him at all. She raised me alone, somehow – it seems the diner fired her, quite illegally, after she gave birth, and I believe she may have lived on public assistance after that, although I cannot be certain.

“But our life as a family of two people cast aside by the greater world seemed quite normal to me, and I felt no loss. Other children had two parents, but to me, fathers were distant, mythical creatures, like unicorns – all I knew was Mama, and all I needed was Mama.”

“So if this festering fucktard was bored with playing sick mind games on your mom and didn’t want you, why did he come back?”

Devon smiled. “You have a magnificently foul way with words, Ashley. I’ve never heard that particular phrase applied to my father before, but it fits him to perfection.”

“Yeah, come to Ashley Daniels for all your nasty insult needs, whatever – why did he come back?”

“You won’t let me get out of this, will you?”

“Nope.”

He looked off into a distant corner of the balcony, stared down some rogue dust bunny for a minute or two, then turned back to me.

“To understand why he returned, you need to know that when he left our lives, Kevin Killane was no more than a minor player in the affairs of Killane Industries. His father and my grandfather, Karsten Killane, ruled the family’s fortune with an iron hand, and insisted on keeping his errant eldest son from assuming any serious responsibilities within the company.”

“Why? Shouldn’t he have been grooming the guy to take over someday?”

“Perhaps, but Karsten Killane never gave up an inch of control to anyone if he could help it. Not to mention that since he had eyes and ears, he knew his son Kevin to be a self-absorbed, feckless idiot who could create disaster from nothing more than a deck of cards and a ball of string, if given the opportunity. So, my grandfather made quite certain that my father was never accorded the slightest chance to get anywhere near any position where he could endanger the company’s prospects.”

“Bet that pissed your dad off, huh?”

Devon snorted and shook his head. “A better man might have been angry, but Kevin Killane had little interest in his father’s opinion of him, and still less interest in one day ruling Killane Industries. He cared only about having a vast pile of money and an endless supply of liquor and women to spend it on – as long as the tiny role he was given to play in the company didn’t keep him from indulging his vices at every turn, it would have been nothing to him if trained monkeys ran the family business.”

“But something happened to destroy your dad’s dream of fucking and drinking his life away, right?”

“Just so. I was five years old, living in bliss with Mama and quite unaware of the existence of the Killanes, when my grandfather discovered, much to his surprise, that he was not in fact immortal. A heart attack claimed him in the middle of a board meeting, and since he’d never followed through on threats to cut his oldest son out of his will, my father inherited a majority share of Killane Industries.

“The family immediately began circling all that delicious money like sharks, contesting the will on every front their lawyers could think of – but the fine print was ironclad. Kevin Killane, a hopeless drunk with only the most basic knowledge of business affairs, now controlled Killane Industries and the fate of his entire family, like it or not.”

“So did it occur to any of them to just help him learn about the business and how to handle it, or would that have made too much sense? Or maybe keep him marginalized somehow and let the senior executives who knew what was what run things? Or did the rest of the Killane tribe just figure your dad was a lost cause?”

“Ashley, the Killanes are jealous, vindictive, thoroughly hateful people, like piranhas with rabies – ideas like cooperation and mutual support are quite foreign to them. The closest they’ve ever come to functioning as a family unit was when my father’s younger brothers – you saw most of them in my office this morning, along with their worthless sons – united to fight him for control of the company.

“When they lost that fight, they nursed what few shares they had of their own – mind you, those shares were still enough to make them rich beyond any decent person’s dreams, but no amount of money is enough to a Killane – and they remained united in their mutual hatred for anything that had to do with my father.”

“Including you?”

“Oh, I was the epicenter of their hatred, Ashley – grown men and their wives and children and lawyers all hating a five-year-old boy with blind and bloody passion, because I was the one thing that kept them from seizing control.”

“Did I miss something here? You didn’t even know any of them existed, you said so just now – how were you keeping them from getting their claws into all that sweet, sweet cash?”

“The answer to that question is the reason he returned to us. You see, my father’s inheritance was conditional upon a particular requirement that my grandfather included in his will – a requirement that the old man thought would force his wayward son into becoming something like a responsible person, although the merest fool should have been able to see how poorly that would work out.

“Kevin Killane would not receive formal ownership of a controlling interest in the company until he produced an heir, thereby forcing him – or so my grandfather assumed – to bully some unfortunate woman into marrying him, to stay around her long enough to father a child, and to become at least the imitation of a responsible family man, a man with an heir who would guarantee the future stability of Killane Industries.”

“But your dad didn’t give a shit about the family business, right? So why not just hang on to enough money to keep himself in hookers and Jack Daniels for the rest of his natural life, and sign over everything else to the other Killanes, seeing as how they wanted it so badly?”

“Ah, but he did a complete turnabout and insisted on his inheritance for precisely that reason – the rest of the family wanted the company, and since he adored making other Killanes unhappy even more than he loved whores and black-out drinking, he determined that they would not have it.

“He did not, however, care to burden himself with a wife – but then he remembered Mama.”

“Oh shit.”

“Oh yes. He remembered he’d left her pregnant, and while that had seemed to be an annoying bother at the time, it now looked like a marvelously convenient way of picking up an heir on the cheap, without having to go to the trouble of hunting down a wife.”

He shuddered, sighed, and then leaned forward. I watched as he planted his elbows on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and then said nothing for several minutes of awful, bottom-dwelling silence.

Why the hell had I brought this topic up in the first place? Did I really need to know the deal with his panic attacks? Was knowing worth putting him through this, worth making him dredge up these horrifying memories? What did I think I was doing, practicing psychotherapy without a license?

“Devon, look, screw the details – your dad came back, he did something searingly horrible to you and your mom, and now can we just leave the rest of this subject for another night? You’re exhausted and I have a bad case of the guilts about making you relive your worst nightmare just to satisfy my curiosity; so enough is enough for now, okay?”

The big guy didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He just sat there, his breathing no more than a faint whisper. Sleet still rattled against the glass over our heads, and I glanced up to see that snowflakes now spiraled down through the darkness as well. Hello, winter – did this mean I’d have to navigate through drifts to get home in the morning? Did I even have to go home in the morning?

Why wasn’t this home?

Devon sat bolt upright.

I jumped a bit, startled out of my thoughts about snow and why I didn’t live here and what was going on in general. Devon now sat straight against the couch again, this time with his arms crossed over his chest and a look in his blue-violet eyes – his mom’s eyes – that said he’d come to a decision.

“No, Ashley, it is not okay.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you will recall my words in the theater, I promised to tell you when everything began – and while the list of my failings and weaknesses and character flaws spools off endlessly into eternity, I always keep my promises. So since I promised to tell you and since the telling will not grow easier with the passage of time, it is not okay to postpone this until another day.

“I might also mention, my lovely and patient Ashley, that you and I both understand you are not asking me to tell you this out of mere curiosity – you wish to know because you wish to help me, although I fear I am far beyond help at this point.”

“I’ll be the judge of that, smart guy – so, spill it. Your dad came back to get you, and then what happened?”

He stared down at his hands and sighed. “Ashley, how well do you remember the events of this morning?”

Huh? Well, whatever – I’d trust he was going somewhere with this.

“I’d say pretty well. I’d recognize every one of those asshole faces if I saw them again – although I doubt we’ll see any of them outside of federal prison anytime soon. I remember all the main points of the conversation, all the major insults, and I remember how you were a stone-cold badass even though your nerves were wired to explode. I remember thinking Uncle Sheridan’s espresso smelled great, I remember how Mr. Ferrum looked like he wanted to pull his gun on those clowns, and I most particularly remember the sweet, sweet feeling of my knee impacting that dumbass kid Keiran’s package. So, what does my stellar memory have to do with your dad coming back?”

Devon drew in a deep breath, held it, and blew it out again.

“Ashley, the confrontation in my office happened only a handful of hours ago, and you witnessed it as an adult. The day my father came back for me happened over thirty years ago and I was only five years old, but I remember every detail of that day as if it had just happened, as if it were still happening now. In a sense, I think it is still happening – those few hours all those years ago were a nightmare from which I have never truly awakened.”

“Was there any warning? Did you and your mom have any idea at all that he was coming?”

“None. Mama was sitting on a bench near the front door of the apartment building, watching me play in the tiny patch of dead grass and battered swings that served as our playground. I remember I found an anthill that morning, and as Mama watched me, I sat in the sun watching all those tiny lives scurrying about, filing in and out of the hill’s entrance, hurrying to perform a host of obscure but desperately important tasks. It was a world within the world, and I thought it must have been created just for me.

“My back was to the street, so I didn’t see his limousine and the cars full of lawyers and bodyguards pull up to the curb. I heard them, but it was a busy street, and what were a few more cars, when I had an entire miniature city of busy black ants before me?”

“But your mom saw them coming, didn’t she?”

I felt him tremble beneath my hands.

“Ashley, I treasure the memory of those ants because that last moment I spent watching them was the last normal moment of my life. You might be surprised how often I think of them – I used to keep an ant farm on my desk, years ago, just to have some tiny connection back to that moment, to keep it alive in front of me.”

“Years ago, but why not now?”

“I found over time that I could not bear to see them spend their small lives trapped inside layers of plastic, bustling through artificial tunnels within a false world, and so one spring day I brought them home and released them, here in the gardens.”