Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (42 page)

Ashley, no – you will NOT start bawling like a baby in front of this man, these kids, and Ronald McDonald. Suck it up, girl.

I sniffed back tears. “So the Killanes didn’t just lock her up for loving her son, but they felt the need to ship her far away too? Out of sight and out of mind, was that it?”

Uncle Sheridan shrugged. “Her love for her son was inconvenient and annoying to the Killanes, who hated Devon and thought little more of his drunken father; sending her into the care of distant strangers who could be relied upon to keep her medicated and confined seemed to them to be the ideal solution.

“Kevin Killane himself certainly had no further use for her, since she’d already produced the heir he needed; therefore, he was quite happy to let the family imprison her in a padded room, far away from curious eyes and any honest judges who might take notice of the whole ugly business.”

He sighed, his fingers toying with the edge of the napkin under his coffee cup. Then he looked past my shoulder at the chattering students, the employees wiping tables and mopping the floor, and the city beyond the restaurant’s windows, where who knows how many awful stories like Devon’s played out every day.

When he turned back to me, the resigned, weary look on his face was heartbreaking. “You should know that I believe you are the only person other than myself to whom Devon has ever told the entire terrible story of that day he became a Killane.”

“I just wish he knew some stories that didn’t tear my heart out.”

He leaned forward, and his eyes drilled into mine. “He told you about that day because he trusts you, Miss Daniels – and after a lifetime of mental and physical abuse, of betrayal and desertion, that boy does not give his trust lightly, I assure you.”

I wiped away the tears that I was absolutely not crying, and his face softened.

“What else has he told you of his childhood? As bleak as it was, I do happen to know he experienced a few bright moments here and there, and that I was not the only person who came to care deeply for him.”

“Well, he did tell me that the servants he grew up around were like a surrogate family – I thought it was all kinds of pitiful that he had to go to maids and housekeepers to find anything like real parenting, but his face lit up when he talked about them … and they also started him on his career as Mr. Language Whiz, right?”

“That they did – Devon soaks up languages like a sponge, thanks both to the servants who raised him and his own razor intelligence. Did you know he minored in Japanese at Harvard?”

“News to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear he’s fluent in Martian.”

“In fact, on the day I met Devon, the first words I heard from him were in Spanish.”

He paused to smile and accept another coffee refill, this time from a different cashier. I got the feeling he was one popular guy at this McD’s, which was not surprising at all, since he was so nice – although it was kind of weird, since he could have bought the place out of his pocket change’s pocket change.

“So when you met him, how much did you know about the whole kidnapping and abused involuntary heir thing?”

“I assure you, Miss Daniels, at first I knew little about Devon’s circumstances. In the years after … after Alva left us, I steered clear of her ghastly family whenever possible – and as they did not care for my company either, that was not difficult.

“I’d heard at various unavoidable parties and public events that Kevin Killane had fathered a child on some girl or other, and was using the boy to foil his family’s plans. There was talk that the child’s mother was difficult and quite mad, and the boy not much better, but that was the sum total of what I knew.

“It seemed like an unfortunate bit of business, but then so did most other things that happened around the Killanes – and as it had no obvious connection to me, I can’t say I gave the matter much thought.

“Then I heard a commotion at my front door one day – this was at my main residence here in the city – and shortly afterward, my housekeeper informed me that Kevin Killane had, entirely without notice or permission, dropped off his inconvenient son and left in an unseemly hurry for a business conference in New York.

“I’d heard he had a habit of dumping the child here and there for care, if he was preoccupied with drinking or women or business, or if he simply felt like annoying his family by forcing Devon on them for a few hours or days – but this was the first time he’d left the boy with me, and as a widower who knew less than nothing about children, I was puzzled and more than a little irritated by this development.

“Then I met Devon, and that changed everything.”

“How old was he?”

“No more than eight. You’d think a child that age would be bewildered at being cast aside onto a stranger’s doorstep without notice or explanation, but Devon was sadly quite used to that sort of abandonment. In any case, I went looking for him, reasoning that as I suddenly had a child under my roof, even if only temporarily, I should probably go and have a look at the boy before deciding what to do.

“He wasn’t in the foyer where the housekeeper had left him, so I had to search here and there down the halls, until I heard a spirited conversation in Spanish – and one of the voices was that of a child. I followed the sound to the kitchen, stuck my head in the door, and there was Devon.”

“What was he doing in the kitchen?”

“Being Devon, once he found himself in a new environment, it was his instinct to gravitate to the nearest servant and make friends – when I came upon him, he was helping one of the cook’s assistants wash a sink load of dishes, drying and putting away the freshly rinsed pots and pans for her while they discussed some fascinating topic in rapid-fire Spanish.

“Once he spotted me, he went still as a startled mouse, shrinking up against her side as he slid his eyes past me at the door, already considering possible escape routes. He relaxed a bit when she put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him – I’m afraid my own Spanish is rather fragmentary, but I got the impression she was reassuring him I wasn’t some child-eating ogre. I remember being struck by his delightfully odd blue-violet eyes when he looked up at me and dared to speak.

“ ‘I’m helping Rosa with the dishes, and she says I’m doing a really good job – is it okay if I stay here and help her some more?’

“I said I couldn’t see why not – after all, I had no clue what to do with him – and then I told him he must be a clever boy, since he spoke Spanish so well.

“He seemed quite puzzled by the compliment. ‘Everybody knows Spanish, it’s easy. Don’t you know it?’ He looked at me as if he suspected that I might be mentally impaired.

“Without waiting to hear that I was largely ignorant of Spanish, he asked more questions, firing them off one after the other, with barely a breath in between. ‘Who are you? Do you know my father? Do you know how long I have to stay here? I promise I’ll be good and I won’t bother anybody, so can I eat something later? Where do I sleep tonight? Why don’t you know Spanish? My father has a dog that knows German, do you have a dog? Do you have a cat? I like books, do you have any books I can read?’”

“He was a charmer even as a kid, huh?”

The old man smiled. “Very much so, yes – despite being never having been around children and having little notion of what they were all about, I found myself liking Devon immensely within a few minutes of meeting him.

“Once I could get a word in edgewise, I told him my name was Sheridan Montvale, that I was his father’s uncle, and that if he liked books, he was welcome to visit my library – and that settled it. He promptly called me ‘Uncle Sheridan’ for the first time, he spent the afternoon in the library plowing through my father’s old Civil War books, we talked about this battle and that over dinner, and he has been like a son to me ever since.”

I wanted to hear more. I wanted to while away the rest of the morning and a healthy chunk of the afternoon listening to Uncle Sheridan tell more fascinating, revealing, non-heartwrenching stories about the lonely, brilliant child who’d grown up to become the complicated, impossible, irresistible man that I loved.

That was what I wanted to hear. It was not what I needed to hear – not if I wanted to help Devon.

My honorary uncle accepted the gift of additional containers of fake cream from another McDonald’s employee who’d fallen victim to his suave, elderly charm. He added a dab of cream and a dusting of sugar to his latest fresh coffee, and I dropped the hammer on the whole ‘what I needed to hear’ thing.

“So you met Devon when he was eight, and this was three years after he’d been taken from his mom, right?”

“That is correct.”

“But he wasn’t having panic attacks yet, was he?”

My favorite Jedi sighed like a man who knew the jig was up. “No, he was not. Miss Daniels, Devon has told me many times that you are both smart and persistent, and as always, he speaks the truth tenfold. I could wish that he had met you years ago, but I fear that by the time he reached adulthood, the damage to his soul had long since been done.”

I leaned forward, my forearms on the table, my fingers twining together as I searched for the right words. “Sir, for Devon’s sake, I need to know what the deal is with these panic attacks. If being wrenched out of his mother’s arms and taken away from her forever wasn’t enough to set them off, that means something one hell of a lot worse happened to him later on.

“I need to know what that thing was. I need to know what the Killanes did to him. I need to know just what happened to turn a sweet, bright little five-year-old boy into a thirty-eight-year-old man who’s an emotional train wreck.”

I remembered something Uncle Sheridan had said after that fateful meeting on Saturday morning. “After we put Devon into the limo and watched him take off for home after the meeting Saturday, you said you could never forgive the Killanes for what they’d done to him – sir, what exactly did they do that you’re not able to forgive? I need …” I let out a long breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “I need to know the worst.”

Uncle Sheridan leaned back, looking down at his hands. He tilted his head and examined the way his fingers laced around his plastic container of cheap, mass-produced coffee that probably tasted almost as plastic as the cup.

When he spoke, he measured his words with care. His voice was colorless and precise, like a professor giving a lecture on a distasteful subject.

“You know that Devon was taken from his mother on that day so long ago, but you may not know that he ran away from his father’s house that same night. He didn’t get far, of course, since he was so young he had no idea of just where he was in the city or where to find his mother – but that didn’t stop him from trying.

“He only made it as far as the nearest street corner that first time, before Kevin Killane himself retrieved him, cursing as he bundled the crying boy under one arm and marched him back to the house. Devon spent that first night under his father’s roof locked alone in a spare room, howling with confusion and fear and loneliness. He tells me he seems to remember his father shouting at him through the door, something about ‘shut up that damn noise’ or some such; knowing Kevin Killane, I would assume he was quite shatteringly drunk at the time.

“Devon kept trying to run away, getting further each time as he grew older and cannier, as he charmed bodyguards and maids into looking the other way, as he came to better understand just what his father had done and why.

“Six months before he arrived on my doorstep, at a mere eight years old, he was told by one of his aunts that his mother had long since been locked away in a madhouse, and that he could stop all this irritating ‘running away’ nonsense immediately. He refused to believe it.

“He believed it when he slipped out of his father’s house a week later, walked five miles, figured out just the right combination of city bus routes that would take him where he most wanted to go, and arrived at the door of his mother’s old apartment, the only real home he’d ever known – to find strangers living there.

“His mother was quite gone. That night his father beat him senseless, and Devon did not speak a word to anyone for the next three weeks.”

“Holy shit.”

I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud until Uncle Sheridan nodded.

“I know no better words for what he went through during those dark days. A weaker child might have been broken by the experience, and many an adult would have given up hope under the circumstances. Some might say any sensible person, young or old, would have surrendered to the cold truth of the matter at that point – but Devon was born with something in him, some hidden steel or perversity, that refused to give up.

“He said nothing and he waited. Once he found his voice, he did not mention his mother. To the best of my knowledge, he did not speak of her again until he was nine years old, during his fourth visit to my home.”

“So his dad kept bringing him back? Even though you were a nice guy who treated Devon like a human being, with actual feelings and rights and all?”

“I found that a bit startling myself. That first visit ended when Kevin Killane returned a week later to retrieve his son, acting as if he barely remembered where he’d left the boy. He seemed surprised and more than a little suspicious when I told him that Devon had been very well-behaved and was welcome to stay with me at any time – but two months later, he dropped Devon off on my doorstep again, and a third time just before Christmas.

“I imagine he got over his doubts not only because my home was a convenient dumping ground for the boy, but also because leaving his son in my care was an easy way to irritate the other Killanes, who disliked me nearly as much as they despised Devon and his father.

“Be that as it may, the first three times that he visited me, Devon did a dreadful amount of my servants’ work for them, read voraciously, and talked at me nonstop about every subject that crossed his fertile mind – but he said not a word about his mother.

“The fourth time Devon stayed beneath my roof, he was dropped off by a bodyguard; the man explained with every kind of disgust that Kevin Killane was in the middle of yet another epic drinking binge, and the household staff had decided together that it would be for the best if Devon were somewhere else, well out of hitting range.”