Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (50 page)

Grizzly bears would use our ribs for chew toys and wolves would pee all over our abandoned SUV while howling at the moon. Mom would curse the day she gave birth to a daughter who was foolish enough to throw away the comforts of civilization and –

“Mr. Killane, pleasure to see you out here again, it’s been a while – and who’s this pretty young thing?”

A sixty-something guy with a dinner-plate belt buckle and an honest-to-God white cowboy hat strolled up to us, nodding at Devon and tipping his Stetson to me. His jeans looked like they were worn for actual work and not standing around looking fashionably western, his faded red flannel shirt was tucked in over a gut just generous enough to indicate that he’d put away a few steaks and beers in his time, and the smile on his weathered face said he’d take care of any rogue bears and no problem, ma’am.

I thrust out my right hand. “Hi, sir. I’m Ashley Daniels, and you’re Mr. Adams, right? We spoke on the phone earlier, and you said the cabin is all set up and ready?”

He didn’t quite shake my hand – it was more like he absorbed it into his enormous paw. “That we did and that it is, Miss Ashley – and you call me Frank, all right? Nice young lady like you calls me ‘Mr. Adams,’ and it makes me feel as old as these mountains.”

He turned to Devon and winked. “We’re all older, but some things never change – for one, I see you still favor the round gals.”

Devon stood off to one side, hands thrust into his pockets and turning slowly on one heel as he stared up at the mountains looming over us. He didn’t look our way, but a distant, distracted smile spread across his face.

“Just this round gal, now. Only this one and no others, round or flat or in between.”

“Well, good for you – nothing better for a man than the love of a good woman, I always say.” Frank followed up this nugget of wisdom by grabbing the two small suitcases I’d packed – I hoped he was right about the whole well-stocked cabin scenario – and heading for the parking lot.

He called back over his shoulder. “You just let me stow these bags in the back of your vehicle over here, and then you two can be on your way. No time to waste – the winter’s been mild as Miami up here so far, but that won’t last, so you want to get out there and enjoy the backcountry before it get buried under a couple feet of snow.”

I stood by the SUV’s flank as the Marlboro Man tossed our bags aboard. I looked up at the snow on the mountain peaks, pictured that same snow standing knee-deep down here, and shivered. If worse came to worse, though, at least they’d find our bodies when the snow melted come spring – right?

Frank’s voice broke into my nervous-city-girl thoughts. “Mr. Killane, I trust you do know better than to expect much action from the trout this late in the season, right?”

Devon had wandered over to the SUV with us, and now turned his gaze into the nearby forest. “No fishing this trip.”

“Well, I thought as much when I saw Mr. Montvale wasn’t with you. He doin’ okay these days?”

Devon turned pale. Frank raised an eyebrow and looked over at me – and even though I knew I shouldn’t blame him, I wanted to punch the old cowboy in the throat.

“Frank, Mr. Montvale passed away suddenly just over a week ago, and Devon and I are pretty torn up about it, as I guess you can imagine.”

Don’t ask for details, asshole, or I
will
slam my fist right into your windpipe – once I find a box to stand on, anyway.

Country Boy’s face fell, and I felt like shit for doubting him. “Well, that’s a damn shame – Mr. Montvale was a fine man and no mistake.” He shook his head as he slammed the SUV’s tailgate shut. “I guess the Lord comes for each of us in his own good time, but you’d think he’d let the decent folks stay a little longer, y’know?”

Devon surprised me by pulling himself together, shaking his shoulders free of dark thoughts, and turning to Frank with a smile that was forced but brave. “Adams, it’s my understanding Jeff Simmons helped you get the cabin ready – doesn’t Sonny Thorson usually assist you with that sort of thing?”

Frank nodded, and what was that naughty twinkle in his eye all about?

“Well, that he does, Mr. Killane, but when Sonny heard it was you coming up here today … well, I guess even after all these years, he’s still sore about that business with Darla, so it might be that he called you a name or two or three, and I ended up getting Jeff to help me with the cabin.”

Ooh, I had to hear more about this …

“So, big guy, this Darla was one of your cowgirl conquests, huh? Back in the days of long ago?” Because yes, I reserved the right, no matter how unreasonable, to be jealous of everything with two X chromosomes that had ever touched my guy, so there.

Devon’s smile turned wicked. “Back in the days when I was sixteen, and full of far more hormones than I had any idea what to do with – and as it happens, Darla was a friendly round girl who was more than happy to teach me just what I could do with those hormones.”

I rolled an eye at Frank. “So more than twenty years later, this guy Sonny is still all pissed and whiny about losing out to the better man?”

Frank chuckled. “Don’t hold it against him, Miss Ashley – Sonny is a pretty good fella about most things, he just has a way of hanging onto a grudge until long after everybody else has forgotten what all the fuss was about. Not to mention it ain’t his fault that he thought way more of Darla than she did of him, if, ah, you know what I mean …”

“She was kinda slutty, huh?”

The old guy burst out laughing, while Devon did a hilarious job of trying and failing to paste an offended look on his face. He settled for a charming grin that must have persuaded more than a few country girls to drop their Levis.

“I would prefer to describe Darla as … generous with her affections. She certainly taught me a few things that you seem to quite like, my lovely and passionate Ashley.”

Then both of those bastards laughed like devils, while I simultaneously blushed brick red and wondered what the penalty was in Montana for murdering billionaires and smartass cowboys.

I settled for not killing anybody on that particular day, and instead climbed behind the wheel of the SUV. The keys were in the ignition, I fired that baby up, and I eyed the half-hearted excuse for a dirt road – topped with an indifferent spattering of gravel – that left the parking area and snaked off into the forest.

The deep, dark forest …

Devon levered himself up into the shotgun seat, while I decided to delay things by pestering Frank for directions to the cabin, even though he’d given me a detailed play-by-play of how to get there when I’d talked to him on the phone a couple of days before. Hey, a triceratops could have eaten the road since then, right?

Cowboy Frank put on his best ‘let’s indulge the nervous round gal from the big city’ smile. “It’s just as I said on the phone, seein’ as how the cabin hasn’t moved – you follow this road straight on for maybe ten miles, ‘til you come out of the trees and hit the county highway. Then you turn right, head that way for another thirty miles …”

He went on like that for another minute or two, detailing turns at old barns and shot-up road signs that might or might not still be there, places where we’d have to ford creeks like ungodly heathen barbarians, and six miles that way and turn left there, and this or that road might be washed out but probably not, while my brain zoned out in an anti-rural panic.

Frank caught me looking at the GPS unit mounted on the SUV’s dash. “Like I’m sure you know, that thing’ll only pick up a spotty, in-and-out kinda signal up here, but take that as a good sign – in my experience, the best places a person can be ain’t never on a map, and satellites can’t see ‘em.”

“Ashley?”

I turned to Devon, who’d slid his seat all the way back and was trying to get his long legs arranged in something like comfort.

“Ashley, I feel I must point out that I have been to this cabin many times before with Uncle Sheridan, and I will be able to direct you if necessary.”

I stuck my tongue out at him, and his chuckle said he was on his way back to me. Well, now maybe the country wasn’t such a bad place after all, if it helped my guy find himself again – although I still caught myself pulling my iPhone out and holding it close for comfort, because no way was I ready to trust these trackless forsaken wilds, not yet.

Frank smiled like a patient dad. “And you know you won’t be getting any bars on that, right? Nearest cell tower is in the next county, and these mountains would block the signal anyway.”

No phone? That settled it – we were going to die out here, and vultures would pick our bones clean.           

“Now, I can tell you that you’ll likely be able to get online out at the cabin – when we went to get the place fixed up for you, Jeff set it up with some satellite internet gear, and he said reception in that valley runs fair to decent.”

Frank’s relaxed smile said he didn’t consider it a big issue whether or not I would be able to access the precious life’s blood of the internet, but I heaved a big sigh of relief. Maybe I would survive being stuck in the back end of beyond for a few days after all.

If it weren’t for the bears …

“Sir, I know I’m probably worrying about nothing, but, well … aren’t there bears out here? Like, you know, giant slavering grizzly bears that will gobble us down like we’re potato chips?”

Frank shook his head, laughed right down into his belly, and then peered past me at Devon. “This is a right sweet little woman you’ve got here, Mr. Killane, but she’s just not a country sort of gal, is she?”

Devon’s eyes were half-closed, but his ears were open, and his smile … well, I couldn’t quite read that cryptic smile. “Adams, my Ashley is full of surprises, and I rather think she might yet learn to take to the wilds.”

Don’t hold your breath, big fella. “So, Frank – bears, or not?”

Before the old cowboy could say a word, Devon opened one eye all the way, and used it to look at me like someone trying to reassure a scared two-year-old that no, there was not one single monster under the bed.

“Ashley, Uncle Sheridan and I visited this location and many others in Montana over the years, and I swear to you on the fair name of civilization that we never once saw a bear. In point of fact, the only bears I’ve ever seen anywhere have been safely behind moats and bars at various zoos around the world.”

Frank nodded his agreement. “He’s right, Miss Ashley – we’ve got our share of grizzlies out here, but most of ‘em have already denned up for the winter, and the rest are likely to take off before you ever get a chance to see ‘em. There is one thing I do want you to look out for, though, and that’s the weather.”

Great – were any cyclones scheduled? Would a blizzard come roaring out of Canada at any second and bury us twenty feet deep?

“Now, like I said before, it’s been pretty mild up here so far this winter, but that won’t hold – and once a big storm hits, it can put you up to your neck in snow before you know it. So you watch the weather reports if you can get online, you keep an eye on the sky, and the second you hear about or see so much as one single snowflake comin’ down, you pack up and head back here straight away, all right?

“Don’t waste any time about it; your flight crew is heading to Missoula right about now to get that big pretty jet refueled and then wait until they get the word to come pick you up – but I guarantee they will not leave their nice warm hotel rooms if we get snowed in up here, seein’ as how they know as well as I do that we don’t have the equipment to clear snow off this runway.”

He added a casual cowboy shrug. “Then you’d just have to find your way down the far side of these mountains and pick up the interstate somewhere God knows how many miles to the west, while snow is barrelin’ down all around you – and unless I miss my guess, you prob’ly don’t have a single idea how to use the four-wheel-drive on that vehicle, do you?”

Busted. “You got me on that one, Frank – but I promise we’ll hustle back here in nothing flat if I see anything other than a clear blue sky, okay?”

“Fair enough – now, you two head out and have fun, and I’ll see you in a week or so.”

And with that he tipped his hat and stepped back, I put the behemoth SUV in gear, and Devon and I drove off down the dirt-and-gravel road into the woods. Bears or not, we had an appointment with a certain stretch of the Blackfoot River, and with a cabin where I hoped I could help my big, hurting man put himself back together.

I had my doubts about the woods – I figured that many unsupervised trees in one place had to be up to something – but we made it to the county highway without running into any ogres, witches, or granny-eating wolves.

Then we hit clear sailing – except for a couple of missed turns, some backtracking, and a opossum who ambled into the middle of the highway and sat down to scratch at one ear for a long, leisurely minute while I honked at him. We also encountered signs so spattered with buckshot they were unreadable, gravel roads where he-man Montana adventurers laughed at the very idea of signs, and potholes big enough to swallow a buffalo.

The clear sailing giggled and ran away once we hit the end of a jolting, bone-rattling dirt suggestion of a road that petered out in the middle of a meadow.

“Big guy?”

Devon peeled one eye open from the nap he’d been pretending to take. “Yes, my lovely and lost Ashley?”

“Your cowboy pal wasn’t serious when he said we had to leave the road here and drive on actual grass and rocks and stuff the rest of the way – was he?”

“Grass, rocks, a few small streams, and we’ll be fording an actual river. Don’t you just love the exciting, thrill-a-minute adventure of forging through the trackless wastes of the high country? Why, it’s a wonder cities were ever invented.”

I threw a folded-six-ways-wrong Montana highway map at him – damn thing was useless up here anyway – and turned to stare down all the unbridled nature that stretched away in front of us.

Then I nudged the gas pedal, and by god, we rolled forward onto the grass – the wild, untended, unmarked, totally-not-meant-for-driving grass. My hands clamped onto the steering wheel at ten and two in a white-knuckled death grip, and I hoped that cabin was worth all this.