Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (52 page)

“I respect that, big guy, but this city girl is reserving judgment in a big way about the trustworthiness of all the green stuff and rocks out there, okay?”

Once again, that smile – but was there something distant and haunted lurking behind it this time, or was I just imagining that?

“You’ll see.” He paused, his gaze wandered off to one side, and now I knew I wasn’t imagining the darkness in his eyes, and the sense of something hiding behind that smile.

He shook himself, and his eyes snapped back to my face. “I cannot explain, not truly and not yet, but I need you to understand what I feel in this place, Ashley. I … there is so much that I hope you can find the strength to understand.”

I sure as hell didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I didn’t need to. He was my Devon, and so I took him into my arms. We stood wrapped together for a long time in the middle of that tiny cabin, as the sunlight sank away from the windows and the day turned colder.

Devious bastard that he was, Devon wouldn’t fire up the woodstove until I agreed to a trade.

“Are you serious? A toasty warm cabin equals no internet and no TV? Are you some drooling Neanderthal savage or something?”

I glanced over at the innocent young laptop and TV and satellite boxes and cables hanging out together in the corner, and panic swirled through my brain. “Do you just enjoying torturing me? Are we going to start wearing furs and worshipping some dark and alien bear god next? Jesus, why?”

“It’s your choice, my embattled Ashley – either you can bask in the warmth of a well-laid fire, staring deep into the flickering, hypnotic flames as you contemplate the meaning of life and the soul-affirming values of the natural world, or you can sit in the corner with your teeth chattering, warming yourself by the glow of that little screen.” He waved a hand at the laptop, which hadn’t done a thing to deserve this kind of treatment.

“But why? And hey, you’ll freeze your toes off too, unless you’ve got some secret internal warmth engine or something – right?”

“Ah, but since I’m ever so much bigger than you, I think I’ll be able to bundle up and stay quite warm enough – certainly enough to make my point, which will be well worth a bit of shivering.”

“And this point is?”

He looked at me, just looked at me for a moment without saying a word. By the time he did open his mouth, he’d already halfway talked me into it with just those eyes.   

“This place is a kingdom, Ashley. It is a kingdom peopled by rustling trees and roaming deer, watched over by castles of rock, and attacked by armies of snow and thunder and lightning. It is another world, and if you walk in this world long enough, listening to its rhythms, watching its subtle movements, walking its paths and breathing its air, you will find a part of yourself that you never knew existed, and that you would never have known in the world outside.”

He nodded at the tangle of cables and electronica huddling together on the desk. “You’ve lived in that world all your life, Ashley – why not put it away and give this world a chance, just for a few days?”

So I did.

The big guy went out back where he claimed wood was stored in a drying shed, and brought in an armload of the dead tree stuff. Then he arranged it in the stove just so, worked some kind of dark magic involving kindling and matches and prayers to a dread demon lord of natural, non-electronic fire – okay, so maybe I imagined that last bit – and soon flames crackled, the walls glowed in the firelight, and we were well on our way to being as warm as if we were lazing around on a white sand beach in the Caribbean … well, almost.

At least his whole anti-tech Luddite thing didn’t extend to electric lights – while I pulled one of the kitchen chairs over so I could sit right next to the woodstove and toast my toes properly, he flicked a switch to send light flooding everywhere from the bulbs of the deer antler contraption hanging overhead.

So was a hamster running a wheel somewhere to power that thing?

“Devon, where’s this blessed electricity that you won’t let me use to go online coming from? Magical pixies born of a love match between Tinkerbell and Thomas Edison?”

Devon’s voice drifted to me from the corner that served as a kitchen, where he was prepping the wood-fueled stove for cooking duty.

“If you dare to step outside tomorrow and look round the back, you’ll see solar panels mounted on the rear slope of the roof; they provide free power during the day, and at night a standby generator housed in a shed out back keeps the demons of the dark away.”

“That sounds disturbingly modern and practical, Mr. Mountain Man.”

“It was Uncle Sheridan’s idea. When I first came here, this cabin had not the slightest hint of electricity about it; but some years later, he came to feel that reading by candlelight was growing a bit hard on his eyes, and so he had the solar panels and the generator installed.”

I heard the hiss of crackling flames coming from the kitchen now as well, accompanied by the rattle of pots and pans. Mmmm, food …

His mention of reading reminded me – while quaint, old-fashioned, real paper books lining the shelves all around us, I had ten times that many ebooks stored on my phone. Surely my beloved iPhone couldn’t possibly be included in the technology ban, could it?          

So where was my glowing electronic minion?

“Devon, did you notice if I left my phone in the car?”

A cabinet door thumped open and shut. “Yes, you did. I saw you leave it behind on the seat.” Now I heard water running, and the hum of the baby fridge as he opened it to retrieve something or other.

“Do you think a bear would eat me if I went outside to get it?”

“I am confident you could terrorize a bear into submission if you had to, my fierce Ashley, but in this case it would be rather pointless – your phone is no longer in our vehicle.”

“So where is it?”

“Oh, I brought your phone in here and hid it.”

I did a slow burn. Then I did a fast burn. Then I considered denying him sex until he produced my phone, and then I realized that there was nowhere for us to sleep later but together in that deliciously comfortable bed over there, and once I was in it with him and he pulled me up against his big, warm body and his big, warm … well, yeah, the whole ‘my phone or no sex’ strategy was so not going to work.

I tried the intellectual approach. “Devon, I have books on my phone, tons and tons of books – ”

Without looking around, he waved a hand at the walls. “As you may have noticed, we have books here. Besides, I hope you will forgive my suspicious nature, but I can’t help but imagine you might try to make a call, or somehow sneak online with the help of your beloved phone.”

“There are no bars here in the godforsaken wilds, and you won’t let me use the internet, remember?”

“True. Would you perhaps consent to share a bracing meal of pork chops and mashed potatoes with me instead?”

My stomach answered for me, rumbling like a traitor as the sweet scent of sizzling pork fat filled the cabin. So I gave up – just for the moment, mind you – on trying to argue my way back into phone ownership, and a short time later, we sat down at the narrow, pine-knotted table and ate like fiends.

He might be worrisome and weird and cryptic, but man – how did I luck into a guy who was gorgeous, adorable, tender and sweet, stinking rich,
and
a pretty fair cook? Did I save a bunch of starving kids from an orphanage fire in a previous life?

I decided to put that question aside, and went for a second helping of mashed potatoes instead. We drank apple cider which tasted strange and tart but still not half bad, we talked about cowgirls and their jealous boyfriends, I snatched one of his pork chops when he wasn’t looking, he told me about his many miserable failures at fly fishing, and full darkness filled the world outside the windows before we knew it.

We sat up for a little while after supper, curling up on the couch while Devon read aloud and I leaned my head on his shoulder. I listened to his low, mesmerizing voice, I thought about how that voice and that face could have made him an A-list actor, I wondered why anybody would read, much less write, this biography of a Confederate general so obscure I was pretty sure even the Confederacy had never heard of him, and I stole glances out the window at the night.

I looked at the darkness out there, and I thought about what it hid. I thought about the river I could still hear rumbling in the distance, and how I’d last seen Uncle Sheridan floating away on the breeze and then disappearing into that churning grey water. I thought about the animals slipping unseen through the trees, the deer with huge, brimming liquid eyes and the bears wrapped in shaggy pelts against the coming winter. I pictured the freezing, snow-covered wastes of the mountains towering all around us, and I wondered if anything walked up there in the night …

“Ashley?”

I jerked upright, peering around in confusion and rubbing my eyes.

“Ashley, don’t you think you’d be rather more comfortable sleeping in our bed?”

Yeah, I’d dozed off like a baby, right there on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, big guy, don’t take it as a reflection on your reading-out-loud skills or anything – it’s just been a really long and weird and stressed-out day for this big city girl.”

“For me as well, and I grant I could have chosen a more lively sort of subject matter – you know, if you happen to have any stories of a naughty and erotic nature on that phone of yours, I might be persuaded to let you read one or two or a lot of them to me tomorrow night …”

He nuzzled my hair and nipped at my ear, and the next thing I knew, we were spooning together in the bed. We snuggled under the quilts, I giggled and squirmed, Devon made some seriously filthy suggestions that thrilled me down to my toes – but though we shared a deep, probing kiss and the promise of much more … well, it had been a strange and unsettling day, and we were both exhausted, and full of all that wonderful food he’d prepared, and yes – we both fell asleep before anything too frisky happened.

But I didn’t stay asleep.

I woke up minutes later, or hours – it was scary and unsettling as hell somehow to find myself awake in the darkness with no idea of what time it was, and no way to find out. A low, reddish glow leaked from the banked fire in the woodstove, a glow that barely lit more than a few inches in the center of the cabin – I could see that, I could make out a faint hint of starlight stealing in through the windows, and that was all. A more country kind of girl could probably have made a guess at the time by looking at the sky, but not me.

What was even creepier than waking up in the most profound darkness I’d ever known was the sound – there almost wasn’t any. Not the rumbling of traffic I’d heard at night for pretty much my entire life, not the low hum of electricity, no doors slamming or dogs barking, no airplanes roaring by overhead, no music, no parties, no distant shouts or arguments or any voices at all – the only sounds were the faint tumbling hiss of the river, Devon’s steady breathing at my shoulder, and the hammering of my own heart.

Why were we here?

“Ashley, it’s all right.”

Devon spoke into my hair, his voice rough and fuzzed by sleep, his arms wrapping around me from behind and pulling me back against his powerful body.

“You’re safe, sweet Ashley, you’re safe and you’re not alone – I’m here, for now.”

For now? What the …

Then his warm hands cupped my breasts, his fingers rubbed over my nipples, and I twisted in his arms to meet him, desperate to see his face and reassure myself he was really there. I kissed him, hungry and scared, and moaned into his mouth as he reached down and slipped a hand between my legs. Moments later he was inside me, thrusting deep with a rough, pounding rhythm, making me more and more his with each powerful stroke, taking me, and protecting me, and chasing away my fear.

For now.

34. Walking to the Stars

“Ashley, you shouldn’t condemn yourself for this – the temperature generated by a wood-fired stove can be quite difficult to judge, particularly for those new to the ways of backcountry cooking.”

I scraped the charred remains of what I’d meant to be bacon and eggs into the trash. “Face it, Devon – your girlfriend is directly responsible for The Great Breakfast Disaster, Day One. I’m just trying to figure out what I should do for an encore – make cereal explode in a toxic cloud of vapors? Knock birds out of the sky with my toast? Scare the children and womenfolk with tales of the horrifying things I do to sausage and hash browns?”

“While those are all entertaining options, perhaps instead you will permit me to make our breakfast today?”

So I planted my ass on a chair, and I watched my talented and sexy personal chef whip up a breakfast of ham-and-cheese omelets and sourdough biscuits with sawmill gravy, all cooked to perfection by someone who clearly knew all about how to make a wood-fired stove roll over and beg for mercy.

 So much for trying to show off my cooking skills and pay the guy back for his amazing pork chops. And believe me, I do know how to prepare honest-to-god food and not just sling something frozen into a microwave – it’s just that my idea of a stove has buttons and dials and digital readouts and is powered by the holy fire of electricity, not the kind of fire that involves actual smoke generated by chunks of genuine dead trees.