Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (64 page)

So why was I scared?

Devon glanced around at me, as he wiped his face clean with a towel drenched in steaming hot water.

“Ah, there you are. After expending so much energy during our activities last night, I rather thought you might still be asleep.” His enchanting, heart-melting smile was back, and how did he always manage to melt me down to my toes with that smile?

“And I thought you might still be sporting that swell beard – so what’s with this crazy shaving nonsense, big guy?”

I watched the rippling muscles of his back and shoulders working beneath the skin as he scrubbed a dry towel over his face and then leaned over the sink to splash on a generous helping of aftershave lotion. When he turned halfway around to answer me, his jaw was smooth, hairless, and perfect.

“Although I am quite charmed and pleased that you liked the beard, I fear that I prefer a clean-shaven look for a business setting – and as we are returning to business today, it had to come off.”

I crossed my arms, slouched against the doorframe, and tried to sound all casual and unconcerned. “We’re going back today? Why?”

“Look outside.”

Ten seconds later, I stood in the front door of the cabin, looking out at the falling snow.

White flakes dipped and spun and swirled out of the grey sky, and clouds shrouded the mountains. Just a few dry specks of snow, with only a trace sticking to the grass and the rocks … so far. But hadn’t that spry old cowboy back at the airfield said that once snow started falling in these parts, it didn’t quit until everything was buried up to the rooftops?

I took a step back inside and eyeballed the doings on the Weather Channel. The bland man and his outlet-store suit had been replaced by a woman about as lifelike as one of Devon’s mannequins, but she waved her manicured hand at the same storm front – the one that was coming to town right here and now.

From the radar map Generic Woman was pointing at, the storm looked like one big and surly beast – and not only was it bearing down on us, but the predicted track had it waltzing into Chicago in just a few days.

I jumped when Devon spoke up right behind me.

“While you’re letting our flight crew know that the time to pick us up has arrived, I’d appreciate it if you could arrange for a barber to come with them – the hair on top of my head also requires a considerable trim to be presentable for business, and you can imagine the sort of ghastly hack job I’d end up with if I tried to cut it myself.”

I turned and slipped my arms around him. I rested my head against his bare chest, breathed him in and held him tight, and asked a question without looking up.

“Can we stay?”

It was crazy and impossible and I knew it, but something in me screamed to stay, to stay huddled here with him in this cabin in our private little mountain realm, and never go home. Here, we’d be safe from whatever terrible thing was coming – the awful unknown thing that I felt coming for us, the thing that was light years worse than any blizzard.

“Ashley?”

I looked up into the blue-violet eyes of this maddening man who I loved more than I ever knew I could love somebody. He brushed his hand against my cheek, pressed a kiss to my forehead, and now his smile was sad enough to break the heart of a stone.

“I want to stay, my sweet and loving Ashley, but the time for hiding is done.”

“Why, Devon? If you’re in danger for some reason, why not hide out for a bit? Why not stay here with me, please?”

He wrapped his arms around me, held me against his warm body with all the strength of love and despair, and whispered like the scared falling boy he’d been so long ago.

“Because my fate will find me wherever I am.”

42. Monster

In the end, it all happened so quickly.

First came was my guy’s lightning transformation – Mysterious Mountain Devon got on the plane at that tiny Montana airstrip, but the man who stepped off his Gulfstream G650 in Chicago was Business Devon to the core.

Thanks to the Missoula barber we brought along for the ride, the big guy’s hair was trimmed and styled into a fiercely crisp and way short look; thanks to a three-piece Italian silk ensemble from the stable of suits he always carried with him on the Gulfstream, he looked like every dime and then some of his sixty billion dollars as he stepped onto the airport tarmac in Chicago.

He flashed his perfect business smile at the cameramen and reporters clustered beyond the private airfield’s six-foot security fence, and then he walked right up the steps of his waiting private helicopter, as I hurried along in his wake.

The next signpost flashing past in the wind was the way he got back to business within minutes, as in right damn away.

Go home to freshen up and maybe relax a bit, before getting back into the big city rhythm? Nope, not Business Devon and not Personal Assistant Ashley – we buzzed over the skyscrapers straight to the helipad on the roof of Killane Corporate Holdings. Ten minutes after we touched down on that freezing Monday morning, Devon was behind his desk and ready for his first meeting of the day.

I wasn’t ready as such, but I faked it. I’d sorted through my army of waiting texts and emails on the plane, called to let Devon’s receptionist Dana know that we were inbound, and put in another call to advise Mom that her one and only daughter had not in fact dropped off the edge of the earth.

I contacted all the department heads with news of their lord and master’s imminent arrival. I got Mr. Ferrum, the building’s security chief, busy checking every shadow for terrorists, and I saw to it that fresh coffee and a comforting selection of doughnuts were on hand to get us through however many meetings Devon felt like taking for the day.

It turned out he was doing every meeting with everybody, that day and the next, and for the three days after that. He tore through the whole week like an impeccably dressed freight train, buying and selling and closing deals and proposing new projects by the dozen; I had all I could do to keep up with his comings and goings and announcements and appearances.

What was the big hurry all about?

Whatever the reason for this breakneck maddening pace, I was at his side for every breathless minute. Our standard working style was to stay close, but during that week we might as well have been joined at the hip. I didn’t just sit through every meeting, no matter how obscure or volatile or technical or routine or ground-breaking it might be – at Devon’s insistence, I sat through each one within an arm’s length of his desk, close enough for him to touch.

Not that he did touch me during those hours of talking and negotiating and planning – he was always professional and polite and focused on business with the intensity of a laser – but if I drifted a little too far away, even just to start another pot of coffee or duck into the outer office to check with Dana about something, tension hummed through him like current through a live wire. He’d watch for me out of the corner of one eye, even as he talked to someone, and when I returned he’d sink back against his chair with the tiniest hint of relief.

No one else noticed, but I did.

Nobody else noticed that countdown clock, either – the clock I’d bravely resolved to not worry about on our last night in the mountains, the clock that laughed at me and burned through my resolve with its quiet, relentless presence, in every breath and every blink and every tiny motion Devon made.

I told myself I didn’t care about this senseless thing that I had to be imagining anyway, but why was it ticking faster now? Why was it sprinting along at the same crazy speed as everything else?

It was all so frustrating, because on the surface nothing was wrong.

On the surface, I stood at Devon’s elbow while he announced buyouts and mergers and the opening of overseas divisions. When he took questions at a press conference on Tuesday, I waited at his side, holding his notes and his tablet and his phone while trying to look inconspicuous – not easy for a worried big girl, but I gave it my best shot. I hovered in the background on Wednesday when he performed a ribbon cutting for the new art museum downtown, I looked stupid wearing a hard hat while he toured the construction site for a children’s hospital in the waning hours of Thursday afternoon, and we blurred through the whole week that way – fast, but normal and smiling.

Beneath the surface, everything was wrong.

As close as we were during the days, he kept me even closer at night, and that was when I felt it most. We laughed through Marx Brothers movies in his private theater, and he cocked his head and stared in absolute puzzlement while me and my Playstation demonstrated the joys of first person shooter games in my tiny apartment.

Despite the increasing November cold of that week, we went out a lot too, walking everywhere, through darkened parks and quiet neighborhoods, holding hands and saying not much at all. It was all right, all perfectly okay, all just like so many other weeks we’d spent together – and it was all so terribly wrong.

I asked Devon time and again, at work and at home and while we were out marching in the cold, just what was going on. Desperate and weirded out, I got to the point on Thursday night where I begged him to tell me, and to his credit, he didn’t lie – not that lying would have worked for him anyway, since he was the kind of transparently honest person who couldn’t tell a believable lie to save his life.

Instead, he simply kept the truth to himself.

“Ashley, all will become clear quite soon, I promise.”

He slid his left arm around what passed for my waist, and led me on through the darkened paths of Lincoln Park, as our bodyguards – Bill/Brad/Brent and some towering Amazonian blonde whose name I also couldn’t remember – drifted along with us, at a respectful but eagle-eyed distance, watching and waiting for trouble that never came.

On that night the trouble was inside their boss, and an army couldn’t protect him from it.

All he had was me.

Two things stood out during that endless week.

One was the single exception to our closeness – a meeting that took place in Devon’s office on Wednesday morning at 11:15, the one and only meeting during those frantic days to which I was not invited.

Three lawyers filed in to stand before Devon’s battleship of a desk, and something about them creeped me out in a major way – maybe it was their absolute silence as they stood at attention in a neat little row, or maybe it was how their identical pairs of wire-rimmed glasses reminded me of my dad’s lawyers, when they told Mom all those years ago that nope, Dad did not care to remember that either of us existed.

Maybe it was the way they stared at me.

Three sets of owlish eyes stared right at me, not at their multibillionaire client. I told myself they were lawyers, an entirely different species from us regular humans, and as such could be expected to get all weird and staring for no apparent reason – I told myself that, didn’t believe it, and then settled into my chair at Devon’s side anyway, idly tapping at my phone while I pretended to be bored with whatever was going on.

“Ashley, I need you to do something for me.”

I glanced up from my phone and met Devon’s steady, searching stare – his mouth was smiling, but those eyes told a different story.

Something in that look of his and something in the hovering stance of those vulture lawyers said a little formality was in order. “Say the word and it’s done, Mr. Killane.”

“Ashley, I do hate to bother you with something so petty, but I’d like you to go down to Kitami Neko and place my lunch order in person.”

He couldn’t bear to have me out of his sight all week, and now he was sending me to a sushi place four blocks away? For a delivery order that I routinely phoned in every morning?

“Now, sir?”

“Now. I’m concerned that between the usual lunch rush and that new chef Teshio they’ve hired, there may be a certain amount of confusion afoot down there and mistakes could be made – but if you and your loveliness appear on their doorstep and insist on the proper order in person, I know all will be well.”

He beamed his confident, nothing-wrong-here smile at me, and I didn’t buy it for one single second. But he kept smiling, the lawyers kept staring, and what could I do but carry out his perfectly reasonable request?

Thirty minutes later, I returned with a dangling plastic bag bearing the familiar smiling cat logo of Kitami Neko, a bag loaded with the big guy’s usual order of exotic raw fish – exotic and cold and slimy and disgusting, because all the gods intended fish to be cooked, dammit – and as it happened, the place had been way busier and crazier than usual. I had to repeat Devon’s order three times and send it back once, when they got it wrong on the first try. Had my little expedition into the outside world been just as innocent and routine as it looked?

The lawyers were gone, Devon was alone, and I just had to be nosy.

“So what was up with the identical triplet lawyers, boss?” And no, they weren’t really identical, they just stared and hovered as if they were.

He dug into his plastic carton of fish and other nasty stuff, eating quickly since another meeting was scheduled in about two minutes. He dipped a chunk of something revolting into some godawful goop that looked like alien snot, and he answered me with the truth.