Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (11 page)

“I cancelled your reservation hours ago – did I forget to tell you? You’ll be staying here with me.”

I closed my eyes and silently counted to ten.

Was this job some sort of divine judgment on me? Was I being punished for horrifying sins committed in a past life? Did Devon Killane have any idea about how male-female and boss-underling relationships worked in the real world?

I muttered a few choice curses under my breath and then I opened my eyes and turned around, ready to let him have it over all this presumptuous, power-mad crap he insisted on pulling.

I’d never seen him in anything other than a suit.

Now he stood before me wearing nothing but a towel tied around his waist. He worked another towel through his sopping hair, as rivulets of water ran down his body. Damn, that body … a broad chest with sharply-defined bands of pectoral muscle, abs that looked like they’d been carved from marble, sleek intercostal muscling sliding over his ribs, a trail of fine black hair running down between those magnificent abs and disappearing under that … holy shit, was that an erection or a baseball bat  he was hiding under that towel? That must have been one inspiring shower …

I stared at his powerful muscles moving beneath his gleaming skin. I watched a bead of water drip off his left nipple. I imagined running my hands over his flanks and under that towel, feeling the warmth and coiled power of his body, holding that massive cock and feeling it surge in my hand …

“Ashley?”

Huh?

“You were about to say something along the lines of ‘who do you think you are,’ or ‘I’ll sleep in the hallway first, you asshole,’ correct? I thought perhaps you might appreciate a reminder, since you seem to have quite lost your train of thought – ah, but that can’t be, since of course you’re not attracted to me or to this body in the slightest. A pity, truly, since my body and I are both very much attracted to you.”

He took a step closer – ever so casually, of course, still drying his hair and still dripping all over the carpet, as I stood there and tried to remember why sleeping with this guy was such a bad idea.

Oh yeah, he’s my boss, and only a slutty gold-digging tramp would sleep with her rich boss, right?

Right?

My body pointed out that right now he wasn’t being my boss, and was in fact doing a great job of being nothing more than an incredibly sexy man wearing only a towel.

And when his rare smile came out to play or when his strange eyes took on that haunted look, was he my boss then? Or was he just a sweet, infuriating, funny, troubled, utterly compelling man who needed me? Where was the sense in turning that guy down, Ashley?

“But as it happens, it is in fact necessary for you to stay here in my suite, since in your new life as my personal assistant, you must be available to me at all times.

“I might decide between one dreary meeting and the next that my presence is required in Manila, and you will have to make the travel arrangements. I may need you to go online at three in the morning and pull up the production figures for one of our overseas manufacturing divisions, or I might want your opinion on the motifs and cultural tropes of an obscure German art film I come across on Netflix.

“You must be on hand to answer the phone when my relatives call. You’ll have to lie for me during my disappearances, and I’ll need you to invent things to tell the press. You’ll also be talking me through my frequent episodes of insomnia.

“In any case, though your duties to me will be many and varied, rest assured that warming my bed will not be among them. That would be recreation rather than work, and would of course be entirely up to your discretion.”

He gave his hair a final swipe, and then dropped that towel over his shoulders while the hoo-boy-what-an-erection towel stayed firmly in place.

“Now since we must make an early start on tomorrow morning’s business, I suggest you take your pick of the two auxiliary bedrooms in this suite; you may rest assured that your virtue will be safe in either of them. I’ll see you at 7:00 a.m. sharp, Ashley – or sooner, if you change your mind about pleasuring me during the night.”

He turned his back on me, he sauntered off down the hall, and he disappeared around the corner to his palatial master bedroom.

I stared at the trail of his wet footprints on the carpet. I stood there staring at them for a good five minutes.

Then I walked to the end of the hall, took a different turn, and ten minutes later was curled up under a goose down comforter in the smaller of the two auxiliary bedrooms. My bags and boxes of business wear from my shopping excursion that morning were stacked against the door, because while I somehow knew I could trust him not to barge in on me during the night, I also knew I couldn’t trust myself.

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. We met with herds of anxious suits in a private conference room at the hotel, had lunch with half a dozen senior negotiators in a downtown restaurant, and held court in somebody’s skyscraper with the upper management of three different companies with a stake in the business at hand.

I say ‘we met’ because I was at Mr. Killane’s side for every mystifying moment of this business I knew so little about. About all I understood of it was that he was insisting on buying out a company that did not want to be bought out, that said company was an obscure startup manufacturing some equally obscure widget that would allegedly revolutionize server farm maintenance, and that it was important to move in on said company before word of their cool new widget got out to the other sharks in the business ocean. The fact that the guys who invented the widget thingie did not want to sell out to Killane Corporate Holdings didn’t seem to matter to anybody.

The additional fact that I had only the barest idea of what was going on also didn’t matter, because I played the part of ‘suave, knowledgeable, and lusciously curved woman of mystery’ like a pro. I sat at Mr. Killane’s elbow, nodded or raised an eyebrow or sighed at the appropriate moments, and made a great show of tapping away at my new phone or poring over some vital data on my also-new iPad.

When I leaned over and showed the boss what I’d been working on, it was always good for murmurs of fear and consternation from the audience of suits around the table, who had no idea Mr. Killane and I were looking at my player stats for World of Warcraft, or admiring the live webcam view of a litter of Shiba Inu puppies.

My second full day in San Francisco was much like the first, with meetings so boring, they’d make a statue beg for the mercy of death. I did seem to be the subject of even more frenzied speculation by various negotiators, lawyers, and executives, though – they stared at me and whispered whenever I entered a conference room or sat down next to Mr. Killane at yet another gleaming boardroom table, and I guessed they’d been up to a lot of urgent googling overnight, trying to figure out who the new girl was and why she was so close to Devon Killane.

I soldiered on, playing the part to the hilt even when the boss upped the ante by openly consulting me in front of his corporate victims, knowing as they didn’t that I had only the slimmest clue as to what was going on. For example, midway through a meeting between the developers of the widget thingamabob and three lawyers from Killane’s own team, Mr. K rolled his eyes at yet another anxious whine from one of the developers and then looked over at me.

“Ms. Daniels, do you have any idea why these people still cling to the notion that their beloved invention is somehow immune from the forces of the free market? Is there some benighted corner of economic theory that gives even a shred of credence to this fantasy?”

He raised an eyebrow and waited. Everyone stared at us – well, at me.

I did my best bored shrug. “The figures certainly don’t support their position, Mr. Killane – I can only think they’re trying to stave off the inevitable any way they can. I’ve been running the numbers, and there’s just no getting around some basic financial realities.”

I held out my iPad to him – carefully angled so the rest of the room couldn’t see it – and pointed to a Cracked article listing five U.S. Presidents who led secret lives as sexual perverts.

“You see? These indexes just don’t lie.” Mr. Killane nodded, everyone else fretted, and I moved on to pull up a Something Awful forum thread that analyzed the crap out of the latest episode of ‘The Walking Dead’.

I pointed at random to a comment halfway down the 23
^rd
page of the thread. “And this report from the Tokyo office pretty much nails the coffin lid shut, don’t you think?”

“You’re absolutely right, Ms. Daniels. I only wish that the rest of the room shared your keen grasp of the issues at stake here.” He leaned back in his chair, aimed his best imperial stare at those poor dumb bastards, and it was all over but the whimpering – once again, Devon Killane would get exactly what he wanted.

But did he still want me?

That night, my boss did not hit on me once we retired to his hotel suite. He was polite and professional and distant, he made no further towel-only appearances, he ate room service by himself on the balcony, and we both went to bed early and alone.

Had he given up on pursuing me?

I didn’t think that was it. Subtle looks during the day’s business dealings, his warm hand on the small of my back as we swept out of one conference room or another – it all seemed to indicate he was still after me, so why the cold shoulder once we were alone? Was he politely waiting for me to make the first move?

Was there any reason I shouldn’t make that move?

I asked myself that as I lay alone and restless in my cold bed, staring at the door of my room and thinking about the man asleep in the master bedroom – the towering, muscular, smoking hot man who was also weird and vulnerable and odd, the man I could not stop thinking about … the man who was my boss.

But what if I’d met him outside of work?

What if he was just a guy I ran into at Starbucks, or the grocery store, or wherever? Wouldn’t I go out with that guy? Wouldn’t I have dinner with him, laugh over drinks, and maybe we’d head back to my place?

I imagined evenings like that, imagined being alone with him, being kissed and fondled and more, as my hand slipped between my legs to help the fantasy along, as I felt my aching wetness, as I imagined feeling his hand there, his tongue, his powerful cock …

I got up. I got up, I grabbed a chair out of a corner, and I propped it up against the door. Then I climbed back into bed and I stared at the door until I fell asleep, just before dawn.

7. Promises

In the morning, Devon Killane was gone.

He was gone – as in vanished without a trace, absent without leave, nowhere to be found, and just flat gone.

I crawled out of bed late, at 7:30 a.m. – that’s late in Killane World – cringed when I saw the time, and hustled through brushing my teeth, showering, and getting dressed. Breakfast would have been sweet, but I was already behind schedule.

Once I was ready to go, I went in search of the boss. It seemed strange that I hadn’t seen him up and about yet, impatient to pounce on his latest financial victim, but I was more annoyed than anything – after all, there were only so many places he could hide, even in a presidential suite the size of Texas.

Mild annoyance edged upward into nervous concern when I didn’t find him in the sunken living room, the dining room, the library, the theater room, the private gym, the study, or on the balcony. The past two mornings he’d been up long before I was; was 7:30 so late that he’d given up and started the daily round of meetings without me?

Once I ran out of other places to check, I knocked on the door of the master bedroom. No response, and when I got up the nerve to go inside, the room was empty.

Empty, that is, except for his new iPhone, his wallet, and his laptop, which were lined up side by side in the center of his bed, sinking slightly into the plush comfiness of the burgundy silk comforter.

What self-respecting first-world adult would go anywhere without his phone? Without his wallet? No cards, no cash, no means of making contact with anybody? In particular, a self-respecting first-world adult who was worth 58.6 billion dollars and had dozens of people waiting for him to show up and finish the job of blowing some hapless tech startup out of the water?

He was not out doing business, and it was too early for partying or general gadding about town. He was missing in action for reasons unknown, and he clearly did not wish to be found.

No, that wasn’t quite right … if he truly meant to pull a disappearing act, why leave his stuff sitting out in plain sight, arranged in a neat little row right where he knew I’d come looking for him?

He wants you to know he’s gone, Ashley.

And he wanted me to deal with it, deal with it and find him – I knew that when his iPhone, which he could have turned off if he’d felt like it, brayed to life as a call came in.

As in literally brayed – he’d found a sound file of a braying donkey somewhere online, and a little tapping and swiping revealed that he’d assigned this as the ringtone for every last business-related caller in his contacts list. I had to admire such a sweet display of contempt for executive asshattery, even as I mentally swore at him for putting me in this spot and worrying the hell out of me.