Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (18 page)

Without waiting for my thoughts on the matter, he took hold of my right fist and lifted it until my arm was stretched at full length along the wall, just below shoulder height. He pried my fist open, curled his fingers around mine, and then pinned that hand to the wall, leaning his strength into it, leaving no hope of that arm moving until he felt like releasing it. While I was still processing what was going on, he did the same with my left arm, stretching it wide across the wall. I let him clamp my left hand in his right, he put his weight into that grip as well, and now I was pinned in place and helpless, trapped against the wall and spread wide open, ready for him.

“There, isn’t this delightful? Why, it’s almost like real bondage.”

It was exactly like real damn bondage, at least to my inexperienced mind. It was also like sweet, delicious torture, and I couldn’t stand one more unrequited second of it.

“Talk is cheap, big guy – where’s that spectacular kiss?”

“I have it for you here, my beautiful Ashley.”

His mouth settled on mine, warm and hungry and possessive. I could barely move in the powerful grip of his hands and I could barely breathe beneath the commanding pressure of his kiss, of his lips sealed against mine. He leaned into me from above as I stretched up on tiptoe to meet him. If only my hands had been free, I would have sunk my nails into his arms, wrapped my legs around him, and climbed that man like a tree.

I wanted more. I breathed in the powerful musk of his scent, I felt the delicious sandpaper rasp of his beard stubble against my skin, I bent beneath his pressure, and I wanted more.

He gave me more, and more still. Mouth open, he teased my lips with the tip of his tongue, inviting me to open to him. He took a step closer to me and eased one knee between my legs, inviting me to open everything to him. My nipples brushed against the hard wall of his body and immediately tightened into hard points, as I ached with need and desire.

I gave way, and I opened my lips. His tongue dove into me, probing and tasting, as I moaned helplessly into his mouth. Wetness gathered between my legs, as I imagined being taken by more than his tongue – God, I wanted him inside me, all of him.

The only way I knew to tell him was to bring my lips to bear on him, to capture and suck on his tongue, tasting him as he was tasting me.

Something between a purr and a growl rumbled in his throat, and then he took me with his moist, searching tongue. He thrust it deep into my mouth, over and over, taking me with firm, powerful strokes, fucking me with his tongue in the same way I was desperate for him to fuck me with his cock.

Nothing existed but his mouth and mine, his body and mine. In that moment, I lived for what his hungrily working mouth was doing to me, for the feelings it was drawing from me, the need, the warmth, the arousal –

And then his mouth was gone.

It was like waking up from a dream. I jumped a little, my eyes popped open, and for a fraction of a second, I had to think about just where I was and what exactly was going on.

Then he came back to me, for one sweet, endless moment. He dropped his head over to one side, he licked my throat, and then he fastened a hungry, sucking kiss onto the side of my neck. He took my skin between his teeth, nipping and worrying at it until the most delicious pain burned into me. I leaned into the pain, into his hungry mouth, wanting him to take me in deeper, wanting him to never, ever stop.

But of course, he did. After somewhere between a minute or two and forever, he stopped. He pulled away from my neck, dusted a single light kiss onto my forehead, and then took his mouth away from me. Releasing his grip on my hands, he stepped back.

Those hypnotic eyes stared at me, through me, as if he were all alone and studying himself in a mirror. His lips parted as he started to say something … but he stopped, and just sighed instead.

Then he turned from me. The most impossible man I’d ever met left me standing there shivering and stunned against the wall, and he walked away. He went back down the hallway, he disappeared through the nearest door, and he was gone, just like that.

My knees gave out. I sank down the wall to the floor and I just sat there, surrounded by drifts of papers, by piles of statistics and projections and percentages, and I wondered how I would ever survive Devon Killane.

***

I couldn’t bear to tell her just how little time we had left.

11. Believe

“Honey, did you know you’re on the cover of Us Weekly?”

“I’m looking at it right now, Mom.”

If I’m nothing else, I am the queen of multi-tasking. Not only was I looking at the bizarre and improbable sight of my round ass splashed across the cover of a gossip magazine, but while stretched out on my thrift store couch in my microscopic apartment – one room, no waiting – I also had my laptop propped on my stomach, open to a celebrity website trumpeting the news of my supposedly torrid relationship with one of the richest men in the world.

While I calmed down Mom on my old phone, my sweet new iPhone displayed a muted Youtube video as it lay close at hand on the coffee table – the boss had been crystal clear that in my position as his keeper/babysitter/amateur therapist, my phone had to be on and within my reach twenty-four hours a day, because apparently he had major issues with separation anxiety. The video was nothing more than a minute or two of blurry footage of our arrival home at the local airport following the San Francisco trip, but it already had over 500,000 views.

Meanwhile, I could see over my folded-up knees that the TV on the far wall – which wasn’t all that far, since as previously mentioned, my place was about as big as a minute – had moved on from a talk show featuring two reality stars and a psychologist babbling at low volume about me and Mr. K to a business show with a panel of financial analysts droning on about the ‘market capitalization options’ of Killane Corporate Holdings, whatever the hell that meant. I considered it a plus that at least they weren’t discussing in obsessive detail just how these options related to the size of my ass in centimeters.

“So, I guess you decided to ignore your dear old mom’s warning about getting involved with a marginally nutzoid rich guy, huh?”

“We are so
not
involved, Mom, please – I fetch and carry for him at work, and he took me out to a nice restaurant one time, and I’m pretty sure none of that constitutes our being ‘involved,’ okay?”

Oh yeah, Mom, and he gave me a toe-curling kiss that totally would have turned into right-there-on-the-carpet sex if I’d been able to move …

“Ashley, you’re my baby and I love you, but I can also read you like a book – if you’re not in deep with this guy yet, you will be, and I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

I muted the phone while I heaved a sigh, tossed aside the copy of Us Weekly, and picked up another magazine at random from the stack on the coffee table. I counted down from ten, unmuted the phone, and forced a smile into my voice. I loved her to death, but sometimes Mom seemed to think that I was literally still an actual baby.

“Look at it this way, Mom – if I ignore your warning about getting all hot and sweaty with an unstable gazillionaire, it  means I’ll be taking your advice to get back on the dating horse and start going out again, right? Meanwhile, let’s take a long, sweet moment together to imagine that idiot Greg reading these same magazines as he burns with jealousy and wonders just where the hell he went wrong.”

Mom giggled like a boss as I looked at the new magazine’s cover, which featured an all-caps headline that shouted “BILLIONAIRE’S BUXOM BEAUTY!” over a picture of me in my world-class red dress. I glanced over at my about-the-size-of-an-envelope closet, where that dress was now slumming in the company of my t-shirts and jeans, then looked back at the magazine. In slightly less frantic type, the cover asked its readers, “Who Is Killane’s Mystery Woman?” and promised an answer on page 10.

I threw that one over the back of the couch because I figured the floor could hold it. “Besides, it takes at least two people minimum for any ‘involvement’ to take place, and seeing as how he’s used to being drooled over and pawed by skinny slutmonsters, I doubt he remembers I exist outside of work.” I crossed my fingers while feeding her this bald-faced lie.

“Um, about that, Ashley …”

Oh God, damage control time – what did he say, what the hell did he do?

“Spit it out, Mom.” I closed my eyes and prayed to the big girl gods.

“Well, did you ever happen to mention anything to him about how you make all these grocery runs for me? Even though I’ve told you several million times that you don’t need to buy food for me, and that I am in fact not starving?”

Please, not this argument again … but didn’t I say something to him about my buying groceries for her on the plane, when we left town that first day? I wasn’t even sure about that, though, so how would he remember it? Don’t world-conquering billionaires have better things to worry about than nervous small talk from curvy girls? And why would he notice or care about my mom, who he’d never even met?

Or had he?

“God, no – Mom, tell me he didn’t show up at your house. He didn’t, did he?” I couldn’t imagine a worse disaster than my molten-lava-sexy boss and my mom having a nice long chat about me when I wasn’t around. Could I maybe just move to an obscure island in the South Pacific and start a new life altogether?

“No, but two nice young men did, the day after you left for San Francisco. They were driving a huge refrigerated truck, and had me sign for a delivery that the paperwork said came from Killane Corporate Holdings. I made a couple of calls to check up on them, just in case it was some kind of weird scam or something, and then they unloaded just about every kind of groceries I could ever want – meats, veggies, frozen dinners, flour, sugar, dairy stuff, bread, the works. I figured you must be behind it, but I guess not, huh?”

Was it a good or a bad thing that this guy surprised me at every turn? “Nope, I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to manage the Killane Traveling Circus at the time – but did I or did I not say Mr. K has his nice moments, when he’s not preoccupied with being all weird and stuff?”

“Oh, it gets better – Greg called me the other day.”

She dropped that little bombshell with a chuckle, while I lurched into full panic mode.

“What did my worthless prick of an ex say, Mom? Was he drunk, do I need to kill him for you?”

“Well, he did seem pretty upset about having to sell his Camaro.”

“Mom, I knew from Day One of our so-called relationship that his precious car meant more to him than I did – trust me, he’d sell his left ball before he sold that Camaro.”

“Then his pants don’t quite fit right anymore, honey, because it seems your Mr. Killane left him with no choice but to sell his beloved 1969 Camaro. So, did you clue your new guy in about Greg at the same time you two were chatting about my grocery situation?”

“Mr. Killane is my lunatic boss, Mom, not my ‘new guy,’ and I don’t remember ever …”

Then I did remember. In San Francisco, just before we went out for that memorable dinner, the subject of one Greg Carpenter, ruler of the asshole-ex universe, came up in an intimate little conversation about my personal insecurities … and hadn’t my boss seemed pretty upset about Greg’s treatment of me? And hadn’t he pried Greg’s full name and place of employment out of me? And hadn’t he disappeared to make a few calls right after that?

Oh shit.

“What did my not-new-guy do, Mom?” I couldn’t decide whether this was a disaster, or absolutely amazing.

“Oh, nothing much – according to Greg, ‘that crazy fucker Killane’ only bought Elmhurst Beverages and then had him fired in front of all the other employees.”

Definitely amazing.

“And it looks like Mr. Killane then put out the word to his local business contacts, because Greggy Boy whined to me about he can’t seem to get hired anywhere else for some mysterious reason, and so he had to sell his sweet Camaro to make ends meet. Poor baby.”

This was beyond amazing. This was dancing-in-the-streets fantastic.

      “Anyway, even though we’re so not involved, I swear, isn’t that spectacular? He smites evil exes
and
he’s generous as all hell. Sweet, huh?”

Mom sighed – and just like that, Sweet Revenge Mom was gone and Cautious Mom was back on duty.     

“Ashley, I do think that it’s easy for a rich guy to be generous with his wallet. Being generous with his heart is something else entirely, and I’m just asking you to remember that.”

She sniffled a bit, and the silence drew out. Words were so not necessary. We were both thinking about Dad, about how nice and funny and generous he was – until the day he got bored with playing at being a family man, and strolled out of our lives without looking back.

“Mom, I don’t know if there’s any way to be careful about what’s not going on between me and Mr. Killane, but I promise I’ll try.”

I could hear the brave smile in her voice. “That’s all I’m asking for, honey. And hey, if he does act like a jerk to you, let me know and I’ll kick his sorry ass, okay?”