Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (30 page)

      Uncle Sheridan’s mint-condition 1939 Packard limousine rolled into the parking lot of my apartment building looking like a luxurious ocean liner pulling up to the dock at a sleazy little marina in the backwaters of nowhere. Once the suave old Jedi peered out the limo’s tinted windows and got a good look at the ‘retro urban apocalypse’ style of the place, he told his driver to wait and insisted on walking me all the way to my front door.

There, the old man stood like an immovable boulder while I unlocked the kazillion or so state-of-the-art deadbolt locks that had come with my new door, and he refused to leave until a) I was inside and safe, and b) he had called one of my bodyguards off ‘sitting in a huge black SUV and watching my building from the street’ duty and insisted that the man stand guard in the hallway directly outside my door until further notice.

I waited fifteen minutes to give Uncle Sheridan time to be well on his way, and then I stuck my head out of my front door and told the bodyguard he was clear to return to the heated leather upholstery and steaming Starbucks latte waiting for him in his Looming SUV of Doom.

Seriously, I knew the bodyguards were dedicated professionals who were just looking out for my safety and all, but those SUVs made me feel like the FBI was watching my place.

You could just move into Devon’s place, Ashley, it would be so easy …

I shoved that thought aside, because I was afraid that if I examined it too closely, I’d be packing my stuff and heading over to my guy’s version of Wayne Manor before I knew it.

So I settled down to wait.

I waited for Devon’s ‘I’m okay’ call. I waited some more. I cranked my iPhone’s volume up as high as it would go, I put it on ‘vibrate’ as well for good measure, and I kept waiting.

I changed out of my ‘office formal’ clothes into a classic ‘Ashley casual’ outfit. The oversized t-shirt I pulled on showed Theodore Roosevelt riding a bull moose into battle against a Tyrannosaurus, while the comfy grey sweatpants sported paint stains from the weekend I’d decided my walls needed to change from ‘blah management beige’ to ‘it was on sale teal.’ I kept my phone within easy reach the entire time, but the stubborn thing still refused to ring.

When I caught myself walking a few nervous laps around my micro-apartment, I decided I needed to chill the hell out. My guy had to get home, change, maybe eat something, and then lie down for a good long while – all that would take at least a couple or a few hours, and I might as well put those hours to good use.

First, I called work and arranged to have my car retrieved from the boss’s private parking area and brought around to my place – once Devon’s call came, I intended to charge over to the Killane Batcave without waiting for a security guy to chauffeur me around.

Second, I called Dana to let her know to clear her boss’s appointment calendar for the rest of the weekend. Another call to the swankiest Mercedes dealer in the state ensured that when she drove back in to work on Monday morning, she’d be doing it in some well-deserved style.

Third, my beloved Playstation was calling my name … and hey, it’s not like the newest shoot-bad-guys-full-of-holes game was going to play itself, right?

Two minutes after the idea crossed my mind, I was planted on the couch, slaughtering virtual terrorists. My phone was in my lap, a bowl of Doritos and a bottle of Diet Coke – I love the taste of cancer-causing artificial sweeteners, deal with it – stood ready on the coffee table, and I was mowing down my opponents with an array of heavy-duty weapons that it would probably take an entire squad of Marines to carry in real life.

In the game’s version of things, my targets were terrorists from a just-barely-not-stereotypical Middle Eastern country – but in my mind, every one of those bastards was wearing the face of a different Asshole Killane, and it was a pleasure dealing out round after round of hollow-point justice on their sorry asses.

As it turns out, killing terrorists by the truckload while waiting for a desperately important phone call from your hot and unstable boyfriend means that everyone else in the world will choose to call you.

The first time my iPhone rang I jumped, dropped the fragmentation grenade I was carrying in the game, and managed to blow up my own character when I threw the controller aside and lunged for the phone.

It was Mom.

“Honey, I just wanted to see if we’re still on for dinner tonight.”

Shit, I’d totally forgotten about our more-or-less regular Saturday night dinner – I sure as hell couldn’t go now, though, not with Devon in potential freak-out mode.

“Or are you planning on ditching me for a night of passion with Mr. Long, Tall, and Mysterious?”

“Um, yeah, I was heading over to his place later, Mom; we’re going to eat popcorn and argue about the cultural import of animé in modern society, and –”

“Ashley, did your hormones call in sick today? Honestly, if you don’t jump all over that man, you are no daughter of mine.”

“Mom!”

She laughed like the crafty fiend she was.

“That’s okay, baby, we’ll just reschedule. Love you, talk to you later.”

She hung up.

Five minutes into a new mission of death and destruction, the phone rang again. This time, it was a telemarketer, and how the hell had they gotten my cell number? I told the faceless call center drone that I couldn’t talk to him because I didn’t speak English, and then I hung up.

The third call was from my security guy outside, notifying me that my car had just been dropped off.

After a wrong number, my cable company trying to sell me on bundling my services for a fantastic, limited-time-only price, and some idiot who wanted to tie up my time with a marketing survey, I gave up. I shut off the Playstation, I set every incoming number on my phone to ‘mute’ except Devon’s, and I settled down to wait.

And yep, you guessed it – not two minutes later, my phone was vibrating like a mad thing and playing “Sharp Dressed Man” at max volume.

“Devon, is your head on straight now? Big guy, I was about to charge over there and –”

“Ms. Daniels, this is Mr. Killane’s housekeeper, Dolores Hadfield.”

Excuse me?

My brain fumbled for what I could remember about Mrs. Hadfield, but although I’d talked to her on the phone now and again – including that time in San Francisco when she’d clued me in on Devon’s preference for mayo-free roast beef sandwiches – I’d never met her in person. My mental impression of the woman extended only as far as fifty-something, head of his household staff, tough on the outside but a marshmallow on the inside – and then her clipped, no-nonsense voice broke into my frantic thoughts.

“Ms. Daniels –”

“Please, call me Ashley – and Mrs. Hadfield, is Devon all right? What’s going on?”

“Well, Ashley, I was calling to ask you what’s going on, but let me guess – Mr. Killane had a bad morning at work, didn’t he?”

“Fifty-fifty, Mrs. H – it was a good morning in that a big project he’s been working on came off without a hitch, and a bad morning in that he had to stress himself right down to the bone to pull it off.”

“Then I’ll throw another guess at you – it had something to do with his shitty excuse for a family, right? It’s all over the news that those assholes are all going to jail, and when Mr. Killane dragged himself in here a few hours ago looking like he’d gone fifteen rounds with the devil, I put two and two together, so –”

Whatever, lady. “Please, ma’am, can you just tell me if Devon is okay? He insisted on going home by himself to lie down, and said he’d call me once he was feeling better –”

“Ashley, everyone here at the house knows how much you mean to Mr. Killane, and if you make him happy, then you’re all right as far as we’re concerned. But you should know the man well enough by now to realize that sometimes you have to give him what he needs, not what he wants or insists on.”

“Swell, I’ll make a note of that. So is he okay, or what?” My voice skated up a notch, and I sat hard on the urge to start sniffling like a whiny little baby.

Tough old mom that she was – I’d never heard that she had kids, but in that moment, I was certain of it – Mrs. H heard my nerves jangling anyway, and laid out the scene at House Killane without further delay.

“Ashley, when Mr. Killane came in earlier, dripping sweat and barely saying a word to anyone, I just figured he was spiraling through another of those mood swings of his – but when he wouldn’t settle down, when he kept wandering into one room after another, staring at them as if he’d never seen the inside of his own home before, I knew something more was going on.

“I followed him and I tried to get him talking, but no luck. He just kept walking all over the house, peering into every room and glancing out the windows, as if he was looking for something or someone.

“Then after I watched him walk six laps around the fourth floor library, he stopped. He stopped, he turned to look at me, and then he said, clear as a bell and twice as calm, ‘Mrs. Hadfield, I believe I need to go lie down for a bit.’ He walked over, handed me this phone of his –”

“Mrs. H, he never lets that phone out of his sight, it’s like an umbilical cord.”

“Don’t I know it – anyway, there I was holding the phone and wondering what I should do, while he marched up the nearest staircase and disappeared into a spare bedroom on the fifth floor.”

“So then he got some rest?”

“Not as such. When I poked my head in to check on him, he was just sitting on the edge of the bed, still fully dressed and shaking like a leaf. I’ve looked in on him every thirty minutes or so since then, and he hasn’t moved an inch, unless you count shaking even harder as moving. I decided to call you when I saw he was hyperventilating – oh, and he spoke up long enough to say, ‘Mrs. Hadfield, for whatever it’s worth, I rather think I’m having a heart attack.’”

“Jesus, lady, call 911!”

“Ashley, you know as well as I do that he’s not having a heart attack, no matter what he thinks.”

“Oh, so you’re a doctor now?”

“Ashley, we’ve all seen this behavior from him before – the sweating, the shaking, the chest pains – and given how close you are to Mr. Killane, I decided to call you and see if you could come over here and be the one to talk him down.”

I looked around to realize I’d been churning around the perimeter of my apartment at a frantic pace, tearing along as if someone was chasing me. Forget this, I was going over there. I swerved over to the closet to shuck on my coat and pull on the first pair of boots I came to – and then it hit me.

“Mrs. Hadfield, um … what do you mean, exactly, by ‘we’ve all seen this behavior’? How is it that you assumed I’d know he’s not really having a heart problem?”

I heard her hesitate, I heard her sigh like a mother dealing with a bratty kid, and I somehow heard her roll her eyes.

“That man – I would have hoped if you hadn’t seen it for yourself, he’d at least have the decency to tell you, so you wouldn’t be shocked out of your socks if … anyway, I take it this means you don’t know about his attacks?”

Attacks?

21. Freak

I didn’t bother telling the bodyguard on duty outside where I was going, since I figured the sight of my Mercedes peeling out into the street at fifty miles an hour would be clue enough that he just maybe should follow me.

A drive to the exclusive peasants-keep-out suburbs where the rich and obnoxious lived would normally have taken about forty-five minutes from my place, but I shaved that down to twenty by means of speeding, cutting through parking lots and alleys, praying all the cops were busy eating doughnuts, and more speeding.

Halfway there, I dared one glance into the rearview mirror – no more than that, because as fast as I was going, I needed to concentrate on objects in my immediate path – and saw the familiar black SUV slewing around a corner behind me, my undoubtedly frantic security guy doing his best to keep me in sight.

I braked it down a bit once I arrived in the tony part of town, because a) this was just the sort of neighborhood where lowly types like me would be reported to the police just for breathing, much less rocketing around corners on two wheels, and b) my GPS couldn’t find Devon’s place.

Knowing him, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d paid Google Maps to claim his address didn’t exist – but some old-fashioned cruising around and looking led me to a back road that fed into a side road that wound around a series of terraced hills, until I rounded one last switchback turn to arrive at, voilá, the most private of private residences this side of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

I swung into a vast circular driveway paved with bricks in a thousand faintly different shades of red, brown, and bone white, bricks inlaid in swirling patterns that might have been hypnotic if I’d had the time to gawk at crap like that.

As it was, though, I ignored the artistic aspects of brick paving, barely glanced at the three-tiered marble fountain in the center of the driveway, and didn’t even notice the life-size topiary hedge animals until I nearly mowed one down as I screeched to a halt.

I jumped out of my Mercedes and was immediately confronted by two towering guys in tailored black suits that didn’t do much to hide their intimidating hugeness or their holstered pistols.