Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (31 page)

Security Guy One nodded. “Ms. Daniels, it’s a pleasure to see you today. Next time, though, you might want to give your escort a bit more of a heads-up about your travel plans – I took his call letting us know you were coming, and I think you just about gave the kid a seizure.”

Security Guy Two stared. He just stared at me and didn’t say a single thing. Man, he was good at staring. It felt like a mountain was staring at me. God help anybody that tried to approach the house without permission, because that guy would have stared them to death.

My bodyguard of the moment – was this one Bill? Brad? Brent, maybe? – pulled up and parked behind my car. He scrambled out of the black SUV looking rattled and sheepish, but not quite in seizure mode.

“Hey, guys – Ms. Daniels, I appreciate that you were in a hurry, but you don’t want to know what would have happened if I hadn’t called ahead, not to mention that it’s my job if you get away from me and then something happens to you.”

A familiar no-nonsense voice rescued me.

“How in hell the human race ever survived with men in charge, I have no idea.”

Mrs. Hadfield called out this comment on society as she stalked down the walkway from the front steps of the house, shaking her head and scowling like someone with murder on her mind.  Once she made it down to the edge of the driveway, she planted herself next to me and glared at the security guys as if they were kids she’d caught shooting off bottle rockets at three in the morning.

“If you’ve got eyes, you can see the girl is in a state, so why are you gentlemen standing here lecturing her on the finer points of security procedures? She’s here at my request, she’s in a hurry, and I might also mention that as Mr. Killane’s personal assistant and girlfriend, she outranks all of you.”

Security Guy One apologized with a smile that he didn’t hide very well, Security Guy Two stared like an alien monolith, and Bill/Brad/Brent shuffled his feet and avoided eye contact while mumbling, “Sorry, Mrs. Hadfield” in a small voice.

“Now go back to interrogating squirrels and cuffing imaginary bad guys or whatever it was you were doing out here, and this young lady and I will be on our way. Ashley, follow me.”

I tailed Mrs. H into the house like a good little girl, half because she radiated a mom-authority-figure vibe that no human could resist, and half because I would have followed the Antichrist into the house if it meant getting to Devon’s side as fast as possible.

Outside, Devon’s place looked like one of those staggeringly elegant mansions that you see on staggeringly dull PBS series about wispy British types with more money than brains. The rose-red façade was lined with windows framed in white marble, as well as wrought-iron balconies ideal for looking down on the unwashed masses. White pillars with spirals of groomed ivy climbing up them flanked each door, while gargoyles grinned from oh-so-twee decorative turrets.  The entire rambling, multi-storied building was surrounded by manicured formal gardens, gardens so perfect that a single leaf dropping onto a raked gravel path probably would have set off a dozen alarms.

Once Mrs. H and I mounted the wide-enough-for-an-army front steps and the gold-trimmed mahogany double doors thumped shut behind us, all that proper Victorian snootiness disappeared.

Inside, the house underwent a radical personality change.

It was like stepping straight from the oozing-with-privilege part of the 19
^th
century into an over-the-top modern art gallery.

The wall were retina-burning white, abstract paintings the size of not-so-small cars hung everywhere, and sculptures that looked like frozen explosions in a junkyard loomed in the corners. The furniture I could see was all minimalist squares and circles of glass and black leather and chrome, and looked more like stuff you’d pose next to than anything real humans would sit on or put things on or use for any practical purpose at all.

I shook my head and tried focusing on my shoes to overcome the dizzy feeling I got from all that aggressive modernity – but the white ceramic floor tiles beneath my feet displayed writhing patterns of black lines that twisted through a dozen different optical illusions before I stopped counting and looked up at the ceiling instead.

The ceiling was a bland cream color and soothing by comparison – or it would have been, if it weren’t for the red eyes of the security cameras up there following our every move.

Mrs. Hadfield glanced around, and then turned to me.

“Hideous, isn’t it?”

“You said it, ma’am – seriously, are we sure the boss even lives here?”

“Follow me, and I’ll explain on the way.”

Mrs. H marched away from the foyer and turned down the nearest hallway without a look back. I hustled after her, wondering why everything associated with Devon Killane had to be mysterious and complicated.

The hallway led into a series of three monstrous interconnected rooms – monstrous in size, since each one could have held about a dozen copies of my apartment, and monstrous in terms of being more in-your-face modern and trendy than any human being should have to tolerate.

The toughest badass-mom housekeeper ever swept along, calling back over her shoulder as we left the third room and turned into a short hallway.

“It all seems like a bit much when you’re new to it, but you’d be surprised how quickly you can get used to crap like this when you work around it every day – anyway, your instincts are right, Mr. Killane doesn’t live on the first floor at all. These rooms are strictly for entertaining – business associates, actors, models, celebrities, they all seem way more interested in being photographed in the right fashionable setting with the right powerful assholes than in having what normal people would call fun, so he obliges them with this weird décor. He hates it himself, won’t even come in through the front door if he can avoid it.”

The hallway led us to an elevator, and one swipe of a keycard later, we were on our way up. The interior of the elevator was plain brushed steel, the numbers flickered from one floor to the next in a thoroughly conventional way, and I sighed with relief at the blissful normality of it all – until I thought of Devon, of how he was somewhere above me in this warren of oddities, hurting and needing my help.

“So where is he, Mrs. Hadfield? I mean, you’re taking me straight to him, right?”

“Relax, Ashley, we’re just a few minutes away from whatever Mr. Killane and his brain are up to right now. The second floor is more eye-bleach masquerading as art, the third floor is servants’ quarters, an auxiliary kitchen, storage, that kind of thing – and here we are, floor three, no waiting.”

The doors slid open and we stepped out into a hallway with a well-worn hardwood floor and plaster walls painted a neutral pale blue – no art, no oddness, just a bland working environment ideal for servants dealing with the demands of maintaining an enormous private mansion like this. But where was Devon?

“Ma’am, on the phone you said Mr. K was in a spare bedroom on the fifth floor – so why are we getting off on the third floor?”

Mrs. Hadfield bustled away down the hall, swerving around one corner and then another. I hurried after her, wanting an answer and also not wanting to get lost up here.

Once again, she called back over her shoulder – man, this woman walked fast.

“We’re on the third floor because this is as far as you can go using the main elevators. The last time he had the house remodeled, Mr. Killane wanted to make sure that none of those trendy party idiots could get anywhere near the rooms where he actually lives, so to access his private floors – from the fourth on up – you need a keycard just to get here to the third floor, and then you have to swipe a different card and punch in three codes to access the private security elevator that takes you to the upper floors. Hang on, we’re almost there.”

We turned down a long corridor featuring more blah paint, plain wood flooring, and one unmarked door after another. I heard the muffled voices of other staff members coming from a few of the rooms, muted salsa music drifted down the hall from somewhere, and then we turned a final corner to find ourselves in the company of the boss’s mega-secure Secret Elevator of Obsessive Privacy.

The elevator doors were blood-red – strictly for purposes of intimidation, I assumed – surveillance cameras swiveled to follow our movements, the card slot hummed like a murder-cyborg powering up for action, and the intricate keypad would have looked right at home in CIA headquarters.

Mrs. Hadfield muttered to herself while she punched her way through the sequence of codes – I heard something like ‘paranoid crap’ and ‘Millard Fillmore’s birthday, dear God’ – and then the doors slid open with a condescending beep, permitting us access to the elevator’s sacred interior.

Well, it let me in – Mrs. H stayed outside.

“You’re not coming, Mrs. Hadfield? I haven’t been in this asylum before, I don’t even know where –”

She leaned in, hit the button for the fifth floor – I was surprised the machine didn’t demand a fingerprint or a blood sample or something – then held the doors open with one hand.

“Once you get out on five, go straight to the windows, then turn right, head down the hall, and it’s the second door after the elephant.”

The elephant? Hell, as long as it wasn’t going to stomp me flat or something, then whatever – anybody who hung around Devon Killane for long learned to roll with the weirdness.

“So why aren’t you coming along, Mrs. H?”

She ignored my question. “Just call if you need anything – and don’t worry, you’re a smart girl and you have good instincts, so you’ll be fine.”

Why was everybody complimenting my instincts today? “But don’t you think – ”

She shook her head and stepped back, still with a hand on the door.

“I don’t think, Ashley, I know – I know he doesn’t need his grouchy old housekeeper right now, or a doctor, or a therapist, or the man in the moon, for that matter.”

She pulled her hand back, and as the doors slid closed, she looked me right in the eye with her ‘mom knows best, so deal with it’ face – man, she could cow a charging rhino into submission with that look.

“He needs you, Ashley.”

I stepped out onto the fifth floor with no idea what to expect, other than no more modernist cubist surrealist existentialist bullshit crap passing itself off as art.

What I found as I hurried over to the windows across from the elevator was an environment that matched the exterior of the house – gleaming wood in deep, burnished shades lining the walls, Victorian leather chairs and damask couches, potted palms and crystal chandeliers, thick, luxurious maroon carpeting, and, wonder of wonders, gold-framed 19
^th
century paintings of horses and landscapes and actual recognizable objects.

It looked almost normal.

That was before I met the elephant.

I went to the windows – they took up most of the wall opposite the elevator – and looked out on a view that showed the house splitting up into three or four wings as it spread across the manicured grounds. I saw a structure that looked like it might be a greenhouse, along with maintenance buildings and a garage with yet another black SUV sitting out front, and then I pulled myself away and turned right, heading down the hallway.

The elephant glared at me from the shadows a few yards down the corridor, and I was almost disappointed it wasn’t alive. Instead, it was the life-sized head of an elephant, carved from marble and mounted on the wall like some bizarro trophy from a hunting expedition in an art gallery. A sculptor good enough to make stone sit up and beg had created it, no doubt of that – the ears flared wide in anger, tiny carved wrinkles fanned out from the eyes, and the rough, leathery texture was so realistic, I almost expected the coiled trunk to move under my hand. It was magnificent and pointless and deliciously weird – in other words, it was so Devon.

Yeah, Devon, Ashley – as in get down to business and leave Horton here to listen for Whos. The big guy needs you.

The door just past the elephant was closed. When I turned the knob and edged it open, I saw a master bedroom – or so I would have assumed from the massive four-poster bed, the antique dressers and cabinets and mirrors, the small door that must have led to a private bath, and the rich-as-sin velvet and silk and gold shining from every corner.

No Devon, though – the room was empty, and silent as a tomb.

The second door past the elephant stood open. That was the one, according to Mrs. Hadfield, and from that one I heard labored breathing.

“Devon?”

The second room was tiny for this place – it was barely half the size of my apartment. Only a trickle of light from the windows made it this far down the hall, and I couldn’t make out much detail – just a small dark room with a dresser, a chair, and a narrow bed.

Devon sat on the edge of the bed, and he was a wreck.

I don’t remember walking or running or teleporting to his side, I was just there. I sat down next to him, I put my right arm over his broad, heaving shoulders, and I saw just how much standing up to his family of raging assholes had cost him.

Devon sweated like a wild-eyed animal being herded to slaughter. Sweat drenched his five-thousand-dollar silk suit, sweat plastered his black hair to his scalp, and sweat dripped from his forehead and ran down his face. His silk tie hung crooked and half-undone, the neat Windsor knot a memory. With the top buttons of his shirt unfastened, I could see beads of sweat rolling down his neck and dripping onto his chest.

His breathing was worse, and it scared the hell out of me. His chest heaved as if he’d just run a marathon, his mouth hung open as he pulled in huge, gasping breaths, and those breaths just kept coming faster and faster.

If I didn’t figure out something soon, he’d pass right the hell out from breathing like that. Could he maybe even work himself into having a real heart attack, if he kept sweating like a crippled racehorse and breathing like a thundering freight train?

The eyes were the worst, though. He stared straight ahead. His eyes didn’t so much as twitch in my direction when I sat down next to him. He stared like a statue at nothing, or at empty air, or at something only he could see. He stared with the blank eyes of a dead man. Nobody was home behind those eyes.