Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (35 page)

Both the soft-as-a-cloud couch and the sinfully warm and sexy guy I shared it with were beyond comfortable, and the idea of spending the night there in Devon’s arms was beyond tempting.

But we weren’t there for eating, duck watching, or snuggling.

Somebody had to bring up the subject of his dad, and I nominated me. “So if your father screwed you over somehow by coming back, that means he left at some point – did he take off when you were just a little kid, the way my dad did?”

Devon sighed, and he looked away to stare into the night for a single silent moment. When he turned back to me, he pressed a kiss to the top of my head and gathered me into the safe harbor of his arms.

He murmured the truth about his father into my hair.

“He did not leave when I was a child, sweet Ashley. He abandoned Mama the very day she told him she was pregnant.”

“What a grade A, gold-plated asshole – please, did she at least milk some child support out of the sleazy bastard? Sic lawyers on him, beat him up, out him as a douchebag to the tabloids?”

“She was not like you, Ashley. If I were to mistreat you, you would do all those things to me and more, but Mama was not fierce, practical, or persistent. I fear she was not strong, not in the way that you are strong.”

He tightened his arms around me as if he was afraid I’d get away. I rested my head on his chest, listening to the pounding of his heart and willing him the courage to tell the rest of the story.

“I was so young when … when Mama was lost to me, so you must understand that most of my memories of her are like dreams that vanish upon waking, or like sunlight that steals through the clouds only to fall upon a dingy window in a forgotten corner of an empty house. On bad days, I rather wonder if she ever existed at all.”

“Wonder if you want, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t spring fully formed from the thigh of Zeus – your mom was real, and your memories of her might be spotty here and there, but they’re real too. So, if she wasn’t strong my way, just how was she strong? Was she a quiet, stealth kind of badass?”

That won me a chuckle and another kiss, this time on my cheek. “She was all that I had, and all that I needed. She was reed thin, tall, pale as a porcelain doll, and always at my side. I think my earliest memory … yes, I remember ever so faintly a day when she sat by a window and held me in her lap, her waterfall of black hair tumbling down on either side of me as she told me a story. I don’t remember just which story it was, but I do recall tugging on her hair with the concentration of a scientist studying a curious new element, and she laughed like an angel.

“On other days, she sang to me. She made breakfast toast that was charred to a crisp, but I loved it because it came from her. She read to me, and I don’t remember a single one of the books, but I remember her giving a different voice to every character – I’m not entirely sure they were even children’s books, but they were hers and so I treasured them. I woke in the night crying from a bad dream or an earache or a toothache, and she cradled me in her arms and rocked me to sleep again.

“I didn’t know it then, but we were alone in the world and had nothing – yet it didn’t matter, because we were alone together and we had each other.”

He sniffed back tears. I held perfectly still, breathing in his warmth, waiting for him to find his way forward.

“Ashley, I own a fortune that totals nearly sixty billion dollars, and I swear on my soul that I would give up every one of those dollars and live destitute in the streets to have Mama back for an hour, to hear her voice and see her lovely, fragile smile, to listen to her stories and eat her horrible toast. God, I loved her.”

I held him, just held him. Sleet began spattering against the glass, the wind gusted, a grandfather clock chimed somewhere deep within the house, and we just held each other.

Devon stirred first, after ten minutes or perhaps an hour. He reached past me to pick up a crystal tumbler from the table, drained half of the water it contained in one gulp, and dropped it back onto the table with a ringing echo of glass against glass.

I snagged another sandwich, washed it down with orange juice because Vitamin C cures everything except broken hearts, and then I burrowed back into the shelter of Devon’s warmth. I pillowed my head on his shoulder this time, eased my arms back around him, and sank down against his powerful body.

His body was powerful, but the Devon inside that body needed my help, which meant that I needed to hear the rest of this story, however painful it turned out to be.

It turned out to be plenty painful. If his father had somehow walked in on us after I heard the rest of that story, I would have stabbed the filthy bastard back into the grave with a thousand knives.

“So how did a woman like that manage to attract an asshole like Kevin Killane? Did she catch his eye across a crowded ballroom floor? Did they bump into each other at the opera, a yacht race, a polo match? Or did he just abduct her off the street and spirit her away to his secret evil-rich-guy lair?”

Devon shook his head before I even finished. “No, Mama did not move in such circles. They met because his limousine broke down.”

“Um, she was a mechanic?”

He smiled, probably at the mental image of his ethereal mom getting grease under her fingernails. “Hardly. I rather doubt she knew anything more of engines than she did of ballrooms.”

Then Devon’s smile turned to shadow. He slipped his hands over mine, he twined our fingers together, and he stared down at the table as if he was looking for answers in the plate of sandwiches.

When he found his voice, it was firm, clipped, and business-like – I didn’t buy that tone for a second, but I also didn’t argue with it; I just kept my hands in his, and leaned against his shoulder as he spoke.

“Ashley, much of what you need to hear and I need to say happened before I was born, or when I was not present, or when I was far too young to remember it. While I have something like a photographic memory now, those laser-like memories began in an erratic fashion – parts of my childhood are preserved for me as if they happened only moments ago, while others have long since vanished into darkness.

“What I did not experience myself, I learned from others – overheard conversations, gossip and rumor, lies and half-truths the Killanes forced down my throat as a child, and investigations I undertook when I became an adult. At one time or another, I have employed most of the leading private detectives in the country to put this story together, and yet there always seems to be one more missing piece to the puzzle.”

“So tell me what you do know.”

“Very well.” He paused to eyeball the sandwiches again. Then he shook himself, he fixed his gaze on the windy night beyond the balcony’s glass, and he told me.

“My father had just returned from a business trip to Houston – though I imagine it was probably more of a drinking and whoring trip, knowing him – when his limousine broke down on the way from the airport to his residence here in the city.

“The nearest building was one of those twenty-four hour eateries where greasy slop is served in the guise of food, and so he and the executives detailed to ride herd on his impulses went inside this alleged restaurant to wait for both the tow truck and a replacement limousine to arrive.”

“And your mom was there eating eggs and bacon and minding her own business when they rolled in the door?”

“She was not eating there, she was working there – Mama was a waitress.”

“Whoa, an actual honest working person, not an overbred socialite type? I like her already – I may even forgive her for being tall and thin. Anyway, I guess they sat down, she walked over to take their orders, and …?”

“And from that moment she was doomed. According to all accounts, he flashed his perfect smile, complimented her on her beauty and charm, made her laugh with his shallow wit, and reeled her in like a fish, just as he had with so many other women over the years.”

“But how did she fall for his crap? I mean, those tall, pretty girls have guys hitting on them nonstop, from what I’ve seen. Wasn’t she used to that sort of attention?”

“Not from Kevin Killane – he was a master at the art of bedding women, including experienced and cautious women, and Mama was barely more than a child at the time.”

“So how old was she?”
            “A few days past seventeen – less than half his age, and with no … experience, so far as I’ve been able to determine.”

“Big guy, can we please take a break here and go to wherever he’s buried, so I can dig him up and make him more dead? Like with a chainsaw or something?”

His faint smile was heartbreaking. “I’ve killed him in my mind so many times, Ashley, and yet it’s never enough. Not for what he did, that day and later. My representatives have spoken to the executives who were with him in the diner, and they all confirm that after that she turned away and left to take their orders to the kitchen, he described to his companions in filthy, sniggering detail exactly what he intended to do to her at the earliest opportunity.”

Rage simmered in Devon’s strange eyes, an old, frustrated anger that cut him to the bone. I needed to divert this line of thought, nudge it in a different direction and move the story onward, before he imploded.

“So didn’t her family warn her about him, do anything to run him off? I mean, at seventeen she was still legally underage, right?”

He roused himself and looked around as if he’d just woken up. When my question sank in, he shrugged, and looked far more tired than angry.

“Her family is still something of a mystery, even after all these years. The only hard fact I’ve uncovered is that her parents died in an automobile accident when she was six years old, or thereabouts. When no relatives stepped forward to claim her, she went into the foster system and grew up there.”

He looked back out into the night. “She’d left her foster family just before she started working at the diner, and it seems they made no effort to retrieve her. From various hints and clues my investigations have uncovered, something sudden and unfortunate seems to have happened, but the truth of what drove her away has long since been lost.

“She was living alone in a tiny nest of a rented room on the day she had the misfortune to meet Kevin Killane, and all she had in the world was her kind heart and a trusting nature.”

“She never had a chance against him, huh?”

“Never. She seems to have thought she was being swept off her feet and into a passionate, romantic love affair with a gallant and dashing man who would take her away into some misty and beautiful future, like a storybook prince. I’ve spoken personally to the few friends and neighbors she had in those days, and they all agree that she had no idea what was truly happening to her.

“Of course, my father knew exactly what was going on – his one and only intent was to fuck her blind until he got tired of her, and then move on.”

Helpless fury filled Devon’s voice, and as I leaned into him, his body felt like a single tense wire on the edge of snapping.

“So what about his family – did the other Killanes know or care what he was up to with her?”

His fingers tightened around mine, and he stared down at the table again. How much more of this could he take? I wanted to ease him onto a different topic, but I knew in my bones that we hadn’t come to the worst of this story yet – and however bad it turned out to be, I needed to know the worst.

“They knew, but at first they did not care. After all, he’d spent years screwing more women than anyone could count, so they took little notice of his latest conquest.”

He sighed and soldiered on, choosing his words like a general choosing privates to die.

“But this time, it was different. Somehow, for some unknown reason, he became obsessed with her. Perhaps he gloried in her height – she stood just over six feet tall, while he was the shortest of the Killanes. Perhaps it was her delicate, trembling beauty, or perhaps her cursed blue-violet eyes that drew him like a moth courting the flame – or at least those were the sort of things his family blamed for his overlong dalliance with her. But I know better.

“I know better because he told me all about it, years later. He bragged about it, bragged to his own son about despoiling his mother, as if it were something to be proud of. He confessed that he did quite like that she was so tall, while her paleness and her dark hair were indeed lovely window dressing, but he was playing a far crueler game than that.

“My father told me he took it as a sporting challenge to destroy her innocence inch by inch – baiting her in, winning her with sweet words and false promises, drawing it out day by week by month, riding her body with passion and seducing her mind, until he could take her heart and tear it asunder with a smile.”

“Holy … Jesus, Devon, how could he could say shit like that to his own
son
? Can we please, please dig him up, kill him six ways from dead, mutilate his body, and then set the whole graveyard on fire?”

“Oh, he thought he was teaching me quite a valuable lesson. He saw fit to inform me that women were not to be trusted, that they required a harsh, unsentimental hand to know their place, and that while toying with their bodies and their hearts made for marvelous entertainment, they were ultimately creatures of little consequence.

“Therefore, he told me – when I was eight, by the way – that Mama’s fate was nothing more than she deserved, and that I would grow to be a happy man if I treated my women in the same way.”

I couldn’t say a thing to that because I was too busy crying my eyes out.

I cried into Devon’s shoulder and he wrapped his arms around me, holding me close and safe as my tears soaked into his robe and ran down his chest. I cried until I was cried out, and then I hitched and sniffled and coughed for another few minutes.

He didn’t say anything until my bawling was well and truly over. He retrieved a napkin from the table, he wiped my eyes dry, and then he pulled back a bit to look down into my face – my face which I just knew had to look all red, blotchy, and generally hideous after that sobfest.