Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance (57 page)

He hesitated, looked down at what was left of our forgotten midnight snack, and then he looked into my eyes, begging me to understand.

“Ashley, I don’t know how to express it to you, but that horse … in that moment, when my father had less than five minutes to live, that horse was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Even dripping with nervous sweat, his ears flicking restlessly in every direction, badly frightened of the shouting stranger who stood less than a yard away from him, he nevertheless glowed with health, vitality, and strength. His coat shone like a burnished penny, his mane and tail were black as midnight, and his eyes held a universe of understanding.

“I’d never seen that horse before, but I loved every line of him.

“ ‘Goddammit, kid, pay attention when I’m talking to your sorry ass!’

“My father’s voice thundered in my ears, I shrank back against Maria, and everyone stared at me – it seemed that while I’d been gaping at that magnificent horse, my father had been cursing at me as well, trying to get my attention.

“ ‘You have got to be the dumbest fucking brat in the world, you know that? Jesus, and I thought your cunt of a mother was stupid – anyway, you see that tree over there?’

“He pointed past me at a towering white oak that stood perhaps fifty feet behind me, near a gate that led to the track.

“I stared at the tree – it was a grand thing, over eighty feet tall and with a trunk like the prow of a battleship – and then I turned back toward him and nodded.

“Then my father spoke to me for the very last time in his life.

“ ‘Great, you can identify a tree, I’m so fucking proud. Now, get away from that little spic bitch and go stand next to the tree, but not right next to it – maybe about six feet away, okay? And don’t move – I swear to Jesus, if you move, I will beat you until you don’t know your own name, you scatterbrained little shit.’

“I ran to the tree and stood precisely six feet to one side from it, because I knew that five or seven feet would earn me a beating just as severe as if I’d never moved at all. My father turned back to the trainer, and death was less than thirty seconds away.

“ ‘I will PROVE to you that anybody could ride this damn horse better than that stupid popbrained jockey you hired, and I will prove it to you NOW!’

“My father sprayed this assertion at high volume directly into the hapless trainer’s face, and there was a nasty note of triumph in his voice. Then he stepped back, he looked around at the shocked and disgusted faces of everyone within earshot, and he spoke – well, shouted, actually – his last words on this earth.

“ ‘I will prove to ALL of you dumb wetback assholes that KEVIN FUCKING KILLANE can ride this horse better than that goddamn shitty excuse for a jockey!’

“He spun around faster than I could have imagined possible for a man so desperately drunk, as fast as if he were stone cold sober and had practiced the move for weeks.

“He spun round and before the groom at the horse’s head could think or breathe, my father snatched the lead shank out of the man’s hands. Then he took two quick running steps, flung himself at the plunging, terrified horse, and landed asprawl over the animal’s back. He swung a leg over its right flank, grabbed a handful of mane, and somehow managed to hang on as the frantic beast reared straight up, front hooves scrabbling wildly at the air.

“The noise that animal made, as my father clung to its back and yanked its head around with the lead shank … that noise didn’t sound anything like a neigh, or like any sound that would come out of a horse – it was a shrieking howl of panic, a desperate, wordless plea for help that never came.”

“My god, did the guy even know how to ride?”

Devon shrugged. “After a fashion – family legend claims that back when he was drinking himself through Yale, he once rode a stolen police horse onto the field during a football game, and he dabbled a bit in polo now and again – but he had neither the self-discipline nor even just the attention span to learn more than the most basic aspects of riding a horse. But as it happens, no more than the basics were required for what he had in mind.”

“Which was?”

He leaned back in his chair again, staring at some innocent spot on the blameless table. “My father kicked his heels into the horse’s ribs and the animal vaulted forward, dirt and scraps of grass flying away from beneath its hooves like bullets fired from a gun. He maneuvered it with the lead shank and more kicks, he screamed and laughed, and as people and cats and chickens scattered out of the way, he steered that lovely product of centuries of careful breeding directly at me.”

“God, Devon – did he mean to ride right over you, in front of all those people?”

“I am fairly sure that his intent was to miss me by a hair, and fly through the six-foot gap between me and the tree – in his addled mind, that would surely demonstrate that he was a better reinsman than a professional jockey who’d ridden thousands of races and won a considerable percentage of them.

“I am absolutely sure, however, that if he had fumbled the business and trampled me into paste, he would have regarded it as no more than a truly annoying wrinkle in his day, and something to be blamed on me and the horse equally.

“I wanted to see racehorses that day, Ashley. That was all I wanted. I can still see no wrong in that harmless, hopeless desire, even now when I understand how much I have to answer for – and in those final desperate seconds of my father’s life, I saw every detail of that one racehorse, every tiny aspect of its beauty and its terror, with the awestruck vision of someone watching death bearing down on them.

“I saw so much, it might have been happening in slow motion.

“I saw the creature’s flailing legs hammering like overheated pistons, its hooves digging great chunks from the earth as it plunged toward me. I saw its ebony mane snapping in the wind like a flag, and the frantic lashing of its tail, and the way those huge, dark eyes rolled in mad fear, showing the whites as my father drove the animal on with his heels and his shouting. I saw the sweat on its flanks and the foam spattering from its mouth. I saw the flash of the aluminum shoes on its hooves, I saw the play of the powerful muscles beneath its velvet skin, and I saw its nostrils flare as it fled from the madman clinging to its back.

“I saw it all, and though it might have seemed to happen at the pace of a glacier, it did not. That horse hurtled forward like a missile, and closed the distance between us in seconds.”

Devon paused, then looked up from the table and into my eyes.

“Ashley, Uncle Sheridan was correct when he guessed that I did not tell him everything about that day. Would you like to hear the one thing I did not tell him?”

I nodded, because words were way out of my league at that moment.

“I moved. My father had ordered me not to move, but as that mountain of muscle and bone and fear thundered toward me, I moved. I never told Uncle Sheridan that.”

“Well, Jesus, Devon, of course you moved – a half-ton animal was flying right at you, and you didn’t want to get squashed like a bug. Anybody in their right mind or out of it would have jumped the hell out of the way – you’re not blaming yourself for wanting to stay alive, are you?”

“I did not move away, Ashley. I moved toward the horse.”

“You … wait, I’m not tracking you here. You did what, exactly?”

“It’s quite simple. I did not move away from the animal’s path. Instead, I stepped toward it, into the gap between myself and the tree, and I did it at the last possible second.”

“But … why?”

“Why hardly matters, does it? In any case, I honestly don’t know – I’ve searched my memories of that instant every day since, and I still don’t know why I did it.

“Sometimes I think that something in me wanted to die that day, something deep within my soul that knew what would happen if I survived. At other times, I think that I was indeed trying to save myself, and simply stepped in the wrong direction due to confusion or poor reflexes.

“In my darkest and most honest moments, I think I knew exactly what would happen. I knew, I wanted it to happen, and so I moved toward the horse on purpose.”

“So what did happen?” The answer to that question was getting clearer with every awful second, but I had to hear him say it.

“I moved toward the animal, just as it would have missed me by a few straining inches. I moved toward it, I stepped into the gap between myself and the tree, and that horse reacted as any horse would. It reacted just as the endless generations of horses before it had reacted whenever they saw a sudden fleeting movement out of the corner of one eye.

“It lunged away from me. It swerved to one side, carrying my father with it, and together they exploded into the tree at forty miles an hour.

“The impact shook the earth. I felt it in my feet, and then in my whole body as I hit the ground and curled into a ball, covering my head with my arms. It was like a bomb going off.”

Devon fell silent. He said nothing for an eternity.

When he did speak again, it was as if he was trying to remember how words worked.

“The blood … dear God, there was so much blood.”

Ashley, you bitch, do you enjoy destroying this guy? Do you like making him suffer? Is knowing everything worth this?

“Devon, stop – stop it now. No way am I putting you through telling me one more second of this nightmare, so just stop, please, and –”

“No. No, I will not stop. I promised you the truth, and I always keep my promises.”

He pulled himself together after another endless, aching moment, and he moved on like a soldier marching to his last battle.

“Sheets of blood painted the tree. Teeth littered the grass. Clumps of flesh and splinters of bone lay everywhere. Gobbets of brain dripped from the leaves, and who knew which had belonged to my father and which to the horse?

“At the base of the tree, plastered against the trunk … well, I won’t describe what that looked like, since it was a mass of unidentifiable … tissue that was quite impossible to describe. It certainly didn’t look remotely like a man or a horse.

“The last half or so of the horse was still recognizable, from a bit behind the shoulders and on back to the tail … and as I stared, not wanting to look and unable to look away, I saw something there that I will never forget. It was one of those details that seems no more important than any other, and yet remains burned into your memory forever.

“I saw one of that lovely, innocent, doomed creature’s hind legs still moving, kicking spastically at the dirt. It must have been obeying signals from what was left of the spinal cord, since the brain was quite gone – but whatever the cause, that leg scraped blindly against the earth for almost thirty seconds before it spasmed one last time and fell still.

“Everything was still. In those few seconds between the instant that it happened and the instant everyone had to admit it had happened, nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. In that brief, blessed moment when nothing moved and the stillness was absolute, I almost convinced myself that it wasn’t real, that it was just a dream that would melt away into darkness when I woke up.

“Then the screaming started.

“Men screamed and cursed, women cried, and I saw one man pitch to his knees and throw up. Panic howled through the air. The trainer bellowed orders, dogs barked like mad things, horses squealed and plunged in their stalls, grooms shouted, and the radios blared on.

“I lay curled in the dirt, shivering and shaking and forgotten. No one took any notice of me. I was quite alone.”

I reached across the table and seized his hands again, to let him know that he wasn’t alone now, to anchor him – and yes, to anchor myself too, because my churning stomach was advising me that it didn’t appreciate hearing a story like that while it was full of greasy food.

We sat there with our fingers twined together, saying nothing as owls called through the darkness outside and the river hissed and rumbled in the distance. Then Devon freed his right hand and reached out to brush a strand of sweat-dampened hair away from my forehead. I turned my face into his hand, his fingers spread across my cheek, and another endless moment passed.

That’s the problem with moments – they insist on passing.

Devon teased one more stray bit of my hair into place, and then he folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. I told my stomach to hang in there.

“And do you know who rescued me, sweet Ashley? It was my new friend Maria. She was the first person to reach my side – before anyone else thought to do more than shriek or scream or curse, that tiny slip of compassion and understanding sprinted toward the nightmare, and dropped to her knees next to me as I lay in the dirt. She scooped me up in her thin arms, scrambled to her feet, and carried me well away from the bloody, shattered wreckage that had once been my father and an innocent horse.

“She took me back to where she’d shown me the mysteries of grain only a few minutes before, in another lifetime. She sat down there in the dirt, next to an overturned bucket and a drift of spilled oats, and she pulled me up against her narrow body, wrapping her arms around me like a shield. She held my face against her shoulder and she whispered a thousand lightning words of Spanish into my hair. She whispered, she rocked me in her embrace, and I cried.

“I cried in shuddering gasps, my lungs heaving like bellows and my heart racing faster than any horse. I clutched onto sweet Maria as if she were the only lifeboat in a heaving sea – not that I deserved to be saved.

“Because you see, I was not crying for my father. Any normal child, any decent and worthy child, would have shed tears for the father who had just been shattered into pulp in front of their eyes, no matter how dreadful a man he’d been – but I was not any part of worthy, decent, or normal.

“I was crying for the horse.

“I kept seeing those glowing dark eyes, and that dying leg thrashing in the dirt, and I cried for the beautiful shining creature I’d murdered. I cried as if the world was ending.

“Two weeks later, it did.”

37. The World Ends