***
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?”
“Actually, he’s got a pretty sweet ass, Mom.”
Her mock gasp followed by a fit of giggles made me feel a whole lot better. I promised to keep her updated on any new developments, with special emphasis on any moments of rampant Killane assholery, and ended the call.
Generous? Mom didn’t know the half of it.
I closed out the celebrity website and went back to the one I’d been looking at before she called. This was the Killane Corporate Holdings intranet site, and I’d seen it a thousand times before; it was where all us KCH wage slaves went to check our earnings statements, change our healthcare elections – not that I’d ever been able to afford even the most humble of the company’s health plans – and generally keep track of our relations with our benevolent corporate overlords.
For the umpteenth time, I pulled up my last pay stub from before the world turned upside down, and saw the same old hilariously inadequate figure of $13.25 an hour being tendered in exchange for my services. Check.
Now, the current pay period, which began after I started my new position – once again, I saw that I was no longer being paid on an hourly basis, but was now a salaried employee instead. And once again I ran the numbers, did the calculations, double-checked, and stared at the same inescapable conclusion I’d come to for ten times in a row.
My boss was paying me $100,000 a year to be his babysitter.
This was like going from being paid in pennies to being paid in bags of African blood diamonds. This was like swapping a rusty tricycle for a new Lamborghini. This was all kinds of crazy, that’s what this was.
Technically, it did make a rough sort of sense. Some hard-core googling revealed that personal assistants to top-level executives often did receive pay in the six-figure range – but I still had trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that I was now part of a world where this was considered a reasonable sum to pay someone for the onerous duty of riding herd on a rich guy’s whims. Not to mention that $100,000 meant about as much to Devon Killane as a grungy green penny did to me.
Oh, and benefits? Try a health plan that covered every possible medical condition under the sun, that paid for every procedure that could conceivably be seen as necessary in this or any other universe, that authorized hospital stays lasting from a day to infinity, and all for a cost to me of zero dollars and no cents – not even a freakin’ co-pay.
I refused to believe it until I’d spent an hour on hold and then twenty minutes talking to two different customer service reps who independently confirmed that yes, this was an unadvertised, exclusive, elite level of impossibly great coverage afforded only to Killane’s chosen few. Did I mention that this plan also provided the same one hundred percent coverage for Mom, from now until the end of time?
Or at least until Devon Killane got tired of me.
I wanted to believe that wouldn’t happen. I wanted to believe that Mom was worrying too much, that I was smart enough and strong enough to not get hurt, that for once a real, imperfect girl with too many curves and not a whole lot other than heart to recommend her could live the fantasy that all those magazines were selling.
More than anything, I wanted to believe in the Devon Killane I saw in his rare unguarded moments. I wanted to believe in him when he was goofy and adorable, when he flashed his smile that was like the sun coming up, when he laughed, when he held me in his arms and made me feel that I was safe and could never be hurt again while I was with him.
I wanted to believe he wouldn’t leave me, even though every other man I’d ever known had deserted me.
I wanted to believe he was real.
12. The Special Project
Humans can get used to anything.
Three weeks into my new job as keeper of the Chief Executive Ego, I had accompanied the boss to an air show in Dubai and taken notes during board meetings in London and Hong Kong. I plied him with tons of questions as we toured factories he owned in Argentina, and I was hit with a storm of wolf whistles when we made a post game appearance in the locker room of the NBA team he also owned.
I held his clothes while he swam naked in a Central Park fountain at three in the morning, and then talked three cops out of arresting him on indecent exposure charges. I also persuaded the big guy to not make a surprise visit to North Korea – dropping in unannounced on isolated, hungry, crazy people with lots of guns was not a scenario likely to end well, I pointed out, particularly since they were probably among the few people on the planet who had no idea who he was.
For a former receptionist accustomed to decisions about which variety of doughnuts to buy and which fake smile to wear, this was heady stuff.
Oh, and I also told the White House to fuck off – did I mention that yet?
That memorable moment came during one of Mr. Killane’s morning workouts in the lavishly appointed gym twenty floors below his office at company headquarters. I had the fun duty of sending out a mass email ordering all employees high and low to steer clear of the gym on this particular sunny morning in late March, since Mr. K didn’t care for company while exercising. I also had the much more fun duty of standing around and watching while my ripped and muscular boss did his sweaty thing on various weight machines.
The call from Washington came a few minutes after he’d moved on from a resistance machine that looked like a device designed by some perverted medieval torture expert to a reasonably conventional treadmill. Sexy walking escalated into a steady and very sexy jog, and I was happily comparing seeing him wearing sweatpants and no shirt to seeing him in just that amazing towel back in San Francisco when his phone started braying.
I picked it up, wondered who a contact labeled ‘Beggar in Chief’ calling from a Washington, D.C. area code might be, and ceased wondering when two aides and one chief of staff later, I found myself talking to, yes, the actual President of the United States.
“Ms. Daniels, it’s a pleasure to speak to you – you know, I think you’ve been on more front pages than I have lately. Are you enjoying your new job?”
Whoa, small talk with the President? Okay, I could do this …
“Um, never a dull moment, sir – speaking of my job, may I let Mr. Killane know the reason for your call?”
The leader of the free world chuckled. “Well, it’s an old story – I’ve got a re-election campaign coming up, and I’d like to see if I can pry a spare few million or so out of him. He’s infamous for being just about the only guy in his income class who doesn’t give money to politicians, but I figure it’s worth taking another shot.”
“I wouldn’t hold your breath, sir, but hang on and I’ll see if he’s available.” I put the President on hold, since I’m all cool like that, and waggled the phone at my boss.
“The President of the United States wants your money, big guy – what do I tell him?”
Mr. Killane never broke stride as he took a swig from a bottle of expensive and trendy vitamin water. I admired the way sweat dripped off his chest and the play of his powerful arm muscles as he returned the water bottle to its holder in the treadmill’s console – but why did the sweatpants have to hide his gorgeous thighs from me? Had the man never heard of shorts?
>
I jerked back to non-hormonal reality when the boss spoke. “I am deathly sick of vote whores begging to use my money for the purpose of deceiving the public. Feel free to tell that fool I’m far more likely to give a fully automatic assault rifle to every toddler in America than I am to give him a single thin Roosevelt dime.”
“So you’re saying I should tell the President of These United States to fuck off?”
Mr. K continued his easy lope, but the sudden devilish glint in his eye combined with his I’m-about-to-be-oh-so-bad grin told me I was in for another of those never-dull moments.
“What I am saying, my bold and lovely Ashley, is that if you tell him ‘fuck off, Mr. President’ in those exact words, I will donate one million dollars to the homeless shelter of your choice.” He eased into a faster stride as a blissful, my-work-here-is-done smile settled on his face.
That was easier than choosing whether to have jamocha mint ice cream or raw turnips for dessert.
“Mr. President, are you there?”
“I’m here and waiting, Ms. Daniels.”
“Then on behalf of Killane Corporate Holdings and the good and decent people of this great nation, I’d like to instruct you to fuck off, Mr. President.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, fella. You need to fuck most firmly off, you need to fuck yourself too, and if you have a minute, I’d be happy to suggest the most effective positions for fucking yourself and everyone in your immediate vicinity, as well as which brands of lube you might care to –”
Why he hung up on me at that point is a mystery for the ages.
Meanwhile, Mr. Killane shut off the treadmill, stumbled to a stop, and leaned over the console of the machine laughing like a loon. He laughed until he couldn’t breathe, he lurched away from the treadmill and sat down on a nearby weight bench to laugh some more, and when he was able to form actual words, he said, “Make that two million dollars, and I’d pay many times more if I could only see his face right now.” He barely managed to add something about my being magnificent before collapsing into a fresh fit of laughter.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 14
