“Yes, that one too, sweet Ashley. I might also mention that I’ve grown quite fond of a number of socks in my bedroom.”
I snorted laughter and somehow blushed at the same time. Man, I adored this crazy bastard …
In the same calm tone that would have been right at home in a discussion of stocks and bonds and investment portfolios, he added, “You’d think with all that masturbation I wouldn’t have anything left for wet dreams, and yet my bed sheets would testify otherwise.”
I blurted out, “You are so disgusting,” but since I was giggling like an infatuated teenager at the same time, that sort of ruined the whole ‘righteous outrage’ effect.
“Ashley, given how much information I’ve just volunteered –”
“Way too much, Mr. K.”
“– I believe I have more than earned the right to a question of my own.”
I choked back one last giggle and nodded. “Fire away, boss.”
“You know what I’m going to ask, Ashley. I’ve asked you many times before, and I am now asking you again. My question is a single word. Why?”
I knew what he was asking, as he went from relaxed and goofy to intent and focused in an instant. I knew, but I stalled for time by shrugging as if I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.
He cocked his head to one side, and though his face eased into a faint smile, his focus didn’t fade one bit. Instead, he held aloft his left hand and began ticking off the points of his argument, finger by finger.
“We’ve already established that neither of us is in a relationship. We both recognize that men and women may indulge in unmarried sexual activity without fear of reprisal from a vengeful and jealous god. We are very much attracted to each other. I have repeatedly made the point that your employment is in no way conditional upon your engaging in sexual relations with me.”
He had one finger left, but he dropped both hands into his lap.
“Ashley, I find your company compelling and soothing and exciting, all at the same time. You are always in my thoughts, and I am happiest when you are close by my side. In but a few brief months, you have come to mean a great deal to me. I would like to think that you have grown at least a bit fond of me, despite all my maddening and impossible quirks of character – well, assuming that I even have character.”
He waited.
He already knew, so why not say it? “It’s unplanned and unexpected and way against my better judgment, but … I’m more than just fond of you, big guy. I’m not sure why, seeing as how you make me crazy on a daily basis and want to eat sushi off me, but hey, there it is.”
His shoulders settled back against his chair and a subtle thread of tension eased somewhere inside him.
“So I ask again, Ashley – why? Why will you not come into my bed?”
Damn the hell if I knew. I groped for an answer, I tried to put words to the why of it, and when the answer popped out of some feverishly working corner of my brain, I just said it. I said it, and those words sealed my fate.
“If you were just a regular guy, a guy I’d met in a coffee shop or at a bar or in the middle of Lincoln Park or wherever, I think we would have been together a long time ago.”
He leaned forward, like a hound on the trail of a fox that was only minutes ahead. “Tell me more.”
“I’ve never seen you outside of work, or a snazzy hotel, or a four-star restaurant, or some bizarre situation you’ve caused. Ninety per cent of the time I’m with you, you’re wearing a suit that cost more than my car. I mean, I know there’s something like a regular guy inside you somewhere, along with all the non-regular-guy stuff that I also like, but …”
I ran out of words at that point, and silently begged him to understand what I was trying to say, whatever that was.
Somehow, he did. I didn’t know it until later, but he knew right then what I needed from him.
“I see. Thank you, Ashley.”
He glowed with satisfaction, and I didn’t find out why until three nights later.
14. A Regular Guy
Three nights later was Saturday, and I wasn’t expecting any earth-shaking personal revelations. My plans included nothing more startling than an early dinner at Mom’s place, followed by a late night alone in my apartment, watching Netflix and munching on leftovers. Do I know all about living on the edge, or what?
Mom’s house was midway down a block in one of the city’s most forgettable neighborhoods, and it didn’t stand out one bit from the other places on the street, except maybe for being what real estate ads like to call ‘cozy’ and ‘a dollhouse’ and ‘adorable’ – all of those being agent-speak for ‘one floor and big enough to turn around in, but that’s about it.’ There was a stub of a driveway where I could park my elderly Honda, and a fenced yard that was slightly bigger than the house.
Between us, Mom and I kept it all looking somewhat less scruffy and needy than the rest of the neighborhood, but I planned to move her into a place of her own as soon I’d saved enough from my enormous and still-hard-to-believe new salary.
Dinner that night was a turkey, plump and golden and mouthwatering. It had come to Mom as part of the Great Killane Grocery Explosion, and she basted and stuffed and roasted that baby into a state of perfection. I’d brought over mashed potatoes with gravy and steamed green beans, while Mom threw in a pumpkin pie, sourdough biscuits soaked with melted butter, and a pan of walnut fudge, just because.
Her tiny dining room table – well, more of a far-end-of-the-kitchen table, really – groaned under the weight of our combined efforts, and barely any of the table’s chipped Formica surface was visible between the serving platters and plates and pans and glasses. It might have been just the two of us, and hey, maybe we did get a little carried away and all, but what was on that table could have fed an army.
It ended up feeding three.
Mom was on her second helping of mashed potatoes and I was downing another slice of pie – with whipped cream, because pumpkin pie is naked without it – when my phone sounded off.
The tones of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” were unmistakable – the boss was calling, and why the hell did he have to develop some weird problem or need or demand that I just had to satisfy right that minute?
Mom knew who it was because she’s smart that way.
“Somebody’s just a tad controlling, huh? Honey, do you have to answer that now?” She sighed and added, “Does your guy have no sense of boundaries? Or does he figure that if Saturday isn’t something he owns, then it doesn’t really exist?”
“Yes, he’s controlling, Mom. Yes, I have to answer this now, because I’m being paid pretty handsomely to be at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day. He’s not my guy –”
She grinned like the all-knowing Mom she was and said, “I call bullshit on that one, baby – you’re not ready to admit it to your dear old mother yet, but he is so your guy.”
“Have it your way, Mom – anyway, while I think he does have some hazy sense of personal boundaries, he just doesn’t figure they apply to him. Also, he may not own our Saturday night dinners yet, but I’m sure they’re on his ‘to buy’ list, along with the Taj Mahal, the moons of Jupiter, and my last frazzled nerve. So let me answer this, okay?”
I took the call and before the boss could get a word in edgewise or sidewise, I took the initiative.
“What’s up, Mr. K? And by the way, are you aware that I’m in the middle of Saturday evening dinner with my mom?”
“Really? How quaint – tell me, Ashley, does this mean you’re at your mother’s home just now?”
“Yes, I’m sitting here at Mom’s table, watching the food we slaved over get cold while you –”
“Excellent, that’s exactly where the security detail said you were.”
“Boss, tell me you’re not making those guys work tonight. I don’t see it as being at all likely that photographers and billionaire groupies will come into a neighborhood like this looking for me, so why not let the bodyguard d
udes have a life for once?”
“Oh, I’ve dismissed them for the night now – I just needed to be sure of where you were.”
“And just calling me and asking where I was made too much sense, is that it?”
“You’ll see.”
He hung up.
Somebody knocked on the door.
I wondered what fresh new lunacy was spiraling through his brain, while Mom shoved her chair back, got up, and headed for the front door.
“Mom, let me get that, please – you know how I feel about you living in this sketchy neighborhood and answering the door for every whacko that comes along. C’mon, don’t you hear this potato salad calling your name?”
She’d already disappeared into the front hallway, but I could sense her eye roll from where I sat. “Ashley, I am not some frail child who’s incapable of dealing with answering the door – anyway, I’m sure it’s just one of the neighbors, or a stray Jehovah’s Witness or something.”
I sighed, decided the potato salad might be calling out to me as well, and ladled a helping of it onto my plate. The biscuits looked lonely too, and could I get away with thirds on the turkey?
“Ashley?”
“Yeah, Mom?”
“There’s someone here to see you.”
I stopped in mid-slice on the turkey and decided that ‘someone’ had lousy timing. Geez, didn’t ‘someone’ realize that as an American, it was my God-given right to sit in peace and privacy at the dinner table, eating until I couldn’t breathe?
Then a horrible thought struck me about just who it might be – and yeah, in retrospect I agree I was a little slow on the uptake about the identity of my mystery visitor, but I blame the tryptophan.
“If it’s that moron Greg, tell him he can kiss my rosy pink ass.”
Mom said nothing. Instead, I heard two sets of footsteps in the hall. Mom appeared around the corner, strolled across the kitchen, and dropped back down into her chair on the far side of the table. That smile of hers was damn suspicious.
“It’s not Greg, honey.” Her smile escalated from suspicious to unbearably smug.
Then ‘someone’ with blue-violet eyes, a stubble-coated jaw, and a grin that shot right past smug to irresistible poked his head around the corner.
“I must confess, I find the notion of kissing your lovely ass quite enchanting – may I?”
Devon Killane emerged from around the corner and walked over to join us, big as life and twice as charming. My traitorous mom cleared off the chair we’d been using to hold extra plates, and just like that my boss, problem child, and alleged-maybe-almost boyfriend sat down at the table with us.
I’d seen him in suits worth five thousand dollars, I’d seen him in a priceless towel, and I’d seen him in workout clothes – but I had never before seen the boss in ordinary, everyday, regular-guy clothes.
He was the least ordinary human I’d ever met, but he so knew how to rock the ‘hey, I’m just one of the guys’ look.
Faded blue jeans clung to every inch of his long legs like a second skin, showing off the muscles of his stare-worthy thighs and the tight curves of his grab-worthy ass. His t-shirt had some sort of frantic multi-colored design on it, but I skipped right over that to admiring the way his chest muscles and broad shoulders strained against the fabric, as if all that delicious, rippling hotness wanted to burst free and put itself on display. His biceps insisted on posing as well, swelling out of the shirt’s short sleeves like the weight-trained demons they were before melding into tightly-muscled forearms covered with fine black hair.
But I wasn’t the only one checking out the man candy.
Mom leaned onto one elbow, propped her head on her hand, and stared up and down and around every masculine inch of our guest. After the kind of lengthy, knowledgeable inspection a rancher might give to a prize bull he was thinking of buying, Mom turned to me and raised her eyebrows.
“Ashley, I love you more than life itself, but if you are not going to jump all over that” – she nodded towards Mr. K, who was smiling like a cat who’d just eaten six canaries – “then step aside, because I sure as hell will.”
“MOM! Jesus, could you possibly be just a tiny bit more embarrassing?” I felt my face blaze with shame, and wondered what the possibilities might be for changing my name and moving to another country.
Mom laughed, and my boss looked even more insufferably pleased with himself.
“It is plain to see that my stunning Ashley derives both her lovely features and her bold nature from you, Ms. Daniels – and tell me, do you think she knows about us yet?”
That’s when the bastard leaned over and planted a kiss on Mom’s cheek. He followed up by draping an arm over her shoulders, and that’s when I threw a biscuit at him.
He dodged the crisp golden missile like a pro, and the biscuit crashed to earth somewhere in the vicinity of the oven.
Mom glanced back over her shoulder at the impact zone and then turned to our guest.
“Well, Mr. Killane, I’d say that proves my daughter is crazy about you – otherwise, I can’t see her sacrificing a perfectly good sourdough biscuit like that.”
She delivered this remark with the casual tone of a commentator reading off the latest figures on pork belly futures; then she picked up a plate and started loading it down with an assortment of everything her kitchen table had to offer.
“And since she’s busy working on her hormone overload, I’ll just fix up a plate for you, okay? The way I figure it, we need to polish off the rest of these biscuits before she starts heaving them at you too.”
“Wow, way to immediately take the gorgeous annoying guy’s side over your own daughter, Mom – while you’re at it, why not just jump him right in front of me, on this convenient table?” I heaved my best aggravated sigh, but neither of them so much as turned a hair.
“Be practical, honey – if I have my way with him on the table, dinner will end up all over the floor.”
“Beautiful Ashley, you wound me – surely you understand I would never ravish your lovely mother before your eyes? I would at least have the common decency to take her into the next room, and if I could keep my hands off her long enough, I’d even close the door first to minimize the noise levels of our passionate lovemaking.”
They stared at me with wide, innocent eyes, and Mom held on for all of three seconds before burying her face in her hands and cackling laughter like a hen on crack. Mr. K found the strength to keep his poker face on for another breath or two before breaking into his infamous ear-to-ear grin that no woman could resist.
A smart girl knows when to admit defeat.
“Fine, you two have at each other like a couple of randy bunny rabbits – I’ll just be sitting here finishing off the pumpkin pie without you.” I cut myself an impressive slice of home-baked goodness, topped it off with a generous swirl of whipped cream, and I made it as far as picking up my fork before collapsing into a helpless fit of giggles.
Once I recovered and was able to breathe and form words again, Mom thumped a full plate down in front of my boss, passed him a glass of eggnog – complete with cinnamon and vanilla, yum – and steered the conversation back into the realm of sanity.
“Mr. Killane, mind if I ask why you’re here propositioning two women at once and eating my food? It’s fun and all to meet Ashley’s new boyfriend, but shouldn’t you be –”
“Mom, he is not my –”
“Yes he is, sweetheart, shut up.”
Mr. K pretended not to notice our verbal sparring. “As it happens, I am here basking in the presence of two lovely women for one specific reason – I wish to ask the bold and beautiful Ashley a question.”
I gave him my best casual shrug. “Fire when ready, boss.”
“I’d like to ask if you might be willing to accompany me on a date.”
I choked, coughed, and stared at him. Thoughts raced through my brain like lightning, and after due consideration of all the possible responses to his question, I chose to say, �
�Huh?”
Yes, I’m all sharp like that when impossibly hot billionaires ask me out during Saturday night dinner.
Mom felt the need to apologize for me. “Believe it or not, Mr. Killane, I did raise her to be way more sensible and on the ball than this – you just have some weird effect on her, I guess.”
“Mom, do you mind? And Mr. K, you mean a date as in today? Like, right now?”
“Granted, I would be asking you to abandon those biscuits and desert the company of your delightful mother as well, but I had hoped you might be willing to make such a sacrifice for my sake.”
“Well … where would we be going?”
“I have no idea, but I propose we share the adventure of finding out. Will you join me?”
“But I can’t just leave Mom to deal with putting away all these leftovers and washing a mountain of dishes by herself …”
Why was I trying to talk my way out of this?
Mom buried her face in her hands, shook her head, and then looked up and glared at me.
“Dear God in heaven, Ashley, ‘I can’t go out with the intriguing hot guy because I have to do dishes’ has to be the lamest excuse for avoiding a date in the history of Planet Earth. Grab your keys, get out the door, and you can tell me all about it tomorrow, okay?”
“Mom, I don’t –”
“Yes, Ashley, you do, and don’t deny it. Now, go start your car while I talk to Mr. Killane for a minute, all right?”
When she put her small foot down like this, there was no resisting the Almighty Power of Mom. I got my round ass outside.
Mr. Killane came striding out of Mom’s house just as the Honda’s cranky, coughing engine accepted that it was going to have to run and keep running, like it or not. My maybe-boyfriend opened the passenger side door, started to get in, and realized the interior geography of the Honda was not going to allow that without some serious seat adjustment. He slid the shotgun seat all the way back, creating more or less enough room for his long legs, and then he levered himself inside.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 16
