Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance

by Sonora Seldon

  The old man was playing hardball, all right – after an endorsement like that, I was ready to tear the throats out of a whole army of ninjas if they so much as looked at my guy.

  Meanwhile, the executives on the far side of the room sent two delegates over to Devon’s desk for a few minutes of mysterious whispering. Once those two returned to the others, the herd of suits stood together as one, looking as grim as executioners as they stared at the door that led to the outside world.

  Devon scanned the screens in front of him once again, and then called Dana on the intercom. “Dana, be aware that our guests are on their way up at this time. You recall the part you are to play?”

  “Yes, sir – make a show of refusing to allow them in, let them bully their way past me, then follow them in there and apologize to you.”

  “Perfect. And be aware, you will receive bonus points – well, an actual bonus, why not – if you can milk out a few tears and perhaps even a wail of despair. Also, I apologize in advance for whatever they might say to you – as you know, we are dealing with crass animals who have no respect for people in general and women in particular.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. Killane.”

  He cut off the intercom and turned to me. “Ashley?”

  I once more put my left hand on his shoulder, my right on the corner of the desk, and leaned in close. “I’m right here, Devon.”

  “I should apologize in advance to you as well, Ashley. These individuals are angry, terrified rats about to find out they’ve been backed into a hopeless corner – they will have harsh words for all of us, and I fear they will likely single you out for some particularly vicious abuse, because they know you are close to me. I’d send you away … but I need you near me just now. I need your touch. Can you forgive me for exposing you to these creatures?”

  “This big girl does not scare easy, boss – in fact, these losers should be very goddamn scared of me, if they plan on messing with my guy. So, are you at least going to tell me who the rats are?”

  “You haven’t met them before, but I fear you will recognize their faces.”

  That told me nothing and freaked me out at the same time, but I decided not to pursue it just then. “Swell – so can you at least tell me about this scene you’ve set up for them here? What are you doing to these guys, exactly?”

  He turned to stare at me, and his blue-violet eyes were filled with despair, nerves, and hopeless fury. “I am destroying them, Ashley.”

  He turned from me, sighed, and closed his eyes. I heard the distant ding of the elevator arriving on our floor, and the shouting I’d heard over the phone was now much louder and only two doors away.

  He ignored the pounding footsteps, the yells, the muffled profanity, the disaster that was drawing closer by the second. Instead, he opened his eyes and settled his right hand over mine. He stared at our intertwined fingers and spoke to me in a voice that was barely a whisper.

  “I will destroy them, just as they destroyed me.”

  I wanted to tell him he wasn’t making any sense. I wanted to kill these assholes for whatever they’d done to him. I wanted so many things I didn’t have words for – so I settled for squeezing his hand in mine, and then straightening to stand just behind and to the right of his chair, with my right hand clenched in a fist at my side and my left hand resting on his shoulder.

  Anybody who came in the door would have to go through me to get at my guy, and nobody – not an army, not God, not anybody – was getting through Ashley Daniels.

  18. Destruction

  Something slammed into the office door, hard enough to make it jump in its frame. Then two or three male voices yelled at once, followed by a different guy shouting, “He’ll see us whether he wants to or not, you stupid cunt – now get out of our way, or you’re hitting the door as hard as that chair did!”

  I winced for Dana, and then glanced over at Uncle Sheridan. “I’m no lawyer, but that charming remark constitutes assault all by itself, doesn’t it?”

  “I fear they’re just getting started, Miss Daniels.”

  Meanwhile, Devon straightened his tie by a micron or so, ran a hand over his perfect hair, and made some invisible adjustments to his cufflinks. Then he leaned back in his chair, stretched like a panther waking up for the morning hunt, and once again became the picture of calm, relaxation, and imperial control. The muscles of his shoulder were like live wires under my left hand, but not a bit of that showed on the surface; when he spoke, he sounded as regal and distant as a statue.

  “And so it begins.”

  The door burst open and rebounded off the wall with an ear-cracking bang, as two men in suits shouldered through at once, with at least four more on their heels. Dana somehow squirmed past them, and those tears shining in her eyes looked real as hell to me.

  “Mr. Killane, I’m so sorry, I explained you were in a private conference, but they forced their way in and I couldn’t –”

  “That’s quite all right, Dana, think nothing of it. In fact, since there’s nothing of any great import on my schedule this morning, why don’t you treat yourself to an early lunch? I’ll handle whatever trifling matters come up, and then I’ll see you back here this afternoon.”

  It wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. yet, but Dana didn’t hesitate to grab this thin excuse for getting out of Dodge. She blurted out a relieved, “Yes, sir, thank you,” and then she ducked back into the outer office and was gone.

  The guys who started all this craziness stood in the center of the room, glaring at existence in general and at those of us who stood by Devon’s side in particular. The youngest were twenty-somethings, the oldest and shoutiest ones looked to be in their fifties, and every last one of them might have been a time-delayed twin in an expensive tailored suit. They all had the same broad jaw with a slight cleft in the middle of the chin, the same classical nose with just a bit of an arch to it, the same high forehead, the same piercing eyes that looked so familiar but not …

  Oh.

  They all stood at least a head shorter than Devon, their hair was varying shades of blond rather than black, and their angry eyes were green and not blue-violet, but they all wore his face … the Killane face.

  I stared at my guy’s hated relatives in silence, because I had no idea what to say to them. The executives standing by the far wall also took the ‘let’s say nothing and look all steely-eyed and cool’ option, while just behind me and to my right, Uncle Sheridan stirred a single cube of sugar into his espresso, topped off the cup, and sipped with the patience of a monk.

  At the center of the storm, Devon beamed the broadest and most insincere smile in human history at his visitors, and addressed them in a voice that was like honey mixed with rat poison. “This is such an unexpected pleasure – tell me, gentlemen, just how might I help you this morning?”

  One of the older assholes stalked over to the boss’s desk, trailed by his fellow assholes. I sensed a serious shout coming on, and the guy did not disappoint.

  He slammed a fist onto the massive desk, making the three laptops jump and edge a bit out of their perfect line. “You can tell us just what the FUCK you think you’re doing! Do you have any idea, or are you just making this crazy shit up as you go?”

  At his shoulder, a twenty-something brat who had to be Head Asshole’s son said, “He knows exactly what he’s doing, I just want to know –”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth, Keiran – as for you, Devon, I expect to hear an explanation that makes some kind of sense for what the hell is going on!”

  Hearing my guy’s first name used by this asshole was like sandpaper on my nerves – I didn’t care how much genetic material they might share, Head Shouty Guy wasn’t fit to use that name, not by a long shot.

  Devon didn’t turn a hair, didn’t flinch, didn’t do a thing but amp up the charm and flash those perfect teeth of his in an ever wider smile. “My apologies, I thought my actions were quite clear – I’ve bought back the shares I sold you people, all those many years ago in the ha
lcyon days of my youth. I might have imagined you’d be pleased at reaping such a considerable profit over what you paid for them back then, but it seems that something about the matter is troubling you – tell me, how can I help?”

  The baby-eyed innocence of his smile was about as genuine as a three-dollar bill dipped in cyanide, and it sent Head Asshole steaming right past anger and straight into outrage.

  “You can call off this farce, because we have zero interest in selling Killane Industries to an ungrateful snot-nosed brat like you!” The guy stepped back, fisted his hands on his hips, and glared at my guy as if waiting for him to admit that he’d lost the argument.

  Devon dialed his smile down to ‘explaining two plus two to an idiot child’ level. “Oh, but I quite understand that you don’t want to sell a controlling interest in the family business – you see, that is why this sort of thing is referred to as a ‘hostile takeover.’ I offer my humble apologies if I somehow gave you the impression that you have any choice whatsoever in this matter.”

  That smile could have dropped a bull elephant in its tracks.

  From somewhere behind Head Asshole, one of the supporting assholes spat out, “You can’t DO this to us! Goddammit, what is wrong with you that you’d do something like this to your own fucking blood?”

  A twenty-or-so fuckwad standing at the back of the group rolled his eyes and muttered, “You could write a book about everything that’s wrong with that freak.” He then turned to glare out the window, plainly tired of having to hang around for whatever the hell was going on.

  Devon beamed at Head Asshole. “I’m afraid the gentleman who spoke a moment ago is quite mistaken – I can do this to you, I am doing it to you, and in point of fact, it’s all over but the shouting. You seem to be quite good at that part, so I’ll leave you to it.”

  Another guy – let’s call him Pretentious Asshole – separated himself from the group and not so subtly shouldered his way in front of Head Asshole. This new guy was maybe in his late fifties and definitely saw himself as the voice of Asshole Reason, speaking down to the boss like a prince shooing away a dirty street kid who was getting on his nerves.

  “Devon, I’m sure someone like you finds this all very amusing, but at the end of the day, what have you really accomplished? Even with a majority share of the company’s stock in your hands, the family can manage quite comfortably on the dividends generated by the minority of shares we still hold – so if your goal was petty revenge for imagined wrongs, I’m afraid this entire nonsensical scheme was for nothing. We’ve gotten along quite well without you and the Killane Corporate Holdings juggernaut for years, and we’ll continue in fine form despite all this posturing on your part – Killane Industries, after all, is still a major player in the manufacturing sector, and even a minority of its profits represents a sizeable cash flow.”

  “What profits?”

  Pretentious Asshole had just turned to aim a confident smirk at his buddies, and he glanced back at Devon with the weary patience of someone who thought they’d gotten rid of a persistent panhandler. “The profits generated by our manufacturing operations in Canada, not to mention subsidiaries in –”

  The boss smiled like a cat closing in on a fat, doomed canary. “Oh, you mean the manufacturing operations that I had shut down as soon as I signed the paperwork on this deal? Honestly, for people who’ve been so foolish as to become dependent on the proceeds from a single company, I should think you’d pay more careful attention to the status and whereabouts of that company’s assets.”

  Silence fell. Absolute, black, impenetrable silence. You could have heard a pin drop on Mars in that silence.

  The junior asshole who’d been glaring out the window while sighing with boredom suddenly registered that this situation might affect him personally. He looked at Devon with the expression of someone who’d just kicked an elderly Chihuahua only to see it transform into a rabid pit bull with a taste for human flesh. “Wait – how can you shut down our manufacturing operations, just like that?”

  “You mean my manufacturing operations? As it happens, it’s a simple matter of bestowing generous severance packages on everyone from the plant managers down to the janitors, stripping the factory floors of all machinery, disposing of said machinery, razing the buildings, and donating the land to the Nature Conservancy. Would you like to see?”

  He leaned forward and spun around the first laptop to face his guests. They stared at the view of the cargo ship with slack-jawed horror, and it took Pretentious Asshole a minute or so to pull himself together and ask, “So what the hell are we looking at here?”

  “We are seeing a live webcam feed from a Killane Corporate Holdings cargo ship currently located three hundred miles off the Newfoundland coast. Do you notice those cargo containers stacked on every available inch of deck space? By an amazing coincidence, they happen to hold all of the manufacturing machinery from the Killane Industries factory in Canada – and as you can see, the crew is now in the process of dumping said shipping containers over the side. I rather doubt you’ll be seeing any further profits from equipment which will shortly be at the bottom of the North Atlantic.”

  Pretentious Shouty Guy wasn’t convinced. “But that can’t possibly be legal!”

  “You’d be surprised what’s legal in international waters, particularly since it’s my property to dispose of as I see fit. As for the site itself, the factory is being leveled by a controlled demolition operation later today, and as previously noted, the real estate has already been turned over to the Nature Conservancy – I understand they intend to return it to its previous status as a breeding habitat for endangered seabirds, or some such thing.”

  “But what about the subsidiaries in –”

  “I assure you that similar operations are at this moment taking place at the Killane Industries subsidiary locations in Russia, Mexico, and the Philippines – equipment is being destroyed or dumped, factories demolished, and the land given away. I’m told the Russian location will be used as an auxiliary site for disposal of radioactive waste from Chernobyl, so even there, we’re all doing our part for the environment. Aren’t you proud?”

  Pretentious Asshole wasn’t so much proud as shocked into silence, staring at the boss in much the same way someone stuck in their car on the railroad tracks might stare at the oncoming locomotive that was about to squash them flat. Behind him, Head Asshole managed to get his jaw working, but no words came out. The rest of The Shouty Bunch stared at each other, and then stared at their surroundings as if unsure of just what planet they might be on.

  The first one to remember how words worked was Keiran Asshole, the twenty-something son, I assumed, of Head Asshole. The kid bulled his way to the front of the group and glared at Devon with all the self-righteous fury of an entitled moron.

  “You can’t DO that – you can’t just blow off a five billion dollar investment as if it were nothing!” He added a jabbing finger to emphasize his point before getting up the nerve to plant his hands on the front edge of Devon’s desk and lean forward to glare at the boss from close range.

  Devon blithely ignored the brat and leaned to one side, raising an eyebrow at Head Asshole. “My, just imagine it – if only you’d thought to wear a condom on a certain occasion twenty or so years ago, you wouldn’t have to be dealing with this pathetic creature today. It’s truly sad how momentary lapses in judgment can have consequences that echo far into the future – don’t you agree?”

  Without waiting to hear Head Asshole’s opinion on the matter, Devon turned back to Keiran the Twat – and he stared, just stared without saying a word, until something in his icy smile and his blue-violet eyes made the kid step back.

  Just as Keiran “I’ve Made a Horrible Mistake” Asshole tried to ease further away and merge back into the asshole herd, my guy spoke up, and his voice pinned the kid in place like a mounted butterfly speared by a pin.

  “As for you, little boy, I must point out that to me, five billion dollars is nothing. You
see, while idle snot-nosed children like you were burning through their trust funds and contributing nothing more than random sprays of semen to the world, some of us bettered ourselves.

  “To use myself as a random example, I embarked upon the unlikely adventure of building a business empire from scratch. I began with little more than my wits and a determination to make worthwhile use of my time, and today, after years of hard work, the end result is far more money than any unemployed wastrel sponging off the paltry dividends generated by Killane Industries could possibly imagine. In short, since my current net worth is closing in on sixty billion dollars, a mere five billion means about as much to me as respect and common decency mean to you.”

  The kid shrank away from the desk and retreated to the fringes of the asshole herd. Meanwhile, Pretentious Asshole found his voice and aimed it at the flock of Killane Corporate Holdings senior executives.

  “Look, I can’t believe any of you are advising him to just flush five billion dollars down the toilet – can’t you people do something to stop this?”

  One of the suits peered at his iPad, tapped an icon or two, and announced in a casual tone, “To be precise, the exact amount that’s being flushed away is 5.3 billion dollars, at current exchange rates and given the stock prices as of yesterday’s market close.”

  A fellow suit standing next to him observed, “Of course, the prices for Killane Industries shares will crash right into the basement once the market reopens on Monday – there’s no stopping that now.”

  A female executive in a grey business ensemble so sharp it could have cut glass added, “Not that anyone here would have any interest in stopping it – I believe you’ll find Mr. Killane’s employees are very loyal to him and to his perceived business goals.”

  All the Killane suits nodded agreement and beamed pleasant, relaxed, fuck-you smiles at Team Shouty Guys.