What I found as I hurried over to the windows across from the elevator was an environment that matched the exterior of the house – gleaming wood in deep, burnished shades lining the walls, Victorian leather chairs and damask couches, potted palms and crystal chandeliers, thick, luxurious maroon carpeting, and, wonder of wonders, gold-framed 19th century paintings of horses and landscapes and actual recognizable objects.
It looked almost normal.
That was before I met the elephant.
I went to the windows – they took up most of the wall opposite the elevator – and looked out on a view that showed the house splitting up into three or four wings as it spread across the manicured grounds. I saw a structure that looked like it might be a greenhouse, along with maintenance buildings and a garage with yet another black SUV sitting out front, and then I pulled myself away and turned right, heading down the hallway.
The elephant glared at me from the shadows a few yards down the corridor, and I was almost disappointed it wasn’t alive. Instead, it was the life-sized head of an elephant, carved from marble and mounted on the wall like some bizarro trophy from a hunting expedition in an art gallery. A sculptor good enough to make stone sit up and beg had created it, no doubt of that – the ears flared wide in anger, tiny carved wrinkles fanned out from the eyes, and the rough, leathery texture was so realistic, I almost expected the coiled trunk to move under my hand. It was magnificent and pointless and deliciously weird – in other words, it was so Devon.
Yeah, Devon, Ashley – as in get down to business and leave Horton here to listen for Whos. The big guy needs you.
The door just past the elephant was closed. When I turned the knob and edged it open, I saw a master bedroom – or so I would have assumed from the massive four-poster bed, the antique dressers and cabinets and mirrors, the small door that must have led to a private bath, and the rich-as-sin velvet and silk and gold shining from every corner.
No Devon, though – the room was empty, and silent as a tomb.
The second door past the elephant stood open. That was the one, according to Mrs. Hadfield, and from that one I heard labored breathing.
“Devon?”
The second room was tiny for this place – it was barely half the size of my apartment. Only a trickle of light from the windows made it this far down the hall, and I couldn’t make out much detail – just a small dark room with a dresser, a chair, and a narrow bed.
Devon sat on the edge of the bed, and he was a wreck.
I don’t remember walking or running or teleporting to his side, I was just there. I sat down next to him, I put my right arm over his broad, heaving shoulders, and I saw just how much standing up to his family of raging assholes had cost him.
Devon sweated like a wild-eyed animal being herded to slaughter. Sweat drenched his five-thousand-dollar silk suit, sweat plastered his black hair to his scalp, and sweat dripped from his forehead and ran down his face. His silk tie hung crooked and half-undone, the neat Windsor knot a memory. With the top buttons of his shirt unfastened, I could see beads of sweat rolling down his neck and dripping onto his chest.
His breathing was worse, and it scared the hell out of me. His chest heaved as if he’d just run a marathon, his mouth hung open as he pulled in huge, gasping breaths, and those breaths just kept coming faster and faster.
If I didn’t figure out something soon, he’d pass right the hell out from breathing like that. Could he maybe even work himself into having a real heart attack, if he kept sweating like a crippled racehorse and breathing like a thundering freight train?
The eyes were the worst, though. He stared straight ahead. His eyes didn’t so much as twitch in my direction when I sat down next to him. He stared like a statue at nothing, or at empty air, or at something only he could see. He stared with the blank eyes of a dead man. Nobody was home behind those eyes.
I fought the panic. I forced the fear from my voice. I had to keep it together, because Devon was falling apart and he needed me.
But holy God, I had never been so scared in all my life.
“Devon, it’s Ashley. Talk to me, tell me what’s going on.”
Nothing. No response. Just more blank staring and bellows-like breathing and sweat pouring off him in rivers – did he even know I was there?
“Ashley to Devon – you’re scaring me, big guy, you know that? Please, just talk to me, baby. Let me hear your voice, so I’ll know you’re okay.”
He couldn’t have been less okay if he’d been standing at ground zero of a nuclear explosion.
“Devon, it’s your righteously round girlfriend, Ashley – give me a sign here, all right?”
It happened between one rasping breath and the next.
“Ashley?”
I leaned in closer. “Yes, Devon, it’s Ashley – big as life and twice as scared. Do you think you could talk to me, just for a minute? Just enough to let me know you’re okay?”
He shuddered through another series of whooping breaths, he shivered and twitched and sweated – and then his head jerked towards me, just for a second.
“You’re not Ashley.”
What the hell?
His head snapped away from me and he went back to staring straight ahead. But he talked. Just a few words, and he didn’t make any sense, and his voice was distant and slow and weirdly calm, but at least I’d gotten him talking, whoever he thought I was.
“You can’t be Ashley. I told Ashley I would call her and then I went home alone, and I haven’t called Ashley yet, so you aren’t Ashley.”
Now that his brain felt that matter was settled, his breathing ratcheted up again. He seemed to forget I existed and he just breathed, faster and faster, his rib cage pumping up and down with the effort of forcing each breath in and out as quickly as possible. His eyes fluttered for an instant, he swayed a bit to one side, and I didn’t have to be a doctor to see he was on the brink of passing out, or worse.
Screw conversation. I needed to get basic with this, and fast.
I scooted off the bed and dropped to my knees on the floor, right in front of him. He stared over my head at the empty air. As far as he was concerned, he was once more alone in the room.
No way, big guy – this ends now.
I raised my arms, I pulled in a deep breath, and then I smacked my hands together as hard as I could, right in front of his face.
He twitched, glanced around, and started to sink back into statue mode – oh, I don’t think so, buddy, not this time.
“DEVON!” I put more than a little of my nerves and fear and bewilderment into that shout, and as it echoed off the walls, I slammed my hands together again, palms stinging, less than an inch away from the tip of his sweat-dripping nose.
He jumped, and he snapped his head around from left to right and back again, like a rabbit looking for a hungry fox hiding in the shadows. When I settled my hands on his knees, he looked down at me, and he didn’t quite seem to know who I was – but his eyes met mine, the contact held for a few seconds before he looked away again …
Progress, but not enough.
I reached up and took his face in my hands. I thumbed away some of the sweat on his cheeks, and then turned his head until he was looking straight at me.
I chanced letting go of him with my right hand. I forked my index and middle fingers directly at his eyes, then pointed them back at my own eyes.
“Devon, your eyes on my eyes, and I mean NOW.”
His eyes lifted to mine, slowly, and this time he kept his eyes on mine, kept staring – I wasn’t sure he was really seeing me, but I’d take any improvement I could get.
“Devon, nod if you can hear me.”
He trembled, his breathing kept running wild, but he did dip his head, just a bit.
“Devon, all you have to do right now is just keep looking at my eyes. Can you do that?”
Another nod.
“Keep looking at my eyes, and I promise you will be safe. Do you understand?”
Between one
stuttered, rasping breath and the next, he hesitated – he hesitated, and then he whispered, “Yes.”
My Devon was in there, somewhere, and he was trying to come back to me.
I put both my hands back on his knees, and I pinned him in place with my own desperate stare.
“Devon, just look at my eyes. What color are they?”
He tilted his head, his drowning eyes stared into mine, and he focused. “Brown …?” He seemed unsure if brown was a real color, but whatever – he was tracking my words, responding, waking up.
“You got it, big fella – these eyes of mine are plain old bargain-bin brown. Yours now, they can’t decide if they want to be some weird kind of blue or flat-out violet. What color are your eyes, Devon?”
His voice trembled between hitching breaths. “Mama’s eyes.”
What the … “Talk to me, Devon – are your eyes the same color as your mom’s?”
He chewed his lip, he started to look away – and I reached up to grab his chin and pull him around to face me again.
“Eyes on ME, Devon – look at me, and nothing else. What color were your mom’s eyes? Same as yours?”
More words – and was I imagining things, or were his breaths coming just a little slower, easing closer to a normal rhythm? He was still pulling in air way too fast for my nerves, but he put together more words between those racing breaths, and his voice firmed up.
“Only Mama and I have these eyes.” He shuddered, and then tilted his head to the other side as he stared down at me. “That’s how they can tell I’m a freak.”
“Devon, listen to me – you are NOT a freak, you’re not any kind of freak, I don’t care what anybody else says. They are wrong, and I am right – look at me, listen to me, tell me you understand.”
“They are wrong.”
“Swell, now –”
“They are wrong because it is not just my eyes. Everything that I am makes me a freak. Can you see that?”
I was going to kill every last member of the Killane family as soon as I could free up two minutes in my schedule – I was going to stake each and every one of those emotional vampires to the ground at high noon in front of City Hall, and I would stand laughing over their bodies.
“No, I do NOT see that, because you are not a freak – you are my Devon, and that is every last bit of the fucking truth. Do you understand?”
I stared up into those impossible eyes. I stared, and I silently begged him to come back to me.
Thirty seconds passed while we stared into each other’s eyes – or maybe it was thirty years, whatever.
Then he spoke. He paused, he drew the first slow, deep, almost normal breath I’d heard from him since I came into the room, and he spoke – and damn that adorable crazy bastard, but he even managed a faint twist of a smile.
“Beautiful, bold, and a deliciously foul mouth – you must be my Ashley.”
My Devon was back.
Devon was back in the land of the living and more or less sane, but his muscles quivered with exhaustion. Between sweat, stress, and a tangled mess of utterly shot nerves, he needed to sleep for about a hundred years – but first, I needed to get him cleaned up.
That Fioravanti silk suit looked like a sweat-drenched pile of thrift-store rags now, and it had to go. I stripped it off him, and since I had no idea where laundry went in the Killane asylum and it was probably ruined anyway, I tossed the whole mess over a chair in the corner. It would get taken care of, or not.
Once I had him down to his skin, I avoided looking at him; even burned out and exhausted he was gorgeous, but he needed me to look after him right now, not jump his bones. Instead, I searched through the room’s one small dresser, and used a folded bathrobe I found in the top drawer to towel the worst of the sweat off his body. A shower would have been better, but he wasn’t in any condition to stand, much less walk to the nearest bathroom. The second drawer down produced a fresh pair of boxers, and he pulled them on at my command.
“Ashley, I truly believe I need to lie down for a little while.”
He still sat on the edge of the bed, but he shook like a leaf, and I could see he wasn’t going to be able to stay up much longer. A fair amount of sweat had run off his body and soaked into the sheets – but I judged that the poor guy just didn’t have it in him to wait long enough for me to strip the bed, find new bedding somewhere, put on the new sheets, and make everything perfect. He needed to get horizontal and zone out now – and hell, most of the bed was dry enough, right? He’d live.
“Devon, I truly believe you’re right. Lie down, and I’ll get you covered up, okay?”
He turned his head as if he was having trouble remembering how, he stared at the pillow as if he’d never seen one before, and then he tipped over onto the bed like a falling tree. Once he was down, he pulled his knees up to his belly, hugged his arms to his chest, and let out a long, shuddering breath as he closed his eyes.
I shook a little bit myself as I pulled the sheet up over him. I took a folded goose-down comforter from the foot of the bed and draped that over him as well, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed and indulged my own nerves for a minute.
I counted backwards from ten a few times. I clenched and unclenched my fists, and then ran my hands up and down my legs. I did a little mellow slow breathing of my own. I watched the shadows shift in the hallway – was it just mid-afternoon still? I pulled out my phone to check the time, and confirmed that it was only 3:12 p.m. With everything that had happened since sunrise, I felt we’d all earned our way into next week at least, but apparently the rotation of the earth did not agree.
I eyeballed Devon, judged that he wasn’t quite asleep yet but would be soon, and stood up. Calling Mrs. Hadfield and having some bottled water and maybe a few sandwiches or something sent up felt like a good idea – once the big guy got up later, he’d seriously need to rehydrate and get some calories into him, after all that sweating and heart-pounding craziness. I didn’t want to chance stirring him fully awake, though, so I decided to make the call from out in the hallway.
I got as far as the door.
“Ashley, please stay.”
With one hand on the doorframe, I turned to see Devon watching me, his head sunk deep into the pillow, his eyes only just open.
“Ashley, stay with me. I need you here, please.”
“Devon, I was just going into the hall for a second to make a phone call, to –”
“I need your arms around me, Ashley, keeping me safe so that I can sleep. Please, will you stay?”
I pulled the door closed. I tossed the phone into the chair holding his sweat-drenched suit, I shrugged off my coat and threw it over there as well, and I sat down on the edge of the bed to pull off my boots.
Then I burrowed under the covers and pulled that huge, fragile man into my arms. I pillowed his head against my chest, I held him tight, and as he drifted off to sleep I murmured into his ear, promising to protect him from all his demons.
But how could I do that when I didn’t know who or what they were?
22. Feature Presentation
“Ashley, wake up.”
Mmmrrph … ?
“Time is of the essence, lovely Ashley – you must make a decision, and quickly.”
Some people can pull off napping in the middle of the day, but I am not one of them. I’ve tried, and while I can sometimes get to sleep when it’s still light out, I always wake up tired, grouchy, headache-y, and less than sure of who and where I am. Naps, ladies and gentlemen, can suck it.
“You must hurry, Ashley; time waits not even for the lovely and round among us.”
Oh, and I wake up from these cruel and unusual naps at a snail’s pace – totally can’t hurry up the process at all.
“Your choices are narrowing by the second, my beautiful and passionate Ashley. You must decide.”
Have I mentioned that naps cripple my brain’s decision-making apparatus? I’m fine after a session of normal night-time sleep, but wake me up from a nap
and I can’t decide the difference between left and right for at least an hour.
“Might this help you to come back to me?”
On the other hand, when six feet and five inches of broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, muscular sexiness bends down and gives me a firm, probing, take-no-prisoners tongue kiss that sets me on fire from my lips right down to my toes – well, in that case, I wake right the hell up.
More or less.
“Um, hi there, big guy … so what’s this decision I have to make? And does it have to be right now? Because if you need me fully awake and rational, a shower and something clean to wear would help my logic circuits to come online.”
“I think you’re ravishing and witty and insightful just as you are, but if you insist, you may certainly shower and change before the evening’s activities – of course, that means I will have to make the critical decision myself, and my decision is that tonight’s playbill will feature German Expressionism, as exemplified by the films of F.W. Murnau.”
More of my neurons started firing, and I remembered … yeah, this bed, this guy, and a titanic breakdown … some world-class snuggling after, although he’d been sound asleep … and then I fell asleep too, and now?
Still a bit fuzzy and disoriented, I peered at Devon and realized that he’d already hit the shower. Instead of rank sweat and fear, his powerful body now smelled like gorgeous man with a hint of musky cologne. Shampoo and a session of blow drying had his thick midnight-black hair looking like a model’s again, and the entire delicious package of him stood before me wrapped in a plush, ivory-white bathrobe that I wanted to rip right off him at the first opportunity – and was he wearing anything beneath it? Inquiring minds want to know …
I told my hormones to shut up and take a seat. Devon might look like his usual sleek and sassy self right now, but the sweat-drenched wreck I’d seen earlier was still in there somewhere, and that guy needed help way more than I needed to get my lust on.
Now, he’d said something about F.W. Murnau, which meant movies, which meant an evening of popcorn and commentary and …
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 24
