“ ‘I couldn’t let my father win. He took everything from Mama and from me, and I couldn’t let him win. He wanted to hang Killane Industries around my neck like a millstone, forcing me into years of conflict with my uncles, laughing from beyond the grave while we drove each other mad, and I couldn’t let him get away with that. I’d already lost everything else to him, and I determined that I wouldn’t let him take my future as well.’ ”
“But didn’t his uncles score a major win? I mean, they got all that sweet, sweet money that they’d been lusting after for years, and they got it for next to nothing. How could he let them win?”
“I asked him that, rather wondering if he grasped that he’d thrown away all my years of effort in keeping his inheritance safe for him – and his answer was cryptic, maddening, and pure Devon.
“He looked me right in the eye, he smiled, and he said, ‘No, Uncle, I did not let them win – I let them think that they’d won.’ He did not elaborate, despite all my efforts to worm out of him an answer that made some sort of sense.”
“So he was dead broke but free of the Killanes, he had his whole life in front of him, and he did … what?”
Uncle Sheridan swirled a dollop of fake cream into his coffee. “Devon had some specific ideas about his immediate future, and he was not in fact with me for long. Harvard was the best source, he told me, for both an education and the connections that would fuel future business endeavors, and might I be interested in funding him for a four-year stay?
“I agreed to bankroll his grand scheme, and it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. It was somewhat harder to persuade such a selective institution to accept someone with Devon’s erratic educational history, but a few calls to friends in the administration and a generous donation to the dean’s favorite charity transformed their reluctant fussing into a place for Devon in the freshman class that fall.
“He thrived at Harvard – no one there knew or cared about his personal history, and he found the course work about as challenging as you or I would find a game of tic-tac-toe. The women were more than friendly, he stayed out of fights and earned perfect grades, and as far as his daily experience was concerned, the Killanes might as well have vanished off the face of the earth.”
“I guess I know the panic attacks didn’t go away entirely, but did he at least get a little bit of a break from those, with the uncles from hell off his back?”
“It is my best guess that the occasional attacks seized him during his time at Harvard, in stray moments of stress and self-doubt – but that is one of many secrets he has kept shut away from the world.
“As for the rest, after he graduated with every honor available – well, you know the rest. Everyone does. Building a small loan I gave him into a global empire, absorbing companies and technologies and rivals, owning virtually everything anyone might care to own, and accumulating yet more at every turn of the road – it’s all there in the public record.
“I watched Devon’s meteoric rise to the summit of the business world, I watched him pile up more money than anyone could ever spend or give away or burn, and I always assumed it was done in the name of security – that, and outdoing the Killanes, rubbing their noses in the fact that they couldn’t begin to achieve between them the destiny that a single terrified, rootless child had built up from next to nothing.
“I thought leaving them behind in the dust was the future Devon had in mind when he said he’d allowed his uncles to think they’d won – until four years ago, when I became the first person he ever told about the special project. In that moment, I realized he had planned the Killanes’ outright destruction from the moment he signed over his inheritance to them.”
“So what’s his plan now?”
“Beg pardon?”
Out of nowhere, the moment I drove away from Devon’s place on Sunday morning popped into my head, the moment I looked into my rearview mirror to see him staring back at me with an expression I couldn’t begin to read.
What was he trying to tell me? What was he trying to keep from me?
“Miss Daniels?”
Uncle Sheridan stared at me now, worry lining his face as surely as age.
When I looked at Devon, I saw someone with a secret – a secret he was hiding from all of us, with the skill of someone who’d spent a lifetime concealing the truth of who and what he was from everyone around him.
A secret he was hiding from himself.
“Uncle Sheridan, there’s something Devon’s not telling us. The Killanes might be in jail and their family business in ruins, but something more is going on here, something he won’t tell me.”
My words tumbled over each other and I knew I must sound like a nervous idiot, but so the hell what? Devon needed me, somehow, for something, and that counted for a lot more than sounding all mannered and rational.
The toughest Jedi in town took me at my word and refused to notice that I was babbling. “Well, the special project is complete, it must be – its goal was to shatter Killane Industries beyond repair and put Devon’s uncles out into the street with nothing, and that has been accomplished.
“The fact that his father’s brothers are also under indictment and enjoying the hospitality of the federal government is an unexpected bonus – everyone always knew the Killanes were as crooked as the coastline of Wales, but there was never any proof until Devon’s people turned over the right rocks in the course of their investigation.
“So far as I can tell, the special project has more than served its particular function and is now history. What more could there be to it?”
“I don’t know, Uncle Sheridan. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know if it’s even anything to do with the special project, but I do know that I’m not imagining things. Devon looks at me, and it’s as if … as if he’s trying to fix me in his memory, like he doesn’t expect me to be around much longer.
“He talks to me, and there’s so much more to his words than what he’s saying – there’s a truth that he’s afraid to tell me, that he doesn’t want to tell me, that he’s begging me to figure out on my own. And whatever it is …”
I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know what I was basing it on. I just knew – so I just blurted it out.
“Whatever it is, sir, there’s a time limit. There’s a clock in Devon’s head that’s ticking off a countdown only he knows about – and there could be months left, or weeks, or days … or hours. I just don’t know.”
Tears welled up in my eyes, but I forced them back. Buck up, Ashley – your man needs you, and it’s not his fault that he can’t tell you why.
Uncle Sheridan stared at me the same way the Sphinx stares at the sun. He stared at me as crowds of laughing, arguing, undeniably alive kids pushed past us, as somebody yelled, and somebody else cranked up the volume on one of the flat screen TVs bolted overhead.
Just about the time I was thinking the old guy could give Jimmy staring lessons, his face softened. He looked over my shoulder at the cars and people choking the street outside, he favored his melting sundae with a glance, and then he turned back to me
“There is a great deal here that I am uncertain about, Miss Daniels, but I am quite sure of two things.
“One, I am sure that you’re right about Devon hiding a greater truth from us – I have no idea what this truth might be, but you know him as well as I do, you know him better than he knows himself, and I trust your judgment in this matter.
“Two, I know for a certainty just what Devon needs from you.”
“Then in the name of the Force, sir, you’ve got to tell me exactly what that is, because I’m feeling pretty clueless right now.”
The old man nodded. “Not long after this conversation began, you told me you wanted to know just what the Killanes had done to Devon that I found unforgivable. You told me you needed to know the worst.
“The worst was not the physical abuse. Were it only a matter of beatings, deliberate malnutrition, and denial of medical care, I
am confident that Devon would have survived with his body and mind intact, because he possesses an inner strength that would serve him well if a mountain were to fall on him.
“The worst was not the mental abuse, the exquisite psychological torture that filled all the days and nights he spent under the control of his uncles and their vile families. Other children have survived being hated for their very existence, and I am confident that Devon would have done so as well, if there was no more to it than that.
“The worst was not even that they believed him to be utterly worthless and undeserving of love or care of any kind, or that they shoved that belief in his face at every opportunity.
“The worst, the one thing I cannot forgive them for, is that they made him believe it. Somewhere in all those lost years, the Killanes broke some crucial part of Devon and now he needs more than anything for you to believe in him, because he is no longer able to believe in himself.”
Now that I could do. I still felt a clock ticking somewhere, somehow, a relentless countdown that had Devon’s name all over it – but in the meantime, I’d believe in him enough for both of us.
I opened my mouth to tell Uncle Sheridan so, but instead of me babbling, we both heard the classical strains of Mozart echoing from the depths of his suit jacket.
Mild and mannered as ever, the classiest honorary uncle in town pulled out his phone. “Speak of the devil and here he is – do you think that remarkable boy knows what we’ve been saying about him?”
While Uncle Sheridan put his phone to his ear, I decided I wouldn’t put it past my guy to have some weird psychic radar that kicked in whenever people talked about him – that seemed like Devon’s style. Uncanny, deliciously odd, and smarter than the offspring of a supercomputer getting all freaky with Stephen Hawking – yep, that’s the boyfriend fate decided to toss your way, Ashley. Where fate got its twisted sense of humor was a whole other subject, one that –
“Why yes, Miss Daniels is still here.” A pause. “Certainly, if you like.”
Uncle Sheridan tapped his phone, and then set it in the middle of the table. “Devon asked me to put him on speaker, as it seems he wishes to speak to both of us.”
As it turned out, he insisted on speaking to the entire restaurant.
“UNCLE, ARE YOU RAVISHING MY GIRLFRIEND IN THE MIDDLE OF McDONALD’S?”
Every head in the place turned our way, because of course the big crazy-making goofball not only shouted that question at max volume on purpose, but he also had the perfect timing to do it just as the buzz of conversations surrounding us dropped off for a few seconds.
Everybody stared, Uncle Sheridan grinned like a bastard, and I decided that two could play this game.
“HE IS SO HAVING HIS WAY WITH ME RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE KETCHUP PACKETS, BABY!”
I decided to crank it up a notch, just in case they didn’t hear me downstate.
“I WON’T BE ABLE TO WALK STRAIGHT FOR A WEEK!”
Devon fired back, “MUST I HAVE WORDS WITH YOU, UNCLE?”
Uncle Sheridan was way too classy to yell at the top of his dignified lungs, but since every customer and employee in the place had shut up to listen to us, we could all hear him just fine.
“If you can’t satisfy her, Devon, then I simply must step up and do my duty.”
Everybody joined in after that. A girl sitting two booths down hollered, “AND HE’S FLEXIBLE LIKE GUMBY!” Another one yelled from the middle of her tittering pals, “AND TIRELESS, TOO!” A cashier added, “AND INVENTIVE!” and some guy who was probably way jealous of the old Jedi’s charm bellowed, “HE’S GONNA PUT SOMEBODY’S EYE OUT WITH THAT THING!”
Through it all, Uncle Sheridan wore a ‘who, little old me?’ smile that could have charmed the panties off a supermodel. I just about laughed myself into a seizure, while our fellow McDonald’s patrons gave us a round of applause, plus a few more comments about my honorary uncle’s legendary sexual prowess.
Devon dialed his voice back to something like normal volume, and after a few more giggles, the attention of the crowd drifted away from us.
“Uncle, I do so hate to interrupt your vigorous fondling of my girlfriend, but I called to see if you might perhaps be available to sit in on a meeting at two o’clock? It seems one of the Allisonia Technologies executives I have to pretend to listen to attended school with you back in the days of yore; if you’re here to hold his hand and make sympathetic noises, I rather think he and his fellows will be more inclined to accept that I’m buying them out whether they like it or not.”
“Dear God, tell me it’s not that fool Blakemore – the man’s so dreadfully dull, he could put a statue to sleep.”
“The same, I fear – but at least it will give you a chance to rest up from pleasuring my exhausted Ashley until she screams. And Ashley, I trust we’re still on for eight o’clock sharp in the theater tonight? I’ve lined up a series of terribly loud films featuring giant robots and explosions, just for you.”
“It’s a date, big guy – but this time, you have to make the mannequins promise not to talk so much, okay?”
“They’re simply in awe of your own flexibility, my Ashley, but I will certainly speak to them. Until tonight, then.”
Uncle Sheridan took Devon off speaker, said goodbye to him in approximate privacy, and then dropped the phone back into his pocket.
“Well, it seems that the symphony must get along without begging me for funds this afternoon. I can’t say I’ll be missing their company, but I imagine they’ll insist on rescheduling at some inopportune time or other.”
He looked around at the lunchtime crowd, and then turned back to me. “My apologies, Miss Daniels, but I’m afraid I have a few small matters I should take care of before that meeting – would you mind if I left you now? I imagine there’s a great deal more we could discuss as regards Devon, but I hope I’ve been of at least some small help to you – and of course I would be more than happy to speak to you again, whenever you wish.”
“Sir?”
He looked at me, all calm and attentive and every inch the perfect gentleman. “Yes, Miss Daniels?”
I don’t know what brought it on and I felt like six kinds of bitch for asking, but I had to know. Maybe it was relevant, maybe it meant something, maybe I was exercising my newfound talent for asking nice guys awful questions, or maybe I just really was a gold-plated bitch.
“Sir, what happened to Alva?”
He’d started to stand, ready to head back out to his day and the little things he needed to square away before that meeting – but thanks to me and my big mouth, he froze, just for a second. He froze, he sighed, and then he sat back down, while I wanted to punch myself in the face for being such a big nosy ball of nosiness.
“Sir, I apologize, it’s none of my –”
“It is your business, Miss Daniels.”
Color me puzzled – I could have sworn I was just being a prying bitch. “I was just curious, Uncle Sheridan, and it’s really not – ”
“It really is, and I should have brought it up myself – if you’ll indulge me for a few more minutes of blathering, you’ll see why.”
He glanced past me at the world outside the restaurant’s windows, but something told me he was looking into the past, looking at a world that had Alva in it – a world that was long gone.
He turned back to me, and he sat up straight. He adjusted the knot on his already perfect tie, and ran a hand over his flawlessly styled waves of white hair. He clasped his hands together in front of him, and if it weren’t for the way his knuckles were blanched white, anybody would have thought he was every bit as calm as he was trying to look.
“Alva was tireless. In the three glorious years we were together, we traveled everywhere, met everyone, and we … well, I’ll leave the personal side of things to your imagination, but trust me, that was glorious as well.
“She was a tiny creature, but with the energy of a dynamo – always in motion, always laughing, always full of a million ideas and pr
ojects, and yet always at my side, and always with time for me. Whenever Alva looked at me, I was the center of her universe, and I saw nothing but her.
“Towards the end of that third year, her energy flagged just a bit, now and then. I thought she might perhaps be taking on too many charity projects – Alva was a miracle worker when it came to persuading wealthy people to part with their money for the sake of a worthy cause, and she championed more causes than I could count. She laughed at my concern, assured me I was worrying about nothing, and I believed her – her enthusiasm for life was infectious, and who could possibly doubt anything she said when she wore that radiant smile?
“Somehow, I think she knew.
“When the end came, there was so little warning. One night, out of nowhere, she became violently ill – I rushed her to the hospital, terrified beyond words, and waited for hours as the doctors poked and prodded and fussed. Her symptoms were a mystery to them, it seemed – until one of the standard blood tests revealed that her white cell count was through the roof.
“As I sat by her bedside, clutching her slim hand in mine, they told me Alva had fallen victim to a rare form of leukemia, one whose early symptoms are few and shifting, and easily mistaken for mere fatigue. By the time the disease shows its true colors, it’s far too late to do anything but wait.
“Alva and I did not have to wait for long. Two days later she shuddered through a massive heart attack; she survived, barely, but I looked at the fading bloom on her lovely face and knew she was not long for this world.
“She drifted in and out of consciousness for three more days, assuring me when she was able to talk that she’d be all right, that I’d be all right, and I so wanted to believe her – and then just before dawn on a Thursday morning, another heart attack shook her tiny frame and she was gone.
“Just like that, between one breath and the next.
“She was twenty-two years old.”
Silence.
I said nothing. What could I possibly say?
That McDonald’s was wall-to-wall crowded, and I suppose those kids kept chattering away, but I sure didn’t hear them.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 35
