Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance

by Sonora Seldon

  What we saw might have been fine particles of whitish-grey sand, powdery and light and threatening to lift into the breeze that stirred past us. Sand like that belonged on some distant tropical beach, soaking up the sun as warm ocean tides rose and fell nearby – if it had been sand, which of course it wasn’t.

  Hi, Uncle Sheridan.

  I stirred against Devon’s side. “Is there, I don’t know … some kind of protocol for this? Words we should say, a ceremony or something?”

  I looked up at the big guy, I looked into those eerie and weird and beautiful blue-violet eyes of his, and after way too many days, I saw life there.

  He shook his head. “I should think not – I imagine he would have been pleased enough simply by our being here with him. Besides, words are pale, meaningless creatures in moments like this, don’t you agree?”

  I nodded. And just like that, Devon held his left arm straight out and upended the container over the rushing waters.

  Uncle Sheridan’s ashes danced away from us in a cloud, billowing and spreading in the breeze until they were caught by the downdraft of the small waterfall at our feet. Some of the particles dove into the froth, while most swirled past and fell into the river beyond – but a few danced on, dipping and coasting over the foam-crested waves, skimming the ice-ringed boulders jutting above the turbulent water, spinning away from us, following the lead of the river as it rumbled and splashed down the slope and out of our lives.

  I’m sure what happened at the last was random chance.

  Just before the river disappeared downhill into the distant trees, just as I was telling myself that yes, I could still see a few of those fine, dusty remnants riding the air currents just above the waves, a trout leapt flailing from the water. It rose in a burst of spray and foam, the sunlight flashing off its wet skin as it struck at the ashes spinning by overhead. Then it plunged back into the heaving water with a fierce splash, and it was gone.

  Bye, Uncle Sheridan.

  33. Hiding in the Light

  The cabin was a sweet, sweet deal.

  I was prepped and ready to not like it one bit, seeing as how it was buried deep in the bear-infested wilds. I was expecting a hut, a hovel, a technical bit of almost-shelter with rocks to sleep on, grungy old berries to eat, and bark for toilet paper, if there even was a toilet.

  Sure, I’d seen the satellite dish and the chimney and the porch from the far side of the river, but those could be faked, right? Some evil backcountry cloaking device luring in round city gals with the promise of civilization, only to leave them bereft and abandoned in a glorified shed as wolves and mountain lions closed in for the kill?

  Nope.

  After I parked the SUV in the weeds off to one side of the alleged cabin and left Devon to haul in our two suitcases because hey, big strong man, I mounted the steps, crossed the not-at-all-faked porch, opened the real-with-a-latch-and-a-knob-and-everything door, and went inside to find a comfortable island of the modern world.

  Sure, it was small. It was microscopic compared to Devon’s office back home, or even just his bedroom – but that cabin packed a lot into the space.

  Square, tight, and efficient, the whole thing was a single room, with a humongous bed drowning in quilted comforters in the far right corner, and a couch of leather and burled wood under the window just to the right of the door. A workspace occupied the corner to the left of the door; it featured a modest, don’t-mind-me plasma screen TV mounted on the wall, a desk underneath it, and on the desk – dear God, yes – a laptop with a functioning internet connection, can you say hallelujah?

  The far left corner was home to a thumbnail-sized kitchen, with small cabinets and smaller counters. There was a single sink, a dorm-sized fridge, a tiny wood-fired stove that I didn’t entirely trust but that Devon must know how to work, and a nearby dining table flanked by four chairs.

  Dominating the center of the cabin was another wood stove, this one big and brawny and designed to radiate heat to every corner of the place – once it was fired up and running, which was another thing I hoped Devon would take care of.

  The walls were bare planks of pine and cedar – at least, the parts of the walls I could see between the floor-to-ceiling shelves that groaned under the weight of hundreds of books. Deep-piled throw rugs covered the floorboards, and a rustic handmade lighting fixture spliced together from deer antlers but featuring real, God-given light bulbs hung from the ceiling.

  The only concession to other-roomness was a door in the back wall, midway between the kitchen corner and the dresser that stood next to the bed. Being a curious sort, I marched right over there, pulled it open, and found myself looking into a pocket-sized bathroom, occupying a small extension attached to the back of the cabin.

  Another tiny but neatly designed space, it held a claw foot tub with a showerhead mounted above it, a porcelain sink below a mirror, a cabinet for towels and shampoo and girl stuff, and a toilet that any citified bathroom would have been proud to have. And thank the heavens, a roll of genuine toilet paper hung next to it, with more packages of the four-ply stuff stacked close at hand – no bark for this city girl, thank you very much.

  “That’s a recent addition, as it happens.”

  I jumped a little, and spun around to see Devon looming just behind me. “So people didn’t believe in civilized facilities, back in the days of cave bears and wooly mammoths?”

  He shrugged. “When I first came here, the only ‘facilities’ available were an outhouse back among the trees, and a well that provided hand-drawn water for cooking and cleaning.”

  “And you survived?”

  And there was that beautiful grin, that grin I knew so well and had missed so much – it was back, this time for good.

  I hoped.

  “Lovely Ashley, you may pretend as much as you like to be discomfited by the terrors of the unknown wild, but I know better.”

  “Um, you do?”

  “You are less stricken than you let on by the woods and the valley and the river and all those potential bears lurking roundabouts – in fact, if you give this place time and even so much as half a chance, I’m quite sure you will come to love it. After all, I did.”

  “I respect that, big guy, but this city girl is reserving judgment in a big way about the trustworthiness of all the green stuff and rocks out there, okay?”

  Once again, that smile – but was there something distant and haunted lurking behind it this time, or was I just imagining that?

  “You’ll see.” He paused, his gaze wandered off to one side, and now I knew I wasn’t imagining the darkness in his eyes, and the sense of something hiding behind that smile.

  He shook himself, and his eyes snapped back to my face. “I cannot explain, not truly and not yet, but I need you to understand what I feel in this place, Ashley. I … there is so much that I hope you can find the strength to understand.”

  I sure as hell didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I didn’t need to. He was my Devon, and so I took him into my arms. We stood wrapped together for a long time in the middle of that tiny cabin, as the sunlight sank away from the windows and the day turned colder.

  Devious bastard that he was, Devon wouldn’t fire up the woodstove until I agreed to a trade.

  “Are you serious? A toasty warm cabin equals no internet and no TV? Are you some drooling Neanderthal savage or something?”

  I glanced over at the innocent young laptop and TV and satellite boxes and cables hanging out together in the corner, and panic swirled through my brain. “Do you just enjoying torturing me? Are we going to start wearing furs and worshipping some dark and alien bear god next? Jesus, why?”

  “It’s your choice, my embattled Ashley – either you can bask in the warmth of a well-laid fire, staring deep into the flickering, hypnotic flames as you contemplate the meaning of life and the soul-affirming values of the natural world, or you can sit in the corner with your teeth chattering, warming yourself by the glow of that little screen.” He wave
d a hand at the laptop, which hadn’t done a thing to deserve this kind of treatment.

  “But why? And hey, you’ll freeze your toes off too, unless you’ve got some secret internal warmth engine or something – right?”

  “Ah, but since I’m ever so much bigger than you, I think I’ll be able to bundle up and stay quite warm enough – certainly enough to make my point, which will be well worth a bit of shivering.”

  “And this point is?”

  He looked at me, just looked at me for a moment without saying a word. By the time he did open his mouth, he’d already halfway talked me into it with just those eyes.

  “This place is a kingdom, Ashley. It is a kingdom peopled by rustling trees and roaming deer, watched over by castles of rock, and attacked by armies of snow and thunder and lightning. It is another world, and if you walk in this world long enough, listening to its rhythms, watching its subtle movements, walking its paths and breathing its air, you will find a part of yourself that you never knew existed, and that you would never have known in the world outside.”

  He nodded at the tangle of cables and electronica huddling together on the desk. “You’ve lived in that world all your life, Ashley – why not put it away and give this world a chance, just for a few days?”

  So I did.

  The big guy went out back where he claimed wood was stored in a drying shed, and brought in an armload of the dead tree stuff. Then he arranged it in the stove just so, worked some kind of dark magic involving kindling and matches and prayers to a dread demon lord of natural, non-electronic fire – okay, so maybe I imagined that last bit – and soon flames crackled, the walls glowed in the firelight, and we were well on our way to being as warm as if we were lazing around on a white sand beach in the Caribbean … well, almost.

  At least his whole anti-tech Luddite thing didn’t extend to electric lights – while I pulled one of the kitchen chairs over so I could sit right next to the woodstove and toast my toes properly, he flicked a switch to send light flooding everywhere from the bulbs of the deer antler contraption hanging overhead.

  So was a hamster running a wheel somewhere to power that thing?

  “Devon, where’s this blessed electricity that you won’t let me use to go online coming from? Magical pixies born of a love match between Tinkerbell and Thomas Edison?”

  Devon’s voice drifted to me from the corner that served as a kitchen, where he was prepping the wood-fueled stove for cooking duty.

  “If you dare to step outside tomorrow and look round the back, you’ll see solar panels mounted on the rear slope of the roof; they provide free power during the day, and at night a standby generator housed in a shed out back keeps the demons of the dark away.”

  “That sounds disturbingly modern and practical, Mr. Mountain Man.”

  “It was Uncle Sheridan’s idea. When I first came here, this cabin had not the slightest hint of electricity about it; but some years later, he came to feel that reading by candlelight was growing a bit hard on his eyes, and so he had the solar panels and the generator installed.”

  I heard the hiss of crackling flames coming from the kitchen now as well, accompanied by the rattle of pots and pans. Mmmm, food …

  His mention of reading reminded me – while quaint, old-fashioned, real paper books lining the shelves all around us, I had ten times that many ebooks stored on my phone. Surely my beloved iPhone couldn’t possibly be included in the technology ban, could it?

  So where was my glowing electronic minion?

  “Devon, did you notice if I left my phone in the car?”

  A cabinet door thumped open and shut. “Yes, you did. I saw you leave it behind on the seat.” Now I heard water running, and the hum of the baby fridge as he opened it to retrieve something or other.

  “Do you think a bear would eat me if I went outside to get it?”

  “I am confident you could terrorize a bear into submission if you had to, my fierce Ashley, but in this case it would be rather pointless – your phone is no longer in our vehicle.”

  “So where is it?”

  “Oh, I brought your phone in here and hid it.”

  I did a slow burn. Then I did a fast burn. Then I considered denying him sex until he produced my phone, and then I realized that there was nowhere for us to sleep later but together in that deliciously comfortable bed over there, and once I was in it with him and he pulled me up against his big, warm body and his big, warm … well, yeah, the whole ‘my phone or no sex’ strategy was so not going to work.

  I tried the intellectual approach. “Devon, I have books on my phone, tons and tons of books – ”

  Without looking around, he waved a hand at the walls. “As you may have noticed, we have books here. Besides, I hope you will forgive my suspicious nature, but I can’t help but imagine you might try to make a call, or somehow sneak online with the help of your beloved phone.”

  “There are no bars here in the godforsaken wilds, and you won’t let me use the internet, remember?”

  “True. Would you perhaps consent to share a bracing meal of pork chops and mashed potatoes with me instead?”

  My stomach answered for me, rumbling like a traitor as the sweet scent of sizzling pork fat filled the cabin. So I gave up – just for the moment, mind you – on trying to argue my way back into phone ownership, and a short time later, we sat down at the narrow, pine-knotted table and ate like fiends.

  He might be worrisome and weird and cryptic, but man – how did I luck into a guy who was gorgeous, adorable, tender and sweet, stinking rich, and a pretty fair cook? Did I save a bunch of starving kids from an orphanage fire in a previous life?

  I decided to put that question aside, and went for a second helping of mashed potatoes instead. We drank apple cider which tasted strange and tart but still not half bad, we talked about cowgirls and their jealous boyfriends, I snatched one of his pork chops when he wasn’t looking, he told me about his many miserable failures at fly fishing, and full darkness filled the world outside the windows before we knew it.

  We sat up for a little while after supper, curling up on the couch while Devon read aloud and I leaned my head on his shoulder. I listened to his low, mesmerizing voice, I thought about how that voice and that face could have made him an A-list actor, I wondered why anybody would read, much less write, this biography of a Confederate general so obscure I was pretty sure even the Confederacy had never heard of him, and I stole glances out the window at the night.

  I looked at the darkness out there, and I thought about what it hid. I thought about the river I could still hear rumbling in the distance, and how I’d last seen Uncle Sheridan floating away on the breeze and then disappearing into that churning grey water. I thought about the animals slipping unseen through the trees, the deer with huge, brimming liquid eyes and the bears wrapped in shaggy pelts against the coming winter. I pictured the freezing, snow-covered wastes of the mountains towering all around us, and I wondered if anything walked up there in the night …

  “Ashley?”

  I jerked upright, peering around in confusion and rubbing my eyes.

  “Ashley, don’t you think you’d be rather more comfortable sleeping in our bed?”

  Yeah, I’d dozed off like a baby, right there on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, big guy, don’t take it as a reflection on your reading-out-loud skills or anything – it’s just been a really long and weird and stressed-out day for this big city girl.”

  “For me as well, and I grant I could have chosen a more lively sort of subject matter – you know, if you happen to have any stories of a naughty and erotic nature on that phone of yours, I might be persuaded to let you read one or two or a lot of them to me tomorrow night …”

  He nuzzled my hair and nipped at my ear, and the next thing I knew, we were spooning together in the bed. We snuggled under the quilts, I giggled and squirmed, Devon made some seriously filthy suggestions that thrilled me down to my toes – but though we shared a deep, probing kiss and the promise of
much more … well, it had been a strange and unsettling day, and we were both exhausted, and full of all that wonderful food he’d prepared, and yes – we both fell asleep before anything too frisky happened.

  But I didn’t stay asleep.

  I woke up minutes later, or hours – it was scary and unsettling as hell somehow to find myself awake in the darkness with no idea of what time it was, and no way to find out. A low, reddish glow leaked from the banked fire in the woodstove, a glow that barely lit more than a few inches in the center of the cabin – I could see that, I could make out a faint hint of starlight stealing in through the windows, and that was all. A more country kind of girl could probably have made a guess at the time by looking at the sky, but not me.

  What was even creepier than waking up in the most profound darkness I’d ever known was the sound – there almost wasn’t any. Not the rumbling of traffic I’d heard at night for pretty much my entire life, not the low hum of electricity, no doors slamming or dogs barking, no airplanes roaring by overhead, no music, no parties, no distant shouts or arguments or any voices at all – the only sounds were the faint tumbling hiss of the river, Devon’s steady breathing at my shoulder, and the hammering of my own heart.

  Why were we here?

  “Ashley, it’s all right.”

  Devon spoke into my hair, his voice rough and fuzzed by sleep, his arms wrapping around me from behind and pulling me back against his powerful body.

  “You’re safe, sweet Ashley, you’re safe and you’re not alone – I’m here, for now.”

  For now? What the …

  Then his warm hands cupped my breasts, his fingers rubbed over my nipples, and I twisted in his arms to meet him, desperate to see his face and reassure myself he was really there. I kissed him, hungry and scared, and moaned into his mouth as he reached down and slipped a hand between my legs. Moments later he was inside me, thrusting deep with a rough, pounding rhythm, making me more and more his with each powerful stroke, taking me, and protecting me, and chasing away my fear.