He switched off the reasonable voice and moved on into goofy mode. “Besides, imagine how exciting it would be to have that magnificent triumph of aerial technology touch down in the middle of the street in that humble neighborhood. The engines would roar, the rotors would kick up a vast cloud of blowing snow that would surround me as I made my dramatic entrance, and it would be altogether such a grand spectacle that I should think your mother would feel obligated to have passionate sex with me immediately.”
I stuck out my tongue at the adorable idiot, and that brought out his real smile – the one that lit up his whole face and his whole body somehow, the smile I’d fallen in love with so many months ago, back when I had no idea just how crazy this ride with him would get.
“Fair enough, big guy – but if you don’t hustle our way as soon as possible, then no sex or pie for you, understand?”
“I understand perfectly, my Ashley.”
I turned from him then, and I walked away. I walked away, and I almost made it to the door.
“Ashley?”
I started to turn around, and then he was there – he crossed the room to my side in a flurry of long strides, and he pulled me into his arms.
He wrapped himself around me, he held me pinned against the hard planes of his chest and his stomach, he buried his face in my hair, and he whispered.
“Ashley, I …”
His voice faded away after those two words, and we stood there, breathing as one. I didn’t want to let him go, and he seemed unable to let me go – until he pulled back enough to settle a hand against my cheek and tilt my face upward for a kiss.
It was sweet and simple, a gentle taste from his lips and tongue, and I felt it in every inch of my body. How could I let him go, even for a little while, after a kiss like that?
But I did. I kissed him back, I held him for another few endless seconds, and then I let him go and walked out of the office, trusting that I would soon be in his arms again, feeling the heat of his body and the sweet hunger of his mouth.
I did stop and glance back though, just as I stepped through into the outer office and started to pull the door closed behind me – I’m not sure why, but I did.
I stopped, I looked back over my shoulder, and I saw him once more standing at the window with his back to me, looking out over a city buried in snow.
Were his shoulders shaking?
***
Sending her away was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I heard the distant hum of the descending elevator and leaned against the window glass, sweat already beading on my forehead. Jimmy called to advise me Ashley was inside his vehicle and that they were proceeding to her lovely mother’s home; in answer, my heart hammered in my chest like a prisoner fighting to escape.
Everything in me wanted to deny my fate and follow her, follow her to the comfort of a warm home with a mother and a meal, but that would have been the coward’s way out – the most important thing in the world was to keep my Ashley safe, and the only way to accomplish that was to stay here and do what needed to be done.
Air rasped in and out of my lungs, the world shuddered beneath my feet, and I shook until I felt as if I would fly apart into a thousand screaming pieces.
Thoughts howled through my head like wild dogs, fighting each other to gain my attention before they were torn away by the flood of yet more frantic thoughts, a torrent of ideas and notions that I couldn’t begin to control – the only one of them I could hold onto, like a man clinging tight to a rock in the middle of a raging river, was that I had to wait.
I had to give her time to get away, so that when I kept my final promise, she would not be able to return in time to save me from my fate.
It was a fate I planned years before I ever knew she existed. It was a fate I no longer wanted, but did not deserve to escape. If I did not embrace this fate, either Ashley would leave me like every sensible person always did, or she would stay and be destroyed – and she deserved so much more than destruction. After all, why should she be punished for her love?
It wasn’t her fault she loved a monster.
43. Four Words
Sometimes, you just need The Awesome Power of Mom.
You know, like when your aggressively unstable billionaire boyfriend gets even loopier than usual? And you try to figure out if this latest spasm of weirdness is only his standard brand of odd or a sign of something you need to step on, and fast? And you don’t know if you’re worrying too much or not enough? And you’re so damn scared you’ll end up alone again that you want to just curl up into a ball and cry?
Happens to us all, right?
I was just thankful I had a mom who knew the minute I walked in her door that I needed her magical mom powers way more than I needed her food.
She did have one of her famous Saturday spreads in progress, sure – I’d called ahead to let her know her wandering daughter was on the way, and I walked into a kitchen filled with the stomach-rumbling aroma of turkey baking in its own delicious juices.
I told her Devon would be along as soon as he could, I pitched in on the pie crust front, we argued about whether we wanted sour cream and chives or cheddar on our baked potatoes, the TV in the other room babbled snow warnings from one of the local stations, and we didn’t talk about anything but food for a long time – because being a world-class mom, mine knew when it was best to let the scary stuff percolate to the surface on its own.
An hour passed.
Then two hours.
Most of the food was now ready, Mom and I were still the only people available to eat it, and she still didn’t bring up the subject of my missing boyfriend.
She wasn’t shy when it came to voicing her opinion about Jimmy, though.
“Ashley, do you seriously think it makes any sense at all for the two of us to sit in here and stuff our faces while that poor man sits waiting in the cold for God only knows what? Does he think muggers or celebrity groupies or assassins or whatever are going to fight their way through the drifts to attack you? Doesn’t he have a home he needs to get to, before he’s stuck out there at the curb in that huge monstrosity of an SUV?”
Yep, Jimmy had insisted – without a word, as usual – on staying on duty as my looming protector, and had refused to come inside to do it. I’d tried logic, humor, ordering, pleading, the works – but his only answer was to settle back in his seat and stare off over the steering wheel into the distance.
Mom was not happy about this scenario – and since even her formidable powers couldn’t persuade the guy to come inside, she ended up taking a plate of food out to him, along with orders to eat it or else. She came back plateless, I assumed Jimmy ate, and as she grumbled about men being obstinate idiots without the common sense to take care of themselves, I checked my phone again.
Still no word from Devon – no call, no text, no email, nothing. Two hours?
“Baby, tell me what’s wrong.”
I prepared some offhand, witty, nothing-wrong-in-Ashleytown answer without taking my eyes from the screen. I thumbed through the iPhone’s menu yet again, convinced I must have missed something. Then I checked the call log, ran down the list of all the unanswered calls I’d made to his number in the last two hours, and wondered if I should try calling the phone on Dana’s desk, because maybe he’d pick that up …
“Ashley?”
I looked up into her eyes, and she knew – she just knew.
I couldn’t resist that gentle and determined face. An army couldn’t have resisted her in that moment, much less one scared daughter.
So I let it all out at once, with no idea I was going to do it.
I dumped it all on her – all the doubts and fears and absolute truths, all the warning signs I’d hidden from her and from myself over the past few weeks, all the things I’d buried under two hours of babbling about seasonings and oven temperatures and whether gravy belonged on biscuits as well as turkey.
It’s beyond weird when your mouth just takes over and starts talking
like that, without permission or an ounce of warning.
Everything I’d been holding back spilled out of me like a flood. I told her how much I loved him. I told her that even though he’d never said the words, I knew he felt the same way about me. I told her about the countdown clock I’d heard ticking for so long now – months, if I was honest about it.
I told her about the frozen wreck Devon had been after Uncle Sheridan’s death, I told her all about the Montana trip – well, all except the frisky bits – and I told her how he’d kept me so close since we got back.
And sure, right now he was probably just tied up with some last-minute business detail he was obsessing over, but no – no, he was not. I knew that, I didn’t how I knew that, and I fought to keep the tears back, but they insisted on having their way.
Then I blurted it out – I don’t know where it came from and I was being such a useless baby, but I couldn’t help it and I said it.
“I’m just so scared of being alone again, Mom.”
I snatched up a napkin from the table and mopped the tears off my cheeks, congratulating myself on being an insensitive bitch.
She’s been alone for years after your asshole dad abandoned her, so you’re going to bring up a bunch of insecure bullshit about your own guy? Ashley, what is wrong with you?
Mom understood. She understood and she took both my hands in hers, soggy napkin and all.
“Ashley, look at me.”
I put aside the fascinating view of my tears soaking into her tablecloth and looked up into her eyes – eyes that were brown like mine, but way wiser.
“Ashley, I’m going to ask the only question that matters here: do you trust him?”
“Yes.” That answer came without doubt or hesitation – I knew that answer the same way I knew that two plus two equals four, or that the sky is blue and not plaid, or that I loved Devon with everything I had in me.
“Good. We’ve got trust for a starting point, so let’s build on that. Something’s going on, but it’s not anything involving his mistreating or using you in any way – you know that because you trust him.
“I know that because I trust your instincts, and I also know that because of one specific thing that you mentioned, one thing that proves he’s not running around on you, or planning to dump you, or any of that crap.”
I freed one of my hands to rub at my reddened eyes. “So what’s this one magic thing I said?”
“He’s keeping you close. If he can’t bear to let you out of his sight for long, he’s not a man who wants to leave. Trust me, if they want to move on, the first thing they do is start keeping you at a careful distance – I learned that lesson from your dad.”
She was right, I knew it. I thought about Dad and how he had moved on, putting us both in his rearview mirror as he moved right the hell out of our lives without a look back.
He moved on, but Mom didn’t.
So far as I knew, she hadn’t been with anyone since he left. She hadn’t dated at all in years, I knew that for certain – just like I knew she still kept a small framed picture of him on her dresser.
She kept it face down, because she couldn’t bear to look at it – but she couldn’t bear to hide it away in a drawer either, so she kept it out at all times but face down, and she’d kept the tiny silver-framed photo that way for twenty years. I’d seen her dust around it.
So what must she have thought when another tall, handsome man with money and style swept into her daughter’s heart? What must she have felt when it looked like my life might echo hers? How could she find the strength to trust Devon, after what she’d been through?
I sniffled, pulled myself together, and tried to be strong in my own way. “Mom, whatever’s going on, I know Devon is nothing like Dad.”
“I know it too, baby.”
“So what do we do now?”
She chewed at her lip as her Amazing Mom Powers went to work on the problem. “Well, we know something is wrong, and we need to figure out what that something is – more to the point, he needs you to figure out what it is and fix it.”
“I’ve been through every last thing I can think of, Mom, going back for months, and I’m still clueless – whatever it is, it’s staring me right in the face, but I’m just not smart enough to see it.”
“You’re a very smart girl, Ashley – your feelings are getting in the way, that’s all. Now, as to all those clues and signs from however many months ago up until now – I can’t do anything with all that, because I wasn’t there to experience it. But here I am now, so let’s look at the here and now – what, specifically, was supposed to happen today?”
I shrugged. “Well, like I said, he sent me here to get a head start on your legendary Saturday spread of food while he wrapped up one more thing at the office.”
“You believe that? It’s been more than two hours now, Ashley – where is he?”
“Well, you said it yourself, there’s a giant apocalypse of a snowstorm going on out there.”
“So why hasn’t he called?”
She had me there.
I stared down at the phone sitting on the table. I imagined the man on the other end of that phone, pictured him as I‘d last seen him, standing silhouetted against the window, his shoulders shaking, maybe … and I knew Mom was right. But how could she be?
“Mom, he wouldn’t lie. More than that, he couldn’t lie, he doesn’t have it in him. I know it sounds naïve of me and all, but he’s just not capable of looking me in the face and telling me a flat-out lie.”
She nodded. “You’re not naïve, you’re experienced – after having that clown Greg and the so-called men who came before him lie to you every time they opened their mouths, I think you’ve developed one finely tuned bullshit detector. So if you say this man isn’t lying, I believe you.”
She held my right hand in both of hers and sighed. “Besides, your dad taught me more than a little about men and their lies, and you know something?”
I tried to paste on a brave smile. “What’s that, Mom?”
“I trusted your guy from the moment I first laid eyes on him. I didn’t want to, but I did.”
Hugs were in order, so I got up, rounded the table, and hugged my mom as hard as I could. We held each other, and in a just and fair world, a hug like that one would have solved everything.
But it didn’t. I gave her one final squeeze for good measure, sure, but then I had to go back to my chair, sit down, and face the same problem: where was Devon? Why hadn’t he at least called?
Mom put logic to work. “He’s supposed to be on his way, so how is he getting here? We may not know what’s he’s doing or why he hasn’t called, but it should be straightforward to figure out how he intends to get from his giant corporate phallic symbol downtown to my dinner table – so we do that, and then we call whoever’s at the wheel. Sound good?”
“We already know how he’s getting here, remember? Like I said, he’s going to have that flying four-star hotel he calls a helicopter drop him off.”
She gave me the Mom Look. “Ashley, have you looked outside lately?”
“Yeah, I know it’s snowing like the end of the world, Mom, but – ”
“Ashley, go to the front door, open it, and look outside.” She made a shooing motion with her hand. “Go on, I’ll wait.”
Since there is no resisting a Mom Command, I marched myself out of the kitchen, down the hall, and to the front door. I opened said door and looked out, as ordered.
Wind howled through the trees, bending the smaller ones sideways and shaking even the monstrous oaks and sycamores as if they were toothpicks. Snow blew with the wind, pouring down like a white waterfall from low grey clouds that hid even the idea that there had ever been a sun.
My breath froze in front of me, and I felt the cold sinking down into my bones. I could see down Mom’s rapidly disappearing front walk to the curb. The SUV waited there, and snow was already up to its hubcaps. I couldn’t see in through the tinted windows, but I just knew Jimmy
was staring.
No helicopter was flying in this.
Back at the kitchen table, I called Devon’s helicopter pilot, Mr. Pulaski, just to check on his status and hear whatever updated plan might exist for ferrying Devon to our Saturday dinner.
As I tapped Mr. Pulaski’s name in my iPhone’s contacts list, I tried to reassure Mom and just ended up sounding every bit as uneasy as I felt. “This guy is nice, Mom, you’d like him – plus Devon says he was some kind of super hotshot combat pilot back in the day, so maybe he can fly through the Mother of All Snowstorms. I mean, it’s not like the snowflakes will be shooting bullets or missiles or anything at him, right?”
“But is he cute?”
“Mom, he’s married.”
“Damn. Well, would you mind putting this possibly cute man on speaker? I think I’d like to hear this.”
Something in her voice said she didn’t expect to like hearing this at all.
So I tapped the speaker icon, I set the phone onto the kitchen table right next to a pan of cornbread stuffing, and we both heard Mr. Pulaski answer the call in his mellow, relaxed Midwestern voice that always managed to sound competent and soothing at the same time.
“Ms. Daniels, it’s a pleasure to hear from you – the boss doesn’t have you out running errands in this storm, does he?”
“No, I’m enjoying some actual downtime here at my mom’s house, Mr. Pulaski; but speaking of Mr. Killane – ”
“Ms. Daniels, I do my best to handle whatever Mr. Killane throws at me in terms of abrupt changes of plan, but I can’t help him this time – if you’re about to tell me he’s changed his mind from this morning, I’m afraid you’ll just have to work your magic and get him to change it back, because we absolutely cannot fly in this weather.”
This morning?
I looked at Mom, and she looked at me with her best poker face. In the background of the call, we heard the faint sound of a TV commentator shouting over the crowd at a football game.
“Um, Mr. Pulaski?”
“Yes, Ms. Daniels?”
“If you don’t mind my asking, where are you and the helicopter right now?”
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 50
