Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 3

  I stowed away the useless speculation and hurried after Dana as she rushed down the hall ahead of me. We swept around a corner, into another dim corridor, and then hung a left into a hallway that ended at a single set of elevator doors.

  This was it, then. This was Mr. Killane’s private elevator, the one that ushered his victims up the final few floors to his office and their own personal dooms. Was I still going to be employed when I came back down in this thing? Or would he just hurl me off the roof while cackling maniacally?

  Dana Receptionist produced a keycard, swiped it through the reader on the wall, and the doors slid open. A small, silent elevator car waited for me.

  “Ms. Daniels, when you get up there, just head straight into Mr. Killane’s office. Then after you’re done, call security from the lobby and they’ll let you out of the building, all right?”

  I didn’t buy that forced professional smile of hers for a minute – and why was she waiting in the hallway?

  “You’re not coming up with me?”

  Queen Dana of the Kingdom of Nervous shook her head and refused to look me in the eye. “No, Mr. Killane advised me that my services would no longer be needed for today. But don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”

  Her fidgeting body language and pasted-on smile said that she seriously doubted I would be fine.

  I rode up alone, surrounded by paneling made from some exotic and probably endangered wood, and with only the hum of the elevator mechanism and my own pounding heartbeat for a soundtrack.

  No one greeted me when I stepped out onto the 103rd floor. The hallway was dim, deserted, and directly in front of me was a single unmarked door.

  My hand settled on the knob. I took a deep breath, focused, and reminded myself that although I was about to be alone with an insanely powerful man who was legendary for his erratic moods and occasionally violent temper, it was still illegal for him to straight up kill me.

  Man up, Ashley. You can do this.

  I opened the door and entered an outer office that had to belong to Dana I’m-Outta-Here. A desk not much bigger than mine barely fit within the walls of the tiny room, a severe line of chairs stood across from it on the right, and straight ahead was one final door.

  I debated knocking, decided ‘screw that,’ and stepped through into Devon Killane’s private domain.

  Big as I was, I felt small standing in that dim, silent room – small like a mouse crouching inside an airplane hangar, that kind of small.

  Mr. Killane’s office occupied most of the floor, but had next to nothing in the way of furniture, plants, or anything at all that would make a visitor feel at ease. There wasn’t even any carpeting on the floor – just bare hardwood inlaid in an intricate pattern of repeating diamonds and polished to a mirror finish. I shifted my feet a bit, and the clicking of my heels on the barren floor echoed in the silence.

  The mahogany-paneled wall to my left – far off to my left, because geez, this was a huge room to be just one guy’s office – hosted a row of clocks displaying the time in a dozen world capitals, reminding visiting mice like me that Killane Corporate Holdings was a financial empire that spanned the globe. Hey, if you decide to squash some regional manager in Helsinki like a bug, you want to know if the condemned man’s last meal will be lunch or dinner, right?

  The wall to my right displayed framed photographs of things, the endless expensive things that my boss owned – skyscrapers in Beijing, a mall complex in Toronto, the stadium where the Super Bowl was played two years ago, antique Bentleys, racing yachts, and assorted private islands.

  There were no photographs of people.

  In front of me, the empty floor stretched off into the distance until it met up with the one piece of furniture in the room – Mr. Killane’s desk.

  I’m calling it a desk, but it was more like an aircraft carrier sailing the hardwood sea. The thing must have weighed a ton, and it couldn’t have been hewn from a single titanic redwood trunk or anything, but it sure looked it. The glass-covered desktop was as bare as the floor – not a single monitor or keyboard or phone or anything on it, just a gleaming emptiness. Did he not use The Desk That Crushed Tokyo to do actual work? Or it was here just to intimidate the crap out of visitors, like everything else in the room?

  And seriously, not a single chair for a tired and worried big girl to park her luscious ass on?

  Beyond the desk, the far wall was all of glass, a giant floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the downtown skyline like the eye of Sauron. The late afternoon light poured in through the glass wall, giving the room its only illumination.

  Devon Killane stood in front of the window.

  His back was to me. Silhouetted against the fading light, he stood there staring out at the city. His hands were clasped behind his back. He didn’t move, he didn’t speak. He had to know I was there, had to have heard my heels clicking on the bare floor when I entered the room, but he didn’t respond. As far as he was concerned, the room was still empty.

  “Mr. Killane?”

  Nothing. The stark lines of his body might have been those of a statue. Traffic rumbled along the streets far below, distant airplanes droned through the sky, and he stared out at it all without moving a single muscle.

  “Sir?”

  Still no response. Geez, it was enough to make me wonder if I was really there.

  “Ah, Mr. K?”

  He turned to face me.

  His hands remained behind his back. He cocked his head to one side and he stared at me like some mad collector staring at a bug he had pinned to a board.

  He didn’t move towards me, he still wouldn’t speak, but now that he was looking at me, his imposing presence, his absolute command of his own personal space, made me feel like that scared, shivering mouse again.

  I stared right back at him – well, at his forehead, actually, because I was still way too gutless to look him in the eye – and I kept my trembling mouth firmly shut. I had no idea just what was going on here, but I figured the best play was to let him be the one to break the silence.

  A minute passed as we stared each other down, and then Mr. Killane shook himself all at once, like a man startled out of a nap, and sauntered forward. He crossed over to his desk, sat down on the front edge of the redwood behemoth, and extended his long, long legs in front of him. He crossed his legs at the ankles, he crossed his arms, and he stared at me for one more beat of silence before he spoke.

  “I’m not interested in shouting across the room at you, Ms. Daniels, so please come here.” He pointed an imperious finger at the bare hardwood floor in front of him, and then crossed his arms again.

  I hurried across the floor to present myself to him before I could even think about it. I wanted to argue, wanted to stroll over to him all slow and bored and Ashley-doesn’t-give-a-shit, but there was no denying the air of command in that voice.

  Once I stood right in front of him, there was also no way to deny my body’s response to this man.

  He rested against the desk like a lazy, confident tiger. The flawless tailoring of his suit did nothing to hide the sleek, toned muscles of his towering body. His broad shoulders stretched against his suit jacket, his crisp, more-expensive-than-my-entire-wardrobe shirt displayed the lines of his powerful chest, and I couldn’t help wondering about his abs, and what lay south of his abs …

  Jesus, Ashley, stop gawping at his body like a starving dog staring at a cheeseburger – find some self-control somewhere, will you?

  I tried staring at his face instead, but he stared back at me with eyes like pale blue-violet fire, and he kept his generous lips clamped shut. I imagined sinking my fingers into the thick black hair he kept cropped just shy of his collar, I admired the sexy two-days-or-so of rough stubble coating his stern jaw, I breathed in the way his cologne didn’t quite mask the musky, masculine scent of his skin … and yes, there was that flush of wet, aching desire between my legs again.

  Why the hell was I letting this guy do this to me? He had
to be laughing himself sick inside at the spectacle of the short, way-too-big girl drooling over him like this – had my self-respect abandoned me, along with my self-control, and my common sense, and everything else?

  “Ms. Daniels?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, forcing myself to focus. I stared into those commanding eyes, and I told my body to shut up and take a back seat while I dealt with this situation.

  “Ms. Daniels, you are the face of this company.”

  He leaned back a bit, his arms still crossed, his face still unreadable.

  “When visitors enter the main lobby of Killane Corporate Holdings, you are the first face they see, the first of my employees with whom they interact – you, Ms. Daniels, therefore set the tone for all their subsequent interactions with my company. Do you agree?”

  “Yes, sir.” I thought he was way overblowing the importance of main reception, but I was pretty sure my opinion was of zero interest to this man.

  He didn’t so much as blink when he lowered the boom. “Apparently you do not agree, since from 9:00 a.m. to 9:05 a.m. today, the face of this company was the empty chair where your ass should have planted.”

  “Sir, the downtown traffic this morning was the worst it’s been in months. Between the traffic, construction detours, an overturned cement truck, and three other accidents, my fifteen-minute early start this morning pretty much unavoidably turned into me being just five minutes late, but –”

  Mr. Killane rose to his feet in one smooth motion. He walked forward, stopped, and stared at me, head again cocked to one side – god, that was creepy – and then turned on his heel and walked away from me without a backward glance. He wandered over to the wall of world clocks and stared with the intensity of an executioner at the current time in New Delhi.

  His voice drifted to me across the dim, cavernous room.

  “Excuses, excuses, excuses – everyone in this misbegotten world is surrounded by a cloud of whining excuses. Do you have any idea just how many excuses I hear every day? Believe me, they can be measured by the metric ton – and frankly, Ms. Daniels, I expected better from you than the standard traffic-was-a-nightmare scenario.”

  He sighed like a weary parent dealing with a particularly bratty child.

  “Sir, that’s hardly fair.”

  “Really?” He turned from the wall displaying International Killane Time and strolled over to his battleship of a desk. He thrust his hands into his pockets as he walked, he favored the inlaid diamond patterns in the floor with a passing glance, and upon arriving at his desk, he sank down into his looming leather chair of command and fixed me with another deadly stare.

  “Tell me, Ms. Daniels, just what part of my expecting you to report to work on time is unfair? Or do you feel your abysmal rate of pay entitles you to blow off five minutes of my valuable time whenever you feel like it?”

  Back up, asshole. “Sir, I take my job seriously, and I would never –”

  “Of course you would – you certainly did this morning, when you were nowhere to be found for five minutes. Where was your dedication to duty then?”

  I counted down from ten in my head, and arrived at one to find that I was still pissed off. “Sir, I can only say that –”

  “And then there’s the matter of your providing sugar, caffeine, and comfortable chairs to the local homeless population, all on my dime. I understand from various sources I’ve consulted that this is in fact something you do virtually every day – tell me, were you under the impression that this sort of unauthorized generosity features somewhere in your job description? Because I have to tell you, it certainly does not – not unless the aromatic Jerry and his scruffy assortment of friends are the ones providing you with your paycheck.”

  Ashley, remember your mom, your rent, and the three or four dollars left in your checking account – you need this job, so do NOT tell this entitled jerk what you think of rich assholes who pick on street people for laughs.

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and decided to say nothing, since anything I blurted out at this point would probably sink me like the Titanic.

  Mr. Killane steepled his fingers on his desk top and hit me with that sideways look once again. Was he angry, or not? About to fire me, or not?

  The silence between us stretched out to one, two, then three minutes. Then Mr. Killane nodded, rose to his feet, and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window. He peered down at the doings of the great unwashed masses for a moment, and then turned to face me again.

  “Guess what I’ve been doing all day.”

  He left the window behind and strolled toward me step by indolent step, with a smug smile pasted on his face. Dear God, what was he up to now?

  He stopped a few feet away from me. I looked him up and down, trying to read him, but it was like trying to read the intentions of a statue. My body chimed in with its opinion that he was a gorgeous, smoking hot statue, and I told my body to shut the hell up.

  He took a step closer. “Go on, guess.” His grin reminded me of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

  On impulse, I hedged my bet between anger and meekness, and went with humor. “I’d say … you’ve been destroying dreams? Bankrupting third-world countries? Having a helicopter lower your favorite yacht into the middle of Times Square and then setting it on fire? Crushing puppies?”

  Just for an instant, he grinned like a little kid – a genuine, heart melting smile that vanished in seconds.

  A pang went straight through my heart – I wanted to see that smile again.

  No such luck, though – now he was back to his blood-in-the-water grin.

  “Turn around and you’ll see what I’ve been up to.”

  He waved at something behind me. I bit my lip – did I dare turn my back on this guy? I mean, he wouldn’t stab me in the spine or anything, would he?

  I took the chance and turned around.

  I saw the door, I saw the paneling, I saw the hardwood floor, but I didn’t see anything unusual. What was he talking about?

  “Look up, Ms. Daniels – there, just under the ceiling.”

  I tilted my head back. Just where the wall met the ceiling, right where Mr. Killane would have a perfect view from his desk, six gleaming monitors hung in a row, displaying the live feed from the building’s security cameras.

  Each LED screen was at least fifty inches across, and each one showed the feed from a different location in the building. Even with the view on each screen changing to a different camera every thirty seconds or so, it took a while to rotate between all the views available, since Mr. Killane apparently had dozens – hundreds? – of snooping little lenses concealed all over this monument to his massive, throbbing bank account.

  “Sir, I don’t understand – you’ve been watching the security cameras all day? Why?”

  “Just a certain select few of them, Ms. Daniels.”

  He pulled a remote control from an inside pocket of his suit jacket. Thumbing rapidly over the buttons – the thing looked like something you’d use to maneuver the international space station into a different orbit – he brought up six different views, one to each monitor. These views did not change.

  Each showed the main reception desk.

  He’d been watching me. All day.

  One angle was from a camera over the main entrance, showing my post from a distance. The only person in view right now was a janitor mopping his way across the lobby.

  Another camera peered down from a point just in front of the desk, giving a close approximation of the view a visitor would have when they walked up to talk to me.

  The third and fourth cameras were closer yet, apparently mounted somewhere in the greenery to either side of my desk. These would have shown him close-up profile views of me, the sort of angle you’d have if you were sitting right next to me.

  The fifth secret little eye was hidden somewhere above and behind my chair – in a ceiling panel, maybe? – and gave what would have been a great view down past my right sho
ulder. Right now, it was displaying a live shot of Lester, my dead jade plant.

  Hi, Lester. Are you as creeped out as I am, little guy?

  The sixth and last camera – that he was showing me, anyway; there could be a dozen trained on main reception, for all I knew – peered down at my position from another overhead angle, and at the moment displayed a view of the picture of Mom I kept on my desk.

  Enjoy the snapshot of my only family, asshole, complete with its cheap Wal-Mart frame.

  I didn’t know whether to be terrified or mad as hell. Should I bolt for the door, or stay and claw his eyes out?

  The monitors snapped off.

  I stared at the blank screens for a few seconds, and then turned around to face Mr. Killane.

  He stood six feet away from me. His arms were crossed in front of him, one eyebrow was raised, and he stared at me. A faint smile drifted across his lips.

  “I’m not sure why, Ms. Daniels, but I find I enjoy watching you.”

  Swell, sir. That’s not disturbing at all.

  His smile vanished. “I don’t like not being sure, Ms. Daniels.”

  I didn’t see how that was my problem, but I kept my mouth shut. I concentrated on my rent. I thought about my student loans. I ran through the list of Mom’s bills in my mind, the bills that I had to cover for her. I considered how low my bank account was, and remembered that I’d need to get her stocked up on groceries soon.

  And what about that other Devon Killane, the one whose face had lit up in that unguarded, beautiful, completely genuine smile only a few minutes ago? Was he still around, hiding somewhere inside the crazy guy standing in front of me?

  But was he flat-out crazy? Or was he pretending? Because something in his words, his body language, and the gleam in his blue-violet eyes just seemed a little bit off to me – not crazy, but like a brilliant actor wanting me to believe he was crazy.

  But why? Did he just enjoy screwing with the heads of receptionists? Maybe he was nuts, or maybe I was just one more human chess piece he was maneuvering around the board of his daily life, a pawn he could sacrifice on a whim at any moment …