Five Minutes Late
by Sonora Seldon
Copyright © 2014 Sonora Seldon
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by Sonora Seldon, 2014.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by GoOnWrite
1. Five Minutes
Five minutes. Three hundred seconds, that’s all. I was just five minutes late, and if it hadn’t been for those five fleeting minutes, none of this would have happened.
***
If she hadn’t been five minutes late, I’d be the richest corpse on the planet.
***
Why would anyone even notice I was late?
The headquarters of Killane Corporate Holdings was a sleek glass-and-steel skyscraper that dominated the downtown Chicago skyline and had enough floors to make a Sherpa dizzy from the altitude. Every one of those floors buzzed with activity, as executives, financial analysts, tech gurus, and corporate lawyers bustled about on their shared mission of making Devon Killane, asshole extraordinaire, even more obscenely rich than he already was.
Me, Ashley Daniels? I was the humblest worker bee in the place, an overlooked and underpaid big girl assigned to receptionist duty at the main entrance. Every day, I dealt with weighty responsibilities like answering phones, making coffee, and directing visitors to the senior receptionists in charge of granting access to people who were actually important. I watered the lobby’s exotic ferns and bromeliads, I ruled the doughnut supply – between me and a few homeless guys who came by most mornings, we usually finished off around a dozen of those glazed beauties – and I surfed the internet when nobody was looking, which was most of the time.
Why was I even a receptionist in the first place? I’d applied for a web design position, a job that was a perfect fit for my training and talents – but of course that opening had gone to a tall, slinky blonde with supermodel legs and big doe eyes, whose experience with websites probably didn’t go much beyond ordering stiletto heels and sex toys online.
Oh, I’d been hired, all right – only for reasons no one had bothered to explain to me, I’d been hired to plant my sorry ass behind a desk in the lobby, smiling like an idiot while I performed a job that a shaved chimpanzee would have found insulting.
If months of trying to nail down a job hadn’t sent my checking account so desperately close to zero, I would have flipped off the head of Human Resources and told him where he could go and what anatomically impossible thing he could do with himself when he got there.
But I had rent to pay – on a studio apartment that was smaller than the average bathroom at Killane Corporate Holdings – and I helped my mom with her bills, so I couldn’t afford to be proud. Instead of pride, I survived on fantasies about suing this mega-corporation for discriminating against girls with ample figures and more than a scrap of intelligence.
Not that any of the busy and important people who ignored me every day would have noticed or cared if I’d stood on my chair and screamed at everyone in sight about fair hiring practices – I learned a long time ago that when you’ve got more than a few generous curves in all the wrong places, you become invisible to the oh-so-thin-and-stylish crowd.
So why would anybody care if frantic traffic, an overturned cement truck, and a maze of construction detours conspired to make me five lousy little minutes late that Monday morning? In particular, why would somebody like Devon Killane, CEO of Killane Corporate Holdings, notice that I was late, or even that I existed at all?
Devon Killane was my boss, in the same sense that the President of the United States is the boss of the guy who mops the floor at your local federal courthouse. I rarely even saw him, since as an entitled asshole of a billionaire, he was far too good to use the main entrance to the building like us common folk – nope, the lofty Mr. Killane had a private entrance, a private elevator, and a private helipad on the roof for those days when he felt like leaving his Rolls-Royce limousine in its private garage.
I heard about him, though. It was hard to avoid hearing about someone who was splashed all over the gossip magazines, the celebrity websites, and the financial pages – my boss was a legend from here to Vladivostok for his money, his looks, his erratic personality, and his women.
Devon Killane commanded a fortune of almost sixty billion dollars, a mountain of money generated by a business empire with outposts on every continent except Antarctica. Factories bearing the Killane Corporate Holdings logo manufactured everything from toothbrushes to battleships. He owned banks and airlines and hotels. His agribusinesses decided what was going onto the shelves of your local grocery store, and at what outrageous price. He built skyscrapers like the world was his own private Lego set, and he bought properties in Hong Kong and Paris and Buenos Aires the way you or I would buy spaces on a Monopoly board. He crushed rivals and engineered hostile takeovers, and Wall Street walked in fear of his every whim.
And since the world is beyond unfair, he was not only filthy rich, but also drop-dead gorgeous. He had the face of a Hollywood heartthrob, as well as the broad chest, tight ass and rippling muscles of a Greek god who worked out all day – and have I mentioned that he towered over us ordinary mortals, at six feet and five full inches? Oh, and that at thirty-eight, he looked at least ten years younger? How about his thick raven-black hair and those striking blue-violet eyes? I’ve seen entire websites devoted to nothing but his damn eyes, I swear.
Women swooning over him in the checkout line didn’t seem to mind that he was also batshit crazy.
Brilliant, sure – he had Harvard degrees in philosophy and history, he held engineering patents that began as designs he sketched out on napkins at four-star restaurants, in his spare time he wrote thousand-page books about economic and political theory, and rumor said he had a photographic memory.
But that razor-sharp mind wandered down some very strange paths.
His moods skated all over the place – one minute he’d be all smiles and laughter, and the next he’d interrupt a board meeting to quote the Tibetan Book of the Dead from memory while staring off into space at something only he could see.
He built toothpick bridges on his desk that descended to the floor, marched out the door of his office, and formed graceful loops up and down the hallways. He once hired a petunia farmer from Oregon to deliver a lecture on 17th century Flemish painters to a conference room full of puzzled software designers – and just why did he buy a mounted specimen of a blue whale, better than one hundred and ten feet long, and have it dumped into the ocean off Miami while a brass band played a funeral march on the beach? Beats me, but you learned not to ask questions when you rode the Killane Crazy Train.
His women sure didn’t ask questions – they just took a number and waited. Actresses with real Oscars and fake breasts, rake-thin models from Rio and New York, heiresses, porn stars, WNBA centers and entire teams of soccer players, tattooed lead singers for alternative rock bands – if you were gorgeous, exotic, and female, you’d be on a magazine cover with him sooner or later.
Big girls need not apply.
Well, you never saw him on the red carpet or the evening news with a woman who had a real body – but in private, who knew? In private, alone under the covers at night, you could read one of those lurid bestsellers about people having nonstop
kinky bunny sex and you could imagine his face on the hero, imagine being tied down as he loomed over you, moving between your legs and …
Yeah, yeah, I confess, I read those books too. So sue me. After all, how else is a curvy girl with minimal dating prospects supposed to have a little fun? But no, I didn’t fantasize about my moody billionaire boss from a distance, imagining what it would be like to feel his strong hands on me, to have him … well, not while I was at work, anyway. At work, I concentrated on keeping my lowly little job, because I couldn’t afford to be broke and homeless, not on top of being big and dateless, and not with my mom counting on me.
But at 9:05 on a Monday morning in February, my careful little life spun out of control in a heartbeat.
2. Trial By Doughnuts
A guy I recognized as a mid-level accounting executive emerged from the building’s grand entrance to hold the door open for me, and that should have been my first clue that something was wrong – in my role as the Invisible Big Girl, people held doors open for me maybe once every other blue moon and executives never did. But I smiled, muttered a hurried, “Thank you, sir,” and hustled inside, intent on getting to my post and doing a great impersonation of someone who’d been there on time.
I rushed across the lobby to reception, head down, thankful for the strange lack of foot traffic, wondering why it was so much quieter than usual, trying to remember if the departmental reviews were today or tomorrow –
“Ms. Daniels, why is there a man who smells like rotting cabbage sitting in my lobby, eating my doughnuts?”
My head snapped up. My mouth dropped open, my heart shivered and skipped, and time slowed to a crawl.
Devon Killane was sitting in my chair. He was leaning back in my chair, his feet were propped up on my reception desk, and he was staring right at me.
My first response to seeing apocalyptic disaster in a $5,000 suit?
“Um, sir, I …”
Yep, I am that witty under pressure – impressive, huh?
He never missed a beat, of course. “In fact, he appears to be washing down my doughnuts with Thunderbird – I wouldn’t see that as the beverage of choice at Killane Corporate Holdings, but there you are. Tell me, Ms. Daniels, does this sort of thing happen every day in my lobby, or did I just make a lucky choice in deciding to use the main entrance today?”
My brain finally clunked into gear. Think, Ashley, think – you’re doomed, sure, but go down to defeat in style, okay?
First, just who is he talking about? Which one of the regular crew of homeless guys happened to wander in early today?
With an effort, I pulled my eyes away from my handsome billionaire boss and his deadly smile. I noted the crowd of executives, assistants, and hangers-on hovering off to one side – every one of them wearing the identical ‘thank God it isn’t me’ expression – and then I spotted Jerry slouched in a chair, swilling Thunderbird and happily working his way through yesterday’s leftover doughnuts.
Swell, this was doable. Jerry was a sweet old guy, and with some gentle persuasion and a promise of future doughnuts, I could probably get him out the door in under a minute. Then I could deal with how screwed I undoubtedly was, but in the meantime, at least this poor frazzle-brained old veteran would be out of Mr. Killane’s line of fire.
I leaned over Jerry, as my eyes watered from his personal aroma – not his fault, I reminded myself, since showers and soap are hard to come by when you’re living on the street. “Jerry, my boss is here, you need to go –”
“Your boss?” The old guy lurched to his feet, staggering a bit and spilling doughnut crumbs onto the immaculate floor, and he stared right at Mr. Killane.
“Mr. Boss, Ashley here is a really nice lady!” His cracked voice echoed across the lobby, and I ducked as he pointed me out by brandishing the Thunderbird bottle at my head.
“I’m sure she’s a fine girl, Jerry.” Mr. Killane beamed the world’s most insincere smile at Jerry, and then fixed me with a blank stare.
I grabbed the old man’s elbow, pried the bottle from his grip and stowed it in his coat pocket, and then steered him towards the entrance, praying for a miracle. I counted every step toward those doors as a tiny victory, I let myself think I might survive this – and then he twisted out of my grasp and swerved back toward the reception desk.
I watched in horror as he moved with surprising speed to stand directly in front of Mr. Killane.
“Mr. Boss, you should give Ashley a raise!”
At that range Jerry’s breath would be enough to peel paint off a wall, and I saw Mr. Killane blink a bit as he leaned further back in my chair, lacing his hands behind his head.
“I’ll certainly give that idea due consideration, Jerry.” My boss looked over at me with a thin smile that said he would give due consideration to whether he should kill me with a chainsaw or a hatchet.
I scrabbled in my purse, came up with the five-dollar bill that I’d planned to spend on lunch, and thrust it into Jerry’s hand. “Jerry, here’s five bucks you can take down to the doughnut place on the next block, but you have to leave right now.”
He bellowed like a happy, ailing bull. “You’re NICE, Ashley!”
He grinned at the five, twisting it in his fingers as I herded him toward the door. Once outside, I had to give him a shove to get him headed in the right direction for the doughnut shop, and off he wandered, smiling from ear to ear. He’d probably end up spending my five on more Thunderbird instead of doughnuts, but that was between him and the gods of alcoholism.
I went back inside to meet my fate.
Mr. Killane seemed determined to extend his reign as lord of the reception desk, and remained lounging in my chair as I walked toward him.
I stopped just short of the desk. “Sir, I apologize for Jerry, he’s just a harmless old guy who –”
“I hardly care if he’s the patron saint of homeless derelicts, Ms. Daniels – he doesn’t belong in my lobby, guzzling that wretched swill and eating my doughnuts. Really, don’t you think my doughnuts deserve better than Thunderbird?” He arched one perfectly groomed eyebrow.
Mr. Killane stared at me, waiting for an answer. I looked down at my worn red pumps. The crowd of executives huddled a few feet away, watching us as if we were the cast of an award-winning Broadway play about a serial killer.
“Ms. Daniels, have you forgotten how to speak English? Or are you in mourning for my doughnuts, doomed to meet their end in a belly full of cheap wine?”
It might have been his confident voice, the smile on his full lips, or the shameful fact that I felt a tiny thrill of arousal at standing this close to him – he was the asshole of the universe, but he was a gorgeous asshole. But in the end, I think it was just that behind his perfect smile, this man with more money than God looked at me and Jerry as if we were pieces of dog shit he’d found clinging to his imported Italian shoes.
Something inside me rebelled.
I tried to stop it. Have you ever had one of those moments when you were horrified at the words spilling out of your mouth, but you just kept right on blabbing anyway? It happened to me, and it was like trying to hold back water roaring out from a broken dam.
“Fuck your doughnuts.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me – I said ‘fuck your doughnuts,’ in clear, unaccented English. You know, you might want to see a doctor about your hearing problem.”
Ashley, what is WRONG with you?
He stared at me. He said nothing. A minute of excruciating silence passed. Meanwhile, all my internal alarm bells were ringing off the scale, three or four of the executives and assorted underlings waiting off to the side gasped, and the rest just stood frozen in shock.
Finally, Mr. Killane tilted his head just a bit and locked his eyes on mine. “Ms. Daniels, it’s quite clear that you –”
“And by the way, those were my doughnuts, Mr. Killane, because I paid for them out of my own damn pocket, okay? And I’ll hand out my doughnuts to –”
“No, Ms. Daniels, they’re mine.”
My brain realized a beat too late that the crack resounding through the lobby was the sound of Mr. Killane’s shoes slamming to the floor as he flashed from sitting to standing in an instant. A millisecond ago, he was draped over my chair like a leopard dreaming about its next meal – now he pounced.
He leaned over the reception desk, his arms braced straight as doom on either side, his hands splayed wide on the gleaming glass-and-chrome surface of the desktop. He loomed over me with every inch of his towering body, his blazing eyes pinned me in place like the claws of a cat spearing into a mouse, and the suicidal courage I’d summoned a moment before decided to take a hike and leave me to my fate.
I stared back at him, my mouth hanging open while vague thoughts of unemployment wandered through my brain.
“You see, Ms. Daniels, unless you’re supplementing your Killane Corporate Holdings paycheck by rolling hobos or playing saxophone in the park in your spare time, the money in your pocket comes directly out of my pocket. Therefore, those were my doughnuts. In point of strictest fact, everything in this lobby is mine.”
Without warning and without looking, he lifted his right leg and kicked back at my chair, sending it slamming into the wall behind him.
“That chair is mine. This desk is mine. The elevators are mine, the hideous plants we seem to have scattered everywhere are mine, and there’s an 1880 oil painting by Van Gogh around here somewhere which has been mine ever since I paid seventy million dollars for it last year.”
He leaned forward until his eyes were only inches away from mine.
“More to the point, your luscious ass is mine.”
He nodded at the flock of executives waiting for him nearby. “Those gibbons in suits over there are mine. Every scurrying ant of a wage slave in this extravagant building is mine, and –”
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 1