“They’re slinky, stunning, and they fuck like randy bunny rabbits?”
“They’re fake. Everyone around me is fake. The women in my bed, the executives in my employ, the business rivals, the reporters, the photographers, the endless stream of fearful faces hiding contempt behind their nervous little eyes – none of them are real. I sometimes doubt that the world itself is real – the people, the places, and the objects often seem like nothing more than mere props, bits of stage dressing whose only purpose is to make my own existence feel less … fictional.”
He’s batshit, Ashley. He’ll crash and burn sooner or later, and he’ll drag you down with him. Get out now.
I turned to stare at his distant, haunted face and realized it was way too late to get out. I looked into those strange blue-violet eyes, and I knew my point of no return with this guy had already gone rocketing past.
“Do you know why you’re here, Ashley? Do you know why I didn’t just drop you back into your safe, sane little life as a receptionist?”
“Tell me why.”
“Because you’re real. I don’t understand the how or the why of it, but you’re real, real when no one else is. That’s why you’re here.”
He stood up and he didn’t say another word. He just turned away, he walked to the rear of the cabin, he disappeared through the door in the back wall, and I didn’t see him again for the rest of the flight.
***
She was real, but what would she do when she found out I wasn’t? Everyone else ran away when they found out I wasn’t one bit real.
I hoped she would stay, and I was terrified she would stay.
6. What a Towel
During my first day in San Francisco, I learned several interesting facts.
For instance, I learned that if you call Apple’s flagship store in downtown San Francisco and mention that Devon Killane needs a new iPhone because his old one has a cracked back plate, the store manager will appear at the door of Mr. Killane’s luxury penthouse suite less than an hour later, new phone in hand and a nervous smile on his face.
As it turns out, you will also be contacted by a senior executive at Apple’s company headquarters in Cupertino, asking if Mr. Killane found the company’s products and service to be satisfactory, and would he perhaps like to be one of a select number of beta users for a prototype of the next iPhone model?
I allowed as to how yes, Mr. Killane would be pleased to get the new iPhone months before it would be available to the common herd, and it arrived by courier that afternoon. Once the sleek beyond-new phone was in my hand, I made a judgment call that the boss could get the current model – his only question when I handed it over to him was, “Will it play Angry Birds?” – and that as his loyal personal assistant, it was my duty to test out the sweet new prototype myself.
I learned that Mr. Killane kept a week’s worth of suits, shoes, and the like aboard that private jet of his, in preparation for spur of the moment trips like this one. He didn’t bother mentioning this fact to me until I panicked at the sudden realization that I hadn’t thought to make arrangements for the guy to have something to wear while he was busy conquering companies and crushing dreams.
He also mentioned that while he traveled with a wardrobe full of five-thousand-dollar suits, he hardly felt that anything in said wardrobe would fit me; that was when I seriously freaked out at the realization that I was the one facing several days of work in an uncertain new job in a strange new city with only the clothes on my back.
But hadn’t Dana said something about cards? I dug the envelope she’d given me out of my purse, searched through its contents, and learned I was now the proud owner of a no-limit company credit card, a gas card, and keycards granting me admission to Mr. Killane’s private entrance, private parking, and private elevator at company headquarters, in addition to keycards and entry codes that gave me access to his private damn home, what the hell?
I decided worrying about why he’d want me at his house could be put off until a later date, and I excused myself out the door. One round-trip limousine ride later, I was back from the high-end stores in Union Square with half a dozen somehow-stylish-despite-all-the-curves-they-had-to-cover business outfits in my possession.
Man, I could so get used to this lifestyle.
In between making arrangements for meetings, monitoring the European markets on his laptop, and issuing commands to various minions over the phone, Mr. Killane took time out to eat. He did this by directing me to order ‘something’ from room service, while refusing to clue me in as to just what he might actually like.
So I pulled up the contacts list I’d transferred to my iPhone-of-the-future and talked to his housekeeper back home. I learned from her that for lunch my boss favored Sicilian roast beef sandwiches garnished with diced bell peppers, romaine lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and honey mustard sauce – but if he found so much as a drop of mayonnaise on his toasted sourdough bread, he’d go ballistic. I ordered a sandwich designed to his exacting specifications, and double-checked what room service sent up for any offending mayo droplets; I found none, and considered this another obstacle overcome.
I learned that the security detail assigned to Mr. Killane for his stay was polite, unobtrusive, professional, and melted into the background – until any unauthorized stranger wandered anywhere near the boss’s personal orbit. That sent them all into ‘glaring menace’ mode, staring at and drifting toward said stranger as if they suspected he or she was concealing an entire armory of lethal weapons on their person and therefore needed to be taken down with extreme prejudice. I commented to Mr. K about the deadly aura these guys radiated, and he said that they seemed to him like ‘nice boys.’
I learned that Mr. Killane’s taste in music was truly horrifying. This fact was revealed to me the afternoon of our arrival, when I found him lounging on one of the huge leather couches in his presidential suite, new iPhone held to his chest, earbuds in place, eyes closed, and a dreamy smile on his face.
When I asked, “What are we listening to?,” he pulled one earbud free, handed it to me, and I should have been warned by the tinny blare from the thing before it got anywhere near me – but no, like an idiot I popped it into my ear anyway. I was immediately assaulted by a firestorm of screaming electronic feedback, actual screaming in a language I couldn’t begin to identify, several not-so-small explosions, a countdown sequence announced in Croatian – don’t ask, I have no idea – and something that sounded like a few thousand cats being tortured by a serial killer during a thunderstorm in Hell.
In response to my asking, “What was THAT?,” Mr. K. advised me this was the latest album by an Eastern European acid death metal band called Rats Eat My Brain, and that he found their musical stylings ‘soothing.’
During my first night in San Francisco, I learned that Devon Killane did not play fair.
My boss informed me that the following day would consist of nonstop meetings, negotiations, offers, counteroffers, concessions, and general infighting; but even though I wasn’t expected to know exactly what was going on, I was for some mysterious reason required to be at his side for every thrilling minute of it. Okay, I figured – I could manage that and probably even keep my eyes open for all of the incessant blathering before Devon “It’s All About Me” Killane got his way in the end, but I’d need to prepare by turning in early and getting some extra sleep.
Problem was, although I’d reserved a small room – small for this place, meaning several copies of my studio apartment back home would have fit into it – on the next floor for myself, the hotel hadn’t yet sent up the keycard for my room.
With 11 p.m. a few minutes away and still no card, I decided to head down to the front desk and pester whoever had night duty until they handed over my card. Figuring that Mr. K would probably have an attack of separation anxiety if I went anywhere without giving him a detailed itinerary, I hollered my intentions through the door of the master bath attached to the suite’s master bedroom at a volume that ensure
d he could hear me over the lengthy shower he was taking.
I was out of the bedroom, down the hall, and almost to the suite’s front door when I heard Mr. Killane’s voice behind me.
“I cancelled your reservation hours ago – did I forget to tell you? You’ll be staying here with me.”
I closed my eyes and silently counted to ten.
Was this job some sort of divine judgment on me? Was I being punished for horrifying sins committed in a past life? Did Devon Killane have any idea about how male-female and boss-underling relationships worked in the real world?
I muttered a few choice curses under my breath and then I opened my eyes and turned around, ready to let him have it over all this presumptuous, power-mad crap he insisted on pulling.
I’d never seen him in anything other than a suit.
Now he stood before me wearing nothing but a towel tied around his waist. He worked another towel through his sopping hair, as rivulets of water ran down his body. Damn, that body … a broad chest with sharply-defined bands of pectoral muscle, abs that looked like they’d been carved from marble, sleek intercostal muscling sliding over his ribs, a trail of fine black hair running down between those magnificent abs and disappearing under that … holy shit, was that an erection or a baseball bat he was hiding under that towel? That must have been one inspiring shower …
I stared at his powerful muscles moving beneath his gleaming skin. I watched a bead of water drip off his left nipple. I imagined running my hands over his flanks and under that towel, feeling the warmth and coiled power of his body, holding that massive cock and feeling it surge in my hand …
“Ashley?”
Huh?
“You were about to say something along the lines of ‘who do you think you are,’ or ‘I’ll sleep in the hallway first, you asshole,’ correct? I thought perhaps you might appreciate a reminder, since you seem to have quite lost your train of thought – ah, but that can’t be, since of course you’re not attracted to me or to this body in the slightest. A pity, truly, since my body and I are both very much attracted to you.”
He took a step closer – ever so casually, of course, still drying his hair and still dripping all over the carpet, as I stood there and tried to remember why sleeping with this guy was such a bad idea.
Oh yeah, he’s my boss, and only a slutty gold-digging tramp would sleep with her rich boss, right?
Right?
My body pointed out that right now he wasn’t being my boss, and was in fact doing a great job of being nothing more than an incredibly sexy man wearing only a towel.
And when his rare smile came out to play or when his strange eyes took on that haunted look, was he my boss then? Or was he just a sweet, infuriating, funny, troubled, utterly compelling man who needed me? Where was the sense in turning that guy down, Ashley?
“But as it happens, it is in fact necessary for you to stay here in my suite, since in your new life as my personal assistant, you must be available to me at all times.
“I might decide between one dreary meeting and the next that my presence is required in Manila, and you will have to make the travel arrangements. I may need you to go online at three in the morning and pull up the production figures for one of our overseas manufacturing divisions, or I might want your opinion on the motifs and cultural tropes of an obscure German art film I come across on Netflix.
“You must be on hand to answer the phone when my relatives call. You’ll have to lie for me during my disappearances, and I’ll need you to invent things to tell the press. You’ll also be talking me through my frequent episodes of insomnia.
“In any case, though your duties to me will be many and varied, rest assured that warming my bed will not be among them. That would be recreation rather than work, and would of course be entirely up to your discretion.”
He gave his hair a final swipe, and then dropped that towel over his shoulders while the hoo-boy-what-an-erection towel stayed firmly in place.
“Now since we must make an early start on tomorrow morning’s business, I suggest you take your pick of the two auxiliary bedrooms in this suite; you may rest assured that your virtue will be safe in either of them. I’ll see you at 7:00 a.m. sharp, Ashley – or sooner, if you change your mind about pleasuring me during the night.”
He turned his back on me, he sauntered off down the hall, and he disappeared around the corner to his palatial master bedroom.
I stared at the trail of his wet footprints on the carpet. I stood there staring at them for a good five minutes.
Then I walked to the end of the hall, took a different turn, and ten minutes later was curled up under a goose down comforter in the smaller of the two auxiliary bedrooms. My bags and boxes of business wear from my shopping excursion that morning were stacked against the door, because while I somehow knew I could trust him not to barge in on me during the night, I also knew I couldn’t trust myself.
Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. We met with herds of anxious suits in a private conference room at the hotel, had lunch with half a dozen senior negotiators in a downtown restaurant, and held court in somebody’s skyscraper with the upper management of three different companies with a stake in the business at hand.
I say ‘we met’ because I was at Mr. Killane’s side for every mystifying moment of this business I knew so little about. About all I understood of it was that he was insisting on buying out a company that did not want to be bought out, that said company was an obscure startup manufacturing some equally obscure widget that would allegedly revolutionize server farm maintenance, and that it was important to move in on said company before word of their cool new widget got out to the other sharks in the business ocean. The fact that the guys who invented the widget thingie did not want to sell out to Killane Corporate Holdings didn’t seem to matter to anybody.
The additional fact that I had only the barest idea of what was going on also didn’t matter, because I played the part of ‘suave, knowledgeable, and lusciously curved woman of mystery’ like a pro. I sat at Mr. Killane’s elbow, nodded or raised an eyebrow or sighed at the appropriate moments, and made a great show of tapping away at my new phone or poring over some vital data on my also-new iPad.
When I leaned over and showed the boss what I’d been working on, it was always good for murmurs of fear and consternation from the audience of suits around the table, who had no idea Mr. Killane and I were looking at my player stats for World of Warcraft, or admiring the live webcam view of a litter of Shiba Inu puppies.
My second full day in San Francisco was much like the first, with meetings so boring, they’d make a statue beg for the mercy of death. I did seem to be the subject of even more frenzied speculation by various negotiators, lawyers, and executives, though – they stared at me and whispered whenever I entered a conference room or sat down next to Mr. Killane at yet another gleaming boardroom table, and I guessed they’d been up to a lot of urgent googling overnight, trying to figure out who the new girl was and why she was so close to Devon Killane.
I soldiered on, playing the part to the hilt even when the boss upped the ante by openly consulting me in front of his corporate victims, knowing as they didn’t that I had only the slimmest clue as to what was going on. For example, midway through a meeting between the developers of the widget thingamabob and three lawyers from Killane’s own team, Mr. K rolled his eyes at yet another anxious whine from one of the developers and then looked over at me.
“Ms. Daniels, do you have any idea why these people still cling to the notion that their beloved invention is somehow immune from the forces of the free market? Is there some benighted corner of economic theory that gives even a shred of credence to this fantasy?”
He raised an eyebrow and waited. Everyone stared at us – well, at me.
I did my best bored shrug. “The figures certainly don’t support their position, Mr. Killane – I can only think they’re trying to stave off the inevitable any way they can. I’ve been running the numbers,
and there’s just no getting around some basic financial realities.”
I held out my iPad to him – carefully angled so the rest of the room couldn’t see it – and pointed to a Cracked article listing five U.S. Presidents who led secret lives as sexual perverts.
“You see? These indexes just don’t lie.” Mr. Killane nodded, everyone else fretted, and I moved on to pull up a Something Awful forum thread that analyzed the crap out of the latest episode of ‘The Walking Dead’.
I pointed at random to a comment halfway down the 23rd page of the thread. “And this report from the Tokyo office pretty much nails the coffin lid shut, don’t you think?”
“You’re absolutely right, Ms. Daniels. I only wish that the rest of the room shared your keen grasp of the issues at stake here.” He leaned back in his chair, aimed his best imperial stare at those poor dumb bastards, and it was all over but the whimpering – once again, Devon Killane would get exactly what he wanted.
But did he still want me?
That night, my boss did not hit on me once we retired to his hotel suite. He was polite and professional and distant, he made no further towel-only appearances, he ate room service by himself on the balcony, and we both went to bed early and alone.
Had he given up on pursuing me?
I didn’t think that was it. Subtle looks during the day’s business dealings, his warm hand on the small of my back as we swept out of one conference room or another – it all seemed to indicate he was still after me, so why the cold shoulder once we were alone? Was he politely waiting for me to make the first move?
Was there any reason I shouldn’t make that move?
I asked myself that as I lay alone and restless in my cold bed, staring at the door of my room and thinking about the man asleep in the master bedroom – the towering, muscular, smoking hot man who was also weird and vulnerable and odd, the man I could not stop thinking about … the man who was my boss.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 8