Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance

by Sonora Seldon

  For now.

  34. Walking to the Stars

  “Ashley, you shouldn’t condemn yourself for this – the temperature generated by a wood-fired stove can be quite difficult to judge, particularly for those new to the ways of backcountry cooking.”

  I scraped the charred remains of what I’d meant to be bacon and eggs into the trash. “Face it, Devon – your girlfriend is directly responsible for The Great Breakfast Disaster, Day One. I’m just trying to figure out what I should do for an encore – make cereal explode in a toxic cloud of vapors? Knock birds out of the sky with my toast? Scare the children and womenfolk with tales of the horrifying things I do to sausage and hash browns?”

  “While those are all entertaining options, perhaps instead you will permit me to make our breakfast today?”

  So I planted my ass on a chair, and I watched my talented and sexy personal chef whip up a breakfast of ham-and-cheese omelets and sourdough biscuits with sawmill gravy, all cooked to perfection by someone who clearly knew all about how to make a wood-fired stove roll over and beg for mercy.

  So much for trying to show off my cooking skills and pay the guy back for his amazing pork chops. And believe me, I do know how to prepare honest-to-god food and not just sling something frozen into a microwave – it’s just that my idea of a stove has buttons and dials and digital readouts and is powered by the holy fire of electricity, not the kind of fire that involves actual smoke generated by chunks of genuine dead trees.

  Damn trees, I knew all along I couldn’t trust them.

  So I munched my way through two of the finest omelets I’d ever eaten, washed them down with pulp-free orange juice fortified with calcium because it turned out the Marlboro Man did know how to stock a refrigerator, and wondered what I was supposed to do with the rest of the day.

  “Devon?”

  He swallowed a forkful of gravy-drenched biscuit, sent some orange juice down after it, and raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, my lovely and hungry Ashley?”

  “Big guy, I’m at a loss. If I can’t go online and I can’t watch TV and I can’t enjoy meaningful personal time with my phone and I can’t make breakfast without poisoning you, what am I supposed to do all day? Compose odes to the glory of nature? Wrest trout out of the river with my bare hands? Build a crossbow out of sticks and go bear hunting?”

  His evil grin told me what he was going to say before the words ever left his mouth. “You could spend the day pleasuring me with your magnificent body, experimenting with one exotic position after another, moaning and whimpering and biting me with your delicious little teeth, hour after hour, until we collapse in a tangle of sweaty and satisfied limbs – would that be a suitable agenda for our day?”

  I threw a biscuit at him because hurling biscuits at hot guys is my special gift, and then I stole one of his to make up for the loss. After all, growing girls need their calories, right?

  And yeah, he wasn’t done.

  “And do not forget the wild, leaping fish in the river – we’ll cast a line and catch one or two, I’ll slice and dice them into many juicy fragments, and voila, we’ll finally be able to bedeck your lovely breasts and thighs and secret places with sushi. Tell me, when I suck those tender flakes of moist flesh from your aching nipples, would you mind terribly if I seasoned them with wasabi? I think the combination would make for a most intriguing flavor.”

  He pasted on a look of wide-eyed innocence, the bastard, as if he was only asking if I’d rather go to a Vietnamese or an Indian restaurant for dinner. Just for that, I snatched another one of his biscuits, and helped myself to a forkful of omelet from his plate – hey, mine was empty and I needed my strength, okay?

  I also shifted on my chair, crossed my legs, and hoped it wasn’t too obvious that I found the idea of his warm, wet mouth tasting my skin and the sushi together weirdly hot. I imagined his tongue easing over my nipples, his mouth sucking gently, the sauce and our sweat mingling and running down over my ample breasts as he …

  “Ah, I see you quite like that idea.”

  Damn.

  “Or perhaps we might go for a walk?”

  And that was how my hiking boots came to know the terrors of actual hiking.

  We did a lot of hiking over the next few days. It took me and my generous curves a while to get the hang of daily death marches through the wilderness – after all, it wasn’t exactly part of my normal routine to go traipsing over rocks and logs, slogging through dead pine needles and icy rivers, and looking nervously over my shoulder for bears, goblins, or whatever.

  But once my thighs stopped chafing like mad with every step, and after my interesting collection of blisters healed … I started looking forward to those hikes.

  Devon chose a different path each day. We went upriver, soldiering into the trees, and I found that walking among them was like moving through the aisles of a vast green cathedral. Sunbeams speared down through occasional gaps in the branches, like light pouring in through stained glass windows; the carpet of dead needles muffled our steps, allowing us to move in respectful silence past slumbering fallen trees that looked like pews waiting for a congregation.

  We went downriver and explored trails that led to the foot of the mountains. The forest was one thing, but when the trees fell away and we looked up to see an army of giants made from grey stone standing over us, it was like stepping onto the slopes of another world. I surprised myself by wanting to go higher, to creep along increasingly steep and narrow trails until we got right up to where the snow started – but Devon vetoed that not-too-bright idea by the simple measure of picking me up, pointing me in the other direction, and blocking the path behind me.

  Birds were everywhere, and that surprised me too – I’d assumed they’d all be relaxing on the beach at St. Tropez or wherever it was birds went for the winter, but it turned out that a lot of them dug in their little toes and stayed put for every bleak snowy moment of the Montana winters.

  It also turned out that just as Uncle Sheridan had said, Devon knew all the details about each and every bundle of feathers we saw – I learned that a Steller’s jay looks like a blue jay wearing a brown hoodie, that the hooting things with huge dinner plate yellow eyes were great horned owls, that the rat-a-tat-tat hammering sounds I heard now and then were made by red-bellied woodpeckers digging into the pines looking for insects, and that cardinals and sparrows were the same here as in Chicago.

  Of course, Devon being Devon and all, he couldn’t resist messing with me just a little.

  One afternoon, as we walked through a stretch of highland meadow miles away from the cabin and just below the mountains, a great winged shadow flickered over the grass. I looked up to see the biggest bird I’d ever seen outside a zoo circling overhead. He eased sideways on the wind, swept lower, and as we watched took station not far above us, cocking his head and staring down at us as he banked and turned and got closer and looked … hungry.

  “Devon, what is that thing, and why is it looking at us like we’re a couple of steaks? Is it a vulture?’

  “God, no – that magnificent feathered weapon is a golden eagle, the largest and deadliest flying killer in North America. That razor-sharp beak can tear open the throat of a mountain goat, and do you notice those giant curved talons on its feet?”

  “The ones that look like steak knives?”

  “The very same – with those talons, he could dive down here and rip the eyes fresh from your head in a single fleeting instant, and be soaring away again before you even realized what had happened.”

  “Really?” I gave out with a nervous little squeak, and crowded closer to him.

  “Of course not.” He put on his classic evil grin and added, “We’re far too big to be considered prey – for that matter, even a mountain goat would be a bit beyond his capabilities.” He looked up and made some weird keening noise that he later claimed was an eagle’s alarm call; the giant flying murder machine hissed back at him, then swept up toward the clouds and soared off in a st
raight line for the mountains.

  Devon watched it go and remarked, “He was probably rather disappointed we didn’t have any rabbits on us.”

  I punched him right in a kidney, just because.

  Man, I loved that crazy bastard.

  We didn’t always go hiking. Sometimes, we just talked.

  You’d be surprised how many hours you can pass just talking – about anything, everything, and then a few other things. We sat and talked politics in the rocking chairs on the cabin’s front porch, or sometimes we argued about history at the kitchen table. Other times, we discussed the ethics of confining zoo animals while walking by the river, or debated the effect of modern technology on social relationships while he was showing me how the generator worked.

  The porch was the best, though. It was a basic sort of porch – no railing, no support posts, just a bit of an overhang from the roof above us, plain wooden planks beneath us, and two of the coziest rocking chairs in the known world. I would curl up in mine, Devon usually leaned back in his while stretching his ginormously long legs way the hell out in front of him, and we’d talk.

  One morning we settled into our chairs, with me propping a plate of biscuits left over from breakfast on my knee because talking can be hungry work, and Devon stretching out those stilt legs of his until his heels almost hung over the front edge of the porch. He aimed one of his patented moody stares at the river, and then two biscuits later, he leaned his head back over the top of the chair and eased his eyes half closed.

  “Ashley, would you like to know something I never told Uncle Sheridan?”

  Whoa. This could be almost anything – juicy details about some rancher’s daughter? Apocalyptic personal revelation? Where he’d buried a body, why he didn’t like strawberry jam on his toast, what the Illuminati were hiding in the basement of the White House?

  “Fire away, big guy – enquiring minds want to know.”

  A faint, wistful smile spread across his face. “Uncle thought I couldn’t take his interest in fly fishing to heart because I was distracted by my raging hormones and thoughts of all those lovely women waiting in the nearest town; I never told him the real reason was that I felt sorry for the fish.

  “Imagine it, Ashley – a trout slides in watery grace through the dark world beneath the surface, probing everywhere for food, surging through the current, plunging and diving like an acrobat as he fights rivals, searches for a mate, or pursues whatever impulses fire through his small brain … and then what looks like an impossibly tasty morsel bobs and twitches just above him, silhouetted against the light filtering in from above.

  “He darts up and strikes at it – and a steel hook lances into his mouth, jerking him entirely out of all that he’s ever known and up into a dry, gasping world of bright light, terrible pain, and the utter inability to breathe. He thrashes and fights to no avail, his struggles weaken, and finally the poor creature drowns in all that poisonous air. It’s quite ghastly, when you think about it.”

  Well, yeah, it did sound awful when he put it that way – but was it really like that?

  “But does a trout even feel pain the way we do? Can it experience fear, confusion, and all that? Maybe what you were seeing when he bagged dinner for the night was a reflex, an automatic response from their fishy little nervous systems –”

  And that set us off on a debate that started with whether fish were self-aware and could feel pain, continued into the subject of animal rights in general, veered off to explore whether trout was better pan-fried or baked because I can never resist the topic of food, and then somehow, I swear, we ended up arguing the merits of all three Matrix movies because they apparently referred back to the idea of being drawn into another world you never knew existed – and then all the biscuits were gone and the sun said it was noon. When did that happen?

  One afternoon by the river, we talked about his history with round girls – because ever since the revelation that he’d been into women with curves and healthy appetites even back in his cowgirl-hunting days, I’d been curious about something.

  “Devon, if you liked big girls even when you were just a teenage guy full of raging hormones, what happened once you got so disgustingly rich? I mean, me and every other grocery shopper in America has seen you on about a million gossip magazine covers, and until me and a certain red dress came on the scene, you always got photographed with models built like sticks, and pipe-cleaner actresses, and heiresses who would disappear if they turned sideways. Where were all us lusty round girls then, huh?”

  He grinned as he twirled a stem of grass between his fingers. “The photographers did not follow me quite everywhere, Ashley – for example, they did not follow me into hotel kitchens, where I often found hard-working and delicious round girls who seemed quite pleased to meet me. On other occasions, I managed to conceal who I was long enough to escape into tiny, obscure clubs and bars where I found more large and lovely women … but do you know one crucial thing about all those round girls, my bold Ashley?”

  He looked over at me as we sat side by side on the river bank, and his smile turned sad. “I always found them in the shadows.”

  I slipped an arm around him because it felt right, and I looked up into that gentle, distant, mysterious face. “Tell me, big guy – why did you find them there?”

  He nuzzled my hair for a brief, sweet moment, and then he turned back to his blade of prairie grass, spinning it round in his fingers as he answered me.

  “Because they were afraid, brave Ashley. You see, they did not have your courage, your determination, your confidence – so many women with lush, beautiful bodies look at those same magazine covers, see all those frighteningly thin waifs draping themselves over someone like me, and they believe the lie that bones are beautiful.

  “They look in the mirror, and they cannot see their own beauty behind the lie. They believe what magazines and television and films tell them, and so they cannot bring themselves to step forward, shoulder all those stick-figure women aside, and claim what they desire. Do you understand?”

  Boy, did I understand.

  I thought about telling him that. I thought about confessing that brave or not, I’d had a few doubts of my own about whether all those guys who’d dumped me because I didn’t look like a ruler were right. I thought about all the sneering glances from thin and undoubtedly slutty bitches, I thought about the pitying looks I got sometimes – and pity is way worse than contempt, trust me – and in the end, I settled for not saying anything. Instead, I put my other arm around him too, and I wrapped my man up in a fierce hug.

  We sat like that for a long time.

  In those lost days, we had all the time in the world.

  Best of all, we had time to not do anything. Some of those lazy mornings and afternoons passed in supreme, blissful silence, as we sat on the porch together and didn’t say a word for what felt like years. If you can talk with someone, share thoughts and ideas and feelings with them that you couldn’t share with anyone else, that’s one thing – but if you can share silence with them? That’s beyond special.

  Devon found time to show off more of his mad nature knowledge, because knowing ten times more than anyone else about everything was just his style, and I don’t think he could help it. One example of his Ranger Rick awesomeness happened when I looked out the window by the couch one morning, yawned like someone who’d never woken up before, and then jolted to full awareness when I saw … things prowling around in the meadow.

  “Baby, there are animals outside. Big ones.”

  Devon was in the corner that served as a kitchen, prodding the coffee maker into providing us with our first caffeine fix of the day. He didn’t bother to look up.

  “How many legs?”

  “Four apiece – there’s three of them, so that’s like, um, twelve legs.”

  He still didn’t look up. “I trust they’re not cows?”

  “No, asshole, they’re not cows – they look like … like deer on steroids.”

 
; “Ah. Elk, then.”

  He puttered around collecting cups, cream, and sugar, and still couldn’t trouble himself to pay direct attention to the fact that the meadow had just been invaded by huge nightmare creatures. “Tell me, might one of them be much larger than the other two, with a great deal of shaggy black hair around the throat, and antlers that look like they belong on a dinosaur?”

  “You called it – is that the gang leader? Will it be the one leading the attack?”

  “That is in fact the male, and the other two would be his harem of the moment – I can’t see an attack as likely, unless one of us sashays out there and expresses an inappropriate interest in his women. Personally, I’d rather have some coffee.”

  So I snatched up a pillow from the couch, kited it at his head, and we drank the coffee.

  At night, we didn’t need coffee to keep us awake – we had books. While a lot of the volumes lining the walls were refugees from Uncle Sheridan’s library, many others were more current and totally didn’t talk about the Civil War at all – Stephen King hung out with Howard Zinn, Neil Gaiman rubbed shoulders with Brian Greene, and signed first editions of all three Lord of the Rings books were stacked on top of the dresser next to tattered paperback copies of the Gormenghast trilogy.

  Devon read aloud a lot of times after that first night; he preferred history, but I nudged and pleaded and smooched him into using that compelling voice of his to bring Middle Earth alive, and the sands of Barsoom, and Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ was never as creepy as when he read it.

  And yep, he coaxed me into reading aloud too, although I didn’t think I had much of a voice for it – not that it mattered, not when I leaned against his chest, breathed in his scent, and tried for the millionth time to figure out how to pronounce all those mile-long mouthfuls of Russian names in “Crime and Punishment.”

  And man, don’t even get me started about “The Brothers Karamazov.”