Just gone. Gone together.
I shuffled my feet forward, right to the edge, keeping a whisper-thin grip on my balance. I felt Devon utterly still at my side, save for his hand trembling in mine.
I wondered about his stillness.
I hadn’t given any thought to his reaction to this, I’d just gone ahead with what every instinct in me said was right. So how would he respond? Fear, denial, anger? Would he try to talk me out of it? Would he beg or plead or argue?
But he was so still, in our last breathless minute before the end. Did that mean he accepted my decision? Would we simply hold hands and step over the edge together, always together, without a word?
I wanted to know. I loved him and I wanted to know, so I lifted my head from his arm and I looked up at him.
Devon stared down at me.
Those fierce and gentle and loving and eerie blue-violet eyes took me in, fastening onto every detail. He held my eyes with his, scanned my face, drank in everything there was to see. Then he cocked his head to one side, one eyebrow arched, in that strange scientist-examining-alien-life pose of his that I knew so well, and he stared some more.
I saw him decide.
Devon decided, and he looked away. He looked out over the stone and concrete canyons below. I watched the freezing clouds of his breath break up and ride away on the wind, and he said nothing. His hand clamped tight against mine. I felt the Harvard ring he wore on that hand biting into my fingers.
Devon was a silent pale statue.
No words, then. I understood – after all, what could we really say, here at the end? Everything important had long since been said, or didn’t need words in the first place.
I turned from him to look down at the endless floating kingdom of air and light and cold waiting for us.
I watched a bird soar past beneath us.
I heard the faint bleat of a car horn in the distance.
I pulled in one more lungful of icy air, and then I held that last breath.
I tightened my grip on Devon’s hand until I felt the blood drain from my fingers.
I leaned into his side.
I closed my eyes.
I love you.
***
She took one final step to the edge. My hand shook in hers. She waited a few delicate, endless seconds, considering, and then she lifted her head from my arm and looked up at me.
I read her face. I looked into her soft amber eyes. I saw the courage of a thousand soldiers there, and a love that could drown worlds.
I knew in that moment she would do it. She would do it and damn the cost, damn the brief and bitter flight down to eternity.
My father left.
Mama left.
Even that brave old warrior Uncle Sheridan left.
Everyone left, always.
I knew in that moment that Ashley would never leave me.
***
His hand tugged against mine.
This was it.
Time to fly, the last second of time, the last shuddering instant –
Another tug against my hand.
A tug backwards.
I opened my eyes.
The world swam in slow motion as I turned my head to the right, kept turning it, turned until I looked over my shoulder.
Devon stood behind me on the rooftop.
He tugged at my hand again.
I stepped down from the ledge and fell into his arms.
47. Five Seconds
Five minutes back down, and Devon didn’t say a word.
We stood side by side, first in his private elevator and then the main one as it carried us on that long, sighing ride back down to the lobby, and he said nothing at all.
We held hands the whole way.
Floor numbers flickered past on the digital display. Devon leaned against the back wall of the elevator, eyes half-closed, breathing slow and deep as his long fingers curled around mine. I leaned against him, sheltering in his scent, his warmth, his fragile strength. Sleepy saxophone music dipped in plenty of syrup echoed from the hidden speakers overhead, but for the first time in my life I did not want to kill Kenny G with a hatchet.
But time passes, like it or not. Whether you’re waiting for a bus or juggling spreadsheets or diapering a baby or descending from a life-altering moment atop the third-tallest skyscraper in the country, the earth insists on turning and elevators insist on stopping at their assigned destinations.
We stepped out into the lobby, still hand in hand.
Devon found his voice two seconds later, when he noticed the shattered glass, crumpled metal, squashed chairs, and, posing proudly in the center of it all, the crashed snowplow.
He’s sharp about details like that.
“I don’t recall this being here.” His fingers trailed out of mine as he stepped forward. His voice was faint and puzzled. He walked around the plow in a slow, wandering circle, staring up at its scarred bulk as if he couldn’t quite decide whether he was looking at a dream or reality.
Devon came to a stop by the plow’s rear bumper. Broken glass crunched beneath his shoes as he shifted his weight. He kept peering up at the big metal monster, cocking his head first to one side and then the other.
Then he turned to me, one eyebrow raised.
“Ashley, did I decide to redecorate the lobby in this rather startling fashion and then forget?”
“Um, no – that was me, boss. All my doing, just trying to park in a hurry and then panicking and crashing into a gigantic skyscraper in a blistering explosion of glass and steel, you know how that kind of thing happens … ah, promise not to dock my paycheck for the next five hundred years? Please?”
He turned back to the plow. He looked it up and down, and nudged a tire with the toe of one perfect shoe.
And he shrugged. “I trust you had your reasons, and I imagine security and building maintenance will be along to clear all this away, sooner or later. Do you suppose the city will want their snowplow back?”
“Probably, considering it’s worth umpteen thousand dollars of taxpayer money and there’s still a lot of work for it to do outside – but hey, I’ll think up a cover story and make some calls, so don’t sweat it.”
“Splendid.” Then he wandered away from the abandoned plow, heading for the gaping hole in the wall of glass flanking the main entrance.
Devon stopped in front of the new entrance I’d improvised. Inches away from the jagged spears of glass, he stood hands in pockets and craned his head back, to the left, and then to the right, staring at every cracked and shattered detail.
“This is rather beautiful, in an unexpected and apocalyptic sort of way.” Having delivered this artistic evaluation, he fell silent and simply stood staring through the hole at the world outside.
I stood alongside him, heard sirens pealing in the distance, and decided we shouldn’t wait around to see if they were coming for us – well, for me.
“Devon, time to head out. Are you up for –”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“It’s called putting one foot in front of another, big guy, and I’m reasonably sure you can pull it off.”
While I wondered what was up with his head and why it had to happen right now, Jimmy appeared outside, marching towards us through the trench carved out by the snowplow. He stopped on the glass-covered sidewalk, assessing his boss’s condition with a quick glance before turning to me.
“Miss, I took the liberty of calling Mr. Pulaski. I explained the situation and that Mr. Killane would be needing immediate transport from the downtown area, and the helicopter is inbound to our location now.”
“You’re the absolute best, Jimmy – the sooner we can get out of here, the better.”
I turned to Devon. “Time to get a move on in a serious hurry, before –”
Devon turned to me. “But I’m lost, Ashley, lost in a trackless country. I have all I can do to remember to breathe.”
“You’re okay, Devon, I swear.” I took a firm grip on his elbow, an
d there was no mistaking the nervous exhaustion trembling beneath my hand – this man needed to get off his feet and sleep for a year or two, at least. “You just woke up from a nightmare that lasted for twenty years and you’re going to be a little shaky, sure, but I promise you’ll be all right. Now, can you head outside with me?”
He turned to look out at that frightening new existence outside, where nothing was mapped or routed or planned. “My entire adult life was a road leading to that ledge, to the moment when I would take flight – and now that I have chosen a different path, I … Ashley, I quite honestly don’t know what to do. I have no idea at all.”
The crazy, impossible bastard I loved looked down at me. “I planned for everything except you, and now look where I am – lost in a strange land without a plan or a clue, and not a single road in sight. What should I do, Ashley?”
The chattering thump of rotor blades echoed from the intersection, and out of the corner of one eye I saw that beautiful beast of a helicopter touch down in a cloud of snow. Our ride was here, and it was well past time to get the hell out of Dodge.
With my left hand still on his elbow, I took his right hand in mine and held tight.
“Devon, the one thing I know for sure is that you don’t have to decide right now. So how about we head over to my place, and you can not decide there?”
He nodded, and together we stepped outside into a new world.
We holed up in my tiny apartment for over a week, and we never talked about the roof.
We didn’t talk much at all. We watched movies in each other’s arms, hours and hours of movies. We ate popcorn and threw it at each other. We took turns cooking, and we never watched the news.
Devon slept away great chunks of every day. He slept for twelve hours that first afternoon, woke up with a fierce hunger for pancakes and maple syrup, and then slept until the following afternoon. He slept early every night and late every morning, and he took a lot of naps. I knew for a fact that he’d suffered from insomnia for years, but he paid off every bit of his sleep debt that week.
I curled up with him for most of those endless hours, sleeping myself or just lying there and listening to him breathe. Sometimes I’d crawl out from under the covers and take care of things around the apartment, cleaning and dishes and all that – and I did make a few phone calls while he slept, just to square some things away and keep that new world out there from pestering us.
A call to Jimmy revealed that he was the first one out of the coffee shop at the sound of the crash – and in a moment of brilliant and devious inspiration he’d turned to everyone behind him, pointed up the street, and said he’d seen the plow disappear around a corner that just happened to be in the opposite direction from Killane Corporate Holdings.
I also called Mr. Ferrum, and he said his instincts told him to leave well enough alone when he sat there in the security control room and watched as the surveillance cameras showed me climbing down out of the snowplow’s cab. Although, bless his badass heart, his instincts had no problem with him calling the police to report that those cameras showed “a Caucasian male, mid-30s, apparently inebriated, exiting the vehicle and then leaving the premises on foot,” and he figured they’d be tied up for quite a while looking for that imaginary perpetrator. He also advised me he’d been in touch with building maintenance, and by putting a rush job on it and sparing no expense, they figured to have the damage repaired and the lobby cleaned up and open for business in a week or so.
Calls to various department heads and senior executives spread the news that Mr. Killane was taking some additional time off and would be back in the office whenever the hell he felt like it, thank you very much. Okay, I did put it a little more diplomatically than that, but the message was clear – deal with things on your own for a little while longer, you big giant babies.
The easiest and the hardest call was the one I made to Mom.
She had to know, didn’t she? Even though when I’d bolted out her front door I hadn’t said where I was going or why, she must know – but she had mom instincts, which meant that she didn’t ask.
“Baby, I’m just glad you and your guy are okay – I mean, he is okay, right?”
Yeah, she so knew. Mom instincts are the sharpest of all.
“He will be. I love you, Mom. You’re the best.”
“So, can I put you two down for another try at Saturday night dinner? After all, that great big tall drink of handsome man still hasn’t had his way with me on the kitchen table or the hallway floor or the couch in the living room yet, and my hormones aren’t getting any younger, you know.”
“Yes to dinner and no to your hormones, you disgusting pervert.”
She laughed like a boss.
Ten days after the old world ended and a new one began, Devon woke up and announced he was going back to work. He arrived in his office that afternoon, shaved and sharp and dressed in a charcoal-grey suit that cost more than any decent human being should pay to avoid being naked, and he began a weeklong examination of every aspect of his global business empire.
It was all new to him, or it seemed that way. He listened to regional managers lay out every aspect of every ongoing project, he questioned executives who’d flown in from the overseas divisions in South Korea and France and Australia and Argentina and everywhere else about every last thing they were responsible for, and then he ordered more suits to come in to make more reports.
He wanted to hear it all – plans and ideas and sales figures and stock prices and strategies, everything from the hourly pay of his factory workers in Jakarta to the establishment of a new nanotech research division in Sacramento.
Now that the special project was well and truly dead, he seemed captivated and intrigued by the idea that he still owned this world-spanning shiny toy of a corporation – and even though he already knew everything there was to know about it, he now insisted on relearning everything about Killane Corporate Holdings, from the ground up to the sky.
He might do anything next – burn it all down, sell it, give it away, or build it up until he owned every damn thing on the planet, who knew?
What he did do next just about gave me a heart attack.
Three weeks to the day after I rushed out of Mom’s front door into the storm, I came back in that door with Devon at my side.
He loomed over my shoulder, actually, being disgustingly tall and gorgeous while wearing an ivory black three-piece Caraceni suit from Milan that I’d tried to tell him was way the hell over the top for one of Mom’s informal Saturday dinners – complete with sapphire cufflinks and a matching tie of Belgian silk, seriously?
He held a pan of the finest lasagna known to man or woman in the crook of one immaculate arm – growing up around cooks teaches you a thing or two about preparing pasta, as it turns out – while in his other hand he carried a bottle of wine that was probably worth as much as the entire contents of the house.
And while I may not have been dressed for dinner at a four-star restaurant or anything, I will proudly say that I brought a covered plate of the best cheddar biscuits on Planet Earth, along with two loaves of fresh-baked bread because low-carb diets come from the devil.
Once she relieved us of our contributions to the meal, Mom greeted us with a giant, two-person-spanning hug, then pulled back to eye Devon up and down. He flashed her his best panties-dropping smile, I punched him in the ribs just on general principles, and after Mom was done looking at the guy as if she were starving and he was a sirloin steak dripping with juices, she turned to me with one raised eyebrow.
“Ashley, you mean everything to me and I love you, but so help me, the second your back is turned I am going to be all over that man – I will rock his world as it has never been rocked before, the earth will move to the tune of about 8.0 on the Richter scale, and I may just have to ask you to leave and come back sometime next week, all right?”
I pasted on the best offended look I could fake while trying to keep from laughing, and threw in a patented Ashley
Eye Roll for good measure. “Mom, do you think you could wait to plunder my boyfriend’s body until after dessert, at least?”
“Honey, his body will be my dessert, and you can just go get your own.”
Devon chimed in with his Mr. Calm and Reasonable voice. “Please, Ms. Daniels, I hardly think it will be necessary to send my lovely Ashley away. After all, with a bit of persuasion, I’m sure she’ll be willing to join us for a night of three-way passion, our bodies combining into one writhing, sweat-drenched mass of pleasure as together we reach heights of orgasmic bliss beyond anything that –”
The fact that he stopped talking at that point might have had something to do with the elbow I poked into his stomach, but it’s hard to say for sure.
I was sure I loved that crazy man right down to the ground, though.
The three of us crowded around Mom’s kitchen table for almost two hours. We enjoyed steak so rare it almost mooed, chicken fettuccine with Mom’s secret addictive sauce, fried onions, stuffed yams, Devon’s amazing lasagna, baked potatoes topped with sour cream and chives and those little bacony bits, and butter-dipped spears of broccoli appearing in the role of ‘token green stuff.’
I had a little bit of the wine, Mom had a little bit more of the really excellent wine, and Devon went overboard crazy by indulging in one glass after another of, drum roll, sweetened ice tea with lemon, because some people just don’t know how to party.
We ate, we talked about everything, and we ate some more. I took a second helping of apple sauce so that no one could accuse me of not eating healthy, sort of, and I asked Mom when the heck she was going to give in to my attempts to move her into a better place.
She sighed, said I had better things to spend my money on than moving her into some huge palatial home that would be a pain in the ass to clean, and when did I plan on moving out of my own microscopic apartment, hmmm?
Devon spooned up a generous portion of steaming mashed potatoes, drenched it in gravy, and observed that if Mom and I would simply move into his filthy huge mansion, then we could all live out his three-way sex fantasy every night.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 56