LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance (16 page)

Lucien

“What? Who do you think it is?”

“We need to get to Katy,” Jacob said. “The meeting place.”

“But what about San Antonio? What did the hotel tell you?”

Jacob looked at me, his expression unreadable. “When you hired Ruben and his goons, did you have any idea what was behind all this?”

I started to shake my head, but he interrupted me.

“Why didn’t you come to me?”

“It was a reporter. Some reporter called and asked specifically about the artificial pancreas. There are only a handful of people who know—”

“Don’t pull that bullshit on me,” Jacob said. “Tell me the truth.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “That is the truth. Only a handful of people knew about that project. Only one of those people could have said something to a reporter.”

“So you went to a private detective instead of talking to me about it?”

“What would you have done had I gone to you? You would have denied you had anything to do with it, and you would have wanted to handle it internally. I know you, Jacob,” I said, staring at him with the same hard expression he had on his face. “The last time something like this happened, you insisted on taking over. You insisted on handling it yourself. How did I know it wasn’t you?”

“Why would I go to the press about something that could only benefit our company?”

“Because you knew that there were issues with the device. Because you knew we weren’t quite ready to go to human trials. You would have wanted to slow things down.”

“Going to a reporter wouldn’t have slowed things down. If anything, it would have sped things up!”

“Unless the reporter found out about the trouble we’ve been having. Then the FDA never would have approved our request for human trials.”

Jacob shook his head, but I saw something in his eyes that worried me. Something wrong. I don’t know what it was, but it set off alarm bells inside of me that I didn’t understand.

“Does any of this really matter now?” I asked softly.

“You lied to me. You lied to me about Adrienne, about her relationship with you, and you lied to me about what she was doing here, in our company. That matters.”

“No,” I said. “The only thing that matters is that Adrienne’s missing and we have no idea who has her. We have no idea what they might do to her.”

“Are you telling me you actually care about this woman?”

He scoffed at me, the tone of his voice mocking me. I wanted to punch him. I’d known Jacob since I was five years old, and this was the first time I’d wanted to punch him.

“You talk like it’s impossible for me to have feelings for someone like Adrienne.”

“No. I just think that something that began as a joke will likely remain a joke.”

“It wasn’t a joke. And it definitely isn’t a joke now.”

Jacob looked me over for a long second, his eyes narrowed, like Ruben’s had been before. He was looking at me like someone far more mature who believed I was acting like a child.

“You’ve always been a spoiled brat, Lucien. Being so sick when you were little, in and out of the hospital, always getting everything you asked for because all the adults around you always felt so guilty for everything you had to go through, for every little pinprick you had to suffer day in and day out to treat your illness, you grew up thinking that you could have anything you wanted. But that’s not how the real world works, brother. That’s not how it will work for you anymore.”

I didn’t understand where this was coming from. I was as much stunned as I was angered by his words.

I shook my head slowly, the movement building with each degree my anger ratcheted as the shock wore off and his words really sank in.

“Fuck you, Jacob,” I said softly. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you—”

“This is my company. I started this company with my own money, my own blood and sweat. You came in as an afterthought. I invited you into this company because my father thought it would make your mother happy. You were supposed to sit in your little office and write little medical apps for people’s phones. That’s all you were supposed to do.”

Again, I was shocked. I hadn’t known any of this. I’d thought his invitation to join the company was genuine.

“No one forced you—”

“No, no one forced me,” he said with a bitter little chuckle. “Father simply announced that if I didn’t invite you into the company, he wouldn’t allow me to put my trust fund up as collateral for a business loan.”

“I didn’t ask him to do that.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did.”

“And everything I’ve done has only made our bottom line better.”

Jacob inclined his head. “Yeah. Until this. Until now.”

“Until what?”

Jacob’s eyes moved over me, dismissing me with a flick of his eyelid. He started for the door.

“We need to get to Katy.”

“No!”  I grabbed his arm. “You started this. You end it.”

Jacob spun around and punched my shoulder. I lifted my hands to hit him back, but I stopped myself. There had to be a line drawn. There had to be a moment when one of us chose to be the bigger person. No matter what he thought of me, this was my brother. I wasn’t going to get into a tussle with my own brother.

“Tell me what you think it is I’ve done.”

“This whole thing is you, Lucien. You know that, I know that. You did this. You created this mess to take the focus off of what you did.”

“Jacob—”

“Don’t try to deny it. I’ve known all along. I talked to Rachel, heard her side of things.”

A vague memory tickled the edge of my thoughts, but I still couldn’t quite grasp what it was he was talking about.

“You sent the emails. You made it look like it was me. You wanted them to think that someone was blackmailing you so that when the truth came out, it would cast doubt on your part of things.”

“My part of what? You’re talking in circles, Jacob!”

“You stole the code that made your artificial pancreas possible.”

It was like he’d punched me in the center of my chest. I stepped back, unable to catch my breath for a moment.

“Then it was him,” Ruben said from where he’d come to stand in the doorway. “The emails, the threats. It was all him?”

Jacob nodded. “It was.”

Ruben rushed across the room and grabbed the front of my shirt, twisting it in his fist.

“Where is Adrienne? Where is my daughter?”

He shook me, forcing me back against the front of Jacob’s desk as Jacob himself disappeared out the door.

Shit!

What was I going to do now?

Adrienne

“You don’t understand. You have to let me out!”

“Why?” I asked as I leaned against the door on the other side of which Rachel stood.

“If I don’t check in every hour, they’ll know something’s wrong.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

She was quiet for a long minute.

“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on. What’s keeping me from taking the van and going back to the city? What’s keeping me from going to the police?”

“Don’t do that!” she said, the fear in her voice telling me more than her words did.

“Tell me why,” I repeated, speaking slowly.

“You’ll get a lot of good people in trouble.”

“Why shouldn’t I? You kidnapped me.”

She was quiet again, but I could hear her moving just on the other side of the door, could hear her brushing against the door itself. Finally, she made a noise like she was tapping her fingernails to the thin wood of the door.

“Let me out. Let me check in with them, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“You won’t try to run?”

“I won’t. I promise.”

Instinctively, I knew that her promise wasn’t worth much. But I also knew that I needed to know what was going on before I went back to Houston. I had no intention of going to the police, but I needed to know who was behind this whole mess. I needed to know who I could trust.

A part of me was afraid Lucien was more deeply involved in all of this than anyone knew.

I unlocked the door with the key she’d kept conveniently on a hook beside the door. She looked suitably abashed as she stepped out, her eyes moving curiously over the clothes I was wearing.

“I’m sorry about your wrists,” she said, almost flinching when she noted the bandages wrapped around my sore, raw wrists. “I wanted to use something a little less uncomfortable, but we were in a hurry.”

I gestured for her to take a seat at the breakfast bar in the center of the large kitchen. She brushed her hips as she sat as though she were wearing a long skirt or something. Always a proper young lady.

“How do you check in with your partners?”

She pointed to a drawer in a small cart against the far wall. “There’s a cellphone in there.”

I walked over and opened the indicated drawer. Sure enough, there was a small flip phone with a sticker that announced the name of one of the companies that specialized in throwaway cellphones. I grabbed it and handed it to her.

“No tricks.”

She nodded.

She opened the phone and drew up a text box, and sent a quick text that had only one letter. K.

“That tells them that everything’s okay and we can proceed.”

I took the phone from her and looked through other messages that had been sent on it. There weren’t many. Multiple messages with just that one letter. A couple of messages with one word messages. Here. Now. Yes. But there were no incoming messages.

“How do they contact you?”

“Calls mostly. They don’t want anything in text that can be traced back to us.”

“Smart.” I set the phone down and studied her face. “Who is ‘they’?”

She blushed. “You don’t understand. You think that we’re trying to steal something, but we’re really just trying to get something back.”

“And what’s that?”

Rachel’s eyes moved slowly over mine. “I’m sure Lucien told you what a loser I am. How I dropped out of college this past week, how I’m always doing all these stupid things and expecting everyone else to bail me out.”

I shrugged. He had told me something like that.

“That’s how Lucien sees me. But the truth is, I’m more than that.”

“Aren’t we all? What does that have to do with you kidnapping me?”

Rachel ran the fingers of both hands through her hair in a gesture that reminded me a lot of Jacob. She leaned back and crossed her legs as though we were just having a normal conversation. As though she hadn’t clocked me over the head and kept me tied up in the pantry of her parents’ beach house.

“I’m good with computers. My father runs an oil business. My mom helps him out there, running numbers for him. I think it started as a way for them to spend time together, but my mom proved to be really good at her job. So I spent the bulk of my childhood hanging out in boardrooms. When you do that, you pick up a lot, you know?”

I grew up watching my father solve robberies, so I knew what she was talking about.

I gestured for her to continue.

“Computers are a big part of any business these days. My dad’s personal assistant taught me how to use Windows when I was five. I started surfing the net shortly after. And then I got into all kinds of things from there. You would be surprised the kinds of websites a kid can gain access to on a business computer. Things that would probably shock my parents. I taught myself things that I’m not even sure Lucien learned in school, and he was always a tech nerd.” Rachel smiled softly at the thought. “No one ever really paid much attention to what I was doing. They didn’t really care.”

Again she brushed her hair out of her face, burying her fingers in it as she stared off into the past, her eyes so much like Lucien’s, lost in thought.

“I interned at Jacob’s company a couple of summers ago, mostly so that I would be out of Mom and Dad’s hair. I delivered the mail, ran errands, that sort of thing. One night, Lucien was working late, doing something on his computer. He got up to deal with something Jaime brought to him and I got to looking at the code, and I just seemed to know exactly what it was he was trying to do and exactly what he needed to fix it. So I fixed it. He didn’t even realize it until the next day. And then he assumed his computer tech, Tito, had done it.”

“And this was for what, exactly?”

“The pancreas. He was trying to find a way to integrate all the different elements required to make such a thing work. Right now, most companies are just trying to take existing pumps and CGMs and make them work together. What he wanted to do was integrate all the different elements of these devices and turn them into one device. But to do that, he had to solve a number of problems, the least of which was how to teach the device the difference between a high sugar and a low one. I solved the problem.”

“Did you tell him it was you?”

“Yeah. Even showed him how I did it.”

“But…?”

Rachel shrugged. “He patted me on the head and told me what a good girl I was.”

I shook my head. “I still don’t understand.”

“Lucien refused to give me credit for my work on the device.”

“Okay. So what?”

Rachel straightened up on her stool, staring at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world. “So what? Do you know how much that device will be worth when it hits the market? It will revolutionize the way diabetes is treated!”

“I know. That’s why Lucien is developing it.”

“Yeah, well, he wants to keep all the credit for himself. But, if not for me, he never would have solved the biggest issue.”

“And that’s why you did this?”

“I asked him if he was going to give me credit. He openly denied it.”

“But what does that have to do with this? With you kidnapping me?”

She groaned. “We did this because it will force him to change the application for the patent. He’ll have to add me as one of the developers.”

I tilted my head slightly, trying to decide if she was being truthful, or if she was just trying to buy time.

She looked completely honest. But that honest face had tricked me once before.

“And the emails?”

“A distraction.”

“From what?”

“He said you would assume it was Tito and you would spend all your time checking into that while he changed the application for the patent.”

“He said?”

Rachel looked away.

“I was supposed to assume it was Tito sending the emails because we traced them back to Lucien’s computer?”

“Yeah.”

“And that would distract me from what was really happening.”

“That was his theory.”

“And what was really happening?”

“We were trying to get the lawyer to change the patent application.”

“Sharon Potter?”

“Who?”

“The lawyer,” I said, though I’d already realized that she had no idea what I was talking about. And, true to my suspicion, she looked truly confused.

“The lawyer we were talking to was named Jack Falsey.”

I stood up and began to pace the length of the kitchen. “Why kidnap me? Whose idea was that?”

“Hers. She thought it would force Lucien’s hand because the lawyer said that we couldn’t do anything until we had his signature on the paperwork.”

I nodded. “So your partner is trying to get Lucien’s signature as we speak?”

“Yeah. She said they were talking and he was about to come around. I guess he really likes you.”

“You don’t think all this is a little extreme for what you want?”

Rachel looked away. “I told her that it wasn’t that big of a deal. I could use my skills to do something else. I mean, I’ve already written a game that’s selling like crazy in the Apple store.”

“Yeah?”

She smiled. “It’s this game that asks you all these impossible questions and you—”

The phone buzzed against the countertop. Rachel found as she reached for it, but I grabbed it before she could get it.

“Change of plans,” I read aloud.

Rachel’s face twisted into a cloud of confusion.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. She’s not supposed to text me directly.”

I began to pace again, trying to work all this out in my head. There was more to it than Rachel knew. Someone was after something, but it wasn’t the artificial pancreas. It wasn’t even the patent. If they wanted to stop or alter the patent, they were too late. It came through a week ago. This was about something else. Stealing the code for the pancreas was just an excuse to get Rachel to help.

“Who is she?”

Rachel’s eyes fell to the phone in my hands. “I should answer him. She’ll worry if I don’t.”

“Tell me who you’re working with.”

“Lynn.”

I nodded slowly, my memory of Lynn a little less than flattering. She’d showed up at a restaurant where Lucien, his family, and I were sharing a meal. She was high or drunk or a little bit of both, and we’d had to drive all the way back to Houston to take her home. And she’d said things, things that implied that she and Lucien had been sleeping together for quite some time.

Lynn was Jacob’s ex-wife.

“Why Lynn?”

Rachel shrugged. “She came to me a couple of weeks ago and told me that Jacob thought Lucien’s actions were despicable. She said they wanted to help me get my name on the patent so that when the device went to market, I’d get a piece of the profit.”

“Jacob’s involved too?”

Rachel shook her head quite adamantly. “No. He just told her what he thought. She was the one who told me to do this, the one who said it was the only way.”

“But you said ‘they’.”

“And Jaime.”

Jaime. I knew that already.

There was a camera I’d placed in Lucien’s office. I was watching it when Rachel burst into my hotel room. It had caught several people on it, but the most interesting thing was how it caught Jaime typing a text into a phone identical to the one that I was now holding. I’d thought we’d caught Lynn in the act when the camera showed her placing something on Lucien’s desk just after midnight. That’s why I’d saved the footage. But then I’d watched the rest—twelve hours of active recording that actually covered almost a full twenty-four-hour period—and was just piecing it together when Rachel hit me over the head. Memory of that phone… I knew it was Jaime on the other end.

Lynn. Jaime. Rachel.

It still didn’t make sense.

“Run me through it again.”

Rachel groaned. “I should answer. They’ll know something’s wrong if I don’t.”

“Okay.” I slid the phone across the table to her. “But you be very careful about what you say.”

She nodded as she flipped the phone open and began typing. I moved behind her. You can never be too cautious.