LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance (17 page)

Lucien

“I didn’t steal anything!”

“I don’t care about that,” Ruben said, pushing me harder against the desk. “I want to know where my daughter is.”

“If I knew that, don’t you think I’d be there? Don’t you think I’d be with her?”

“No. I think you had her kidnapped so that we would change our thinking about what’s going on. But it’s backfiring on you now. Your own brother no longer believes you.”

I glanced over his shoulder, looking for Jacob, but he wasn’t there.

“Where did he go?”

That distracted Ruben enough that I was able to move around him. I grabbed the list of names Jacob had written and ran out the door, running to the stairwell ahead of the goons Ruben yelled at to follow me.

I had to find Adrienne. I had to prove that all of this had nothing to do with me. But first I had to figure out who it was about.

I ran down three flights of stairs and burst out onto the street, running until I reached my car. And then I was speeding toward the interstate, not quite sure where it was I was headed. Just away. As far from Ruben and his men as I could get.

I’d thought it was a good idea to turn to the people I trusted the most to find Adrienne. Now I was beginning to understand that I really couldn’t trust anyone.

I pulled to the side of the road not far from Rice University. There was a huge park and a bunch of young people still out despite the fact that it was getting late. It would be ten in an hour or so, the meeting time in Katy. But my guess was that meeting wouldn’t lead to any more information on Adrienne than we already had.

I turned on the dome light and studied the list Jacob had made, wondering what the hell all these random scribblings meant. I’d figured out part of his shorthand once, but it was long ago. I could just make out initials and random words here and there. Nothing that made any sense to me. Maybe they didn’t make sense to him, either. Maybe he hadn’t really written down the names the hotel manager had read to him.

Was Jacob behind this? Was Jacob working with whoever it was who had Adrienne?

Why would he accuse me of stealing code for the pancreas?

And then I remembered. Rachel.

Rachel wrote part of the code for the pancreas. She was upset with me when I told her that I wasn’t going to give her credit on the patent application. The thing was, I did give her credit. Her name was right there next to mine and Tito’s and the scientists who had helped us create it. I wasn’t one of those who tries to take all the credit to himself. I was honest. But I’d wanted to surprise her with it.

If I had shown her the original application, would we have avoided all this?

It made no sense to me. The reporter. The odd emails. And Adrienne.

None of it added up. The threats that weren’t really threats. Emails from my computer that seemed to be a setup to confuse Ruben and his team.

That’s what it all was, wasn’t it? Just a distraction.

But from what?

What was happening this week that someone was trying to distract me from? Not the pancreas. The patent had come through, but the FDA application was still weeks from approval. There was nothing else… But there was, wasn’t there?

Fuck! Why didn’t I see it sooner?

I gunned the car’s engine and turned it around, racing back to the office. I knew what was happening. I knew what he was doing. Why? Why would he do this to me, to the company? Was he that selfish?

I didn’t want to believe it. Maybe that was why it took me so long to see it. I love Jacob. He’s my brother. But maybe… Maybe it didn’t go both ways.

Self-centered, he’d said. My disease led to me believe I could get whatever I wanted. But I’d always thought it was the opposite. I’d always thought that my illness had made me more sensitive to other people. Maybe I was wrong.

I shouldn’t have missed this. And by missing it, I’d put Adrienne in danger.

If he hurt her…

Adrienne

“I’m supposed to take you back to the city.”

I was reading the text over her shoulder. It said exactly that.

Take the package to the roses.

“The roses?”

“It’s a code name for a bed and breakfast in Katy where Jacob and Lynn used to go all the time when they were dating. Lynn said it was the perfect place for a rendezvous because it was in the heart of the city, but in a place that’s sort of secluded, you know? It’s on one of those little side streets where people don’t go much.”

I took the phone and slid it into my jeans pocket.

“Let’s go.”

“But what am I going to tell them when they see you all dressed and free?”

“We’re not going to the bed and breakfast.”

“But—”

“Do you want to be arrested for kidnapping?”

Rachel immediately stopped arguing. I grabbed the keys off of the peg outside the pantry and led the way to the garage. It was a much different walk than it had been a few hours earlier when she brought me into the house. The garage was still dark, but I had a better idea of where I was going. Rachel climbed into the passenger seat without questioning me. She clearly understood that the tables had turned.

It would be more than an hour’s drive. More than long enough for Rachel to run through her story one last time.

But first…

I pulled the phone out of my pocket.

“Poppy, it’s me.”

The relief in his voice was so overwhelming that I nearly burst into tears myself.

“Where are you?”

“Safe. I’m on my way back to Houston.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“I told that man if you were hurt—”

“What man?”

“Lucien. I told him if he hurt you—”

“Lucien isn’t involved in all this, Poppy. But I think his brother might be.”

A heavy silence fell on the other end of the line. “Why?”

“I’m still working on that.” I glanced at Rachel. She was watching me, her face so pale she might have disappeared if she were leaning against the outside of the white van. As it was, she seemed to glow against the dark of the upholstered seat. “I’ll be in the city in roughly an hour. I’ll explain everything then.”

I disconnected the call and focused on Rachel. “Start talking. Tell me everything, even if it doesn’t seem important.”

I needed to figure this out as much for my own sanity as for Lucien’s safety.

Something in my gut told me this wasn’t the end of things.

Lucien

I went to the house because I knew he wouldn’t have done anything to hide the evidence this time. He knew I’d be occupied with other things. He assumed I wouldn’t put two and two together and come up with fourteen.

But here I was, dragging his computer out of his room and running it through its paces.

I remembered walking into my own kitchen and finding Adrienne going through Jacob’s computer, how outraged I’d felt at the sight. Jacob couldn’t possibly have done anything to hurt me, let alone the company. The pancreas was going to be the thing that would put our company over the top, financing all the other marvels of modern medicine we wanted to create. Jacob wouldn’t do anything to change that.

But he would. There was something else more important to him, something bigger than the pancreas was ever going to be. Something that would change life as we knew it. And he was on the verge of discovering how to make it work.

The proof was here. I just had to find it.

A distraction. Just a fucking distraction. And I’d played a role in it all. The perfect role, as it turned out. Adrienne was supposed to be a decoy, pretending to be my girlfriend. And then she was in my bed and I couldn’t think of anything else. I’d welcomed her there, brought her in on my own. And she’d proven to be the one distraction Jacob hadn’t planned on, but which was the best gift he could have given himself.

How could I be so blind to what was going on around me? How could I put Adrienne into that sort of danger?

I booted up the computer and bypassed the welcome screen, moving into the hidden files without so much as blinking an eye. I’d looked over Adrienne’s shoulder, seen a few folders on the home screen that seemed suspicious. But that was all just another distraction. Jacob knew what he was doing.

And there it was. Proof of what he was doing.

Contracts. Code. Specs.

He was stealing it all. Selling it to another company.

I could see what was going to happen. Jacob had decided that the drugs we were developing weren’t coming along fast enough to make money. And the few things we did have—the patents we’d purchased on other drugs, vitamins and other things, the pacemaker we already had on the market—weren’t making enough money to support the development of the new devices and drugs we were working on. The company was struggling. We’d discussed it months ago, the loans we were going to take out to make things better, to give us what we needed to make things stretch. But Jacob wasn’t going to wait.

He was going to sell all of our patents and walk away.

He was distracting me so that I wouldn’t see what he was up to. He was just waiting for the patent on the pancreas to come through. That was the cherry on top. He was getting billions of dollars for it all.

He was going to leave me high and dry with a failed company on my hands.

There were contracts for the whole thing. And the paperwork I’d signed last month giving me control over the company. He’d said it was for the loans. He’d said it was a safety measure. He’d said it didn’t mean anything.

But it did. When the patents were gone and we had nothing left to sell, I was going to be left holding the bag for millions of dollars in unpaid loans. It would ruin me.

I couldn’t let this happen.

I dug through the paperwork, wondering how he was getting around my name on most of the patents. And then I remembered the power of attorney I’d signed when I first went to work at the company. He was using it to make the sales. And it was all such a joke, the way he played me. Hand me some paperwork, tell me it meant nothing, get me to sign it. Then he had the power to screw me over so royally I would never have survived the fallout. There would have been lawsuits from vendors, from our employees. There would be… It was so massive that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what all this would do to me, to the company, to the people who worked there. To the people we’d vowed to help.

How long had he been planning this?

“Fuck me!”

“Yes, that was it exactly.”

Every muscle in my body went rigid. I sat still, afraid if I moved I would do something I would forever regret. I felt him come up behind me and watched as his hands moved around me, picking up the computer from the counter in front of me.

“I knew you would put it together if given enough time. That’s why I had to distract you.”

“You made it look like you were the one who wrote the emails.”

“I didn’t realize you’d hired an investigator. I really do think you should have told me about that one before you did it.”

“Don’t you think I was capable of tracing them?”

“Oh, sure. I was hoping you would. But I thought it would take you longer. Again, I didn’t think you would hire an investigator.”

“You were trying to keep me busy.”

“Exactly. The deal took longer than expected. And your investigator traced the emails so quickly. If not for that sweet little piece of ass you were screwing, you probably would have figured everything out days ago.”

I grabbed the front of his shirt without thinking about it, shoving him between me and the bar, his computer slipping from his fingers and crashing against the tile floor.

“You’ll have to pay for that,” Jacob said, his voice low. A growl. And then he laughed. “Wait. You already have.”

“Why, Jacob? Why are you doing this?”

“Why?” Pure hatred filled his eyes as he studied me. “Because I was the sole heir to my father’s billions. And then he meets your mother and brings you into the mix. And then Rachel. And, suddenly, I’m no longer the sun and the moon. I’m suddenly just the mistake that came from a marriage he’d never really wanted in the first place.”

I pushed him hard against the counter even as a wave of dizziness suddenly washed over me. I was sweating, had been for a while now, but I hadn’t really noticed. And then my CGM began to buzz in my pocket.

“You’re my brother.”

“No. You’re my stepbrother. There is a big difference.”

“You…you… What about Rachel?”

“Rachel will be taken care of. The help she offered in this whole game was invaluable.”

“Rachel…” My head was really spinning, and I could actually feel the strength seeping out of my arms. I knew I was going low. I knew the symptoms better than I knew the lines of my own face in a mirror. But I couldn’t let diabetes beat me now. “Rachel’s just a kid.”

“Yes, well, that kid managed to get the drop on your girlfriend and snatch her out of the hotel without you being any the wiser.”

“Rachel has Adrienne?”

“Yeah. Surprised me too. I thought she’d screw things up. Thought she’d get caught and you would be tied up at the police station in San Antonio until tomorrow. But, well, you can’t pan for every situation, can you?”

“You put her up to that?” I asked, aware that my words were beginning to slur.

Jacob pressed a hand to my chest and gave a simple shove. I fell back, landing hard on my ass. He laughed again.

“Feeling a little ill, brother? You might want to check your pump. Those things are so easy to hack, a fatal flaw you might want to look into the next time you design one. If you survive this little trip.”

I pushed myself up on my elbows, the effort more than it really should have been. I was out of breath, the world spinning and my stomach turning on itself.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. Just had your pump empty the contents of the reservoir into you. I figure if you changed your infusion set last night like you were supposed to, that that would be about…what? A hundred units? Two hundred? Enough to put down an elephant, anyway.”

He reached down and started digging through my pants. He tugged my cellphone out and slid it into his own pocket.

“I didn’t want it to come to this, Lucien. I would have preferred to sit back and watch you deal with the financial ruin of the business. But you wouldn’t back off. I had no choice.” He put his foot on my shoulder and pushed me down to the floor. “You should have kept your nose out of it.”

“You won’t get away with this.”

He stared at me a long minute.

“I know you’re trying to say something,” he said, “but I have no idea what it is.”

And then he laughed as he walked off. A moment later I heard the door slam.

Shit, shit, shit!

I tugged at my shirt. My hands weren’t working properly, so it took twice as long as it should have. I tugged for what seemed like forever. My fingers brushed the tubing of my infusion set. I wrapped it around my fingers and pulled. I felt the pain, so I knew it came free. But I had no idea when Jacob had hacked the insulin pump or how much of the reservoir had been deposited into my body. He was right that I’d changed the infusion set recently. But it was in the morning, so there would have been…I wasn’t sure how much insulin in the reservoir, but not as much as he thought. Maybe a hundred and fifty units. Enough to kill me. But if not all of it was delivered…

I had to get into the kitchen, had to drink like a gallon of juice. I had to do something to counteract the effects of the insulin. I had to bring my blood sugars back up.

I had to…had to…