LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance (10 page)

Adrienne

I spent half the night pacing the floor of my living room, an Audrey Hepburn movie playing on the television behind me. I kept rolling the facts through my mind, trying to figure out what was going on. I listed the facts as we knew them one by one:

1. A reporter called Lucien asking about the artificial pancreas, even though there were only six people, other than those in the patent offices, who knew about it.
   
2. He received an email on his office computer that implied bodily harm.
   
3. He received another email while in Kemah that implied a threat.
   
4. His brother received an email telling him to rein Lucien in.
   

Those were the facts. But they didn’t seem to add up to anything.

One of the emails mentioned the artificial pancreas. The others didn’t. The others implied that the writer knew Lucien had gone to my dad’s PI firm. At least, that’s what I got out of it. But who could know that? And how? And how did the reporter find out about it?

Maybe that was where I should start. Maybe I needed to go back to the beginning.

But when I looked her up from the phone records Robert had gotten when we first took the case, the address turned out to be a hair salon. I called the number she’d called from, but it was no longer in service.

“Who would want to hurt you?”

Lucien looked up from his computer, his eyes not really focusing on me at first.

“What do you mean?”

I’d been sitting on the couch in his office for more than an hour, flipping through a magazine without actually reading any of the articles. My dad had told me to just keep watching him, that they’d work on the who and the why. But I just couldn’t let it go.

“Who would want to make threats against you? Who would want to distract you from your work or make you angry with Jacob?”

“I don’t know. The only person I could think of is Lynn.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s let the drugs drive her crazy.”

“My dad’s checking her out. But he doesn’t think it’s her.”

“What about my computer? Have you figured out if someone’s breaking into my office?”

“Robert has the security footage from the camera out in the hallway, but he doesn’t think anyone was actually coming into the office. He thinks if it’s someone other than you, they were doing it remotely.”

Lucien shook his head. “The whole thing’s pretty insane.”

He turned back to his computer, returning to whatever it was he sat there and worked on all day. I turned back to my magazine, but I was so bored that I was beginning to go stir crazy. Jaime came into the room, shooting me a dirty look before dropping a couple of file folders onto Lucien’s desk.

“Jacob asked me to remind you that you have a meeting at two.”

“Thanks, Jaime,” he said without even looking up.

The moment she was gone, I stood. “I’m gonna go.”

“Aren’t you supposed to hang out with me all day?”

“You’re safe as long as you’re inside this building. Call me if you get worried.”

He came around his desk and pulled me against his chest. “What about tonight?”

“What about it?”

“Can I take you out? A nice dinner, maybe?”

“Like a date?”

“Why not?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Meet me back here about five.”

I rose up on my tiptoes and kissed him lightly. “I’ll see you then.”

I left, but I didn’t go far. I’d set a little camera up on a low shelf in Lucien’s office while he was off at a meeting this morning. I just hung around long enough to see if he would notice it, but he didn’t. I curled up in the front seat of my car and watched the feed, smiling as Lucien settled back down behind his desk, completely unaware that he was being watched.

Robert had accessed the webcam on Lucien’s desk, but he hadn’t thought of this. This camera wouldn’t just show us who was staring at the computer monitor. It would show us who was coming and going through the room all day long. That might tell us more, if whoever was doing this wasn’t smart enough for a remote log in, but too smart to sit where the webcam could pick them up.

I could do more than just teach rich, complacent CEOs a few self-defense moves.

Lucien

“Come to the house for dinner.”

I sat back and turned to look out the window. “Mom, I have a date with Adrienne tonight.”

“Bring her with you.”

“We were kind of hoping to have a little time alone.”

“Rachel’s refusing to even consider returning to college. She says that she doesn’t need a college education because of the trust fund Karl set up for her. You have to make her understand that she can’t live her life just surfing on her father’s money. She needs to be able to take care of herself if the money suddenly disappears.”

“If she won’t listen to you, what makes you think she’ll listen to me?”

“I hear Adrienne had a brilliant idea on how to make her go back to school.”

“Jacob told you that?”

“He actually calls me from time to time.”

“I just saw you two days ago!”

“That was two days ago.”

I laughed even though it really wasn’t funny. I was a grown man, twenty-six years old, and she still treated me like I was a child.

“What about the Andersons? Didn’t you say the Andersons were coming to the house this week?”

“Tonight.”

I groaned. “So your real motive is to get me in the same room with Cindy Anderson, right?”

“What harm would it do?”

Cindy Anderson was a friend of my mother’s from the days when she was still married to my father. She was a secretary at Karl’s oil company who happened to marry one of his vice-presidents or something. I don’t remember for sure what her husband did at the company, but he’d quit long ago to start his own real estate company. Long story short, Cindy wasn’t much older than my mother, maybe forty-eight, but she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. My mother thought she would be an ideal candidate for the trials we were going to start soon. I kept telling her that I wasn’t in charge of that, or even had anything to do with it. She’d be better off talking to Jacob or, better still, one of the FDA officials who was helping design the protocol for the human trials. But she wanted me to meet her.

“You know I can’t do anything for her.”

“But you can see the face of someone who will be helped by your work.”

“It’s not my work, Mom. It’s Jacob’s.”

“It’s all the same thing, isn’t it?”

I started to argue with her, but then something she’d said opened a door I hadn’t realized was inside my head. It was all the same. A lot of people outside of the company, and a few inside, didn’t understand that I had nothing to do with the drug side of the business. I didn’t have a biomedical engineering degree. I was a computer guy. I knew how to develop an app, knew how to manipulate computer code. I knew my way around the brain of a device. But I knew absolutely nothing about the drugs our company produced.

But not everyone knew that.

“I have to go, Mom.”

I hung up the phone and pulled up a folder on my computer. Inside were dozens of emails I’d gotten since I began working with Jacob. Some were from people asking to be a part of our drug trials. Others were from family members requesting that their loved one be allowed access to the drugs we were rumored to be developing, even though drug trials had yet to begin. Others were thank you letters, or requests for changes to our apps and computer software. It was a file where I dumped just about anything that was from a customer or potential customer, things I read but rarely responded to or felt needed added attention. There was a lot in this file.

What if something in it came from whoever was playing these games with me?

I spent a good part of the afternoon rereading the emails in that file. I made a list of the ones that seemed somewhat threatening or in which someone mentioned a family member who had died because our drugs didn’t come to market soon enough. The words in some of these emails pulled at my heartstrings, reminded me why I’d wanted to go into this business in the first place. But others… It was amazing what grief would push a person to do or say.

When I was done, I sent the emails to Ruben Garcia as an attachment in an email explaining what they were. Just as I pushed the button, Jaime stuck her head through the door.

“Time for that meeting.”

Adrienne was waiting in my office when I came back from my meeting, a garment bag hanging over the back of one of the chairs at the conference table. She was wearing jeans that hugged her ass perfectly and a thin t-shirt that did very little to hide the black and red bra underneath.

“Your dad lets you go out in public like that?”

“I’m twenty-three. I do what I want to do.”

“I’m not sure I would be that brave if I had a father like yours.”

“I’m not sure you should be doing a lot of the things you do with a father like mine.” She moved up against me, reaching up on her tip toes to place a kiss on my bottom lip. “If he had any idea what we’ve been doing…”

“We won’t tell him, right?”

She just smiled as she turned and walked back over to the magazine she’d been reading when I walked in.

“That must be a fascinating magazine.”

She shrugged.

I went over to the couch and collapsed beside her. She immediately snuggled back against me, a contented sigh slipping from her lips.

“We’re having dinner at my parents’.”

“What? I thought we were having a proper date.”

“Yeah, well, my mom pulled that card. You know, the you-left-our-weekend-early-so-you-owe-me card.”

She groaned. “At least I brought a proper dress.”

“You left your suitcase at my house. There’s a dress in there, too.”

“All wrinkled by now, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, but it would probably still look good on you.”

“There you go again, dropping the compliments.”

“Have you looked in a mirror? You don’t need me telling you what is so obvious.”

She just shook her head. “You’re delusional.”

“You wait. When I finally do take you out on a proper date, every man in the room is going to wish he was me. Just wait.”

She shook her head again, but there was a lovely blush on her cheeks. I liked to make her blush.

Adrienne

They lived in a house that would probably hold my apartment a dozen times over. It looked like a hotel, like one of those massive estates from television shows, like the abbey on
Downton Abbey.
I couldn’t stop staring out the window as Lucien drove up the circle drive, my eyes growing wider and wider as I took more and more of it in. Massive house, massive pillars out front, massive balconies, massive grounds. It was like a museum piece.

Elizabeth was all smiles as we walked past the butler into the entryway.

“Welcome,” she said, leaning in to kiss my cheek lightly. “I’m so glad to see you again.”

She turned to Lucien. “Thank you. I’m sorry I usurped your plans.”

“I’m sure you are,” he said, making me want to hit him. He should respect his mother a little more than that.

Karl was in the living room entertaining another couple about Elizabeth’s age. The woman looked up and smiled widely.

“Well, Lucien. Don’t you look well.”

Lucien bent to kiss her cheek. “Cindy.”

The woman’s eyes moved to me. “And this would be Kelly?”

“No, Cindy,” her husband said. “Remember I told you? Lucien and Kelly broke up several years ago.”

“Oh, of course.” She smiled, but there was confusion in her expression as she continued to stare at me.

“Adrienne,” I said, smiling as warmly as I could muster.

“Adrienne? That’s a lovely name,” she said.

“I’m Tom,” the man said, holding out a hand to me.

I shook it, smiling at him, too. Lucien pulled me close against him. “Want a drink?” I nodded enthusiastically.

We settled there in the living room, and talk centered mostly around the roses we could barely see outside the back doors. Cindy seemed to think they were quite beautiful, oohing and ahhing over them like the sun was shining right down and they were glowing with a bright aura. I didn’t understand why everyone was letting her babble that way. She was making a bit of a fool out of herself.

When we went into the dining room, Lucien slid his arm through mine and pulled me back a little, letting the other two couples lead the way.

“She’s got early onset Alzheimer’s,” he said near my ear.

“Oh. Wow. Really?”

He nodded. “Her husband wants her to be included in the trials of our new drug when they become a reality. But I have no control over that. Not even Jacob had any control over it. It’s all regulated by the FDA. But she’s an old friend of my mom’s…”

“She’s hoping you can break some rule or something.”

“Yeah.”

“Does that happen a lot? People asking for special treatment?”

“Yeah, actually, it does. I sent your father a bunch of emails I’ve gotten over the years that might have something to do with what’s going on.”

“That’s good.”

He slid his arm around my waist and guided me the rest of the way into the dining room. His mother looked at me as we came into view, her eyes full of something that was like understanding, but not quite. I couldn’t quite decide if she liked me or not. I wanted her to. I wanted the whole family to like me. I especially wanted Lucien to like me.

And that frightened me.

“Where’s Rachel?” Lucien asked as he helped me into my chair.

“She’s resting,” Karl said. “She has a headache.”

“Convenient,” Lucien said, shooting his mother a look. She shrugged, clearly not bothered by whatever it was going on between the two of them.

He sat beside me and slid his hand over my thigh. I suddenly felt as though I was caught in the middle of something I didn’t want to be caught in.

I could see the way Tom was helping Cindy now, the way he had to show her which utensil to use for her food, which glass was hers to drink from. She seemed to remember who everyone was, but keeping her knife out of her hands was an ongoing task for Tom. It hurt me to watch her, thinking of how awful it would be to lose your memory in such unpredictable and humiliating ways.

“Your mother says your company is getting ready to run a trail on a new Alzheimer’s drug,” Tom said to Lucien as the salad course was served.

“We are.”

“She says it’s promising.”

Lucien inclined his head. “That side of the business is really Jacob’s department.”

“But you’ve filed for FDA approval to move to human trials.”

“We have. We expect to begin within the next six months.”

“Then the drug must be close to market ready.”

I watched the clouds move over Lucien’s face even as his eyes darted toward his mother briefly. This was what he was talking about earlier, I guessed, patients and their families wanting special treatment in the trials.

Lucien handled it with grace, though.

“We’re doing the best we can to get the medications patients need to the market as quickly as possible. We want to see people benefit from the latest advancements. But there are rules set forth by the FDA that we must follow. I’m sure you understand that.”

Tom looked disappointed, but he agreed.

“We can’t break the rules, I suppose. Then there would be mayhem everywhere.”

Lucien reached under the table for my hand, squeezing it as Karl asked Tom about his golf game. Subject changed. Crisis averted. But that dark cloud of disappointment still lingered.

Halfway through dinner, my cellphone buzzed.

I know who you are,
a text from an unavailable number read.
I can find you whenever I wish.

The words seemed chilling. I glanced at Lucien, but he was listening closely to something Karl was telling him, not really paying attention to me.

Who is this?
I texted back.

You’ll find out soon enough if you don’t back down.

How?

There was no response.

I took a screen shot and sent it to Robert.

I’ll take care of it,
was his quick response.

This situation was beginning to creep me out a little. It seemed benign on the surface, but sometimes it was the most benign situations that got out of control very quickly.

“Take me home,” I whispered into Lucien’s ear.

He nodded without asking why.