LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance

by Glenna Sinclair

  “There’s no shame in wanting what you want.”

  She bit her lip, her eyes falling again.

  I lifted her chin again. “Tell me you want me.”

  She blushed. “I don’t even know you. This is insane. It’s not what I—”

  “Tell me you want me.”

  Her eyes came up to mine, tears making them darker.

  “I want you.”

  It was a whisper, but it was the truth. I could see it in her eyes, feel it in her hand as she pressed it against my navel and let it move downward, move closer and closer to what I needed. I closed my eyes and sighed as she wrapped that little hand around my shaft, using the water from the shower as a lubricant of sorts. The memory of last night and the feel of her touch was almost too much. I bent low and grasped her thighs, lifting her up, pinning her against the wall as she guided me to her much the same way she had last night.

  The urgency was lessened, but the need was just the same. Her arms snaked around my neck, giving her leverage as she responded to my slow thrusts. And then our mouths found one another again, dancing a new but familiar dance. We clung together, taking our time in a way we hadn’t last night. But it built to the same crescendo, took us on the same ride. I felt her thighs quiver seconds before she tossed her head back and cried out, the sound like the first music to ever fall on deaf ears.

  She had this power over me. Every time I thought I was in control, she managed to make me lose it. If I had known what this would be like, I might have thought twice when Ruben showed me her picture and assured me she would take care of my problem. It would be simple. And we’d have a little fun along the way. But this… What had I gotten myself into?

  I lost myself. I exploded inside of her, my thoughts already rushing ahead to the next time.

  We finished our shower in silence. There didn’t seem to be a need for words.

  I heard her phone ring as I joined her in the bedroom after shaving, watched her cross the room in just bra and panties. She spoke low, her words a mixture of English and Spanish as she spoke in a hurry to whoever was on the other end of the line. When she hung up, she just stood there, tension making her tiny shoulders stiff.

  “What?”

  She turned, her eyes moving over my face as though she were trying to figure out how to say something she really didn’t want to say.

  “What?” I repeated.

  “Robert, one of the tech guys who works for my father, traced the IP address of the origin of that email you got yesterday.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  She cocked her head, her light blue eyes shifting around the room as though she were suddenly concerned that we could be overheard.

  “What is it?”

  She shook her head, crossing to her suitcase and snatching a light summer dress out of it. She seemed to feel more confident once she pulled it over her head. She turned and studied me, her hands on her hips.

  “Spit it out, Adrienne. Are you always this difficult, or is it just something about me?”

  Anger flashed in her eyes. “The email came from a computer belonging to Jacob.”

  “Well, fuck,” I muttered.

  That was exactly what I’d been afraid she’d say.

  Chapter 10

  Adrienne

  There was one thing I should have been thinking about, but I couldn’t seem to get myself to focus. My dress was too long, brushing against my ankles in a way that kept me thinking I had a bug crawling over my feet or something. And it seemed odd having so much cleavage hanging out. Where were my vintage t-shirts and old sweatshirts? Why was I wearing a damn dress on the beach, anyway?

  And then there was Lucien. His fingers were intertwined with mine, and I felt him tug me close to him from time to time, felt his breath against my throat whenever he spoke close to my ear. It made my nerves come alive, made me want to turn to him and welcome a kiss. What had he done to me, that I suddenly craved his touch? Two days ago I had no idea who this guy was. My dad shows me a picture and tells me I’m supposed to pretend to be this guy’s girlfriend. When did that become something more than just a show in front of his family and coworkers?

  Speaking of family, his sister and brother were walking ahead of us, their arms around each other as though they were making fun of the way Lucien couldn’t seem to bear to move more than a few feet from my side.

  We were walking on the boardwalk in Kemah, not far from their parents’ beach house. The town was having some sort of fair that had spilled over here. Rachel, Lucien’s sister, wanted to play the carnival games they had set up over here. Somehow we were talked into coming too. At least it meant I wouldn’t have to don the bikini Lucien had warned me to bring.

  I wasn’t this girl. I didn’t go for long walks on the beach. I didn’t spend my leisure time with people who have lived in an entirely different economic bracket all their lives. I was the girl who joined the Army instead of going to college, the girl who grew up with the hardnosed robbery-detective-turned-private-investigator. I was the girl who wore jeans to work and spent her leisure time—when there was any—watching old movies on a twenty-seven-inch console television.

  I was here because Lucien was a job. I was supposed to be figuring out who wanted to steal a medical device his company was trying to get patented. I wasn’t supposed to be thinking the thoughts I was thinking, or remembering how good it had felt to be with him last night. Or this morning.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  “You don’t really think he’s behind all this, do you?”

  I glanced at Lucien. He was watching his brother up ahead of us talking animatedly to Rachel.

  “I don’t know. I find it hard to believe he’d be willing to do something to hurt his own company.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “But the email threatening you came from his computer.”

  Lucien stopped walking, pulling me toward him as he did, forcing other people who were trying to get to the carnival games to move around us like a river flowing around a fallen boulder.

  “I’m sure you know as well as I do that someone knowledgeable with computers can mask their IP address.”

  “I know.”

  “Someone could have set him up.”

  “I know that, too.”

  He studied me, his blue eyes, already such a deeper blue than mine were, even darker with the emotion rushing through them.

  “I can’t make myself believe that Jacob would have anything to do with selling the prototype of the artificial pancreas.”

  “Listen,” I said, moving closer to him so that our voices didn’t carry so much. “I know that you’re upset. But my father and our team are working on it. If it’s someone trying to set Jacob up, we’ll know pretty quick.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we go from there. But, for right now, we just keep going the way we’re going.”

  Lucien glanced ahead of us, looking for Jacob. We’d lost them in the crowd, but they couldn’t have gotten far. His eyes fell back on mine, and he touched my chin with the pad of his thumb. It was a gentle caress, almost a friendly touch. But there was so much more behind it than that. I wanted to move into his arms, wanted to feel the reassuring warmth of his body despite the late winter warmth of the south Texas sun, but I reminded myself that this was just another case. I was letting myself get carried away with the fact that he was so incredibly handsome and so different from any man I’d ever known before. And his touch… Damn, I was doing it again! I was letting my mind go to where it had been last night, and that was too dangerous.

  I had to focus.

  “Lucien!”

  Rachel was running toward us, high color on her cheeks. She grabbed his arm, pulling his hand away from my face.

  “Come throw softballs with me!”

  She was laughing as she dragged him away. He glanced back at me, a touch of longing in his eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said, waving a hand to indicate h
e had no control over his life.

  “She’s still such a child in so many ways,” Jacob said as he came up alongside me. “And he was always her favorite playmate.”

  “It must be nice having a little sister.”

  “Only child?”

  I never really knew how to answer questions like that. I wasn’t always an only child. I had a little sister once. She was five years younger than me, a pest I wanted to go away, until she did. Until the night she and my mother ran to the store and never came home.

  “Yeah,” I said, because I really didn’t see the point in getting into the whole story.

  “Sometimes I think I might have preferred to remain an only child. And others I realize that I would have missed out on too much if my father had never met Elizabeth and Lucien.”

  I’d thought about what it would be like if my father had ever gotten remarried. I knew he dated some, knew that he came close once. She was a waitress at his favorite diner downtown a block or two from his old precinct. He thought I didn’t know about it, but I did. I saw the little hand touches, the long looks. I don’t know what happened, why they broke up. I worried when I went into the Army that he would be left all alone. I still worry.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” Jacob said.

  I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. You were just looking out for your brother.”

  “I was. And that’s not what I’m apologizing for.” He tilted his head slightly as he studied me in the bright sunshine. “I’m just sorry that I went about it a little clumsily.”

  “You and Lucien are pretty close.”

  “Yeah.” He dragged his fingers through his short, dull brown hair. “Working together day in and day out does that.”

  “Were you close before you started working at Callahan Biomedical?”

  “I don’t know. Not as close as we should have been, I suppose. I went off to college almost as soon as he and Elizabeth moved into the house. Then I got married, went to graduate school. My life was elsewhere.”

  “Your wife. She was your college sweetheart?”

  He nodded, taking my elbow and beginning a slow walk toward the end of the boardwalk, where Rachel and Lucien were laughing as they failed to win a stuffed animal.

  “We met at UT Austin and moved on to Stanford together.”

  “Lucien said you separated a couple of months ago.”

  “We did.”

  “Can I ask what went wrong?”

  Jacob was quiet for a moment. We walked a slow pace together, side by side. The crowd had lessened a little, and we were in one of those pockets of quiet that sometimes happen in a large crowd. I wasn’t sure he would answer me, but then he sighed.

  “It was pretty typical, I suppose. I wanted children. She didn’t. She got tired of arguing about it, so she asked me to leave.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Like I said, pretty typical. I guess we should have had the children talk before we got married.”

  I found myself watching Lucien, thinking he would make gorgeous babies someday. And then I wondered why in the hell I was thinking that. I mean, he was beautiful. That golden blond hair and those blue eyes… Shit, what was wrong with me?

  “You okay?” Jacob asked, pulling my attention back to him. “You went pale there for a second.”

  “Yeah. Must be the heat.”

  He glanced up at the sun, squinting as he did. Then he glanced at Lucien and Rachel, smiling at the screaming curses and hoots of laughter.

  “They enjoy each other too much.”

  “It must be interesting, running a biomedical company.”

  Jacob shrugged. He tugged me over to a bench that was a few dozen yards from where the games were situated and the worst of the crowd lingered.

  “Lucien showed me around yesterday. It’s pretty impressive, some of the things you guys are doing there.”

  “Most of what we have on the market now or ready to go public is Lucien’s doing. He’s the brains behind the medical devices and the apps.”

  “He told me you have some drugs on the market already.”

  “Most of those are patents we bought from other companies. The drugs we have in development will take at least ten more years before they’re ready to be sold to the general public.”

  “He told me that most of your ongoing projects are highly secretive because of the nature of the business.”

  “True. Anyone in our line of work would have to worry about corporate espionage.”

  “Do you? Has anyone ever tried to steal one of your projects before?”

  “No. Our security it pretty tight. I’m sure you noticed that when you were there the other day.”

  I nodded, thinking about the security guard at the front desk and the card reader in the elevator that dictated which floors the rider was allowed to travel to. Their security was fairly impressive. As a security expert, I could have tweaked it a little, but not much. And that was saying a lot.

  “No one has ever made threats against you before?”

  “Oh, we’ve all had minor threats. The occasional email or phone call. But nothing to worry about. Though I know Lucien worries about his big projects. He has one in the works right now that he’s really concerned about. But it’s just paranoia on his part.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” He touched my knee lightly. “My biggest concern for Lucien right now is that I can see the way he looks at you. He really likes you.”

  I blushed, a blush that was completely genuine and not as made up as it should have been.

  “Like I said last night, he’s had his heart broken. I’d hate to see it happen again.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Lucien came over then, sliding onto the bench behind me and wrapping his arms around my waist.

  “Hey,” he said, kissing my neck roughly. Almost possessively.

  “God, you two make me sick,” Rachel said as she came breathlessly up behind Jacob. “Get a room!”

  “We had a room, but you dragged us out here,” Lucien told her. “So live with it.”

  I laughed, because the look on Rachel’s face was priceless. It was a cross between horrified and deeply amused. Jacob laughed too. I think that was the first time I’d ever seen him relaxed enough to laugh. As much as he seemed unwilling to admit it, he did adore his siblings. And that made me lean toward Lucien’s gut instinct. I didn’t think Jacob could make threats against his brother, let alone follow through on them. Whoever sent that email threatening Lucien for talking to someone—who, I wasn’t sure—and telling him to accept that the prototype to his artificial pancreas was compromised had to be someone else, someone close to the company. Maybe even a member of the development team. But it wasn’t Jacob.

  “Come on,” Lucien said, pulling me off the bench. “Let’s go play.”

  Chapter 11

  Lucien

  My cellphone buzzed. I had so many devices in my pockets that I almost forgot which one I’d shoved the damn phone into. I finally wrapped my fingers around it just as Jacob jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow.

  “You better watch out for that one,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward Adrienne. She was playing one of those games where you have to shoot a target dead three times to win a prize. So far, Adrienne had gotten two out of three. And, as we watched, she got the third.

  Rachel screamed and threw her arms around Adrienne. Poor Adrienne didn’t seem to know what to do with my sister’s enthusiasm. She just stood there for a minute, her arms stiff at her sides. But then she slowly slid her arms around Rachel and hugged her back.

  I nodded, feeling like I should flash her a thumbs up sign or something.

  And then I remembered my phone.

  I stepped back a little and turned on the screen. There was an email notification from an address I didn’t recognize.

  Looking forward to that patent? Think things are going your way? Think again.

  Cold fingers began to dance the le
ngth of my spine. I turned. Adrienne was watching me, and I could tell by the expression in her eyes that she knew something was wrong. She said something to Rachel, then came to where I was standing.

  “What?” she asked softly.

  I handed her the phone, aware that we were drawing attention from both Jacob and Rachel. In fact, Jacob moved up behind her just as she darkened the phone’s screen and handed it back to me.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just going a little low. I think we should head back to the house.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  Using the diabetes card could be convenient sometimes.

  We walked back down the boardwalk toward the parking lot where we’d left the Jeep that belonged to our parents’ beach house. Rachel talked the whole way, gushing about Adrienne’s shooting skills. I glanced at her.

  “That was pretty impressive.”

  “Army sharp shooter training.”

  She said it with such a straight face that I almost believed she was joking. But then, I knew more about her background than either Rachel or Jacob, so I knew she wasn’t trying to pull our legs.

  “No fucking way!” Rachel said, clapping a hand over her mouth the moment the words were out.

  Jacob shoved her to the side a little. “Watch it, little sister!”

  “Sorry, but, seriously?”

  Adrienne nodded.

  “You were in the Army?”

  “Served a tour in Afghanistan.”

  Now I was impressed. That information explained so much about her that it felt like a dozen puzzle pieces were suddenly falling into place. I took her hand and squeezed gently. She glanced at me, her eyes guarded, as though she were afraid I might look at her differently now, or something. I guess we both had our insecurities.

  I tugged her in front of me and wrapped my arms around her.

  “You’re a badass,” I whispered against her ear.

  She laughed, twisting in my arms and stealing a kiss.

  Rachel wouldn’t let it go, asking Adrienne a million questions as Jacob guided the Jeep over the sandy streets back to the house. Adrienne tried to answer them all, revealing that she had spent time in Germany as well as Afghanistan, but Rachel was so curious that she was asking question on top of question, never waiting for a full answer before asking the next question.