LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance

by Glenna Sinclair

  “You stay at the same hotel every time you go to San Antonio.”

  I nodded slowly, my thoughts moving a thousand miles a second. “What if the person who did this, what if they figured out where I was going and checked in before us?”

  Jacob just nodded, but the line must have been picked up on the other side, because he began speaking.

  “Yes, this is Detective Wallace from the Houston police department. We’re looking for a suspect in a robbery. I was wondering if you would be willing to give me a list of your guests who checked in between ten o’clock and six on Monday night, Tuesday morning.”

  He listened a moment, said something about getting a warrant, and then he gestured for a pen. When I handed it to him, he began to write quickly in this shorthand that I’ve always teased Jacob for using. It’s not a sort of shorthand that anyone else can read. It’s something he devised himself in high school that he’s never explained to anyone. He wrote quickly then thanked whoever was on the other end of the line.

  He didn’t speak immediately.

  That told me more than any words he could have spoken.

  Chapter 32

  Adrienne

  She came back a little less than an hour later.

  “This isn’t about the Alzheimer’s drug?”

  She ignored me in favor of cleaning up the rest of the oatmeal mess she’d left behind before.

  “What is it that you want? Why are you doing this?”

  “We have our reasons.”

  “You have a reason for torturing your own brother?”

  She stiffened, all movement ceasing. But then she just started cleaning again.

  “Rachel, I know it’s you. And if I know, I’m sure Lucien is figuring it out right now. Lucien and Jacob.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You followed us to San Antonio. You followed us on the Riverwalk. You were even on the elevator with us, weren’t you?”

  Again she stiffened, but she didn’t stop working. She cleaned those cans until the labels were moist and beginning to flake off.

  “Do you really think Lucien won’t think back on every moment of time we spent there and realize that was you? If he hadn’t been so focused on me, he probably would have realized it at the time.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “But he will. What will you do then?”

  “By then, we’ll have what we want.”

  “You’re his sister. Do you think he’ll understand?”

  She turned and looked at me, slowly tugging the mask off of her face. Her eyes were wide and red, as though she’d been crying.

  “He did this. We asked him over and over…”

  “Asked him what?”

  She shook her head. “I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

  “Then let me go. Let me call Lucien. We can work something out.”

  She shook her head. “It’s too late for that. He’s got your father involved.”

  “I can handle my dad.”

  She just shook her head again even as tears began to spill over her cheeks. “Things were supposed to be so simple. We send a couple of emails, shake him up a little. And then he would do what we wanted. But it wasn’t that simple. And now—”

  “Let me go, Rachel. Let me fix this.”

  “How are you going to fix it?”

  That was a good question. I didn’t know.

  “I can talk to Lucien.”

  “We’ve talked and talked. He’s not talking back.” She stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest. “You don’t understand what he’s done.”

  “Then tell me.”

  She studied my face for a long minute; then she just shook her head. “There’s no point in talking anymore. We all understand that now. You should, too.”

  “Maybe if I knew what was going on,” I said, dipping my head in what I hoped was a defeated look. But I wasn’t defeated. Another pull and—

  “I should go,” Rachel said. “I’m not supposed to be in here.”

  She turned just as my wrist came free of the cable tie holding it in place. I jumped to my feet, kicking at the chair until it fell over and my ankles came free from the bottom of the chair legs. I rushed Rachel, grabbing her shirt just as she was about to slip out the door.

  Rachel cried out as she fell back. I moved around her and slipped out the door, pulling it shut. It locked automatically, just as I’d suspected, and she was trapped inside. She immediately began banging against the door, screaming for me to open it, but I wouldn’t have known how even if I’d wanted to.

  I was standing in a well-outfitted kitchen that I knew almost instantly. Stupid girl had brought me to her parents’ beach house. That’s how I’d known it was her. I’d recognized it when she brought me inside.

  I went to the sink and ran cool water over my raw wrists. It burned, forcing me to close my eyes and whisper a few unkind words. I was bleeding pretty good from where the cable ties had bitten into my flesh. Nothing so bad that I would need stitches, but it would be pretty sore for a couple of days. I found a couple of towels in a nearby drawer and wrapped them around my wrists. Then I searched the cabinets for some sort of bandage, but couldn’t find anything.

  I walked cautiously through the kitchen into the long, open living room. I didn’t think there was anyone else here, but thought I’d be better off safe than sorry. I pulled the blinds in the living room, blocking the dim moonlight coming in through the French doors and long, beautiful windows on either side of the room. Then down the hall, peeking inside each of the four bedrooms. Then the master.

  Nothing.

  I slipped into the room I’d shared with Lucien on our visit here this past weekend. He had a first aid kit in a drawer there. I fixed my wrists and removed the cable ties on my ankles with a pair of scissors in another drawer. Then, down the hall to the master bedroom, I searched through a few dresser drawers and found a pair of jeans that weren’t too terribly large for me. A belt could do wonders.

  A pair of shoes and a light jacket, and I felt more like myself.

  Now…what the hell was going on? And who the fuck was ‘we’?

  Chapter 33

  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?

  Chapter 34

  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 the
re 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.