“Don’t worry about that. Cora of all people understands what it’s like to be held captive by the man you love,” he says, which is not really an answer.
I frown into the phone. “Logan isn’t holding me captive.”
“Isn’t he?”
“All right, sorta. But...he isn’t holding me against my will.” Not really. Not any more. “He didn’t capture me. He saved me.”
There’s a long silence where he digests my words, and I feel relief at the life I escaped. I’m not CEO of my father’s company anymore, and so much has changed, but at least I’m living life on my terms.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better. It’s one day at a time. Tell me more about your new spa.” He happily changes the subject and we chat easily for a few more minutes. He jokes a few more times about planning my wedding as the “event of a lifetime.”
I end the call and droop against my pillows, wondering if I can borrow his certainty about my future. There’s no way I can marry Logan when I know I’m dying. I won’t shackle him to me, and he won’t let me go.
Only one thing to do, I tell myself as I rise out of bed, hobbling towards the bathroom to start my day. Keep moving forward. Don’t waste a minute.
We will find a cure. We have to.
* * *
Logan
“Good morning, dove,” Daphne calls out in a singsong as her chair finishes riding on the track I installed down the wall of stairs.
I look up from the microscope. I didn’t know she was awake yet.
My breath catches for a moment. She’s so beautiful. She’s finally started putting on more weight again, even if just the slightest bit. I’m constantly trying to get her to eat more. But she just doesn’t have much of an appetite.
I would have been far happier simply carrying her down and up the stairs every day but her independence is important to her. And what’s important to her is important to me. I get it, I do. When I was stuck in that hospital, I hated having to wait for someone to bow and scrape for my every need.
But those were strangers. This is me. It’s been a hard lesson to learn. But we’re getting there.
“What are you working on?” She rolls over to my side and immediately her hand comes to my bare forearm where I rolled my sleeves up. I love that the second she sees me, it’s unconscious, she has to touch me. Reestablish contact. I cover her hand with my own and squeeze.
With a single touch, my tether to this world comes back into focus. I will be strong, for her.
“Same old, same old. The super T cells we treat with the rose essence colonize well enough in the petri dishes, but the ones that survive reentry into the body and start replicating just don’t last that long.”
She nods. This is the problem that we’ve been facing for weeks now. She wheels her chair over to the microscope where I’m working. I step aside and she fits her eyes to the sights. “At least it’s latching onto the Battleman’s antigen cells. We’ve got our targeting spot on.”
What does that matter, if we can’t deliver it into the body where it’s needed? I want to shout. But no, I never show my frustrations in front of her. I was selfish for too long. No more. Daphne’s going to get the version of Logan she should have gotten all along.
“Little by little,” I say.
“We learn the alphabet,” she finishes the saying for me. We picked up a book of foreign euphemisms and they’ve become our inside jokes. The Romanian rhyme about keeping on, keeping on had landed close to home with both of us.
She joins me by my side and we do exactly as we said, little by little. Doing the work of research scientists. It’s far from glorious. We make incremental changes and test. Experiment after experiment. Some fail, some show promise. More incremental changes. More testing.
We’d be down in this airless basement for days on end if I let us. So it’s always me keeping my eye on the clock and dragging an always tired Daphne away from her work. To eat. For her mandatory afternoon nap.
Even when she’s obviously run ragged, she refuses to acknowledge her own limits. I want to throttle her for not protecting herself and at the same time I want to wrap her in so many blankets and put her on a pedestal where no one can touch her and nothing bad could ever happen to her.
I’m always fighting two wars—against the actual disease and against Daphne’s stubbornness. She’s determined to have her big life, now. And I want to give it to her… As long as it doesn’t interfere with her long-term recovery. Something she can lose sight of in the moment when she’s lost in research or lost in my body.
And we are having so much sex. Every night, that’s a given. No matter how tired she is, she begs me to take her. Sometimes that means getting creative with how the pillows are arranged so she can just lay back and let me do the heavy lifting. Other times it means tying her down to the bed so tight she couldn’t twitch a muscle even if she wanted to.
So, we’re managing to figure it out…
But for how long? That’s the thought that keeps me awake at fucking night. Everything’s too good right now. And in my life, nothing good ever lasts.
“Logan? Logan?”
My head jerks up and I look her direction. “What?”
Daphne looks at me quizzically. “I asked if you were done with that sample.” She reaches out a gloved hand.
“Oh, right.” I take the slide off of the microscope I’m looking at and hand it over to her.
She slips it into her machine and is immediately intent, examining it through the illuminated scope. She shakes her head, watching the same drama I watched a hundred times as it plays out. Our super T cell is introduced into a colony of diseased Battleman’s cells.
While our super T cell begins to attack the diseased cells, it simply doesn’t have staying power. It clones itself a few times but then all the clones die and the Battleman’s continues to torture for another day.
I don’t know how Daphne doesn’t shove away from the table and throw the damn microscope at the wall. I was tempted a few times in the middle of the night last night.
Daphne moves a few dials on the microscope to get a better view and then shakes her head. “They are so volatile,” she whispers. Then she grins up at me. “Our super cells are like Logan cells right now. Hot, angry, wanting to take out the opponent right away.”
I puff out my chest. “And what’s wrong with that?”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “It doesn’t always get the job done. This is going to require patience. And time.”
Then her eyes go distant and she starts to tap her teeth with the tip of her nails. A classic Daphne tell that she’s having a big idea.
“The current serum is made from the distilled essence from the x hybrida rose, right? From pulped petals and blossoms?”
Her bright green flecked eyes come to mine, lit with excitement. “But what if it’s like the yew tree?”
“The what now?”
“Taxol, from the yew tree!”
She zooms backwards and turns so fast with her wheelchair that she almost pulls a wheelie on her way over to a computer in the corner. I can barely keep up with her.
By the time I join her, she’s already got several webpages pulled up.
“Oh, Taxol.” I thought the name sounded familiar, but now that I see what she’s pulled up, I’m reminded of exactly where I’ve seen the name. It’s also a non-chemotherapy drug, developed from— “the bark of yew trees,” I remember out loud.
“Exactly,” Daphne says like I just solved the puzzle.
“What does that have to do with us?”
But Daphne has buzzed to the other side of the room and is pulling out several three-ring binders of old experiments off the shelf. She’s skimming through and discarding almost as fast as she can pull them down.
“Daph, what are you looking for?”
“I know when we first discovered the oncologic applications for the hybrida essence, Belladonna did studies on the properties of the entire plant. Where
are those? Are they only at the Belladonna offices?”
I’m still not sure where she’s going but I can help. “I have copies of all of Belladonna’s records.”
She pauses a moment, her head swinging around my direction.
I hold up my hands in a what? gesture. “It was part of the deal when I bought the patents back. I said I wanted to know what I was buying and I wanted all accompanying research. I have copies of everything.”
This time it’s her shaking her head. “You conniving little…”
“Do you want to finish that sentence, or do you want help finding what you’re looking for?”
Her face stays hard only another moment before she breaks up laughing. “You’re incorrigible. But I guess you’re my incorrigible. Okay, get your butt over here and help me find what I’m looking for.”
I’ll accept any excuse to be close to her. I scooted over to her side.
“What is it that we're looking for again?” I ask as I start to sort through the endless shelves of binders. They could have sent the information to me digitally but that would’ve made it easy on me. Instead, boxes upon boxes of these binders were delivered.
“Ha! Sounds like Dad,” Daphne says before going a little sad. But soon she’s too busy flipping through binders, her eyes scanning pages, and she’s distracted, thank gods.
I grab a couple of binders as well, and am just about to ask again what we are looking for when Daphne suddenly slams down the binder she’s looking at and declares, “Ha! There! Look!”
I lean over her shoulder and look. At first all I can see is the page full of running columns of numbers. Gibberish. But then I look at the top and sides of the page and start to decipher what the numbers represent. What it all means.
“Holy…”
“Shit!” Daphne finishes excitedly for me. “Holy shit, right?” she whispers. “We’ve been using the wrong part of the plant. In the yew tree, the medicine is in its bark. We’ve been using the rose, but the real medicine is in the thorns.”
Twelve
Logan
No. It can’t be that simple. I tell Daphne as much.
But she just pounds her fingers at the numbers on the page. “We weren’t trying immunotherapy before. We were just trying to kill the cells. But now that we’re trying to insert living cells that reproduce and target the diseased cells, just look—”
She slides the notebook in front of me. “The properties of the blossoms and pulp that we thought we might have to try to figure out how to synthesize and allow to fix our longevity problem?” she shakes her head and thumps the binder again. “It’s all here already. We were just looking in the wrong place. Or, when we were looking in the right place, we were looking for the wrong thing.”
I keep staring down at the numbers. Could it be real, what she’s saying? Or is she just desperate and seeing miracles that aren’t really there?
Even more dangerous? What she’s saying makes sense.
A tremor works its way through my body. And it’s only then that I realize, deep down, I’ve been absolutely sure that I will lose her. That we’re living on borrowed time. That something and someone so good and precious could never truly be mine.
For all my brash confidence in declaring I would cure her, I knew in reality the fickle fates would snatch her away far too soon. But I ignored all my fear for her.
She needed strength and optimism so I gave her strength and optimism. And ignored my own underlying terror of what I was sure would come.
But what if that’s just my own fucked up past and not…real? What if she doesn’t have to die from this? What if I don’t have to be punished forever for my sins?
I can’t speak, can barely breathe as I hurry over and pull on a fresh pair of medical gloves, then get the blood drawing kit out and ready.
Daphne is quiet and wide-eyed as I approach her with the kit. I think the ramifications of what we might have just stumbled on are finally starting to hit her. But at least the blood draw is familiar. I wrap the rubber tubing around the upper top of her arm, find the vein, and draw several tubes of blood.
“Do we need to go harvest some vines and thorns from the greenhouse?” Daphne asks.
“No, I have some on hand already.” A good thing, because the process of distilling even a milliliter of concentrated oil from any part of a rose takes a lot of raw material and processing.
Daphne claps. “So we can really see if this will work?”
“The batch might be too old, so we might get inconclusive results, don’t get your hopes up—”
“This is going to be great. Stop being such a fart in a jam jar!”
Okay, that made me smile. “I can’t remember, is that one Scottish?”
“Welsh.”
Thirteen
Daphne
“Babe. Babe. Wake up. The results are in.”
I roll over and squint at Logan. He doesn’t look happy or sad. He just looks like Logan—intense. His intensity softens as he takes in my face.
“What is it?” I whisper around the terror in the pit of my stomach. “Did it work?”
He leans closer and for a horrible moment I just know he’s going to say it failed, and hold and comfort me.
But then he says: “It did, baby. It worked.”
I gasp as the fist around my middle abruptly lets go. “Oh my god,” I sag forward, into Logan’s arms. “Oh my god.”
There is so much to do, so much I want to ask him, but his mouth is on mine and in this moment I can't do anything but be with him.
I claw off the bed sheets and my clothes, and clamber onto Logan, our lips frantic on each other’s. He turns so we’re both lying side by side on the bed, still clinging to one another and kissing. I’m breathing him in, deep lungfuls of oxygen and Logan. He is my source.
“I need you,” he murmurs against my throat. He’s still half-clothed, but my hands are up under his shirt, stroking over his acres of muscles. I scoot into place under him and hiss when he breaches my entrance. I dig my nails into his skin, urging him faster. I want him to ride me hard and let our orgasms blow up like a summer storm, quick as lightning. I want to feel him the next day, and forever.
But he won’t let me. He sets the pace, brutally slow, surging into me with increasing force.
Pleasure surges, a white hot force burning through me. I convulse around him, and cry out as his cock continues to batter me.
Orgasms cascade through me, each greater than the last. They hit me from all sides and spin me sideways. The only constant is Logan, rocking over me, grinding against me.
When he finally comes, I hang on for dear life and hope this moment is real.
He collapses over me and I cling to him, not wanting him to shift his weight. He’s my rock, pinning me to earth. My knight who fought Death and won. Strange that winning feels as scary as losing.
I speak my worry before it chokes me. “It might not work again. I mean, we’ll have to run more tests.”
“Already started them.” He raises his head, and his certainty blows my doubts away. “But this is it, baby. We found the answer.”
And I know it’s true.
* * *
Logan
I look down at the beautiful woman lying in my arms and my mind starts spinning. I can’t believe we’ve found the answer after all these years. Now we just need to synthesize the production of our new drug.
But it’s only now as I lay here that I start to think through the actual practicalities of that. I just saw the results, verified them twice to make sure I wasn’t getting excited about nothing, then ran up here to Daphne to tell her the good news.
In other plant-based drug trials, especially one based on a limited supply like ours when such a massive amount of product is needed to produce even a milliliter…and Daphne will need a lot more than that…
Now that we know the molecular makeup, we have to create a synthetic form. They did it for Taxol, the cancer drug discovered from the bark of the yew tree Daphne
mentioned the other day.
A pit forms in my stomach. But it could take years. Does Daphne have years? But we made the discovery, I could get her in the first clinical trial. As long as we are in control of production.
I glance around us at the cold stone walls.
A makeshift basement lab in a cold, drafty castle is not going to cut it. We need a lab. A fully functioning, fully-staffed lab working around the clock on this.
My chest goes tight as I roll out of bed as smoothly as I can, careful not to wake Daphne. Where the hell am I going to get a lab?
Belladonna has the labs but as the Rose Garden banquet made clear, they’re far more concerned with making their new business partner Adam Archer happy than maintaining any relationship with Daphne. And after punching their golden boy plus having security called on me…
Shit! Why couldn’t I keep my fucking temper under control?
I storm back down the stairs and head straight for the liquor cabinet. But before I can pour myself two fingers of scotch, I slam the cabinet closed.
I need to be clearheaded. Think. Think. I slam my head with my palm.
My mentor left me with this place and a fair chunk of money, but it’s not an unending well of resources. I’ve been sparing no expense as it is, and am running dangerously low on liquid capital. But if Daphne died, what did it matter? What did any of it matter?
Now, though. To get so close and not be able to go the distance…
No. My fists clench.
I’ll never give up on her.
I breathe out long and deep.
Today was a success. Daphne has a future now. And I will do anything, pay any price…
Humble myself in any way.
I look up, nodding. I know exactly what I have to do.
* * *
I stand with my arms crossed, glaring up at the tall high-rise with Archer Industries emblazoned across the top. And the entrance. And on signs all over the sidewalk.
Beauty and the Rose: a Beauty and the Rose Novel Page 7
