His Absolute Arrangement: A Scandalous Billionaire Love Story (Jessika, #1) (14 page)

When I finished, I peeked around the room.  Above me, dimmed lights washed the room in a soft glow.  The room smelled like cleaning chemicals.  The bed looked strange and the sheets were harsh and overstarched.

"Why am I in the hospital?" I asked.

"You were having a panic attack," Asher said.  "I couldn't calm you down and one of the EMTs offered to sedate you.  They brought you to the hospital just in case, but you should be fine."

"The fire," I said.  My eyes widened and my nostrils flared.  "Asher, what happened?  What about the fire?"

"It should be alright.  It was contained.  The police are doing an investigation, though.  They said the circumstances surrounding the fire are suspicious."

"What do you mean?"

"It wasn't an accident," he said.  "That's what they're saying, at least.  Everything was very well set up and organized, with the fire being in one exact area.  They found hints of tampering in the room, as well, plus a few other items they're going to analyze.  The fire's out and the rest of the main house is fine, though.  No one was hurt."

"What about Elise and Lucent?"

Asher hesitated, not speaking.

"Asher?  What about Elise and Lucent?"

"I don't know," he said.  "There were some issues and I'm not sure what's going on."

"Are they safe?  Asher, they didn't die, did they?  Please..."  Please what?  I wasn't even sure what I was saying.  Please save them?  Bring them back from the dead?  Tell me they're fine?

Tears crept into my eyes, or they tried to, but I couldn't even cry anymore.  I just sat there, eyes scrunched up, wanting to sob but unable to.  Asher caressed my cheek and caressed the side of his hand up along my nose, brushing away invisible tears.

"No," he said, sounding as if his heart was melting at the sight of me in distress.  "Jessika, they aren't dead.  No one's dead.  They're missing, though.  That's all.  They probably just left through a different exit.  You know how Lucent is?"  Asher tried to laugh, but he only managed a half-hearted chuckle for barely more than a second.  "I'm sure they're fine."

"You're not telling me something," I said.  I knew he wasn't.  I could tell.  I knew Asher so well, and maybe I didn't know everything about him, but I could tell he wasn't telling me everything.  "What is it?  What's wrong?"

"The police want to bring them in for questioning about the fire.  They found Lucent's jacket in the room after the fire department put out the flames.  They asked me about it and I wasn't thinking and I knew it was his, so I said as much, and it escalated from there."

"They think Lucent started the fire?"

"They don't know what to think, but as of now that's probably what they're thinking.  They're going to investigate further, and I tried to explain that Lucent wouldn't have.  Elise especially wouldn't have.  There's no... it just doesn't make sense.  One of the police officers said that's how it always is, and there's no immediate assumption of guilt, but they need to question them both.  If they were there outside with us, it probably wouldn't have been an issue, but because they were missing..."

Asher trailed off.  He always sounded so confident and sure of himself, but right now he sounded confused and lost.  He sounded like I felt, and I wanted to console him.  There was a world between us, though, some huge, spacious gap, and I didn't know how to step across it.  He sat at the side of my bed in a swiveling hospital chair while I sat propped up against the headboard of the hospital bed.  One of his hands held one of mine, and his other hand lay across my cheek.

"Come in bed with me," I said.

"I... I don't think I'm supposed to," he replied.

"I don't care.  Come in bed with me.  I don't want to be here alone.  Please, Asher?"

He smiled.  "You realize you're in one of those hospital gowns, don't you?" he asked.

"I don't care," I said.  "Come in anyways, but take off your pants and your shoes first."

His jacket already lay draped across the chair he was sitting in.  He gave in to my request and removed his shoes and pants, then crawled atop the bed.  I held up the covers and invited him in to join me.  Then I laid down and he did, too, and we lay there, side by side, staring up at the ceiling.

"I love you," I said, moving to rest my cheek on his shirt and his chest.  "I don't think Elise and Lucent did anything, either."

"I'm sure they didn't, but this is going to cause problems," Asher said.  He put his arm around me and held me close to him.

I kissed his cheek.  "It'll be alright.  They'll talk to the police and everything will be fine."

He kissed me back.  "There's something more going on," Asher said slowly.  "Jessika, that room... it was the database backup room for Landseer Enterprises.  It's just an extra copy.  We've got copies online in the Landseer Cloud Network, and in other places, too.  It's not important in and of itself, since there are other copies.  But... no one should have been in that room.  Not just Lucent, and if Elise was there she shouldn't have been, either, but no one.  It's not like the kitchen or a hallway where people might be passing through.  It's just a room with a bunch of computers and database servers and harddrives.  That's it.  It's not important because we have other facilities with backups, but it's important in that all of the Landseer Enterprises confidential and private information was held there."

"I don't understand," I said.  "I don't know what any of that means.  Why was Lucent's jacket there, then?"

"I don't know.  I don't understand it either," Asher said with a sigh.  "That room is locked up extra tight, though.  No one should have been able to get in through regular means.  It's possible Lucent could have, but it doesn't make sense.  There's a lot of company-specific, sensitive information there, which makes this whole situation worse, too.  With the Solomon Royce incident from before, even if it's been awhile since then, the police are on high alert.  They didn't say so, but I think they think it might be connected."

"Lucent and Solomon?" I asked, stunned.  "No.  That's not even possible, is it?"

Asher squeezed me tight and kissed his forehead.  "No."

"But..."

I knew Asher trusted Lucent.  I trusted Lucent, too.  There were a lot of reasons, probably too many to mention, but that was us and our feelings.  The police had no reason to trust him, and going by the evidence, it seemed even less likely they would trust us in saying we trusted him, too.  Also, we couldn't very well go into exact details about it, for various reasons, either.  There was too much going on to explain everything and some of it wouldn't make sense if we tried to explain it to people who would never understand.

And the media.  I remembered now, remembered cameras and lights focusing in on me.  I'd been screaming about Elise and Lucent being missing.  Would they take it the wrong way?  Possibly.  With the police wanting to bring Lucent and Elise in for questioning, and the news crews potentially seeing me screaming about them being missing, it was just a small step before they wrongly put two and two together and assumed that Lucent and Elise were arsonists and saboteurs.

Asher's cellphone rang from the pocket of his pants.  He reached for it, or tried to, but he was on the wrong side of the bed.  I leaned over and fetched it from his pants pocket, then handed it to him.  He stared at the screen, eying the caller's number, then he flipped it open fast.

"Lucent," he said.  "Where are you?"

They spoke.  I couldn't hear what Lucent was saying.

"No," Asher said.  "No, that's not a good idea.  No.  Don't go back to your apartment.  Stay where you are for tonight.  Yes.  Jessika and I will be in sometime in the morning.  We might be late.  Everything's a little hectic right now.  We're fine, though.  Everything is fine.  There are police staked out around the Landseer estate, warding off trespassers and doing detective and investigation work.  I don't know the specifics."

"Is Elise with him?" I asked.  "Are they fine?"

Asher nodded and whispered to me, "Yes, they're both fine."  To the phone, to Lucent, he said, "Whatever happens, just stay where you are, alright?  I'll think of something."

Asher hung up soon after.  He stared at the screen of his phone and sighed, then placed it on the hospital bedside table.

"Is everything alright?" I asked, tentative.

"For now," Asher said.  "Right now, everything's fine.  I might be worrying about nothing, too.  I don't know.  There's just... there's a lot of complications going on."

"Lucent and Elise are safe, though," I said.  "No one got hurt tonight."

Asher nodded and smiled.  "That's true.  No one's hurt."

"We're going to see them tomorrow?"

Asher nodded again.  "We'll work everything out then.  Everything will be fine.  We just need to rest for now."

I wrapped my arms around him and kissed his cheek.  "Let's sleep."

He chuckled lightly.  "I'm going to get yelled at by the hospital staff if I stay in this bed with you."

"I don't care," I said.

"I don't care, either."  He grinned and kissed my lips.  "I'm glad you're alright."

I
n celebration of the re-release of
His Absolute Arrangement,
please enjoy this free bonus scene.  This scene happens at Jessika and Asher's marriage, months before the beginning of this book, and is mentioned early on when Jessika decides to write about her wedding night...

~*~

"Y
ou may now kiss the bride," the priest said.

It was us, just us.  Asher and I stood in the middle of the gazebo near the pond in this, oh, so very small town.  Water from the pond lapped at the edges of the grass and turf nearby, mixing with the ambient sound of crickets and a handful of frogs.

To say that this was how I expected my wedding day to go, well... that would be entirely incorrect.  I was glad this was how it went, though.

The priest stood before us, simple, nothing but him, his clean white robes, and a book held in his hands.  As a witness to our marriage, his wife stood nearby, leaning against the rail on the outskirts of the gazebo.

The ceremony had been simple, but we'd said our own vows, which I thought was wonderful.  We didn't get too dressed up, but we tried to wear something a little more formal.  I wore a white, lacy dress, with a veil to match, and Asher wore a suit.  I'd laughed at him when he said he was just going to wear sneakers along with his dressy clothes, but I kind of liked the look once I got used to it.  Still, I wore heels instead of something more casual.

Honestly, all of this, these words, these thoughts, they were meant to distract me.  I didn't want to look up, didn't want to look at Asher, didn't want to pry my eyes away from his sneakers, covered partly by his dress pants.  I...

Was this real?  It was supposed to be, but in a way it didn't really feel like it.  It felt false, but not bad.  Imaginary and dreamy, almost surreal.  Beautiful and wonderful, but in a second I'd wake up and...

Asher and I held hands, his fingers touching the undersides of my palms, slightly curled around my own fingers.  He shifted both my hands to one of his, holding them tight.  His hands were much bigger than mine, but still, he couldn't quite hold the both of them fully.  His fingers grasped my wrists slightly, which pulled me out of my thoughts with a sudden abruptness.  Sometimes he did something similar when we were alone, when we were together, naked—or about to be—in bed, his own body desiring mine, to control me, to loom above me, to...

He used his free hand to lift and move aside my sheer veil, caressing his fingers down the side of my cheek, resting them on my chin, and then pushing up ever so slightly, bringing our gaze together.  My eyes met his, but I turned them down quickly, unsure and uncertain.  Asher smiled at me, and then without a care in the world he brought his lips to mine.

I didn't need to look at anything after that.  I closed my eyes and let his lips consume me.  Our kiss was likely anything but erotic; it was sweet and soft and silently seductive.  But it was ours, it was us, it meant everything to me when I wasn't sure what anything meant.

The priest closed his prayer book a few seconds later, snapping me back to the moment, this reality.  My eyes fluttered open, the feel of Asher's lips still tingling against my own.  We both looked to the priest; he smiled at us and we smiled at him.

"So," he asked.  "How's it feel?  Any different?"

"Yes," I said, feeling like I might faint at any moment from the weight of my nerves crashing down on me.

"Not quite," Asher said.  "Maybe a little, but I've loved her with every part of me for awhile now, and nothing has changed.  I hope this will make our relationship more respectable to the world, but to me it's always been everything I could have ever hoped for."

I laughed and slapped playfully at Asher's arm.  "You're not supposed to say that!  Marriage is supposed to be important, Asher."

The priest and his wife laughed at us, giving us friendly, knowing smiles.

"Some things can change everything and nothing at the same time," the priest's wife said.  "We don't always need to move mountains to cause a big change in our lives.  It's the smallest, simplest things that can mean the most.  I truly hope the both of you have a wonderful, lasting marriage.  I can tell you both have a lot of love for each other."

"Remember everything you've promised one another today," the priest added.  "Even the smallest parts.  Remember when you paused, remember when you stopped.  Words are important, and words have meaning, but so do the commas and the periods in our lives.  Our hesitations are just as important as our immediate reactions, but in a different way.  As long as you remember everything, I believe you'll be happy with one another for the rest of your lives."

"I will," Asher said, adding another agreement to our wedding vows.  "I'll always remember, Jessika."

"I will, too," I told him.  "I'll remember everything, Asher."

S
eeing as it was just me and Asher, we weren't exactly in a rush to run to our after-wedding party.  There wasn't even really a party to speak of.  We were going to enjoy ourselves and have fun, but it was just me and him, just us.