LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance (14 page)

Adrienne

Time passed incredibly slowly. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I wasn’t tied to a chair. I thought about Lucien. I thought about the moment I first saw him, watching me across that crowded bar. My dad had shown me a picture of him, but it didn’t do justice to the man in reality. He was so tall I almost had to stand back and lean so that I could see him properly. His shoulders were impossibly broad. And that charming smile he had was enough to make my heart melt just at the sight. I’d never known a man quite like him before. And no man like him had ever taken notice of me before. If not for the little scheme my father had cooked up—me pretending to be his girlfriend so I could get close to the people he worked with and figure out which one was selling business secrets—we probably wouldn’t have looked twice at each other.

But he came over, whispered in my ear and dragged me over to the table he’d been sharing with Jacob. And the story he told, dragging it out like it was a real drama. I’d fallen, kit and kaboodle, before the first kiss.

All I could think about was how badly I wanted to see him again.

I’d been in worse situations than this. I’d served in Afghanistan. I’d walked patrols where children carried hand grenades and tried to blow us up even as we handed out candy bars. I’d seen friends lose limbs, held a twenty-two-year-old father in my arms as he bled out. I’d seen worse.

But I had some measure of control in those situations. I had no control in this one.

The cable ties were cutting into my skin. I could feel the chafing. They’d be bleeding soon. And maybe then the blood would lubricate the way, allow me to pull my hands free. But my ankles… That was going to be more difficult.

I wish I’d had pants on when she walked into the room. I had a little pocket knife I always carried in the pocket of my jeans. Maybe, if she hadn’t discovered it, I could cut the cable ties with that. But I wasn’t planning on going anywhere in that moment. I’d expected Lucien to come back and pull me into bed again. The man was insatiable… A slow smile touched my lips at the memory of just how insatiable he was.

I’d been with other men. But none of them had ever been like Lucien.

What was it about him that had gotten under my skin so quickly? What was it that made me want him as desperately as I did? What made me allow him to touch me when I knew it was all an act on his part? What had made me need to prove to him that I believed he was as much a man as any I’d served with in Afghanistan?

He’d asked me that night. He was diabetic and had a low blood sugar that made him shaky, that left him struggling. And he asked me:

“Does it make me weak in your eyes?”

“What?” I was startled. I didn’t know what to say.

“Does it make me weak? Less of a man?”

“I… No, it doesn’t. But you should have told me.”

“Why? Some women think it’s a weakness. An infirmity. Like I’m not really a man because I have a chronic illness that can knock me flat on my ass at any moment. Do you think that?”

I didn’t know what to say. I thought about a man I’d served with who lost his leg and refused to allow his wife to see him. I told him the loss of his leg didn’t make him less of a man. And I told Lucien basically the same thing.

“If you think this makes you less of a man, then your definition of masculinity and mine are two very different things.”

And that’s when everything changed between us.

Lucien had always been seen as weak in the eyes of the women in his life. And I’d always been seen as too tough in the eyes of the men in my life. Together we finally found an equal, someone who understood. We were a perfect match.

If only we could find each other again. If only he could find me before this ended the way I was afraid it would.

I had no control. I was pretty sure my kidnapper was quickly losing control, too. And that was not good.

Someone had to be in control.

Lucien

The building was quiet. It was well after five now, and most of the employees were gone for the day. The labs would still be humming, but those were in the basement. Sergio and I made our way up to the executive floor, where my office was. Ruben was there with a couple more goons, staring as a tall, thin man worked at my computer.

“What’s going on?”

Ruben didn’t even look up.

Sergio went to one of the other men and bumped fists. They whispered to each other for a moment, but Sergio didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to tell me what was going on. He stepped back and stood in the doorway with his arms behind his back.

“What’s going on?” I repeated.

“If you’d give us a second,” Ruben finally said, “you might actually find out.”

I glanced at the couch, thinking about the first time Adrienne had been up here. I’d explained to her how the company worked and who might be behind the leak. I remembered her watching me as I explained it all, the way she crossed her legs, the way she scratched at her brow. I remembered thinking I’d like to be doing something other than talking about business with a woman who looked like that. I also remembered how awkward she’d been with the clothes that were clearly new and the little purse that kept grabbing onto her cellphone, making it impossible for her to pull it out with anything like sophistication. I’d nearly laughed that first time when it caught on the lining of the purse.

I’d never make it as a woman. And Adrienne… She was so beautiful, she didn’t need all those trappings to make her femininity obvious.

I wished she was here now. I wished she was sitting on that couch, watching all this hub bub with the same look of amusement in her eyes she’d had that day.

Where the hell was she?

“There!”

The man behind the computer suddenly looked up and pointed across the room. Ruben quickly crossed to a bookshelf that sat just off of the door, running his fingers over books and along keepsakes I had set there. He found what he wanted about halfway down, tucked into a corner.

“What is that?”

Ruben turned and held up a tiny tube-like object for me to see.

“A camera. Adrienne set up a camera in here.”

“A camera? Why?”

“To catch whoever was sending those emails from your computer,” the man at my desk said. He studied me a minute, then slowly stood and awkwardly came over to me, sticking his hand out. “I’m Robert, by the way. I don’t know if Adrienne ever mentioned me, but I’m Ruben’s tech guy.”

I nodded as I shook his head. “She mentioned you helped figure out where the emails were coming from.”

He smiled widely, like a child who’d just been given the best compliment ever. “I was the one who did that. She mentioned me?”

“Do you think you can figure out what
mija
saw on this?” Ruben interrupted.

Robert looked over at Ruben, and the smile disappeared from his face. He straightened up, snatching the camera from Ruben’s hand, and went back to my computer. I moved behind him and watched as his fingers flew over the keyboard. He was doing things to the computer system that I barely grasped. He was moving so fast, but I could see he was connected to an offsite computer and he was overriding some sort of software to get access to the camera.

“It’s one of ours,” he said, “so it should have backup on our system. But I think Adrienne overrode the system protocols.”

“Why?” Ruben asked.

Robert shrugged.

“Because she knew you thought it was me and she was trying to prove it wasn’t.”

“Or she was afraid I was right.”

I glanced at Ruben. He was watching me closely, his eyes narrowed. He still believed I had something to do with all of this.

“Here,” Robert said. “I’ve got the images.”

Ruben came around the desk, and we both watched as the camera footage began playing.

“These cameras only record twelve hours of footage at a time. They record over the footage if the user doesn’t save what was on it.”

“Did Adrienne—”

“It looks like she did,” Robert said as he tapped at the keys on my computer keyboard. “She saved footage from last night just after midnight.”

I nodded slowly. “Her computer was gone. She must have been checking the footage while I was out.”

“When the ‘kidnapper’ came in?”

I glanced at Ruben, at the speculation in his voice. “Exactly.”

“How do we know that you didn’t catch her looking at it? How do we know that she didn’t find evidence that you’d done something to her?”

“Because I would have been smart enough to erase the evidence.”

“Or change it.”

As Ruben said that, he gestured at the computer screen. At 12:07 am last night—while Adrienne and I were driving to San Antonio—someone let themselves into my office and crossed to the computer. The glow of the computer screen as it was woken revealed who the user was. My heart stopped in my chest. Of all the people I had expected to see standing there, this face was the never even on the list.

“Oh, hell,” I muttered, stepping back until my back hit the windows.

“You know who that is?” Ruben asked.

I nodded. “Adrienne saw this?”

“She saved it at two o’clock this afternoon,” Robert helpfully reported.

I nodded slowly, my head spinning.

“Who is it?” Ruben demanded.

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell him the truth. But I couldn’t lie, either. What if she had Adrienne? What if she was the one behind all this? What if—

“Is there more on there?”

“Yeah,” Robert said, pushing a button that made the footage move forward again. The camera turned off when it didn’t detect movement in the room, so the next bit of footage didn’t show up until nearly dawn. A little before 6:30 in the morning.

“Too early for work,” I said softly as Jaime’s face appeared on the computer screen.

She picked something up from on top of the computer keyboard and placed it in the center of the blotter. Then she began typing on the keyboard, her fingers moving almost as quickly as Robert’s had. And then she looked up and spoke.

“Who’s she talking to?”

Robert shook his head. “Can’t tell from this angle.”

Jaime turned back to the computer, typed a moment longer, then grabbed whatever had been sitting on the blotter and took it with her when she left. The rest of the footage was just normal daily activity in the office.

“When Adrienne saved this footage,” Ruben asked slowly, “was she saving something specific or just this particular twelve-hour stretch of time?”

“There’s no way to save just one bit of footage on these cameras. It has to be downloaded onto a computer and edited that way.”

“Then we can’t know which person she reacted to when she saved the footage.”

I glanced at Ruben. For once he wasn’t staring at me. He was staring at the footage as it continued to play out.

“No, not really,” Robert said. “All we can know is that she saw this and she felt it was important enough to the case to save it.”

“Can you identify who’s on the tape?” Ruben asked me.

“The woman there,” I said, gesturing as Robert continued to let the footage play and Jaime again came into the office, “is my personal assistant.”

“Is she supposed to be in here, messing with your stuff?”

“She is.”

“What about the other woman?” Robert asked, reversing the footage until the first bit played again. “Do you know who that is?”

I had to be careful. I couldn’t just tell them. She couldn’t be behind all this, could she? What advantage would she get from all this?

Jacob, with is wonderful timing, suddenly burst into the room.

“There’s been another message.”

Adrienne

“What will he say when he realizes it’s you?”

She didn’t answer me, but she paused in her movements. It was just a slight hesitation, a movement that wasn’t quite completed. But then she shoved the spoon toward my mouth again.

“Eat.”

“Not hungry.”

“Don’t care. Wouldn’t do if you’re not alive when he asks for proof that you are.”

“You must know how he feels about me. What do you think he’ll do when he realizes you’re the one who took me? Do you think he’ll forgive and forget just like that?”

She stood up and dropped the bowl on one of the shelves, splattering the bland oatmeal she’d been feeding me all over cans of tomato paste.

“You weren’t supposed to figure it out. We didn’t know about the camera in his office.”

“No one knew. I slipped it in there without telling anyone.”

“Yeah, well, that was your mistake. We were going to let you go. We were going to get what we wanted and just let you go. But you had to get nosy.”

“Nosy?”

She glanced at me. “If you hadn’t put that camera there…” She sighed. “We worked so hard to convince your father that Lucien was doing this to himself. You should have been gone. The case was over.”

“But I was still investigating.”

“You didn’t go away. He brought you to dinner after your father told you Lucien was the one who sent the emails. That’s when we realized he really liked you. And he would respond to you going missing.”

“You keep saying ‘we’. Who else is involved in this?”

She shook her head. “It’s none of your business.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

She spun around a second, staring at me like she thought she hadn’t heard me clearly. If I’d been able to see her face, I’m sure it would have been pale. But I couldn’t. She continued to insist on wearing that thin ski mask even though she knew I knew who she was.

“I wouldn’t…I couldn’t do something like that! I can’t even smash a fly!”

“But you kidnapped me.”

“I had help.”

“From who?”

She shook her head, turning away again. She picked up the bowl and wiped at the spilled oatmeal with a piece of her shirt. She gave up after a second and walked toward the door, her head down, as though she were a prisoner walking to the death chamber, not the prison warden.

“We never wanted to hurt anyone. We just wanted to help.”

“Did it ever occur to you to go to him and simply ask?”

She made a sound that was something like a snort. “We did ask. Over and over again. But he wouldn’t even consider it.”

“All of this just for a drug you don’t even know will work.”

She looked at me again, her eyes narrowing slightly as she studied me. “Drug? What are you talking about?”

“That’s what this is about, right? The Alzheimer’s drug?”

She stared at me for a long second. And then she began to laugh.