The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 3 (6 page)

“Who?”

She shook her head. “Look,” she said, shoving her shoulder against mine as she brushed past me, “all I know is that this guy contacted me over a text message and asked if I’d be willing to take a video. He said he was playing a trick on a friend, but he needed video to win this bet with another guy. He said it was all harmless, that the drug was nothing more than an over-the-counter sedative. He just wanted video of this guy acting like he was high while he was at work.”

I watched her move across the room, stopping to fiddle with something on another table. I believed her; I believed that she didn’t think anything serious would happen. But it still didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

“So, Lena put the drugs in the water bottles and offered one to Logan—”

“Logan wasn’t supposed to get one.”

Annie was right.

“Then who was?”

Terri shot me a look that suggested she thought I was an idiot.

“What happened to Lena? Do you know where she went?”

“She ran out of there the second Logan collapsed. She hadn’t known that would happen…neither of us did. We didn’t mean to hurt anyone. It was just supposed to be a joke.”

“Who did you call?”

Terri turned around and sat back against the table. “My dad. He’s a lawyer. I wanted to know if I could get arrested for killing Logan Mitchell.

***

“Annie doesn’t have to go to LA now, then.”

Rawn shook his head even as the words were slipping from Madison’s lips. It made me wonder what was going on between her and Annie, why she was so set on keeping Annie from Logan.

“She needs to go. At the very least, it’ll get her out of the way should this thing escalate.”

Madison started to say something else, but Rawn shot her a look that shut her down.

Conrad moved up behind me and ran his hand slowly over the small of my back. I leaned back into him, grateful for his support as a wave of exhaustion washed over me. All of this cloak and dagger stuff was growing a little too heavy for my taste.

“But now we know that you and/or Madison was the real target,” Conrad said. “Maybe that will help us narrow down whoever it is that’s doing this.”

Rawn poured himself a drink at the bar, but he never lifted it to his lips. He just stood there staring down into the glass, clearly lost in thought. Madison watched him, concern clear in her eyes.

“This has got to be about Cepheus,” Rawn said slowly. “Someone trying to sabotage the company. I get that. I get how ruining me could serve a blow to the company. With Aurora’s resignation, the development department would be a black hole if I was forced to leave too. But it could survive if the CEO was quick about finding a replacement or moved around existing personnel. There are several other department heads who could handle development for a while.”

“Maybe it’s a personal vendetta.”

Rawn looked at Madison, a complex number of emotions racing over his face.

“Possible,” he said quietly. “I have pissed off a lot of people since the beginning of my career. But I can’t imagine that I did anything so bad as to warrant this kind of personal attack. I mean, kidnapping…”

“That wasn’t your fault,” I said. “That was about my secrets, not yours.”

Conrad kissed my temple lightly, but no one argued.

And then…

“It might have ended that way, but it’s beginning to look like it didn’t start that way.” Rawn sighed deeply as he crossed to his desk and sat on the edge. “I think someone just hired the wrong person to play out a scenario that clearly did not go as it was intended.”

“What do you think was the original intention?” Conrad asked.

Rawn shook his head. “I don’t know. But I think if we were able to figure that out, we would have a better idea of what the end game is.”

A heavy silence fell over the room. We were all lost in our own thoughts, Rawn and I consumed with guilt; Madison and Conrad worried about the people they loved. It made my heart swell to feel Conrad’s arm tighten around me, making my own secrets so much easier to deal with.

Soon…

Then Rawn’s cellphone rang.

“Shit,” he muttered, as he listened to whoever it was on the other end, never saying a word to that person before he shut the phone down.

“What?” Conrad asked before Madison could.

“Someone broke into my place.”

“The apartment?” Madison asked.

“No. My house.”

***

Madison

I had never been to Rawn’s home. We spent our nights together at the apartment that held our secret room, or we didn’t. He had never suggested taking me to his home, and I had never really asked. So it was a little ironic that my first visit there included three police cruisers parked in the circular drive.

Rawn’s home was surprisingly modest. It was a single story ranch, built in the center of a half-acre lot that was mostly consumed by a well-manicured lawn and that circular drive. Inside, the décor was modern and dark, like his office. It felt like it was mostly for show, not for comfort. I was anxious to see what his bedroom looked like, but he clung to my hand and refused to let go as he spoke with the police in the living room.

There was little sign of a break-in. The front door didn’t appear to be damaged. The living room wasn’t ransacked. In fact, it was so neat that I wanted to knock a magazine off the coffee table to give it a sense of normalcy. It looked like it had been cleaned recently—even smelled like pine furniture polish.

“A neighbor called it in,” one of the uniform cops said. “They saw what they thought was a flashlight in the windows. When we got here, the front door was standing open.”

Rawn glanced around the room. “Doesn’t look like they had time to do much.”

The cop gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. His partner nodded.

“There’s a mess in the back. Looks like a study?”

Rawn tensed, but he just nodded at the cops.

“We’ll write up a report, and you can pick it up in a few days to submit to your insurance.”

“Thanks.”

The cops shook Rawn’s hand, then mine, before turning to go. Rawn immediately locked the door behind them and rushed down the hallway. I had to run to catch up.

His study was a disaster area. There were books and papers all over the floor. A desk was upended. A printer smashed in the center of the carpet. File cabinets stood open, drawers clearly ransacked. And then there was the safe low on the wall that Rawn was kneeling in front of.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

“What?”

I walked up behind him, careful to step on as few papers and books as possible. When I lay my hand on his shoulder, he moved out of the way, pulling himself to his feet with his hands on a shelf above the safe.

He shoved his way to the other side of the room, kicking things out of his way, as though there was no value in any of it. He cursed again, a low stream of words that I never would have imagined coming out of his mouth. And then he slammed his fist against the wall.

“Rawn, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

He shook his head. “Now it’s really become personal.”

“What?”

“It’s like they knew exactly what they were looking for.” He lifted his hand like he was going to punch the wall again, but then he just braced his hand there, his head hung low. “How could they have known?”

I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen him this way before. I wanted to go to him, but I knew that Rawn didn’t respond to affection the same way others might. He didn’t like to be vulnerable; he didn’t like to seem weak. If I acted like I pitied him…it would be devastating for him.

My arms ached to touch him, but I just wrapped them around my chest and waited.

A long bit passed as we stood there in silence, just the sound of Rawn’s heavy breathing filling the room. Finally, he pushed himself up and turned, his eyes moving all around the room but avoiding me.

“I told you how I came to work at Cepheus, right? How I would visit my dad at the lab and I would pick out flaws in the blueprints? How that led to the CEO offering me the position of president of product development at seventeen?”

“Yes.”

“There’s more to it than that. It’s…complicated.”

I nodded. I had thought it might be. The CEO offered Rawn an impressive job at seventeen, but she left her own nephew working his way up through the ranks as an executive assistant? There was something more there. I just couldn’t imagine what.

“That complication was in my safe. And now someone else has it…”

“What was it?”

Rawn shook his head. “The death of my career, the destruction of my father’s reputation, and, quite possibly, the end of Cepheus.”

“Rawn—”

“We have to go talk to Conrad.”

Rawn rushed toward the door, once again kicking books and papers out of his way as he went, as though none of it mattered to him. And I realized that it didn’t. None of it mattered as much as whatever it was these thieves had taken from him. And he was keeping it from me.

Rawn had been brutally honest with me from the beginning of our relationship in his attempts to win my trust. For him to keep something from me now meant only one of two things, and neither was good.

Either he was losing interest in me and our relationship.

Or whatever had been stolen was big enough to change everything.

I didn’t know which it was, but I was suddenly nauseous with fear.

Annie

I was packed and ready to go in about an hour, which is probably a record for me. Logan waited in the living room, moving around to look at the crazy pictures Madison and I framed and left haphazardly around the room. A couple of us at orientation the day we met. A few selfies taken in various places all over the city. Her graduation photos. And then there were the family photos that Madison brought with her when she first came to school a little over three years ago.

He was holding one of those when I walked into the living room.

“Do you always schedule work over the Christmas holiday?”

He glanced at me. “They usually give us a few days off for the holiday.”

“Do you go home?”

His eyes fell to the picture he was holding, one of Madison with her sister, Allison.

“Were they close?” he asked.

“Yeah, pretty close. Especially at the end.”

“Must be nice, to have a sibling who matters so much to you.” He set the picture down and crossed to me, taking the handle of my suitcase out of my hand. “Is this all?”

“Yeah. That and this,” I said, patting the backpack I’d thrown over my shoulder.

Logan turned and headed for the door and the SUV waiting for us downstairs. Rawn was sending us out of town in style, a nice car and passage on his private jet. I was trying not to act as though it was all new to me—even though it kind of was, not counting the limo that transported us to the launch party weeks ago. He was polite enough to help me into the back of the car, but quiet, distracted, as we rode to the private airport.

He got like that whenever Madison came up. It made that little worm of doubt grow bigger in my gut.

“I guess you’re used to this sort of thing,” I said as we climbed aboard the jet and I tried not to gasp at the luxury that unfolded in front of us.

“Some of it is still fairly new to me,” he said, running his hand appreciatively over the back of one leather-bound chair. “I usually travel commercial.”

“Really?”

He glanced at me, that signature smile that had won him so many fans touching his full lips. “Don’t sound so surprised. Not all actors are pampered stars.”

He settled into a captain’s chair and swiveled to look at me as I chose the one directly across from his.

“But how do you keep all those adoring fans off of you?”

He shrugged. “Most people boarding a plane are consumed with their own problems. They don’t expect me to be there, so they don’t see through the cap and glasses I sometimes wear.”

“I would.”

His smile returned. “I’m sure you would.”

“Would you like a drink?” the male steward asked as he came toward us up the aisle.

Logan shook his head, but I was suddenly feeling a little adventurous. Madison had told me about the milk infused drink he had served her when she first flew on this plane with Rawn. It sounded like something I might like.

The steward smiled when I told him what I wanted. “I remember,” he said softly, winking as he walked off. A minute later he was back with a tall, thin glass filled with the creamiest white chocolate I’d ever tasted with just a hint of Bailey’s Irish Cream. Delicious.

I caught Logan eyeing me, and I suddenly felt a little ashamed of myself.

“Does this bother you?”

He shook his head. “Should it?”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard that most recovering addicts shun every kind of intoxicant, even when their drug of choice was something other than alcohol.”

His beautiful eyes fell over me for a long second, hard little pebbles that looked like sapphire jewels. It was the most intensely he had looked at me since this whole fiasco had started, but it wasn’t the dreamy, love struck stare I had wanted. It felt more like I had done something wrong.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Okay. No talking about recovery.

I set the drink down and settled back in my chair, glancing out the window just in time to see the pilot finishing up his pre-flight check. He boarded the plane a moment later and introduced himself to both Logan and myself, spending more time fawning over Logan than anyone would ever spend trying to set me at ease. His son, apparently, was a big fan.

We took off a few minutes later, the plane sailing smoothly over the clouds. I watched for a while, fascinated with the wispy, cotton-like clouds that touched the window.

“Do you fly much?” Logan asked.

“No. I’ve never really been out of Oregon.”

“I never thought I’d leave Michigan,” he said, the softest hint of an eastern accent touching his words. “Funny how life takes you in directions you never saw coming.”

“It must have been a culture shock, going from Michigan to the halls of Princeton.”

He nodded. “It was. Even more so when, up until a few weeks before school started, I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to go.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Money was tight in my family. My father was disabled and we were barely getting by on what my mother made from her secretarial job.”

That surprised me a little. I’d read about Logan’s past in the various celebrity gossip magazines, but few of them mentioned what his life was like before he arrived in Hollywood and quickly became one of the hottest actors in town.

“What happened to change things?”

“A scholarship. My mother had applied without telling me, and we were notified of my award just before the deadline to register.”

“That’s pretty awesome.”

“It was.”

“Are you close to your mother?”

Logan tilted his head slightly as though weighing his answer. “We were once. But there have been issues between us lately that make it difficult for us to be around each other.”

“What about your dad?”

“He died years ago.” Logan shoved a piece of hair out of his face. “He’d been sick for a long time.”

I nodded, thinking about my own parents. My father was a driven corporate lawyer who rarely spent much time at home, and my mother was the charity chairperson queen. She spent so much time working with her charities when I was a kid that I spent most of my days alone with the housekeeper. Needless to say, we weren’t very close. That’s why it had been so easy for Madison’s family to sort of adopt me. Or for me to adopt them.

“I guess we’re both sort of orphans.”

Logan’s eyebrows rose impressively into his hairline. “Yeah?”

“Neither of us have siblings, and we’re both estranged for one reason or another from our parents.”

His eyes softened as he studied me. “Yeah, I guess we have more in common than I would have imagined.”

I laughed. “Do I seem that different?”

“No.” He shifted a little in his seat. “It’s just…people tend to assume things about me.”

“You’re still human, right?” I reached over and poked his leg as if I was looking for a metallic shell or something. “You laugh and cry, sleep and eat, just like the rest of us.”

“True.”

He smiled again, and I began to think I could really get used to living under the umbrella of that. It was like stepping into a pocket of sunlight after spending too many days locked up in a library studying for final exams.

“So tell me something else no one knows about you.”

“Hmm,” he said, scratching his chin as he considered his answer. “I don’t know. I studied astronomy at Princeton. I thought it would be cool to study the stars for the rest of my life.”

“Something you and Madison have in common.”

“I suppose.”

“I’m surprised the two of you haven’t discussed it.”

He shifted in his chair, the casualness of the moment changing. He turned to the windows and stared out for a second. “I like to cook,” he said. “My mother taught me. She said she didn’t want me to starve to death if I married some girl who couldn’t cook like she does.”

“Smart lady. I can teach you all about condensed matter, but I can’t seem to boil water without Madison there to save the pot from warping.”

“Condensed matter, huh?”

“Yeah. I should graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in May. Then I’m probably going to pursue a Master of Science degree.”

“Impressive.”

I shrugged. “I’ve always been good at math and science. Physics just seemed to follow.”

Logan’s eyes moved slowly over me, as though he was seeing me for the first time.

I got that a lot when I first started college, back when I would tell casual dates what I was studying. It taught me to lie a lot. Guys tended to be intimidated by a smart woman. But there was something different about Logan’s look. Maybe it was just because I so desperately wanted him to like me, or because I was blinded by my lust for him. But he seemed impressed, not intimidated.

“When do you go back to class?”

“Not until after the new year.”

“Good. There’s something I want to show you while we’re in LA, but my schedule is pretty much set, starting tomorrow morning. But if you’re there for a while…”

“I’m all yours—for as long as you need me.”

That smile came again, and I just basked under the brightness of it.

***

Madison

Conrad stepped back and gestured for us to come into his house. It was dark, like he had already been preparing for bed when Rawn called to let him know we were coming. He actually had to flip on a light to illuminate the spacious living room he led us into.

“Where’s Mellissa?” I asked.

“She wasn’t feeling well, so I took her home a while ago.”

I nodded, studying his face for any sign that I should be more concerned than he seemed. But he was focused on Rawn, curiosity the ruling emotion in his green eyes at the moment.

“What’s going on?”

Rawn sat on the edge of a loveseat, leaning forward with his hands on his knees as though he needed all the support he could get. I felt useless as I watched, like there was nothing I could do to calm his anxiety. Just being near him seemed to irritate him. He practically pulled out of the driveway of his house before I had the door closed, as though he hadn’t realized I was in the car with him.

“The thieves who hit my house; they knew exactly what they were after.”

“It wasn’t just a random burglary?”

Rawn looked up at him, the look on his face enough to tear my heart out of my chest. I crossed my arms over myself again, holding my shoulders so tight I could feel the bite of my own touch.

“They took some blueprints out of my safe that could destroy Cepheus, my career, and my father’s reputation.”

Conrad sat with a grunt on the coffee table in front of Rawn and adopted almost the same position. “Tell me everything.”

Rawn sat back, his eyes jumping to my face for a moment, but then he looked away again, as though he couldn’t stand the sight of me.

“When I was in high school, I would visit my father at the Cepheus labs. Sometimes it was the only way I would see him for weeks at a time. And while I was there, I would look at the blueprints of the things he was working on and imagine each step of the manufacturing process. While I did that, all these little, sometimes meaningless, mistakes would pop out at me. At first, it was nothing of consequence. But then there were bigger, dangerous mistakes that could have meant terrible things for the companies buying and using these things: lasers, robots, lab equipment.

“After a while, my father set up a meeting between me and the engineers. They told the CEO about me and she wanted to meet me. I think it started out as an oh-what-a-cute-kid sort of thing, but it became bigger when I pointed out several flaws in a medical laser Cepheus had bought the rights to and was planning to sell to hospitals all over the world. They had only just begun manufacturing them and their use was restricted to small scale trials. She had spoken to the inventor herself, a retired doctor, and believed the blueprints to be flawless. But they weren’t.”

Rawn pulled his fingers through his hair, as he paused to take a breath. “When I pointed out the flaws, she didn’t believe me. She couldn’t make herself believe that some kid could see something that she and her engineers hadn’t. Months later, when patients started to die, she thought twice.”

“People died?” I asked.

Rawn glanced at me, but his eyes were heavily hooded. He focused on Conrad then.

“The patient deaths were called human error, the hospitals assuming that their doctors’ inexperience with the technology had caused them. But the CEO and I both knew that it wasn’t true. The laser was flawed.

“She asked me to show her how to fix them in exchange for a position with the company. My father saw it as the perfect opportunity. He couldn’t afford to send me to college, not with my mother’s illness. My mother needed me. A job at Cepheus, especially an executive position with a six figure income, was the perfect solution to everyone’s problems. So, we quietly fixed the laser and no one knew any better.”

“But you kept the proof.”