Uncovering You 10: The Finale (24 page)

Jeremy comes up a few minutes later carrying a tray of food.

“How did it go?” he asks me solemnly.

I frown at him. “How did what go?”

“The talk, with my brother?” Jeremy asks. “He was not happy with me when he found me this morning.”

“We sorted it out,” I say, a little smugly.

“Did he yell at you?” Jeremy asks. His jaw tightens. “You know what my attitude is toward men who raise their voices—especially around women.”

“No.” I say. “He was very cordial.”

Jeremy exhales a deep breath. “Thank God,” he tells me. “I had no way of predicting what he might do. We grew up in different homes. He does not share the same distastes as I.” Then Jeremy confesses, almost the way a schoolboy would admit to wrongdoing before the principal. “He yelled at
me
.”

I burst out laughing.

“Hey!” Jeremy protests, all mock indignation now. “The only person I fear more than you is my brother.”

“You fear me?” I scooch forward, eager now. “Oh! This I
have
to hear.”

“Of course I fear you,” Jeremy says, sitting on the bed and feeding me peeled grapes. “I fear what you think of me. I fear that I do not deserve your love, having failed you so absolutely. I fear doing something inadvertently, unintentionally, and spooking you away. I fear the return of the monster in your eyes.”

“Jeremy! Stop!” I tell him firmly. I press my lips tight against the grape he tries to feed me. “You can never revert to that. I love you completely. You’ve consumed me fully. There is no one else who is or ever will be the equal to you.” I flash my engagement ring. “And I’ve already committed to you. Or have you forgotten.”

“Never.” Jeremy says. He moves in to kiss me with such passion in his eyes…

But then he stops. He pulls back, just millimeters from my face. He closes his eyes, sighs, and leans his forehead against mine. “Right,” he breathes, then briefly touches my lips with his, and pulls away.

I am struck by such monstrous yearning for him that I do not know what to do with myself.

Jeremy stands up, feeding me my meal forgotten. His hands tighten into fists. “I’m sorry, Lilly,” he says. “I know I’m testing you. But I cannot resist. I’ll exert better self-control from now on. I swear.”

I don’t want you to
, I want to say. Instead, I bite my lip and nod my head.

“But I can’t stay,” Jeremy tells me. “I need some time alone. To train, maybe. Work out. Clear my mind.” He smiles at me. “You rest. I’ll be back soon.”

With that, he leaves me alone.

I spend the rest of the day drifting in and out of sleep.

Dr. Telfair visits me before Jeremy returns. He brings a heavy laptop with him. He attaches a set of electrode tabs to my forehead, plugs the other end into his computer, and tells me to relax as he studies my brainwaves.

Then we go through a series of exercises. He asks me questions that he knows will trigger an emotional response. I answer however I want. He instructs me to lie in response to certain ones, and to tell the truth for others. All the while, he monitors my galvanic skin response, my brain activity, and my vitals.

When he’s done, he folds up the laptop and stands up.

“Wait,” I tell him. “Aren’t you going to explain what all that was about?”

“Do I need to?” he asks. “Not yet. You will see later. In essence, all I’m doing is establishing baselines, seeing how they deviate from expected values, trying to understand the full extent of your injuries.”

“And your verdict?”

He chuckles. “That, you definitely have to wait for. Data collection has just begun. It will take weeks, months perhaps, to form a clear picture.” He smiles. “Lucky for us, we have that time.”

My eyebrows go up. “So, you’re staying?”

“Of course. Even with last night’s transgression, you’ve convinced me. I can work with you. I
will
work with you, Lilly. I will see you better. If for nothing more,” He sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. “Than to make up for the sins of my biological father.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

The remainder of the week proceeds in a similar fashion.

Jeremy and I are still barred from physical intimacy. It’s rough. But I promised Dr. Telfair I would listen to him. And Jeremy is true to his word, as well.

After the immense high of my rescue, and the morning of Jeremy’s proposal, my energy levels plummet. I spend more than twelve hours each day in a deep and completely undisturbed sleep. But when I wake, I feel like I’ve been up for days.

The sun makes things a little better. After being held underground for so long, its rays are invigorating.

It’s unfortunate that I’m allowed to soak it up for no longer than five minutes at a time.

“The injections make you extremely photosensitive,” Dr. Telfair tells me. “It’s a restriction that will be with you for the rest of your life. Stay out in the midday sun longer than ten minutes and you’ll burn to a crisp.”

So, to keep me safe, we cap it at five.

The second day after my promise to Dr. Telfair, I finally learn what Jeremy meant when he said that he left Stonehart Industries behind.

“In the days after you went missing, Lilly, I lost it. I poured everything I had, all my energy, and all my resources into finding you. Every potential trail we hit turned up dry. Your capture was perfectly executed. It could only have been so with inside information. Well, Rose provided that. Hugh provided that. It was the perfect storm of events that had been brewing. Rose knew my habits—and yours—at home. Hugh knew everything there was to know about Stonehart Industries and what it’s like at work. Together with Esteban’s relative wealth, and his crazed zeal to see justice done, it was possible. My glaring omission of oversight notwithstanding, there could not have been a more perfect trifecta of opportunity.

“All three had been done wrong by me. All three had long-standing issues with transgression that I’d committed. I thought Hugh cowered. I thought Rose had moved past who she was in the past. I did not think—I never expected—that their hatred for me would be so intense and long-standing.”

“You said you sent me away, to Maine, that one time, because you were shielding me from danger. What danger? What was that about?” I ask.

Jeremy exhales. “I did it on a whim, Lilly. I felt something brewing. I could not put my finger on exactly what it was. Call it a gut feeling. It frightened me. I dislike uncertainties. I loathe things I cannot control. I sent you away, and blocked your cell phone because of a suspicion I had.”

“What sort of suspicion?” I pry. “About what?”

“Alas,” Jeremy sighs, “I do not know. I just knew, at the moment, that I had to get you away. Get you out of California lest something manifest itself. While you were gone, I committed myself to discovering what it was. I found nothing. But still that feeling nagged at me. I had a faint warning that something dire could happen to you. It never went away…not until you returned. Not even after Fey and Robin found you in San Jose.”

“That’s why you blocked her calls?” I ask. “I don’t really care now, Jeremy. All that is so long past that it seems like it happened in a different lifetime, to another person. But I’m still curious, even if somewhat…detached.”

Jeremy smiles. “An interesting perspective. Yes, in answer to your question. That is why I blocked her calls. I did not know what the source of the danger was. I thought, if I could keep you as close to me as possible, if I could keep you securely guarded, I was minimizing risk.”

I feel a spontaneous smile coming on. An empowering sort of joy blooms in my chest.

“You know what?” I ask. “That is probably what I love most about you.”

“Oh?” Jeremy raises an eyebrow. “And what would that be?”

“How much you want to protect me… in your own misguided way.”

Jeremy chuckles. “You do force me into bad decision, at times,” he admits.

“So what happened next?” I prompt. “When I didn’t return to the Stonehart Industries Building?”

“I lost my shit,” Jeremy confesses. “The first night you were gone, I prowled the streets looking for you. I was a man lost. I thought you had left me, at first, of your own will.”

“I would never!” I say

“I know,” Jeremy agrees. “That’s why I knew something was very wrong—especially when I returned home and discovered Rose missing. Then I found out that Hugh had left, too. Well, I knew who had taken you from right under my nose!” Jeremy’s voice takes on a maddened zeal. “Rose orchestrated it all. Did you know? She used Simon to fly out and pick Hugh up. The idiot man did not think to check with me. From there, they met Esteban at a rendezvous point and smuggled you out of the country.

“Well,” Jeremy pauses. “All this I found out only after the fact. And only when those demands were made of me, and I received the video footage of you…” Jeremy growls, deep in his throat. “…did I finally have enough of an understanding of the situation to create a plan.

“But you have to understand, Lilly. That type of knowledge took me weeks. All that time, in every spare minute of my time, I obsessed over how I had failed you. How I allowed you to be taken from me. I hated myself for failing you so spectacularly. I hated that I could do nothing to influence things. Every day without communication from your captors was agony. I could only focus on you; on finding you, on rescuing you, on seeing you home safe.

“Well,” he gives a sour chuckle. “despite all that, there was still a company that needed to be run. Stonehart Industries cannot operate without me at the helm. I told you about the contingencies I’ve made in case of my death: The proper chain of command and so on? The only way that would be initiated was
through
my death. Even in a public company, I held ultimate control.

“But with you missing, I could not concentrate on the regular day-to-day running of the company.” He barks a laugh. “How could I? However, continuing to run Stonehart Industries kept me grounded. It gave me enough of a distraction to at least get through the day without succumbing to a blind rage. I had no idea what was being done to you. Hell! I had no idea whether you were still alive or not. I hoped, of course. Dear God, how I hoped. Yet everything around me was simply noise.

“So I lost control. I was still
in
control. But, I was failing all my responsibilities. I made grievous errors in judgment with only half an understanding of the facts. The board members you know called me out on it. I did not deny anything. I knew I had lost my nerve, had lost everything, because I lost…you.”

“So what happened?”

“I evoked those contingency plans. The moment I got my first communication from Esteban, I finally had an ‘in’. I knew what I had to do. The plan was vague, at first. But Esteban revealed his king. He made himself vulnerable. And I played my role, showing him the papers acknowledging transfer of the company shares to my father, the release of Dextran from Stonehart Industries’ grip, the gift of my wealth to Rose…”

“You did all that?” I wonder. “For me? In truth?”

“Of course in truth,” Jeremy tells me. “You are the most important, most vital part of my life, Lilly. For you, I would do
anything
.”

“But that’s not what happened,” I point out.

“No,” Jeremy agrees. “It is not. Do you know why? It’s because I could not trust my father, or Esteban, with your life. If there had been a guarantee, made by an arbitrator, a judge, some type of third party, under binding terms, that if I gave in to their demands I would have you back, alive, unharmed, completely safe, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

“But their compliance could not be guaranteed. If I signed the legal papers—which would have been binding, by the way—who could say if they would have released you? It would be me putting your fate into somebody else’s hands. And that, I could not do. Not ever.

“So I demanded a meeting. I said I would give them everything they wanted if only I could see you.

“My father suspected something. Shrewd mind that he has, of course he did. But he could not put his finger on what. He disliked uncertainty as much as I. He advised Esteban to reject my condition.