“You were out sick a couple of months ago, so Madison sat at your desk to answer the phones.”
“I remember that.” I touched the valley between my breasts. “I had a chest infection that I couldn’t shake. I was off for like a week or two.”
“Yeah, well, one of those days, Madison sat at your desk and found a sticky note that said, ‘Don’t trust Conrad.’ She remembered it after she was kidnapped and suggested to Rawn that it might be an indication that I was the inside man at Cepheus and someone had been trying to warn you to stay away from me.”
I reached up and ran a finger over the thin hairs that dotted his chest. “You couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Yeah, well, Rawn apparently told McFarren about the sticky note and he told the police.”
“But it’s just a note. How do they know I didn’t write it? Or Russell didn’t do it as some sort of joke?”
“They don’t. But I do.”
“You do what?”
“I know who wrote it.”
Conrad rolled onto his back, pulling away from me. I sat up, allowing the comforter to fall around my hips, covering my back but leaving the rest of me uncovered. I ran my hand over his bare chest, his impressive abs, and waited for him to move his arm from over his face and explain what he meant.
He groaned, the kind of sound that a man who knows he’s been beaten makes. He slowly uncovered his face and looked up at me.
“You can’t tell a soul what I’m about to tell you.”
“Who would I tell?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Russell? Rawn? Madison, or her little roommate, Annie?”
“I wouldn’t. Not if you didn’t want me to.”
He pushed himself up on his elbow and held out his other hand to me. “Pinky swear.”
I laughed. “I haven’t done a pinky swear since I was eight.”
“Pinky swear.”
I shook my head, but I hooked my pinky around his. “I swear.”
He lay back down with a sigh.
“So, who wrote it?”
“Aurora.”
As much as it should have been obvious to me—Einstein was the only person in the office who still used Post-It notes. She had several stacks of them in her pockets, in her laptop bag, and stuck inside her binder. She carried them everywhere and was constantly writing notes on them. It wasn’t.
“Why would she—”
“Because she was angry with me.”
Conrad sat up, picking up the comforter and rearranging it in his lap. He was delaying I could see by the way his jaw flexed with tension that he was formulating what he wanted to say next. And I knew it couldn’t be anything good. My heart felt like a heavy stone had just been strung around it, and I wanted to go back five minutes and un-ask my question. Maybe this was something I really didn’t want to know.
“You’ve heard of Alzheimer’s disease, right?”
I nodded. “They thought for a while that Memaw might have it.”
Conrad nodded. “It’s normally a disease of the elderly, only striking people over sixty-five. But there are documented cases of people showing symptoms as early as their forties.”
“Yeah.”
He tilted his head a little, his eyes seeming to focus on me, but not really. It was like he was miles away, or months away, remembering something that haunted him.
“Aurora’s maternal grandmother and aunt both suffered from the illness. There was a great deal of concern for her mother, and she was tested every year for a long time. And then they discovered that they could do a blood test and look for a specific gene that would suggest the possibility of her suffering from the disease, and hers came back negative. But when Aurora was tested…”
“It was positive.”
“It’s called familial early onset Alzheimer’s.”
“But Aurora can’t be older than thirty.”
“She’s thirty-two. But don’t tell her I told you that, either.” He smiled a crooked smile that might have been extremely charming under different circumstances. But then it disappeared. “It’s highly unusual for someone to show symptoms so young. So, when Aurora began forgetting things, when she became so ‘scatter-brained’—I think you called it—we all just assumed it was her dedication to her work and her penchant for forgetting to eat and sleep. But a few months ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night. She was wandering around a park near her house in her nightgown, crying and demanding to know where Angel was.”
“Angel?”
“A cat she had when she was a teenager.”
“Wow,” I whispered, horrified at the idea of losing that much of myself just out of the blue. And Einstein…she was so brilliant. She had a mind that could have solved most of the world’s problems if she was inclined to do so. To have this happen…it was a tragedy.
“There are medications that can slow down the progression. Her parents took her to a clinic in Switzerland, and they did tests and tried a couple of new treatments that aren’t available here. It looked like it helped. The symptoms come and go. But it’s been rough, and when she struggles, she does things that aren’t safe.”
“Like?”
He shook his head. “She spends money on frivolous things. She forgets to lock her doors when she leaves home, and her house has been broken into a few times. She forgets she’s driving while she’s on the highway…things that could cause her, or someone else, to end up in the hospital. Or worse.” He stared down at the comforter, his normally tan skin a little pasty. “I talked to her parents about going to court to get power of attorney over her. That pissed her off.”
He looked at me, the hurt in his eyes almost more than I could take. I touched his hand, and he immediately folded his fingers around mine.
“She wrote a bunch of those notes…‘Don’t trust Conrad’…and left them all over her apartment. I gathered them up and threw them away because when she has lapses of memories—bad ones—she becomes paranoid, and I was afraid the notes would make it worse. And then I was at the Cepheus offices one morning, sitting at your desk while I waited for Aurora to get some notes on the 3D telescope launch, and I found another of those notes on her binder. I dropped it into your desk drawer because Madison just happened to walk up. I didn’t want her to see me throw it out and wonder why I was destroying Aurora’s notes.”
“You’re trying to protect her.”
“Yeah.”
I thought about my grandmother, of all the health ailments she’d begun experiencing over the past year or two. Her memory began failing her first. There was once a time when I would open the refrigerator and find a potted plant or the television remote in there. Or I would find the milk in the bathroom cabinet. And then she fell, broke her hip in three places and had to be in the hospital for over a month. The doctors noticed her memory lapses and tested her for everything from a brain tumor to Alzheimer’s to simple senility. They finally decided it was a side effect of a blockage in her carotid artery. But the blood thinners they gave her to clear it only caused her to bleed internally. They were afraid to try anything more aggressive. At her age, they said, it might be better to put up with the forgetfulness. Her age. She was only seventy-five. My great-grandfather lived to be a hundred and two.
I remember how angry I was that they wouldn’t even try. And then she had a heart attack.
That was when I decided it would be better to live with the forgetfulness than to live without Memaw at all.
I knew exactly where Conrad was coming from.
“Aurora was…is an important part of my life. She was my wife.”
“I know.”
“It’s not that I’m still in love with her. I just—”
“You don’t have to explain.”
He looked at me and ran his thumb along the curve of my chin. “I just want you to know that my relationship with Aurora will never again be what it was. I love her, but I’m not in love with her.”
“I know.”
He groaned. “Mellissa—”
“I know you’re not the kind of man who could lay with me the way you did tonight and still want someone else.”
“You know that?”
“I do.”
“And what about all that we barely know each other stuff?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there are some things that don’t take time to glean about a person. Maybe there are some things you can just know.”
He kissed me gently, his lips lingering against my bottom lip. “You are something else,” he whispered.
A thought popped into my mind as he leaned in for another, deeper kiss. I leaned back out of reach.
“What if it’s her?”
“What?”
“What if Aurora is the one.”
“The one, what?” he asked, pulling back, a puzzled frown making him more handsome than he was before—if that was possible.
I touched his chin because I just couldn’t help myself.
“What if Aurora is the inside man?”
He shook his head. “You’ve lost me, baby.”
“What if Aurora unwittingly gave information to these corporate spies? What if she was the one who told them to take me? What if she confused me with Madison, or someone else? She could have confused me for Alana, that girl who works in Todd Wilson’s office? She’s done that before, and Alana would have known about some of the things the kidnappers asked Madison about. And she would have recognized Madison, so she could have been the one who told them they had the wrong girl.”
“You think Aurora worked with corporate spies to hurt Cepheus?” He shook his head vigorously, his uncombed hair swishing around his head quite erotically. “Aurora would never hurt Cepheus.”
“But what if she didn’t know what she was doing? What if they confused her and made her think they were up to something a little less damaging?”
“Like what?”
I didn’t know. I tried to think of all the things that I had heard Einstein mention recently, or things I had seen in the office that might suggest an answer. But I really didn’t see much of the paperwork. My job was centered mostly on answering the phones and keeping Einstein moving from meeting to meeting. And then I remembered a weird email that had ended up in my mailbox that I was pretty sure she had meant to send to someone else.
“What about a reporter? What if they approached her, pretending to be a reporter from some scientific journal? She sent a reply to an email to my email address by mistake once, a request for an interview from some magazine…Science Quarterly, or something like that. It was full of enthusiasm, like a starlet who’d just gotten her first fan letter.”
Conrad pushed the comforter out of the way and moved up closer to me, sliding his hands around my hips and tugging at my bare ass.
“You make it awfully hard for me to concentrate.”
“Conrad…”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll look into it and see if I can find anything. But I don’t think Aurora’s symptoms have gotten so bad that she wouldn’t see right through a ruse like that.”
“I hope not. But if it is her, don’t we have a responsibility to do something about it?”
“We?” He cocked an eyebrow, a soft smile slipping across his lips. “We’re a ‘we’ now?”
“After all the orgasms I let you give me tonight, I think we can say that.”
“Let me? You let me?”
“Yeah,” I said, sliding up into his lap. “And if you’re a good boy, I might let you do it one more time before we go to sleep.”
“Again with that sleep nonsense,” he groaned against my throat, as he began to pepper it with soft kisses. “Who said anything about sleep?”
Chapter Ten
I had barely settled at my desk the next morning when Russell rushed past with an armful of files.
“Glad to see you came to your senses,” he said. “Make sure you don’t have any more unexplained absences.”
“Yes, boss.”
He shook his head, but I didn’t miss the flash of pride that washed across his face as he disappeared around the corner.
The second he was gone, I slipped into Aurora’s office and approached her desk. She had her office arranged in something of a horseshoe. Her desk was in the middle with two smaller sides on the right and one on the left—workstations for her assistants. Only one of the smaller desks was occupied at the moment—Russell’s. While Madison was still technically Aurora’s assistant until a replacement could be found, she hadn’t been to work since the 3D telescope launch party and probably wouldn’t be. She had been promoted to Rawn’s assistant since his own assistant quit after learning she was pregnant.
I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Russell hadn’t returned, then moved around Aurora’s desk to search its drawers for anything of interest. There were a lot of Post-It notes, including a few more with that terse little warning about Conrad. I wondered if he knew about these. Most of the others were notes on the 3D telescope and other projects that were currently at various stages of production. There were also a couple of notes about grocery shopping. And one that reminded Aurora to tell Madison to bring her laptop to work on her first day—a message I was pretty sure she’d never received because she’d ended up borrowing Rawn’s former assistant’s laptop.
There was nothing else in the drawers of interest, just pens and pencils, a couple of legal pads, and a manicure set that was still wrapped in its manufacturer’s packaging. I don’t know what I had hoped to find—a smoking gun?—but it wasn’t there. I was about to open the top drawer of her filing cabinet when Russell’s voice suddenly demanded, “What the hell are you doing?”
I turned a little too quickly, my head spinning in response, and forced a smile that I was afraid came off a little too awkwardly. Russell was standing in the doorway with a tall, dark-haired woman beside him. A woman who looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite figure out why.
“I was looking for Madison’s phone charger,” I said, pulling my phone out of my pocket. “We have the same phone, and I forgot mine at home this morning. She told me she keeps a spare in the office, but I can’t find it.”
“Madison’s stuff is in her desk,” Russell said, pointing to one of the sad, empty-looking desks to the right of Aurora’s. “You might try looking there.”
“I did, but it wasn’t there. I thought that maybe Aurora picked it up thinking it was hers?”
A dark, sinister look briefly crossed Russell’s studious features. “Maybe.”
I slid my phone back into my pocket and turned back to the filing cabinet, peeking in the first, then the second of the two drawers. However, I found nothing but files…ironically enough. When I turned back around, Russell was showing the stranger to the desk beside Madison’s.
“This will be your desk. You’ll basically be assisting me with most of the day to day operations of the office.” He seemed to feel my gaze because he waved in my general direction and said, “This is Mellissa. She’s Aurora’s receptionist…whenever she bothers to come in to work.”
“Janet,” the woman said, politely holding out her hand to me.
As I took it, I suddenly remembered where I had seen her before. She was the potential assistant whose file Russell had shown me Friday morning before Annie’s phone call set off the crazy chain of events that turned my life upside down this weekend. The one who struck me as sinister and whom I advised him not to hire.
Of course, she was the one he chose.
“Nice to meet you,” I said—damn that good southern upbringing—before letting go of her hand as quickly as politeness allowed.
And then I left the room, goose bumps breaking out along my arms as I did. There was something not right about that woman.
***
“These are the top three.”
I picked up the brochures Richard shoved across the diner’s table at me. Assisted living centers. It made me sick that I was even considering this.
“Maybe she could survive another trip. Maybe,
if the government had a couple of good doctors check her out before and after—”
“I’ve already talked to her doctors, Mellissa. They say that her heart just isn’t up to it.”
I pressed a finger against the front of one of the brochures, blocking the smiling face of some elderly patient who was staring at me, almost like he was mocking me.
“She wouldn’t like being placed in one these places. She always said she would rather die than live in an old folks’ home.”
“These are a little different than that. She’ll have her own room, her own space, and she’ll be able to set her own schedule.”
“What about her shows? Will they let her watch television?”
“There’s a television in each of the rooms.”
“You thought of everything.”
“That’s kind of in my job description.” Richard reached across the table and took my hand. “I know you’re scared, Mellissa, but we both knew this day might come.”
I looked at him, angry with myself that my vision was blurred by unshed tears. “Haven’t we lost enough already? Do you really expect me to be okay with abandoning my grandmother and letting her die alone in some nursing home?”
“She won’t be alone. I promise you that.”
There was a softness to his tone that I knew was sincere. But it didn’t take away the feeling that I’d been punched in the gut. I pulled my hand from his and fled the booth, rushing to the women’s room tucked into a back corner of the diner.
“Get a grip,” I told myself as I stood at the mirror, grasping the thick porcelain of the sink between my hands, staring into my own eyes. “Don’t do this.”
And then every bite of my breakfast—eaten just a few hours ago in this very diner—came up into the sink.
I couldn’t do this. I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t walk away from the friends I’d made, the life I’d built. I couldn’t leave my home, my few, precious possessions. Conrad. How was I supposed to leave Conrad so soon after I found him? Hadn’t I always dreamed of finding my prince, my soulmate? Hadn’t I always dreamed of meeting a man who touched my soul when he looked in my eyes the way Conrad did? How could I leave him now, now when he was in the middle of this legal nightmare, struggling with protecting the woman he once loved?
The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 2 Page 10