DONOVAN (Gray Wolf Security, #1)(136)

I glanced at Lucien. He was watching his brother up ahead of us talking animatedly to Rachel.

“I don’t know. I find it hard to believe he’d be willing to do something to hurt his own company.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“But the email threatening you came from his computer.”

Lucien stopped walking, pulling me toward him as he did, forcing other people who were trying to get to the carnival games to move around us like a river flowing around a fallen boulder.

“I’m sure you know as well as I do that someone knowledgeable with computers can mask their IP address.”

“I know.”

“Someone could have set him up.”

“I know that, too.”

He studied me, his blue eyes, already such a deeper blue than mine were, even darker with the emotion rushing through them.

“I can’t make myself believe that Jacob would have anything to do with selling the prototype of the artificial pancreas.”

“Listen,” I said, moving closer to him so that our voices didn’t carry so much. “I know that you’re upset. But my father and our team are working on it. If it’s someone trying to set Jacob up, we’ll know pretty quick.”

“And then?”

“And then we go from there. But, for right now, we just keep going the way we’re going.”

Lucien glanced ahead of us, looking for Jacob. We’d lost them in the crowd, but they couldn’t have gotten far. His eyes fell back on mine, and he touched my chin with the pad of his thumb. It was a gentle caress, almost a friendly touch. But there was so much more behind it than that. I wanted to move into his arms, wanted to feel the reassuring warmth of his body despite the late winter warmth of the south Texas sun, but I reminded myself that this was just another case. I was letting myself get carried away with the fact that he was so incredibly handsome and so different from any man I’d ever known before. And his touch… Damn, I was doing it again! I was letting my mind go to where it had been last night, and that was too dangerous.

I had to focus.

“Lucien!”

Rachel was running toward us, high color on her cheeks. She grabbed his arm, pulling his hand away from my face.

“Come throw softballs with me!”

She was laughing as she dragged him away. He glanced back at me, a touch of longing in his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said, waving a hand to indicate he had no control over his life.

“She’s still such a child in so many ways,” Jacob said as he came up alongside me. “And he was always her favorite playmate.”

“It must be nice having a little sister.”

“Only child?”

I never really knew how to answer questions like that. I wasn’t always an only child. I had a little sister once. She was five years younger than me, a pest I wanted to go away, until she did. Until the night she and my mother ran to the store and never came home.

“Yeah,” I said, because I really didn’t see the point in getting into the whole story.

“Sometimes I think I might have preferred to remain an only child. And others I realize that I would have missed out on too much if my father had never met Elizabeth and Lucien.”

I’d thought about what it would be like if my father had ever gotten remarried. I knew he dated some, knew that he came close once. She was a waitress at his favorite diner downtown a block or two from his old precinct. He thought I didn’t know about it, but I did. I saw the little hand touches, the long looks. I don’t know what happened, why they broke up. I worried when I went into the Army that he would be left all alone. I still worry.

“I’m sorry about last night,” Jacob said.

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. You were just looking out for your brother.”

“I was. And that’s not what I’m apologizing for.” He tilted his head slightly as he studied me in the bright sunshine. “I’m just sorry that I went about it a little clumsily.”

“You and Lucien are pretty close.”

“Yeah.” He dragged his fingers through his short, dull brown hair. “Working together day in and day out does that.”

“Were you close before you started working at Callahan Biomedical?”

“I don’t know. Not as close as we should have been, I suppose. I went off to college almost as soon as he and Elizabeth moved into the house. Then I got married, went to graduate school. My life was elsewhere.”

“Your wife. She was your college sweetheart?”

He nodded, taking my elbow and beginning a slow walk toward the end of the boardwalk, where Rachel and Lucien were laughing as they failed to win a stuffed animal.

“We met at UT Austin and moved on to Stanford together.”

“Lucien said you separated a couple of months ago.”

“We did.”

“Can I ask what went wrong?”

Jacob was quiet for a moment. We walked a slow pace together, side by side. The crowd had lessened a little, and we were in one of those pockets of quiet that sometimes happen in a large crowd. I wasn’t sure he would answer me, but then he sighed.

“It was pretty typical, I suppose. I wanted children. She didn’t. She got tired of arguing about it, so she asked me to leave.”