DONOVAN (Gray Wolf Security, #1)(150)

“Rachel’s refusing to even consider returning to college. She says that she doesn’t need a college education because of the trust fund Karl set up for her. You have to make her understand that she can’t live her life just surfing on her father’s money. She needs to be able to take care of herself if the money suddenly disappears.”

“If she won’t listen to you, what makes you think she’ll listen to me?”

“I hear Adrienne had a brilliant idea on how to make her go back to school.”

“Jacob told you that?”

“He actually calls me from time to time.”

“I just saw you two days ago!”

“That was two days ago.”

I laughed even though it really wasn’t funny. I was a grown man, twenty-six years old, and she still treated me like I was a child.

“What about the Andersons? Didn’t you say the Andersons were coming to the house this week?”

“Tonight.”

I groaned. “So your real motive is to get me in the same room with Cindy Anderson, right?”

“What harm would it do?”

Cindy Anderson was a friend of my mother’s from the days when she was still married to my father. She was a secretary at Karl’s oil company who happened to marry one of his vice-presidents or something. I don’t remember for sure what her husband did at the company, but he’d quit long ago to start his own real estate company. Long story short, Cindy wasn’t much older than my mother, maybe forty-eight, but she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. My mother thought she would be an ideal candidate for the trials we were going to start soon. I kept telling her that I wasn’t in charge of that, or even had anything to do with it. She’d be better off talking to Jacob or, better still, one of the FDA officials who was helping design the protocol for the human trials. But she wanted me to meet her.

“You know I can’t do anything for her.”

“But you can see the face of someone who will be helped by your work.”

“It’s not my work, Mom. It’s Jacob’s.”

“It’s all the same thing, isn’t it?”

I started to argue with her, but then something she’d said opened a door I hadn’t realized was inside my head. It was all the same. A lot of people outside of the company, and a few inside, didn’t understand that I had nothing to do with the drug side of the business. I didn’t have a biomedical engineering degree. I was a computer guy. I knew how to develop an app, knew how to manipulate computer code. I knew my way around the brain of a device. But I knew absolutely nothing about the drugs our company produced.

But not everyone knew that.

“I have to go, Mom.”

I hung up the phone and pulled up a folder on my computer. Inside were dozens of emails I’d gotten since I began working with Jacob. Some were from people asking to be a part of our drug trials. Others were from family members requesting that their loved one be allowed access to the drugs we were rumored to be developing, even though drug trials had yet to begin. Others were thank you letters, or requests for changes to our apps and computer software. It was a file where I dumped just about anything that was from a customer or potential customer, things I read but rarely responded to or felt needed added attention. There was a lot in this file.

What if something in it came from whoever was playing these games with me?

I spent a good part of the afternoon rereading the emails in that file. I made a list of the ones that seemed somewhat threatening or in which someone mentioned a family member who had died because our drugs didn’t come to market soon enough. The words in some of these emails pulled at my heartstrings, reminded me why I’d wanted to go into this business in the first place. But others… It was amazing what grief would push a person to do or say.

When I was done, I sent the emails to Ruben Garcia as an attachment in an email explaining what they were. Just as I pushed the button, Jaime stuck her head through the door.

“Time for that meeting.”




Adrienne was waiting in my office when I came back from my meeting, a garment bag hanging over the back of one of the chairs at the conference table. She was wearing jeans that hugged her ass perfectly and a thin t-shirt that did very little to hide the black and red bra underneath.

“Your dad lets you go out in public like that?”

“I’m twenty-three. I do what I want to do.”

“I’m not sure I would be that brave if I had a father like yours.”

“I’m not sure you should be doing a lot of the things you do with a father like mine.” She moved up against me, reaching up on her tip toes to place a kiss on my bottom lip. “If he had any idea what we’ve been doing…”

“We won’t tell him, right?”

She just smiled as she turned and walked back over to the magazine she’d been reading when I walked in.

“That must be a fascinating magazine.”

She shrugged.

I went over to the couch and collapsed beside her. She immediately snuggled back against me, a contented sigh slipping from her lips.

“We’re having dinner at my parents’.”

“What? I thought we were having a proper date.”

“Yeah, well, my mom pulled that card. You know, the you-left-our-weekend-early-so-you-owe-me card.”