He was stealing it all. Selling it to another company.
I could see what was going to happen. Jacob had decided that the drugs we were developing weren’t coming along fast enough to make money. And the few things we did have—the patents we’d purchased on other drugs, vitamins and other things, the pacemaker we already had on the market—weren’t making enough money to support the development of the new devices and drugs we were working on. The company was struggling. We’d discussed it months ago, the loans we were going to take out to make things better, to give us what we needed to make things stretch. But Jacob wasn’t going to wait.
He was going to sell all of our patents and walk away.
He was distracting me so that I wouldn’t see what he was up to. He was just waiting for the patent on the pancreas to come through. That was the cherry on top. He was getting billions of dollars for it all.
He was going to leave me high and dry with a failed company on my hands.
There were contracts for the whole thing. And the paperwork I’d signed last month giving me control over the company. He’d said it was for the loans. He’d said it was a safety measure. He’d said it didn’t mean anything.
But it did. When the patents were gone and we had nothing left to sell, I was going to be left holding the bag for millions of dollars in unpaid loans. It would ruin me.
I couldn’t let this happen.
I dug through the paperwork, wondering how he was getting around my name on most of the patents. And then I remembered the power of attorney I’d signed when I first went to work at the company. He was using it to make the sales. And it was all such a joke, the way he played me. Hand me some paperwork, tell me it meant nothing, get me to sign it. Then he had the power to screw me over so royally I would never have survived the fallout. There would have been lawsuits from vendors, from our employees. There would be… It was so massive that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what all this would do to me, to the company, to the people who worked there. To the people we’d vowed to help.
How long had he been planning this?
“Fuck me!”
“Yes, that was it exactly.”
Every muscle in my body went rigid. I sat still, afraid if I moved I would do something I would forever regret. I felt him come up behind me and watched as his hands moved around me, picking up the computer from the counter in front of me.
“I knew you would put it together if given enough time. That’s why I had to distract you.”
“You made it look like you were the one who wrote the emails.”
“I didn’t realize you’d hired an investigator. I really do think you should have told me about that one before you did it.”
“Don’t you think I was capable of tracing them?”
“Oh, sure. I was hoping you would. But I thought it would take you longer. Again, I didn’t think you would hire an investigator.”
“You were trying to keep me busy.”
“Exactly. The deal took longer than expected. And your investigator traced the emails so quickly. If not for that sweet little piece of ass you were screwing, you probably would have figured everything out days ago.”
I grabbed the front of his shirt without thinking about it, shoving him between me and the bar, his computer slipping from his fingers and crashing against the tile floor.
“You’ll have to pay for that,” Jacob said, his voice low. A growl. And then he laughed. “Wait. You already have.”
“Why, Jacob? Why are you doing this?”
“Why?” Pure hatred filled his eyes as he studied me. “Because I was the sole heir to my father’s billions. And then he meets your mother and brings you into the mix. And then Rachel. And, suddenly, I’m no longer the sun and the moon. I’m suddenly just the mistake that came from a marriage he’d never really wanted in the first place.”
I pushed him hard against the counter even as a wave of dizziness suddenly washed over me. I was sweating, had been for a while now, but I hadn’t really noticed. And then my CGM began to buzz in my pocket.
“You’re my brother.”
“No. You’re my stepbrother. There is a big difference.”
“You…you… What about Rachel?”
“Rachel will be taken care of. The help she offered in this whole game was invaluable.”
“Rachel…” My head was really spinning, and I could actually feel the strength seeping out of my arms. I knew I was going low. I knew the symptoms better than I knew the lines of my own face in a mirror. But I couldn’t let diabetes beat me now. “Rachel’s just a kid.”
“Yes, well, that kid managed to get the drop on your girlfriend and snatch her out of the hotel without you being any the wiser.”
“Rachel has Adrienne?”
“Yeah. Surprised me too. I thought she’d screw things up. Thought she’d get caught and you would be tied up at the police station in San Antonio until tomorrow. But, well, you can’t pan for every situation, can you?”