Until It's You (2 page)

"But those feelings wouldn't be real."

"They wouldn't mean what we think of them as meaning, no. Feelings are chemicals in people's brains. It would feel real to him, and maybe that would be all she cares about."

Kristina shook her head. "Why would someone do that?"

"Maybe it's lust. There’s a long history of people wanting love potions." He shrugged. "The point is, there are many uses. Some are more obvious than others, but anything is possible."

"Okay. But there are obvious ones, right? I don't think a high school girl is out there trying to kidnap me or shoot up my brother's office.”

"I agree. There are more obvious possibilities than spurned teenage girls." He shifted in his seat. "You said this Agent Carter was at the party last night.”

“The tall brunette hanging on Fordelli, yes. Looks like she could have been a model.”

Landon looked at her blankly.

An embarrassed flush rose to her cheeks. Her nostrils flared, frustrated with herself as much as Landon. “You don’t have to play these games, Landon. I know she's pretty hot.”

“I’m not playing any games.” His eyes met hers, nearly innocently. “I didn’t see her.”

She held his gaze for a moment, feeling a pull toward him just as she had earlier, but turned away. They were attracted to each other, so what? They also had a job to do, and she’d set down the rules already.

“Well,” she said. “Carter was there, and then she turned up at my office and told me you were being investigated.”

Landon's eyes opened wide, all the innocence that had been there moments before replaced by shock. “Wait, she actually said the FBI is investigating me? Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“I’m mentioning it now.”

He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m pretty sure I would know about that if it were true.”

"Why?"

"I'm...not without contacts in the government. Someone would have heard."

“Maybe things are isolated at the moment. I didn't get the impression Carter has a big team."

He smiled in a way she thought was indulgent. "Perhaps."

She nodded. Clearly he thought she was crazy, but there was no point in arguing about it now. "So you had no idea?”

“Not about the FBI, no.”

“Okay. Well, that was what she said. She was upset that she hadn’t been able to contact you.”

His dark eyes were little slits as he shook his head. “So she just happened to need to contact me on the day I disappeared. Why?”

She sighed and waved her hand. He had a point, of course, but it was all she was working with at the moment. “The worst of it is, when I let her into my office I discovered my safe had been broken into.”

His eyes shot open. “How do you know?”

She grimaced. “Because the envelope you sent me had been stolen. Everything except the passwords for your communications and the key to the safe deposit box.”

“So the letter I wrote—”

“Right. Gone.”

Landon looked at her steadily. “So you think it was the agent?”

Kristina hesitated. She’d run the scenario through her head a few times without getting to a definite answer.

“The door was locked,” she said slowly.

“So?”

“It would be pretty brash to pick the lock of my office in plain sight. Definitely possible, but risky. Someone with a key could have done it more easily." She pressed her lips together until her bottom teeth were digging into the inside of her lip. "Couldn’t get a read on her at the time. If she got caught either trying to break in or coming out, it would raise a lot of suspicions. Embarrassing at best for an FBI agent. The firm would sue the shit out of her office.”

“So probably not.”

“At the time I was so shocked I couldn’t get a good read on her to be sure. My guess is no."

“Would a Recall help?”

She cringed and shook her head. “Tom’s missing anyway.”

Landon’s brows shot up and he seemed to gather himself for a moment. “I can run a Recall, Kristina,” he said delicately.

She studied his bemused expression. Of course he could. The man had started a pharmaceutical company right out of college. “What about the equipment?” she asked.

"I’ll buy it tomorrow, after I get us a car.”

“What do you mean, once you get us a car? What were you driving earlier? And just how much cash do you have on you right now? Earlier you offered me a hundred grand. That’s not much less than what I make in a year.”

“I ditched the car from earlier in case it gets tracked,” he said impatiently. “And as for your second question, I have taken quite a bit of cash out over the last few weeks. Bank thinks I gambled it away, probably.”

She blinked. “How much is ‘quite a bit’?”

“About five million. It’s in the bedroom closet, packed up in a duffel bag.” He picked the pen up and began writing under where Kristina had stopped. “So we should be set for whatever we need within reason.”

She nodded dumbly. Five million and the bank didn’t even bat an eye. At a loss for words, she leaned forward to see what he was writing.

It was an agenda for the next morning, with three bullet points underneath the header: Car, Recall, and a question mark where the investigating would be done.

“So I think our first step is investigating Carter,” Landon said. “We’ll form an action plan once that’s done.”

"The first step is gathering profiles on all the players," Kristina said, springing into action.

She was not going to let him rip control away.

He hesitated, then gave a short nod. "How long will that take?"

"I can get a start on it in a few hours. Assuming I don't find anything unusual, we can dive deeper on Carter once I'm done."

"Okay, we go with that. Anything else?"

She swallowed. The full reality of her situation—the fact she would wake up tomorrow and things would still be just as messed up—hit her. "I will have to figure out what to do about the office," she said tentatively.

He looked at her skeptically. "You can't go in, can you?"

"I don't know how much Dunn and Brantley know. If I give them nothing, it's going to ring alarm bells."

"You were lucky to get away this afternoon."

She rubbed her eyes. He was right, of course. "I'll figure something out. At the very least, I will get started here."

He leaned back into the couch, but she could see from his tense shoulders he was still worried. "Let me know when you decide."

"Of course."

Her thoughts slowed down then, suddenly. A crash was coming. She desperately needed sleep.

Landon seemed to sense the change. His eyes darted around and found the clock on the wall.

"If that's all we have tonight, we should get some sleep,” he said.

“Separately,” Kristina said sleepily.

Her cheeks warmed and he flashed a quick smile. Why had she said that? Wake up!

“That was the arrangement we agreed to," he said, a trace of a smile still playing on his lips. "Did you have a change of heart at some point and then just now flipped back?”

“No. I was just reinforcing.”

He sat up and her chest tightened. “Consider me reinforced,” he said, his voice low. “For now.”

A warm surge fluttered through her body. Her cheeks burning, she turned to face him as he stood up. She looked up at him, speechless, and brought her hand up to her ear, where his breath had been moments earlier.

Landon looked down at her, his dark eyes still burning. His fists were clenched. “I’m going to go wash up. You can have the bed. I’ll take the couch.”

She swallowed and finally found her voice. “We can switch off depending on how long this lasts.”

He looked at her quizzically. "No, you can have it as long as need be. Don't you think I'm a gentleman?"

She opened and closed her mouth dumbly but said nothing.

With his lips pressed together, he gave her one last look and turned away. She watched him all the way to the bathroom door.

When the door closed, she shook her head. What the hell had gotten into her? Before today she would have never thought he was her type. Now with this pharm in her veins, she didn’t know what to think.

Was he really not her type? Just what was that type, anyway? She didn’t exactly have a lot of successes to choose from.

She sighed and stood up from her seat on the couch. She needed to get a grip. People were after her, and they weren't going to stop while she worked out what to do with Landon.

Nothing was going to stop for that. She needed to set it aside. There was a hell of a lot more important than this to focus on.

Now, to go pass out.

Landon blinked and turned onto his shoulder, burying his face into his pillow. A dull ache just above the base of his spine swelled as he tried to get his bearings. The room was mostly dark, but diffused sunlight shone through and put a rectangle of light on the wall, shadowed with the slats of a cheap shade. That meant something: it was morning.

The scent of organic leather filled his nose. He was on a couch, and a sinking feeling settled into his consciousness. Something was wrong. Dimly, he checked for a hangover, but that wasn’t it. It had been forever since he’d had one of those. He turned again and stared up at the ceiling.

It wasn’t his office either. The shade was too cheap. Must be something...what was that on the ceiling?

His head flooded with realization. The past thirty-six hours. The past six weeks. The
wrongness
of his current situation.

He had dragged her into this. There was someone after him. After her. After his company and after her family. Whoever it was could get close to him, but he didn't know who, or why.

Slowly, like an old tablet, his mind came alive.

He shook his head to wake himself up a little more and looked over at the clock projected on the wall. 8:04. Later than he’d thought, but then last night had been a long one. How long had it been since he’d slept this late on a week day? He needed to get to work.

He got up with a yawn. Waved on the vid screen to get the Bloomberg stream going in the background while he got some caffeine rolling through his blood and finished waking up. Walked over to the kitchen to get a start on the coffee. The beans were in their clear, pressure-sealed container on the counter. He used his thumb to break the seal on the container and dumped them into the grinder. Resealed the container and set them to grind.

The smell of fresh beans ground up was refreshing. The lights overhead came on at a warm glow. A lot of lag in that. System was halfway to shot.

Absently, his eyes searched for the vents in the ceiling. He'd set the apartment up with only the bare bones of an aero system. Soothers slowed him down too much, the concentration aeros bogged him into details. Even the stims felt more artificial than coffee, like he was being pulled along by the nose.

He preferred a more old-fashioned jolt, and that meant making coffee the old-fashioned way, if he was going to have it. A quick fix he could get from a stim, but coffee was something different. It was a process to start the morning. Something he appreciated. Two minutes later, the sound of percolating goodness popped through the apartment.

The report he'd gotten from that private investigator he'd hired had said Kristina loved the stuff. That was something they shared. He’d learned to love coffee with his mother toward the end, sitting by her bedside when he went to visit her at Northwestern Memorial during college.

People would probably find it ironic that the maker of the world’s biggest stim pharms didn't use them much. But it was an old rule of drug dealers you would see in classic movies: don't get high on your own supply.

Of course, that was a rule for drugs that damaged people's systems, not the safe, government approved pharms his company sold. But still.

He didn’t care for many of the consumer pharms, anyway. The Sabor they pumped in restaurants these days could get to nauseating levels. The Tranqueel at spas just dulled things. He could go for the Xcite that was pumped into sports stadiums, but like anything else it just hit you after a while: What the hell am I feeling? Is it real?

And that was something nobody liked.

He’d managed to hide these feelings from the media so far. Pharms had made him a hell of a lot of money. Especially the consumer-facing aeros. Hospitals and defense contracts were important, but the growth in his company’s consumer sector is what had made him a billionaire a few times over.

It was what had the stockholders so giddy. The market seemed limitless.

And to be fair, there wasn't much difference between the pharms people ingested and the other ways people distracted themselves. Web media, streams, the slew of commercials assaulting them everywhere. Always being manipulated one way or another. Pharms were just a new way, and if most people were honest, they liked it. You had to be a little messed up to stop and think about it long enough to let it bother you. He was that kind of messed up, but only sometimes, and it never lasted long. There was too much work to do.

He shook his head as he stared at the coffee dripping down into the pot.

Kristina would be a challenge. The way he’d felt kissing her on the couch had been unexpected. Troubling, even. Being with women had mostly been about performance and pleasure. He enjoyed the give and take of a skillful lover, but it had always been about just that: skill. And release, of course. But either what had happened with Kristina was something else or he was losing it.

After finishing with the coffeemaker, he grabbed a banana from the counter and went back to the living room. Got to work peeling the banana and turned his attention to the vid screen. Markets had opened down, but nothing unusual. To be expected given the commodities news coming out of Africa. He took a bite of the banana and flicked his eyes over to the bedroom door, where Kristina was sleeping. Turned back to the vid screen.

His name was running across the bottom.

His breath caught in his chest. He continued to read as the text crept across the screen.

BREAKING REPORT: Tatum Pharmaceuticals CEO Landon Tatum missing since yesterday morning.

Tatum Pharmaceuticals spokesperson had no comment. Chicago Police Department Spokesperson also declined comment.

He put his tongue between his teeth and bit down hard, trying to steady himself. This was bad. If he wasn't stuck in this safehouse before, he definitely was now.

How could it even happen? There was no way they had anything solid without police involvement. His PR people weren’t so bad they couldn’t stall for a single day, especially with something this minor. The news program had felt confident enough to go without getting confirmation from his company. So they were risking getting sued if it wasn't true.

He shook his head. What the hell was going on?

***

Kristina woke up in a strange bed and immediately regretted it. Everything that was going on came at her at once. Her brother. The chase. The mystery of who the hell had it out for her. Landon. All of it.

As she recovered from the whiplash of the stress around her, a familiar sound came from the other room. Despite herself, a smile bloomed on her face. She knew that sound. Unless she was very much mistaken, Landon was brewing coffee.

She hopped out of bed and walked out into the living room. It looked different in the morning light, although Landon still hadn't drawn back the shades. A quick look up told her the light was artificial, in fact. Impressive setup for an apartment like this. She wondered if they were on a motor or had to be done manually. Seemed a waste of good light to keep the windows covered, even if you had a nice light system.

He was standing in front of one of those windows now, actually, his eyes fixed on the vid screen mounted on the wall. He still wore the same shirt and pants he'd worn the previous day, but they were both totally unwrinkled. Of course all his clothes would probably be treated with wrinkle-free chemicals. The man was a pharmaceuticals billionaire.

Still, as she looked at him, she couldn't help but feel some of the attraction she'd felt last night tugging at her mind. Feel the way her body had responded to his closeness, his touch.

She closed her eyes and tried to push it aside.
Think of something else
. Like the problems outside.

Or, for now, coffee.

“Are you brewing that just for me?” she asked.

He shot up straight and wheeled around to face her, seemingly startled. Lines of stress were etched at the corners of his eyes and his mouth.

A cool spasm worked its way down from her sternum to her stomach. Something had happened. Anxious, her eyes took in what was on the vid screen. His name scrolled across the bottom.

“What’s going on?” she asked quickly, looking back to him. “Why are you on the news?”

He bit his lip, looked quickly at the screen to see if he was missing anything, then back at her.  “It says I’m missing.”

“Already?”

“Right. Someone reported it, and my PR firm couldn't get a handle on it before Bloomberg went public." He shook his head. “For Bloomberg to feel confident putting this on, the source has to be big. There's no way they would chance it if they thought I might sue them. The shareholders will be going nuts."

She took a deep breath. “Your face is going to be everywhere.”

He nodded grimly. “I was hoping the protocol I had drafted would buy me a little more time once I went under.”

“Well, we know whoever is after us has that now.” She walked over and took a seat next to him. “Did they mention anyone else? An accomplice?”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed her thumb at her chest. “Me?”

He shook his head. “No. Not yet, anyway. The police refused to comment on any investigation. For now it’s just this report.”

"We need to figure something out for this," she said.

"Agreed. But first, coffee."

She walked over to the kitchen, found a mug, and poured herself a cup of coffee. After a moment with his comm, Landon followed.

She watched him approach from the kitchen. His short hair looked like he’d been running his hand through it all morning, and his scruff had come in darker through the night. The small differences in his normally perfectly composed appearance—at least as much as she’d seen him—were disorienting, almost dream-like. Nobody ever saw him look anything less than perfect. Like a walking commercial for himself.

He got to the kitchen and took a coffee mug down from the cupboard to pour himself a cup. As he did so, she took her first sip.

It was heavenly. Whether Landon was an avid coffee drinker or just got it for her, he knew how to pick good beans and brew a good cup.

“Thank you for this,” she said. “It was really sweet.”

“You’re welcome, but it wasn’t just for you.”

“You like coffee?”

“Loved it since college.”

She smiled. “Love it, huh?” She raised her mug to him. “Me too. Did that show up in the report you had some P.I. do on me?"

He smiled, unembarrassed by her insinuation about using a P.I. She could appreciate that. "It did."

"I'm sure it helped paint a picture for you. Would it have changed your plans if you found out I was addicted to all your products? More than most people, I mean."

He shook his head. "No. The report checked trustworthiness and competence. Personal details were added in only for the general picture."

"Of course." She took another sip of her coffee, decided to let the issue drop. She, of all people, couldn't get mad about someone snooping a bit on her life. “So what do you want to do about the news?"

He shook his head. "Not sure yet. Haven't thought through all my options."

"But obviously it's a problem."

"Yes. Are there some potential solutions?"

Kristina wrapped her hands around the mug and shrugged. “You can use a disguise.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I suppose if it's good. . ."

"You don't think I can make you a good disguise?"

"I know nothing about this. How convincing can you make one with the resources at hand?"

"Do I get a trip to the drug store?"

He waved his hand. "Sure. Anywhere within walking distance, so long as it's fast and discreet."

She thought it over quickly. "If I can get to a Walgreen's, I can put together something good enough to avoid ambient detection. Anything significant in terms of suspicion and you'd be blown, even with forged IDs. But it would pass for gawkers."

“Are you sure?”

“Did this not show up in your report?” She gave another shrug. “It’s my specialty. You didn’t even recognize me last night.”

He hesitated for a moment but then nodded. “What do you need to get started?”

"Walgreens will work. I'll do a quick search and head out.”

He took a deep breath and looked back in the direction of the vid screen. “Okay, you do that. While you’re out I’ll see if I can figure out a way to get a message to my PR team to get this thing under control. Maybe a cover story or something.”

“You didn’t already have one?”

“I had to disappear pretty fast. And no, when I drew up the other docs I thought I would have enough time to fabricate a cover before I had to disappear.”

She finished her mug of coffee. “Okay. So how are you going to handle it?”

“Not sure.” He put his mug down pointed to the bedroom. “Let me worry about that, you get going on that disguise. I want to get those Recalls going as soon as possible.”

She bit her tongue before saying something snarky. He took control very naturally, and she couldn’t tell if it annoyed her or if she became frustrated with herself for how attractive she found it. Something she could table for now and worry about later, anyway.