Jennifer Greene - Mesmerizing Stranger

The galley door suddenly slid open. She must have jumped five feet, even though she could have sworn she’d completely calmed down.

“I know. You’ve got a rule about intruders in your galley. But I was hoping you might have a bandage.”

Harm stood there with a hand over his neck where she could see blood between his fingers.

“What on earth did you do? Get in here!” Men. Such idiots. She pulled open a drawer, grabbed a clean white towel, then pushed his hand away when he failed to remove it fast enough. That close to him, her hormones gave an instantaneous buck, which she tried to ignore. “Who taught you to shave? Attila the Hun? These days we use razors instead of axes.”

“I just figured I’d try to look more civilized before dinner. But it seems I packed an old razor because the blade sure seemed dead.”

“You think?” There were no chairs in the galley, just a stool wedged under the counter-which she pulled out and motioned him to sit in. Impossible for her to get a good look at his neck if she was stuck balancing up on tiptoes.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

She edged between his legs, took a good look at the cut, then reached above his head for the first-aid kit. “I know it’s nothing. But you’re still getting antiseptic, and yeah, a bandage. Did the blade have rust on it?”

“I don’t think it was that old.” And then, when he saw where she was reaching, he muttered, “Good grief.”

She grinned. Her first-aid kit did rival a complete trauma unit. “Yeah, I know. But the thing is, I’ve got a collection of knives that would make a gangster proud. When a girl works with knives for a living, she unfortunately tends to get cut once in a while, so naturally I’m prepared.”

Instead of sounding reassured, his voice took on a punch of panic. “Wait a minute. What are you going to do?”

She had to chuckle. Only then… She looked at him. She’d stepped between his legs to get a better view and angle on his cut. There was nothing odd about that. It was only now, she realized, that her outer thigh was grazing his inner thigh. And her palm cupped the side of his face, not unlike how a woman would cup her lover’s face for a kiss. And his eyes were on hers, her eyes on his, with enough electricity to crackle up a fire or two.

Where the patooties had that come from?

“Hmm,” she said, and stepped back fast.

The instant she let up pressure, unfortunately, the scrape on his neck immediately started bleeding again. It needed to be cleaned. Then she had to wait until the moisture dried before applying antiseptic. That had to dry before a bandage could conceivably stick, so that took another wait. Obviously, none of those minor actions took long…but all of them took touching him. She was close enough to smell and sense and see. To be aware. Too aware. So she started asking him nosy questions. She sensed he wasn’t normally into chatting up strangers, but maybe he was just uneasy enough around her to open up. Either that, or he was actually interested in spilling about his company and his current situation.

“So,” she started out with, “is your first name ‘Harm’ symbolic of what you’re like to be around or what?”

He chuckled. “Nothing that interesting. Harm is just a Dutch name. Means ruler or leader or something like that. My dad was Scottish, my mom Dutch. Inherited stubbornness from both sides, or that’s what the parents claim.”

“Are they right?”

“I plead the fifth.”

It was her turn to smile. “So what’s the deal with this company of yours?”

He took his time answering, but eventually, out it came. “I never anticipated having anything to do with the company. That’s the problem. My uncle’s name was Dougal, hit a mother-lode lottery when he was twenty-five. He was only married a couple of years when his wife got cancer, pancreatic, which is one of the wrong kinds, the kind where there’s just not a lot of hope. Anyway, he was nuts about her, and that’s how it all started-he was supposed to be an engineer, but when she died, he poured everything into a research lab, determined to find a cure. Didn’t know shoes from shinnola when he first started.”

“But he learned?”

“He more than learned. He spent his life at it, and like I said, Connollys seem to have that particularly stubborn gene. The first really great drug he patented over twelve years ago. By then he was almost broke, but that brought in a new flood of money. He wasn’t interested in living high. He wanted the infusion for the research. The two areas he never stopped targeting were pancreatic and ovarian. Just when the lab had come up with an outright miracle drug, he fell ill. And right after that, the guys came through with an even more incredible breakthrough.”

“For one of the biggies he cared especially about? Pancreatic or ovarian?” It was a relief when she could step away from those eyes, that skin, the feel of him. She piled the first-aid supplies back in the box and whirled around, happy to talk-but with a little distance between them. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t find dinner chores to work with by then.

“Pancreatic. Two new drugs had passed FDA by then, and a brand-new one-the best, a true miracle drug-was a pinch away from the last clinical trials. That’s when Dougal died. I knew he wanted me to have the company, to continue with his work, but man.” Harm scrubbed the back of his neck. “I was in the military. Mechanical engineer. Built bridges, roads, had a ton of math but never much straight science. Only my uncle, he had a terror of the firm getting sold, falling into the hands of certain pharmaceutical corporations-he wanted it kept in the family, with people who had the same goals, to conquer this cancer thing. Not to just be about profit.”

“So he passed it on to you…” She put a little plate in front of him because that’s what she did-fed people. A few wedges of bread, fresh herbs in a dip for him to dunk, one of the hors d’oeuvres she’d put on in the salon in a bit.

“Yes. Only the will was barely read-I’d just found a place in Cambridge, wasn’t unpacked-when the clinical trials for BROPE, the new drug, disappeared-”

“BROPE?”

“Bright Hope. The guys named it-”

“Okay. Got it. So the drug was stolen?”

“No. The trials were. The data. The proving data. Damn, this is good-” He motioned to his decimated plate. “Anyway, that crisis took place my first week. Then Fiske, our financial guru, comes into my office the next week looking gray and sick. The funds allocated for the last trial disappeared. They exist on paper. There’s no record of anyone unauthorized-or authorized-touching the account. Only the money’s gone. And Fiske is beside himself, worried I’ll accuse him.”

She rolled her eyes. Just like a child, he was holding out the empty plate, begging for more. “But you didn’t?”

“No. There’s no way Fiske did anything wrong. Fiske is good to the bone. Can’t say he’s a twenty-first-century economics man-he was my uncle’s crony in age, old-fashioned in his thinking. But he’d have gone to the wall for Dougal. They were like brothers. But to sum up this cyclone-I’ve got this company that on paper is thriving beyond all anyone’s expectations, with a cure for pancreatic cancer, a real damn cure, on the cusp. Reachable. Only now the whole thing is at risk. Someone inside has to be the problem, but it’s not that easy figuring out the who. Yale and Purdue claim it was their research that was suddenly obliterated, so they’d hardly be guilty of any wrongdoing. They’ve been set back several years. And Arthur claims he’d been pushing Dougal for more careful recording and reporting practices for years, couldn’t get anyone to listen to him, so finding him guilty doesn’t make any sense, either.”