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One
“You have got to be kidding me!”
Sebastian West scanned his proximity card for the third time and yet the front door of BioTech—the biomedical technology company he co-founded—refused to open. Seeing his employees moving around inside, he pounded his fist on the glass, but all of them ignored him.
“I own this company!” he shouted as his secretary walked by without making eye contact. “Don’t make me fire you, Virginia.”
At that, she came to a stop and circled back to the door.
“Finally,” he sighed.
But she didn’t open the door as he’d expected. Instead she just shook her head. “I’m under strict orders from Dr. Solomon not to open the door for you, sir.”
“Oh, come on,” he groaned.
She couldn’t be moved. “You’ll have to take it up with him, sir.” Then she turned on her heel and disappeared.
“Finn!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, pounding on the glass with angry fists. “Let me in, you son of a bitch.”
A moment later Sebastian’s former college roommate and business partner, Finn Solomon, appeared at the door with a frown on his face. “You’re supposed to be on vacation,” he said through the glass.
“That’s what the doctor said, yeah, but since when do I take vacations? Or listen to doctors?” The answer was never. He certainly never listened to Finn. And as for vacation, he hadn’t taken one in the decade since they’d started this company. You couldn’t be off lying on a beach and also breaking barriers in medical technology. The two were incompatible.
“That’s the whole point, Sebastian. Do you not recall that you had a heart attack two days ago? You’re not supposed to be in the office for a minimum of two weeks.”
“A mild heart attack. They didn’t keep me in the hospital for more than a few hours. And they’re not even sure I really had one. I’m taking the stupid pills they gave me, what more do you want?”
“I want you to go home. I’m not letting you in. I’ve had your badge deactivated. I’ve also sent out a memo that anyone who lets you in the building will be terminated.”
So much for piggybacking through the door behind someone else. He did have a laptop, though, if he could get Virginia to bring it out to him. That wouldn’t technically be breaking the rules if he worked from home, right?
“I’ve also had your email and remote access accounts temporarily suspended, so you can’t even work from home.” Finn was always remarkably good at reading his mind. He’d been able to do it since they were in college. It was great for working together. Not so great for this scenario. “You are on mandatory medical leave, Sebastian, and as a doctor, I’m sorry, but I’m going to enforce it. I can handle things for two weeks, but I can’t run this company with you dead. So get some R and R. Take a trip. Get a massage. Get a hand job. I really don’t care. But I don’t want to see you here.”
Sebastian was at a loss. He and Finn had started this company after school, pouring their hearts a
nd souls into technology that could make people’s lives better. He was the MIT engineer and Finn was the doctor, a winning team that had developed advanced technologies like prosthetic hands and electric wheelchairs controlled by a patient’s brain waves. That seemed a noble enough cause to dedicate his life to. But apparently a decade of trading sleep and vegetables for caffeine and sugar had caught up with him.
Of course he didn’t want to die; he was only thirty-eight. But he was close to a breakthrough on a robotic exoskeleton that could make paraplegics like his brother walk again.
“What about the new prototype for the exo-legs?”
Finn just crossed his huge forearms over his chest. “Those people have gone a long time without walking. They can wait two more weeks while you recover. If you keel over at your desk one afternoon, they’ll never get it. As it is, I’m having a defibrillator installed on the wall outside your office.”
Sebastian sighed, knowing he’d lost this fight. Finn was just as stubborn as he was. Normally that was a good match—they never knew when to take no for an answer. But that wouldn’t benefit him in this situation. He knew the doctor’s orders, yet he’d never once imagined that Finn would enforce them this strictly. He’d just thought he’d work ten-hour days instead of the usual eighteen.
“Can I at least come in and—?”
“No,” Finn interrupted. “Go home. Go shopping. Just go away.” With a smug expression Finn waved at him through the glass and then turned his back on his business partner.
Sebastian stood there for a moment, thinking maybe Finn would come back and tell him he was just kidding. When it was clear that Finn was deadly serious, he wandered back to the elevator and returned to the lobby of the building. He stepped out onto the busy Manhattan sidewalk with no real clue as to where he was going to go. He’d planned to take it easy for a few days and head back to work today. Now he had two full weeks of nothingness ahead of him.
He had the resources to do almost anything on earth that he wanted. Fly to Paris on a private jet. Take a luxury cruise through the Caribbean. Sing karaoke in Tokyo. He just didn’t want to do any of those things.
Money was an alien thing to Sebastian. Unlike Finn, he’d never had it growing up. His parents had worked hard but as blue collar laborers they’d just never seemed to get ahead. And after his brother Kenny’s ATV accident, they’d gone from poor to near destitute under the weight of the medical bills.
Scholarships and loans had gotten Sebastian through college, after which he’d focused on building his company with Finn. The company eventually brought money—lots of it—but he’d been really too busy to notice. Or to spend any. He’d never dreamed of traveling or owning expensive sports cars. Honestly, he was bad at being rich. He probably didn’t even have twenty bucks in his wallet.
Stopping at a street corner, he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and noticed the leather had nearly disintegrated over the years. He’d probably had this one since grad school. Maybe he should consider getting a new one. He had nothing better to do at the moment.
Up ahead, he spied Neiman Marcus. Surely they sold wallets. He made his way across the street and over to the department store. Sebastian stopped long enough to hold the door for a group of attractive women exiting with enough bags to put a kid through a semester or two of college. They looked vaguely familiar, especially the last one with the dark hair and steely blue eyes.
Her gaze flicked over him for a moment and he felt it like a punch to his gut. His pulse pounded in his throat as he tried to unsuccessfully swallow the lump that had formed there. He didn’t know why he would have such a visceral reaction to the woman. He wanted to say something but he couldn’t place the woman and decided to keep his mouth shut. Half a second later she looked away, breaking the connection, and continued on down the street with her friends.
Sebastian watched them for a moment with a touch of regret, then forced himself into the store. He made a beeline for the men’s department and quickly selected a wallet. He wasn’t particularly choosy with that sort of thing. He just wanted black leather and a slim profile with enough room for a couple cards and some cash. Easy.
As he found a register open for checkout, he noticed a strikingly attractive brunette ahead of him. Sebastian realized she was one of the women he’d just seen leave the store a few minutes before. The one with the blue-gray eyes. He wished he remembered who she was so he could say something to her. They’d probably met at one event or another around town—Finn forced him to go to the occasional party or charity gala—he couldn’t be sure, though. Most of his brain was allocated to robotics and engineering.
