The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 3 Read Online Free Page B

this craziness going to stop?”
    “I don’t know, babe.” He kissed my neck lightly. “The CEO is not thrilled. She’s probably on the phone with Conrad right now, instructing him to squash the rumors spinning around town as quickly as possible.”
    “Do you think it was someone at the hospital who leaked it?”
    “Don’t know. Conrad said the reporters who have left messages for him seemed to know he was at a photoshoot for Cepheus. That can only mean one of two things: someone from Cepheus leaked the information, or Logan told someone what he was doing this morning and that person leaked the information.”
    “Maybe he told one of the nurses at the hospital.”
    “Maybe.” Rawn sighed, his breath washing over me like a troubled wind. “It always seems to come back to Cepheus. That can’t be a coincidence.”
    “But why would someone want to hurt Logan? He doesn’t work here; he was just doing me a favor.”
    “Because he’s a name.” Rawn squeezed my arms before stepping around me and pouring himself a drink. “News of this type could spread like wildfire because of his celebrity status. It has the potential to be national news, maybe even international. This could hurt Cepheus’ bottom line for a while to come.”
    “Why?”
    He took a healthy swig of his drink before turning to me. “Cepheus is a publicly owned company. Bad publicity like this could not only affect sales, it could cause the stocks to plummet. And Cepheus has been on a rocky foundation for more than a year, anyway, because of a frivolous lawsuit last year that accused us of stealing the blueprints for a product and passing them off as our own.”
    “Really?” I hadn’t heard about that, and I did a lot of research into Cepheus before I applied to work here. “Did it go to court?”
    “No. But we spent a lot of money fighting to keep it out of court. After we settled, someone released a copy of the settlement to a scientific journal who, in turn, contacted a bunch of our private clients, informing them of what had happened. Some of them dropped us as their suppliers of the product, cutting into our bottom line.”
    “I didn’t realize…”
    I thought about the tension in Rawn every time we talked about his work, but I had always assumed it was rooted in his distaste for the job in general. Now, I realized that it had just as much to do with the possibility that Cepheus might go under and he could find himself without a job.
    Rawn had never gone to college. He got this job because he impressed the engineers when he pointed out problems with the blueprints his father worked on in Cepheus’ labs. And he couldn’t take a comparable job with another company because he signed a non-compete clause when he joined the company. He had few options…
    There was a lot on the line for Rawn.
    I moved close to him, sliding my hand slowly up the front of his heavily starched shirt. “I’m sure Conrad will work his PR magic and sweep all this under the appropriate rug.”
    “If not?”
    I shrugged. “Then, we’ll survive. We’ll start our own company if we have to.”
    “I love your optimism,” he said, as he pressed his lips to my forehead. “Let’s just hope we don’t have to do that.”
    I smiled, but some of what he had just said made me wonder. Was it possible that what happened this morning was connected to my kidnapping last month? Could this mean that whoever had been behind that wasn’t just Peggy Duprey and Aurora, but someone totally different? And if that was the case, who?
    I still couldn’t shake the memory of that man…the man who came into the house where I was being held. His voice, when he spoke my name, was a purposeful whisper. But I recognized it. And the other man—I know there was someone else involved, not just the lackeys the police said they were searching for, but I suspected they had decided weren’t big enough fish to waste their time on. I just didn’t know why. I didn’t know what the end game