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“You are for now,” Whit told him. Getting behind Elizabeth’s chair, he took hold of the back and moved it out for her as she stood. “We’re leaving, Detective,” he told the other man. There was no room for argument with his tone. “If you have any further questions, Ms. Shelton will be happy to answer them after she’s had a good night’s sleep and a change of clothes.” He barely spared her a glance as he said, “Let’s go, Elizabeth.”
Her legs felt wobbly as she walked out with Whit, but she suppressed the desire to take hold of his arm for support. Elizabeth was exceedingly relieved to get away from the detective, whose questions had come at an ever increasing rate as his tone grew more accusing.
But her sense of relief was in conflict with the sorrow she felt for the man standing beside her in the elevator.
Though she was certain that he didn’t know it, she was aware of the case of hero worship that Whit harbored when it came to his father. Knew, too, that at least on the surface, her late boss had not demonstrated any sort of displays of affection for his son. For any of his children, really, except, from what she’d heard, his daughter. The youngest Adair appeared to be near and dear to the man.
“You should have called me,” Whit told her the moment the doors closed, separating them from the rest of the police-crowded floor.
He sounded even more distant than usual, Elizabeth couldn’t help thinking.
“The detective wouldn’t let me,” she told him. “He said I didn’t need to make a phone call because I wasn’t under arrest. According to him, we were only having a friendly discussion.”
“Friendly?” Whit questioned.
“It’s a new, really loose definition of the word,” she said sarcastically. Elizabeth sighed deeply, relieved beyond words even though her heart was very heavy. “Thank you for coming to get me. How did you know I was here?”
“Some detectives came to notify me about Dad. They had me come to the morgue to make the official identification.”
But she had already told them it was Reginald Adair, Elizabeth thought. “I guess my word wasn’t good enough,” she said with a shrug.
She would have wanted to spare Whit having to make the ID. Obviously the detective had had other ideas.
“You’re not the next of kin, I am,” Whit told her the next moment.
His voice was stony, as if he was doing his very best to keep any sliver of emotion as far away from him as possible, Elizabeth noted.
He hadn’t been like that the night they’d found themselves all but trapped in the hotel room, held captive by a freak storm.
As if on cue, the warmth, the tenderness, the passion that she had experienced that night came rushing back to her. She’d had no idea that Whit was that sort of a lover. He was so different from the way he usually acted around her. If anything, she would have said he was repressed, keeping all his emotions under virtual lock and key, so well hidden that no one would ever suspect that the man had cupped her face with his hands and initially brushed his lips against hers as lightly as a falling petal floats to the ground when cradled by a spring breeze.
That had been the start of it all—and had led to so much more.
Her heart ached for him. She wished that there was something she could do to help.
But there was nothing.
Elizabeth stopped at the base of the stairs just before the relatively empty rear parking lot.
“Why are you stopping?” Whit wanted to know.
Her eyes met his. “Whit, I am so, so sorry,” she whispered.
“Yeah, well, everyone dies sometime,” he said with a careless shrug. Inside he was struggling to keep himself under control, but he had no intentions of exposing that part of himself to anyone. “The car’s right over—”
He got no further than that, absently pointing in the general direction where he had parked his vehicle.
He got no further because at that moment, Elizabeth threw her arms around him, as much to comfort him as to be comforted by him. Her feelings of bereavement were enormous.
He’d been taught from a very young age not to show any emotion. That included responding to it if it came from anyone else.
Whit instinctively began to pull back.
Chapter 3
“I’m sorry,” Whit said stiffly, successfully managing to suppress all signs of the internal tug-of-war that was going on within of him. “I’m not very good at comforting people.”
Elizabeth forced a smile to her lips. “I’m not looking to be comforted,” she told him. It was a lie, but right now, she felt something far larger was at stake here, namely the rest of the truth. “I’m trying to comfort you.”
Her reply seemed to put him off even more than before. “Well, you don’t have to bother. I’m all right,” he proclaimed as he began heading toward his car again. “I’ll take you home,” he informed her just before he reached the vehicle.
The thought of going straight home was extremely appealing, but it would also leave her stranded the next morning. Intent on questioning her at the police station, Kramer had whisked her away in a squad car. Her own vehicle was sitting in the parking structure beneath the AdAir Corp building where she had left it.
“My car is still at AdAir Corp. If you don’t mind, I need to be dropped off there,” Elizabeth told him. Getting into the passenger seat of his sports car, she quickly secured her seat belt. “And you are not all right,” she insisted as he put his key into the ignition. Just who did the man think he was kidding? “Your father was just murdered.”
“I know,” Whit replied, his voice distant and deadly calm. “I just had to identify his body.” Before she could continue her outpouring of sympathy, sympathy he neither welcomed nor wanted, Whit steered the conversation in a different direction. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened.”
Elizabeth drew in a deep breath as they pulled away from the police station’s rear parking lot. She slanted a look at his profile. “Are you asking me to tell you what I told the police?”
He considered the idea that she might have kept something back from the detective. After all, she was his father’s executive assistant. Her loyalty lay with AdAir, and if something had happened tonight that might have put his father in a bad light, Whit felt rather confident that Elizabeth would either cover it up or omit it in her narrative in an attempt to preserve his father’s good name.
“I want you to tell me what happened,” Whit repeated evenly.
“That’s not the same thing,” Elizabeth pointed out. “I don’t really know what happened,” she told him truthfully. “I only know what I saw after the fact.”
Maybe she was telling the truth, Whit thought. For now, he had no choice but to believe her.
“Then tell me that,” he said.
His voice was so devoid of any emotion Elizabeth was certain that he was going to have a meltdown at any moment.
She continued looking at him, trying to penetrate the walls he had put up around himself. “It’s not healthy to repress what you’re feeling.”
“I’m well aware of that.” His tone was frosty as he cut her off, closing the topic. “You were going to tell me what you saw.”
She couldn’t reach him, Elizabeth thought. She felt helpless even as she understood that he was doing the only thing he felt he could do—employ a survival mechanism. It was obviously too early for him to deal with the feelings of loss his father’s murder had unearthed within him.
She’d try to reach him later, Elizabeth promised herself. But now just wasn’t the time.
Elizabeth focused on the events that had transpired earlier that evening.
“I had just pulled out of the parking area when I realized that I didn’t have everything I needed to work on my presentation.”
He spared her a quick look as he made a right turn. “Presentation?”
She nodded. “It’s scheduled for Monday morning. I’m making it in your father’s place,” she explained. “He was going to be away on a business trip.” Again she thought of the fact that she needed to call people, to cancel meetings and appointments.
Tomorrow, she’d do it all tomorrow. Tonight was for regrouping. And healing.
Whit frowned. He wasn’t aware of any business trip, but his father didn’t usually clear things with him, even if he was the corporation’s vice president. His father had always had his own way of doing things. Like as not, those who worked in close proximity with Reginald Adair usually found things out after the fact. Whit supposed this presentation was to have been no different.
“Go on,” he urged stoically.
She went over the events step-by-step, thinking that without the police breathing down her neck, maybe now she would remember something that had escaped her when she was being interrogated if she reviewed all her own movements.
“I made a U-turn and drove back into the parking structure. Almost everyone else had left at five o’clock, so the lot was practically empty. The security cameras were all down and your father felt that his people shouldn’t have to be working in an unsecured building.”
“I read the memo,” Whit snapped curtly.
She looked at him for a long moment. “Sorry. I forgot.”
Realizing that he was exceeding the speed limit, Whit eased his foot on the accelerator. He also reined in his temper.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off. Go on,” he encouraged.
She picked up the narrative where she had dropped it. As she spoke, she could see the events transpiring before her all over again.
“I took the private executive elevator up to the sixth floor. Your father’s door was closed, but the lights were still on. I knocked on his door to see if I could help him with whatever was still keeping him here. I knew he should have already left for the airport.
“When he didn’t answer, I knocked again, then tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.” For a second, her breath caught in her throat as she relived the moment. “I pushed it open slowly.” Elizabeth stopped for a moment, bracing herself against the words she was to utter next. “Your father was lying facedown on the rug. I think I screamed—I’m not sure,” she confessed.
“Was he still—?” Whit couldn’t bring himself to say the word.
She spared him that by quickly replying, “Alive? Yes, he was. I tried to stop the bleeding with my sweater, pressing it against the bullet wound, then I called nine-one-one. I performed CPR on your father until the paramedics came. But I couldn’t save him,” she said mournfully, taking full responsibility for his father’s demise with those very words.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Whit told her stiffly, his body rigid as he stared straight ahead at the road.
“But it was,” she argued. Whit glanced in her direction, clearly puzzled. “If I had come back earlier, maybe the killer wouldn’t have killed your father.”
“And maybe he would have killed you for being a witness to what he did,” Whit countered, stating the fact as if he were reading chapter and verse out of a criminology textbook.
Despite his words, Elizabeth wasn’t finished beating herself up. “I should have gone to your father before I left and asked him if he needed me to do something, help with something. He would have been done that much faster and who knows, he might not even have been in the building when whoever it was who killed him got into his office.”
An annoyed look flashed across Whit’s handsome, rugged features. “You can reconstruct the scenario a hundred different ways and torture yourself from now until doomsday, it still won’t change anything. Still won’t bring my father back,” he emphasized. “Why don’t you put that energy to better use and make sure that his company continues to operate and thrive?”
If she was going to devote herself to something, it shouldn’t be work as usual. At least not yet, Elizabeth thought.
“What about catching his killer?” she wanted to know.
Whit swallowed an expletive. The last thing he wanted her to do was attempt to track down a killer. “That’s what the police are for.”
Elizabeth turned to look at him again, taking in the hard ridges of his profile. Analyzing what he had just said.
“Yes, but you don’t believe that,” she guessed. She saw a muscle in his cheek flicker slightly. She was right, she congratulated herself. “You think that vengeance belongs to you.”
Whit stopped his sports car just within the entrance of AdAir Corp’s parking facility and looked around. Her car was all the way over to the left, near the rear elevator. Getting his bearings, he drove straight for the vehicle.
Bringing the car to a stop beside Elizabeth’s vehicle, Whit turned to look at the woman who had already caused him to lose control once. With effort, he pushed that whole episode behind him.
“You sure you’re up to driving home?” he asked. His tone made it sound like a routine question instead of one fueled by genuine concern—which it was.
Whit was keeping a very tight rein on himself, fearing that if he allowed even a glimmer of emotion to come through, everything would be lost because the dam would most certainly give way and break apart. He was not about to allow that to happen.
“I’m sure,” she told him, then smiled as she added, “thanks for asking.”
Whit shrugged, not knowing how to respond to her expression of gratitude. It wasn’t an emotion he was accustomed to.
“I don’t want to have to identify your body, too,” he told her matter-of-factly.
Elizabeth nodded, expecting nothing more from him. He was very tightly wound right now, she thought, more than willing to give him a pass. The fact that she always did, no matter what the transgression, wasn’t something she was about to dwell on.
“You won’t have to,” she promised.
Getting out of his car, Elizabeth crossed to her own, taking careful, small steps as if she was afraid that tilting even a fraction of an inch in any direction would send her sprawling to the ground. Discovering her boss’s body the way she had had thrown her equilibrium into complete turmoil and she found herself both nauseous and dizzy.
Or maybe that was due to the tiny human being she was carrying within her.
In either case, she couldn’t allow herself to display any signs of weakness—especially around Whit.
At the last moment, just before she got into her car, Elizabeth turned and looked in his direction. Whit was still watching her, as if he wasn’t entirely certain that she was capable of navigating either herself or her vehicle once she got behind the wheel.
“If you need to talk—about anything at all,” she emphasized, “call me. You have my number.”
Actually, he didn’t, Whit thought. He had deliberately deleted it from his contact list the morning after they’d slept together. He had done it predominantly to remove immediate temptation from his reach. But in actuality it had been a token gesture to assuage his conscience, since obtaining Elizabeth’s phone number again would have taken almost no effort whatsoever on his part. All he had to do was pull it out of her personnel file.
So far, he had resisted the temptation to do so.
Not wanting to prolong this exchange between them a second longer than he had to—because it might lead to results he told himself he shouldn’t allow to happen—Whit said, “Yes, I do.”
“And you’ll call if you need to talk?” she asked, watching his expression.
“I won’t need to talk,” Whit told her flatly.
Someone else might have been rebuffed, gotten into their car and driven away. But that someone else wasn’t Elizabeth. Then again, no one else would have had her motivation and desire to be there for Whit.
“But if you do,” she emphasized, looking at him intently.
Whit nodded, surrendering because he wanted to finally bring this to a close. “Yes, I’ll call,” he agreed. With that, he slammed the driver’s side door closed.
He wouldn’t call, Elizabeth thought, sliding in behind the steering wheel of her vehicle. She closed the door and tugged her seat belt from behind her, clicking it into place.
The man could be unbelievably stubborn, Elizabeth thought, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about that.
Nothing she could do about any of it, except to express her heartfelt sorrow and regret. That and be there if Whit discovered that he did need someone to turn to.
She knew for a fact that Whit’s work kept him so busy he had no close friends to share things with. And if he had ever been close to his younger siblings, Carson and Landry, the past few years had seen those relationships drifting apart. Carson had enlisted in the Marines several years ago and from what she had heard, Landry had been taken over by Patsy, her mother, who was grooming the girl for a “suitable marriage” with someone the woman viewed as the “right” son-in-law.
Whit had thrown himself completely into his work for the sole purpose of earning his father’s gratitude as well as his admiration, both of which were now off the table. Permanently.
If Reginald Adair had been proud of his firstborn, he’d never given any verbal indication of that. For the most part, the man had been distant from his family.
Elizabeth shook her head, remembering. Reginald Adair had been closer to her than he had been to his own flesh and blood, she thought now as she drove the familiar path to her town house from AdAir Corp.
You can’t exactly throw rocks, now can you? Elizabeth thought, mocking herself. Talk about all work and no play—she was practically the poster girl for that cliché. All she did was work. In all honesty, she was surprised that the route from the AdAir Corp building to her home wasn’t delineated with well-worn tire marks.
Except for that recent business trip she’d made with Whit to Nevada, almost all of her time was spent either at work, going to work or preparing to go to work. The drive home was usually a tired blur.
And those hours that she had put in, she thought as she drove home now, had all involved Reginald Adair. What was going to happen to her now that he was gone?
The company was far too large to shut down. Besides, it was considered the leader in its field and it was just a matter of time before it surpassed the competition. Would Whit take over the corporation? Would he just pick up where his father had left off and act as if it was all only business as usual?
His manner just now indicated that most likely he would, but the man wasn’t a robot or an android. He was going to have to make time to grieve over his loss. If he didn’t, eventually, it would catch up to him, causing him to break down, perhaps on a grand scale.
A scale from which there would be no way to come back. It wasn’t as if things like that never happened—they did, and careers ended because of it.
Whit was too good at his job to allow that to happen, she told herself. But she was still uneasy. After all, Whit was a man, not a machine.
She had to find a way to make sure that didn’t happen. For his sake as well as for the memory of Reginald Adair.
Just missing a light, she sighed and stepped on the brake. Waiting for the light to turn green, she pressed the flat of her hand against her abdomen. Her thoughts turned to the small passenger she carried there.
“I’m going to have to hold off introducing the idea of you to the world a little longer,” she murmured to her stomach. “You understand, don’t you? Your dad just isn’t ready to hear that he created you right now, sweetie. We’ll tell him when the time is right, okay?”
Elizabeth didn’t bother saying out loud that the time might never be right. That was something she was going to have to deal with later, but not now.
For now, she was just going to have to put that problem on the back burner. This was absolutely not the time to tell Whit that their one night together had produced a dividend. She was certain that would throw him for a loop, especially at a time like this. Whit deserved to know that he was going to be a father and she had every intention of telling him—when she felt the time was right. In short, he needed to know, but not now.
Perhaps not until after it was all behind them, Elizabeth thought.
What she was afraid of was that Whit might think that she had deliberately allowed this to happen in order to trap him. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Under no circumstances did she want Whit thinking that she wanted anything from him.
In reality, she actually did want something from Whit, but it had nothing to do with the baby—or at least, not directly. She would have loved nothing better than to have Whit tell her that he wanted to marry her—but she wanted him to marry her because he wanted her and he loved her, not because he felt a sense of obligation, or because he wanted to give the baby his last name.
The last thing in the world she wanted was to look back someday and have Whit accuse her of tricking him into marrying her.
She would rather die first than have that happen to her.
To them.
And there was even a worse scenario than the one she wanted no part of. What if she told him that their one night of indescribable passion had yielded a baby and he went on to deny that the baby was his? Too busy working to form any personal relationships, she hadn’t been with anyone else in a number of years.
The child she was carrying below her heart most definitely belonged to Whit Adair.
If she heard Whit deny it—or tell her to simply “take care of the problem”—it would absolutely break her heart. Not just that, but it would completely destroy the way she thought of Whit.
No, this was most definitely not the time to tell Whit Adair that he was going to become a father.
Perhaps, Elizabeth thought as she turned her vehicle in to her neighborhood, there would never be a right time and this would just be a secret she would keep from Whit forever.
Better that than to have her heart destroyed.
Elizabeth blew out a long, ragged breath. No matter how she looked at it, this was going to be a no-win situation.
Getting out of her car, she headed straight for the front door of her two-bedroom town house. She wanted the solace of having familiar things around her.
Preoccupied, she didn’t notice the person who remained in the shadows.
The person who had followed her and was intently watching her every move.
* * *
It was hard remaining in the shadows, hard not to give in to the surge of adrenaline the observer could feel coursing through their veins, bringing with it a desire to act. A desire to have Elizabeth Shelton done away with and have her join her dead boss in whatever hell was reserved for godless people like that.
Soon. The word shimmered seductively in the observer’s mind. Soon the world would be rid of the girl just like it was now rid of that pompous ass with his phony, shallow smile.
Checking the impulse to follow Elizabeth into her town house and bring her to her knees, having the so-called “administrative assistant” beg for her life, the person cleaving to the shadows savored the deed that still lay ahead. The mistake would be improved on. Adair was allowed to die too quickly. Next time, there would be torture. Slow, painful torture.
The observer smiled in anticipation.
And made plans.
* * *
As she opened the medicine cabinet to reach for the light cologne she liked to spray on before she left the house, she saw that it wasn’t in its usual place. It wasn’t there at all.
What had she done with it, Elizabeth asked herself, trying to remember when she’d had it last. This was getting very annoying, she thought. Yesterday, her lipstick had been missing—she never had found it.
Opening the drawer where she kept several different brushes that she used to style her hair, she saw that the cologne was lying on its side—the drawer was long and shallow. She took it out, hit the spray quickly twice and then put it back in its customary place.