Marie Ferrarella - Carrying His Secret

“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.