Marie Ferrarella - Carrying His Secret

“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.