His mind kept jumping around, going back and forth between the present and less than an hour ago.
Grief pressed against his chest like a giant lead weight.
He was never going to get the chance to bond with his father the way he’d always secretly hoped and, yes, dreamed that he would.
Someone had stolen that opportunity from him. Someone had murdered his father.
Someone was going to pay.
Whit swerved, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with an SUV that jumped the light.
Damn it, Whit, get ahold of yourself!
For the life of him, Whit couldn’t remember getting into his car. Moreover, he couldn’t really remember the name of the detective whose card was in his pocket.
The man he was now following to the morgue.
The man who had said those awful words to him: There’s been a murder.
And just like that, his entire life was put on hold as chaos took immediate possession of his brain. Everything else in his life—the myriad of details, the pending launch of new cellular software—all of it had taken a backseat to this horrendous event.
And now he was going to the morgue to identify the man who had been found shot dead in his father’s ultramodern office.
He wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to get through it.
* * *
There was glass separating him from the lifeless form on the gurney. Glass and a white sheet.
Bracing himself, Whit nodded and the attendant—probably the medical examiner’s assistant, he assumed—gently pulled back the sheet from the deceased’s face.
He hadn’t braced himself enough.
Seeing his father like that, lifeless and so incredibly pale, was a horrible shock to his entire system.
“Yes, that’s him. That’s my father.”
His voice sounded almost disembodied to his own ear. The words echoed in his head, tormenting him, long after they had faded from the air.
“Would you like to take a moment?” the detective asked.
No, he wouldn’t like to take a moment. A moment wouldn’t help. A thousand moments wouldn’t help, Whit thought angrily. There was only one thing that would.
Turning away from the glass partition, he looked at the detective and asked, “Do you know who did this to him?”
“The investigation’s just started,” the detective replied.
“So you’ve got nothing,” Whit concluded.
“We do have a person of interest at the precinct who’s being questioned right now,” the man offered.
Whit’s blue eyes, normally so brilliant, were almost flat as he asked, “Who is it?”
“Sir, we can’t discuss an ongoing investigation,” the detective said, nervously hiding behind regulations.
Whit had been trained to detect weakness and uncertainty in any and all opponents. That had been his father’s doing. Whit could tell now that the detective was a man who could be bullied into complying—to an extent.
“You can if that investigation involved my father. Now who is being questioned?” he asked the man more forcefully.
The detective shrugged, as if conducting an internal debate with himself. “I guess you’ll find out soon enough. It’s your father’s assistant. Elizabeth Shelton.”
Whit stared at the man as if he had lost his mind. “Elizabeth Shelton?” he repeated incredulously. The one he’d taken numerous business trips with—the one who stirred his soul, although that was something he never intended to admit.
What the detective was suggesting just wasn’t possible.
The detective nodded, anticipating the next question: Why? “She was the one who found the body and called it in.”
A barrage of words rose to Whit’s tongue like a band of angry villagers storming the manor carrying pitchforks and torches, but he didn’t intend to waste his breath or his time on the detective. He needed to be elsewhere.
“Where is she being questioned?” he asked.
“At the police station. Detective Kramer is handling the case. Otis Kramer,” the other man all but shouted after Whit as the latter hurried to the elevator.
* * *
This was insane, Whit thought over and over again as he hurried to the police station. Completely insane. Elizabeth could no more have killed his father than he could. Whit gripped his steering wheel, channeling his anger, doing his best to regain control over himself. He had to put an end to this farce and get Elizabeth out of there.
He owed it to both her and his father to put an end to the interrogation that was being conducted.
That he had to come to what amounted to her rescue was, in itself, only adding to his internal turmoil.
He’d been avoiding his father’s executive assistant these last few weeks. Totally avoiding any one-on-one contact with her, avoiding even being in the same room as the woman. He had wanted to work a few things through first.
But his feelings in regard to being possibly confronted and maybe even redressed by Elizabeth were trumped by this unimaginably bizarre situation. Just because he hadn’t summoned the courage to face her didn’t excuse him from coming to her aid and extracting her from being interrogated by some overeager detective looking to make lieutenant.
Doing the speed limit and above, Whit arrived at the police station in what amounted to record time. A part of him had been expecting to be pulled over at any moment and given a speeding ticket. Luckily for him, San Diego’s finest were otherwise occupied tonight.
Parking his silver-gray sports car in the lot’s first row, Whit got out of the vehicle and dashed up the concrete front steps, then hurried into the building.
The interior of the precinct was alive with multiple activities, all going on at once. Even so, it was obvious that the murder of Reginald Adair was taking precedence over everything else.
Whit was grateful—if such a feeling could be put into play at a time like this—that the media hadn’t come crawling out of the woodwork yet. One less obstacle for him to deal with.
But they would. They would most definitely come out of the woodwork. He knew that it was just a matter of time before this whole thing became a giant media circus, three rings and all.
The desk sergeant looked up just as Whit approached him. The grumpy expression on the heavyset man’s face melted away as recognition set in. AdAir Corp—its president in particular—made large annual contributions to the policemen’s fund. That earned the company—and especially Whit—respect as well as pledges of complete cooperation should the need arise.
It had arisen.
“We were all very sorry to hear about your father, Mr. Adair,” O’Hara, the desk sergeant, told him, rising in his chair to shake his hand.
“Thank you,” Whit answered, doing his best not to snap the response out. He wanted to move on to the reason why he was here at the precinct, not discuss his father’s murder. “You’re holding my father’s assistant, Elizabeth Shelton, for questioning,” he began.
“Yeah, that’s right.” The sergeant looked up from the ledger he was checking. “Ruiz,” he called out, stopping the first uniformed policeman who walked by at that moment. “Take Mr. Adair upstairs to where Kramer’s questioning that person of interest.”
Elizabeth was a person of interest all right, Whit thought, falling into step beside the officer. A person of interest to him.
Very much so, he thought ruefully as he got into the elevator and rode up beside the diminutive Officer Ruiz. Elizabeth was a person of interest to him despite the fact that he had broken his own rules and crossed the line with her, a line he had sworn to himself that he would never cross.
And he hadn’t.
Not for five years.
Not until that night in Nevada when they’d wound up stranded thanks to an untimel
y thunderstorm.
Stranded, attracted to one another, with just a little too much to drink—it was a recipe for disaster. He realized that he’d been doomed right from the very start.
It had turned out to be a very volatile combination—for both of them.
Neither one of them, in his estimation, had imbibed enough to be considered drunk—but they had consumed just enough to have the carefully constructed walls around their professional relationship turn into tissue paper.
For his part, he’d been drawn to Elizabeth from the first moment he’d seen her that day she came to work for his father. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her.
But he more than anyone knew that business and pleasure had to be kept at arm’s length from one another. Mixing the two together was just asking for trouble—with a capital T.
But none of that had been on his mind that night in Nevada. All he’d been able to think of was how very much he wanted her.
Outside their hotel window, the wind had howled and the rain had lashed angrily against the glass panes. Inside, though, they had managed to create their own private haven. For the space of one magical night, he’d found himself coming as close to experiencing total perfection as he could ever hope.
Even so, morning had come with its heavy mantle of guilt. He had let his guard down. Moreover, he had taken advantage of the situation and of her. There was no excuse for that.
At a loss for how to handle it, he’d felt that his only recourse was to behave as if nothing had happened.
Elizabeth had done the same, which was why he was certain that refusing to acknowledge that anything had changed between them was the right way to go.
The right way...even though he ached for her with every breath he took.
But that was his problem, not hers, and Whit was resigned to spending the rest of his life dealing with that.
What he wasn’t ready to do was spend the rest of his life without the man he’d looked up to and done his very best to emulate. Sure, for the most part, sons outlived their fathers, he knew that. But he wasn’t ready for that to happen just yet.
Not like this.
Guess what? It happened. Deal with it, a voice inside his head ordered.
The stainless steel doors parted and he followed Officer Ruiz off the elevator and down the winding corridor.
The floor could have been deserted for all the attention Whit paid to what was going on all around him. He was focused on finding Elizabeth.
“Wait right here, Mr. Adair,” the officer told him. “I’ll let Detective Kramer know that you’re here about the suspect.”
Whit was not in the mood to hang back, waiting while the officer and the detective sorted things out. The turmoil within him was building up at an alarming rate, threatening to erupt at any moment unless he found some sort of an outlet. He didn’t want to wind up yelling at anyone, but containing these emotions was becoming an increasingly difficult balancing act.
“I’ll tell him myself,” Whit informed the officer, moving ahead of Ruiz and letting himself into the room that the officer was about to open up.
His back to the door, Kramer snapped, “Not yet,” thinking that he was being interrupted by one of the uniformed patrolmen.
“Yes, yet,” Whit retorted coldly as he came in. At an imposing six feet two inches, Whit took command of any room he entered. The interrogation room was no exception.
Both the detective and the young woman he had been relentlessly questioning for the past hour turned in Whit’s direction.
If there was a single point during the entire evening’s events that she could have broken down and cried, Elizabeth thought, it would have been this very moment.
The man she had been determined to avoid until she came to grips with her private situation had suddenly been cast in the role of a white knight.
Her white knight.
Elizabeth felt more conflicted than ever.
“Mr. Adair,” she cried, remembering where they were and that their relationship was supposed to be strictly business and nothing more. To her credit, she was positive that no one else even suspected that they were anything more than two people who happened to work together and, on occasion, share a car.
He deliberately kept his face expressionless. “Elizabeth, are you all right?” he asked stiffly. With what amounted to great effort, Whit successfully suppressed the desire to sweep her into his arms and seek solace in hers.
She didn’t answer his question. Instead, because she wasn’t sure what he’d been told, she said, “Your father’s gone. I am so sorry.”
He wasn’t about to respond to that or even react to it. He couldn’t, not without breaking apart, and an Adair had to always remember to save face at all costs. So instead, he turned to the detective, his anger barely under control.
“What is Ms. Shelton doing here?” he demanded.
Obviously stunned at being challenged, Kramer was caught off guard.
“We had some questions,” he began.
“So you decided to ask them in your interrogation room?” Whit wanted to know, his tone clearly indicating that the course Kramer had taken was completely unacceptable.
“I didn’t want her distracted,” Kramer answered coolly. After fifteen years, the detective felt he knew how to play the game.
It was a weak excuse at best and a lie at worst. Whit’s brilliant blue eyes narrowed as he pinned the detective in place.
“Is Ms. Shelton being placed under arrest?” he wanted to know.
“No, but—” Kramer’s voice cracked slightly at the obvious confrontation. He hadn’t expected it to come from the family.
“Then if she’s not under arrest, she’s coming with me,” Whit informed the detective. “Anyone with eyes can see that the woman’s in shock, not to mention that she’s in desperate need of a change of clothes.”
“They offered me some sweat clothes,” Elizabeth interjected, desperately struggling to keep from breaking down. “I think one of the officers just went to get them.”
The information had no effect on Whit. “They shouldn’t have brought you here in the first place,” he said tersely, his eyes never leaving the detective’s face.
Kramer had no use for people of privilege who believed themselves to be above the law and allowed to do as they pleased.
“I’m not finished questioning her,” Kramer informed Whit.
Whit was not about to back off. He wanted to get Elizabeth out of here. He had questions of his own he wanted to ask her, but first she needed to get away from the interrogation room.
“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 doo
rs 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.
Carrying His Secret Page 3