“Why do they have to treat everything as if it’s some sort of a classified secret? Why can’t they just speak plainly, answer a few logical questions? Tell us what’s going on?” he asked, raising his voice so that it followed the orderly down the corridor.
“Maybe they think you won’t feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth if everything is resolved so quickly,” Elizabeth suggested.
Whit looked at his watch. “We’ve been here over two hours. That’s not being resolved quickly in anyone’s book,” he declared.
This wasn’t getting him anywhere, he thought. With effort, he calmed down. Dragging over the chair he’d previously occupied, he set it next to Elizabeth’s gurney. Whit sat down again and took her hand in his. “How’s your head?” he wanted to know.
She offered him a weak smile. “It still feels a little sore and I still have a headache,” she confessed. “But it’s nothing major. Don’t worry so much,” she urged.
Shifting gears, since there was nothing else to occupy their time, Whit tried to ascertain why she’d fallen down the stairs. “Did you trip on something on one of the steps?”
She began to shake her head and found that it instantly increased her headache. So she stopped and answered quietly, “No.”
“Did you make a misstep?” he offered. He knew that sometimes people miscalculated the height of a step and it threw them off as they put their foot down.
“No. I hadn’t started to go downstairs yet,” she told him. “I was tying my shoelaces just before—just before it happened,” she concluded hesitantly.
Whit frowned, taking in the information. “Then you weren’t moving? I don’t understand. How did you wind up falling down the stairs if you weren’t moving? Did you faint?”
Elizabeth looked away. If she told him, she would be accusing someone in his family of trying to harm her, and she didn’t want to do that. They’d taken her in. To accuse one of them of being responsible for this trip to the ER didn’t seem right.
“Let’s just drop it, please,” she said, still avoiding any eye contact with Whit.
He had no intentions of dropping this. He intended to get to the bottom of it. “No. I want to know. If you tripped over your own feet, well, these things happen. I won’t hold it against you. I—”
She knew she should just let it go at this, but it bothered her, being painted as a klutz. More than that, it bothered her to lie to him.
“No, I didn’t trip over my own feet,” she informed him.
He’d run out of guesses. “Then how did you wind up falling down the stairs?” Whit wanted to know.
Elizabeth opened and closed her mouth twice before finally finding the words to say, “I think I might have been pushed.”
Elizabeth saw his face turn pale and his expression grow instantly very somber.
Elizabeth was making a very serious accusation, he thought. He’d known her to be nothing but truthful in all his dealings with her, but he found it difficult to imagine what she was saying now was actually true.
“What makes you say that?” he wanted to know, his voice deadly still.
She should never have said anything, Elizabeth thought. But now that she had, she had to see this through. “Because just before I tumbled down the stairs, I felt something.”
“Felt something,” he repeated, trying to make sense out of what she was telling him. What did that even mean? What was she trying to say? “What kind of something?” Whit wanted to know.
Elizabeth took a deep breath, bracing herself. The deep breath, in turn, reminded her of the scent she’d thought she detected just before her fall.
“I thought I felt someone’s hands on my back...giving me a shove,” she told him hesitantly. “Look, I didn’t want to come here at all. Can’t we just leave and go home? I haven’t broken anything. They would have already put some part of me into a cast if that was the case. Please, let’s just leave,” she begged.
“Can’t,” he answered matter-of-factly. “The ER physician has to sign you out before you can go,” he reminded her.
That wasn’t strictly true. “I can sign myself out,” she told him.
“That wouldn’t be advisable,” Whit countered.
There was silence between them for a moment, a heavy silence that didn’t sit well with either one of them. It made Whit uncomfortable.
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked Elizabeth out of the blue.
She almost jumped at the sound of his voice. If her nerves had been any more taut, they could have doubled as violin strings.
“What do you mean?” she asked, trying very hard to look innocent. It only succeeded in making her appear more guilty.
Was he asking her about the baby? Had he somehow found out that she was carrying his child? But how?
“I can see it in your eyes. There’s something else. Do you know who pushed you?”
He was still talking about the so-called accident. She felt a wave of relief wash over her. He didn’t know. And she was going to keep it that way for as long as possible.
“I didn’t see anyone,” she answered.
“That’s not what I asked,” Whit pointed out. “I asked if you knew who did this to you.” He leaned in a little closer, doing his best not to react to her but keep his mind focused on the subject. “You do know, don’t you?” he asked. Her body language told him he’d guessed right. “Elizabeth, tell me who it is. Who pushed you down the stairs?”
She raised her chin almost defiantly. “Like I said, I didn’t see anyone.”
His eyes pinned her down, leaving her no room to squirm. “But?”
He wasn’t going to stop asking questions until she told him what he wanted to hear, Elizabeth thought. “But I think I might have detected a scent.”
“What kind of a scent?” he asked. “Was it body odor, or—”
Her stomach was feeling queasy again. She didn’t want him going over a list of pungent smells. It would only make her more nauseous.
“Perfume. Expensive perfume,” she added, staring down at the thin cotton cover on the gurney.
“You might have caught a whiff of your own perfume,” he told her.
God knew that he did often enough. There was something very arousing about the scent she wore. When it filled his head, it made him want to drop to his knees in surrender, as long as she was the person he was surrendering to.
But Elizabeth shook her head—instantly regretting the movement. “You don’t smell your own cologne or perfume. After a very short while, you become completely desensitized to it.”
“Then whose—?” It hit him like the proverbial ton of bricks. His sister didn’t wear perfume. But someone else in the family did. “Mother’s,” he declared. “You smelled my mother’s perfume, didn’t you?”
Accusing his mother of a deed like that would instantly turn her into the enemy, she thought. She didn’t want to be his enemy.
“Whit, she might have just passed by a minute before the other person who pushed me did. You said yourself that she never ventures to your side of the hacienda.”
She was making excuses for his mother, but now that her name was on the table, Whit could see his mother being capable of doing something so cold and detached. However, she would need a reason, no matter how strange it might sound to the rest of them.
Whit looked at Elizabeth. “Is there something going on or that has gone down between the two of you that you’re not telling me?”
“No, nothing. I swear,” she told him with feeling. “You know every detail of my boring life,” Elizabeth assured him.
He shook his head. No matter how he looked at it, it wasn’t making any sense. “Then I don’t—”
Just then, the ER physician, a Dr. A. Walker, came in, a bright, warm smile on his face.
“W
ell, good news, you two,” Dr. Walker said. “There’s no evidence of a concussion, nor do you have any hairline fractures that we can find. Just some minor bruising, and you’ll be experiencing aches and pains for probably the next three days or so. Other than that, you’re good to go.”
Elizabeth sighed, incredibly relieved. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“No need to thank me. I’m just the messenger, nothing more.” He was about to leave when he suddenly remembered what he saw as the most important detail of all. “Oh, and by the way, despite that tumble, your baby’s fine, too. I’d say you were one lucky lady,” the doctor pronounced. “I’m signing your papers and you’re free to go. Wish everyone who came in here could be as fortunate as you.”
With that, the doctor made his exit.
She could feel Whit’s scrutiny as if it was a physical thing.
Looking at him, Elizabeth could almost see him literally closing up again.
Her mind began to race around, searching for a way to communicate with him, to explain why she’d withheld this all-important piece of information from him.
Where did she begin?
How did she start?
“Whit—” she began.
“You’d better get dressed,” he told her crisply. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
She stared numbly at the white curtain after he pulled it closed behind him.
This was the worst possible thing that could have happened, she thought, desperate for a way to fix this, to make it all go away and replay itself differently.
Fighting tears, she got dressed, hardly remembering the process once it was over.
It was all she could do to remember to keep breathing.
* * *
“I know you’re angry,” Elizabeth began once they were out of the hospital and in his car. She knew that if she didn’t say something to explain herself and her actions, Whit wasn’t going to say a word the entire trip back to the ranch.
“Why should I be angry?” Whit countered coldly. “You’re a grown woman, what you do—and with who—is your own business. All that time you worked late with my father, it was really just inevitable. My father was a good-looking man and lonely, from what I gather. You’re a beautiful woman, so naturally—”
“Wait, what?” she cried, trying to make sense out of what he was saying to her. She definitely didn’t like what she was coming up with. What Whit was suggesting not only horrified her, it turned her stomach, as well. “You think— Are you—” She tried to compose herself but it was nearly impossible. “This isn’t your father’s baby,” she spat out, upset and offended that he’d even think such a terrible thing.
“You don’t have to deny it,” he told her calmly, still looking straight ahead rather than at her.
As far as he was concerned, she was just a disembodied voice, another one of his father’s women who also worked for the company. She just happened to be smarter than most of the women his father had interacted with, which was why he’d made her his executive assistant. Obviously his father hadn’t held himself up to any high moral standard, but the company was another matter entirely. Promotions were earned, not handed out in exchange for sexual favors.
That didn’t help soothe his wounded feelings.
Whit struggled to contain his anger, his outrage. He’d always wanted to share things with his father, but the same women never numbered among those things.
“I do if it’s not true,” she told him, anger infusing her every word. “I don’t know what it is you think me capable of, but you are the only man I have slept with since my junior year in college. That experience was so not memorable that I didn’t want to go out with another guy for the rest of my life. That I wound up in bed with you that night was just the result of a whole bunch of different factors choosing that moment to come together.”
Whit abruptly pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. “Let me get this straight. Are you telling me that this baby you’re carrying is actually mine?”
She didn’t know if that was denial in his voice or awe. “Would you like me to explain it using hand puppets?” she offered, the tension bubbling within her bringing a wave of sarcasm to the surface.
He stared at her. She was telling him the truth. It was too easy to do a DNA test these days for her to think she could get away with a lie.
That left him with one glaring question. “Why didn’t you tell me? The only reason I ever assumed it was someone else’s is because if the baby really was mine, I would have expected you to come to me.”
“I’m your father’s executive assistant. I’m also from the wrong side of the tracks. You’re the vice president of a hugely successful cell phone service provider. Do the math. Telling you that our one night together yielded a tiny dividend would sound like a shakedown. And it’s not,” she said firmly, just so there was no misunderstanding. “I don’t want anything from you.”
He looked at her as if he didn’t understand her logic. “But that’s my baby,” he repeated.
Maybe he thought she was trying to retain exclusive rights to the baby and bar him from ever seeing the child. That wasn’t her intent. “You can see him—or her—anytime you want.”
That wasn’t enough—not by a long shot. He wasn’t a man who shirked his responsibilities, and he wanted to do right by this child. “I want the baby to have my last name.”
That was no problem, she thought. “That can be arranged. It’ll be entered on the birth certificate,” she promised.
But Whit shook his head, frowning. “That’s not enough.”
“We can have the birth certificate laminated,” she answered flippantly.
His eyes pinned her down. “I want to do the right thing.”
He sounded like someone straight out of the ’60s, she thought. “There is no right or wrong thing in this case,” she informed him.
He wasn’t accepting that. “There is in my world. We’ll get married,” he told her in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “It’ll take me a little while to set everything in motion, but it can be—”
“Stop. Stop!” Elizabeth shouted. His thoughts coming to a grinding halt, Whit looked at her, caught off guard and surprised. “Aren’t you listening?” she demanded angrily. “I don’t want anything from you. I never did. You’re not obligated to do anything.”
That was not the way he saw it. “It’s my baby and my child deserves to have a family. That means a mother and father who will be there for him, night and day.”
That sounded very idyllic—except for one very important thing he forgot to mention. “And love? Does love enter into it?” she wanted to know.
“Of course. I already love him—or her,” Whit said, and he knew that it was true. He did. These past few minutes, when he’d realized that there was a child waiting to be born, a child that was part his, a transformation had occurred within him.
He didn’t get it, did he? “I’m talking about me, Whit. The only reason in this world to get married is love. Do you love me?” she asked pointedly.
The silence within the car was deafening—and thus soul destroying.
Chapter 13
Putting his feelings into words did not come easily for Whit. For the most part, he had no feelings that he thought needed to be expressed.
But in this particular instance, because there was a child to think of, he did his best to try to make Elizabeth understand what was going on within him.
“If I could love anyone, Elizabeth, it would be you,” Whit told her. Each word he uttered stood alone, like an awkward soldier unschooled in basic social graces.
Elizabeth looked at him. Was that it? Was that all he had to say? Did he think that rather backhanded apology was supposed to satisfy her? Make her relent her position, agree to settle for less than love and marry him?
&
nbsp; If that was what he thought, then Whit was in for a surprise, Elizabeth silently predicted.
She didn’t ask for much, but she did ask for—actually, demand—this. That he only marry her if he loved her. Because if he didn’t love her, then they weren’t going to get married at all. She was not about to accept a sham of a marriage, no matter how good Whit thought his reason for going through with it was.
“My turn to say ‘not enough,’” Elizabeth told him in a quiet, controlled voice.
“I’m being honest with you,” Whit told her, his frustration and helplessness mounting. “I don’t know if I’m actually capable of love, Elizabeth,” he confessed. “I’ve got nothing to base it on, no examples to follow. My parents’ marriage didn’t exactly merit the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Most of the time, if they spoke at all, it was to say hurtful, cutting things—unless they were in public,” he amended. “Then it was all sweetness and light. They put on a decent enough show, but once they were home, they went back to their separate corners, their separate lives.” Whit told her truthfully, “I don’t even have a clue what goes into making a good relationship.”
He made it sound as if there was some prefabricated formula out on the market. “Marriage isn’t something that comes out of a box with assembly instructions. You don’t build a marriage like you build make-believe castles using kids’ building blocks,” she insisted. “A successful marriage takes constant work and above all, it’s something that comes from within. From your heart. You either feel it—or you don’t.”
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment, giving Whit every opportunity to deny what she was about to say and set her straight.
But he didn’t.
“And you,” she concluded with a heavy heart, “obviously don’t.”
“So you’re turning me down?” Whit asked incredulously. She knew what he was worth, give or take a couple of million. He’d thought that alone would win her over. It would win over a lot of women he knew. But then, Elizabeth wasn’t like any other woman he knew. “You’re turning down my marriage proposal?”
Carrying His Secret Page 14