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.
“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,