Carrying His Secret

by Marie Ferrarella

  “That’s already taken care of,” he told her, then belatedly, because he knew she was trying her best to help, he added, “Thank you.”

  “Nothing to thank me for,” she replied. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “But you were willing to,” he countered. Whit looked at the containers that were on his counter, surrounding the now empty bag. “Would you like to stay and have some of this?” he asked, indicating the takeout she had brought.

  Elizabeth had always liked Thai food herself. But right now the thought of consuming it had her stomach threatening to rebel violently even though it was still empty. Just the mere thought of food made her want to throw up. Without thinking, she pressed her hand to her stomach and shook her head.

  “Thank you, but no, I’ll have to take a pass on that for now.”

  He looked at her, remembering how much she had enjoyed the meal that night that they shouldn’t have spent together. She’d eaten her portion with great appreciation. Having her pass on it now could only mean one thing. “Aren’t you feeling well?” he asked her.

  She suddenly realized what she was doing and immediately dropped her hand to her side.

  “I think I’ve got a touch of stomach flu. Or maybe it’s just my way of responding to Friday night. I really haven’t eaten anything since it happened,” she confessed. And it was true, she hadn’t eaten anything except for a few crackers, and even those hadn’t stayed down.

  But it wasn’t Reginald’s murder that had her stomach in such an upheaval. The reason her stomach instantly cramped up at the mere thought of food was all due to the small passenger she was carrying around.

  So far, she found herself throwing up everything that passed her lips, including water. She’d heard that it was to be expected for some women and that it wouldn’t last, but that didn’t really help her cope with the awful feeling she was forced to walk around with.

  All her attempts to divert her attention to something else only worked for short while. And then another wave of nausea would rise up and claim her and she became absolutely miserable.

  Again.

  Elizabeth stepped back from the counter. She’d done what she had come to do: asked about his state of mind and gotten him to contemplate eating.

  “Well, I’d better go. If you need anything, or if I can help in any way,” she emphasized, “please don’t hesitate giving me a call.” She underscored her request by touching his arm and meeting his eyes. “At the very least, I can take care of calling everyone with the details of the funeral.”

  She could see by the look in his eyes that he hadn’t gotten that far in his thinking yet.

  “Your father touched a lot of lives during his time on earth,” she reminded him. “They’re all going to want to come to the funeral and pay their respects.”

  Whit suppressed the sigh that rose to his lips. She was right. A lot of people would want to attend the funeral. To leave them out wasn’t advisable. There might be repercussions.

  So much for having a small and intimate service where he could deal with his grief privately.

  He nodded. “You’re right,” he acknowledged. “I’ll be in touch later,” he told her.

  Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t, she thought. But she had pushed all she could today. Ultimately, it was all up to him whether he would accept her help or not. For now, she would leave him to his thoughts.

  Elizabeth flashed a quick, small smile at him, then stood before the door, waiting.

  When Whit looked at her, puzzled, she told him, “You’re going to have to disarm the system for me. Otherwise I can’t leave. The second I try, the alarms are all going to go off and some little security person monitoring this at their desk is going to have heart failure.”

  It was rather a dramatic take on the matter, but essentially, she’d described the scenario that would ensue if she tried to open the door before he disarmed the system.

  “Right,” he agreed. “Sorry. I just assumed you knew the code.”

  Why would he think that? “I’ve never been here before, so no, I don’t.”

  It was his turn to look puzzled. To be honest, his recollection of previous dealings was at best spotty. He was having trouble gathering his thoughts together.

  “Then how did you get in through the front gate?” he wanted to know.

  That had been easy. Dealing with people had never been that difficult for her as long as she thought of herself in a professional capacity. Elizabeth Shelton, private citizen, had no clout, but Elizabeth Shelton, Reginald Adair’s executive assistant, could move mountains if she needed to.

  “I showed the guard my AdAir Corp ID and explained why I was here. It took a little doing, but I finally convinced him.”

  Whit nodded. He could see her doing that. Elizabeth was the type of person who could convince anyone of anything, he thought. It was her appearance that did it. She looked far too innocent to lie.

  And she never abused that ability. Whit found that admirable. He found a lot of things admirable about her, he realized.

  The next moment, he blocked that thought.

  * * *

  Whit had taken her up on her offer to help and she began immediately. There was an endless amount of people to call, notifying them where the funeral and the reception were going to be held. Then, of course, there were also the actual arrangements that needed to be made. Caterers to be called, menus to be selected.

  It began to feel as if the phone was a permanent attachment to her ear. Her arm had gotten tired, so she’d opted for a headset. It allowed her to continue with this sadness, plowing her way through so that she could finish sometime in the foreseeable future.

  As she called numbers and talked to people, often repeating herself, she paced about her town house. Pausing after a call, she slipped the headset down to rest around her neck. She moved it back and forth, trying to work out a crick. A noise coming from the vicinity of her front door caught her attention.

  She cocked her head, listening. She could have sworn she saw her doorknob turning ever so slightly, as if someone was attempting to get in.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?” she called out.

  The doorknob stopped moving.

  Or maybe it had never moved to begin with and her mind was playing tricks on her.

  “Face it, you’ve had a huge shock and you’re jumpy,” she lectured herself. “Calm down. There’s nobody there.”

  But just in case, she inputted Whit’s cell number. With her finger hovering over Send she approached the door and opened it quickly.

  But there was no one there. With a huge sigh of relief, she closed it again and got back to work.

  She missed seeing the shadow of the person who was hiding just out of sight.

  Chapter 5

  He hadn’t been able to gather his thoughts together. Ordinarily much more eloquent on paper than he was when he spoke, this time it was as if his mind had been a chalkboard that had been washed down. Chalk left no impressions on it. And so it was with him. Numbed by this horrible event, no words came to his mind. Nothing.

  As if sensing his situation, Elizabeth had offered to “help.”

  Help, he thought now with a suppressed dry laugh. She hadn’t helped, she’d written the whole thing, somehow instinctively knowing just what it was he wanted to say and putting it down in words that, once they were written, could effectively reach everyone who had come here today.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” he’d told her when she’d turned over the pages to him.

  “The look on your face already has,” she’d replied.

  He read it quickly. Every word was golden, he thought. And just like that, he was back on even keel—because of Elizabeth.

  Whit stood at the podium, looking at the sea of faces before him. There were hundre
ds of people sitting in uncomfortable pews, waiting for him to say something that would make some sort of sense out of his father’s untimely and violent departure from this world. The eulogy was right in front of him, a combination of a few hurried notes of his own and Elizabeth’s rather insightful suggestions.

  She was proving to be indispensable, Whit thought.

  The funeral had turned out to be standing room only. The church where the service was held was filled to overflowing with his father’s large extended family, plus his friends, and then there were the people who wanted or felt obligated to pay their last respects. Lastly, there were the curious, the onlookers and the people who had no lives of their own and were attracted to events that involved people of accomplishment.

  His father certainly was that.

  Despite the fact that everything had been hastily arranged, family members had managed to come from all over the country. Again, Elizabeth had been instrumental in helping to reach all of them. The woman truly was turning out to be far more helpful than he had ever anticipated, taking it upon herself to make sure no one was left out and that everything went as smoothly as possible.

  Whit saw his father’s older sisters, his aunts Emmaline and Rosalyn, seated in the row behind his mother, his brother and his sister. Rosalyn’s three daughters sat next to her, while Emmaline’s son, Noah, was missing—the only family member he and Elizabeth hadn’t been able to reach.

  His mother, Whit noted, seemed to be feeding on the attention that being Reginald Adair’s grieving widow generated.

  There were people throughout the gathering whose faces would have been recognizable on the news programs, both local and national, as well as people who tended to be almost invisible, moving about unnoticed by those who passed them on the street.

  His father’s death—especially the manner of his death—had been a jolting surprise to everyone.

  Whit pushed on with the eulogy. He was almost finished.

  “At sixty-two, my father seemed far too young to leave us. I was so sure that he would be around for another twenty, thirty years, by which time I’d have most—but not all—of my questions answered. Now I’m just going to have to try to channel my father whenever a particularly difficult situation comes up.”

  A resigned smile curved the corners of his lips. “But it certainly won’t be easy. Neither will it be easy living in a world without Reginald Adair in it. But we’ll have to try to find a way, because that’s what he would have expected of us. I have a lot to live up to,” he told the people before him. “We all do.”

  Finished, Whit returned to his seat. The oppressive weight he had been struggling with since he’d been told of his father’s violent death seemed to have lifted just a little.

  Sitting several rows behind Whit and his family, Elizabeth never took her eyes off him.

  The set of his shoulders told her just how uncomfortable Whit was standing before all these people, giving the eulogy, although she doubted if anyone else was aware of it. He was good at putting on a brave, solid front.

  As was she.

  * * *

  Caravans of dark limousines and passenger cars took the mourners from the cemetery where Reginald’s body was interred to Adair Acres, a good distance away, for the reception.

  Because of the suddenness and the manner of Adair’s demise, the family was dealing with varying degrees of emotional distress. Elizabeth had taken it upon herself to step in and had made all the arrangements for the reception that was held after the funeral. She’d employed highly recommended caterers to handle the food and had instinctively made sure that everyone who deserved an invitation to this gathering of family, friends and associates received one.

  “I’m beginning to see why Dad thought so highly of you,” Whit told her when their paths crossed during the second hour of the reception.

  Left to himself, Whit would have continued to go out of his way to avoid having any contact with Elizabeth, accidental or otherwise. However, his father’s murder had changed everything—or rather, the way Elizabeth had pitched in and handled the thousand and one details that went into coordinating the church service, the funeral and the gathering afterward had changed everything. He couldn’t ignore what she had done and how much of a burden she had taken off his shoulders by doing it.

  “I don’t know if I could have pulled any of this off the way you did,” he confessed. “And on my own, this would have been a disaster.” Facing her, he said, “Thank you for everything.”

  Elizabeth forced a smile to her lips. He had no idea just what sort of feat she had pulled off, she thought. She’d done all this—handled details, hired limousines, made all the necessary adjustments to schedules—while feeling as sick as the proverbial dog.

  She felt very proud of the fact that Whit would never guess that she would have given anything to just curl up in her bed and try to sleep until this constant nausea finally abated. But she didn’t have that luxury, so she’d tried to get her mind off her physical misery by being nonstop busy.

  For the most part, it worked.

  The smile Elizabeth gave him now wasn’t forced, it was one of encouragement.

  “I’m sure you could have,” she told Whit. “But I am glad I could help in some small way.”

  The past few days had been a complete strain on him and Whit felt as if he’d been sleepwalking through most of it, only intermittently aware of his surroundings. During all that he had been only peripherally aware of Elizabeth. But now, when he was able to draw a breath, thinking this was almost all behind him, he looked at Elizabeth, really looked at her, and it gave him a little pause. All semblance of color was gone from her face. She looked drained.

  Guilt pricked at his conscience.

  “Are you feeling all right, Elizabeth?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, perhaps a bit too quickly. Then, regrouping, she asked, “Why?”

  “I don’t know, you look a little...pale to me,” he finally said, summing up her appearance as tactfully as possible.

  She knew perfectly well why she looked like a ghost searching for a final resting place, but she grasped at the all too available excuse.

  “It’s just the result of having to come to grips with the shock of what happened to your father,” she told him. “I’ve never known anyone who was murdered before and since I was the one who found the body, it was doubly upsetting,” she reminded him.

  “Right.”

  What was he thinking, Whit silently upbraided himself. Of course, this had all been a terrible shock to her and perforce it had to be fresh in her mind, since his father had been murdered just a little more than a week earlier.

  “Sorry.” He was being completely insensitive, Whit realized. Besides, what woman liked having someone point out flaws in her appearance?

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Elizabeth assured him. If she was being honest about it, she rather liked the fact that he had even noticed her appearance. Aside from that one night, she sincerely doubted that she’d ever been anywhere on Whit’s radar. Certainly not the way he was on hers. “You were just showing your concern.”

  He didn’t know what he was actually showing. But Whit did know that he didn’t want Elizabeth to feel that she had to take on all these various obligations by herself. As he looked at her, bits and pieces of that one glorious night they had spent together came rushing back to him, almost against his will.

  Suddenly, he found himself remembering all the emotions that had risen up within him when he was with her. When he was holding her in his arms. Making love with her.

  Wanting her.

  Seriously? You’re thinking about that now, with the lieutenant governor of the state standing less than two feet away? he reprimanded himself.

  The lieutenant governor wasn’t the only high-ranking official who had attended the funeral. Th
ere were a couple of senators and a few congressional representatives paying their respects as well. His father, Whit couldn’t help thinking, would have eaten this up happily. Except now he couldn’t, Whit reminded himself with regret.

  “Thanks for this,” he told Elizabeth just before he went to exchange a few words with the lieutenant governor. At the moment, his mother appeared to be hanging on every one of the man’s words.

  His mother, he had known from a very young age, was one incredible piece of work. Her first and foremost priority had always been herself, to the exclusion of all else.

  Nothing had changed.

  Whit knew that if she could have, his mother would have filled her world with high-ranking officials, well-known celebrities and philanthropists of the highest magnitude. For the moment, his father’s murder and subsequent funeral played right into her hands. It gave her the perfect setting for garnering the kind of attention she thrived on.

  She probably saw it as the best thing that had ever happened to her, Whit couldn’t help thinking.

  Bit by bit, Whit was beginning to understand why his father would spend so much time at work rather than coming home. His father and his mother were drifting apart. They had been for a long time now.

  As strange as it seemed under the circumstances, he found himself feeling sorry for the man who was responsible for giving him life.

  * * *

  “Thank you all for coming,” Nathan Miller said several days later, addressing the people gathered in his conference room.

  Initially, the lawyer had thought that his office would have been a sufficient place to hold the reading of Reginald Adair’s will, but given the number of people mentioned in it, the senior partner of his law firm felt the conference room would feel less crowded.

  Even so, Miller had had to have extra chairs brought in beyond the ones already at the conference table to accommodate everyone.