Carrying His Secret

by Marie Ferrarella

  Beyond the dramatically grieving widow and Reginald Adair’s children, included were his two sisters and Rosalyn Adair Cross’s three daughters, not to mention a number of faithful servants, employees and colleagues, all of whom received some sort of mention and bequest in Adair’s will.

  Miller, of course, was quite aware of the will’s content, having drawn it up for his longtime client years ago. Just recently, they had gone over all the will’s stipulations to make sure everything was up-to-date and still met with Adair’s approval.

  Adair’s death—or more accurately, his murder, the lawyer silently amended—might have been untimely, but at least Reginald had been completely prepared for the end of his life. His will went into great detail as to the distribution of all his worldly possessions.

  “Well, I think we can get started now,” Whit told the lawyer. “It looks like everyone’s here.”

  Actually, he thought, it looked as though more than everyone was here. He wondered if there were going to be some disappointed people by the time the reading was finished.

  He hoped that this wouldn’t get ugly.

  Miller nodded. “Very well.” Making himself as comfortable as he could under what he foresaw was going to turn out to be a rather uncomfortable occurrence, the lawyer began reading. “It begins in the standard way,” he told the gathering. “‘Being of sound mind and body, I, Reginald Adair...’”

  The first things that were touched upon were the smaller bequests. Generous monetary awards for years of faithful services were enumerated.

  Patsy frowned and shifted in her seat as each sum, and its recipient, was read aloud.

  The largest of those went to Elizabeth, who seemed stunned by the amount and the very fact that she was included at all. She had come to the reading because she’d felt she might be needed—and because Miller had requested her presence. But she had assumed he meant it in some sort of professional capacity, not as an intended recipient who was mentioned in the will.

  She was still dealing with her surprise as Miller informed Adair’s sisters of the amounts left to each of them and their offspring.

  The fact that no money was allocated to his brother, Bucannon, or his brother’s children came as no surprise, since that branch of the family was exceptionally well-off. They had no need of his money.

  The next paragraph, however, threw Adair’s widow for a wide, dizzying loop. She stared, openmouthed, as Miller disclosed the sizable chunk of money that was being left to Adair’s first wife, Ruby—a woman who, according to Miller, had declined to be present for the reading because she felt her presence would disturb the rest of Reginald’s family.

  “There has to be some mistake,” Patsy cried, jumping to her feet as she glared accusingly at Miller. “He wouldn’t do that to me!” It was obvious that she viewed mentioning Ruby at all as a slap in the face, completely humiliating her.

  Miller remained unfazed. He worded his answer as precisely as he could. “I believe he wasn’t doing anything to you, Mrs. Adair. He was doing it for his ex-wife.”

  “No! You can’t give it to her,” she cried angrily. “That money doesn’t belong to her.”

  “Apparently Mr. Adair felt that it did,” Miller replied calmly. “And as you must know, I have to abide by your late husband’s wishes.”

  Patsy’s eyes blazed as she withdrew from the table in a huff. “We’ll see about that!”

  With that, Patsy looked as if she was about to storm out of the room. But then she sighed dramatically, murmured something about Ruby getting the money over her dead body, and sat down in her seat again.

  She was obviously waiting to hear what she would continue to own once the smoke cleared.

  Miller resumed with the reading as if the outburst hadn’t happened.

  “‘Part ownership of my beloved ranch,’” the lawyer read, “‘that held so many good memories for me, will go to my sister Emmaline’s only son, my nephew Noah Scott.’”

  That, Whit felt, had been done because Noah had enjoyed himself so much at the ranch the summers he was allowed to spend there. Those months had been the only time his aunt Emmaline would relinquish her tight hold over Noah during his adolescent years.

  His mother, Whit noted, seemed to care less about the ranch. He knew she would be more than happy never to set foot on it again. Without his father around, there was no reason for her to ever have to go there again. The city, with its vibrant nightlife and all it had to offer, was far more her style.

  “‘And now I come to my main achievement,’” Miller read, pausing in all the places he had been instructed to pause. “‘AdAir Corp. I want the company to be divided equally between all four of my children: Jackson, Whit, Carson and Landry.’”

  It was as if a bomb had been dropped in all their laps.

  “What?” Landry cried, confused. She looked to Whit for an explanation.

  “Who’s Jackson?” Carson wanted to know. Whit’s younger brother looked at his mother, waiting for an answer. Patsy in turn had turned pale for just a moment before rage took over and put color back into her face. Vivid color.

  Whit felt that if there were answers to be gotten, they were going to come not from his mother’s viper tongue but from his father’s lawyer.

  “What does he mean, four children? My father only had the three of us,” Whit said to the man, waiting for some sort of an explanation.

  But even as he said it, he could see by the look in the lawyer’s eyes that he and his siblings had been under the wrong impression all these years.

  “I’m afraid that’s not quite accurate, Whit,” Miller told him. “When your father was married to his first wife, Ruby—”

  “The whore!” Patsy bit off.

  Miller ignored her comment and continued as if the widow hadn’t said anything.

  “—they had a son they called Jackson. Jackson was kidnapped from his own garden when he was three months old. Your father did everything in his power to find Jackson, moving almost heaven and earth. But he was never able to recover the boy.

  “Rightly or wrongly, your father blamed Ruby for the kidnapping. She had left the baby in the yard, unattended, for a minute while she ran in to answer the phone. When she came out, the baby was gone. Their marriage began to break down right there. Eventually, they divorced and he went on to marry your mother.

  “But your father never gave up hope that his firstborn was alive and out there somewhere. Your father was absolutely convinced that Jackson would turn up someday. When he did, your father wanted him to be able to reclaim his heritage, hence the equal division of AdAir Corp’s shares.”

  The news of another sibling joining their ranks totally floored Whit. He just wasn’t sure how he was going to assimilate this latest curveball his father had sent, essentially from beyond the grave.

  Trying to deal with the breadth and scope of this newest revelation, Whit looked at the lawyer. “Is there anything else that we should know about? Any other immediate family members hiding somewhere? Or some other equally shocking piece of information?”

  Miller took no offense at the sarcastic tone beneath the words. “I realize that this is a lot for you to take in,” the lawyer began.

  “That’s an understatement if I ever heard one,” Whit commented.

  Miller lowered his eyes to the will, as if taking refuge in what was written there and his duty to make the parties involved aware of the situation per his client’s wishes.

  “Perhaps, but your father wanted to be completely honest with you.”

  “Then he should have said something while he was still alive,” Whit snapped, feeling betrayed by the man he’d held in the highest possible esteem.

  “Maybe he didn’t want to upset you,” Elizabeth suggested gently.

  Her words were met with a look of disgust. “Well, that didn’t exactly
work out as planned, now did it?” Whit retorted sarcastically.

  The next moment, he regretted what he’d just said and especially the way he’d said it. Elizabeth was only trying to relieve the tension ricocheting through the conference room. He should not have snapped at her the way that he had.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t be taking this out on you. It’s just a shock to suddenly find out at my age that I have an older brother.” Frustrated, he blew out a long breath.

  “All of this is pretty much of a shock,” Elizabeth agreed. “But we’ll deal with it. You’ll deal with it,” she said pointedly. “You always do.”

  Chapter 6

  “You have more faith in me than I do,” Whit commented after a beat.

  “I have justifiable faith,” Elizabeth pointed out. She had known him, studied him and been drawn to him for five years. That had made her, in her opinion, pretty much an expert on the man. “You are your father’s son. You’ll deal with this and anything else that might come your way.”

  Except, perhaps, for finding out that you’re going to be a father, Elizabeth thought.

  But that was something that she would have to deal with later, after this newest, completely unexpected tempest died down.

  Dealing with his father’s murder was bad enough. Finding out that his father had a son he’d never mentioned but obviously kept close to his heart—well, that not only threw everything off balance, it damn near pushed Whit right over the edge.

  Discovering that he had a baby on the way might just break the man completely, Elizabeth thought. At the very least, she knew that she couldn’t count on Whit approaching this latest twist in a calm, rational manner. Not right now.

  If by some chance Whit proposed marriage because she was pregnant with his child, she would never know if he was doing it out of a sense of obligation, out of wanting to give his child his last name or any of a dozen other reasons, none of which had anything to do with the one all-important thing that mattered to her: that he did it because he loved her.

  Her loving him was a foregone conclusion. She would never have lowered her guard on that wonderful rainy night if she hadn’t.

  Nothing had changed in that respect, except that she’d been deeply wounded the next morning when Whit had acted as if absolutely nothing had happened between them. But she still loved him, even though she was fairly convinced that love had never entered the picture from Whit’s side.

  The heart wants what the heart wants—wasn’t that the way the old saying went? She was living proof that the saying was very true. She couldn’t do anything to change how she felt, just as she couldn’t do anything about making the man love her.

  But what she could do was help him weather and cope with this latest storm he was facing. And she fully intended to.

  Since the reading of the will had concluded, most of the people who had gathered in the firm’s conference room had begun filing out, buoyed by the fact that they were leaving a little richer than when they had walked in. They were also quite stunned by this little bombshell that Reginald Adair’s lawyer had dropped, mentioning a fourth, heretofore unknown, offspring.

  Whit and his siblings remained, as did his mother, who still appeared to be seething over the matter of the bequest to Reginald’s ex-wife.

  Elizabeth also remained behind, to see if she could be of any further immediate assistance to Whit before she went back to work. She might no longer be Reginald Adair’s executive assistant, but she was still an executive assistant and she knew everything that had been on the late president’s schedule, as well as everything the man had wanted to attend to and accomplish at the company.

  A veritable storehouse of information, Elizabeth was still a very necessary person to have on hand.

  However, first and foremost, her loyalty lay with Whit, and although she didn’t say it out loud, she was prepared to be anything he needed her to be, do anything he needed her to do.

  In his own way, Whit had sensed that.

  His mother, however, sensed something else. She viewed the much younger woman’s presence—at the funeral, at the reading of the will and especially now with just the family unit together—as an affront to her.

  Her brown eyes narrowing to intense, highly critical slits, Patsy glared at Elizabeth as Whit closed the door behind the departing family members, friends and employees. Convinced that her dead husband had been cheating on her with every woman who crossed his path, she was certain that Reginald’s relationship with Elizabeth went well beyond boss and executive assistant.

  “You can run along now, Elizabeth,” Patsy said dismissively, gesturing toward the door. “Your meal ticket’s gone, so there’s no reason for you to hang around any longer.”

  “Mother,” Whit said sharply, angry and embarrassed at his mother’s belittling tone.

  There was no love lost between them. Patsy’s relationship with her children only encompassed how society viewed them and how that reflected on her. She had never been the all-embracing, milk-and-cookies type of mother. If the woman noticed and spoke at all to her children during their childhood years, it was to criticize them.

  “She has a right to be here,” Whit informed her gruffly.

  “As what? Your father’s little plaything?” Patsy challenged hotly.

  The color of Elizabeth’s cheeks instantly turned a shade of crimson, not from embarrassment but from sheer anger. Hot words of denial and outrage sprang to her tongue, but she bit them back for Whit’s sake. She was not about to stoop down to the woman’s level.

  “Mother—” Whit began again, but got no further as his mother turned on him.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know,” Patsy cried sarcastically. “Why do you think he valued her so much? All those late hours they spent together—are you so naive that you think they were actually working all that time? Hardly,” Patsy jeered, the expression on her very carefully made-up face turning ugly. “I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want the shame of scandal to taint our name, but now your father managed to take care of that by getting himself murdered,” she summed up harshly.

  Whit wasn’t a little boy any longer, which meant that he didn’t have to put up with and be embarrassed by his mother’s tantrums, outbursts and incredibly bad behavior. “Mother, you owe Ms. Shelton an apology,” Whit ordered sternly.

  “For what?” Patsy demanded haughtily, her hands on her subtle hips. “She was well compensated, I’m sure. What about me?” she cried in the next breath. “Why don’t you tell this trollop to apologize to me?”

  Pushing her son aside, she confronted Elizabeth, going toe-to-toe with her. The platinum blonde was shorter than Elizabeth by an inch, but her stiletto heels made up the difference.

  “How about it, you hussy? Do you want to apologize to me? Or do you have a little something on the side to surprise us with, like that bimbo Ruby and her disappearing baby?”

  Elizabeth had always known that her boss’s wife was a jealous shrew, but she had never thought the woman would accuse her of this sort of heinous behavior. She took offense for herself as well as the man she had worked for, a man who had always treated her with the utmost respect and kindness.

  The mention of a baby threw her for a loop, as well. Had Patsy somehow guessed that she was pregnant?

  The next moment, Elizabeth realized that there was no way that Patsy could have guessed. The woman was just being nasty.

  “That is enough!” Whit ordered sharply.

  Stunned by his tone, Patsy stopped short, turning to glare at her son. “You’re right. I’ve had enough. More than enough!”

  With that, she grabbed her purse and stormed out of the conference room, slamming the door in her wake so hard, the glass shook. For a second, Whit thought it was going to crack and come raining down into the room in shards.

  But, like his resol
ve, it held together.

  “I’m sorry.” Elizabeth apologized to everyone who was left in the room, but predominantly to Whit. “I should have left when I saw that my presence was agitating her like that.”

  “No, we’re the ones who should be sorry,” Whit told her, struggling to repress a whole host of emotions that had been stirred up.

  “Mother had no right to talk to you that way,” Carson said, speaking up for the first time. “Mother has never been a happy woman and she doesn’t want anyone else to be, either.”

  Because his mother’s behavior had been such an embarrassment to him and his siblings, Whit abruptly changed the subject. He turned his attention to the reason he and his brother and sister had remained behind—unanswered questions.

  “What can you tell me about this Jackson?” he asked the lawyer.

  Miller sighed. He didn’t have all that much to add to the sketchy picture. “Only that your father never stopped hoping the boy would turn up. Periodically, Mr. Adair would hire detectives to look for his son. But the trail always remained cold. Jackson was the only thing that held his first marriage together. Your father married Jackson’s mother in order to give the boy his name. He didn’t really know her that well. She was already pregnant when they got married,” Miller explained.

  The mild-mannered lawyer’s words stabbed Elizabeth right through the heart.

  In order to give the boy his name.

  That was exactly the reason why she had decided she wasn’t going to say anything to Whit about her pregnancy. With any luck and careful camouflage dressing, she might never have to. All she knew was that she wasn’t going to be part of a loveless marriage, even if it was only loveless on his part—because that, to her, was the only part that counted.

  “Once the boy was kidnapped,” Miller concluded, “and your father blamed Ruby for that, there was nothing to hold them together.”

  Carson looked at the man, puzzled. “If Dad was so crazy about this baby, why didn’t he just pay the kidnapper the ransom?” Carson wanted to know.