against the words she was to utter next. “Your father was lying facedown on the rug. I think I screamed—I’m not sure,” she confessed.
“Was he still—?” Whit couldn’t bring himself to say the word.
She spared him that by quickly replying, “Alive? Yes, he was. I tried to stop the bleeding with my sweater, pressing it against the bullet wound, then I called nine-one-one. I performed CPR on your father until the paramedics came. But I couldn’t save him,” she said mournfully, taking full responsibility for his father’s demise with those very words.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Whit told her stiffly, his body rigid as he stared straight ahead at the road.
“But it was,” she argued. Whit glanced in her direction, clearly puzzled. “If I had come back earlier, maybe the killer wouldn’t have killed your father.”
“And maybe he would have killed you for being a witness to what he did,” Whit countered, stating the fact as if he were reading chapter and verse out of a criminology textbook.
Despite his words, Elizabeth wasn’t finished beating herself up. “I should have gone to your father before I left and asked him if he needed me to do something, help with something. He would have been done that much faster and who knows, he might not even have been in the building when whoever it was who killed him got into his office.”
An annoyed look flashed across Whit’s handsome, rugged features. “You can reconstruct the scenario a hundred different ways and torture yourself from now until doomsday, it still won’t change anything. Still won’t bring my father back,” he emphasized. “Why don’t you put that energy to better use and make sure that his company continues to operate and thrive?”
If she was going to devote herself to something, it shouldn’t be work as usual. At least not yet, Elizabeth thought.
“What about catching his killer?” she wanted to know.
Whit swallowed an expletive. The last thing he wanted her to do was attempt to track down a killer. “That’s what the police are for.”
Elizabeth turned to look at him again, taking in the hard ridges of his profile. Analyzing what he had just said.
“Yes, but you don’t believe that,” she guessed. She saw a muscle in his cheek flicker slightly. She was right, she congratulated herself. “You think that vengeance belongs to you.”
Whit stopped his sports car just within the entrance of AdAir Corp’s parking facility and looked around. Her car was all the way over to the left, near the rear elevator. Getting his bearings, he drove straight for the vehicle.
Bringing the car to a stop beside Elizabeth’s vehicle, Whit turned to look at the woman who had already caused him to lose control once. With effort, he pushed that whole episode behind him.
“You sure you’re up to driving home?” he asked. His tone made it sound like a routine question instead of one fueled by genuine concern—which it was.
Whit was keeping a very tight rein on himself, fearing that if he allowed even a glimmer of emotion to come through, everything would be lost because the dam would most certainly give way and break apart. He was not about to allow that to happen.
“I’m sure,” she told him, then smiled as she added, “thanks for asking.”
Whit shrugged, not knowing how to respond to her expression of gratitude. It wasn’t an emotion he was accustomed to.
“I don’t want to have to identify your body, too,” he told her matter-of-factly.
Elizabeth nodded, expecting nothing more from him. He was very tightly wound right now, she thought, more than willing to give him a pass. The fact that she always did, no matter what the transgression, wasn’t something she was about to dwell on.
“You won’t have to,” she promised.
Getting out of his car, Elizabeth crossed to her own, taking careful, small steps as if she was afraid that tilting even a fraction of an inch in any direction would send her sprawling to the ground. Discovering her boss’s body the way she had had thrown her equilibrium into complete turmoil and she found herself both nauseous and dizzy.
Or maybe that was due to the tiny human being she was carrying within her.
In either case, she couldn’t allow herself to display any signs of weakness—especially around Whit.
At the last moment, just before she got into her car, Elizabeth turned and looked in his direction. Whit was still watching her, as if he wasn’t entirely certain that she was capable of navigating either herself or her vehicle once she got behind the wheel.
“If you need to talk—about anything at all,” she emphasized, “call me. You have my number.”
Actually, he didn’t, Whit thought. He had deliberately deleted it from his contact list the morning after they’d slept together. He had done it predominantly to remove immediate temptation from his reach. But in actuality it had been a token gesture to assuage his conscience, since obtaining Elizabeth’s phone number again would have taken almost no effort whatsoever on his part. All he had to do was pull it out of her personnel file.
So far, he had resisted the temptation to do so.
Not wanting to prolong this exchange between them a second longer than he had to—because it might lead to results he told himself he shouldn’t allow to happen—Whit said, “Yes, I do.”
“And you’ll call if you need to talk?” she asked, watching his expression.
“I won’t need to talk,” Whit told her flatly.
Someone else might have been rebuffed, gotten into their car and driven away. But that someone else wasn’t Elizabeth. Then again, no one else would have had her motivation and desire to be there for Whit.
“But if you do,” she emphasized, looking at him intently.
Whit nodded, surrendering because he wanted to finally bring this to a close. “Yes, I’ll call,” he agreed. With that, he slammed the driver’s side door closed.
He wouldn’t call, Elizabeth thought, sliding in behind the steering wheel of her vehicle. She closed the door and tugged her seat belt from behind her, clicking it into place.
The man could be unbelievably stubborn, Elizabeth thought, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about that.
Nothing she could do about any of it, except to express her heartfelt sorrow and regret. That and be there if Whit discovered that he did need someone to turn to.
She knew for a fact that Whit’s work kept him so busy he had no close friends to share things with. And if he had ever been close to his younger siblings, Carson and Landry, the past few years had seen those relationships drifting apart. Carson had enlisted in the Marines several years ago and from what she had heard, Landry had been taken over by Patsy, her mother, who was grooming the girl for a “suitable marriage” with someone the woman viewed as the “right” son-in-law.
Whit had thrown himself completely into his work for the sole purpose of earning his father’s gratitude as well as his admiration, both of which were now off
