Zane silently emphasized, not if.
Feeling momentarily overwhelmed, Zane suppressed a sigh.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Colton?”
Zane roused himself. Lost in thought, he hadn’t realized he was still standing by his open door, staring after the departing sheriff, rather than going back to his desk.
“Not yet,” he admitted, his voice a bit vague.
Looking at Mirabella, he flashed a quick smile in his administrative assistant’s direction because she had expressed an interest in his well-being.
These days, a lot of people went out of their way to avoid him rather than be faced with having to find words of comfort and encouragement.
“But it will be,” he concluded.
Mirabella pressed her lips together. Her stomach was suddenly rebelling again. Clenching one fist at her side, she struggled to exercise some sort of control over the queasy feeling. After all, she couldn’t very well just dash off to the ladies’ room in the middle of his sentence. Besides, Zane looked so lost for a moment, her heart went out to him.
“Was this about Mr. Eldridge?” she asked Zane quietly.
“Yes, it was,” he replied.
Her eyes immediately widened and he caught himself thinking, despite the quagmire he found himself in, that her pale brown eyes looked beautiful.
Not the time, he admonished himself. Besides, the woman works for you, you’re not supposed to think of her that way.
A glimmer of fear had frozen on her face. “The sheriff didn’t come to tell you...” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
She didn’t need to. He could see Mirabella was thinking the worst. Zane immediately cut his assistant short, putting her mind at ease.
“No, he didn’t,” Zane told her. “It seems that there’s just been another puzzle piece added to this mix.”
“Oh.” The single word escaped her lips, indicating she had no idea if this was good news or bad.
Mirabella wasn’t asking him any questions and normally, he would have been grateful for that and wouldn’t have volunteered anything. But today, this minute, filled to the brim with a host of tumultuous emotions, he found himself needing to talk to someone. His concern about his stepfather’s ultimate welfare was eating away at him and he didn’t know who to talk to, who to really trust.
There was something almost sweetly honest about the woman who quietly took care of all the myriad small details that went into making his job run as smoothly as it did.
In all the time they had worked together, there’d been no slipups. Mirabella was good at her job.
In the blink of an eye, she went from administrative assistant to temporary confidante.
“It’s come to the sheriff’s attention that someone might have been blackmailing my father,” Zane told her without fanfare or hemming and hawing.
There was concern on Mirabella’s delicate, heart-shaped face. Not a rush to judgment, not a quick, terse correction to remind him that Eldridge Colton was his stepfather, not his flesh-and-blood father.
Zane wasn’t much of a talker, but he found Mirabella extremely easy to talk to. It was almost as if her very expression coaxed the words out of his mouth—and the weight off his shoulders.
“Blackmail?” she repeated in a small, hushed voice that almost vibrated with horrified disbelief. “Mr. Eldridge? Are you sure?”
Zane sighed, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Right now, Belle, I’m not sure of anything. But the sheriff came to tell me that one of my father’s bank accounts was experiencing regular withdrawals once a month.”
“Where were the withdrawals going?” Mirabella wanted to know. Who could be doing such an awful thing, blackmailing that sweet old man?
“That is what I intend to find out. Belle, get me—” He stopped talking and looked at her as if he hadn’t really seen her today. “Are you feeling all right, Belle?” he asked.
No, I feel as if my stomach is being twisted inside out and it’s all going to be coming up into my throat at any second, she thought, desperately trying to hold it together.
It was her own fault, she upbraided herself. She was the one asking questions, detaining Zane. She should have just nodded and withdrawn, pretending to go back to her desk. This way she could really be hurrying off to the ladies’ room, praying it was unoccupied. The last thing she needed was to have someone overhearing her throwing up and offering to take her to the company nurse.
“I’m fine, sir,” she told him, hoping she sounded convincing.
No, she wasn’t, Zane observed. She wasn’t fine. His administrative assistant looked very pale and it made him feel guilty. She was undoubtedly concerned about his father’s well-being and reacting to what he’d just told her. Images of blackmailers and the way some might handle a situation that wasn’t to their liking didn’t exactly create calming scenarios.
He shouldn’t have said anything to her.
Feeling responsible for making her feel this way, Zane took her hand in his in a gesture of comfort.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her, “he’ll be all right.”
Mirabella looked at her boss, confused even as she found herself reacting to the gentle way he was holding her hand.
There’d never been any physical contact between them before. Despite the nausea gripping her, something else was going on as well, something faint, but compelling nonetheless. She had no idea where this was coming from or why it seemed to momentarily supersede everything else.
This assault on her hormones she experienced because of the baby had literally knocked out all the rules. She quite frankly didn’t know what to expect from herself from one minute to the next.
Right now, all she could think about was telling Zane how totally attracted to him she was. It was a real struggle not to. Almost as much of a struggle as it was to keep down whatever was threatening to purge itself right this minute.
So she forced herself to smile, desperately hoping she wasn’t going to start sweating—which she knew would only lead to more questions.
Instead, she said, “I know everything will be all right because you’ll find Mr. Eldridge, I know you will.”
“First thing I’m going to find,” Zane told her, releasing her hand and turning toward his desk, “is exactly where and to whom these monthly withdrawals are going.”
Though everything within her screamed to leave right this second while she still could, before risking embarrassment, Mirabella had to ask, “The sheriff really didn’t tell you?”
“The sheriff indicated he didn’t know.” Whether or not that was the truth he didn’t know, but he was going with that assumption for now. “He said something about it
