and torches, but he didn’t intend to waste his breath or his time on the detective. He needed to be elsewhere.
“Where is she being questioned?” he asked.
“At the police station. Detective Kramer is handling the case. Otis Kramer,” the other man all but shouted after Whit as the latter hurried to the elevator.
* * *
This was insane, Whit thought over and over again as he hurried to the police station. Completely insane. Elizabeth could no more have killed his father than he could. Whit gripped his steering wheel, channeling his anger, doing his best to regain control over himself. He had to put an end to this farce and get Elizabeth out of there.
He owed it to both her and his father to put an end to the interrogation that was being conducted.
That he had to come to what amounted to her rescue was, in itself, only adding to his internal turmoil.
He’d been avoiding his father’s executive assistant these last few weeks. Totally avoiding any one-on-one contact with her, avoiding even being in the same room as the woman. He had wanted to work a few things through first.
But his feelings in regard to being possibly confronted and maybe even redressed by Elizabeth were trumped by this unimaginably bizarre situation. Just because he hadn’t summoned the courage to face her didn’t excuse him from coming to her aid and extracting her from being interrogated by some overeager detective looking to make lieutenant.
Doing the speed limit and above, Whit arrived at the police station in what amounted to record time. A part of him had been expecting to be pulled over at any moment and given a speeding ticket. Luckily for him, San Diego’s finest were otherwise occupied tonight.
Parking his silver-gray sports car in the lot’s first row, Whit got out of the vehicle and dashed up the concrete front steps, then hurried into the building.
The interior of the precinct was alive with multiple activities, all going on at once. Even so, it was obvious that the murder of Reginald Adair was taking precedence over everything else.
Whit was grateful—if such a feeling could be put into play at a time like this—that the media hadn’t come crawling out of the woodwork yet. One less obstacle for him to deal with.
But they would. They would most definitely come out of the woodwork. He knew that it was just a matter of time before this whole thing became a giant media circus, three rings and all.
The desk sergeant looked up just as Whit approached him. The grumpy expression on the heavyset man’s face melted away as recognition set in. AdAir Corp—its president in particular—made large annual contributions to the policemen’s fund. That earned the company—and especially Whit—respect as well as pledges of complete cooperation should the need arise.
It had arisen.
“We were all very sorry to hear about your father, Mr. Adair,” O’Hara, the desk sergeant, told him, rising in his chair to shake his hand.
“Thank you,” Whit answered, doing his best not to snap the response out. He wanted to move on to the reason why he was here at the precinct, not discuss his father’s murder. “You’re holding my father’s assistant, Elizabeth Shelton, for questioning,” he began.
“Yeah, that’s right.” The sergeant looked up from the ledger he was checking. “Ruiz,” he called out, stopping the first uniformed policeman who walked by at that moment. “Take Mr. Adair upstairs to where Kramer’s questioning that person of interest.”
Elizabeth was a person of interest all right, Whit thought, falling into step beside the officer. A person of interest to him.
Very much so, he thought ruefully as he got into the elevator and rode up beside the diminutive Officer Ruiz. Elizabeth was a person of interest to him despite the fact that he had broken his own rules and crossed the line with her, a line he had sworn to himself that he would never cross.
And he hadn’t.
Not for five years.
Not until that night in Nevada when they’d wound up stranded thanks to an untimely thunderstorm.
Stranded, attracted to one another, with just a little too much to drink—it was a recipe for disaster. He realized that he’d been doomed right from the very start.
It had turned out to be a very volatile combination—for both of them.
Neither one of them, in his estimation, had imbibed enough to be considered drunk—but they had consumed just enough to have the carefully constructed walls around their professional relationship turn into tissue paper.
For his part, he’d been drawn to Elizabeth from the first moment he’d seen her that day she came to work for his father. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her.
But he more than anyone knew that business and pleasure had to be kept at arm’s length from one another. Mixing the two together was just asking for trouble—with a capital T.
But none of that had been on his mind that night in Nevada. All he’d been able to think of was how very much he wanted her.
Outside their hotel window, the wind had howled and the rain had lashed angrily against the glass panes. Inside, though, they had managed to create their own private haven. For the space of one magical night, he’d found himself coming as close to experiencing total perfection as he could ever hope.
Even so, morning had come with its heavy mantle of guilt. He had let his guard down. Moreover, he had taken advantage of the situation and of her. There was no excuse for that.
At a loss for how to handle it, he’d felt that his only recourse was to behave as if nothing had happened.
Elizabeth had done the same, which was why he was certain that refusing to acknowledge that anything had changed between them was the right way to go.
The right way...even though he ached for her with every breath he took.
But that was his problem, not hers, and Whit was resigned to spending the rest of his life dealing with that.
What he wasn’t ready to do was spend the rest of his life without the man he’d looked up to and done his very best to emulate. Sure, for the most part, sons outlived their fathers, he knew that. But he wasn’t ready for that to happen just yet.
Not like this.
Guess what? It happened. Deal with it, a voice inside his head ordered.
The stainless steel doors parted and he followed Officer Ruiz off the elevator and down the winding corridor.
The floor could have been deserted for all the attention Whit paid to what was going on all around him. He was focused on finding Elizabeth.
“Wait right here, Mr. Adair,” the officer told him. “I’ll let Detective Kramer know that you’re here about the suspect.”
Whit was not in the mood to hang back, waiting while the officer and the detective sorted things out. The turmoil within him was building up at an alarming rate, threatening to erupt at any moment unless he found some sort of an outlet.
