His Wedding Date (The Second Chance Love Series, Book 2) (15 page)

Two days later, Brian was still feeling decidedly uncivilized. He hadn't slept well, and he hadn't figured out a damned thing.

He could have stood that. It was the wondering he couldn't take. He wanted to know whether the man with the light blue dress shirt had shown up at Shelly's after he'd left the other night.

An almost insane reaction—he knew that. A caveman, she'd called him, and he did feel rather barbaric this morning. She wasn't his—not in that way. She was a good friend, the best female friend he'd ever had, and he was just worried about her, he reasoned with himself.

He was allowed to worry over a good friend caught in the middle of a dangerous situation.

But he shouldn't lose sleep at night, wondering if the man who gave her that shirt was peeling it off her at that very moment.

You don't want me for yourself,
she'd told him.

Okay, true, he'd never really thought of her that way, but he'd been the one who'd put that mark on her neck.

He shifted back in his chair and gave up on all pretense of working. This was crazy. This was Shelly. This was the girl he'd known since she was a little kid—

Someone knocked on the door to his office.

"Yes," he said, trying not to let irritation at the interruption show in his voice. It wasn't like him to be such a bear. It wasn't like him to get drunk, pop some pills and make love on the floor to a woman he'd known forever, either. Or had they been on the bed? Both? He could not remember.

"Have you heard from Charlie this morning?" asked Charlie's secretary, Maureen.

"No. Why?"

"It's almost ten, and he hasn't come in yet."

"I haven't seen him," Brian said. He hadn't seen anybody. He'd come to work a little before seven, closeted himself in his office and tried not to come out. He didn't want to inflict his bad temper on anyone unless he absolutely had to.

"Wait a minute," Brian said as Maureen turned away. "I think his car was in the parking lot when I came in this morning."

Brian had noticed that and thought it was unusual. He normally beat everyone to work in the morning.

"Let's go check," he said, a bad feeling coming over him.

Charlie drove a big, tan, dull sedan . It sat in his designated spot. Brian could see it from the window on the east side of the office.

"When did you last see him?" he asked Maureen.

"Yesterday, around lunchtime. He was going to get something to eat, then check on the work at the hotel site near Gulf Shores before heading east of town to do a safety check on a bridge."

"He took one of the company's pickups?" Brian asked.

"I'm not sure, but that's what he usually does when he's going to a construction site." Maureen's face looked stricken now. "Do you think something's wrong?"

Brian shrugged, trying to make the movement as nonchalant as possible. "It's not like him to just not show up."

"What should we do?"

"Has anyone else in the office seen or heard from him since noon yesterday?" he asked, heading for Charlie's office.

"I don't know. I haven't asked everyone yet."

"Why don't you do that now?" Brian said. "And call his home number, too."

Brian walked into Charlie's office. He sat down in the man's chair and searched through the stacks of papers that cluttered the desk until he found Charlie's appointment calendar. He'd had a meeting marked for the hotel site yesterday at two—Brian knew where that was—then a bridge inspection at four, with a highway number, but nothing else to indicate where the bridge might be located.

Maureen came to stand in the door a few minutes later. "No one's heard from him," she said. "And there's no answer at his home."

"Okay," Brian said, not liking the way this sounded at all. "This hotel site isn't more than two miles from here. I'm going to go over there and see if he ever showed up yesterday. Call me on my cell if you hear anything from him."

Maureen nodded, then stepped aside.

For the first time, Brian realized that Shelly was standing behind Maureen. She'd probably heard the whole thing.

"What's going on?" she asked. "What's happened to Charlie?"

It was the first time she'd spoken to him since Monday night, when he'd come to her apartment. "We don't know. Nobody's seen him since yesterday."

Brian heard the air leave her lungs in a whoosh. She looked as if she hadn't been sleeping well, either, although that alone didn't mean much, he told himself. She might have been as worried as he was, or she might not have been alone.

He remembered the way she'd looked in that shirt—that other man's shirt. He could so easily picture her in that, rather than the colorful sweater she wore over jeans. And he had no business noticing.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, as he started to move.

"I'm going to find Charlie."

And when he did, he was going to get some answers out of the man.

"What can I do?" she asked.

Brian hated to tell her what he thought their next step should be, but, as he saw it, it had to be done. If he asked someone else to do it, she'd hear about it soon enough, anyway. The office was too small for secrets to stay secrets for long.

"His car's in the parking lot, so he took one of the company pickups yesterday," Brian said. "Why don't you get the license number and call it in to the police? See if they've found him or the truck."

"Brian?" she said, then couldn't say any more.

The way she said his name seemed to cut right through him, seemed to rip something open inside him. It was like a shot out of the past, from a time when she not only looked up to him but trusted him and depended upon him, as well.

He'd make her trust him again.

"I'll find him, Shel," he said, resisting the urge to touch her.

* * *

It didn't take as long as Brian thought it would to find some news. As he was walking through the lobby, the building's security guard flagged him down and pulled him into a conversation with a sheriff's deputy.

"Officer? Brian Sandelle," he said, extending a hand to the older man and trying not to think of what might have happened. "What can I do for you?"

"You're with Williams Engineering?" The deputy shook his hand.

"Yes, sir."

"You the boss?"

"As close as you're going to get to him today."

The deputy nodded. "We found a white pickup this morning parked on one of the side roads off U.S. 41, about fifteen miles east of town. It had a faded Williams Engineering logo on it."

"We have a couple of trucks like that," Brian said.

The deputy rattled off a license number. "That one of yours?"

"We could go upstairs and check the records, but I'm sure it is," Brian said. U.S. 41 was the highway listed in Charlie's appointment calendar along with the note about a bridge to be inspected. "Did you find anything else?"

"Some ropes—looked like safety lines of some sort—hanging from the bridge."

Brian swore.

"Anyone from your office missing?" the deputy asked.

"Charlie Williams, the owner, took one of those pickups out yesterday afternoon to inspect a bridge on that road. No one's seen or heard from him since around noon."

"That's, uh, that's bad news."

An understatement if Brian ever heard one. "Did they find anything else?"

"Nothing that anyone's told me about. Does this man have a wife? Kids? We'll need to notify someone."

"Let's go upstairs," Brian said, wondering how in the world he was going to tell Shelly this.

* * *

Brian was determined to see the bridge where Charlie had disappeared. Shelly insisted on going, as well. He didn't like the idea, but he didn't want to let her out of his sight, either.

It was unseasonably cold that day and rainy, a perfectly miserable setting for a perfectly awful event.

"I can't believe this is happening," Shelly said as she stood beside Brian and the deputy on the two-lane bridge. The small bridge spanned a normally shallow river that drained into the swamp east of town. With the deputy's permission, Brian inspected the rappelling gear but didn't change anything about it. It was at least one knot shy of being effective.

"Charlie was too careful to make an amateurish mistake like that," Shelly said.

"I know," Brian replied.

He stared down at the river, which was running fast as it carried away the runoff from the day-long rain.

"He could have survived the fall," Shelly said, although she didn't sound that convinced.

This part of Florida was pretty flat, so it wasn't that much of a fall from the bridge to the river.

"Could have," the deputy agreed. "But it's fairly shallow water, and look at those rocks sticking out above the surface over there. He cracks his head on one of those, gets knocked out, and he's a goner."

Yes, Brian agreed, Charlie would have been. If it had happened that way.

"You haven't found anything else?" he asked.

"Not yet," the deputy said. "The truck wasn't locked. It seemed like he expected to be back soon. Otherwise, he would have locked it."

"No sign of a struggle?" Brian asked.

The man shook his head. "This is it."

"Have you searched the river?"

"Not yet. We walked the shoreline on either side for about half a mile. Didn't find anything. We'll go farther up and down river this afternoon, but the way the current's running... "

Left unsaid was that it wouldn't take long for a body to be carried away, that in all likelihood, Charlie was gone.

Shelly had taken the news better than Brian had expected, but he suspected it was because she hadn't been able to make herself believe it. He was having trouble believing it himself. But the news would sink in eventually, and then...

He would force himself to move on, to do what he had to do. "Shelly, will you check in with the office, just in case they've heard anything we haven't?"

"Sure," she said.

Brian watched her walk away. It wasn't fifty yards to the side of the road, where they'd parked the car, but it was the first time she'd left his side since he'd told her about Charlie.

Brian had responsibilities to the company, to all the employees, in Charlie's absence. But only one priority was uppermost in his mind right now—he didn't want her hurt. He didn't know what he was up against, what Charlie was up against, but Brian was going to make damned sure Shelly didn't get caught in the middle of it.

"Officer?" he said. "You think he's dead?"

Grimly, the uniformed man nodded.

"There are some things you need to know." Brian proceeded to tell him about the company's plane crashing and Charlie Williams's reaction to it all.

* * *

Shelly didn't sleep that night. She spent the hours staring at nothing and trying to figure out why anyone would want Charlie Williams dead. It just didn't make any sense. Nothing did anymore.

They hadn't had any word about a body all day or night, so she was still hopeful. Charlie could have survived that fall. He could be out there somewhere.

She was just getting out of the shower, shortly after dawn, when her doorbell rang.

"Oh, no," Shelly said in the still, empty apartment. She gave herself a minute to lean against the bathroom wall for support before she made her way to the front door.

"Brian?" she said, opening the door to him.

He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. She knew what had happened. "They found his body?"

He nodded.

Charlie
, she thought, closing her eyes tight.
Gone for good.
One more person who'd disappeared from her life. Her mother, her father, and now this.

"C'm'ere, Shel," Brian said, holding out his arms to her.

She shook her head, standing her ground for a moment, trying not to think about Charlie. She just couldn't handle it right now. Instead, she concentrated on fighting back her tears and fighting against the memories of all the other times in her life when Brian had been the one to comfort her.