His Wedding Date (The Second Chance Love Series, Book 2) (21 page)

"Damn," he muttered, the frustration eating at him. When she finally did try to move away from him, he grabbed for her too harshly. "Wait a minute, please," he said, easing his hold, then dropping his hands from her arms altogether.

He'd frightened her, and that was the last thing he wanted to do.

"I don't understand any of this," he said, knowing it explained nothing, that it excused nothing in his behavior, but not knowing what else he could tell her at that moment.

Besides, it was the truth.

"It's not that hard to understand," she said. "Rebecca's gone, and I'm here. I'm... available. At least, you think I am."

"That's not it." He was sure of that. "Do you think I haven't tried to find someone to take her place? You remember the years she spent with Tucker, the times I didn't think I had a chance with her? And it's been almost a year since she broke our engagement. Believe me, I tried to forget about her with a half-dozen women, probably more, and it's never worked."

Instead, it had left a bitter taste in his mouth and an even emptier feeling inside. He had learned it was better to be alone.

Until now.

"I won't be your substitute for her," she said.

"I'm not looking for one." And he wasn't. He hadn't realized it until just this moment, but he felt curiously free of Rebecca. It was a strange feeling, one that would take a while to get used to. Ever since he'd been a boy, Rebecca had been there.

While his friends were looking at photos of girls and women on the internet, Brian was looking at the girl next door. Rebecca had colored his perception of all the other women he met for so long. He hadn't thought he'd ever escape that.

But he had.

Because of the woman standing in front of him? The woman she'd become while he hadn't been paying any attention? He couldn't say. And he had no right to touch her like that, kiss her like that, until he knew.

He'd hurt her enough already.

Brian shook his head, but it didn't help to clear it at all. He threw up his hands at his sides. "I don't understand any of this."

"Let me know when you do," she said, looking so fragile, so breakable, it frightened him.

He could so easily hurt her again. He wondered how much he'd hurt her already—before the night of the wedding—when he'd been blind to feelings she had for him.

And he wondered exactly what sort of feelings they were.

Did she love him? Did she think she did? She said she'd been with that other man, hoping he could help her forget someone else.

He groaned at the thought—her with another man, all the while wishing that man was someone else. Brian knew how rotten that felt. He'd done it before, and he hated the idea of her going through that, as well.

So what was this thing between them? He was afraid to even put a name on it. It was still so new, so overwhelming.

"Are we going to work this morning?" she asked finally from the spot across the room where she'd retreated.

"Yes," he said. "Let's go."

* * *

Work
, he told himself as he drove them to the office. Concentrate on that and that alone. He didn't have a prayer otherwise.

He was anxious to start digging into Charlie Williams's files, anyway. He wanted to know what the man had been up to, and he wanted to make sure Shelly and the other people who worked there weren't in any danger.

"This thing just gets more and more strange with every day that goes by," he said, pulling into the parking lot.

"Have you heard anything from the FAA yet about the plane?" she asked.

"No, and I doubt we'll hear anything more soon. It may well be a year or more before they give us an answer for sure."

"What about the sheriff? Is he at least investigating Charlie's death as a murder?"

"Not yet. He did send the body to Miami for an autopsy, but it came back inconclusive." He slid into a parking space, glad to see the lot was empty.

"How did he die?"

Brian would have taken her hand then in an instinctive gesture of comfort, but things had changed between them. He had to get used to that. "He drowned," he said simply.

"In four or five feet of water?"

Brian shrugged. "Remember, it was raining the day they found him and the day before. You know how much water levels fluctuate here, and how quickly, depending on rainfall.

"But there was something else," he said. "There was some blow to Charlie's head, but no one could tell whether he hit his head in the fall or whether someone hit him and then dumped his body in the river. I'm sorry, Shel. I know he meant a great deal to you."

Brian got out and went around the car to open her door. They walked into the small office building the engineering firm shared with an accounting firm and an architectural firm.

"Did you find anything in the records from Charlie's house?" he asked as they made their way up the stairs.

"It was mostly medical bills. Thousands of dollars in bills, all of them paid. I guess we know where his money went."

"There has to be a connection in all of this," he said.

He ran through the firm's client list in his mind. They had a lot of big-time clients.

Charlie Williams had been born and raised in Tallahassee, the state capital. That's where he and Brian's father had become friends.

Charlie had done a lot of contract work for the state years ago, and he still knew all the guys running the state highway department. Contractors who were looking to do business with the state often came to Charlie because of his connections.

People in charge knew Charlie. They respected him, and they trusted him. Every little edge a construction company could get could help. In fact, some of the biggest road and bridge contractors in the southern tip of the state did business with Charlie.

Brian's immediate suspicions concerned the company whose bridge work Charlie was inspecting at the time of his death. Brian hadn't had a chance in the past forty-eight hours to check which company that was. Things had been too crazy.

But he'd check today.

He looked down at the keys in his hand, trying to come up with the correct one. He was right at the front door to the engineering office when he realized Shelly wasn't at his side.

He turned to find her standing in the middle of the hall, two feet behind him. "What?"

"Look." She pointed to the engineering office's front door. It was standing halfway open.

At eight o'clock on a Saturday morning?

He held up a hand, motioning for her to stay outside the doorway, then listened.

No sound came from inside.

"Stay here," he whispered to add to his signal.

Cautiously he stepped into the entranceway and looked around.

"Damn," he muttered.

The place was trashed. Papers were everywhere. Desks had been swept clean, and the debris littered the floor. Overturned filing cabinets spewed out papers in all directions.

Brian walked through the paper trail to Charlie's office and, just as he suspected, the destruction was even worse here.

"Brian?" Shelly called out.

He took one more look around, satisfied that they had the place to themselves. "Come on back," he said. "I'm in Charlie's office, and whoever did this is long gone."

It would take days to sort out this mess, to even figure out what was gone. Although he spotted one thing right away. Charlie's desktop computer's case had been pried open, and the hard drive was gone.

Brian wondered how many of the other computers in the office had been cleared of their information, as well.

Even if they had, the destruction of Charlie's was the most devastating blow. Employees handled billing, accounts receivables and payroll, but Charlie had kept all of the firm's overall financial information himself.

"Tell me there's a backup copy of that computer's information somewhere," Brian said to Shelly.

"There has to be," she said. "If we can find it in this mess."

"Okay, so think about this with me," he said. "What don't they want us to find? And who doesn't want us to find it? What could be in this office that someone would kill for?"

He picked up the phone to call the police.

* * *

They were tied up all morning with the police, trying to figure out what had been taken. So far they hadn't found anything missing except Charlie's hard drive.

Then they spent the afternoon trying to put the place back together again. Brian called in the secretaries and the receptionist, who did double duty as a billing clerk. He found out that she had access to surprisingly few of the firm's financial records, as he had feared. A quirk of Charlie's? Or a way to hide something more sinister?

Shelly was with one of the secretaries now, combing through debris on the floor, trying to find some of the records.

He motioned for her to join him in the corner, out of earshot of the dozen people working in the office. "Got anything?" he asked.

"Very little," she said.

Brian shook his head. "I've never understood why Charlie would be keeping the books himself—unless he had something to hide."

"Maybe he just didn't want anyone to know how close he was to bankruptcy," Shelly said. "Maybe it was nothing more than his pride."

"I guess that's possible," Brian said, but he doubted it. "Have you gotten any more of those phone calls?"

"No," she said.

"You're sure you recognized the guy's voice."

"Yes. Is the sheriff looking for him?"

"He's a little more interested than he was before this happened at the office, but he hasn't made a lot of progress in finding the guy."

Brian didn't add that he'd love to find the guy himself. Brian wanted to know how the man could have left Shelly here, knowing she was in danger. And he wanted to know if she had any feelings left for the guy now.

Business, he reminded himself. Stick to business—for now.

"Did Charlie and this guy work on any big projects together?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't remember."

"The client files are a mess, but it looks like most of them are still here. We've got a chance of finding something there, if we knew what the hell we were looking for."

Chapter 14

Shelly was exhausted. They'd spent the entire day sorting through papers until the words and the numbers were swimming on the pages.

She'd been too tired to argue when Brian wanted to drive her home and was nearly asleep when the cessation of the car's movement roused her. She yawned and waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Something wasn't right.

"Where are we?" she asked, as the car slid into a garage.

"My house," Brian said.

"Oh." It was a breathless sound, much too meek and mild. She tried again. "Why are we at your house?"

Brian opened his door so the interior light of the car clicked on, then scowled at the console as it broadcast an annoying beep. He went to pull the keys from the ignition to stop the noise, but they weren't cooperating, which obviously annoyed him even more. He finally closed the door and clicked on the overhead light.

Shelly found it all quite fascinating. If she hadn't known better, she would have said the man was flustered. But that couldn't be right. Brian didn't get flustered.

"Please don't fight me on this, Shel," he said.

"On what?"

"I'm not taking you back to your apartment tonight, not unless I go back there with you." He shifted in the seat, turning his upper body to face her. "This thing has gotten way out of hand. Charlie's dead, and whoever was after him has already missed once and nearly gotten both of us killed in the process."

She didn't say anything to that. She'd tried not to imagine the implications of the break-in at the office.

"The man's getting more dangerous by the minute," Brian said. "He's not even trying to hide things anymore. He trashed the office. Think about that."