His Wedding Date (The Second Chance Love Series, Book 2) (14 page)

That night, Shelly e-mailed her college's job placement office again to ask about new listings, and sent follow-up e-mails about some resumes she'd sent out weeks ago. She hit the trade-journal websites, too, scanning the advertisements for new job openings, sipping a cup of hot chocolate.

She started with the listings from west coast firms. If she was going to go, she might as well go all out. Seattle sounded good. Maybe Portland, if she could stand the rain.

The doorbell rang, startling her as the noise broke the stillness of her apartment.

She glanced at the clock—just after ten—and wondered who could be coming to see her at this hour. Then she remembered the phone call from last week, the problem with the plane.

Danger
, the man had said.

She shivered. Cautiously she peered through the peephole in the door and, for an instant, she was relieved when she saw who it was. And then, she wasn't.

"Brian?" she said, opening the door, then shivering again in the cool air that swirled in.

Too late, she realized what she was wearing—a well-worn man's dress shirt with tails that hung to her knees in front and back, but curved higher on the sides. It was comfy as could be, but not the kind of thing she wanted him to see her in.

"What's wrong?" she asked, when he didn't say anything.

He just stood there in the doorway, looking at her. He was making a bad habit of that lately. Shelly fought the urge to button one more button of her shirt, and she wished she'd left her bra on.

"I was out driving," he finally said. "Couldn't sleep... Can I come in?"

Her instincts said no—a thousand times no. "It's late," she said.

"I won't stay long."

She thought he might have shouldered his way past her if she hadn't backed out of his way first. She couldn't win.

Brian stood just past the entranceway with his hands in his pockets, searching his brain for the half-dozen excuses he'd come up with for being here at this time of night.

He couldn't remember one. He didn't think she'd appreciate hearing the truth—that he was about to go crazy worrying about her. Some idiot was trying to kill their boss, some man on the phone thought it was too dangerous for Shelly to even be in the office, and she didn't trust him enough to tell him about the whole thing.

He'd thought of all those things on the way over here. But now that he'd arrived, he just stood there, staring at her in that shirt.

Something in his normally methodical, meticulous brain seemed to have short-circuited in the past week. He seemed to be incapable of logical thought. Otherwise, he never would have found himself in this position. Insisting on being at Rebecca's wedding. Dragging Shelly into danger. Popping those pills, drinking that champagne and mistaking Shelly for Rebecca. He couldn't begin to figure out exactly how far that colossal mistake had gone. In his dream–what he thought was his dream–it had gone pretty far. He'd been moments away from being inside her.

Surely it hadn't gone that far.

She'd be furious with him.

Like she had been that morning and ever since.

When he needed to be here, to make sure she was safe. Which was why he'd come here. He could have sworn that was the reason.

Now all he could do was stare at her in that damned shirt.

He'd told her on the plane ride home yesterday that he knew she wasn't a little girl anymore, but maybe he hadn't taken that all the way in. He sure hadn't taken a good look at her lately, not like this, anyway.

He started to loosen his tie, then realized he wasn't wearing one. The tightness in his throat was coming from some other source, and he was staring at the problem right now.

She had grown up. She was still pint-size, but then she always would be. He figured she was maybe five foot two. But she had incredible legs halfway hidden under those shirttails. And the scrawny kid he remembered so well was still thin, but the curves were there, too, in all the right places.

He'd bet a month's salary she wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts swayed under the shirt when she moved. He could only hope she was wearing panties, and he wasn't going to catch a glimpse of them beneath that shirt or spend way too much time trying to imagine what they looked like or what she looked like in them.

"Brian?" she said, her cheeks flushed.

She was either angry or embarrassed by the way he'd been looking her over. He couldn't tell which. And then something else—something that made him decidedly uneasy—occurred to him.

"You are alone, aren't you?" he asked, a little too harshly, too demandingly. He suddenly had to find out what had happened to the man that shirt belonged to.

"What?" she said.

"The shirt?" He knew he was in trouble, but it was too late to stop. And he needed to know where she'd gotten the damned shirt. "That's a man's shirt."

She folded her arms across her chest, and the ends of the shirt gaped open another inch, surely not what she had intended when she crossed her arms, but that was the net effect.

"Yes, it is," she admitted. And then she waited, making him go ahead and say what he had no business saying.

"So, there must be a man who goes with that shirt."

"I suppose," she shot back. "I really don't remember."

A few years ago, he would have expected something like that from her. She'd been full of sass as a teenager. He would have laughed a few years ago.

Instead, he swore out loud. He didn't think it was funny now. He didn't see anything funny about the whole situation.

And he couldn't remember what she looked like underneath that shirt, although, when he closed his eyes and went back to that night, he thought he could remember what she felt like.

She was lying about the shirt, he decided in a moment when he could make logic prevail. She wasn't the kind of woman who'd have a parade of men coming through her bedroom and leaving pieces of clothing behind.

He wondered what the man meant to her, wondered if the man whose shirt she wore had hurt her as he had himself. And Brian wondered just how badly he'd hurt her, even as he scanned the apartment for any telltale signs she wasn't alone.

Two glasses? Two dinner plates? A jacket that looked too big for her to wear? He didn't see any of those things, but he felt only marginally better.

"Well? Is he still here?" Brian asked, unable to stop himself from heading farther down this treacherous road. He was determined to know if he'd interrupted anything, if someone had been waiting for her to get back from Tallahassee.

"Oh, for God's sake, we're alone, okay? Are you satisfied now? This is my shirt. I sleep in it. It's big. It's comfortable, and it's none of your business. But if you must know, the man who used to own it has been out of my life for a long time." She put her hands on her hips as she put him in his place, and the shirt ends shifted enticingly along her neck and her collarbone.

Brian helped it along on her right side, uncovering a distinctive, reddish mark near the base of her throat.

"Then I guess I'm the man who left this on you. Like some damned teenager," he said, still unable to help himself as his fingers traced the small circle of darkened skin, a mark of passion.

That did it. Shelly smacked his hand away. "What is it about men? You don't want me for yourself, but you don't like the idea of anyone else having me, either?"

Shelly hated herself for admitting that to him, hated him a little for pushing her into saying it. What did the man want from her? What could he want that she hadn't already given him?

"Shel—"

"Get out, Brian. Get out of here now."

For a minute, she didn't think he would leave. She glared at him, daring him not to, while she pulled the throat of her shirt back together.

"Shelly, I swear, I never meant to—"

"I know. Believe me, I do—"

Her cell phone rang, and she had never been so grateful to hear that sound.

"Go!" she told him as she turned to answer it. "Hello."

A man's voice, muffled in a curious way, came to her through the phone. "I heard there was some trouble with the plane," he told her.

Oh, God.

It was him.

Again.

The man who'd called the office the week before.

He had her cell phone number?

And if he had that, did he also know where she lived?

Shelly whirled around, grateful to see that Brian hadn't walked out the door yet. When he saw the look on her face, he closed the door and walked back into the room.

She turned her back to him and spoke softly into the phone. "Who is this? If you're really trying to help me, tell me who you are and what you know."

"I can't," the man said. "It wouldn't do you any good, and if you said anything to the wrong person, it might get me killed."

Killed?

Shelly didn't say anything for a moment.

"Shelly?" the agitated man on the phone said. "Damn, woman, I'm trying to help you. You need to get out of there."

Damn, woman.
If he'd said that to her once, he'd said it a thousand times.

"Shelly," he said impatiently as she figured it out. "Listen to me this time. You may not get another chance."

And then the phone was buzzing in her ear, the call disconnected from his end. But it didn't matter that much. She knew who it was. She'd been right. She had known his voice.

"Who was it?" Brian asked, taking the phone from her hand.

"You don't know him," Shelly said, still having a hard time believing who it was.

"It was that man again, wasn't it? The one who tried to warn you away from the office last week? What did he say to you? Did he threaten you?"

"No," she said, arguing with herself about what to do next. "It wasn't like that."

"Then who was it?" Brian demanded.

And then Shelly knew exactly what she was going to do and how she was going to accomplish it.

She wanted to be alone tonight, to figure this out as best she could. And once she had some time to herself to think about it, she'd probably tell Brian everything, because she did trust him and she did worry that they both were in danger.

But for now, she just wanted him out of here. She wanted to put her feet up, lock her doors and try to make sense of it all.

Thankfully, she knew just how to accomplish that. "It was the man whose shirt I'm wearing."

Brian looked like he could spit nails. She could have enjoyed it, just a bit, if she hadn't been so mad or so scared and if the previous few days hadn't been so awful.

"Go," she told Brian.

He argued, and she all but shoved him out the door. Finally she found herself alone again, sipping more hot chocolate and waiting for the dawn.

Grant Edwards had been Charlie Williams's second-in-command at the engineering firm when Shelly started working there. They'd dated briefly, casually, after she first came to Naples. He'd helped her paint her apartment one weekend, and he'd brought along a couple of old shirts for them to wear while they did it.

Shelly still wore the shirt around the house sometimes, because she found it incredibly comfortable. She didn't see any need to explain that to Brian.

She also had no intention of explaining that Grant had been one of a handful of men who Shelly hoped would help her forget all about Brian. Grant had failed miserably at that. So had all the others.

One thing, though—if anyone besides Charlie was in a position to know what was going on there, it was Grant.

If Grant thought she was in a dangerous situation, if he was as scared and desperate as he sounded on the phone... She thought about the way Charlie had reacted when they'd told him about the plane and how it had felt when it fell through the sky.

Her nice, sane world had been turned upside down, and she didn't know why. She wasn't even supposed to be here. She was supposed to be getting away from here, away from any kind of danger, and especially, far, far away from Brian.

Chapter 9