His Wedding Date (The Second Chance Love Series, Book 2) (3 page)

The weekend.
Surely they could have a safe conversation about that.

"I hadn't thought about it," she said. "What's the weather supposed to be like?"

"Rain, Saturday and Sunday."

She made a face and sipped her coffee.

Brian laughed. "Why don't you let me take you away from all this? Let's get out of town for the weekend."

Shelly nearly choked, then found herself afraid to meet his eyes as heat flooded her cheeks.

It wasn't what she'd first thought. She was certain of that. She'd known the man since she was six, for God's sake.

But what in the world was going on this morning? Shelly stared at him, her mouth hanging open, until she finally remembered to close it.

And for a minute, she could think of only one thing, that she'd always known one day she was going to humiliate herself in front of him, spilling out all the feelings she had for him and then having no place to hide. Maybe that day had finally come.

A clattering sound brought her back to the problem at hand. It was noise her cup made as it bounced off the hard tile floor and broke into pieces.

Only some of the coffee made it to the floor. She felt the wetness on her arm before she felt the pain.

"Ouch!" she said when she finally realized the coffee was burning through the sleeve of her cotton blouse. She shook her head in amazement at what she'd done.

Less than five minutes alone with him, and he'd reduced her to this.

"Hey, let me help." Brian was beside her, checking her hand, unbuttoning the cuff of her sleeve, grinning at her. "I guess some things never change, Shel."

"No," she said softly, eating him up with her eyes while at the same time she took a little step away from him. "Some things never change."

He was tall enough to tower over her, broad through the shoulders, lean through the hips, with short-cropped, thick brown hair, and those eyes—the darkest eyes she'd ever seen. She could get so lost in them she'd forget her own name.

And—as the wetness on her forearm reminded her—he shook her up so badly she turned into a klutz whenever she got within ten feet of him. She always had, probably always would.

Of course, he didn't know that. He thought she was this clumsy around everyone.

Brian finished rolling up her sleeve. For the second time, Shelly stepped back, this time as far away from him as the confined space of the office kitchenette would allow.-

She had to be so careful around him, because she had trouble hiding her reaction to him. And the worst thing she could imagine would be him realizing how she felt about him.

"Hang on," he said. She could breathe again as he turned to the cabinet drawers, searching through them until he found a dishtowel.

He ran cold water over it, then turned back to her.

"Here." He took her hand in one of his and put the cool cloth over the burn.

"Better?" he asked.

"Yes." It was all she could manage as she stood there in the little kitchen, much too close to the tall, lean, rock-solid man, and wondered what it would take to drive him out of her heart forever.

She hoped marriage would do it—his marriage to someone else, that is. Judging from the unread invitation she'd received in February, she couldn't have long to wait for that to happen. And she looked forward to that day. It was going to be the day she could stop this. Because it was hopeless to go on loving him. She knew that in her mind, fought it endlessly in her traitorous heart.

He found some ice cubes in the small refrigerator. "Here, let's see if this helps."

Shelly took a deep breath to steady herself—a definite mistake. She simply drew in the scent of him—something warm and musky, and thoroughly unsettling despite the familiarity of it.

She looked down at the hands that held her injured arm. She knew them so well, knew their strong yet gentle touch, knew just as certainly that he would never touch her in the same way he touched the woman he loved.

"Better?" he asked again, his dark eyes locking on hers.

"A little," she lied absently, her mind lost in their tangled past.

"I didn't mean to startle you."

She laughed, the sound tinged with desperation. "I'm not sure how your fiancée would feel about you going away for the weekend with another woman so close to your wedding."

It had to be nearly time, she thought. She'd so carefully avoided any information about it. She'd filtered her email so all her friends from Tallahassee got an auto-response saying she was on a big deadline and probably couldn't respond to anyone for now. She'd put a similar message on her voicemail, and screened her phone calls before she picked up any of them. She'd stayed off any social media sites where someone might post wedding news. She'd simply worked and tried not to think about anything else.

Brian had told Shelly a few things about his and Rebecca's wedding plans months ago, but she hadn't heard much lately. She'd gotten better at avoiding him after work or sticking to business topics when they had to be together at the office.

And, like a coward, she'd left the unopened invitation in the wicker basket where she kept her mail, as if she could ignore the whole thing and make it go away.

She forced herself to go on, avoiding his eyes, trying for all she was worth to hide her feelings from him. "You're not getting cold feet, are you?"

It was a ludicrous idea. Brian wasn't afraid of anything. He was a very careful, methodical man. He thought things through to the end, made his decisions and stuck to them.

Pausing, she let herself glance at him for a second, noted that he'd gone unnaturally still and silent beside her. Shelly made herself look at him then. Someone who didn't know him as well as she did probably wouldn't even have noticed, but she did.

There was a bleakness to his expression, a guarded look to his dark brown eyes, a smile that wasn't really a smile on his lips.

Brian squeezed her hand once, then put her own hand over the ice-filled cloth he was holding over her burn. He turned and headed toward the door, then turned back to her when he reached the doorway, looking decidedly uncomfortable.

She closed her eyes and listened to the eerie quiet of the early morning hours in the empty office. The coffee was still gurgling and spitting and hissing. Other than that, the office outside the kitchenette was dark and silent, probably would be for another two hours. It had been Shelly's favorite time to work without interruptions, before Brian had started working here.

"What is it, Brian?" she asked when she couldn't stand it anymore.

He just blurted it out then. "Rebecca and I aren't getting married."

"What?" Shelly forgot all about the burn on her arm.

He loved Rebecca. He'd always loved her, and Shelly believed Rebecca loved him, as well. It was simply the way of the world, like some cosmic force. There were laws about these things, and they couldn't be broken.

Brian loved Rebecca. She loved him back. In the end, they would be together, and Shelly would have to find a way to live without him.

He and Rebecca had been engaged when he'd moved here. Because he'd asked and she hadn't been able to come up with a plausible reason to refuse, Shelly had helped him start house hunting while he waited for Rebecca to close her business in Tallahassee, pack up her things and her little boy's and join him in Naples.

What in the world had happened?

She didn't ask him, because she knew she didn't have to. He'd tell her on his own, the way he'd always talked with her about him and Rebecca.

Now that Shelly thought about it, he'd probably been trying to tell her about it for weeks. But she'd pretended to be too busy, pretended to have other plans, anything to avoid being alone with him for a conversation she'd expected to be too painful to hear.

Brian shifted his weight from one foot to the other and leaned back against the doorway.

"Actually," he added, "what I said wasn't entirely correct.
I'm
not getting married.
Rebecca
is."

Shelly wondered if her mouth was hanging open again and decided that it probably was. Twice in the space of five minutes, he'd left her speechless.

She couldn't stop that small bit of hope that flared up inside her, crazy as that was.

This man was going to be the death of her yet.

"Brian—" She forgot about the ice she'd been holding on her forearm, and it clattered to the floor amid the pieces of her shattered coffee cup.

Shelly closed her eyes and felt her cheeks burning again. Damn the man, anyway. He'd done this to her ever since she hit puberty.

It was an effect much like the one that came from setting a magnet down next to a compass. Like that little arrow suspended on the dial, she went right to him, quivered in his presence, her brain short-circuited by the power he had over her.

"Hey," Brian said, sneaking up on her while her mind went blank to everything but him. His hand guided her chin up so he could see her face. "What's wrong with you?"

Every nerve ending in her body went haywire at the soft, sweet touch. She pulled away too quickly, drawing his attention even more with the sudden movement.

"Shelly?"

"I'm sorry." She suddenly found herself ridiculously close to tears.

She wanted to hope, damn him. Despite everything, she wanted that desperately. She wanted to believe she was going to get another chance with him.

Yet she couldn't hope. She'd done it too many times already. She'd seen so many little things—a soft, friendly touch, a special warmth in his eyes, the tender care of one friend for another in difficult times. And he'd seen her through the worst of times, through her father's death.

So she knew better than this.

But, she argued with herself, she'd never really had a chance with him before. She'd never stood a chance against Rebecca.

But if Rebecca was out of the picture...

Afraid of the direction of her own thoughts, she decided she was better off concentrating on the porcelain bits and ice and coffee that now littered the floor. "Let me get this cleaned up."

"I think it would be safer if I did it," Brian said, but she knelt on the floor with him, anyway.

She managed to help clean up the mess without making any others. She got to her feet, avoiding his eyes as she backed away from him. She knew he was studying her, and she wondered what he saw when he looked at her. She prayed he didn't see a lovesick little girl who'd turned twenty-six now, but had never gotten over her crush on him.

"I guess this isn't your day," he said lightly.

She shook her head, feeling like a clumsy child who'd never measure up to the poised, elegant woman he'd always loved—the woman who was marrying another man. That was so hard to believe.

"Your arm okay?" he asked as they dumped the last of the ice in the sink.

She hadn't felt a thing after the initial sting. She looked down at her arm, found the skin reddish, but couldn't tell if that was from the burn or the cold of the ice.

"I'm sorry—about you and Rebecca."

He shrugged. "The wedding's this weekend in Tallahassee. I'm surprised you didn't get an invitation."

Shelly didn't want to tell him she had, though it obviously wasn't an invitation to the wedding she'd expected. She hadn't even sent a gift and a letter declining the invitation. Rebecca's parents must think her incredibly rude.

"Anyway," Brian continued, "you haven't been home in ages."

She hadn't, not since her father's death. Tallahassee had nothing for her after that. No one but Brian, who'd never been hers in the first place.

"The whole town is going to be there," he said. "So you'd have a chance to catch up with some old friends, and my parents would love to see you."

"You want me to go to Rebecca's wedding with you?" she asked incredulously.

"Is that so crazy?" he asked, shrugging and trying to smile.

"Yes," she said. "You know it is. The whole thing is... What happened?"

"I... Uhh... God, I don't know," he said. He tried to laugh but couldn't quite pull that off.

"You said you wanted out of your father's firm, that it was a little too much family togetherness, working for him, but she was going to join you here. You said you were engaged."

"We were," he admitted. "We have been for a long time, and... God, I feel like such an idiot."

No, not him.

She was the idiot. Shelly, that is. Maybe Rebecca was, too, if she was marrying someone else.

Brian was the sane one. The careful one. The logical one. The man who always had a plan, a perfectly sensible one.

"It just... doesn't make any sense," Shelly blurted out.

"I know." Brian did laugh at that. "Believe me, I feel the same way. It... she said she wanted to be with me. She said she loved me, but she couldn't quite bring herself to actually marry me."

He shoved his hands into his pockets and shrugged again, as if to say,
What are you gonna do?

Shelly stayed silent, unable to process the news.