Page 6 of SEAL's Fake Girlfriend

His words, as solemn as they were, barely registered—most of Rhianne’s senses were processing how his touch felt.Feels, she amended, because her upper arm was still warm long after he dropped his hand.

“Look, we’re here,” Rhianne said, glad to have something to occupy her thoughts, but wishing it was something else. Anything else. A dental appointment. No—her scheduled PAP smear, even.

“Even if nothing else is.” Eric peered around at the abandoned semi-rural road.

It was also deserted, which made parking a snap. Eric was out of the car first, taking the lead while Rhianne tried calling her sister, getting sent straight to the damn voicemail again. “Should we leave the road, try across country?” she asked.

“The app is indicating here,” Eric reminded her, coming close and bending low to see the red dot signal on the screen of Rhianne’s iPhone. “Exactlyhere, in fact.”

Still following him, Rhianne turned left when he did, her gaze on the ground, and she saw—

“Look!” She rushed to the shiny thing in the ditch. She’d feel foolish if it was a tin can or foil packet, but they didn’t glitter…not like Robyn’s phone did. Her heart thudded.

“Rhi?”

“It’s hers.” Rhianne would know that crazy fake rhinestone cover anywhere. She scooped it up and held it out. “Robyn and her friends all got the same case, like that girl rapper, Bling Gem, has.”

She was rambling. Eric didn’t need to know this. He was looking back at the road and then to the ditch again. “I know.” Rhianne had to swallow hard past the lump wedged in her throat. “It’s too far from the road to be dropped by accident, even if this was a place Robyn would have any reason to be.”

“I think it was tossed out of a car.” Eric spoke gently, but his words hit hard and made the bottom drop out of Rhianne’s stomach.

She gazed around, not knowing what she was looking for, then bent down to the ditch. “Maybe there’s more here, a clue—we just have to keep looking.” Her words trailed off. The space was empty. There was no magic piece of paper with Robyn’s location on it, written in her sister’s handwriting, no matter how hard she looked. But this was the closest she’d felt to her sister in days, and she couldn’t bear to give up yet. “So we search around here, maybe find someone who saw something—”

“Rhianne…”

His tone wasn’t harsh, but it was firm, and she shoved back the lock of hair that had fallen from her ponytail.

“There’s nothing for us here,” he said, simple and matter of fact. “So what we’re going to do is get back in the car and return to the office.”

When she stood her ground, refusing to leave the last spot where her sister had been, Eric gently grasped her arm.

“We’ll go back to Charlie and make a game plan,” he said.

This time he drove, because Rhianne, staring straight ahead, clutched Robyn’s phone tight in her hand the whole way back. She was dimly aware of Eric calling Charlie to fill him in, and she roused herself when they pulled into a lot. “This isn’t the office,” she said, looking around.

“No.” Eric pointed at the café’s signage. “I’m calling in to grab lunch for the team. What can I get you?”

Rhianne shook her head. Food was low down on her list of priorities. “I’m not hungry.”

“Yes, you are,” Eric countered. “You just don’t know it. I’ll lay fifty dollars you didn’t eat breakfast.”

“I…didn’t,” Rhianne recalled. “But—”

“I’ll get you something.” Implacable, Eric was out of the car and striding into the deli before she’d mustered an argument.Huh.Rhianne silently fumed about Eric while he was in the takeout place. She thought what a typical overbearing male he was, thinking of his stomach at a time like this. When he came back, she opened her mouth to tell him her opinion, but the aromas wafting out of the greasy bags he was carrying had her drooling instead.

Eric grinned. “Tomato meatball wraps. This place does the best. At BSS, we start off a case with a conference, everyone chipping in with ideas, and making sure we’re all up to speed, and it’s kind of the tradition that whoever’s taking lead provides the lunch. So…” He indicated the bags he was stowing. “I didn’t ask what time you have to be at work? Or what you do now that you left the Coast Guard?”

It wasn’t exactly the best time for chitchat, but Rhianne explained how she’d joined the San Diego Sheriff’s Department’s Search and Rescue team. It wasn’t that different from her work in the Coast Guard, flying a S&R helicopter, meaning she could still do what she loved, closer to home. And while she was still hurt and angry that the others in the sheriff’s department hadn’t taken Robyn’s disappearance seriously, at least they’d had the decency to give her a couple of days off.

They didn’t return to Eric’s office or even Charlie’s, but to a larger room with a big conference table, where Charlie and another familiar-looking man, one she’d glimpsed earlier, were waiting.

“Rhianne, you remember Ian Campbell?” Charlie asked.

“Yes.” Rhianne shook hands with the tall, broad brunet with the gleaming hazel eyes. Like Eric’s, his beard and mustache were more pronounced now that he was a civilian.

“Sorry we’re meeting again under these circumstances.” Ian frowned.

“Thanks. And, speaking of, shouldn’t we get started?” Rhianne asked.

---