by Cajio, Linda
He started to move away. Caleb reached out and grabbed his arm. “Memory card.”
The photographer opened his mouth to protest. Caleb’s hand tightened. Weasel Face gave a reluctant nod, pulled himself free, and extracted the card from his camera. Caleb put it in his pocket.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Go to hell.”
“Never mind. I saw your car on the street. I’ll run the plates. If I see you in Camelot again, I’m going to make you sorry. And if you step on any more of Ms. Callahan’s plants on your way out, she’s going to make you sorry.”
A prickle of unease walked up the back of Ellen’s neck. Who was Caleb Clark, exactly? She’d assumed he was just a friend of Carly’s, but she knew most of Carly’s friends already.
I’ll run the plates. A cop? She’d never seen him in a uniform. Unless he was a detective—they wore suits, right?
“Go,” Caleb said, and Weasel Face went. He detoured around another lungwort plant on his way out of the yard, then hurried down the drive to the cul-de-sac.
Caleb had dispatched him so easily. He issued commands like he was accustomed to being obeyed. Ex-military? He had the body for it. Rangy and muscular, his build fairly announced, I ran fifteen miles before you got up this morning, and I still have energy left to bayonet the enemy.
It hardly seemed fair.
A moment later, an engine started up with a cough, and the brown streak of the Weaselmobile appeared and disappeared in the gap at the bottom of Carly’s driveway.
He would probably be back. Even if he didn’t return, there were others. They were always out there now, sometimes four or five cars, sometimes more. Waiting for news to happen. Waiting for Jamie to show or Carly to come outside in a bikini and pose for belly shots.
Ellen turned back to Caleb.
He grinned, quick and bright, and she found herself almost smiling back when he raised his hand in the universal invitation for a high five. The slap of his dry palm against her clammy one snapped her to attention.
What had just happened? It wasn’t like her to get so angry or to let herself be overwhelmed. All these amped-up emotions belonged to some other woman.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Not a problem.” He slid his hands into his pockets. Something devilish in his expression made her wonder if he’d seen her marching across the lawn with nothing but a glass of iced tea for a weapon.
She had her shortcomings, but vanity wasn’t one of them. If she’d been able to witness herself taking on the photographer, she’d probably be amused, too. As it was, she felt a little loopy.
Could adrenaline explain why he was leaping into focus this way? Or shock? Everywhere her eyes went to avoid meeting his, they got caught on some manly detail. The hollow of his throat above the open top button of his shirt, say, or the breadth of his shoulders under all that pristine cotton.
She sucked in a deep breath and got woozy with the clean, woodsy-warm smell of him. His soap, she guessed, and beneath all those pine needles or whatever, a tang of sweat that was all man.
Get a hold of yourself.
Caleb Clark wasn’t hard on the eyes, but he was hardly Apollo. He had close-cropped dark brown hair, olive skin that suggested less-than-completely-white-bread ancestry, and a nice straight nose with a bump in the bridge. Whoa factor aside, he was just a guy who’d helped her out on his way to visit Carly.
Just an ordinary guy with a dimple in one cheek and crinkle-cornered, happy brown eyes that transformed him into a very attractive specimen when he smiled.
A disarmingly attractive specimen. Who had disarmed her.
He seemed well aware of it.
“It’s my job,” he said.
So dazzled was she by the smile, it took her a few seconds to hear him, and then a few more to figure out what he had to mean.
It’s my job to drive men like Weasel Face off the lawn.
Oh, crap. She should have known. The black SUV with tinted windows, his body, his self-assurance—Caleb was a bodyguard. Of course he was. “Who do you work for?”
“I work for myself. Camelot Security. But Breckenridge brought me in.”
Breckenridge was the company Jamie used. Which meant that Caleb wasn’t a friend of Carly’s at all. Her brother had hired him. And Ellen knew Jamie well enough to guess he wouldn’t have brought in security just for Carly. Not when he knew exactly how many times Ellen had called the police in the past week.
Caleb was here for her.
“I don’t need you.”
This earned her a smile she found considerably less charming than its predecessors. “Seemed like you did a minute ago.”
“I did, and I already said thanks for that. But I don’t want a bodyguard.”
“I’m not a bodyguard.”
“What are you, then?”
“I’m a security specialist.”
“I don’t need one of those, either.”
Caleb raised his eyebrows and looked pointedly toward the cul-de-sac.
Damn it, he didn’t even need to speak to make her see it. He was right—Ellen had no way of keeping the invaders at bay. Dumping her tea on the photographer had been stupid. If Weasel Face had wanted to, he could have done a lot worse to her than just step on her plants.
“Okay, fine,” she admitted. “You have a point.”
Caleb glanced past her to the house, his eyes jumping from one feature to another, panning across the front lawn. Surveying her domain. His lips kept twitching at the corners, as if it took some effort to keep his satisfied expression from crossing over to smug. “When was this place built?” he asked. “Sixties?”
“Mid-seventies.”
“It’s a nice house. If you’ve got the plans, I’m going to need them—architectural drawings, schematics. That’ll make it easier for the alarm installer. We’ll have to find the survey stakes at the property lines, too, or else get a new surveyor out here.”
“Why?”
“How attached are you to this tree?” He started walking toward the front yard, and Ellen hurried to catch up. “It’s not supposed to be that close to the road. The county wants a ten-foot easement along the street side of the property to keep the electric and phone wires clear. Didn’t the guys tell you that when they planted it?”
“No.” She’d dug the hole herself after she bought the tulip tree for Henry’s first birthday. It had never occurred to her that she wasn’t allowed to put it wherever she wanted.
She felt as though she ought to say something about that, but she was having trouble keeping up with him. He walked fast, and her thoughts kept whirling around, a tornado that flung little bits of verbal flotsam toward her mouth, words like no and what? and stop and fuck and help.
“Sorry, I’m not sure … what does the tree have to do with anything?”
“It’s going to mess up your fence line. I can have it moved back, though. No worries. First things first, I’m going to do a circuit around the house. I’d like to see—”
“Stop.” He was getting away from her, his long legs eating up the ground, and an air raid siren had started going off inside her head. “Stop walking. Stop looking at things. And for the love of God, stop talking.”
He actually had the audacity to grin at her again, as if they were still allies, and this was all an enjoyable game rather than the second wave of a hostile incursion.
“There’s not going to be a fence,” Ellen said firmly.
“Your brother is crazy-famous, and you have a kid. You need a fence. I can get it painted any color you want. Or stained. Cedar would look nice with your siding.” Caleb looked at his watch. “Are you free in about an hour? I’m supposed to be meeting with Carly, but after that I’d like to come back by here. In the meantime, it would help me a lot if you could pull together your itinerary for the next few weeks. I need names and contact information for all your friends, too—family, boyfriends, anybody who comes over to play with your son—so I can let my team know who it’s o
kay to let on the property. Oh, and does your cell phone have a radio function, by any chance?”
Ellen’s fingers had begun to ache deep in the joints, so she opened her hand to stretch them, and the iced tea glass fell onto the lawn. She gawped at it, unable to collect her thoughts over the ringing in her ears.
Trouble. This man was trouble. Far bigger trouble than a few photographers.
Caleb leaned over and scooped up the glass. Then it was in front of her face again with his hand wrapped around it, and her eyes traveled the length of his forearm and over the rolled sleeve at his elbow, up to the rounded cap of his shoulder, his collar and neck, his jawline and that bump in his nose and those twinkling, confident, conspiratorial eyes. Heaven help her, he looked good. Why did misery always come in such attractive packages?
She took the glass from him, and his fingers bumped hers, and it was terrible the way she felt it. Just terrible.
“What?” she croaked.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll get you a new phone with a radio. Comes in handy as a backup. You’ll have to let my team know every time you leave the house, and they’ll decide whether you need an escort. I’ll get that set up by tomorrow morning. In the meantime—”
“Stop,” Ellen whispered.
Not loud enough. You had to be loud—she’d figured that out with Richard. You had to be louder than they were, stronger than they thought you could be, and so mean and cold and unforgiving, they called you names.
She knew how to do this. She’d done it before.
“Stop,” she said, and this time the word came out at a satisfying volume. “You’re not putting a fence up on my property. I’m not giving you schematics. I don’t want your help.”
“Didn’t we already cover this a minute ago?”
They had. But she’d been a fool, and she knew when to change tactics. If she gave this man one more inch, he would take over. She’d seen it with Jamie. One day, she and Jamie had been ordinary teenagers, and the next thing she knew her brother had his own armed escort. He was ostensibly an adult now, but he reported his comings and goings to a team of people who monitored his food, screened his friends, and installed an alarm system in his house that had a habit of going off a three a.m. in irritating bursts of shrieking that no one knew how to stop.
Security guards oversaw Jamie’s whole life. They told him where he could go and when, controlled him, choked him. Ellen couldn’t handle that. Not after Richard.
So she folded her arms over her chest and stood up straighter. Caleb’s gaze locked with hers. Let him try, she told herself. Just let him try.
But he only smiled, his eyes too kind and a bit bewildered. “I’m here to help you. The way I see it, Breckenridge put me under contract, but I work for you.”
“Excellent,” she said. Because it didn’t matter whether he was kind. It only mattered that he would wreak havoc with her life if she let him. “In that case, you’re fired.”
Read on for an excerpt from Linda Cajio’s
Strictly Business
One
What a shame he was gay.
Even the driving music, the high-pitched hysterical laughter, the roving spotlights couldn’t distract Jess Brannen. Her gaze was riveted to the tall man standing near the doors of the banquet room. He was glaring at the young male dancer, aptly named Adonis, who was slowly peeling off his shirt to the screams of enthusiastic women. The lines of the man’s mouth became even grimmer when the stripper, hips gyrating rhythmically, tossed the shirt onto one of the tables. Five women pounced on it, literally ripping it to shreds as each grappled for a souvenir.
From her place near the back of the room, Jess carefully watched for a reaction. His arms were folded across his chest, and she could see his body stiffen, the muscles of his jaw tighten.
His stony expression triggered a memory, and she realized she’d seen this man before. Immediately, she shifted so she no longer had a clear view of him. She prayed the same was true for him.
Although she’d never met Nick Mikaris, fastest-rising builder in the Philadelphia area, she had seen his picture in the business section of the newspaper several weeks ago. She had a meeting with Mikaris Tuesday morning to discuss her firm’s doing the landscaping for his latest project, MeadowHill, and she didn’t want him to recognize her as a spectator at a male strip show. Businesspeople could be very quirky about something like that.
But if it was Mikaris, why was he here?
Maybe she was worried for nothing, she thought. Maybe it wasn’t he, just someone who looked like the picture. Photos could be deceiving. She decided to risk a peek.
It was he.
It was the same set of the jaw, but the picture didn’t begin to do him justice. Although his features were too sharp for him to be truly handsome, he gave off an air of potent virility. She judged him to be about six feet in height. He was lean, with dark hair brushed back from his forehead. His simple pullover and gray slacks revealed the well-toned muscles of his body. He was a very attractive man – and definitely possessive of the dancer.
Suddenly Mikaris turned his head, and she found herself staring directly into his eyes. Even from twenty feet away, she could easily feel his gaze rake her. Her blood flowed hot and thick in blinding response, and her breasts ached almost painfully. Molten sensations swirled around her belly and thighs.
With a mighty effort, Jess ducked her head. She immediately took a huge gulp of her drink, but the chilled Bahama Mama didn’t help. Her face was flushed with embarrassment, and she groaned to herself. Of all the idiotic things to do! She hoped he hadn’t had a good enough look at her to actually identify her. To insure he wouldn’t, she planned to look entirely different for the meeting – exactly like a businesswoman who would be shocked at the very idea of attending a show like this one. If only she hadn’t been so intrigued by him in the first place… .
She must be drunk, she decided, frowning at her glass. It was only her second drink, and the fruity concoction was supposed to be fairly innocent. But the combination of the drinks, little dinner, and total exhaustion was making her silly. Her movements did seem awkward, and her head was too heavy for her neck. That was it, she thought in relief. She was just a little bit tipsy. Maybe more than a little, she conceded. But that explained her unusual reaction to the man.
“Jess! He’s at our table!” Although her best friend, Sandy Fitzgerald, was literally rubbing shoulders with her, Sandy had to shout over the din.
In a panic, Jess looked around, then shivered with relief when she saw Sandy meant the dancer, Adonis. He was performing directly in front of reserved, elegant Gwen. Laughter overtook Jess when Gwen pulled the linen tablecloth over her head. Gwen was taking Sandy’s practical joke well, Jess thought.
The five women, Sandy, Gwen, Adele, Miranda, and herself, had been close friends since they’d attended Bryn Mawr College together, and every year one of the group played a practical joke on another. This time Gwen had been Sandy’s victim. Dinner and gambling in Atlantic City had actually been a “Ladies’ Night” show at the Breakers Casino/Hotel – the very last thing Philadelphia socialite Gwen Halloran would ever attend. This joke had been perfect and diabolical in its simplicity, Jess thought, and Gwen had been truly caught. Although they had all been shocked initially by the male strippers, they had soon relaxed and begun enjoying themselves, even laughing at the men’s outrageousness. It was innocent fun, Jess decided, wiping the tears from her eyes.
Adonis moved closer to her, and her mirth immediately subsided. But the dancer settled on Sandy for his next private audience, and she started to relax… .
Her entire body froze when the good-looking dancer turned to her. He gave her a lazy smile, while his hips began to circle slowly. She hadn’t realized how tiny his G-string was. The damn thing was almost nonexistent!
“Oh, no!” she moaned, and buried her face in her hands.
“Stop being a prude, Jess!” Sandy shouted in her ear.
“I’m n
ot!” Jess lied, laughing with good-natured humiliation.
She turned to her friend and spread her fingers wide so she could see perfectly. Sandy burst into laughter. Jess didn’t turn back to the dancer, however. One look had been more than enough.
But Adonis moved closer until he was actually bumping her chair. She instantly closed her fingers together and wished the floor would open up and swallow her. She had to get rid of him.
Snatching up her purse, she grabbed the first bill her fingers touched and shoved it at the dancer. It was a twenty.
Sandy leaned forward and asked dryly, “Would you like change?”
“A Brannen doesn’t wait for change, darling,” Jess drawled in her best Bryn Mawr voice. She didn’t have a smaller bill, and even if she had, she’d be damned before she’d hunt for it.
Adonis kissed her on the cheek and danced away.
“We’re blowing our conservative image to Hades!” Gwen shouted, finally emerging from the tablecloth. Her carefully styled hair wasn’t even mussed.
“You are,” Jess screamed over the pounding music. “I have to keep up the family image of eccentricity!”
“What?”
Jess waved her hand. Her throat was already raw, and it would never carry past three people. She watched Gwen nod in understanding about the noise level. Anyway, Gwen already knew what Philadelphia’s first families thought of Jessica Brannen. All the Brannens were noted for flaunting convention upon occasion. Still, her career as a landscaper raised more eyebrows than usual. Why it should, she didn’t know. Doing what she liked and had a talent for made a lot more sense than working at some job she hated.
She chuckled to herself. People might frown, but it didn’t stop them from asking her to landscape their properties.
Suddenly, she felt as if someone were staring at her, and glanced toward the doors. Mikaris whirled on his heel and left the room.
Jess sighed. She hoped she wouldn’t pay for this night out.
And in more ways than one.
* * *