by Ruthie Knox
“Why doesn’t her mom stop her?”
“The mothers are usually half the problem.”
The tension in her voice made him wonder if her own mom had been like that, pushing Jamie’s career along. If so, what had it meant for Ellen? Nothing good.
“How old were you when your brother got famous?”
She showed him her profile and drank some more of her wine. He’d just about decided she was going to take a pass on the question when she said, “I was in college. But he signed his first record deal when we were fifteen, just like this girl—Aimee Dawson’s her name. It took four lawyers six years to get Jamie out of that contract. Came really close to wrecking his whole career.”
“But he made it, right? After he got out of the contract?” Dumb question. Of course he had, or his face wouldn’t be on magazine covers all the time.
She nodded. “And I went to law school.”
He nodded, figuring he was starting to get the measure of Ellen Callahan. “So you planned to do this all along? Work for musicians, I mean. Because of what happened with your brother.”
“Yeah, though I didn’t expect to end up in Ohio. I was lucky. When I found out I’d be moving to Camelot right after law school, I landed a summer associate’s job with the firm I work for in Columbus. Minchin and Prague. They represent a lot of the best athletes out of OSU, and so they had the best team in the state to mentor me in what I do.”
“Anybody I’ve heard of?”
“At Minchin and Prague?”
“The athletes. I went to OSU.”
She smiled. “I can’t say.”
“Too bad. So they taught you the ropes and then you just, what, went out on your own?”
“No, I commuted to Columbus six days a week for three years.”
A hundred and twenty miles a day. Ellen took her work seriously. “Long commute.”
“It got a little old, yeah.” She made a face. “Not so great for my marriage, either. But then Henry came along, and I had to figure out something else. Now they kind of let me do my own thing. They take a big chunk out of the hours I bill to cover overhead and association fees and malpractice insurance, all that good stuff.”
“And you get to stay here in Camelot.”
She sipped her wine and settled more deeply into her chair, staring down the slope of her front lawn to the trees that bordered her property. “Yeah. I have to show up in the office for a week every quarter or so, and I still do some negotiations in Columbus or even every now and then out in L.A. or New York, but for the most part, I get to work from home.”
The contentment in her voice mingled with the wine he swallowed and put a warm glow in his veins. “You like it here.”
“Here is great.”
Caleb rolled the bowl of his wineglass back and forth between his palms and admired her tidy little slice of the good life. In his peripheral vision, he could see the ball of her foot on the deck chair, so he admired her red toenails, too.
Sexy woman, sexy toes. Sexy convictions.
Ellen was a crusader. She protected the weak and the foolish for a living. No wonder she didn’t want to be protected herself. A woman like that wouldn’t relish the thought of admitting vulnerability.
He thought of how she’d looked, marching across her lawn to dump tea on the photographer this morning. Gutsy. She’d make a hell of a soldier.
They had more in common than he’d guessed.
“Good for you,” he said. “Fighting the good fight.”
“I thought so.” She polished off her wine and poured herself another glass. “Although now Jamie keeps sending me divas to rescue. Plus, the money really sucks.”
“Being evil always pays better.”
“Yeah.” She smiled at him, and for the first time there was nothing held back. No edge. This was Ellen with her defenses down—bright, warm, and inviting.
Caleb hadn’t been prepared for the smile, but even if he had, he wasn’t sure he could have done a damn thing about the way it affected him.
Too easily, he could imagine those lips kiss-swollen and soft. The silky, tangled mess of her hair spread over his pillow, and the contrast of her pale skin against his dark sheets. The hot, slick welcome of her body.
Rein it in, Clark.
He set his glass on the ground and interlaced his fingers behind his head, going for casual. It was time to get down to business. “So, Ellen,” he said, glancing over her shoulder to where the security light was mounted below the soffit. “You have a replacement bulb for that light?”
Ellen did a mental double-take.
At least, she hoped it was only mental. If Caleb had seen evidence on her face of the psychic slap he’d just delivered, she’d be monumentally embarrassed. But there was no way for him to know that she’d been lost in thoughts of how nicely the sleeves of his white dress shirt pulled tight across his biceps, was there? It would be her little secret.
“For the floodlight?” she asked.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Yeah, I have one inside.”
“Mind if I replace it?”
His innocent question sent her thoughts down a twisty path. She’d tried to change the bulb herself once, but it had turned out to be a little too high to reach even from the top rung of the ladder, and a lot too tippy.
Caleb would be able to reach. He could help.
It drove her crazy, having that bulb out. Sometimes she felt as though the stupid thing were mocking her, public evidence of her inability to handle her own household maintenance.
But the relief she felt at the idea of having Caleb take care of it made her antsy. She had to be on her guard against that feeling, to remain wary of reassigning agency from herself to a man. Be sufficient. That was the lesson of her relationship with Richard, the conclusion she’d drawn from the first twenty-seven years of her life.
“Ellen?”
Caleb was staring at her, his brows drawn together. He’d asked her if he could change her lightbulb, and she was sitting here pondering it as if the fate of the world rested in her hands.
“No,” she said.
“Is that no, you don’t mind, or—”
Abruptly, she stood. “I’ll get the bulb.”
Inside the house, she rooted through the storage closet and wondered what her problem was. Insanely sensitive about that house, Jamie had said. But it wasn’t about the house, really. She just didn’t know where to set boundaries between herself and other people anymore.
Strike that. She didn’t know where to set boundaries between herself and men. Especially this man.
Still, it seemed pretty clear she didn’t need to hold the line at lightbulbs.
She went into the garage and came out carrying the bulb and the stepladder. Caleb jumped up. “Let me get that.”
And she did. But her brain had to force her fingers to let go.
“So how was your day?” she asked as he leaned the ladder against the house. She needed the distraction, needed to make this small moment of male home improvement feel unimportant in order to counteract the fact that her armpits were damp with anxious sweat that made very little sense.
This was a lightbulb, not the first domino in a chain. Every decision would be hers to make, individually and on her own timeline.
He couldn’t take that away from her. And if he tried—well, then he would deserve to find out how hard she could fight. Right now, he wasn’t her enemy. He was a nice guy offering to change the lightbulb over her front porch.
Caleb threw her a lopsided grin as he ascended. “Well, it started off pretty good. I got a new client this morning.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Some rich pop star’s mistress, the way I understand it. And his pampered sister. But here’s the trouble, see?” He looked down at her, and just being the focus of his dark-brown gaze made her feel interesting. “Would you hand me the bulb?”
Ellen blinked.
“Over there?” He pointed.
Gangly as an ostrich, she ru
shed to pick it up from where he’d set it down. When she handed it to him, he laid it on the top step of the ladder and carried on being charming and helpful.
“The sister wouldn’t let me in her house, and the mistress has an eccentric grandmother who cornered me with photo albums and scrapbooks.”
“Nana was there?”
Carly’s eighty-four-year-old grandmother had recovered slowly after breaking her hip last year. She’d decided to move into an assisted-living facility in Mount Pleasant, turning her house over to Carly, who’d needed a refuge after her marriage broke up. But as much as Nana relished the social opportunities of her new living situation, she still spent a lot of time over at Carly’s. She claimed she needed time off from all the “old people.”
“Yes, and she was in fine form.” He reached up and unscrewed the burned-out bulb, the movement so effortless, Ellen wanted to cry.
“What, she doesn’t like you?” she asked. “I’d think you’d be exactly Nana’s type.”
“No, Nana loves me. She’s loved me since Carly brought me home in the fourth grade and I ate an entire plate of her chocolate-chip cookies.”
“Her chocolate-chip cookies are awful.”
“I know. But she kept offering them to me, and my mom always says it’s impolite to refuse food at a stranger’s house, so I kept eating them and praying for rescue.”
From four feet above her head, he smiled his dazzling smile. With the color leaching out of the sky, he looked as though he’d been lit from the inside, his teeth whiter and his skin darker than they had been this morning. Phosphorescent, almost, his bright shirt and charcoal slacks an afterimage burned onto her retinas.
He climbed down, picked up the ladder and the broken bulb, and carried them into the garage as if he owned the place.
Ellen gazed into the gathering twilight and focused on breathing.
She’d braced herself for a fight tonight, but the tussle this morning had left her so tired, and he was so much easier to be around than she’d remembered. She hadn’t been ready for this … what? This casual rapport. He made her feel safe, and feeling safe worried her.
Paging Dr. Freud.
She sank into her chair and willed herself to relax. It had taken her so long to bring the Dawsons around this afternoon, she’d missed her chance to watch the movie. By the time Henry fell asleep, she’d been ready to hang up her gloves. Couldn’t she just sip her wine and look at the empty front lawn and let him steer for a while? It was nice, sitting on her porch and talking to Caleb. He was good company.
Also, disconcertingly hot, and dangerous to her peace of mind.
And he wanted to put up a fence.
He came back out and sat beside her.
“So what were you and Nana looking at?” Ellen asked.
“Primarily the album from her lecture tour in the Netherlands. Nineteen seventy-three, she said.”
“Is that the one with Bruno and all the mustaches and leather?”
“For an hour.”
Ellen smiled, but this time the smile was mostly for Nana, so she didn’t have to second-guess it. Carly’s grandmother had traveled the world as a feminist lecturer and professional consciousness-raiser in the late sixties and early seventies before moving to Camelot to take a faculty position at the college and make a home for her orphaned granddaughter. She looked like a sweet little old lady, but in fact she was as mouthy and lascivious as a frat boy, and about ten times as liberated.
“And then I spent the afternoon in the office giving myself a headache over a contract I had to sign and fax back to Breckenridge.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing, it turns out. It just took me forever to understand it.”
“Not your forte, huh?”
“I’m no good with paperwork. Anyway, to top it off, tonight I had dinner with my whole family.”
“That’s bad?”
“That’s just Wednesday night. I love them, but they find a different way to drive me crazy every week.”
She fought back all the other questions she wanted to ask. How big was his family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces or nephews? A girlfriend?
Her curiosity had no shame. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cared so much about the mundane details of someone else’s life. There was nowhere this intense wanting-to-know could lead that she had the freedom to follow.
“It sounds kind of nice,” she said. “To have all that family around.”
He laced his fingers behind his head, resting his elbows against the chair back. “It has its moments. Does that mean you don’t? Have family or somebody around, I mean?”
“Just Jamie, when he comes to visit. And my ex’s mom, I guess. She takes care of Henry a few days a week. She’s sort of family. Both of my parents are gone.”
“What about the ex, does he help out?”
“He’s an alcoholic.”
Caleb made a pained face, a standard response to her confession about Richard. He was probably thinking the standard thoughts and would soon offer one of the standard platitudes. What a shame. How hard for you.
It had been hard, but the alcohol had been the least of her problems when she was married to Richard.
One time, she’d embarrassed him at a dinner party by admitting she’d never read Ulysses. He’d had a few too many drinks, and he’d launched into a monologue that began with a few witty jokes at her expense and ended with a dissertation on her shortcomings. It went on so long that she’d fantasized about standing up and dumping her dinner in his lap. She’d imagined herself walking out, hiking half a mile home in the dark in her heels. Locking him out of the house until he sobered up.
She’d done nothing. Not that night, and not for days afterward. Finally, when it seemed possible it could be funny, she’d told Jamie.
Verbally abusive, Jamie had said. Never good enough for you. You should leave him.
But those were all Jamie’s words, and she hadn’t been able to absorb them, to believe them. Part of her had understood the logic behind her brother’s hatred for Richard, but she hadn’t known how to make it her own logic, her own hatred. Not until Henry came along.
In the divorce, she’d gotten the house and a custody agreement that allowed Richard three hours’ supervised visitation with Henry each week. Richard had gotten everything else. Ellen considered it a victory.
Caleb leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Ellen waited for his sympathy, but it wasn’t what she got.
“No boyfriend?” he asked.
Surprised and grateful, she made a snorting sound of dismissal, the sort of accidental pig noise she was always embarrassing herself with. “No.”
Caleb rubbed his finger and thumb over his jaw, looking ponderous but with mischief in his eyes. “A girlfriend, then.”
“Come on, I’m not gay,” she protested. “Just, you know, divorced. A mom.”
“You say that like it’s the same thing as ‘washed up.’ ”
It is.
“Camelot’s a hard place to be thirty and single,” she pointed out. “All these college girls running around are tough on the ego.”
“They’re kids. They could hardly compete with you.”
When she glanced over, he was smirking at her. Served her right. She’d fished pretty deep for the compliment.
Caleb’s smirk was dead sexy.
Her libido growled and started pacing back and forth across her lower belly.
Don’t look at him, Ellen told herself, but her furtive eyes snatched tidbits to catalog. Shoulders so broad, he just about filled the whole chair. His throat where he’d unbuttoned his shirt. The shadow of stubble on his neck and jaw.
Here was a species of man she had no experience with. She’d always gone for the Heathcliff types, men with wild hair and deep thoughts. Army guys didn’t do it for her. Or they never had before.
Oh, not good. Not good at all.
She couldn’t have him. There was no room in her life for
any man, let alone one this … big. Even if she had the feminine wiles to capture his attention, what would she do with him? You’d roll right over and let him take charge.
And then she’d be back at square one, weak-willed and malleable, chained to the whims of another man who didn’t want or respect her enough. No, thanks.
When Jamie had said she should find a boyfriend, he hadn’t meant this at all. Her brother had been thinking of somebody bland and amiable, a Little League coach who’d buy her penne with marinara and give her a peck on the cheek when he dropped her off at home. Whereas Ellen’s interest in Caleb was more of a restless urge for clutching, desperate, sweaty coupling. She wanted, for the first time in three years, to have actual, physical, hot-as-hell sex. With a man.
Not remotely in the cards. But if it were, would he go for it? Was Caleb merely being nice, buttering her up so he could try to slap a fence around her house or whatever it was he thought needed doing?
Her intuition said no. Of course, her intuition had allowed her to marry Richard. She had no reason to trust instincts with such a shitty track record.
Ellen let the back of her head hit the chair with a solid thunk and polished off the rest of her wine. The muddled, murky sip at the very bottom of her glass matched the inside of her head, which suggested she’d already had more wine and more Caleb than were advisable for one evening. She should probably call it a night.
“So were you in the military?”
Whoops. Go to bed, woman.
“What makes you ask?”
“You have that whole bossing-people-around thing going on. And the … you know. The physique.”
Oh, dumb. Dumb statement, dumb question, dumb Ellen.
Caleb grinned, and she flushed all over—pink heat in her chest, her cheeks. The tip of her nose, even.
“I was in the military police.”
The military had police? Why had she even asked? She could barely tell one branch of the military from another, much less remember what they all did.