by Ruthie Knox
Her confusion must have been obvious, because he said, “It’s part of the army. MPs deal with law-and-order stuff. Like security for soldiers—protecting convoys, bodyguard details for some of the big shots, training and mentoring police in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prison facilities for detainees, too.”
“You did all that?”
He nodded. “Most of it. Convoys, the first time I was over in Iraq, and then personal security detail for an ambassador in the Green Zone on my second deployment. Iraqi Police the third time.”
“I guess this must all seem like small potatoes after that.”
“A mission’s a mission.”
“I’m not your mission.”
“Sure you are.” He didn’t smile, but his eyes crinkled up at the corners. Playful. “Operation Ellen Callahan.”
“But they always have fancier names than that. Like ‘Desert Eagle’ and ‘Storm Shield.’ ‘Operation Storm Ellen.’ ” She realized belatedly that she’d just made herself sound like a bunker he needed to crack open and conquer.
“Catchy.”
“Thanks. So what brought you back here, then?”
“Family stuff. And I thought my job was basically done. Not in Afghanistan, maybe, but Iraq was my war. Second time I was over there, it was a complete clusterfuck—” He glanced at her. “Sorry. It was a mess.”
“You can say ‘fuck.’ ”
He smiled. “Still rude, though. My mother would have a fit. Anyway, it was a mess. We got shot at so often when we ran the ambassador out Route Irish to the airport, it became routine. But by the last time I was over there, in Najaf, civilians were walking the streets again. It wasn’t totally safe, but it was a lot better. And then the war wrapped up, and the army started focusing too much attention on bullshit again and not enough on training soldiers for combat. So it seemed to me like, time to go, you know? My family needed me, and my platoon really didn’t anymore. Iraq didn’t.” He paused. “Plus, I was really done getting shot at.”
Ellen smiled. “I promise not to shoot at you.”
“Good. That’ll be a help.”
They were silent for a while. Crickets chirped. Ellen tried to think about Caleb in combat, but her brain shied away from the desert.
“Do me a favor,” he said.
“Do I owe you a favor?”
“No. That’s why it would be a favor. Tell me why you don’t want me here.”
Oh, but I do.
“This house is mine. I don’t want …” She didn’t want anybody to take it from her—didn’t want it to be altered in any way that made it less hers. But she could hardly explain that to him in a way that made any sense, and certainly not without spilling a whole bunch of painful truths about her life with Richard that she’d rather keep to herself.
She started over. “Look, I don’t need security. There’s no real risk. These vultures”—she waved her hand around as if they were everywhere, which was sort of silly, since surely they were all in their hotel beds now, or sleeping in dead trees or whatever—“have been circling Jamie for the last twelve or thirteen years. I’m not afraid of them. I’m not going to give them more power than they deserve.”
He didn’t move, but she could feel him lean in closer. Not with his body, so much, but with his attention. “I can understand that.”
“You can?”
“Sure. But is it possible, hypothetically, that this is a different situation than you’ve been in before? Because it’s happening here, in Camelot, and it involves your next-door neighbor as well as you and Hank?”
“Henry.” Hank was a nickname for a grown-up, tobacco-spitting baseball player, not her baby. “I don’t see why that changes anything. It doesn’t make them dangerous. It just means they’re a bigger hassle.”
“Want to hear what the situation looks like to me?”
“Not especially.”
He shook his head, the smirk back on his lips.
“What?”
“You’re kind of a pain in the ass.”
“Only when large, obnoxious men get all up in my face.”
He grinned. Those white teeth and crinkly-cornered, laughing eyes had probably felled dozens of women. She wondered what kind of man he was, what kind of lover. Whether he’d earned that cocksure smile, or if it was an affectation that would only disappoint.
“Fair enough. You don’t want me to crowd you. You like doing things your own way, and the last thing you need is some strange man following you around, messing up your systems, protecting you from danger you don’t even believe is real.”
Perceptive, too.
“I get all that,” he said. “And I think, within reason, it’s healthy and perfectly fine. But here’s the part that’s not fine. You have hardware on all your doors that’s not worth a damn. A photographer could drive out toward Cedarburg, take the gravel road into the cemetery, and end up just behind those woods out back, and then he could walk up to your back windows and take a picture of you and your son playing in the living room. Or he could wait until dark and break in and pull a knife on you, or a gun.”
An ugly thought. She didn’t want his ugly thoughts taking up residence in her head. “Why would anybody want to do that? I’m a lawyer, not a celebrity. I’m not interesting to them. I live in Camelot for a reason. I like not having to lock the car doors when I run into the market for some milk. I don’t want to worry about men with knives in my living room.”
“You don’t have to worry about it. You just have to let me worry about it.”
She crossed her arms, already fatigued. He was more difficult to spar with than she wanted him to be. That brick wall of a body came accompanied by an agile mind, which made Caleb Clark a thoroughly inconvenient man to butt heads with. “What do you want from me?”
“I want a car at the end of your driveway, regular patrols of the perimeter, deadbolts, motion-sensitive floodlights, blinds, an alarm system, and a fence.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“That’s good, because it sounds awful, and you haven’t even been inside the house yet.”
“None of it’s going to bother you, day-to-day. You’d put up with a couple hours of installation, and then you could go back to ignoring it all, and I could sleep at night.”
“As if I’m keeping you up.”
“Not yet, but I feel like you have the potential.”
She didn’t know quite how to take that. The insistent drumbeat his remark set off between her thighs suggested one interpretation, but rationally it wasn’t the most likely one.
Not that she had much rationality left. At some point in the last few minutes, she’d crossed the line that divided pleasant, alcohol-infused drowsiness from blurry, weary, and done.
Ellen stood up and gazed down at Caleb for one long, fathomless moment.
Bodyguard, she reminded herself. Bad, bad idea.
“I’m going to bed now.”
“In the morning, I want to install new deadbolts on your doors.”
She sighed. “If I’ve managed to make it through the night without getting slain in my bed, we’ll see how I feel about it then. At the moment, the answer is no.”
“I’m also going to go ahead and tell the a.m. shift they can pull the car into your driveway. I want a separate team on Carly’s place. If anything weird happens, it’ll be easier to deal with if I’ve got four men and two vehicles here.”
Did she care whether the SUV parked on the street or in her driveway? She was pretty sure she had, earlier, but she couldn’t remember why.
“Fine. That’s it, though. Don’t push your luck.”
He stood up, putting him much closer than she’d been ready for. Close like that time in the market. Whoa close.
Her lips parted on a hitched inhale that might have been nothing but might have been an invitation. She wasn’t exactly sure, because with his face six inches from hers, she couldn’t think straight. His dark, devilish eyes blanked out her brain, and she di
dn’t want to think, anyway. She just wanted him to do things to her—to remind her what it felt like to let somebody else lead. He’d be good at it. He was tall and strong, and he smelled like fabric softener and wine and man.
Kiss me, she thought.
But he didn’t. He backed up, and she hadn’t been ready for that, either. She’d unconsciously shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, and as he retreated down the first of the porch steps, she lost her balance and swayed into him, planting both hands on his chest.
His firm, hot, way-out-of-her-league chest.
Get a grip, she told herself, but her libido had no claws, and the situation was slippery—a bizarre combination of socially awkward and inconveniently arousing. Just when she ought to have been letting go, she clutched at his shirt.
Caleb took her wrists in his hands and gently tugged until she released him. He backed farther down the steps as he lowered her arms, eyes on his shoes, his thumbs brushing over her knuckles just before he dropped her hands.
“Better if I don’t,” he said to his feet.
Right.
Too humiliated to reply, she shrugged. He made a squinty, wrinkle-nosed face that conveyed regret and embarrassment, and she wished she might miraculously disappear, but it didn’t happen.
“Goodnight, Caleb.”
When he nodded and turned to go, she hoped to have the self-discipline not to watch him all the way down the driveway, but she found, to her disappointment, that she didn’t.
Chapter Six
“Doesn’t he need pants?” Carly asked.
“He’s not too keen on them lately.” Ellen fastened the harness buckle that secured Henry in the backpack and hoisted it onto her back with an indelicate grunt. “Okay, we’re ready.”
“You want all that stuff you packed?”
Right. That. Sippy cup, crackers, sunscreen, sun hat, favorite toy steamroller—all where she’d left them on the table. Forgotten.
“Yeah.” She loaded the supplies into the mesh pockets on the side of the pack, wondering if the number of mom points she’d just lost was equal to or greater than the points she’d earned for meticulously gathering the stuff up to begin with. Motherhood had forced her to learn a lot of unpleasant lessons, but the impossibility of getting everything right all the time was the one she least liked having shoved in her face.
Henry piped up from behind her head. “Do you have your steamroller?”
My steamroller, he meant. His habitual pronoun confusion made her heart ping. Two-year-olds were basically torture implements on legs, but Henry was so freaking cute, he made up for it. Mostly. “Yep, I’ve got it, buddy.”
“Want it.”
Ellen fished it out and handed it back to him before cheerfully announcing, “Okay, now we’re really off.”
She waited until they were in the woods behind the house before she exhaled.
“I always wanted to sneak out,” she said, pushing a branch above her head and holding it there so it wouldn’t smack Henry in the face as they passed underneath.
Carly turned to smile over her shoulder. The sun filtered through the tree cover and bounced off her crazy curly red hair. “You were too much of a good girl, huh?”
“Way too much,” Ellen agreed. All those years of being the perfect daughter, the perfect sister, hadn’t taught her anything except how to let people walk all over her.
She’d learned more about how to be assertive since her divorce than in the previous three decades combined, and even so, she kept discovering things she’d missed. Today, the cheap thrill of disobedience.
Not that they were technically disobeying. She didn’t have to be home when Caleb turned up to install locks she hadn’t agreed to yet. “She was a free woman, and it was a nice morning for a walk. Humid, but that was Ohio in July. At least it wasn’t too hot yet. Carly had knocked just when Henry was getting bored, and Ellen had figured, Why shouldn’t we take a ten-minute stroll downtown, buy coffee and chocolate-chip muffins, and head over to the elementary school playground?
Of course, this bold logic broke down when she considered that Carly had snuck around to Ellen’s back door to issue the invitation, and they were fleeing through the woods to avoid being captured by Caleb’s agents.
And yet Ellen was slightly disappointed not to have been caught. A perverse part of her hoped Caleb would show up with the deadbolts any minute now and get angry when he figured out she was gone. Imagining him riled up made her heart pound against the sternum strap of her pack, anxious and exhilarated.
She wanted to get a rise out of him. If that made this outing a form of revenge or rebellion or ass-backwards flirtation, she didn’t care.
“That bird is?” Henry asked.
Catapulted back to the world outside her head, she took a few seconds to find the bird Henry had spotted. “Down there? That’s a goldfinch.”
“Doing?”
“Looking for food, I guess.”
“His food is?”
“They eat berries, seeds, that kind of stuff. Worms, too.”
“Henry wants a worm.”
That made her smile. “A gummy worm like Grammy Maureen gave you?”
“Yas.”
“How about a cracker instead?” She pulled out the package and passed him one over her shoulder, and he got busy crunching instead of talking.
“Central Path?” Ellen asked when they emerged from the woods. The gravel artery ran straight through the middle of town, splitting the main road into one-way veins on either side.
“Nah, let’s stick to the pavement. I probably shouldn’t show my face on the path again this year.”
Carly’s accompanying smile was bright but false, reminding Ellen that Central Path was where the infamous photo of Jamie and Carly had been taken.
“Are you really doing okay?” Ellen knew it had to be hard on Carly, first losing Jamie, now risking cameras and rumors every time she stuck her head outside. Though she was certainly better equipped to handle the pressure than most people. Carly had a thick suit of emotional armor that she rarely took off.
Back before she got pregnant and her husband walked out on her, she’d been a choir teacher at a ritzy private school in Columbus. Ellen liked to imagine Carly in front of a gang of awkward twelve-year-olds. She’d have been one of the tough teachers, the kind who had firm rules and a wry sense of humor. The kind who set standards her students killed themselves to meet.
But she had a soft side, too, much as she hated to show it. Once, in an unguarded moment, Ellen had caught Carly looking at Jamie with such simple, perfect adoration, she’d been embarrassed to witness it.
She hoped the two of them would get a clue sometime soon.
“I’m fine,” Carly said. “This week has been all kinds of crazy, but it’ll blow over. The press will figure out I’m boring eventually and find someone else to chase after.”
The sun beat down on the crowns of their heads and the tips of their shoulders. Henry’s weight balanced on Ellen’s hips and pressed the balls of her feet into the asphalt. “Cracker,” he said, and she passed another one back to him.
“I miss Jamie,” she said, and then shook her head at her own tactlessness. Missing Jamie was the last thing she was supposed to talk to Carly about.
Carly smoothed her hands over her bump. “Me, too.” Picking invisible lint off the black camisole that stretched over her stomach, she flicked it into the air. “But don’t tell him I said that.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“What a mess, huh?”
“Yeah.” What a terrible mess. Jamie wounded but flippant in L.A., Carly wounded and bitter here, and Ellen suffering from a weird combination of reckless, angry lust and deep mortification every time she thought about Caleb. Which was every four seconds or so, all morning long.
She’d thrown herself at him, and he’d responded with Better if I don’t. Of all the painfully innocuous ways to be turned down—like she was a piece of cheesecake or a third beer. Nah. Thanks, but I�
�m good. Better if I don’t.
Probably last night had been nothing out of the ordinary for him. No doubt women swooned into him all the time, and he had to pluck them off him, like ticks. Just one of life’s hazards when you were Caleb Clark.
Whereas she was so ridiculously smitten, she’d spelled his name with Henry’s alphabet blocks. C-A-L-E-B.
Mama spelled?
Nothing, Peanut. Mama’s being silly.
“So what’s the story with Caleb?” Ellen asked.
Silly, silly Mama.
A ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of Carly’s mouth. “Which story do you want?”
“I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned him, but he said you’re old friends. Are you two close?”
“I guess so,” Carly said with a shrug. “I’ve known him forever. I would’ve sworn you’d met him. He helped carry all Nana’s stuff out to the truck when we moved her into the assisted living place. Weren’t you around for that?”
“No, we were out visiting Jamie that weekend.”
“Oh. Well, Caleb’s a good guy to have around. Nana loves him. I guess I do, too, in a known-you-forever sort of way. I don’t, like, pour my heart out to him or anything. I didn’t tell him about Jamie.”
“Why not?”
Carly wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t think he’d approve. He and your brother—I can’t see them hanging out and watching football together, you know?”
The idea amused her. Caleb was such a man’s man, solid and sure of himself. Jamie had a whole different sort of appeal. He was carefree, a guy who’d spent his adulthood recording albums and doing tours and getting fawned over for it. Whereas Caleb had been guarding convoys in Iraq.
The thought of Caleb in fatigues, with a gun, sent a frisson of excitement through her, which only amplified her mortification. She’d been married to a poet, and now she was the kind of woman who got hot flashes thinking about a guy with a bazooka. Soldier kink. She was hopeless.
They reached the cross street that marked their arrival downtown. Two blocks long, Camelot’s minuscule business district featured a market, a deli, the college bookstore, and a pub on one side of the path and a bank, the post office, and a handful of other, less vital businesses on the other.