by Ruthie Knox
“I promise not to let him run around with the screwdriver,” he said.
She sank to the floor with her back against the kitchen doorjamb, eyes fixed on him. “I guess I’m not willing to take my chances.”
“Suit yourself.”
Caleb chiseled out a mortise and screwed in the latch plate. Henry made rumbling diesel-engine sounds and crashed his trucks into one another.
Cute kid. He had Ellen’s blond hair and round cheeks, but those big blue eyes must have come from his daddy. Who Caleb really needed to check out.
Ellen’s ex was on his to-do list, but the list kept getting longer. He’d lost most of the morning to the plumbing job over at the apartments, and then to the runner Carly and Ellen had decided to take. By the time he was done with these locks it would be noon, and he still had to chew out Carly and replace the lock on her back door, plus find an hour to get over to Ellen’s mother-in-law’s place and figure out what it would take to keep Henry safe over there for the weekend.
With Carly shut tight in her house and Callahan out in L.A., the vultures were going to get restless. Caleb wouldn’t put it past them to start poking their beaks where they didn’t belong. He wouldn’t put much of anything past them.
And then there was Plimpton.
Too many variables for him to let Ellen take her safety for granted. Too much to be on guard against. She needed defenses more foolproof than her temper. Which was why this afternoon, a couple of guys were coming over to install floodlights and an alarm system on her house whether she wanted them or not.
Chapter Eight
Carly let him in the back door when he knocked.
“Jarhead,” she said with a nod of acknowledgment.
“Jarheads are the Marines, Shortie.”
“Okay. I’ll just stick with calling you ‘Killer.’ ”
“I’ve asked you a million times not to call me that.”
The nickname was short for “Lady Killer.” She’d come up with it in high school, an act of retaliation for his relentlessly teasing about her height. Even at seventeen, he hadn’t liked the suggestion that he was some sort of player who used women and then discarded them.
He expected a retort, but instead Carly just sighed. “Come on in,” she said with a half-hearted sweep of her hand. “You can yell at me while I make lunch. You want a sandwich?”
She walked around the kitchen island and started pulling dishes down from the cabinets.
Even if she’d seemed up to it, Caleb no longer had the urge to hassle her. He’d acted patient and calm with Henry for so long that he’d started to feel that way.
“Yeah, a sandwich would be great, thanks.” He leaned both elbows on the countertop and caught her eyes. “Look. I’m gonna change out the lock on your back door. Later on, I’m sending a couple guys over to install an alarm system. I’ll show you how to use it. It’s no big deal. I want you to stay in the house and not give me any shit about it. I know you hate this, but it’s not safe for you to be walking around town alone, and it’s not safe for the baby, either.”
Carly started pulling stuff out of the refrigerator—deli meat, condiments, vegetables. “All right,” she said with her back to him. “I wasn’t going anywhere this afternoon, anyway.”
“Thank you.”
“You want pickles?”
“Just make it however you make it, and I’ll eat it.”
Caleb got out a screwdriver and started removing the strike plate from Carly’s doorjamb. The lock needed an upgrade, but upgrading a deadbolt was easier than installing one from scratch. No drilling, no sawdust, and not much cleanup.
Simple. With Carly, this was all pretty simple. Why couldn’t it be simple with Ellen?
But he knew the answer to that question, or at least some of it. Ellen wasn’t bored and ornery, like Carly. She had a chip on her shoulder about her house approximately the size of Texas, and Caleb didn’t think it had much to do with him, or even with the situation. He was merely the one who had to deal with it.
“Did Ellen tell you what her problem is with security?”
“Nope. Is she giving you a hard time?”
“Her default position is ‘Bite me.’ ”
Carly piled slices of salami on top of the Muenster cheese she’d started with. She made odd sandwiches, but they were usually good. “Ellen likes to do everything herself,” she said with approval.
“A one-woman island, huh?”
“Pretty much. She’s good at it, but she juggles a lot. I’m not sure she ever sits down and rests.”
Caleb had seen her rest. She’d seemed like a natural. Just how unusual had that hour on the porch last night been?
He worked the cylinder of the old lock free and dropped it to the floor. “Who was she talking to downtown?”
“Richard.”
“Her ex?”
“Yeah.”
That explained the touching. And the antagonism. “What’s he like?”
Carly gave him an inscrutable look. “He tried to pick me up at the pub once. I’d say he’s smooth as Scotch on the rocks, if you have a thing for good-looking guys whose pickup lines are all from John Donne.”
“Who?”
“A poet.” She gave the plate on the countertop a small, private smile. “You don’t need to worry about Richard.”
“Quit mocking me, Shrimp Boat. I’m not worrying about Richard. Not like you think, anyway. What I meant was, is he dangerous?”
“I know what you meant. You’re checking out the competition.”
Caleb reached for the new cylinder, wondering if that was what he’d been doing. And whether Richard Morrow was any kind of competition. “Checking out her ex is part of the job. There’s nothing between me and Ellen.”
Carly rolled her eyes. “Try again. I know what ‘nothing’ looks like on you. This is not nothing. You’re interested.”
“What’s going on with you and her brother?”
“Clumsy as ever on the misdirect, Killer, but I give you points for trying. Tell you what. I’ll go first, but then it’s your turn. Deal?”
It might help to get Carly’s opinion on the Ellen situation. He wasn’t doing such a stellar job of managing it on his own. “Deal.”
She started adding a layer of pickles to the sandwiches. “Ellen introduced us. It was your typical fairy-tale deal. He was Prince Charming. I was Cinderella. I gave him a tour of the house. I had sex with him in the laundry room, like, forty minutes after we met.”
Impulsivity had always been part of Carly’s appeal. And her Achilles’ heel.
“I fell for him. I thought … I don’t know. I was stupid. The whole thing seemed romantic. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones. We had a few good months, on again, off again. But then that picture turned up online, and he got really upset. When they found my blog, it was like he really thought about the situation we were in for the first time, and he tried to take it out on me. Like it was my fault.”
She put down the pickles and gripped the edge of the countertop hard enough to turn her knuckles white. For half a second she met his eyes, and he was shocked by the raw pain he saw there.
Then she starting slicing a tomato, and Caleb pretended not to notice she was struggling not to cry. She wouldn’t want a hug or kind words from him right now. Carly didn’t do sentimental.
“What blog?”
“It’s nothing, just part of this infertility community thing. I made friends on there. We write about … you know, everything. Sometimes when people lose babies, it’s good therapy, but most of the time we just talk about mundane stuff. Joke around. It’s like a support group. And I never used his name. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I’ve never—”
She shook her head, unwilling to continue that train of thought. With a sniffle, she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She squared her shoulders and banished the vulnerability, then looked at Caleb again. “And he yelled at me for it, the prick. So I told him to take a hike.”
Some th
ings never changed. He’d spent the better part of the past fifteen years away, seeing Carly only every now and then when he was on leave. She and her husband had been living in Westerville, a bedroom community of Columbus that was a fifty-minute drive from Camelot. Caleb had e-mailed her, talked to her on the phone sometimes, but their friendship had mostly lapsed until he’d moved back home.
But here they were in Nana’s kitchen, and she was dealing with being kicked in the heart the same way she had when her prom date dumped her for another girl—just as brave, and just as fierce.
“You want him back?”
“Hell, no.”
Just as stubborn, too.
“Your turn, champ,” she said. “What’s the deal with you and Ellen?”
Caleb tried on the new strike plate for size. Too big. He reached for a chisel. “She came on to me last night.”
“Ellen did? Seriously?”
“Not like she climbed onto my lap or anything. There was just this … moment. Like a moment of opportunity, okay? An invitation. But I didn’t take it.”
“Why not?”
He frowned. Wasn’t it obvious? “I’m supposed to be protecting her.”
“So?”
“So I can’t sleep with her.”
“Because?”
“Because it would be unethical.”
Carly put their plates on the table. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Go wash your hands.”
Caleb ignored her and fit the new strike plate into the space he’d opened up for it. Finishing the installation was a two-minute job, so he did it while Carly stared at him.
There was nothing stupid about thinking it would be unethical to take Ellen to bed. Was there?
No. He was trying to do the honorable thing. The practical thing.
He put his tools away and washed his hands. At the table, he took a bite out of his sandwich. As he’d expected, it was weird. She’d used two different kinds of bread, and he must have been looking somewhere else when she’d put potato chips in it. Who did that?
“What’s so stupid about it?”
She lifted the bread off the top of her own sandwich and stuck in a few more chips. He must have made a face, because she said, “What? It wasn’t crunchy enough.”
Then she leaned forward and pinned him in place with her keen blue eyes. “You’re not Ellen’s personal bodyguard, right? You got hired to keep photographers off her lawn. It’s not as if there are assassins with nunchucks after her. You’ve got the guys at the end of the driveway, you make her lock the doors at night, and who the hell cares what the two of you get up to between the sheets? It’s not like you signed a contract promising not to sleep with her.”
It was certainly a different way of looking at the situation.
He took another bite of the sandwich, which was actually pretty good. Tasty, even.
Caleb didn’t like thinking of his role as basically that of a human NO TRESPASSING sign, but Carly had a point about the nunchucks. Compared to what he’d done in the army, this job was a cakewalk, with next to no potential for physical danger. Yes, there was Plimpton—if that guy was even the felon Plimpton, and not some completely different person—but all the evidence so far suggested Plimpton was here to take pictures, just like the others. The folks outside Ellen’s house had no reason to hurt her or anybody else. They just wanted to make money off the scandal surrounding Carly and Jamie. Ellen was right—she wasn’t interesting to these people.
And Carly was right that his mission was to put measures in place to keep the danger at bay, not to provide personal, physical protection. He’d told Ellen two or three times that he wasn’t a bodyguard. On this job he didn’t even carry a weapon, because he’d been instructed not to. Jamie Callahan didn’t want guns anywhere in the vicinity of his nephew.
Nor did Caleb’s contract with Breckenridge say a thing about how he was meant to conduct himself on duty. Nothing in writing specified he couldn’t have a personal relationship with Ellen, any more than it said he couldn’t have lunch with Carly.
Breckenridge expected him to use his judgment, same as the army had. He’d been promoted to command his own platoon on the basis of his ability to lead from the front and make sound decisions.
Could he protect Ellen and pursue a relationship with her at the same time?
He’d assumed the two goals were incompatible because in the army he’d get his ass handed to him if he’d even looked sideways at a woman under his protection, whether she was a fellow soldier or a detainee.
But this wasn’t the army. This was Camelot, Ohio.
Jamie Callahan wanted Carly and his family kept safe and out of the tabloids. That was Caleb’s mission. He wouldn’t let harm come to any of them. But provided he didn’t let his attraction distract him from the mission, where was the harm in getting close to Ellen?
Of course, since yesterday morning, he’d rejected her, pissed her off by walking all over her objections, and sent a crew to do work on her house without her permission. By the time he saw her again, she might not be all that eager to get cozy.
He polished off the sandwich and looked up. Carly was watching him, her hands folded over her protruding stomach.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“What?”
“All those rusty wheels grinding around in your head as you try to relearn how to think for yourself.”
Carly liked to remind him that soldiers were mindless drones whenever she got the chance. “Very funny, Short Round.” He stood up. “Thanks for lunch.”
For a pregnant woman she moved fast, blocking him with her belly before he could cross the threshold. “Don’t even think about leaving without saying, ‘You’re right, Carly.’ ”
Giving her his best confused look, he asked, “What are you right about?”
“Ellen.”
He smiled. “Get out of my way, Carly. I’ve got work to do.”
Watching Caleb saunter down the driveway, Carly brushed off her hands.
There. Good deed for the day: done and done.
Caleb obviously had the hots for Ellen. Ellen just as obviously had the hots for Caleb. Now they could get their rocks off, and Carly would get bonus points from the Universal Matchmaker for hooking them up. Some day, after baby Wombat was born and she’d lost her pregnancy weight, the Universal Matchmaker would send her somebody to love in exchange. Fair was fair.
The Wombat kicked, and she rubbed the contact spot on her belly. “Yeah, I know. That’ll be the day, eh, kid?”
Love didn’t play fair, and Carly had never believed in any power beyond herself. She made her own luck. Just lately, she’d made herself an impressively shitty streak.
She returned to the kitchen and started gathering up the dishes and putting away all the sandwich fixings. It still felt weird to be in this kitchen without Nana. Like Nana was the kitchen, and without her here, Carly was bumbling around in an empty shell. She didn’t feel big enough to fill the place up.
“Good thing I’m getting bigger every day. Pretty soon, I’ll be spilling out the windows like Alice in Wonderland.”
The Wombat had no comment. Maybe he—or she—had gone to bed. Like a cat, the Wombat took a lot of naps, awakening primarily to kick her in uncomfortable places or, just as she was drifting off to sleep, to get the hiccups for forty-five minutes. Because there was nothing quite so sleep-inducing as a torso full of Mexican jumping beans.
She squirted soap into the sink and began running some warm water over the dirty plates and her breakfast cereal bowl.
She’d told Nana she was going to buy a dishwasher, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, any more than she could bring herself to replace Nana’s radioactive-green dish soap with something environmentally friendly. It didn’t feel right to change anything, not when this was the only home she’d ever known. She wanted to preserve it like a museum so the Wombat could grow up here, surrounded by all of Nana’s things.
As if her grandmother’s love had s
oaked into the walls and the cabinets and the carpeting. The Wombat could breathe it in, but only so long as Carly didn’t throw away Nana’s collection of chipped coffee cups or her huge-ass microwave from 1987.
If Baby Wombat was indeed ever born—and Carly still had a hard time believing that a living, breathing human baby was at the end of this bizarre ride known as pregnancy—she figured she could use all the help she could get.
Two months to go, and she’d be a mother. You’d think it would have sunk in by now. She’d wanted this for so long—couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t wanted it—and now that it was actually happening, she often felt as though it were happening to someone else.
Some of her online infertility friends had warned her about this strange period of unreality called pregnancy. The battle to conceive became all-consuming, and then it happened, and you didn’t know what to do with yourself or how to think anymore. Your head space got completely warped by the experience of being not-pregnant.
It had certainly warped her marriage. The endless blood draws and progesterone injections took a lot out of even the most solid, dedicated, mutually infatuated couples, and she and Mitch hadn’t been one of those. Not by the end, at any rate, and probably not even on the day she married him.
The other dads-to-be had shown up for appointments with books and iPhones and crossword puzzles, offering their quiet, steadfast support to the women they loved. Mitchell hadn’t shown up at all, but he had unfailingly offered color commentary as he’d plunged that 22-gauge needle in her ass.
Christ, honey, this is depressing. How much longer are you going to keep this shit up?
I’m running out of places to stick this thing, babe. Pause. Chuckle. That’s what she said.
Holy crap, Carly, did you know this syringe was made by a company called Wang? That’s just all kinds of wrong.
At least he wasn’t the Wombat’s biological father. After refusing tests and putting her through three years of Clomid hot flashes and headaches, Mitchell had finally consented to have his sperm checked out, only to confirm her suspicion that she wasn’t the only one with second-rate reproductive organs.