by Ruthie Knox
A sensible person might have concluded that a biologically related child wasn’t in the cards, but nobody had ever accused Carly of being sensible, and Mitch seemed to take the sperm motility number as a personal affront to his manliness. She went through three rounds of IVF with donated sperm and a husband who cracked tasteless jokes and skipped appointments. Mitch lost forty pounds and bought a new wardrobe. At some point in the middle of round three, he told her it was their last hurrah. He didn’t want to do it anymore.
Then it worked.
Then he left.
Two months after she finally succeeded in getting pregnant with another man’s sperm—clinic-approved, cleaned, and sanitized, thankyouverymuch—Mitch packed two bags and jetted off to screw surfer girls in Baja.
Good riddance, Nana had said when Carly told her. And Carly had cried. But the tears didn’t last as long as she’d expected.
She ought to have known better than to have married a man named Mitchell. It was like marrying a Duane or a Conrad. Born losers, all of them. Marrying Mitch had been a form of late-adolescent rebellion. At twenty-two, she’d taken the plunge into matrimony as a way of thumbing her nose at Nana’s Second Wave feminist stance on patriarchy.
Stupid of her to try to rebel. She should have used Nana’s life as a template. Her grandmother had more fun than anybody Carly had ever met. If she’d followed Nana’s lead, maybe she’d be in Amsterdam right now with some hot guy named Sven, working her way through the Kama Sutra positions one at a time, instead of pregnant and trapped in Nana’s house with Caleb Clark for a protector.
She gave the Wombat a pat. “Don’t take it personal, Wombat. I still want you.” Before Jamie, her life had focused down to the point that the Wombat was the only thing she’d wanted. Jamie had helped remind her there were other things in life than babies and needles, scumbag husbands and online friendships.
Sex, for example. Fun. Music.
She pulled a plate from the soapy water in the sink and began to wash.
At least on the name front, she’d done better with Jamie Callahan. Not that he was marriage material, but he did have a great name. A girl could be confident that a guy named Jamie Callahan would show her a good time.
And oh, man, had he ever shown her some good times. Once, he’d even made her see stars—honest-to-goddamn stars circling her head after a colossal orgasm, and he hadn’t even been nailing her into the headboard. Jamie had been far too considerate of her delicate condition to nail her into anything. It hadn’t kept him from nailing her, over and over again, but he’d been a real sweetheart about it. A raunchy, clever, dirty-minded sweetheart.
She took her hands out of the warm dishwater and dried them off so she could fan her face. Bad idea to think about Jamie. Thinking about Jamie either made her hot or it made her cry, and sometimes it did both at the same time. She’d almost cried in front of Caleb, which would have sucked. Caleb had never seen her cry, and he wasn’t going to. He was a good guy and a good friend, but he wasn’t that sort of friend.
Jamie was that sort of friend.
“Oh, shut up,” she told herself, exasperated. Jamie was over. The fight they’d had about her blog was stupid, but it had needed to happen.
Jamie Callahan smiled like a god, and he had some fantastic moves in the sack. He’d made her laugh like she hadn’t laughed in years. And for four incredible months, he’d made her dancing-in-the-fucking-tulips happy. But he was the kind of boy you played around with for a little while and then sighed over after he broke your heart. He wasn’t serious.
Jamie had been Impulsive Mistake #786, the latest in a lifetime of failures to look before she leapt. She’d sailed over the cliff, thinking, despite knowing better, that maybe this guy would catch her, because she really was a complete moron. Naturally, she’d broken both legs.
“De nada,” she told the Wombat. “That’s Spanish. You say it to mean ‘You’re welcome,’ but it really means, ‘It’s nothing.’ Learned that from my worthless prick of a husband.”
It’s nothing. The bruised heart. The memories that weren’t fading yet. The way she’d cry whenever one of Jamie’s songs came on the radio. De nada.
“Don’t you worry about Mama, Wombat. When you’ve taken as many falls as I have, you learn to pick yourself up and dust off your own butt.”
The Wombat acknowledged this wisdom by kicking her in the kidneys.
“Ugh.” She rubbed her back with one hand as she put the last plate on the draining board. “Dish it out, you little weenie. I can take it.”
She could take it. She could take getting kicked by the Wombat and losing Jamie and a thousand times worse if she had to.
And if sometimes, late at night, she wished she didn’t have to, well, tough.
She made her own luck.
Chapter Nine
“Sweetie, that fire truck is huge, and you haven’t played with it for a week. You’re not taking it to Grammy Maureen’s house.”
“Henry take that one.”
“No, not that one either.”
Ellen scooped her son’s last four clean T-shirts out of the drawer and added them to the bag. The Thursday afternoon packing-for-Grammy’s had simplified as Henry grew out of the tiny-baby stage, but it remained a challenge due to his newfound desire to “help” by bringing her countless precious objects that he insisted had to come with him. Tongs from the kitchen. All of his fire trucks from the living room play area. The plunger from the bathroom. No, no, and eww.
She zipped the bag shut before he could come up with anything else and carried it out to drop it beside the front door, where she saw a man standing behind the screen.
This time, it wasn’t Caleb. It was an older guy in a blue uniform shirt that said “Bill” over the breast pocket, and behind him the tallest, skinniest, palest, Abraham-Lincoln-lookingest sidekick she’d ever laid eyes on.
“Hello!” Bill said cheerily. “You must be Mrs. Callahan. We’re going to have to shut off the power for a while to get these lights installed, and then for the alarm we’ll have to turn it on and off a few times. Can you show me the way to the master switch, or do I need to have a poke around myself?”
Henry meandered out of his room, caught sight of the strangers, and wrapped his arms around Ellen’s bare leg.
“You—” she began. “What—”
Scrambling. Her brain was half a beat from figuring out what was going on, but apparently her emotional intelligence had an edge, because emotionally she’d already moved on from confusion to irritation, and something like full-blown outrage waited not so patiently in the wings.
“Not to worry. A lot of women don’t know where to find the shut-off. We’ll have a look ourselves. You’ll just want to turn off the television and computers and such before we flip it.” He reached for the handle on the screen door and pulled it open a few feet.
“Out,” she managed to say, her voice thick and choked. “Get off my porch.”
“Mrs. Callahan?”
Her thinking brain caught up. “You’re not installing any lights on my house. Or any alarm system. Get off my porch. Please.” She picked up Henry, opened the screen door, and stepped outside. Bill and the Human Cadaver eased back to the top step. Bill’s jovial smile had faded slightly. He plucked a piece of paper from his pocket and inspected it, then looked up at her house number.
“This is 334 Burgess, isn’t it? Mr. Clark sent us here to do the installation. Said it was a rush job, had to be done today.”
She pitched her voice as close to civil as she could manage—which wasn’t terribly close—and said, “This is not Mr. Clark’s house. It’s mine. You don’t have my permission to install anything, nor do you have my permission to continue standing on my porch. This is the third and final time I’m going to ask you to get off my property. If you’re not gone in five seconds, I’m going to call the police and tell them you’re trespassing. Is that clear?”
Bill and the circus freak backed all the way down the steps. “Yes, ma’a
m, that’s clear. I’ll just call Mr. Clark.”
“It won’t make any difference.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder as he scuttled to the work van. “We’ll call Caleb,” he said, loud enough so she knew she was meant to hear it, and then both of them ducked inside and left her standing on her front porch, hand on one hip, toddler on the other. Glowering.
“Cabe is?” Henry asked, unaffected by her mood.
“I don’t know, Peanut, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out.”
The van backed past the Camelot Security SUV to park on the street, and then the workmen and the security men formed a huddle near the bottom of the driveway, talking to one another and looking up at her intermittently, as if she were the enemy and they needed to regroup to come up with a superior plan of attack.
Bring on the cannons, fellas. Bring on the catapult, and that big log thing they use to bust down the doors. She was in the mood to fight for her castle. Hell, she was in the mood to dump a big cauldron of tar on the handsomest, most annoying man in Camelot, Ohio.
Henry was in the mood to get down. “Play with the chalk,” he said.
“You want your sidewalk chalk?”
“Yas.”
So she got out the bucket of sidewalk chalk, checking first to make sure the spot where they settled wouldn’t be visible to any stray photographers in the cul-de-sac. She and Henry drew pictures on the asphalt, which wasn’t the best rage-sustaining activity. Toddlers did have a way of puncturing a good rage.
Funny thing, that—how hard it was to hold on to anger around Henry, and how hard it had been to stay upset with Caleb when he’d shown up at her house with a box of tools, looking sexy as sin in jeans and an olive T-shirt that clung to his chest. Making her heart beat too fast. Paying more attention to her son than Richard ever had.
When she’d gotten close to him to reclaim Henry, he’d smelled like sawdust and brass, and she hadn’t been able to figure out what to look at, where to put her hands, what to say to him. She’d felt so irrationally betrayed, and so annoyed with herself for feeling that way, that she hadn’t even been able to meet his eyes.
He’d been completely unaffected. Installing the damn deadbolts over her objections, without reading the instructions, and entertaining her son while he was at it. She’d found herself tempted to toss him a few bowling pins, to see if he could juggle, too. See if there was any job he couldn’t handle.
It was only business between them. She knew that. He had a job to do, and she had to either let him do it or fire him. Instead, she kept fluttering around, a bird without talons. Screeching at him but doing next to nothing to stop him.
And all the while, admiring him. His decisiveness. His competence. His body.
Human biology was such a cruel joke.
Henry made her draw a rainbow, a pot of gold, a leprechaun, and a goat. All but the first were well outside her artistic skill set. Ellen looked up from time to time at the scrum of men at the end of her driveway and nurtured her resentment, but somehow she felt as though the battle had already been lost.
“What’s that, a giraffe?”
Caleb. Damn it, she hadn’t heard him coming. She got to her feet in a hurry, but man, he was tall. And unruffled. And sexy. And she was once again at a disadvantage, her legs streaked with green chalk dust, her pathetic attempt at a leprechaun visible for all the world to see.
“Get them out of here,” she demanded.
“Who?”
“Bill and What’s-His-Name. You’re not installing lights on my house, and you’re not installing an alarm system, either.”
“No,” he said, slowly. “Bill and Matthias are going to do that.”
“I can’t believe you. I made my views on this perfectly clear last night, and they haven’t—” Her train of thought derailed. “His name is Matthias?”
Caleb smiled. “Yep. He has a sister named Millicent. She’s even taller.”
“That’s horrible. His mother must be very cruel. Or insane.”
“Artsy,” he explained. “I think she wanted to make sure they’d stand out from the crowd.”
“That man would stand out anywhere. Except maybe at a Lincoln convention in a stovepipe hat.”
He chuckled, and she covered her mouth with her hand, horrified. She was making him laugh. She was a hair’s breadth away from flirting with him, again, now, when she was supposed to be tipping cauldrons of tar off the battlements onto his head. For heaven’s sake.
She tried again. “Get them out of here, Clark, or I’m calling the police.”
He sobered, showed her his palm with the thumb tucked over his pinky. “Three lights. One over each of the two entrances that don’t have them, one outside your bedroom window. They only come on if something moves outside, and even then only for a couple minutes before they shut themselves back off.”
“No.”
“You can leave the alarm system off during the day. All you have to do is hit one button to turn it on at night and another one to turn it off in the morning. It doesn’t even beep.”
“No.”
“Your house is not safe.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Anyone could walk in at any time.”
“But no one will. This is Camelot, Clark. The whole entire point of living in a village of two thousand people in central Ohio is that you can leave your doors open during the day, and you don’t have to have security lights and alarm systems.”
Even as she said it, she knew she was being unreasonable. Three new lights and an alarm system—it wasn’t exactly armed guards on every door, or even the Secret Service–type guys in blazers who followed Jamie around backstage when he did a show. It was middle ground. Ceding it would not mean she’d lost the whole war.
But the sound of Caleb cutting holes in her doors earlier had set her nerves on edge. She’d felt as if she were walking around naked. Turned inside out. Exposed.
It was the principle of the thing. Having decisions made for her, being told she needed Caleb, she needed anybody, messed with her head.
It was Richard.
Richard had manipulated her, controlled her, used her to feel better about himself. He’d always been telling her what she meant and what she thought, what she ought to think. Patronizing her. Pitying her. Pushing her around with words and helpful suggestions and veiled put-downs.
She didn’t want her house tampered with—didn’t want her life tampered with. Not when it had taken her this long to get it all just the way she liked it. She’d had to fight so hard for her independence, she barely remembered how to yield, and she didn’t want to have to learn all over again.
Caleb folded his arms over his chest. It hadn’t gotten any less broad since she last looked at it. His biceps hadn’t gotten any smaller, either. At some point after he left her house, he’d ditched the jeans and T-shirt for dark slacks and a pale gray dress shirt with white pinstripes. The sleeves were rolled up in deference to the heat, which gave her a rather delectable view of his forearms, ropy with muscle and sprinkled with dark hair.
She was a pervert. Only a pervert would get turned on by forearms at a time like this.
“This is a special situation,” he said. “There are enough strangers in town to fill all the rooms at the Camelot Inn, and most of them have press cards and deadlines and an insatiable curiosity about your brother. A curiosity that might extend to you and your son if they get desperate enough for a story.”
He had a point, but she was in no mood to hear it. Or she hadn’t been, until a minute ago.
Perhaps he sensed her weakening, because he said, “Let’s negotiate.”
That snapped her out of the forearm trance and brought her eyes to his face. “You’re in no position to negotiate. You have nothing I want.”
The smirk returned. “Nothing?”
Oh, you cocky bastard. “Nothing.”
“I had something you wanted last night.”
“Says who?”
He steppe
d closer. Close enough for her to see his mid-afternoon stubble and to wonder how he’d broken his nose. Whether he’d played football for Mount Pleasant High or gotten into a fight defending some woman’s honor in a barroom on the other side of the world. Some Chiclet.
Not a hearth-and-home guy, Ellen reminded herself. Carly had told her Caleb was a player. He certainly had the charm for it. The confidence that was almost arrogance.
“You wanted me to kiss you,” he murmured.
“In your dreams.”
His eyes were black and daring. Daring her to do what, exactly? There were four men watching them from the bottom of her driveway, and anyway, Caleb wasn’t attracted to her. She was cheesecake. Better if I don’t.
“I think you still want it.” He had a bedroom voice, a low rumble designed for exchanging dirty secrets in close quarters. It made her go all shivery.
She did want it. She really, really did. But she didn’t want to want it, and he’d turned her down, and it was just plain mean of him to be changing the rules now. “You’re an insensitive, pig-headed jerk,” she said. The statement came out kind of breathy and needy.
“You’re gorgeous.”
She blinked. Opened her mouth. Looked down. Henry was ignoring them, pounding chalk into dust on the driveway. Her khaki shorts were smudged and five pounds too tight in the ass. Her pink T-shirt boasted of her visit to see the Butter Cow at the Ohio State Fair. There was a disposable chopstick holding her hair in a bun at the base of her neck.
Her brother was gorgeous. She was a hausfrau who would require a shower, a new wardrobe, and a haircut before she could pass for pretty.
“Quit trying to manipulate me, Clark. I don’t want an alarm system. Even if I had one, I wouldn’t set it. I’d forget to turn it on. I’d lose the stupid code. Jamie’s got one at his place, and I despise it.”
He stepped closer again, until they were almost touching. Not quite. But almost. He picked up a strand of hair that had escaped from her bun and rubbed it between his fingers. “You smell fantastic,” he said. “And I like it when your hair’s all falling down.”