by Ruthie Knox
“No, don’t do that. I like this guy. He’s …”
What?
Pushy. Domineering. Too confident by half.
Funny. Kind. Sexy.
The problem with Caleb was that he pushed all her buttons. He wanted to protect her, to mess with her house and her life in order to make her and Henry safer, and she probably needed to let him. To admit he was right. To change.
She didn’t like that.
And he pushed other buttons, too. Caleb made her yearn, and she didn’t want to yearn anymore, not ever again. She’d had enough of twisting herself into pretzel shapes to please men who made her feel small and unwanted. Enough of offering herself body and soul to guys who were all wrong for her.
Only, maybe he wasn’t one of those. She’d thought so when she met him yesterday, but now … the way he’d looked at her, touched her. The way he’d stood behind her and offered his help without any pressure, almost wordlessly. Protecting her, but not like a security guard. With one hand on her body, he’d held her there like a lover. He’d claimed her in front of her ex-husband.
And God help her, she’d liked it.
“He’s the right person for the job,” she said finally. “He knows what he’s doing.”
I don’t, though.
“Well, at least one thing’s going right. Oh, just a sec—”
Someone’s muffled voice came over the phone, and she heard Jamie say faintly, “What time?” and then, after a moment, “Now?” Then he was back on the line. “I’ve gotta go. I have a meeting in five, and it’s going to take ten to get there. I’ll call you back this weekend, okay?”
“Sure. Just … think about Carly, okay?”
“I hardly ever think about anything else. Later, Ellen.”
“Bye.”
After she disconnected the call, she looked down at the giant mound of celery she’d sliced—enough for eight salads. Multitasking had never been her strong suit.
She had to decide. To make up her mind about whether she wanted the lights, the alarm. Whether she wanted Caleb.
It had been so long since she wanted anything at all, she didn’t know how to decide.
After a moment’s consideration, she made up her mind to watch her movie. Bogey and Bacall always seemed to know what they wanted. Maybe it would rub off.
Chapter Eleven
“I have to go out. You want pizza for dinner?” Caleb asked. “I’m going to pick a few up at the Cove, and I could drop one off for you.”
“Where are you going?” Katie twisted a silver ring around and around her thumb. A nervous habit. Caleb recognized it from her television-watching weeks, and he looked at her more closely. She’d been doing a lot better lately—so much so that he’d almost forgotten to worry about her. But tonight, something was off. She’d been quieter than usual since he got home this afternoon, and here came the twisting.
“I’m headed over to Ellen’s,” he said.
“Oh, reeeally. And why, may I ask, are you going to Ellen’s again tonight?”
“It’s not that. I was trying to get her to install security lights, but she wouldn’t agree, and now I have to make good on my threat to stand guard on her porch.”
“When are you supposed to sleep?”
Caleb scrubbed his hand over his face. “Maybe I won’t sleep. But I’m hoping she’ll cave by midnight.”
“Not me. I hope she keeps you out there all night. That would be hilarious.”
“Thanks.” Part of him wanted to ask Katie what was the matter, but it didn’t usually work to be that direct with her. If she wanted to talk to him, she would have to be the one to say something. “So do you want a pizza or not?” He picked up his keys and his wallet off the phone table. “I need to get moving.”
“I’ll walk with you. I can carry the pizza.”
He waited.
“I have to talk to you,” she muttered.
“Okay.” He opened the door. “After you, Katelet.”
He kept the conversation light on the short walk over to the Cove, a dank hole-in-the-wall that had long been a Camelot institution. The Cove sold greasy take-out pizza and offered customers their choice of two ancient video games to pass the time until their orders came up. Caleb got a couple of bucks’ worth of quarters and waited until they’d settled into their customary Ms. Pac-Man duel before he asked, “So what’s up?”
Katie ran Ms. Pac-Man straight into the blue ghost, which was when he knew for sure this would be bad. His sister was crazy-talented at Ms. Pac-Man. Usually, she kicked his ass.
She turned around to lean on the machine and stare at her Keds.
One afternoon when she was thirteen, he’d brought her here to play Ms. Pac-Man and told her he was joining the army. She’d started to cry—ugly, snuffling sobs—and there had been nothing he could do. He hadn’t seen her cry since she was a baby. It had shocked him. He’d patted her on the back and bought her a Cherry Coke, feeling thoroughly out of his league.
It was tough to figure out how to help Katie. He couldn’t predict her moods or guess what was bothering her. He still didn’t know what had gone down in Alaska.
He didn’t know what to say to her right now.
She took a deep breath.
“You know you’re the only person in the family who’s never asked me what happened with Levi?”
Caleb shrugged and moved the joystick, eyes on the screen. “I figured if you wanted me to know, you’d say something.”
“I haven’t told anybody.”
“Yeah,” he said, pausing between screens to take a drink from the Styrofoam cup he’d perched on top of the game. “I got that impression.”
Katie looked at her shoes again and went back to twisting her ring. “I’m married,” she said.
At first, he didn’t respond because his brain couldn’t figure out what to do with the information. She wasn’t seeing anyone—and he would know, because she lived at his house and worked in his office. His fingers went slack on the joystick as he tried to puzzle it out, and Ms. Pac-Man bit the dust with a sound like a shot from a digital laser.
And then it clicked. This wasn’t recent news. This was the past she’d been hiding. “To Levi?”
She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “It wasn’t a real marriage. He proposed one night when we were both half drunk. We only did it to get residency, because we couldn’t afford the tuition otherwise. And even married, we could only afford for one of us to go at a time. Which is why—”
She glanced at him and faltered. He tried to make his face do something less rigid and foreboding, but every muscle in his body seemed to have frozen.
Katie was married to Levi. Presently. Right this second.
“Where is he?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I ran into his mom at the post office, and it would seem he’s in California. I thought he was in Tibet. He told me he was going to Tibet. When he left. I mean, he didn’t actually tell me, but he left me this note, and the note said he was going to Tibet, and he wished me luck, only he took all the money, so it wasn’t as if luck was going to be much help—”
“Jesus Christ.” Caleb smacked the flat of his palm into the side of the video game hard enough to knock his drink off the top, spilling crushed ice and water all over the cheap red carpet. Katie went down on her knees and started pushing the mess back into the cup with her hand, as if there were some way she could prevent the water from soaking in.
“Leave it.”
She didn’t, and he couldn’t stand to see her there, looking like she was doing some kind of penance. He found her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Leave it.”
“Clark?”
A teenager with a shaved head and several ounces of metal in his face slid their pizzas onto the counter. Caleb looked at him without really seeing him, and the kid shuddered.
“Caleb,” Katie whispered, giving his hand a squeeze with her cold, wet fingers. “Get the pizzas.”
Moving stiffly, he pulled his wallet out
of his pocket and paid. When he had the pizza boxes in hand, he turned and walked out the door.
Married. His baby sister.
He didn’t know why it should make a difference. She’d lived up north with Levi for almost a decade, first in a ramshackle apartment with cinder-block bookcases, later in a ramshackle house that Katie had done her best to turn into a home. He’d visited them up there, had even learned how to fly fish from Levi. He’d liked the guy all right, accepting him as Katie’s choice. Levi was a little flaky, a happy-go-lucky type. Good with the customers he guided on raft trips and taught how to kayak.
Caleb had liked him.
She followed him up the hill, across the campus toward Ellen’s house, walking a step or two behind him. He wanted to tell her she didn’t have to trail after him like that, but he was too worked up to talk.
Married him. She’d married Levi. The word was stuck in his head, and he couldn’t get past it, even though it was probably the least important thing she’d told him.
Married him, and he’d used her, cleaned her out, and left her.
At the top of a steep, grassy hill, Caleb stopped abruptly. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“What? When?”
“When he left! Christ, Katie, you got married, you put him through college, ran a business with him, and then he stole all your money and went to Tibet? And you didn’t fucking think it might be a good idea to call?” His voice slipped the track and rose to a shout on the last word.
She flinched, and he sucked in a deep breath. He was too amped up, yelling at his sister as if she were the one who’d done something wrong.
“You were in Iraq,” she said cautiously.
Caleb dropped the pizzas and turned away from her expression. He walked ten feet away from her, twenty, and found a tree to kick as hard as he could.
“That fucking low-life scumbag son of a bitch,” he said. He managed not to shout it. The words came out more of a tortured mutter. “What an asshole.”
Katie followed him. He heard her shoes shushing over the grass as she came up behind him.
“If you’d called me when he left, I’d have found him, and I’d have fucking killed him,” he said to her feet.
“Well, that’s one reason I didn’t tell you.”
When he turned around and looked at her, really looked, he saw that her eyes were big and round and wet-looking, her mouth flat and trembling. She looked like a PFC about to engage the enemy for the first time. Scared shitless, but holding up.
How had he let himself become the enemy in this scenario? Yelling at his sister for telling him what had happened to her—what the hell was wrong with him?
“Jesus,” Caleb said, pulling her into a rough hug and smoothing her hair with one hand the way he’d done when she was thirteen years old and she’d sobbed herself hoarse at the thought of him going away to get shot at. “You should’ve called,” he said into the top of her head. “I know I couldn’t have come right away, but I would have come as soon as I could. I would’ve helped you.”
She gave him a minute to hold her before she pulled away, patting his chest. Her eyes were dry. “I know,” she said. “Thanks. I did okay on my own.” Bending down, she picked up the half-crushed pizza boxes and said, “Come on.”
They walked the rest of the way to Burgess in silence. Caleb handed off a pizza to each of the security teams and got an update on the situation, which hadn’t changed.
When they reached the porch they found Ellen’s door standing open, the screen door closed but unlocked. No one answered when Caleb rapped on the jamb. He tried not to let that get him all riled up again, but his body didn’t cooperate particularly well.
Katie handed Caleb a slice of pepperoni from one of the remaining boxes. They sat on the steps together.
“So I think I need a divorce,” she said.
“Think he’s got any money to pay alimony? He owes you.”
“I doubt it. Even if he does, I don’t want it.”
“But you might need it some day.”
“I won’t. I’ve got you.”
Caleb turned to look at her, surprised.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t assume—”
“No, don’t be sorry. You’ve got me,” he said. “I’m glad you know that.”
It helped ease the ache in his chest when he thought of his baby sister, drawn across the country by a man who’d used her and then left her behind like she was worthless. He wanted to tell her what she was worth, but she wouldn’t be interested in hearing it from him. It wasn’t how the two of them operated.
“Well, anyway,” she said. “I don’t even know where Levi lives, and I promised to go out to see his mom soon, so I guess I’m going to have to tell her about … everything. And ask her for Levi’s address. But then I was thinking I want to, you know, move on with my life. I think I need a lawyer. If you still want to help, maybe you could help me with that?”
Caleb reached over to squeeze her shoulder. “Yeah, I can help you with that.”
They ate together on Ellen’s porch. Katie gazed down the driveway, looking lost and far away. Caleb tried to imagine what she was feeling, but it was impossible.
“Thanks,” she said after a while.
“What for?” He hadn’t done anything.
“For being awesome.” Her smile didn’t quite make it.
“Listen, if there’s anything you need me to do for you—anything at all—”
“I know.” She tipped to the side and rested her head against his arm. “You’re already doing enough.”
Chapter Twelve
He scared her half to death. Ellen was walking through from the kitchen, about to take the stairs up to her office loft, when she spotted Caleb on the front porch, leaning against the siding. He wore his soldier face, presiding over two squished-looking pizza boxes by his feet.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, rather pointlessly. He was doing precisely what he’d said he would do. No doubt he always did.
“Keeping the Huns out of your house. You left the door wide open, and you didn’t even lock the screen. Where have you been?”
“I went for a quick walk in the woods with Carly,” she said, stepping onto the porch. “But we stuck close to home. Zero danger, cross my heart. Except from heat stroke.”
The urge to make excuses annoyed her. She still hadn’t promised not to leave the house; he still hadn’t asked her to promise. The woods were mostly on her property, and she’d never encountered another soul back there.
And this time, she hadn’t even been trying to antagonize Caleb. All she’d wanted to do was to watch her movie. Carly had come over three minutes into it and begged and whined until Ellen gave in and agreed to take another walk with her.
She glanced at the glass of ice water she’d carried through from the kitchen. “You want something to drink?”
He crossed his arms and shook his head. “Did anybody take your picture?”
“Nobody even saw us.”
He made a face, sort of half-amused, half-resigned disgust. Like a guy who fed a stray dog all his best table scraps and pretended to mind. Such a male face.
“What are you smiling at?” he asked.
“Nothing. Do you even own shorts?”
“Sure. But I’m working.”
“This is not in your job description.”
“You might be surprised.”
She mirrored his posture, leaning against the house opposite him. Something in the set of his jaw, the intensity of his mood, made her want to tease him. This wasn’t the Caleb she was used to. He needed lightening up. “Is that your best guard stance, all slumped like that?”
“No, this is my defeated stance. It’s for when I’ve given up hope of protecting the women I’m supposed to be taking care of.”
“Really? You look very relaxed. Not at all defeated.”
“I’m good at pretending. On the inside, I’m a wreck.”
She smiled at him, and after a moment he rewarded h
er with a reluctant version of his sexy smirk.
“We really were perfectly safe this time.”
“There’s no such thing as perfectly safe.”
Ellen lifted her knee and planted one foot against the siding. “Don’t be such a downer. I can’t handle negativity tonight. I had another death-march day.”
“Me, too.”
“Oh, yours couldn’t possibly have been as bad as mine.”
“No?”
“I snuck out for the first time in my life this morning, and I got caught.”
“The first time in your life?”
“And then I ran into my ex-husband, which I try very hard never to do, and he called me ‘Els’ and told me he wanted to see more of me and Henry, which is nightmarishly bad.”
“ ‘Els’ is a really terrible nickname,” Caleb said with an agreeable nod, and she was grateful for the levity. There had been so little of it today.
“And then this big, angry man showed up and drilled holes in my house—”
“And played with your kid for an hour.”
“—and gave my son all kinds of ideas about how he should get his own screwdriver, and maybe a drill for his birthday. And this obnoxious guy sent circus-freak workmen over to make even larger holes in my house without my permission—”
Caleb pointed his index finger, a pistol of emphasis, and said, “Because he’s trying to keep you safe, despite your stubbornness.”
Ellen smiled and let her eyes drift to her trail shoes. “And you’re not going to believe this, but he hit on me. It was so weird, and unbelievably badly timed—”
“You loved it, too.”
“It was completely gross. And all I wanted to do tonight was watch The Big Sleep in the dark, in my room, and pretend to be Lauren Bacall, but instead Carly made me go for a walk, and now you’re probably going to give me a lecture.”
“I’d rather give you a spanking.”
The thought made her snort, even as it gave her a naughty thrill. “Just so we know where we stand.”
When she dared to look up, he was grinning at her. “I’m standing right here, trying to figure out why I haven’t kissed you yet.”