by Ruthie Knox
“Fun” wasn’t the first word that had come to mind when he’d laid eyes on Ellen’s bodyguard. The first word was probably “whoa.” He would hate to meet Caleb Clark in a dark alley. Other words that had suggested themselves included “intense,” “serious,” and “tall.” Also, “surprisingly comfortable wandering around half-naked in Ellen’s kitchen.”
Plus, Caleb hadn’t sucked up at all. Not a single Jeez, it’s incredible to meet you or I have all your albums or I saw you play the Super Bowl halftime show. Instead, he’d had the balls to chew Jamie out for the way he’d treated Carly.
A month ago, he might have resented that, but these days he saw the flip side. What had he ever done to earn Caleb’s respect? Nothing. So why should he get it?
He was learning to appreciate people who had no tolerance for celebrity bullshit—or any kind of bullshit, for that matter. People like Carly.
He reached for another doughnut. It was too early in the morning to start thinking about Carly. He’d been up half the night thinking about her. He’d thought about Carly every freaking waking moment since the day he left Camelot. In a few hours, he was going to have to go over there and face her, but until then he wanted to distract himself with his sister’s love life, which couldn’t possibly be as catastrophically screwed up as his own.
“You’re going to make yourself sick if you keep eating those,” Ellen said.
“Since when do you sleep with guys for fun?”
“Do you really want to talk about my sex life?”
She was giving him her ice princess look, challenging him to drop it. She did this whenever he poked too hard at something she considered personal—turned it into a thing he wouldn’t want to know about. Anytime he’d tried to get her to talk about what a complete jackass Richard was, she’d go all, Jamie, you don’t want to hear about that. How was your concert?
Ellen liked to keep herself to herself. He’d always let her get away with it. But that was bullshit too, wasn’t it? And it seemed likely that the first step toward becoming a better man was to eliminate as much bullshit from his life as possible. Including Ellen bullshit. If she wanted to hold his hand and help him through his problems—which she most certainly did, seeing how fixing his problems was one of the great pleasures of her life—she had to tell him about hers, too. Fair was fair.
“Yeah, let’s talk about your sex life,” he said. “Is it any good?”
Her cheeks went hot pink in about three seconds. Wow. He hadn’t seen Ellen blush like that in a long, long time. Maybe not since she’d met Ricky Martin backstage when she was fifteen and spilled her drink all over his crotch.
He grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes. So do you like this guy, or is he just a plaything?”
“Jamie!”
“What? There’s nothing wrong with having a plaything. You’re all grown up, Ellen. You can have a boy toy if you want to.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“What’s gotten into you?” Besides Caleb Clark.
He was crude enough to think it, but not to say it.
“Nothing.” She stuck out her bottom lip and blew air up her face, ruffling her hair. He hadn’t seen her do that in a long time, either. Ellen was reverting to adolescence. She had it bad for this guy.
“It’s nothing,” she insisted. “Carly says he’s a womanizer. A girl-in-every-port type, you know? I just wanted to be that girl for once in my life.”
As he chugged orange juice from the plastic bottle, he studied her. Her eyes kept darting around, first to the contract, then to her hands, to his face, out the window. Either Ellen was lying to him or she was lying to herself.
“You’re having totally awesome, totally meaningless sex with your bodyguard?”
“He’s not my bodyguard, Jamie. But yes. Yes, I am.” She folded her hands primly in her lap and sat up straight, as if her posture could somehow rescue her from the moral bankruptcy of this position.
“But you don’t care about him.”
Now she wouldn’t look at him at all. “I like him,” she told her fingers. “He’s a good guy.”
“Uh-huh. And he doesn’t care about you?”
“Carly says he goes through women like Chiclets, and she’s known him since they were kids.”
“Sometimes guys like that change,” he said. “When they meet the right woman.”
She did meet his eyes then, and he was stunned to see Ellen looking almost as scared as he felt. “Who are we talking about now?”
“Definitely me,” he admitted. “But maybe your boy toy, too. He seemed pretty taken with you.” In truth, the guy hadn’t had much to say on the subject of Ellen except “yeah.” But he’d called her his girlfriend, and from what Ellen was saying, that wasn’t a role she’d asked him to audition for. Plus, when his sister came into the room last night, Jamie had been talking to Caleb, and Caleb had made this face like someone had just smacked him in the forehead with a Louisville Slugger.
Jamie recognized that look. It was exactly how he’d felt the first time he laid eyes on Carly, and every single time she’d walked into a room since then. It wasn’t a dignified look. Kind of gobsmacked. But he had enjoyed seeing Caleb go to pieces over Ellen.
“No,” she said firmly. “He knows what this is.” She was using her lawyer voice. That don’t-mess-with-me tone worked with agents and record-company executives, but Jamie had been born three minutes before Ellen, and it never worked on him.
At least now he’d figured out who she was lying to. Definitely not her big brother. Ellen didn’t seem to have the slightest idea how deep a hole she’d already dug for herself.
Jamie knew, though. He’d been at the bottom of his own personal Love-struck Idiot in Denial pit for long enough that the groundwater had seeped in and started to fill it. When he’d gotten Ellen’s message that Carly and the baby were in danger, the water level rose, and he’d been forced to start swimming. Today, he was going to get out of the damn pit, or he was going to drown.
“Tell you what,” he said with a smile. “Have another doughnut, and we can talk about my problems for a while.”
Chapter Twenty-one
By seven a.m., nearly everyone Caleb knew hated him.
With help from Katie, whom he’d dragged out of bed at around one o’clock, he’d called up every warm body he could find to work shifts on Burgess over the next twenty-four hours. They’d sent extra vehicles to both Ellen’s and Carly’s houses, posted sentries on the far back corner of each lot, and made a pair of guys start walking continuous loops around the perimeter.
The Camelot Police Department had reluctantly agreed to set up a roadblock at the stop sign a block from the cul-de-sac. After some persuading, he’d also managed to get an old friend who worked the airfield in Mount Pleasant to promise to keep him in the know about how many press planes were landing and when. Amber’s husband, Tony, had agreed to send a Mazzara Construction crew over by eight to hustle up a temporary fence around the perimeter of Ellen’s and Carly’s joined properties.
Caleb now owed favors to a lot of people.
Meanwhile, Katie had been throwing together schedules, printing out lists, programming new numbers into Caleb’s cell, and figuring out how to wake up anybody he wanted to talk to who wouldn’t pick up the phone. Which sometimes meant waking up those people’s neighbors, their siblings, or their Aunt Carol and having them do the legwork.
Half the village of Camelot met the sunrise bleary-eyed and irritable, but on alert. Caleb started another pot of coffee for Katie, showered, threw on some clothes, and toasted bagels and scrambled eggs for breakfast. He was going to need the fuel.
Katie trudged into the kitchen, still wearing her pink pajamas, slippers, and dark circles under her eyes that were totally his fault. Couldn’t be helped. He needed her.
“You look way too awake,” she said. “Don’t you even require sleep?”
In Iraq, he’d gone days without sleeping when necessary. Some far-off part of him registered
the fatigue, but it was easy to ignore. Pleasurable, even. It had been a long time since he’d had this much on his plate, and the sense of purpose, the tension, came as a relief. Such a clarifying thing, to have a mission and obvious obstacles in the way. All he had to do was take them out, one by one. “I’m fine. You going to be okay alone in the office today?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll hang in.”
Sliding a plate onto the table for Katie, he pointed her toward a chair and began shoveling in his own breakfast standing up.
“I need to head over to Burgess in a few minutes to meet Tony and the fence crew,” he said. “You want me to drop you off?”
“No, I can walk. You’d better get over there to talk to your woman before a bunch of strange men in hard hats start operating a posthole digger on her front lawn.”
“She’s going to be mad enough to spit.” He didn’t like where he’d had to leave things with Ellen last night, and when it came down to it, he didn’t like what he was about to do, either—strong-arm his way into getting that fence up whether she wanted it or not.
Who was he kidding? No way would she want it.
But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let the way he felt about Ellen interfere with the way he did the job. She needed the fence.
Katie had asked him three times in the past few hours if there was any possibility he was going overboard on the security. There was. There was a pretty strong possibility, actually. But he had a bad feeling—a feeling that told him that for every guy with a shady past who’d been skulking around the village last week, there would be a dozen more today—and he wanted to be prepared.
He’d learned never to ignore that gut-level unease. It had saved his life a few times.
“I’m sure you’ll charm your way back into her pants soon enough,” Katie said.
“Knock it off.” The rebuttal came out sharper than he’d intended, and when he looked up at Katie, she was staring at him with wide eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”
“You didn’t say! How was I supposed to know when you didn’t say?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This thing with Ellen. It isn’t casual for you, is it? You’re serious about her.”
“Yes,” he admitted. Hell, yes.
“I thought—well, you’re sleeping with her, Caleb. Don’t you think that’s a mistake, if you’re serious about her?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said she has a kid. How old?”
“He’s two. Henry.”
“So tell me this—do you want to marry Ellen Callahan and raise Henry with her? You want the whole shebang?”
He’d known Ellen for a couple of days. It shouldn’t be possible for him to answer this question yet. Shouldn’t be, but it was. Another gut feeling—that she was the right one, she and Henry. His future. “Yeah.”
Katie stood up, walked over, and smacked him on the side of the head, hard. “Then what the hell are you doing sleeping with her? Don’t you have any idea how this is supposed to work? You’re supposed to be taking her out to dinner and romancing her for, like, three months before you get her into bed. You’re supposed to respect her.”
“I do respect her.”
“No, you obviously don’t, or you’d be doing this right.”
She shoved his shoulder, and he rubbed at the side of his head. What the hell? Katie never hit him. She rarely challenged him like this, with her lips set in a white line and her hands on her hips. She looked furious.
She looked wounded, too, as if his behavior had personally offended her.
Christ, it probably had. Maybe to Katie, what he was doing with Ellen looked as screwed up as what Levi had done to her.
It wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like that. He respected Ellen, and damn it, he’d tried taking it slow. Ellen hadn’t gone along with the plan.
“I do respect her,” he said a second time. “This wasn’t my idea. She wouldn’t go out with me.”
His intentions had been pure. Pure-ish. Until Ellen walked out on the porch in those shorts and lured him inside. The memory made his lips curve into an ill-timed smile.
“Quit smiling, Caleb. This isn’t good. It’s really bad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re a booty call for this woman. She doesn’t take you seriously.”
“Sure she does.”
But he didn’t have as much confidence in the statement as he’d have liked.
Katie shook her head. “Single moms get lonely. I know—some of my friends have kids. One minute they’re young and hot, and then they have a baby and they hardly ever wash their hair anymore, and men look right through them. That’s Ellen’s life, and then you come along, Mr. Sexy Security Guard, and she thinks, ‘I can get some action, and it doesn’t have to mean a thing.’ So she leads you to bed by your dick, and of course you go for it, because you’re a guy.”
“Jesus, Katie,” he said. Frustrated, because his sister had it all wrong. Ellen was—well, hell, he didn’t know for sure. She didn’t want a boyfriend, but that didn’t mean she was using him for sex. He was going to change her mind about the whole relationship situation. He just needed some time. “That’s not what it’s like. I swear.”
Katie crossed her arms and lifted her chin. A challenge. “So ask her to dinner on Wednesday. Bet she won’t come.”
She wouldn’t. He knew better than to even ask. That wasn’t good, was it? That suggested maybe Katie knew what she was talking about. “We’re not doing Wednesday dinner again. It sucked too much last week.”
“I already invited everyone. We’re going to have a cake for Clark’s birthday.”
Amber’s oldest was turning ten. Shit. No skipping the Wednesday dinner, then. “I have to buy him a present.”
“I already got one for you. You’re going to have to wrap it, though.”
He glanced at the clock. It was already nearly eight. He had to hustle. “Thanks. I need to go. If Tony’s guys get there before I do, I’m in trouble.”
Katie’s parting jab followed him out the door. “You’re already in trouble, Buster. You’re in huge trouble.”
At eight, Jamie called up the steps to the loft, “So when do you think I should go over there?”
“Not yet. It’s too early. She could still be asleep.”
Carly would be up, no question. But she was grumpy in the morning. Ten would be better. Nana would have her fed by ten.
Ellen scrolled through her in-box and sighed. She had a lot of work to do, but it was hard to concentrate with Jamie pacing around downstairs, making her worry. Plus, there was this piercing beeping noise coming from outside, like the sound the garbage truck made when it backed up. Henry had a dump truck that made that noise, and she hated it so much she’d sent it to Grammy Maureen’s house. But this was no plastic dump truck. No, this was something big, and the beeping kept drilling her between the eyes. It was giving her a headache.
It sounded like a construction site out there. But how could that be? She didn’t have any neighbors but Carly, and if Carly were getting work done, Ellen would know about it.
A solid crack ripped through her office, followed by a big crash into the underbrush. A tree had fallen over. Unless she was very much mistaken, a tree had fallen over in her front yard. Ellen sprang out of her office chair and moved to the other side of the loft, where she could get a view out the clerestory windows.
There was a huge truck in her driveway, the back of it filled with silver chain-link and a pile of galvanized posts. Half a dozen men in hard hats and work boots were walking all over her front lawn, and they’d just felled a good-sized cottonwood tree at the property line. Caleb was standing on her leprechaun in the driveway with one hand on his hip, pointing in the direction of the downed tree and talking to a guy in an orange vest. Gesticulating like he owned the joint.
“You bastard,” she said through her teeth. “You promised me.”
I wouldn’t drea
m of it, he’d told her. Not Caleb. Caleb would never try to mess with her, push her around, manipulate her.
He wouldn’t dream of doing that. Except whenever the hell he felt like it.
She didn’t stop at the door to put on her shoes. The giant truck had somehow managed to spray gravel onto her driveway, and it bit into the soles of her feet, which made her even angrier. Her driveway was not supposed to have gravel on it. Or a giant truck. And those men were not supposed to be trampling her lawn, and—
“So help me God, if they cut down that tulip tree, I am going to kill you, Caleb. You stop them. You stop them right this second.” She stomped her foot, and a big, sharp rock stabbed her in the heel so hard she yelped and picked her foot up off the ground by instinct, holding it in both hands as she hopped around. “Ohhh, mother of all that is holy, that hurt. That really fucking hurt!”
Caleb reached out to steady her.
“No! Don’t touch me. Don’t even think about it.” She took one hand off her foot and pointed down the drive. “Tree. Deal with the tree. I planted that tree myself, and if those men cut it down I will sue the pants off you.”
“I thought you were going to kill me.”
“I’ll do that, too.”
“I’m harder to kill than you might think.”
“I’ll do it when you’re sleeping.”
Caleb’s lips twitched, amused by her threat or her fury. She wanted to squeeze his neck until his head exploded.
When he said, “That sounds like fun” and Anonymous Hard-Hat Man chuckled, she lost all semblance of control over the stream of invective coming out of her mouth.
She called Caleb every bad name she could think of, and then she did a 180 so she could call Hard Hat some names, too, but he’d wisely moved off to stop a third guy with a chainsaw from attacking her tulip tree. So she ended up spinning in a circle with her jabbing finger out, ready to poke at Caleb some more. He caught her wrist and lowered it, and for some reason she let him.
“Ellen,” he said, very quietly.
She wasn’t going to answer him. It seemed she’d run out of swear words to call him, so now she’d go the other way. She wasn’t speaking to Caleb. She was breathing at him through her nostrils like a pissed-off bull, but she was not speaking to him. He’d promised not to play her, and then he’d turned right around and played her, and she was sick of it. Sick of being messed around with by men, sick of being treated as if her opinion didn’t matter. This was her house. It was the only thing she had. He was ruining her whole front yard, and he hadn’t even asked for permission so she could tell him N-O, no.