by Ruthie Knox
“Ellen, honey, I’m sorry. It’s really important.” Caleb trapped her with his eyes, which were humble and very unhappy. Also, kind of bruised and tired-looking, because he’d never gone to bed.
He was still the handsomest thing she’d ever seen. And she didn’t give a damn.
“It’s really important that I have the world’s ugliest fence put up around my house at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?” So much for not talking to him. She had things she needed to say.
“Yes.”
“Because there are, what, seven cars out there by the road, with people in them who might want to take Jamie’s picture?”
“They’re coming,” he said. “Your brother snuck back into town in a way that’s gonna make a fantastic story for the press as soon as they figure out what happened. Which they will any time now. A whole lot more of them are coming. And the fence is only temporary.”
She met his eyes. He really did look sorry. But the thing was, it didn’t matter if more of them were coming, or if it was all Jamie’s fault. That was not the issue. The issue was between her and Caleb. “You promised me.” To her horror, her voice broke as she said it.
“Whatever they ruin, I’ll fix it later. This is just temporary—one fence around your property and Carly’s both, to help me keep them out. I have to do this to protect you.”
He reached for her face, and she batted his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”
“Ellen. Come on. This is my job.”
What did he want her to do, forgive him? Say, Oh, well if it’s your job, I absolve you? Not going to happen. He’d pretended to care what she wanted. All that negotiation crap over the security lights, and all that negotiation crap in the bedroom. But he didn’t have any real interest in what she wanted, any more than Richard ever had. He’d told her brother he was her boyfriend even when she’d said flat-out she didn’t want a relationship, and now he’d invited a bunch of bristly-jawed jackasses onto her property to cut down her trees and surround her beautiful house with something ugly.
Caleb was supposed to be fun. Having an affair with him was supposed to be something she was doing for herself. This was not remotely fun.
“You can’t have it both ways, Clark. Protect me from the ravening hordes if you want to, but don’t expect me to like it. Don’t expect me to thank you for it, either.”
She turned her back on him and stomped toward the house as best she could in bare feet. More of a hobbling mince than a stomp, unfortunately, because her feet felt all chewed up. Her everything felt all chewed up.
Caleb Clark. For Christ’s sake. Not an hour had gone by since she met him that he’d failed to put her through the wringer. What had possessed her to sleep with him?
Multiple orgasms.
Yeah, there was that. But she could live without those. She’d managed to live thirty years without them, after all.
Passing a guy who was pulverizing her geraniums with his work boots, she turned around one last time and told Caleb, “That tulip tree cost a fortune. Don’t let them cut it down.”
Caleb had his soldier face on. He gave her a grim nod.
Ellen wanted to smack him. She wanted to smack somebody, anyway.
By nine, Jamie couldn’t stand it anymore. Ellen was up in the loft grumbling to herself about the fence—which in his opinion she was blowing way out of proportion, but no one had asked his opinion—the construction guys outside were making a racket, and all he could think about was Carly next door. Carly looking happy to see him. Carly in his arms again. Kissing Carly. Oh, man, kissing Carly.
“I’m going over there,” he announced to nobody in particular.
The scene outside was uglier than he’d expected. Caleb’s guys had chain link stretching all across the front yard, and a few of them were lining it with blue plastic fabric. There was a gap for Ellen’s driveway and another gap over at Carly’s, but he couldn’t see any cars parked along the street except the Camelot Security ones. Maybe Clark had put up a roadblock or something. If so, he’d moved pretty quickly for a yokel.
Bad move on the fence, though. The guy should have known better than to think he could get it past Ellen without a fight. And Ellen could bear a grudge for a good long time.
There were some gawkers on foot at the base of the drive, and he could hear the cameras whirring as he walked up Carly’s porch steps. “Jamie!” “What brings you back to Camelot, Jamie?” “Look over here, Callahan!” “Your mother’s ugly!” “Jamie! You’re a jerk!”
They’d say anything to make him look. If he looked, they got a better picture, and then they got to go on vacation in the Caribbean. Freaking vultures.
He took a deep breath and rang the bell.
An older woman with wild, curly white hair answered the door. She was Carly all over—the hair, the elfin chin, the sparkling blue eyes. This had to be Nana Short.
“Well, hello there, handsome!” she said with a smile. “I’ve been waiting for you to turn up.” Nana looked him over slowly, toes to crown and then back down again. “People magazine didn’t lie. You are one fine piece of ass. Turn around so I can see your butt.”
Carly had told him Nana was “feisty,” but somehow the word hadn’t conjured up this sort of cheerful lechery.
He extended his hand. “Hello, Nana. Pleasure to meet you finally.”
He’d always wanted to meet Nana, but Carly hadn’t allowed it. At first, he’d assumed his missing her was accidental. Later Carly claimed that she’d wanted to protect their time together. Only after she dumped him had it crossed his mind that she might have another reason—that she might be ashamed of him, or so unserious about their relationship as to make introducing him to her family inadvisable.
Nana shook his hand quickly, but she seemed more interested in inspecting his forearms, turning his arm this way and that to consider his musculature.
“Dang,” she said quietly.
“Uh, is Carly home?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Not going to turn around, are you?” She darted out the door, skirted behind him, and, apparently, ogled his ass. “Ha! I knew it. Those are some fine buns. Old men never have butts like that. What happens to your butts as you get older, do you think? It’s like they just disappear, and there’s nothing to grab onto anymore.”
An image he could have lived without.
Hoping to distract Nana from talking about the disadvantages of geriatric sex, he turned around—though this gave the photographers a better shot—and offered her a broad smile. “Carly’s told me all about you.”
She cocked her head at him like a tiny bird. “She’s told me all about you, too, sweet cheeks, and I’m sorry to say not all of it’s good. I’ve been rooting for you in the pool over at the home, but you were starting to look like a lost cause. I’m so glad you finally turned up. I was worried I was going to lose a hundred bucks.”
“You bet a hundred bucks on …” He really wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“That she’ll take you back. Georgie who runs the pool puts the odds at twenty to one against you, but I know my Carly better than that. She has a soft spot for you.”
That sounded promising. “Can I see her?”
“Oh, no. She told me not to let you in.”
He swore, and Nana smiled. “She knows I’m out here?”
“It was a sort of blanket prohibition. But I’ll tell her when I go back inside. Want me to pass along any messages?” She rocked up and down on her toes, clearly excited to be at the center of the drama.
His mind was blank. Whatever he had to say to Carly, he didn’t want to pass it along via this tiny, bawdy, captivating old woman. “Just that I’d like to talk to her.”
Nana frowned at him. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that. Come back in an hour. I’ll make you some cookies. You’re much too thin.”
At ten, Nana informed him Carly had called him “rather a lot of awful things” and still wasn’t too keen on talking to him.
She steered hi
m toward a chair on the corner of the deck, seemingly oblivious to the cameras flashing, and fed him warm shortbread and a glass of milk. “Do you have a plan?” she asked. “Because I’m starting to think maybe you’re not too bright.”
“Sorry?”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? What are you sorry about? You come all this way from Los Angeles, and you want to see Carly. Who wouldn’t? She’s a very sweet girl. But you can’t just expect her to take you back. You have to win her over. What’s your strategy?”
“I—I guess I thought I’d talk to her, and we could figure it out together.”
Nana shook her head, terribly disappointed. “That’s never going to work. She’ll cut you to pieces.” She patted him on the knee. “You go back to your sister’s house and come up with something. I’ll see you in an hour.”
When she went back in the house, he heard Carly through the open door. “—tell him to take his sorry ass back to L.A. where he can bonk brainless supermodels, and then I’ll—”
Just hearing her voice fired him up. He loved that woman. Maybe he’d been a little stupid about her, but he’d never been in love before, so it had taken him a while to get with the program.
He was entirely with the program now. He just needed a plan.
At eleven, he brought her flowers. He’d had to pick them from Ellen’s garden, which she probably wouldn’t have been pleased about if he’d told her, but she was way too preoccupied with staring out the windows and muttering to pay attention to him. He found a vase under the kitchen sink, arranged the stems as best he could, and carried them over to Carly’s.
Nana took one look at the flowers, pursed her lips, and said, “You’re really not very good at this, are you?”
Screwing up his courage, he said, “Tell her I love her.”
Nana plucked the flowers out of his hands. As she shut the door in his face with a wink, he heard Carly shout, “Tell him he can go to hell!”
He smiled. He was going to marry that woman.
At eleven thirty, his PR guy called and basically forbade him to continue walking over to Carly’s. All the gossip sites were running pictures of him at her front door. The suits said it made him look helpless.
He wasn’t helpless; he was in love. He hung up on the PR guy and grabbed Ellen by the arm, pulling her away from the window. “You have to teach me how to cook,” he said.
At twelve, he took grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup over on a tray. It had been the only thing Ellen could show him how to make in half an hour. Cooking turned out to be both difficult and time consuming, which was, of course, why he’d avoided it all these years.
Nana opened the note he’d put on the tray. He’d written out the lyrics to a song about Carly that he’d been working on back in L.A. He had a whole album’s worth of songs about her.
With a smile and a shake of her head, Nana shut the door.
At twelve thirty, Carly reactivated her blog and posted a single sentence: “Jamie Callahan has a pencil dick.”
At one o’clock, the news crews started to arrive. He called a press conference for two.
Chapter Twenty-two
Ellen ate a late lunch on the back patio and tried not to be grateful for the fence.
It was hideous. Big and blue and hideous.
It was also keeping about a hundred people with cameras out of her face so she could sit here in the sun and go over Aimee Dawson’s latest round of contract revisions in peace.
She’d spent a good part of the morning watching the construction workers out the window and thinking murderous thoughts, but her supply of murderous thoughts turned out to be sadly limited. Also, her sense of fairness had forced her to admit that Jamie carried at least half the responsibility for the fence. Maybe 75 percent. As much as she hated it, Caleb was just doing his job.
Before she knew quite how it had happened, she’d started musing about him in a decidedly nonmurderous fashion.
He just looked so damn good out there. So commanding and sexy with his shirtsleeves rolled up—green shirt today, yum—directing traffic, issuing stern warnings when the people gathered by the barricade got out of line. Barking orders into his phone.
Mr. Military again. When he did the Sergeant Clark thing, she had no defenses against him. It made her want to rip his shirt off and push him up against the side of the house and kiss him stupid.
It didn’t help that she knew how he’d smell up close. How his bare skin would be hot satin under her hands. She was furious with him, and yet the thought of never seeing Caleb naked again made her whimper.
The whole situation swamped her with a restless irritability she couldn’t seem to shake.
It was one of those days when the entire universe seemed to be conspiring against her need for Zen-like calm. And she really did need that calm on the weekends. It helped her compensate for the chaos of her Henry days.
Instead, she got Caleb waging a very sexy battle on her front lawn and Jamie calling a press conference to talk about Carly.
And could she just pause for a moment to contemplate the inanity of that? A press conference. To talk about Carly. Her brother had gone off the deep end, but he refused to discuss it except to say, “I know what I’m doing. Possibly for the first time in my life, I know exactly what I’m doing.”
To top it all off, there were an astonishing number of people standing out on Burgess Street staring through the gap in the fence toward her house, waiting for something interesting to happen.
The crowd had grown considerably since Jamie started his win-over-Carly project, especially after Carly called him a pencil dick on the Internet. Some of the people out there were locals who’d wandered over to see for themselves what the fuss was all about, but quite a few appeared to be professional photographers, newscasters, and cameramen. Whenever Jamie left the house, they turned into sharks after chum, pushing against the sawhorse barriers and shouting at him.
Sometimes, they broke loose and started running up the driveway, and then Caleb stopped them and handcuffed them and led them away. It was all pretty crazy.
But back here, she had a sanctuary. Courtesy of one ugly-ass fence and one bossy-ass man.
She sighed.
And then Richard came around the corner, escorted by a very pretty blond security guard, and Ellen wished she hadn’t already wasted her sigh. It would be handy to be able to sigh again. Naturally, Richard would show up again in the midst of all this other insanity. Her life had become a soap opera, and the commercial break had just ended. Time for another segment to ratchet up the dramatic tension.
“Mrs. Callahan?” the woman asked. “Mr. Morrow asked to be allowed to see you. He’s on the list, so I thought it should be okay, but Caleb said all guests are to be escorted.”
“It’s fine. You can leave him with me.” Might as well find out what he really wanted. If Richard was determined to make amends, her utter distaste for his company wouldn’t stop him.
“Thank you, Cassie.” Richard gave the blonde his most endearing smile. “I can find my way out when we’re finished here.”
Cassie smiled back, already besotted, and said, “You’re welcome. Check in with me before you leave, huh?”
“Of course.”
She departed with a rather more pronounced sway to her hips than the situation warranted.
A few women who looked like Cassie had turned up on the front porch over the years, asking for Professor Morrow. How crestfallen they’d been to find Ellen at the door.
She wondered how many of them he’d screwed in their bed. The first thing she’d done after kicking him out was buy a new headboard, a new mattress, and three new sets of sheets.
Richard settled into the cast-iron chair beside her and looked at the fence. “Nice addition.”
“It’s temporary.”
“I should hope so.”
“What do you want?”
It was Richard’s turn to sigh and scrub his hand over his face. Having shaved recently, he lo
oked slightly less haggard than he had the other day. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt, and he filled them out well enough. She could see the appeal if you had a thing for lying, cheating bastards.
For her part, she couldn’t really get past the leather vest. He wasn’t even wearing it, but it was like this ghost presence, teasing the corners of her mouth into a smile. Caleb had been so funny about the vest. Do chicks go for that woebegone poet crap?
The truth was, they did. But she didn’t. Not anymore.
Richard must have thought she intended the smile for him, because he smiled back and relaxed into the chair. “I want us back, Els. I miss you.”
“Oh, please.”
He leaned forward, about to touch her arm, then thought better of it. Instead, he put his elbows on his knees and gazed at her. “I mean it. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. You’re my lodestar, Els. I need you. I want us to be together, with Henry. To be a family.”
There had been a time when she would have sold her soul to have Richard look at her like this. To hear that she was his lodestar, or his muse, or some other fancy, silly thing.
Ellen closed her eyes for a few seconds, searching around to determine if any part of the dazy, yearny, sappy girl she’d once been still survived.
Nope. Nothing there. That was the thing about parenthood, wasn’t it? It beat whatever was left of your idiot adolescence right out of you.
Eyes still closed, she leaned forward and put her elbows on her own knees, matching Richard’s posture. His tobacco breath fanned over her face, but she endured it, because she wanted to be sure he really heard what she was about to say. “Can I ask you something?”