Along Came Trouble: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Ruthie Knox

  “C’mon, Carly, that was fifteen years ago. He’s grown up, you know.”

  She snorted but didn’t respond. It was no good arguing with Katie about her brother. She would defend Clark with her dying breath. Also, she maybe had a point. Girls had started throwing themselves at Caleb from the moment he hit puberty, and back in high school he’d been happy enough to catch them. But now that she thought about it, when was the last time she’d heard about him going out on a date?

  She couldn’t remember.

  “Whatever,” she said, hating to make the concession.

  Music began to play outside, throbbing loud enough to vibrate the windows.

  “Ooh, he’s starting!” Nana shouted from her post in the window seat. “Can you see, Carly? Want me to help you move closer?”

  “I’m not watching,” Carly insisted.

  “He’s wearing a tuxedo,” Nana replied.

  “Where did he get that?” Ellen wondered aloud.

  “Caleb got it for him,” Katie said absently. “Wow, he’s hot. If you don’t want him, Carly, let me know.”

  And then Jamie started talking, and Carly tried shoving a pillow over her head, but it was no use. She heard every single word.

  “Hi, Carly,” he said into the microphone, as if the crowd of five or six hundred people weren’t there. “I, uh—man, this is a lot weirder than I expected. You know, I’ve been giving concerts for most of my life, but I’ve never performed on anybody’s front lawn before. And I’ve never—there’s never been so much at stake. So if I sound a little nervous, you’ll have to cut me some slack.” There was a pause, and then he chuckled, and the Wombat kicked again. “Yeah. Like that’s going to happen. It’s not really in your nature, is it? But you know, that’s just one of a thousand different reasons why I love you.”

  He loved her. Oh, that was just fantastic. Just hearing him say the words triggered a gigantic avalanche of doomed joy in her stupid, pregnant, irrational body, while the heels she’d dug firmly into the dirt reminded her that Jamie might have mentioned that he loved her before she’d dumped him. When she still loved him back. When she would have given a lot to hear him say those words and tell her he understood what she was going through, and he wanted to be there for her. But not now. What was the point now? It was over.

  Over.

  “So here’s the thing, Carly. I know you’re sitting in there, probably somewhere pretty far from the window so you can’t see me, and if I know you at all, you’ve got your fingers in your ears and you’re saying ‘la-la-la-la’ and hoping I’ll go away.”

  She sat up and took the pillow off her head. Three women were smirking at her. “Shut up,” she told them.

  “But I’m not going away,” Jamie said. “Not this time. I already did that, and it was the stupidest mistake I’ve ever made. This time, I’m sticking. I’ve never stuck before, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”

  “Oh, Jamie,” Ellen said with a sigh.

  Oh, Jamie, Carly thought. And then wanted to slap herself, because she was losing this battle, and she couldn’t. She couldn’t.

  “So I figure everybody has their talents, and I’ve only ever really had two. I can sing, and I can—” He paused, then chuckled again. “Let’s just say ‘pencil dick’ was a low blow.”

  The crowd went crazy.

  “I figure if I want you to let me in the house, I should use my talents to try to persuade you. So what I’m going to do is sing—I wrote you a whole bunch of songs, Carly, which means this could take a while—and maybe dance a little, even though I don’t have any choreography for this new stuff yet.”

  “I knew he’d sing,” Katie said. “This is going to be sweet. Don’t stop him too soon, okay, Carly? I want to hear the new songs.”

  “The other thing I’m going to do,” Jamie continued, “is strip.”

  At this point, the assembly on Burgess started screaming and cheering so loudly, Jamie had to wait a full minute for them to settle down.

  “And if you don’t stop me and let me into the house so I can talk to you, eventually I’m going to be naked out here.”

  More cheering and screaming. In her head, she could imagine Jamie smiling, sheepish but defiant. He had a thousand smiles, and all of them got to her differently. All of them got to her.

  “Then I guess I’ll get arrested. But not before I give all these nice folks a chance to see for themselves about the pencil-dick thing.”

  Five hundred people lost their minds, including Katie and Nana. Ellen said, “Oh, Jamie” again, not so pleased this time, and Carly sank down onto the couch with her arm over her face.

  Then Jamie started to sing, and the ice around her heart began to melt.

  “This is so stupid,” she said, trying to harden it back up.

  “This is so romantic.” Katie sighed.

  Nana cracked the window and yelled, “Take off your shirt!”

  Jamie belted out the chorus. “Damn,” Ellen said. “This is a really good song. He didn’t even tell me he was writing.”

  “That man’s got moves,” Katie said.

  “He really does,” Nana agreed. “I could watch him wiggle that butt all day long.”

  He started a new song.

  “Oh!” Katie again.

  “I think I’m having a hot flash.” Nana.

  “What did he do?” Carly asked, hating herself.

  “He took off the tie.” Ellen this time.

  “That’s all?”

  “He has a way of taking off his tie …” Katie said, fanning her hand in front of her face.

  Oh, shit. She knew that. She’d seen him do it once, after he’d taken her out for dinner in Columbus. He’d loosened his tie in the backseat of the limo, yanked it out of his collar with a practiced flick of his wrist, and she’d gone a little insane with lust. They’d had to do it right there and then. When they were halfway home, she’d flashed back to the tie-yanking thing again and crawled onto his lap for round two.

  She was never going to survive this concert.

  She was never going to survive Jamie Callahan. If she let him in this time, he would shred her into a million little pieces of confetti, and then someone would sprinkle them over his head while he was singing and dancing and looking hot onstage, and he’d go home to his fancy life and leave her to be swept up and thrown away in a Dumpster somewhere.

  She couldn’t risk it.

  “Someone help me up,” she said. “I want to go to bed.”

  Nana snorted. Katie and Ellen ignored her. Jamie started singing another song.

  By the time he had his shirt off, Katie had gone pink, Nana had cat-called herself hoarse, Ellen was a little pale, and Carly couldn’t really remember anymore why she was refusing to let him in. That voice of his ate right through her defenses.

  It always had. It was the whole entire reason she’d screwed the man in the laundry room to begin with. Well, that and his body. And his smile. And his charm. But mostly it was his voice in her ear. He’d come up behind her while she was giving him a tour of the house, put his hands on her hips, and told her flat out in that voice like warm honey that he wanted to take her to bed, and did she think there was any chance she’d let that come to pass?

  It had been bold, brazen, and wildly inappropriate.

  She hadn’t hesitated for a second.

  But that was her whole problem. Her greatest fault. Impulsive Carly, always leaping before she looked. It got her into heaps of trouble. Impulsive Carly had fallen in love with Jamie Callahan, but impulsive Carly was going to have a baby soon, and she needed to knock that shit off if she wanted to be a good mother. Good mothers did not have sex on the laundry room floor with strange men, and they didn’t place their bets on Jamie Callahan. He was flighty and irresponsible and so, so sexy. He was giving a concert on her front lawn, for her. He was—

  “Holy hell, he’s taking off his pants!” Katie said.

  “Nah, he’s just unbuttoning them,” Nana clarified. “He’s going to
make us wait.”

  “The label will have his head on a platter,” Ellen said.

  But it was hard to hear them over the cheering of the crowd and the voice in Carly’s heart that told her it didn’t matter what Jamie’s faults were, because she loved him and he loved her. And she needed him now.

  “There goes the zipper,” said Katie.

  “What do you suppose he’s got on under there?” Nana asked.

  Nothing. He had nothing on under there, because Jamie always went commando. And suddenly, she didn’t relish the thought of the rest of the world knowing that fact. Or getting a glimpse of what her lover was packing. Which was not remotely small or pencil-like.

  “Let him in,” Carly said.

  Three heads turned and gave her three identical blank, astonished looks.

  “Let him in the fucking house before he embarrasses himself.”

  Ellen sprinted for the door.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The day never ended. Callahan disappeared into Carly’s house. Ellen came out twenty minutes later and walked straight through her own front door. Caleb presided over the shift change, fielded questions, kept order. Katie dropped by with tacos around seven, which he wolfed down standing up.

  It got dark after nine, and lights came on in Ellen’s house. A few hours later, they went out. The crowd around the barricades gradually thinned, but it didn’t disappear, and neither did he. He still had work to do.

  He did sit down, though, for the first time since late afternoon. Falling heavily into one of Ellen’s cast-iron chairs on the flagstone patio out back, he stared at the fence without seeing it and tried to recharge his depleted brain.

  If the universe had been taking requests, he’d have asked for a beer. Ellen in his lap would be nice, too. Ellen and a beer. All he wanted in the world.

  He’d thought about her while he stood there watching her brother sing and strip for Carly. Callahan had made an ass of himself, but he’d pulled it off. There was nobility in going after what you wanted when you had to walk over broken glass to get it. Somehow, Jamie had known what it would take to get Carly to give him a shot.

  Caleb didn’t know what it was going to take with Ellen. But he knew what he had to do.

  So, yeah. A beer would hit the spot.

  The security light came on as Ellen’s door opened behind him.

  She sat down in the wrought-iron chair next to his, an open bottle of wine in one hand and two empty glasses in the other. His dream girl in shorts and a T-shirt. Ellen with a bottle of wine was almost as good as Ellen with a beer. She didn’t look too much like she wanted to chew him out, either. She actually looked pretty mellow.

  “I thought you were asleep,” he said.

  “I’ve been keeping tabs on you out the window. You started to slow down about an hour ago, and I thought if I waited long enough, you’d eventually come to rest somewhere. Need a drink?”

  “I’m still on duty.”

  She reached over and pried his phone out of his hand. After fiddling with it for a while, she got it turned off. “I’m clocking you out.” She set it on the ground, poured a glass of wine, and handed it over.

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. No way could he leave his phone off all night, but he could give it half an hour or so. Long enough to drink a glass of wine and see what he could do about fixing the mess he’d made.

  “Thanks.” Their fingers met briefly when he accepted the glass, and he had to remind himself not to extend the contact. Not to slide his hand up her arm and pull her close.

  The light shut off, plunging them into darkness. Fireflies lit erratic paths in the air. He’d missed fireflies. The army had sent him all over the world, but nowhere else seemed to have fireflies except Fort Leonard Wood, where he’d gone for MP school. At eighteen, the sight of lightning bugs in Missouri had made him homesick.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

  “I don’t owe you any answers right now.” She sounded amused.

  He could probably have her owing him an answer inside of ten minutes, but that wasn’t where he wanted to go with this encounter. Katie was right—he had to ease up on the physical stuff if he expected Ellen to take him seriously.

  “Can I ask anyway?”

  She must have run her finger around the rim of her glass, because it made a low, melodic sound. “Yes.”

  “Did Richard kiss you this afternoon?”

  “What?”

  “Did he kiss you? He looked like he was going to.”

  “He looked like he was going to strangle me.”

  “Before that. When he was over here.”

  She turned toward him, but it was too dark to read her expression. He heard her take a drink, and then there was a long pause. “No,” she said. “He didn’t kiss me. Why, were you jealous?”

  “No comment.”

  She smiled then, a flash of white teeth. “How unpleasant for you.”

  It had been. The jealousy had dissolved when he overheard her attack Richard at Maureen’s, but the situation still didn’t sit right with him. Ellen’s ex wanted something from her, and whatever it was, Caleb wasn’t positive it was over.

  “What did he come here for?”

  “I’m not sure. He told me he wanted me back. Maureen made it sound like the pictures were some twisted kind of stunt to win my affection.”

  “There any chance that’s going to happen?”

  She drank her wine and made him wait a long time for an answer. “He looked right through me and said I was his lodestar. I don’t want to be a lodestar. Not his. Not anybody’s.”

  Considering Caleb only halfway knew what the word meant, he thought he didn’t have much to worry about there.

  They were silent for a while. His vision had compensated for the darkness some. Enough for him to watch her chest rise and fall beneath her dark T-shirt and to admire the smooth lines of her legs crossed at the ankles. Her feet were bare again. He wondered what she had against shoes.

  “I owe you an apology,” she said. “For the fence.”

  “That’s funny. I thought I owed you one.”

  “You already apologized,” she said. “Now it’s my turn. You were right. We needed the fence. I don’t know how you knew we would, but you did. So thank you. Though if you ever try to pull something like that again, fair warning, I’m going to stop speaking to you.”

  An apology and a thank you. Huh. Maybe he hadn’t screwed up absolutely everything today. But he was about to.

  “Ellen, I think we’d better not see each other anymore. Not until after this job’s done.”

  It hurt more than having the shrapnel removed from his hip, but he gritted his teeth and let the statement stand.

  She stiffened, and for a moment she didn’t seem to breathe at all. Then her chest rose again, and she said in a decent approximation of her normal tone, “What makes you say that?”

  “It turns out I’m not any good at mixing business with pleasure. If the fence didn’t make that clear, then what happened this afternoon did. I’ve been thinking about you too much when I ought to be thinking about the job.”

  Katie had been right the first time. He’d thrown over his principles for Ellen. He’d made the wrong call, and the result was his unacceptable failure to protect Henry. If he hadn’t been so caught up in her, he’d have seen the situation more clearly. Followed up with the police and been a more active part of the Plimpton investigation. Something.

  Every time he thought about it, his stomach soured. It could have been so much worse, and if it had been, there would have been no one to blame but himself.

  But his bad judgment wasn’t the whole problem. It was worse than that, because he was falling for her, he wanted to build a life with her, and she hadn’t given him a single sign that she felt the same way.

  “I want a chance to start over with you,” he said at last. “I want to take you out to dinner and do this thing in the right order. Not—” He faltered. He didn’t k
now how to describe what they’d been doing.

  “Not play hide the bone with me the day after we met?”

  “Yeah.” Exactly.

  She set her glass down on the flagstones and leaned toward him. Their knees brushed, and she splayed her hands over his thighs, high up. “What if I say I want to play hide the bone?”

  Ah, hell. Just her playful tone of voice was enough to turn him on. Just the light pressure of her fingers on him. The smell of her hair.

  “I’d say I want that, too. But we need to wait.”

  Ellen cocked her head to the side and studied him. “When do you expect the job to be done?”

  He had no idea. Days? Weeks? Months? Maybe not until after Carly had her baby. Maybe longer. It depended on whether Jamie Callahan decided to stick around and whether Carly decided to let him. Whether Breckenridge fired Caleb for letting the concert go on. Dozens of things would make a difference, and all of them were out of his control.

  “I don’t know.”

  She stood, and the floodlight clicked on, backlighting her so that Caleb couldn’t see her face, only her shape. She took his wine out of his hand, placed it on the ground, and lowered herself onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  “I don’t want to wait,” she said. “We have a contract. I’m pretty sure it obligates you to take me to bed now.”

  “I can’t, sweetheart. I shouldn’t, and I really can’t. I have to work.”

  She tucked her head against his neck, making his throat thicken. She was so beautiful, and he wanted her so much. Right now. All the time. He didn’t really have much hope of holding out against her. But what did that say about him, if he sucked this much at doing the right thing?

  The night lapped at the edges of their pool of light, humid and thick with the sound of crickets chirping. There were no other sounds. No other activities to manage just now. “You haven’t slept or stopped working in two days,” she murmured, kissing his throat. He shifted beneath her, pushing his erection into her hip. Unable to help himself. “Jamie is at Carly’s now, and he’s not coming back out. She won’t see him yet, but Nana’s going to let him sleep on the couch.”