chapter Ten
Minutes later, the entire peanut gallery had cleared out.
After Henry was packed into the car, Caleb had followed Maureen home so he could do a security assessment. He must have called off the workmen when Ellen wasn’t paying attention, because Bill and Matthias had left, too. She didn’t know what that meant, decision-wise, but she expected Caleb would be back to make his intentions known.
In the meantime, she went to work. It was hard to concentrate, but it wasn’t as if she had a choice. When Henry was with his grandma, she worked. Her to-do list was as long as her arm.
Plus, she had the urge to kick some serious ass. After ninety minutes on the phone, at least half of which she spent berating the attorney responsible for Aimee Dawson’s contract, she’d won a number of concessions from the label and the promise of a revised contract in her in-box by the end of the workday.
She wrote threatening letters full of lawyer-speak until six, when she decided to call it a night, having managed to burn through most of her Richard-and-Caleb-related fury. In the meantime, her head had been growing more and more crowded with all the implications of the day’s events.
Ellen pulled a bunch of vegetables out of the fridge and called Jamie. When he didn’t answer, she sent him a text. Richard is back.
He called two minutes later, while she was still washing the lettuce.
“What does Dickhead want?”
“‘Hi, Ellen,’” she answered. “‘How are you? It sure is good to hear your voice.’”
“I’d barely even heard your voice yet.”
“But now you have.”
He sighed. “Hi, Ellen. How are you? Everything sucks here, and it’s really good to hear your voice.”
“That’s better. Richard is sober. He wants to make amends.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Apparently it means he gets to touch my arm and call me ‘Els’ again.”
Jamie made a sound of disgust. She’d never liked Richard’s nickname for her, but Jamie had taken it as a personal affront.
“Did you tell him where he could stick that idea?”
“More or less, yeah.”
She started peeling carrots and filling Jamie in on both encounters, trying to make it funnier than it had been in reality.
“I don’t see where he gets off suggesting you should let him see Henry more when he hardly ever bothers to show up for the visits he’s got,” her brother observed.
It was a fair point. Three times out of four, Richard missed his visits with Henry at Maureen’s house. He failed to show so often that she and Maureen had agreed not to tell the boy to expect him. They didn’t want Henry to spend his childhood waiting around for a father who didn’t turn up.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He is Henry’s father. If he’s sober, I suppose he has a right to get to know his son better.”
“Henry doesn’t need a father. He’s got me.” Jamie had done his best to be a decent stand-in dad, since both of them knew what it was like to grow up fatherless. Theirs had died before they were old enough to remember him. It was a phantom-limb situation: you got used to the absence, but you could always feel it, and sometimes it itched. Sometimes it ached. Always, it sucked.
“You live in Los Angeles.”
“True, but at least I’m not going to get bored with him and run off after some bimbo with a D-cup.”
The bra she’d found underneath the marital bed had actually been a 36C, but Ellen didn’t bother saying so. Henry had been the size of a kidney bean in her uterus at the time, an uninvited guest whom she’d already decided to let stick around. The bra was exactly what she’d needed to make up her mind that she wasn’t going to raise her child with an alcoholic serial adulterer. She couldn’t trust Richard not to wound their baby, and she’d understood what a bad role model she would be for her son or daughter if she continued to put up with the way her husband treated her.
What she hadn’t understood was that the harm had already been done. Or not done, exactly, but foreordained. Richard had fathered her son, and so he would always be her son’s father. Every month, her baby got older, and the day when he would fall under Richard’s spell drew closer. Sooner or later, Henry was going to decide his daddy was the most interesting, remarkable, amazing man alive, just like Ellen had. And then Richard was going to grind Henry’s heart to powder under the heel of his motorcycle boot, just like he’d ground up hers.
It turned out they grew back. Hers had, anyway. But she worried for her son, hoping he wouldn’t have to pay for her mistakes. Knowing that sooner or later, he almost certainly would.
She sliced celery up fine and tried to formulate any reply other than “Yeah.” Nothing came to her.
She’d given herself to Richard cheaply, putting a bargain-basement price tag on her love and devotion. Jamie had never been able to wrap his mind around why she’d let Richard woo her, why she’d stuck by him for three years when he’d valued her so little. But then, Jamie had grown up in the spotlight, with all the benefit of their mother’s unalloyed affection and the approval of every casting agent and director who’d seen him perform and told him he was brilliant and talented and special.
Ellen had been raised in the wings, charged by her mother with keeping Jamie’s stage outfits clean and complaining to the management when his dressing room didn’t have the required brand of bottled water. She’d spent her whole childhood in the shadow of her handsome, charismatic brother. What could have been more natural than marrying the first handsome, charismatic man who told her he needed her by his side? No one but Jamie had ever expected her to do more than play a supporting role.
Until she left Richard, she hadn’t really expected more of herself.
“What do I do, Jamie?” she asked finally, reaching for more celery. It was a rhetorical question. Sort of.
“I’m the wrong guy to ask,” he said. “I can’t seem to make a good decision these days to save my life. What do you want to do?”
She wasn’t accustomed to thinking about what she wanted. Since the divorce, her life had been all about what she had to do. Living alone had taught her what she was capable of, which turned out to be pretty much whatever. She could get the job done for her clients, raise her son, and pay the mortgage. She could fix a leaky faucet and make Carly a batch of chocolate-cherry cookies. Husbands turned out to be optional. She was doing fine without one.
But what did she want?
She wanted Richard to drop off the face of the earth.
She wanted to have sex with her security guard.
These were not good answers.
“I want to incinerate Richard’s balls with a blowtorch.”
Jamie laughed. “That makes two of us.”
“I want you to come visit.”
The mirth went out of his voice. “I can’t do that right now.”
“Why not?” she asked, hoping he’d say something stupid about the press so she could bat away the objection and insist.
“I don’t want the attention on Carly and the baby, okay?” He let out a frustrated breath. “I really screwed that up. The least I can do is keep away from her. Listen, is she—is everything okay there? Are you and Henry safe?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. Carly and the baby are fine, too. I think—” I think she misses you. But she’d promised not to say that. “I wish you were here,” Ellen said instead. “And I wish you would call her.”
“There were more pictures today,” Jamie said after a pause.
“We ran into a photographer downtown.” Ellen had left that part out of her report on Richard. “It wasn’t the brightest move.”
“My PR people would kill me if I came back to Camelot.”
“Your PR people work for you. Tell them to back off.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just, this is harder than I expected, Ellen. I didn’t know what I was getting into with her, or I might not have done it. I’m the last thing she needs.”
“I don’t get it. Why is that, exactly?”
“Because I waltzed in and messed with her life, exposed her to danger and unwanted attention, and then waltzed out again. And I did all that without even thinking about it. Carly’s going to have a baby. She needs somebody who sticks. What use am I to her?”
“You love her.”
The silence stretched out for long seconds before he said, “Yeah, I think I do. That’s why I’m going to stay away from her.”
“Jamie—”
She wanted to tell him she believed in him. That he was good enough for Carly, that he could be somebody who stuck if he wanted to be. But her brother talked right over her, and his tone clearly said the subject was closed.
“Now tell me how things are going with this security guy. Breckenridge wants to know if he’s competent.”
She thought of Caleb’s hard body behind her as she’d talked to Richard in the driveway. Richard wasn’t the threat Breckenridge had in mind when they’d hired Caleb, but she’d certainly felt safe with him standing there. Better than safe.
“Oh, he’s competent.”
“You sound funny. What’s wrong with him? I can get somebody else.”
“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.