chapter Fourteen
When he’d recovered enough to be capable of coherent thought, Caleb noticed the heat first.
Ellen’s bedroom had become a greenhouse, hot and humid and smelling of sex and cinnamon. One of them needed to turn on the ceiling fan if they were ever going to have a hope of cooling off. Crack a window, get some air moving around in here.
But her hair spread out over his shoulder in damp ropes. Her hand was on his stomach, and he could see it rise and fall with every breath he took. He slid his palm down her back and over her ass, savoring the dip and curve, the way his hand fit so many different ways against her body.
Without warning, she sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. “I’ll be right back.” She disappeared into the bathroom.
Caleb raised himself onto his elbows to look at the door that had just swallowed her. It didn’t have any messages written on it, which was a shame, because he could really use a clue. Had that been I’ll be right back as in I want nothing more than to stay here with you but I just have to nip out for a second?
He’d like to think so. Unfortunately, given the lack of eye contact and the abrupt scuttle, it had come across more like I’ll be right back, but feel free to get dressed and get the hell out of here while I’m gone. Which was a shock, since he’d sort of assumed he would spend the night. He’d sort of assumed he’d just made love to a woman he was starting a relationship with.
A relationship he’d sort of assumed would turn into something.
Now that he thought about it, those were a lot of assumptions. He’d brought her a pizza, planted himself on her front porch, and she’d seduced him. Normally, he didn’t get into bed with a woman without having some kind of conversation with her about where they were headed—usually one version or another of Let’s keep this casual, shall we?
This time, he hadn’t wanted to set that particular parameter. But maybe Ellen had.
And maybe it was time for him to get dressed.
As he was zipping up his pants, she emerged from the bathroom wearing an oversized T-shirt. She’d combed her hair and pulled it into a tight knot at the back of her neck. He wasn’t sure what she’d done with the open, sensual, abandoned woman he’d been burning up the sheets with a few minutes ago. Stuffed her in the trash, maybe. This Ellen had tight lips and eyes that skipped right past his face as if she couldn’t bear to look at him. He didn’t need a message written on the door to figure out that this Ellen wanted him to leave.
Crossing to the windows, he pushed them open several inches. He found the switch for the ceiling fan and flipped it on, then moved a pair of her jeans off the butter-yellow leather chair in the corner of the room and sat down, throwing one leg over the side.
Ellen watched him with her arms crossed over her stomach, nervy as a fawn about to bolt for the woods.
He wasn’t going anywhere until he got some answers.
“Will you go out with me?” he asked.
“What?” She looked as though he’d smacked her with a wet fish.
“Will you go out to dinner with me? Tomorrow night?” When she didn’t answer right away, he added, “That’s what I planned to do when I came over here tonight. Other than stand on your porch. The plan was to apologize and to ask you out.” He pointed at the bed. “That wasn’t in the plan. Though I’m certainly not complaining.”
She didn’t return the smile he gave her. Her expression morphed from wet-fish surprise to something close to out-and-out horror before she got a handle on it and wiped it clean. “No,” she said. “I mean, thanks, but no. I can’t really—I don’t really date. I don’t have the time.”
“You have to eat. We’ll grab something quick.”
By now, there was no doubt in his mind she’d say no. What he was trying to figure out was why.
She flicked her eyes to his face, then stared at the carpet beneath her feet. He’d seen it, though. The fear again. They’d been buck naked together not five minutes ago, as close as two people could get, but the idea of going out to dinner with him scared the pants off her. Or it would have, if she’d been wearing pants.
“That’s—no. Sorry. I have so much work to do when Henry’s gone, and I don’t really leave the house much. I can’t . . . date.”
“Ellen.” She didn’t look up.
“Look at me, Ellen.”
She could hardly refuse. Her eyes made a slow journey from the floor up his body and settled on a point in the vicinity of his left ear.
He pitched his voice low and soothing. “You said you’d tell me anything I wanted to know. So tell me. Why won’t you go out with me?”
“That’s not fair,” she protested. When she met his eyes, she asked him silently to drop it. Let her go. Be nice to her.
He was being nice. He hadn’t asked, What are you afraid of, Ellen? He hadn’t demanded that she tell him why she was trying to get rid of him after what had been the hottest, most intense sexual experience of his life. Those were the questions he really wanted answers to.
“You didn’t mean it when you said you’d tell me anything?”
She glanced down at her hands, then wiped her palms on her hips. “I was . . . coerced.”
That made him smile, though he couldn’t keep the tension out of his shoulders. He felt strung tight, and not in a good way. Half-cocked. It was a new situation for him, this postcoital vulnerability, and not a comfortable one. “I did not coerce you.”
Turning her face to the side, she looked down at the floor again as a slow flush spread over her cheeks. “No.”
He didn’t know whether she meant no, he hadn’t coerced her, or no, she wouldn’t answer his question. Probably some of both.
“You like me.” He rose from the chair and slowly closed the distance between them. As he drew near, her nipples hardened under the T-shirt. She couldn’t look at him, but it turned her on to have him in range. He could understand that. She did the same thing to him.
He reached out and slid both palms up her legs, under the shirt, over her hips. Pulled her close with his hands moving up the smooth plane of her back, the shirt bunching up over his forearms as her bare stomach brushed against his. She didn’t move away. He wanted her naked again. He wanted her to meet his eyes.
Leaning down, he spoke in her ear. “You like me a lot, Ellen. So why won’t you go out with me?”
She closed her eyes and whispered. “I don’t want a relationship.”
He kissed her throat. “With me?”
“With anyone.”
That made sense. The last one hadn’t gone so well, and she had a lot of responsibilities to juggle. But it was too late. They already had a relationship, and he wasn’t giving her up easily. He wanted her too much, was already risking too much, to let her brush him off.
“You want me to touch you.” He palmed her breast, moved his thumb over her nipple, satisfied when she arched her back and sucked in a deep breath. “Say it.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to take you back to bed.” He pushed the shirt up and lowered his mouth to her breasts.
“Yes.” Breathless now.
Guiding her onto the mattress, he stretched out beside her. Moved his hand between her thighs and dipped his finger into her wet heat. “You want me to be your lover.”
When he kissed her, she plunged her tongue into his mouth and twined her arms around his neck. Murmured against his lips, “Yes.”
“And then you want me to go home.”
She opened her eyes, and he watched her pupils contract as they adjusted to the light. Watched desire do battle with fear. Waited for her to deny it.
“Yes.”
Damn it.
This wasn’t about him. But whatever the a*shole had done to her, it was Caleb’s problem to deal with now. He wanted to ask her what had happened. What had made her so stingy with her trust.
Instead, he pulled the shirt over her head and kissed her. He touched her exactly how she wanted to be touched, exactly where she wanted him to touch her. He kept his eyes on her as he brought her to a wild, hard, beautiful climax.
If he could, he’d do this for her every day for the rest of his life. But she’d have to let him.
As she lay there afterward, panting and naked, glowing and gorgeous, he settled down on one elbow next to her and said, “What we’re going to do now, honey, is negotiate.”
Negotiate?
Crap.
She couldn’t even lift her arms, she was so saturated with sex pheromones. Endorphomones. Sexophins. Whatever.
The way she’d understood it, there were rules. She’d seduce Caleb, they’d roll around on the mattress for a while, and then he’d kiss her on the cheek and say, Thanks, baby, that was hot, and he’d go home. Maybe he’d sext her in a day or two, and they’d do it again.
Simple.
But instead he’d given her two toe-curling, soul-scorching orgasms, and then he’d put his arm around her and held her. She’d flipped and flipped through her mental playbook, but damned if she could find the page for that.
So she’d done the logical thing and fled to the bathroom, and she’d come back out channeling Princess Buttercup, all remote and haughty and go-home-now-Farm-Boy, but wow did that ever not work. He’d had her flat on her back inside of two minutes, and the third royal orgasm served up in five.
How could she negotiate when her thighs were still quivering?
You’re a lawyer. You could negotiate on the deck of the sinking Titanic.
Okay, yes, that was true. She simply needed to approach this as a professional. Preferably not spread-eagled, then.
She sat up and propped a pillow against the headboard. Clothes would be nice. Caleb had done something with her T-shirt; it was no longer in evidence. Peeling back the comforter, she found the sheet and tugged, trying to pull it up over herself.
Unfortunately, she’d tucked it in under the mattress when she made the bed, and it wouldn’t budge. Stupid sheet. She yanked at it ineffectually for a moment, and then Caleb helped her out, gathering the fabric in his fist and liberating it with one rapid jerk that made his biceps bunch and his pecs flex and his stomach tighten and oh boy howdy, did she ever want to get those pants back off him.
It wasn’t a good position from which to begin negotiating.
She tucked the sheet under her arms and closed her eyes briefly, willing herself into lawyer mode. Caleb was rustling around, distracting her, and when she opened her eyes he’d positioned himself cross-legged at the far end of the bed. He still wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he still had a rather impressive hard-on, and she still wanted to ravish him. Plus, he was smiling at her. You weren’t supposed to smile at the enemy. Negotiation 101.
“All right, Clark. What do you want?”
“You,” he said. As if this were the sort of thing people declared all the time. Combined with the smile, it made her blood fizzy and her head ditsy.
Reset. Reboot. Lawyer mode. “Can you define what you mean by that?”
The smile widened so she could see his dimple, and this time it hit her between the thighs. Would he have the same effect if you put the dimple in a suit and tie and met with it across a couple briefcases and a tray of litigation pastries?
Yes, damn it, he would.
He counted on his fingers. “I want to take you out on dates. I want to get to know you better. I want to get to know your son better. I want to make love to you repeatedly, in every position I can think of. And I want to spend the night.”
Holy hell, Caleb wanted to be her boyfriend. How had she gotten herself into this mess? She needed a boyfriend like she needed an emergency appendectomy.
She often counseled clients who were having trouble keeping a cool head to take five deep breaths before responding to a difficult statement. She tried it, but it didn’t work at all. Not at all.
“We’re not doing that,” she snapped after two and a half.
He spread his hands wide, palms up. Innocent as a baby bunny. “I’m just saying what I want. Isn’t that how you open a negotiation? Now it’s your turn to tell me what you want.”
I want to be a Chiclet.
Well, she couldn’t very well say that. She needed to think of a more appropriate way to express what she was looking for. Which was, essentially . . . “Sex.”
Maybe that had been a little blunt, but lawyer Ellen was all about honesty in negotiation.
He raised an eyebrow. “Can you define what you mean by that?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Sex. Physical intimacy. Penetration of the woman’s—”
“I know what sex is, sweetheart. How much? When? Where? Who initiates?”
She glared at him, but he simply shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out what kind of lover you’re in the market for.”
Two could play at this game. She counted on her fingers. “I want lots of sex. After hours, when I’m not working. Or in the morning would be okay, too, but not after eight o’clock Pacific time, because that’s when I have to make calls. We do it at my house. Either one of us can initiate, but not when Henry’s here and awake. Oh, and no sleepovers. No dates, no deep conversations, no getting-to-know-you-better.”
Caleb smiled. He wasn’t supposed to be smiling. He was supposed to be surprised, or disappointed, or outraged, or something other than smiling.
“What?”
“This is good,” he said. “We can work with this.”
“It’s good?”
“Mmm-hmm. We have something in common. We both want to have lots of sex. The rest is going to be easy.”
“I very much doubt that.”
“Let’s start with the timing issue. You want sex at night and early in the morning, so logically it makes sense for me to sleep over.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I’m afraid I’ll like it too much. “You’ll snore.”
“I don’t snore.”
“You’ll take up the whole bed.”
“It’s a big bed, and you’re a small woman. There’s plenty of room.”
“I’m not small.”
“Compared to me, you are.”
“Compared to you, Big Bird is small.”
He smiled. “So I can sleep over.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She imagined sleeping in Caleb’s arms. Rousing to consciousness surrounded by the smell of him, and snuggling against his warm body in the night. And then heard Henry screaming awake. Maaaaa-ma!
The cognitive dissonance made her dizzy. Or maybe that was Caleb. He was kind of stubbly this late in the day, like a very hot pirate.
“I don’t want you here in the morning when Henry wakes up. It would confuse him.”
“So I won’t sleep over when Henry’s home, but I can sleep over on the weekends.”
“No.”
“You mean ‘yes,’ right? Because we’re negotiating, and that means you’re supposed to make some compromises. Plus, you don’t have a leg to stand on here.”
She sighed. This discussion was absurd, but as much as she’d like to pretend it wasn’t happening, it was. She’d have to bend on something if she wanted to come to an agreement with him. She had to come to an agreement with him if she ever wanted to have sex with him again. She had to have sex with him again, or she’d curl up in a ball and die.
“Fine. Yes. You can sleep over on the weekends, theoretically. You’re not sleeping over tonight, though.”
“Excellent. See, we can do this.” He grinned, and she looked around for something to throw at his head. Nothing available but her naked body. She’d save that for a later stage of the negotiations.
All business again, Caleb carried on. “Next point. I want getting-to-know-you conversations. You don’t. I’ll stipulate you can ask me any question you like, at any time, and I’ll answer it.”
“I don’t want to ask you questions.” She really didn’t. Much. She refused to be curious about Caleb. She didn’t want to hear all his stories, including the story of that scar on his hip that looked like it must have been horrifically painful to acquire. She didn’t wonder what he did to stay in such amazing physical shape or how he’d gotten to be so good with kids. Where he lived, house or apartment. She bet he had a house. He seemed like a house kind of guy. How he’d decorated it. If he’d ever been married. What his bed looked like.
Shit.
“Asking me questions is your prerogative,” he said. “But you have to give me a chance here. How about you let me ask you personal questions, but you only have to answer two out of three?”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not a game show.”
“Or you let me ask them for half an hour a day, but that’s all?”
She crossed her arms. “No.”
“I can ask questions in the bedroom, but no other place?”
“No.”
“Really? I thought that was a good offer. Huh. Give me a second to think.”
She was already wavering. What was the harm in letting him ask a few personal questions? She wasn’t such a secretive person, after all. She’d told Carly her life story over a bottle of wine soon after they met.
“You can have one a day,” she offered.
“One per orgasm.”
“Yours or mine?”
“I was thinking yours.”
“You think I’m going to have more than one orgasm a day, on average?” What a heady notion. Three climax-free years followed by a veritable monsoon season.
“You’ve had three since I showed up with the pizza.”
Fair point. Three orgasms, three questions?
It would be worth it for the orgasms.
“One question per orgasm, but you can’t save them up.”
“The orgasms?”
“The questions. If you don’t ask your question within five minutes, your time expires.”
He stroked his chin, producing a delicious, piratey rasping noise. “I want longer than that. If you only give me five minutes, it’ll ruin the afterglow. I’ll have to lie there thinking about questions when all I want to think about is how you just blew my mind.”
She rolled her eyes. What sort of man talked about the afterglow and fought fiercely for sleepover rights? She’d question his masculinity, except . . . yeah. No. He could probably make her come from forty paces, just by saying her name the right way.
“You can have twenty minutes.”
“Two hours.”
“Half an hour.”
“Ninety minutes.”
“An hour.”
“Okay, an hour,” he said. “You want some pizza?”
“Yes.”
He left the room and returned with a box. They carried on, eating cold pizza while they argued. He’d said it would be easy, but he’d lied. It took them another forty minutes to hammer out the contract, and Caleb was absolutely ruthless. She never wanted to meet the man across a conference table. He pushed and pushed to get what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he tried to charm her into changing her mind, and if that failed he did his level best to outsmart her. She’d never come up against such a worthy opponent in her life. He put her University of Chicago classmates to shame.
It was kind of fun.
“So we have a deal?” he said at last.
“Let’s hear it.”
One more time, he ticked off each item on his fingers. “Lots of sex. Sleepovers allowed, but only when Henry’s not home. Dates to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, but not this weekend, and not if they interfere with your work.”
She interrupted him. “And both parties to agree they’re meaningless.”
He shook his head. “I’m not agreeing to the meaninglessness of anything, Ellen. You think what you want. I’ll think what I want.”
“And never the twain shall meet.”
“We’ll see about that.” Touching his ring finger, he said, “I can ask you personal questions, but only one per orgasm, and no saving them up to ask a bunch at once. I have to ask them within an hour, or they expire. You can ask me personal questions whenever you want—”
“But I won’t.”
“—and I’ll answer them. Quit interrupting me. I can interact with Henry as I see fit, under your supervision, provided I promise not to become his new best friend and then abandon him, which I would never do anyway, because it would be cruel. Oh, and I’m not allowed to give him presents.”
“You’re not allowed to give either of us presents.”
“Right. All gifts are forbidden. Did I miss anything?”
“We’re not going to call it ‘making love.’”
He sighed. “You’re going to make a thing out of that?”
“Yes.”
“All right. What do you want to call it, ‘nookie’?”
She laughed. Even when she was exhausted, wrung out from lack of sleep and a stressful day, from hot sex and waging war, Caleb could make her laugh. She liked him. He was a good guy. A sexy, funny, smart, solid guy. Also, a piranha.
“I was thinking ‘boffing.’”
He rose onto his hands and knees and started crawling toward her. “Yeah, because that’s sexy. C’mere, baby. I wanna boff you.”
She giggled. “How about, ‘Let’s make whoopie’?”
“Sounds like you want to bake a cake.” He straddled her thighs and kneeled above her. “I want to play hide the bone.”
“That’s gross.” She smacked his chest, and he captured her hand in his.
“I promise, it wouldn’t be gross. It would be a lot better than gross.” Kissing her fingertips, he added, “But we’re out of condoms, and you need some sleep. I’m going to head home. In just a minute.”
He took her head in his hand and kissed her, gently and slowly and quite thoroughly, and by the time he was done she was ready to let him call it whatever he liked if he’d just stick around for some more of it. But he was already pulling away.
“It’s been a pleasure negotiating with you, Lawyer Callahan. I’ll be back in the morning.”
She watched him put on his shirt. Watched his capable fingers work the buttons, untie his empty shoes, put them on, and lace them up again. He smiled at her from the doorway, telling her to lock up after him, and she smiled back and sank down the headboard into the pile of pillows behind her and stared as he disappeared down the dark hallway.
Two thoughts chased each other around in her head.
When they’d been negotiating, he could have kissed her like that anytime he wanted, and she would have given in. But he hadn’t.
And also, now that he was leaving, she really didn’t want him to go.
Caleb stopped at the end of the drive to talk to Cassie and Eric. He’d tucked his shirt in before leaving the house, but given the fact that Ellen had come outside scantily clad earlier and then the two of them had disappeared indoors . . . Well, it was none of their business anyway.
“Everything quiet out here?”
Cassie yawned. “It’s been a nonstop party since you went in there, boss. Chicks with Mardi Gras beads, guys rolling pony kegs down the street. You wouldn’t believe it.”
Frowning, Eric said, “We had a couple cars down here to turn around, but that’s it.”
A mid-career cop Caleb had lured off the force, Eric took the job seriously. Cassie was younger, one of Katie’s friends, lively and smart. He’d wondered before if he’d made the right decision hiring her. Eric had never complained, and Cassie did have some experience working as a mall cop, but Caleb suspected she talked too much, and when she was talking, she wasn’t watching and listening, which is what he paid her to do.
“Call me if anything out of the ordinary happens.”
Cassie’s lips twitched. “Like any more pizza deliveries?”
He stared at her until she started to squirm. She needed to learn to keep her thoughts to herself.
“We’ll call,” Eric said, breaking the tension.
“All right.”
He walked home in the dark, wondering if tonight he’d made the best or the worst decision of his life.
Too soon to say. It was often like this when you led from the front. You had to make tough calls, and you didn’t get the feedback you needed to evaluate them until it was far too late to use it.
For now, he’d done the only thing he could do. He wouldn’t let Ellen keep him at arm’s length, but he’d promised himself he wouldn’t manipulate her, either. She needed him honest and direct. She needed to be treated as an equal.
That didn’t mean she always needed to get her way.
He had some maneuvering room. She was a tough negotiator, but she’d started from a weak position. He’d asked for everything but her hand in marriage, figuring that if he presented a long list of demands and she began by saying no to all of them, he’d end up getting at least half of what he wanted. He’d done a little better than half.
The question now was whether he could use the leverage he’d gained to win Ellen over. To make her see him as more than just a lover.
He hoped so, because being Ellen’s lover would never be enough. He wanted more. He wanted everything.