chapter Fifteen
Caleb eased into consciousness smiling, thinking about Ellen before he even got his eyes open.
It made a nice change. Most mornings, he woke up hungover from nightmares. Moments of indecision with terrible consequences. Bodies he’d found, deaths he blamed himself for. The explosion on Route Irish that had ripped everything apart.
He didn’t like to dwell on the memories, but he didn’t want to forget, either. Forgetting was its own kind of betrayal.
But this morning, he had the luxury of not even worrying about it. He ran seven miles instead of five, and he could have done ten easy if he hadn’t needed to get to work. It felt great to move. Everything felt great.
Back home, he put on coffee for Katie. By the time he’d showered and dressed, she was nursing a mug at the kitchen table.
“House looks nice,” he commented. The kitchen was immaculate.
“I cleaned last night while you were out getting lucky.”
Camelot relished gossip as much as the next small town, but this was ridiculous. Katie had been asleep when he got home. “What makes you think I was out getting lucky?”
“Cassie sent me a text when you went inside with Ellen.”
“So maybe I kept my hands to myself.”
“You were whistling while you got dressed.”
“It’d never hold up in court.”
“I’m still waiting for your denial.”
Caleb bent over and finished tying his shoes. “Keep waiting.”
“What ever happened to ‘I’m not allowed to notice how hot she is’?”
“I reconsidered my position on that.”
“Huh.” Katie folded her arms on the table and leaned forward to rest her chin on her hands. “She must really be something if you’re throwing over your principles.”
“I’m not throwing over my principles. Carly helped me see I was thinking about the situation all wrong.”
“You took advice from Carly? She of little impulse control and even less good sense? Wow. Now I really want to meet this woman.”
He hadn’t taken advice from Carly. Not exactly. She’d simply nudged him toward understanding the error of his ways. He was relying on his own judgment, and it was solid.
Wasn’t it?
It always had been before. In Camelot, though . . . he wasn’t as sure as he wanted to be.
“Do you think it’s unethical? Me and Ellen?”
“You have some kind of security guard code I don’t know about? Some secret oath that says you won’t sleep with your clients?”
He shook his head. Shouldn’t have asked. She’d have a field day with this one.
But Katie surprised him. “No,” she said after a long pause. “It’s probably okay. You’re both consenting adults, and she’s not, like, traumatized by fear or anything. If she were under major stress, then maybe you’d have to worry about the Stockholm syndrome thing, but this is just some guys with cameras hanging around, and I bet she’s used to that. I think it’s fine.”
His shoulders dropped, releasing tension he hadn’t noticed he was holding. “Thanks. Listen, you get anything else on Martin Plimpton yet?”
“Nope, but I still have to call a few of the names you gave me.”
“Let me know if you find something.” He tucked his shirt into his slacks and fastened his belt. Katie looked him over and wolf-whistled. “You look good in black. Kind of a Johnny Cash thing.”
“Shut up.” At least his sister was back to her usual smart-ass self.
Sticking his wallet in his pocket, he grabbed his phone and his keys off the counter and crossed to the garage door.
“The Man in Black. Sing us a song, Johnny.”
“Shut up, Katie.”
“Or like a magician. Mr. Mysterious. Shaazam!”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Knock ’em dead, Cowboy. Oh, and stop by the apartment later. Mom has some work for you.”
“Okay. You making dinner?”
She nodded. “You’re not going to be with your piece of action?”
“Jesus, Katie. Her name’s Ellen. She’s a lawyer. She has a kid. She’s not my piece of anything.”
Katie laughed. “Bring her home for dinner, then.”
“Not tonight. I’ll be back around six.”
As the door closed behind him, he heard Katie singing in a low, wavery voice, “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”
Now he was going to spend the whole day with that song in his head, wondering if wearing a black shirt with black slacks made him look like an idiot.
Sisters. What a pain in the ass.
Nowhere in Camelot could a man buy condoms by the box at seven in the morning. It was one of the drawbacks of small-town life. He made the ten-mile drive into Mount Pleasant to a convenience store, where he also picked up orange juice and some doughnuts. Did Ellen eat doughnuts? She’d tucked into the pizza last night like the sort of woman who didn’t waste her time counting calories. He liked that.
Basically, he liked everything about Ellen.
When he turned onto Burgess, he counted eight cars. Ellen and Carly’s outing yesterday morning must have drawn a few more sharks to town. He pulled into Ellen’s driveway next to the Camelot Security vehicle. The shift had changed; he nodded to the guys on duty before strolling up to the house.
The front door stood open again, but she’d flipped the lock on the screen door, and he had to ring the bell. She came into view feet first. Red toenails on the step, then legs, legs, and more legs. Off-white corduroy shorts and a tight Camelot College T-shirt in royal purple. She had a headset on, and she was chewing someone out in what had to be her lawyer voice as she thumbed the lock open to let him in.
“No, that’s not going to work. Absolutely not. You can’t take thirty percent on that, not when you’ve already got thirty on—”
She paused, listening, then smiled at him in greeting and looked down at the lock and back at his face with raised eyebrows, as if to say, See? I locked the door for you.
He wanted to devour her.
“Ha!” she said suddenly. “Don’t be stubborn. If you won’t come down to fifteen, she’s going to walk.”
Having noticed the plastic bag in his hand, she narrowed her eyes at him and mouthed No presents.
He shrugged and walked into the kitchen, setting the food on the table and extracting a condom from the box to slip in his pocket. Ellen trailed behind him and rested her hand briefly between his shoulder blades, a casual touch that pleased him and fired him up at the same time. “Oh, yes, she can and will do that,” she was saying. “Aimee has another offer, and it’s looking better all the time. You think about it. I’ll give you an hour.”
She disconnected the call and took off her headset.
He backed her into the nearest wall and kissed her with all the desperation of a man who’d gone home unfulfilled and woken up hungry. Her mouth was soft, her fingers in his hair, and he needed to put on the brakes or he’d do something reckless, like bend her over the kitchen table and take her in front of the window, the blinds open to anybody who cared to look.
Ellen wasn’t helping. She kissed him back hard, unbuckling his belt as he moved his hands inside her shirt to pop the clasp on her bra. When she stroked him through his pants, he cupped her breasts and asked, “How about we do hard and fast and rough right now?”
So much for putting on the brakes.
Hooking one leg over his hip, she pressed up into him and moaned when he pushed her more firmly against the wall. “You read my mind.”
He got one hand between them and unzipped her shorts. She was wet. He made her wetter. She talked dirty in his ear and made him harder.
A phone rang.
He slipped one finger inside her. She gasped. Then another, and she swore.
The phone kept ringing.
She swore again, but this time it wasn’t the good kind.
“That’s not mine, Clark.”
“Shh,” he told her. Now that she’d pointed it out, he couldn’t pretend not to notice. His phone was ringing on her kitchen table. It was almost certainly a work call. If it was someone on his team, he needed to return the call within a minute. Two minutes at the most.
He’d always performed well under pressure.
Four more rings, and he had his zipper down, the condom on, and her shorts and panties around her ankles. She kicked them off. The call went to voice mail. He lifted her, gripping her hips as he positioned himself between her legs.
When she wrapped her thighs around him, he moved inside her, deep and hard, groaning at how tight she was, how sexy, how utterly intoxicating. “Ellen,” he said, his face buried in the silky fall of her hair. She draped her arms around his shoulders and the back of his head, clutching him to her neck and spurring him on with every eager, helpless sound she made.
Neither of them lasted long. Maybe a dozen strokes, his fingers plucking at her nipple, and she started to tighten around him. He followed almost immediately with an orgasm so stupefying, he thought he might black out.
Chest heaving, mind temporarily blank, he held her there for a long moment before he remembered the phone. When he raised his head to look at her, her eyes were still cloudy and her lips parted. He kissed her soft mouth, wishing he could carry her to bed and keep her there all morning. Make up for this crude, greedy assault with a day of languid exploration.
His phone buzzed. A message waiting.
Kissing her one more time to tell her he’d rather be staked to a hill of fire ants than leave her right now, he disentangled himself and set her feet on the floor, waiting to ensure she wouldn’t wobble. Then he made himself presentable again and checked his messages.
“Hey, Caleb. It’s Eddie. We’ve got a situation here at Miss Short’s place. She, uh, seems to think she’s going to drive herself to an appointment. Alone. You didn’t say we were allowed to keep her here against her will, but I thought she was supposed to be escorted, and this isn’t on the schedule. We’re blocking her exit, and she’s not real happy with Sean right now. Give me a call back, okay?”
He found Ellen’s shorts under the table and brought them to her. She was still standing with her head tipped back against the wall, watching him. She looked satisfied and happy and so sexy he wanted to shoot Carly and have done with it.
“I have to go,” he said with an apologetic smile. “They need me over at Carly’s.”
“Aren’t you going to ask your question first?”
He kissed her one more time, his thumb tracing the delicate line of her jaw. He’d forgotten all about the questions. He asked the first one that popped into his head. “What’s your middle name?”
She gave him half a smile. “Sydney.”
“Ellen Sydney Callahan.” It tripped right off his tongue. “I like that.”
“To think I spent the last two hours worrying about what you were going to ask me.”
“Did you? Well, don’t get too comfortable. I went easy on you this time.” He started backing toward the side door, unwilling to turn away before he had to.
“I don’t know, I’d say you roughed me up pretty good.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement.
“Sorry, honey.”
“Don’t apologize. I’ve never had a quickie with a tall, handsome man in black before.”
“You like the Man in Black thing?”
“Zorro, you can do me any time.”
She was still laughing when he closed the door. He honestly couldn’t tell if she was laughing with him or at him.
He felt so good, he didn’t really care.
The sight of Carly laying into Sean was enough to sober him up fast. He heard the words “pompous,” “high horse,” and “sue” before he made it out of Ellen’s yard. The red curls rioting around Carly’s face and the round swell of her stomach under her flouncy white shirt made an amusing contrast to the rest of her: sharp words, sharp nose, sharp elbows flying through the air as she made her displeasure clear. Carly Short, human razor blade. When she saw him, her eyes narrowed as if she were preparing to slice him up.
“You said I wasn’t supposed to go for a walk, not that I can’t drive anywhere. This is insane. This jackass can’t keep me here against my will. I’m not a prisoner. Get this car out of my driveway, Clark, or I’ll call the cops. It’s a violation of my rights!”
She had a canvas bag slung over her shoulder with a towel sticking out the top, and she smelled like coconuts. “Where you headed, Squirt? Taking the baby surfing?”
“I have a doctor’s appointment, smart guy.”
He raised an eyebrow and waited for her to fess up.
“And then I was going to go to the lake for a while,” she grumbled. “I’m bored, Caleb. I can’t stay indoors all the time. I’m not a house plant!”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the appointment?”
“Because I’m not six years old, and you’re not my daddy.”
It would almost be funny, but there were at least a dozen cars in the cul-de-sac now. Which meant Caleb’s ass was on the line.
“You know they’ve taken about a thousand pictures of you since you came outside, right?” Whereas Ellen’s house was tucked back a bit behind a slight curve in her driveway, Carly’s was a straight shot from the road. Anything that happened in front of her house could be seen from the street.
“They can take all the pictures they want. I’m sick of it. I’ve decided I don’t give a flying—”
He cut her off. “And you know if you drive out of here by yourself, fifteen cars are going to be following you by the time you get to Mount Pleasant, and another ten when you leave the doctor’s office? You want to sit in the sand with a bunch of reporters for company?”
“I thought of that. I was going to ditch them.”
Carly knew every back road within sixty miles, and she drove like she did everything else—too fast, with a lot of flair but not much sense. Or she used to. Caleb hadn’t been in a car with her behind the wheel in more than a decade.
“I’ll drive you.”
He tossed his keys to Sean, who’d been standing mute with his hands on his hips since Caleb arrived. Sean was good at mute. It was half the reason Caleb had offered him a job one night a few weeks back when he’d met him at the village pub—Sean didn’t say much, but what he said, Caleb liked.
Katie had gone to high school with him, and she said he was also some kind of genius. Sean kept quiet about that, too. Caleb liked the guy. They were getting to be friends, slowly. Sean didn’t talk enough for it to happen fast.
“We’re taking Eddie and the SUV. After we go, you get Bryce off Mrs. Callahan’s driveway to cover for you, and you move my car over here. Then you call Katie and have her send the backup team over. Once they get here, drive my car to the hospital and park it on the south side. Come around the front, and Eddie will bring you back to Burgess. Then you can send the backup guys home. Got it?”
Sean nodded.
Carly screwed up her mouth and wrinkled her forehead as if she were about to object, but just then a couple more cars pulled up to the cul-de-sac, and she gave in. “Will you take me to the beach after?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Caleb went the wrong way into town. She felt obligated to tell him. If he’d taken Granger to Shady Hill and then come around the back side of the hospital, it would have been faster.
He didn’t thank her for the advice. He was too busy driving and ordering around the lanky guy who worked for him.
Every time she twisted to look out the back, the conga line of idiots following them was a little shorter, though, so she let it go. Caleb could handle these douche bags. He’d driven Hummers in Iraq. Katie had shown her pictures once of him in fatigues, with a helmet on his head and some building out of Aladdin behind him. He’d been smiling that breezy Caleb smile as if there weren’t people waiting to kill him just outside the frame.
There had been, though. During his deployments, she’d never quite managed to forget it. No matter how invincible his smile, every time she heard about casualties in Iraq, she would wonder if this time he’d bit it. So she’d gotten into the habit of ragging on him unmercifully for being a jarhead.
Everybody had their coping mechanisms.
Caleb somehow magically managed to make a barricade appear at the hospital. They pulled inside it, and he got a big OSU umbrella out of the trunk, which he used to shield her from view as they walked into the lobby. He was good at this security guard stuff. It didn’t exactly surprise her. He’d always been smart, though school wasn’t really his thing.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. They rode the elevator to her doctor’s office on the third floor. Caleb glanced over at her and gave her a trademark smirk, probably trying to put her at ease. He looked particularly heart-throbbish today in a black button-up and black slacks. “Nice parasol, Buckeye,” she said.
“Thanks, Munchkin.”
Her phone buzzed again, letting her know she had texts piling up. She ignored it.
When it was her turn to go into the examining room, Caleb rose to his feet, clearly intending to come with her.
“You can stay in the waiting room with the husbands and boyfriends,” she said. “I don’t need an escort.”
“Too bad. You’re getting one.”
So he tagged along as she got weighed and had her blood pressure taken, and then he posted himself outside the exam room door, which meant that the whole time the nurse was asking her the same sixty-seven tired questions somebody asked every time she came in for a checkup, Carly had an image of Caleb in her head, lounging in the hallway and charming the pants off the staff.
An image that made her angry, because she wanted Caleb to be Jamie, joking with the receptionist or sitting with her in exam room, holding her hand.
And she wanted herself to stop wanting that.
The doctor arrived and asked her the sixty-seven questions over again, same as always. Carly’s phone buzzed for the third or fourth time. The Wombat kicked her hard in the bladder.
Back off, Buddy. It’s probably just Nana wanting to know if I’ll bring her bing cherries and bikini wax, or some other god-awful combination of things.
The Wombat gave her another sound punt.
Fine. I’ll check the damn phone. You happy now?
When Dr. Gordon’s back was turned, Carly slid the phone out of her pocket. Every text was from Jamie.
JCallahan: R u OK?
JCallahan: TMZ sez u r @ hospital.
JCallahan: Call me.
JCallahan: Srsly. Call me.
She turned the phone off.
Dr. Gordon sighed. This was nothing new. Dr. Gordon was something of a freak of nature, built like a linebacker, with the bedside manner of a clinically depressed clown. She had the clown feet, too, tricked out today in the longest pair of sad beige flats Carly had ever seen.
But she was good people. She’d received the Nana stamp of approval.
“Your blood pressure is still too high,” Dr. Gordon said.
“Oh. Bad high, or just let’s-keep-an-eye-on-it high?”
“Bed-rest high.”
Carly looked down at the Wombat-bump. “Preeclampsia.” She’d read her pregnancy books. At one time, she’d read nothing but pregnancy books, one after another. She knew the score.
“Possibly preeclampsia,” echoed the good doctor, with an expression that suggested she was going to off herself as soon as she left the room.
“That’s not good.” Carly tried to think of something funny to say to deflect the worry, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
Sliding her hand into her pocket, she wrapped her fingers around her phone. It was so pitiful to want Jamie here. No doubt the urge would pass as soon as she got her land legs back. She only wanted him because he’d shared so much of this pregnancy with her, and because she’d just had such a shock. A really f*cking awful shock.
“Do you have anyone who can help you? You’re going to need family or friends to take care of you.”
Jamie.
But Jamie was gone.
“Caleb,” she said, clutching the phone so tight her fingers started to hurt. “He’s right outside.”