chapter Twenty
“Since when do you drink orange juice?” Jamie asked, rooting through his sister’s fridge for something to eat. All she had was beer, kid food, and vegetables. He’d sort of hoped she’d make him breakfast, but she was already working, and he knew better than to ask.
Maybe he could hire her a service like the one he had back in L.A. that delivered homemade meals directly to his fridge. That way, when he visited, he could just find the container labeled “frittata” or “quiche” or whatever and be done with it.
But Ellen probably wouldn’t approve. She seemed to like fending for herself. If she didn’t, she would have moved to California to live with him like he’d invited her and Henry to do a million times.
Shoving aside a box of baking soda and trying not to wonder why she kept it in the fridge, he found nothing behind it but a carton of eggs. Which he didn’t know how to fix.
He’d never seen the appeal of doing everything yourself when you could hire someone to do it for you. The way he figured it, people should do what they were good at. He was good at singing. Ellen was good at taking care of Henry and being an ass-kicking lawyer. There had to be somebody in Camelot who got his thrills making breakfast. That was the person they needed to locate.
On the other hand, if he knew how to fix eggs, he could be eating right now. He’d have to add it to his list of competencies to acquire, once he got Carly back.
“I don’t drink orange juice,” Ellen said from behind him. “Caleb brought it over.”
“Ah. So you’re at that stage.” He picked up a jar of pickles, then put it back. A man couldn’t have pickles for breakfast, no matter how desperate he was.
“What stage?”
“The stage where he brings you stuff, but he doesn’t know you well enough to know what to bring you. Then, later, he’ll know you better, but he’ll no longer have the impulse to wait on you hand and foot, so you’ll never get the peach juice you deserve.”
He hoped she’d volunteer details about her affair with Caleb, but no such luck. “I don’t like peach juice either,” she said absently. “That’s you.” He only had half her attention. The other half was focused on the fat contract she was reading at the table.
“Really?” He could have sworn Ellen loved peach juice. “What juice do you like, then?”
“I don’t like juice in the morning. It’s too sweet. I like coffee.” She picked up a red pen and made a vicious slash through one paragraph.
He gave up on the fridge and started rooting through the cabinets.
“There are doughnuts on top of the microwave,” she said.
Hallelujah.
Of course, he wasn’t supposed to eat doughnuts. He was supposed to stay fit and attractive, lest he lose his appeal to the thirteen-to-thirty-five demographic. He grabbed the whole box and carried it over to the table.
“These are unreal,” he said after polishing off the second one. The orange juice wasn’t half bad, either.
“They’re just convenience-store doughnuts,” Ellen said, giving him a skeptical glance over the top of her reading glasses.
“Did you have one yet?”
“No.”
“Eat one, and then tell me it’s not the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”
Ellen picked a glazed chocolate doughnut out of the box and ate it, dropping crumbs onto her contract. Then she picked another one out of the box, and he had a third. “These are pretty damn good,” she conceded.
“Who’s the contract for?”
“Aimee Dawson.”
“You’re amazing.” He’d known he could count on Ellen to help the girl out. “What’s going on with you and Caleb?”
She looked up, and Jamie smiled. “See what I did there? Misdirection. You were supposed to just spit it out without thinking.”
“Spit what out?”
Shrugging, he said, “I don’t know. Whatever there is to spit.”
He was going for nonchalant, but the truth was he was intensely curious about the man he’d found in his sister’s kitchen last night. As far as he knew, Ellen hadn’t dated anyone since her divorce, and she’d never dated anyone in her life like this Caleb guy. If you did a lineup of every Y-chromosome Ellen had ever gone out with, Caleb would stick out like a chorus dancer with a limp—the one fella with a buzz cut, hard muscles, and testosterone to spare in a sea of skinny guys with too much hair, too much ego, and not nearly enough appreciation for Ellen.
She turned her attention back to the contract. “It’s a casual thing,” she said. “He’s fun.”
“Fun” wasn’t the first word that had come to mind when he’d laid eyes on Ellen’s bodyguard. The first word was probably “whoa.” He would hate to meet Caleb Clark in a dark alley. Other words that had suggested themselves included “intense,” “serious,” and “tall.” Also, “surprisingly comfortable wandering around half-naked in Ellen’s kitchen.”
Plus, Caleb hadn’t sucked up at all. Not a single Jeez, it’s incredible to meet you or I have all your albums or I saw you play the Super Bowl halftime show. Instead, he’d had the balls to chew Jamie out for the way he’d treated Carly.
A month ago, he might have resented that, but these days he saw the flip side. What had he ever done to earn Caleb’s respect? Nothing. So why should he get it?
He was learning to appreciate people who had no tolerance for celebrity bullshit—or any kind of bullshit, for that matter. People like Carly.
He reached for another doughnut. It was too early in the morning to start thinking about Carly. He’d been up half the night thinking about her. He’d thought about Carly every freaking waking moment since the day he left Camelot. In a few hours, he was going to have to go over there and face her, but until then he wanted to distract himself with his sister’s love life, which couldn’t possibly be as catastrophically screwed up as his own.
“You’re going to make yourself sick if you keep eating those,” Ellen said.
“Since when do you sleep with guys for fun?”
“Do you really want to talk about my sex life?”
She was giving him her ice princess look, challenging him to drop it. She did this whenever he poked too hard at something she considered personal—turned it into a thing he wouldn’t want to know about. Anytime he’d tried to get her to talk about what a complete jackass Richard was, she’d go all, Jamie, you don’t want to hear about that. How was your concert?
Ellen liked to keep herself to herself. He’d always let her get away with it. But that was bullshit too, wasn’t it? And it seemed likely that the first step toward becoming a better man was to eliminate as much bullshit from his life as possible. Including Ellen bullshit. If she wanted to hold his hand and help him through his problems—which she most certainly did, seeing how fixing his problems was one of the great pleasures of her life—she had to tell him about hers, too. Fair was fair.
“Yeah, let’s talk about your sex life,” he said. “Is it any good?”
Her cheeks went hot pink in about three seconds. Wow. He hadn’t seen Ellen blush like that in a long, long time. Maybe not since she’d met Ricky Martin backstage when she was fifteen and spilled her drink all over his crotch.
He grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes. So do you like this guy, or is he just a plaything?”
“Jamie!”
“What? There’s nothing wrong with having a plaything. You’re all grown up, Ellen. You can have a boy toy if you want to.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“What’s gotten into you?” Besides Caleb Clark.
He was crude enough to think it, but not to say it.
“Nothing.” She stuck out her bottom lip and blew air up her face, ruffling her hair. He hadn’t seen her do that in a long time, either. Ellen was reverting to adolescence. She had it bad for this guy.
“It’s nothing,” she insisted. “Carly says he’s a womanizer. A girl-in-every-port type, you know? I just wanted to be that girl for once in my life.”
As he chugged orange juice from the plastic bottle, he studied her. Her eyes kept darting around, first to the contract, then to her hands, to his face, out the window. Either Ellen was lying to him or she was lying to herself.
“You’re having totally awesome, totally meaningless sex with your bodyguard?”
“He’s not my bodyguard, Jamie. But yes. Yes, I am.” She folded her hands primly in her lap and sat up straight, as if her posture could somehow rescue her from the moral bankruptcy of this position.
“But you don’t care about him.”
Now she wouldn’t look at him at all. “I like him,” she told her fingers. “He’s a good guy.”
“Uh-huh. And he doesn’t care about you?”
“Carly says he goes through women like Chiclets, and she’s known him since they were kids.”
“Sometimes guys like that change,” he said. “When they meet the right woman.”
She did meet his eyes then, and he was stunned to see Ellen looking almost as scared as he felt. “Who are we talking about now?”
“Definitely me,” he admitted. “But maybe your boy toy, too. He seemed pretty taken with you.” In truth, the guy hadn’t had much to say on the subject of Ellen except “yeah.” But he’d called her his girlfriend, and from what Ellen was saying, that wasn’t a role she’d asked him to audition for. Plus, when his sister came into the room last night, Jamie had been talking to Caleb, and Caleb had made this face like someone had just smacked him in the forehead with a Louisville Slugger.
Jamie recognized that look. It was exactly how he’d felt the first time he laid eyes on Carly, and every single time she’d walked into a room since then. It wasn’t a dignified look. Kind of gobsmacked. But he had enjoyed seeing Caleb go to pieces over Ellen.
“No,” she said firmly. “He knows what this is.” She was using her lawyer voice. That don’t-mess-with-me tone worked with agents and record-company executives, but Jamie had been born three minutes before Ellen, and it never worked on him.
At least now he’d figured out who she was lying to. Definitely not her big brother. Ellen didn’t seem to have the slightest idea how deep a hole she’d already dug for herself.
Jamie knew, though. He’d been at the bottom of his own personal Love-struck Idiot in Denial pit for long enough that the groundwater had seeped in and started to fill it. When he’d gotten Ellen’s message that Carly and the baby were in danger, the water level rose, and he’d been forced to start swimming. Today, he was going to get out of the damn pit, or he was going to drown.
“Tell you what,” he said with a smile. “Have another doughnut, and we can talk about my problems for a while.”