chapter Twenty-one
By seven a.m., nearly everyone Caleb knew hated him.
With help from Katie, whom he’d dragged out of bed at around one o’clock, he’d called up every warm body he could find to work shifts on Burgess over the next twenty-four hours. They’d sent extra vehicles to both Ellen’s and Carly’s houses, posted sentries on the far back corner of each lot, and made a pair of guys start walking continuous loops around the perimeter.
The Camelot Police Department had reluctantly agreed to set up a roadblock at the stop sign a block from the cul-de-sac. After some persuading, he’d also managed to get an old friend who worked the airfield in Mount Pleasant to promise to keep him in the loop about how many press planes were landing and when. Amber’s husband, Tony, had agreed to send a Mazzara Construction crew over by eight to hustle up a temporary fence around the perimeter of Ellen’s and Carly’s joined properties.
Caleb now owed favors to a lot of people.
Meanwhile, Katie had been throwing together schedules, printing out lists, programming new numbers into Caleb’s cell, and figuring out how to wake up anybody he wanted to talk to who wouldn’t pick up the phone. Which sometimes meant waking up those people’s neighbors, their siblings, or their Aunt Carol and having them do the legwork.
Half the village of Camelot met the sunrise bleary-eyed and irritable, but on alert. Caleb started another pot of coffee for Katie, showered, threw on some clothes, and toasted bagels and scrambled eggs for breakfast. He was going to need the fuel.
Katie trudged into the kitchen, still wearing her pink pajamas, slippers, and dark circles under her eyes that were totally his fault. Couldn’t be helped. He needed her.
“You look way too awake,” she said. “Don’t you even require sleep?”
In Iraq, he’d gone days without sleeping when necessary. Some far-off part of him registered the fatigue, but it was easy to ignore. Pleasurable, even. It had been a long time since he’d had this much on his plate, and the sense of purpose, the tension, came as a relief. Such a clarifying thing, to have a mission and obvious obstacles in the way. All he had to do was take them out, one by one. “I’m fine. You going to be okay alone in the office today?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll hang in.”
Sliding a plate onto the table for Katie, he pointed her toward a chair and began shoveling in his own breakfast standing up.
“I need to head over to Burgess in a few minutes to meet Tony and the fence crew,” he said. “You want me to drop you off?”
“No, I can walk. You’d better get over there to talk to your woman before a bunch of strange men in hard hats start operating a posthole digger on her front lawn.”
“She’s going to be mad enough to spit.” He didn’t like where he’d had to leave things with Ellen last night, and when it came down to it, he didn’t like what he was about to do, either—strong-arm his way into getting that fence up whether she wanted it or not.
Who was he kidding? No way would she want it.
But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let the way he felt about Ellen interfere with the way he did the job. She needed the fence.
Katie had asked him three times in the past few hours if there was any possibility he was going overboard on the security. There was. There was a pretty strong possibility, actually. But he had a bad feeling—a feeling that told him that for every guy with a shady past who’d been skulking around the village last week, there would be a dozen more today—and he wanted to be prepared.
He’d learned never to ignore that gut-level unease. It had saved his life a few times.
“I’m sure you’ll charm your way back into her pants soon enough,” Katie said.
“Knock it off.” The rebuttal came out sharper than he’d intended, and when he looked up at Katie, she was staring at him with wide eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”
“You didn’t say! How was I supposed to know when you didn’t say?”
“What are you talking about?”
“This thing with Ellen. It isn’t casual for you, is it? You’re serious about her.”
“Yes,” he admitted. Hell, yes.
“I thought—well, you’re sleeping with her, Caleb. Don’t you think that’s a mistake, if you’re serious about her?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said she has a kid. How old?”
“He’s two. Henry.”
“So tell me this—do you want to marry Ellen Callahan and raise Henry with her? You want the whole shebang?”
He’d known Ellen for a couple of days. It shouldn’t be possible for him to answer this question yet. Shouldn’t be, but it was. Another gut feeling—that she was the right one, she and Henry. His future. “Yeah.”
Katie stood up, walked over, and smacked him on the side of the head, hard. “Then what the hell are you doing sleeping with her? Don’t you have any idea how this is supposed to work? You’re supposed to be taking her out to dinner and romancing her for, like, three months before you get her into bed. You’re supposed to respect her.”
“I do respect her.”
“No, you obviously don’t, or you’d be doing this right.”
She shoved his shoulder, and he rubbed at the side of his head. What the hell? Katie never hit him. She rarely challenged him like this, with her lips set in a white line and her hands on her hips. She looked furious.
She looked wounded, too, as if his behavior had personally offended her.
Christ, it probably had. Maybe to Katie, what he was doing with Ellen looked as screwed up as what Levi had done to her.
It wasn’t like that. He wasn’t like that. He respected Ellen, and damn it, he’d tried taking it slow. Ellen hadn’t gone along with the plan.
“I do respect her,” he said a second time. “This wasn’t my idea. She wouldn’t go out with me.”
His intentions had been pure. Pure-ish. Until Ellen walked out on the porch in those shorts and lured him inside. The memory made his lips curve into an ill-timed smile.
“Quit smiling, Caleb. This isn’t good. It’s really bad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re a booty call for this woman. She doesn’t take you seriously.”
“Sure she does.”
But he didn’t have as much confidence in the statement as he’d have liked.
Katie shook her head. “Single moms get lonely. I know—some of my friends have kids. One minute they’re young and hot, and then they have a baby and they hardly ever wash their hair anymore, and men look right through them. That’s Ellen’s life, and then you come along, Mr. Sexy Security Guard, and she thinks, ‘I can get some action, and it doesn’t have to mean a thing.’ So she leads you to bed by your dick, and of course you go for it, because you’re a guy.”
“Jesus, Katie,” he said. Frustrated, because his sister had it all wrong. Ellen was—well, hell, he didn’t know for sure. She didn’t want a boyfriend, but that didn’t mean she was using him for sex. He was going to change her mind about the whole relationship situation. He just needed some time. “That’s not what it’s like. I swear.”
Katie crossed her arms and lifted her chin. A challenge. “So ask her to dinner on Wednesday. Bet she won’t come.”
She wouldn’t. He knew better than to even ask. That wasn’t good, was it? That suggested maybe Katie knew what she was talking about. “We’re not doing Wednesday dinner again. It sucked too much last week.”
“I already invited everyone. We’re going to have a cake for Clark’s birthday.”
Amber’s oldest was turning ten. Shit. No skipping the Wednesday dinner, then. “I have to buy him a present.”
“I already got one for you. You’re going to have to wrap it, though.”
He glanced at the clock. It was already nearly eight. He had to hustle. “Thanks. I need to go. If Tony’s guys get there before I do, I’m in trouble.”
Katie’s parting jab followed him out the door. “You’re already in trouble, Buster. You’re in huge trouble.”
At eight, Jamie called up the steps to the loft, “So when do you think I should go over there?”
“Not yet. It’s too early. She could still be asleep.”
Carly would be up, no question. But she was grumpy in the morning. Ten would be better. Nana would have her fed by ten.
Ellen scrolled through her in-box and sighed. She had a lot of work to do, but it was hard to concentrate with Jamie pacing around downstairs, making her worry. Plus, there was this piercing beeping noise coming from outside, like the sound the garbage truck made when it backed up. Henry had a dump truck that made that noise, and she hated it so much she’d sent it to Grammy Maureen’s house. But this was no plastic dump truck. No, this was something big, and the beeping kept drilling her between the eyes. It was giving her a headache.
It sounded like a construction site out there. But how could that be? She didn’t have any neighbors but Carly, and if Carly were getting work done, Ellen would know about it.
A solid crack ripped through her office, followed by a big crash into the underbrush. A tree had fallen over. Unless she was very much mistaken, a tree had fallen over in her front yard. Ellen sprang out of her office chair and moved to the other side of the loft, where she could get a view out the clerestory windows.
There was a huge truck in her driveway, the back of it filled with silver chain-link and a pile of galvanized posts. Half a dozen men in hard hats and work boots were walking all over her front lawn, and they’d just felled a good-sized cottonwood tree at the property line. Caleb was standing on her leprechaun in the driveway with one hand on his hip, pointing in the direction of the downed tree and talking to a guy in an orange vest. Gesticulating like he owned the joint.
“You bastard,” she said through her teeth. “You promised me.”
I wouldn’t dream of it, he’d told her. Not Caleb. Caleb would never try to mess with her, push her around, manipulate her.
He wouldn’t dream of doing that. Except whenever the hell he felt like it.
She didn’t stop at the door to put on her shoes. The giant truck had somehow managed to spray gravel onto her driveway, and it bit into the soles of her feet, which made her even angrier. Her driveway was not supposed to have gravel on it. Or a giant truck. And those men were not supposed to be trampling her lawn, and—
“So help me God, if they cut down that tulip tree, I am going to kill you, Caleb. You stop them. You stop them right this second.” She stomped her foot, and a big, sharp rock stabbed her in the heel so hard she yelped and picked her foot up off the ground by instinct, holding it in both hands as she hopped around. “Ohhh, mother of all that is holy, that hurt. That really f*cking hurt!”
Caleb reached out to steady her.
“No! Don’t touch me. Don’t even think about it.” She took one hand off her foot and pointed down the drive. “Tree. Deal with the tree. I planted that tree myself, and if those men cut it down I will sue the pants off you.”
“I thought you were going to kill me.”
“I’ll do that, too.”
“I’m harder to kill than you might think.”
“I’ll do it when you’re sleeping.”
Caleb’s lips twitched, amused by her threat or her fury. She wanted to squeeze his neck until his head exploded.
When he said, “That sounds like fun” and Anonymous Hard-Hat Man chuckled, she lost all semblance of control over the stream of invective coming out of her mouth.
She called Caleb every bad name she could think of, and then she did a 180 so she could call Hard Hat some names too, but he’d wisely moved off to stop a third guy with a chainsaw from attacking her tulip tree. So she ended up spinning in a circle with her jabbing finger out, ready to poke at Caleb some more. He caught her wrist and lowered it, and for some reason she let him.
“Ellen,” he said, very quietly.
She wasn’t going to answer him. It seemed she’d run out of swear words to call him, so now she’d go the other way. She wasn’t speaking to Caleb. She was breathing at him through her nostrils like a pissed-off bull, but she was not speaking to him. He’d promised not to play her, and then he’d turned right around and played her, and she was sick of it. Sick of being messed around with by men, sick of being treated as if her opinion didn’t matter. This was her house. It was the only thing she had. He was ruining her whole front yard, and he hadn’t even asked for permission so she could tell him N-O, no.
“Ellen, honey, I’m sorry. It’s really important.” Caleb trapped her with his eyes, which were humble and very unhappy. Also, kind of bruised and tired-looking, because he’d never gone to bed.
He was still the handsomest thing she’d ever seen. And she didn’t give a damn.
“It’s really important that I have the world’s ugliest fence put up around my house at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?” So much for not talking to him. She had things she needed to say.
“Yes.”
“Because there are, what, seven cars out there by the road, with people in them who might want to take Jamie’s picture?”
“They’re coming,” he said. “Your brother snuck back into town in a way that’s gonna make a fantastic story for the press as soon as they figure out what happened. Which they will any time now. A whole lot more of them are coming. And the fence is only temporary.”
She met his eyes. He really did look sorry. But the thing was, it didn’t matter if more of them were coming, or if it was all Jamie’s fault. That was not the issue. The issue was between her and Caleb. “You promised me.” To her horror, her voice broke as she said it.
“Whatever they ruin, I’ll fix it later. This is just temporary—one fence around your property and Carly’s both, to help me keep them out. I have to do this to protect you.”
He reached for her face, and she batted his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”
“Ellen. Come on. This is my job.”
What did he want her to do, forgive him? Say, Oh, well if it’s your job, I absolve you? Not going to happen. He’d pretended to care what she wanted. All that negotiation crap over the security lights, and all that negotiation crap in the bedroom. But he didn’t have any real interest in what she wanted, any more than Richard ever had. He’d told her brother he was her boyfriend even when she’d said flat-out she didn’t want a relationship, and now he’d invited a bunch of bristly-jawed jackasses onto her property to cut down her trees and surround her beautiful house with something ugly.
Caleb was supposed to be fun. Having an affair with him was supposed to be something she was doing for herself. This was not remotely fun.
“You can’t have it both ways, Clark. Protect me from the ravening hordes if you want to, but don’t expect me to like it. Don’t expect me to thank you for it, either.”
She turned her back on him and stomped toward the house as best she could in bare feet. More of a hobbling mince than a stomp, unfortunately, because her feet felt all chewed up. Her everything felt all chewed up.
Caleb Clark. For Christ’s sake. Not an hour had gone by since she met him that he’d failed to put her through the wringer. What had possessed her to sleep with him?
Multiple orgasms.
Yeah, there was that. But she could live without those. She’d managed to live thirty years without them, after all.
Passing a guy who was pulverizing her geraniums with his work boots, she turned around one last time and told Caleb, “That tulip tree cost a fortune. Don’t let them cut it down.”
Caleb had his soldier face on. He gave her a grim nod.
Ellen wanted to smack him. She wanted to smack somebody, anyway.
By nine, Jamie couldn’t stand it anymore. Ellen was up in the loft grumbling to herself about the fence—which in his opinion she was blowing way out of proportion, but no one had asked his opinion—the construction guys outside were making a racket, and all he could think about was Carly next door. Carly looking happy to see him. Carly in his arms again. Kissing Carly. Oh, man, kissing Carly.
“I’m going over there,” he announced to nobody in particular.
The scene outside was uglier than he’d expected. Caleb’s guys had chain link stretching all across the front yard, and a few of them were lining it with blue plastic fabric. There was a gap for Ellen’s driveway and another gap over at Carly’s, but he couldn’t see any cars parked along the street except the Camelot Security ones. Maybe Clark had put up a roadblock or something. If so, he’d moved pretty quickly for a yokel.
Bad move on the fence, though. The guy should have known better than to think he could get it past Ellen without a fight. And Ellen could bear a grudge for a good long time.
There were some gawkers on foot at the base of the drive, and he could hear the cameras whirring as he walked up Carly’s porch steps. “Jamie! What brings you back to Camelot, Jamie? Look over here, Callahan! Your mother’s ugly! Jamie! You’re a jerk!”
They’d say anything to make him look. If he looked, they got a better picture, and then they got to go on vacation in the Caribbean. Freaking vultures.
He took a deep breath and rang the bell.
An older woman with wild, curly white hair answered the door. She was Carly all over—the hair, the elfin chin, the sparkling blue eyes. This had to be Nana Short.
“Well, hello there, handsome!” she said with a smile. “I’ve been waiting for you to turn up.” Nana looked him over slowly, toes to crown and then back down again. “People magazine didn’t lie. You are one fine piece of ass. Turn around so I can see your butt.”
Carly had told him Nana was “feisty,” but somehow the word hadn’t conjured up this sort of cheerful lechery.
He extended his hand. “Hello, Nana. Pleasure to meet you finally.”
He’d always wanted to meet Nana, but Carly hadn’t allowed it. At first, he’d assumed his missing her was accidental. Later Carly claimed that she’d wanted to protect their time together. Only after she dumped him had it crossed his mind that she might have another reason—that she might be ashamed of him, or so unserious about their relationship as to make introducing him to her family inadvisable.
Nana shook his hand quickly, but she seemed more interested in inspecting his forearms, turning his arm this way and that to consider his musculature.
“Dang,” she said quietly.
“Uh, is Carly home?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Not going to turn around, are you?” She darted out the door, skirted behind him, and, apparently, ogled his ass. “Ha! I knew it. Those are some fine buns. Old men never have butts like that. What happens to your butts as you get older, do you think? It’s like they just disappear, and there’s nothing to grab onto anymore.”
An image he could have lived without.
Hoping to distract Nana from talking about the disadvantages of geriatric sex, he turned around—though this gave the photographers a better shot—and offered her a broad smile. “Carly’s told me all about you.”
She cocked her head at him like a tiny bird. “She’s told me all about you, too, sweet cheeks, and I’m sorry to say not all of it’s good. I’ve been rooting for you in the pool over at the home, but you were starting to look like a lost cause. I’m so glad you finally turned up. I was worried I was going to lose a hundred bucks.”
“You bet a hundred bucks on . . .” He really wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“That she’ll take you back. Georgie who runs the pool puts the odds at twenty to one against you, but I know my Carly better than that. She has a soft spot for you.”
That sounded promising. “Can I see her?”
“Oh, no. She told me not to let you in.”
He swore, and Nana smiled. “She knows I’m out here?”
“It was a sort of blanket prohibition. But I’ll tell her when I go back inside. Want me to pass along any messages?” She rocked up and down on her toes, clearly excited to be at the center of the drama.
His mind was blank. Whatever he had to say to Carly, he didn’t want to pass it along via this tiny, bawdy, captivating old woman. “Just that I’d like to talk to her.”
Nana frowned at him. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that. Come back in an hour. I’ll make you some cookies. You’re much too thin.”
At ten, Nana informed him Carly had called him “rather a lot of awful things” and still wasn’t too keen on talking to him.
She steered him toward a chair on the corner of the deck, seemingly oblivious to the cameras flashing, and fed him warm shortbread and a glass of milk. “Do you have a plan?” she asked. “Because I’m starting to think maybe you’re not too bright.”
“Sorry?”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? What are you sorry about? You come all this way from Los Angeles, and you want to see Carly. Who wouldn’t? She’s a very sweet girl. But you can’t just expect her to take you back. You have to win her over. What’s your strategy?”
“I—I guess I thought I’d talk to her, and we could figure it out together.”
Nana shook her head, terribly disappointed. “That’s never going to work. She’ll cut you to pieces.” She patted him on the knee. “You go back to your sister’s house and come up with something. I’ll see you in an hour.”
When she went back in the house, he heard Carly through the open door. “—tell him to take his sorry ass back to L.A. where he can bonk brainless supermodels, and then I’ll—”
Just hearing her voice fired him up. He loved that woman. Maybe he’d been a little stupid about her, but he’d never been in love before, so it had taken him a while to get with the program.
He was entirely with the program now. He just needed a plan.
At eleven, he brought her flowers. He’d had to pick them from Ellen’s garden, which she probably wouldn’t have been pleased about if he’d told her, but she was way too preoccupied with staring out the windows and muttering to pay attention to him. He found a vase under the kitchen sink, arranged the stems as best he could, and carried them over to Carly’s.
Nana took one look at the flowers, pursed her lips, and said, “You’re really not very good at this, are you?”
Screwing up his courage, he said, “Tell her I love her.”
Nana plucked the flowers out of his hands. As she shut the door in his face with a wink, he heard Carly shout, “Tell him he can go to hell!”
He smiled. He was going to marry that woman.
At eleven thirty, his PR guy called and basically forbade him to continue walking over to Carly’s. All the gossip sites were running pictures of him at her front door. The suits said it made him look helpless.
He wasn’t helpless; he was in love. He hung up on the PR guy and grabbed Ellen by the arm, pulling her away from the window. “You have to teach me how to cook,” he said.
At twelve, he took grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup over on a tray. It had been the only thing Ellen could show him how to make in half an hour. Cooking turned out to be both difficult and time-consuming, which was, of course, why he’d avoided it all these years.
Nana opened the note he’d put on the tray. He’d written out the lyrics to a song about Carly that he’d been working on back in L.A. He had a whole album’s worth of songs about her.
With a smile and a shake of her head, Nana shut the door.
At twelve thirty, Carly reactivated her blog and posted a single sentence: “Jamie Callahan has a pencil dick.”
At one o’clock, the news crews started to arrive. He called a press conference for two.